Pilgrimage (20 page)

"How come you like ghost towns? What draws you to them? History? Treasure? Morbid curiosity?"

"Treasure-history-morbid curiosity-" He tasted the words slowly and approved each with a nod of his head. "I guess all three. I'm questing."

"Questing?'"

"Questing." The tone of his voice ended the conversation. With an effort I detached myself from my completely illogical up-gush of anger at being shut out, and lost myself in the wooded wonder of the hillsides that finally narrowed the road until it was barely wide enough for the car to scrape through.

Finally Low spun the wheel and, fanning sand out from our tires, came to a stop under a huge black-walnut tree.

"Got your walking shoes on? This far and no farther for wheels."

Half an hour later we topped out on a small plateau above the rocky pass where our feet had slid and slithered on boulders grooved by high-wheeled ore wagons of half a century ago. The town had spread itself in its busiest days, up the slopes of the hills and along the dry creeks that spread fingerlike up from the small plateau. Concrete steps led abortively up to crumbled foundations, and sagging gates stood fenceless before shrub-shattered concrete walks.

There were a few buildings that were nearly intact, just stubbornly resisting dissolution. I had wandered up one faint street and down another before I realized that Low wasn't wandering with me. Knowing the solitary ways of ghost-town devotees, I made no effort to locate him, but only wondered idly what he was questing for-carefully refraining from wondering again who he was and why he and I spoke together underneath as we did. But even unspoken the wonder was burning deep under my superficial scratching among the junk heaps of this vanished town.

I found a white button with only three holes in it and the top of a doll's head with one eye still meltingly blue, and scrabbled, bare-handed, with delight when I thought I'd found a whole sun-purpled sugar bowl-only to find it was just a handle and half a curve held in the silt.

I was muttering over a broken fingernail when a sudden soundless cry crushed into me and left me gasping with the unexpected force. I stumbled down the bank and ran clattering down the rock-strewn road. I found Low down by the old town dump, cradling something preciously in the bend of his arm.

He lifted his eyes blindly to me.

"Maybe-!" he cried. "This might be some of it. It was never a part of this town's life. Look! Look at the shaping of it! Look at the flow of lines!" His hands drank in the smooth beauty of the metal fragment.

"And if this is part of it, it might not be far from here that-" He broke off abruptly, his thumb stilling on the underside of the object. He turned it over and looked closely.. Something died tragically as he looked. "

'General Electric,' " he said tonelessly. " 'Made in the USA.' " The piece of metal dropped from his stricken hands as be sagged to the ground. His fist pounded on the gravelly silt. "Dead end! Dead end!

Dead-"

I caught his hands in mine and brushed the gravel off, pressing Kleenex to the ooze of blood below his little finger.

"What have you lost?" I asked softly.

"Myself," he whispered. "I'm lost and I can't find my way back."

He took no notice of our getting up and my leading him to the fragment of a wall that kept a stunted elderberry from falling into the canyon. We sat down and for a while tossed on the ocean of his desolation as I thought dimly, "Too. Lost, too. Both of us." Then I helped him channel into speech, though I don't know whether it was vocal or not.

"I was so little then," he said. "I was only three, I guess. How long can you live on a three-year-old's memories? Mom told me all they knew but I could remember more. There was a wreck-a head-on collision the other side of Chuckawalla. My people were killed. The car tried to fly just before they hit. I remember Father lifted it up, trying to clear the other car, and Mother grabbed a handful of sun and platted me out of danger, but the crash came and I could only hear Mother's cry 'Don't forget! Go back to the Canyon,' and Father's 'Remember! Remember the Home!' and they were gone, even their bodies, in the fire that followed. Their bodies and every identification. Mom and Dad took me in and raised me like their own, but I've got to go back. I've got to go back to the Canyon. I belong there."

"What Canyon?" I asked.

"What Canyon?" he asked dully. "The Canyon where the People live now-my People. The Canyon where they located after the starship crashed. The starship I've been questing for, praying I might find some little piece of it to point me the way to the Canyon. At least to the part of the state it's in. The Canyon I went to sleep in before I woke at the crash. The Canyon I can't find because I have no memory of the road there.

"But you know!" he went on. "You surely must know! You aren't like the others. You're one of us. You must be!"

I shrank down into myself.

"I'm nobody," I said. "I'm not one of anybody. My Mom and dad can tell me my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, and they used to all the time, trying to figure out why they were burdened with such a child, until I got smart enough to get 'normal' "You think you're lost! At least you know what you're lost from. You could get un-lost. But I can't. I haven't ever been un-lost!"

"But you can talk underneath." He blinked before my violence. "You showed me Lucine-"

"Yes," I said recklessly. "And look at this!"

A rock up on the hillside suddenly spurted to life. It plowed down the slope, sending gravel flying, and smashed itself to powder against a boulder at the base.

"And I never tried this before, but look!"

I stepped up onto the crumbling wall and walked away from Low, straight on out over the canyon, feeling Earth fall away beneath my feet, feeling the soft cradling sweep of the wind, the upness and outness and unrestrainedness I cried out, lifting my arms, reaching ecstatically for the hem of my dream of freedom. One minute, one minute more and I could slide out of myself and never, never, never...

And then...

Low caught me just before I speared myself on the gaunt stubby pines below us in the canyon. He lifted me, struggling and protesting, back up through the fragile emptiness of air, back to the stunted elderberry tree.

