complete. I have felt them calling the last year or so, and now that I am on the way to the Presence I can hear them clearer, and clearer.” She paused and held her breath. “There is a canyon-north. The ship crashed there, after our life slips-here, Peter, give me your hand.” She reached urgently toward me and I cradled her hand in mine.
And I saw half the state spread out below me like a giant map. I saw the wrinkled folds of the mountains, the deceptively smooth roll of the desert up to the jagged slopes. I saw the blur of timber blunting the hills and I saw the angular writhing of the narrow road through the passes. Then I felt a sharp pleasurable twinge, like the one you feel when seeing home after being away a long time.
“There!” Mother whispered as the panorama faded. “I wish I could have known before. It’s been lonely-“But you, Peter,” she said strongly. “You and Bethie must go to them.”
“Why should we, Mother?” I cried in desperation. “What are they to us or we to them that we should leave Socorro and go among strangers?’”
Mother pulled herself up in bed, her eyes intent on my face. She wavered a moment and then Bethie was crouched behind her, steadying her back.
“They are not strangers,” she said clearly and slowly. “They are the People. “We shared the ship with them during the Crossing. They were with us when we were out in the middle of emptiness with only the fading of stars behind and the brightening before to tell us we were moving. They, with us, looked at all the bright frosting of stars across the blackness, wondering if on one of them we would find a welcome.
“You are woven of their fabric. Even though your father was not of the People-“
Her voice died, her face changed. Bethie moved from in back of her and lowered her gently. Mother clasped her hands and sighed.
“It’s a lonely business,” she whispered. “No one can go with you. Even with them waiting it’s lonely.”
In the silence that followed we heard Gramma Reuther rocking quietly in the front room. Bethie sat on the floor beside me, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide with a strange dark awe.
“Peter, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all. It healed!”
But we didn’t go. How could we leave my job and our home and go off to-where? Looking for-whom? Because-why? It was mostly me, I guess, but I couldn’t quite believe what Mother had told us. After all she hadn’t said anything definite. We were probably reading meaning where it didn’t exist. Bethie returned again and again to the puzzle of Mother and what she had meant, but we didn’t go.
And Bethie got paler and thinner, and it was neatly a year later that I came home to find her curled into an impossibly tight ball on her bed, her eyes tight shut, snatching at breath that came out again in sharp moans.
I nearly went crazy before I at last got through to her and uncurled her enough to get hold of one of her hands. Finally, though, she opened dull dazed eyes and looked past me.
“Like a dam, Peter,” she gasped. “It all comes in. It should-it should! I was born to-” I wiped the cold sweat from her forehead. “But it just piles up and piles up. It’s supposed to go somewhere. I’m supposed to do something! Peter Peter Peter!” She twisted on the bed, her distorted face pushing into the pillow.
“What does, Bethie?” I asked, turning her face to mine.
“What does?”
“Glib’s foot and Dad’s side and Mr. Tyree-next-door’s toe-” and her voice faded down through the litany of years of agony.
“‘I’ll go get Dr. Dueff,” I said hopelessly.
“No.” She turned her face away. “Why build the dam higher? Let it break. Oh, soon soon!”
“Bethie, don’t talk like that,” I said, feeling inside me my terrible aloneness that only Bethie could fend off now that Mother was gone. “We’ll find something-some way-“
“Mother could help,” she gasped. “A little. But she’s gone. And now I’m picking up mental pain, too! Reena’s afraid she’s got cancer. Oh, Peter Peter!” Her voice strained to a whisper. “Let me die! Help me die!”
Both of us were shocked to silence by her words. Help her die? I leaned against her hand. Go back into the Presence with the weight of unfinished years dragging at our feet? For if she went I went, too.
Then my eyes flew open and I stared at Bethie’s hand. What Presence? Whose ethics and mores were talking in my mind?
And so I had to decide. I talked Bethie into a sleeping pill and sat by her even after she was asleep. And as I sat there all the past years wound through my head. The way it must have been for Bethie all this time and I hadn’t let myself know.
Just before dawn I woke Bethie. We packed and went. I left a note on the kitchen table for Dr. Dueff saying only that we were going to look for help for Bethie and would he ask Reena to see to the house. And thanks.
I slowed the pickup over to the side of the junction and slammed the brakes on.
“Okay,” I said hopelessly. “You choose which way this time. Or shall we toss for it? Heads straight up, tails straight down!
I can’t tell where to go, Bethie. I had only that one little glimpse that Mother gave me of this country. There’s a million canyons and a million side roads. We were fools to leave Socorro. After all we have nothing to go on but what Mother said. It might have been delirium.”
“No,” Bethie murmured. “‘It can’t be. It’s got to be real.”
“But, Bethie,” I said, leaning my weary head on the steering wheel, “you know how much I want it to be true, not only for you but for myself, too. But look. What do we have to assume if Mother was right? First, that space travel is possible-was possible nearly fifty years ago. Second, that Mother and her People came here from another planet. Third, that we are, bluntly speaking, half-breeds, a cross between Earth and heaven knows what world. Fourth, that there’s a chance-in ten million-of our finding the other People who came at the same time Mother did, presupposing that any of them survived the Crossing.
“Why, any one of these premises would brand us as crazy crackpots to any normal person. No, we’re building
