She reached over with a slender milky finger and touched my hand. “Brown,” she said. Then, “Tan,” as she caught my thought.
“The sun,” I said. “We’re out in the sun so much, unshielded, that it browns our skins or freckles them, or burns the living daylight out of us if we’re not careful.”
“Then you still live in touch of Earth. At Home we seldom ever-” Her words faded and I caught a capsuled feeling that might have been real cozy if you were born to it, but…
“How come?” I asked. “What’s with your world that you have to shield all the time?” I felt a pang for my pictured Eden ….
“We don’t have to. At least not any more. When we arrived at the new Home we had to do a pretty thorough renovating job. We-of course this was my grandparents-wanted it as nearly like the old Home as possible. We’ve done wonderfully well copying the vegetation and hills and valleys and streams, but-” guilt tinged her words, “it’s still a copy-nothing casual and-and thoughtless. By the time the new Home was livable we’d got into the habit of shielding. It was just what one did automatically. I don’t believe Mother has gone unshielded outside her own sleep-room in all her life. You just-don’t-“
I sprawled my arm across the sand, feeling it grit against my skin. Real cozy, but…
She sighed. “One time-I was old enough to know better, they told me-one time I walked in the sun unshielded. I got muddy and got my hands dirty and tore my dress.” She brought out the untidy words with an effort, as though using extreme slang at a very prim gathering. “And I tangled my hair so completely in a tree that I had to pull some of it out to get free.” There was no bravado in her voice now. Now she was sharing with me one of the most precious of her memories-one not quite socially acceptable among her own.
I touched her hand lightly, since I do not communicate too freely without contact, and saw her.
She was stealing out of the house before dawn-strange house, strange landscape, strange world-easing the door shut, lifting quickly out into the grove below the house. Her flame of rebellion wasn’t strange to me, though. I knew it too well myself. Then she dropped her shield. I gasped with her because I was feeling, as newly as though I were the First in a brand-new Home, the movement of wind on my face, on my arms. I was even conscious of it streaming like tiny rivers between my fingers. I felt the soil beneath my hesitant feet, the soft packed clay, the outline of a leaf, the harsh stab of gravel, the granular sandiness of the water’s edge. The splash of water against my legs was as sharp as a bite into lemon. And wetness! I had no idea that wetness was such an individual feeling. I can’t remember when first I waded in water, or whether I ever felt wetness to know consciously, “This is wetness.” The newness! It was like nothing I’d felt before.
Then suddenly there was the smell of crushed manzanita again, and Salla’s hand had moved from beneath mine.
“Mother’s questing for me,” she whispered. “She has no idea I’m here. She’d have a quanic if she knew. I must go before she gets no answer from my room.”
“When are you all coming out?”
“Tomorrow, I think, Laam will have to rest longer. He’s our Motiver, you know. It was exhausting bringing the ship into the atmosphere. More so than the whole rest of the trip. But the rest of us-“
“How many?” I whispered as she glided away from me and up the curve of the ship.
“Oh,” she whispered back, “there’s-” The door opened and she slid inside and it closed.
“Dream sweetly,” I heard soundlessly, then astonishingly, the touch of a soft cheek against one of my cheeks, and the warm movement of lips against the other. I was startled and confused, though pleased, until with a laugh I realized that I had been caught between the mother’s questing and Salla’s reply.
“Dream sweetly,” I thought, and rolled myself in my blankets.
Something wakened me in the empty hours before dawn. I lay there feeling snatched out of sleep like a fish out of water, shivering in the interval between putting off sleep and putting on awakeness.
“I’m supposed to think,” I thought dully. “Concentrated thinking.”
So I thought. I thought of my People, biding their time, biding their time, waiting, waiting, walking when they could be flying. Think, think what we could do if we stopped waiting and really got going. Think of Bethie, our Sensitive, in a medical center, reading the illnesses and ailments to the doctors. No more chance for patients to hide behind imaginary illnesses. No wrong diagnoses, no delay in identification of conditions. Of course there are only one Bethie and the few Sorters we have who could serve a little less effectively, but it would be a beginning.
Think of our Sorters, helping to straighten people out, able to search their deepest beings and pry the scabs off ancient cankers and wounds and let healing into the suffering intricacies of the mind.
Think of our ability to lift, to transport, to communicate, to use Earth instead of submitting to it. Hadn’t Man been given dominion over Earth? Hadn’t he forfeited it somewhere along the way? Couldn’t we help point him back to the path again?
I twisted with this concentrated restatement of all my questions. Why couldn’t this all be so now, now!
But, “No,” say the Old Ones. “Wait,” says Jemmy. “Not now,” says Valancy.
“But look!” I wanted to yell. “They’re headed for space! Trying to get there on a Pogo stick. Look at Laam! He brought that ship to us from some far Homeland without lifting his hand, without gadgets in his comfortable motive-room. Take any of us. I myself could lift our pickup high enough to need my shield to keep me breathing. I’ll bet even I in one of those sealed high-flying planes could take it to the verge of space, just this side of the escape rim. And any Motiver could take it over the rim and the hard part is over. Of course, though all of us can lift we have only two Motivers, but it would be a start!”
But, “No,” say the Old Ones. “Wait,” says Jemmy. “Not now,” says Valancy.
All right, so it would be doing violence to the scheme of things, grafting a third arm onto an organism designed for two. So the Earth ones will develop along our line someday-look at Peter and Dita and that Francher kid and Bethie. So someday when it is earned they will have it. So-let’s go, then! Let’s find another Home. Let’s take to space and leave them their Earth. Let’s let them have their time-if they don’t die of it first. Let’s leave. Let’s get out of this crummy joint. Let’s go somewhere where we can be ourselves all the time, openly unashamed!
I pounded my fists on the blanket, then ruefully wiped the flecks of sand from my lips and
