“We don’t know,” I went on. “We haven’t had the occasion to find out. Do you want Valancy to be part of the first experiment?”
Jemmy slapped his hat viciously down on his thigh, then he laughed.
“You have the Gift,” he said, though I had never told him.
“Have you any idea, sister mine, how little you will be liked when you become an Old One?”
“Grandmother was well liked,” I answered placidly. Then I cried, “Don’t you set me apart, darn you, Jemmy. Isn’t it enough to know that among a different people I am different? Don’t you desert me now!” I was almost in tears,
Jemmy dropped to the step beside me and thumped my shoulder in his old way. “Pull up your socks, Karen. We have to do what we have to do. I was just taking my mad out on you. What a world!” He sighed heavily.
I huddled deeper in my coat, cold of soul.
“But the other one is gone,” I whispered. “The Home.”
And we sat there sharing the poignant sorrow that is a constant undercurrent among the People, even those of us who never actually saw the Home. Father says it’s because of a sort of racial memory.
“But she didn’t say no because she doesn’t love me,” Jemmy went on at last. “She does love me. She told me so.”
“Then why not?” As his sister I couldn’t imagine anyone turning Jemmy down.
Jemmy laughed-a short unhappy laugh. “Because she is different.”
“She’s different?”
“That’s what she said, as though it was pulled out of her. ‘I can’t marry,’ she said. ‘I’m different!’ That’s pretty good, isn’t it, coming from an Outsider!”
“She doesn’t know we’re the People. She must feel that she is different from everyone. I wonder why?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about her, though. A kind of shield or wall that keeps us apart. I’ve never met anything like it in an Outsider or in one of the People either. Sometimes it’s like meshing with one of us and then bang! I smash the daylights out of me against that stone wall.”
“Yes, I know, I’ve felt it, too.”
We listened to the silent past-midnight world and then Jemmy stood.
“Well, g’night, Karen. Be seeing you.”
I stood up, too. “Good night, Jemmy.” I watched him start off in the late moonlight. He turned at the gate, his face hidden in the shadows.
“But I’m not giving up,” he said quietly. “Valancy is my love.”
The next day was hushed and warm, unusually so for December in our hills. There was a kind of ominous stillness among the trees, and, threading thinly against the milky sky, the slender smokes of little brush fires pointed out the dryness of the whole country. If you looked closely you could see piling behind Old Baldy an odd bank of clouds, so nearly the color of the sky that it was hardly discernible, but puffy and summer-thunderheady.
All of us were restless in school, the kids reacting to the weather, Valancy pale and unhappy after last night. I was bruising my mind against the blank wall in hers, trying to find some way I could help her.
Finally the thousand and one little annoyances were climaxed by Jerry and Susie scuffling until Susie was pushed out of the desk onto an open box of wet water colors that Debra for heaven only knows what reason had left on the floor by her desk. Susie shrieked and Debra sputtered and Jerry started a high silly giggle of embarrassment and delight. Valency, without looking, reached for something to rap for order with and knocked down the old cracked vase full of drooping wildflowers and three-day-old water. The vase broke and flooded her desk with the foul-smelling deluge, ruining the monthly report she had almost ready to send in to the county school superintendent.
For a stricken moment there wasn’t a sound in the room, then Valancy burst into half-hysterical laughter and the whole room rocked with her. We all rallied around doing what we could to clean up Susie’s and Valancy’s desks, and then Valency declared a holiday and decided that it would be the perfect time to go up-canyon to the slopes of Baldy and gather what greenery we could find to decorate our schoolroom for the holidays.
We all take our lunches to school, so we gathered them up and took along a square tarp the boys had brought to help build the dam in the creek. Now that the creek was dry they couldn’t use it, and it’d come in handy to sit on at lunchtime and would serve to carry our greenery home in, too, stretcher fashion.
Released from the schoolroom, we were all loud and jubilant and I nearly kinked my neck trying to keep all the kids in sight at once to nip in the bud any thoughtless lifting or other Group activity. The kids were all so wild, they might forget.
We went on up-canyon past the kids’ dam and climbed the bare dry waterfalls that stair-step up to the mesa. On the mesa we spread the tarp and pooled our lunches to make it more picnicky. A sudden hush from across the tarp caught my attention. Debra, Rachel and Lizbeth were staring horrified at Susie’s lunch. She was calmly dumping out a half dozen koomatka beside her sandwiches.
Koomatka are almost the only plants that lasted through the Crossing. I think four koomatka survived in someone’s personal effects. They were planted and cared for as tenderly as babies, and now every household in the Group has a koomatka plant growing in some quiet spot out of casual sight. Their fruit is eaten not so much for nourishment as Earth knows nourishment but as a last remembrance of all other similar delights that died with the Home. We always save koomatka for special occasions. Susie must have sneaked some out when her mother wasn’t looking. And there they were-across the table from an Outsider!
Before I could snap them to me or say anything Valancy turned, too, and caught sight of the softly glowing bluey green pile. Her eyes widened and one hand went out. She started to say something and then she dropped her eyes quickly and drew her hand back. She clasped her hands tightly together, and the girls, eyes intent on her, scrambled the koomatka back into the sack and Lizbeth silently comforted Susie, who had just realized what she had done. She was on the verge of tears at having betrayed the people to an Outsider.