"But I did! I did!" I sobbed against him. "I didn't just fall. For a while I really did!"

"For a while you really did, Dita," he murmured as to a child. "As good as I could do myself. So you do have some of the Persuasions. Where did you get them if you aren't one of us?"

My sobs cut off without an after-echo, though my tears continued. I looked deep into Low's eyes, fighting against the anger that burned at this persistent returning to the wary hurting place inside me. He looked steadily back until my tears stopped and I finally managed a ghost of a smile. "I don't know what a Persuasion is, but I probably got it the same place you got that tilt to your eyebrows."

He reddened and stepped back from me.

"We'd better start back. It's not smart to get night-caught on these back roads."

We started back along the trail

"Of course you'll fill in the vacancies for me as we go back," I said, barely catching myself as my feet slithered on a slick hump of granite. I felt his immediate protest. "You've got to," I said, pausing to shake the gravel out of one shoe. "You can't expect me to ignore today, especially since I've found someone as crazy as I am."

"You won't believe--" He dodged a huge buckbrush that crowded the narrow road.

"I've had to believe things about myself all these years that I couldn't believe," I said, "and it's easier to believe things about other people."

So we drove through the magic of an early twilight that deepened into a star-brilliant night, and I watched the flick of the stars through the overarching trees along the road and listened to Low's story.

He stripped it down to its bare bones, but underneath, the bones burned like fire in the telling.

"We came from some other world," he said, wistful pride at belonging showing in his "we." "The Home was destroyed. We looked for a refuge and found this earth. Our ships crashed or burned before they could land. But some of us escaped in life slips. My grandparents were with the original Group that gathered at the Canyon. But we were all there, too, because our memories are joined continuously back into the Bright Beginning. That's why I know about my People. Only I can't remember where the Canyon is, because I was asleep the one time we left it, and Mother and Father couldn't tell me in that split second before the crash.

"I've got to find the Canyon again. I can't go on living forever limping." He didn't notice my start at his echoing of that thought of mine when I was with Lucine. "'I can't achieve any stature at all until I am with my People.

"I don't even know the name of the Canyon, but I do remember that our ship crashed in the hills and I'm always hoping that someday I'll find some evidence of it in one of these old ghost towns. It was before the turn of the century that we came, and somewhere, somewhere, there must be some evidence of the ship still in existence."

His was a well-grooved story, too, worn into commonplace by repetition as mine had been-lonely aching repetition to himself. I wondered for a moment, in the face of his unhappiness, why I should feel a stirring of pleased comfort, but then I realized that it was because between us there was no need for murmurs of sympathy or trite little social sayings or even explanations. The surface words were the least of our communication.

"You aren't surprised?" He sounded almost disappointed.

"That you are an out-worlder?" I asked. I smiled. "Well, I've never met one before and I find it interesting. I only wish I could have dreamed up a fantasy like that to explain me to me. It's quite a switch on the old "I must be adopted because I'm so different.' But-"

I stiffened as Low's surge of rage caught me offguard.

"Fantasy! I am adopted. I remember! I thought you'd know. I thought since you surely must be one of us that you'd be-"

"I'm not one of you!" I flared. "Whatever 'you' are. I'm of Earth-so much so that it's a wonder the dust doesn't puff out of my mouth when I speak-but at least I don't try to kid myself that I'm normal by any standard, Earth-type or otherwise."

For a hostile minute we were braced stonily against each other. My teeth ached as the muscles on my jaws knotted. Then Low sighed and reaching out a finger he traced the line of my face from brow to chin to brow again.

"Think your way," he said. "You've probably been through enough bad times to make anyone want to forget. Maybe someday you'll remember that you are one of us and then-"

"Maybe, maybe, maybe!" I said through my weary shaken breath. "But I can't any more. It's too much for one day." I slammed all the doors I could reach and shoved my everyday self up to the front. As we started off I reopened one door far enough to ask, "What's this between you and Lucine? Are you a friend of the family or something that you're working with her?"

"I know the family casually," Low said. "They don't know about Lucine and me. She caught my imagination once last year when I was passing the school. The kids were pestering her. I never felt such heartbroken bewilderment in all my life. Poor little Earth kid. She's a three-year-old in a twelve-year-old body-"

"Four-year-old," I murmured. "Or almost five. She's learning a little."

"Four or five," Low said. "It must be awful to be trapped in a body-"

"Yes," I sighed. "To be shut in the prison of yourself."

Tangibly I felt again the warm running of his finger around my face, softly, comfortingly, though he made no move toward me. I turned away from him in the dusk to hide the sudden tears that came.

It was late when we got home. There were still lights in the bars and a house or two when we pulled into Kruper, but the hotel was dark, and in the pause after the car stopped I could hear the faint creaking of the sagging front gate as it swung in the wind. We got out of the car quietly, whispering under the spell of the silence, and tiptoed up to the gate. As usual the scraggly rosebush that drooped from the fence snagged my hair as I went through, and as Low helped free me we got started giggling. I suppose neither of us had felt young and foolish for so long, and we had both unburdened ourselves of bitter tensions, and found tacit approval of us as the world refused to accept us and as we most wanted to be; and, each having at least glimpsed a kindred soul, well, we suddenly bubbled over. We stood beneath the upstairs porch and tried to muffle our giggles.

"People will think we're crazy if they hear us carrying on like this," I choked.

"I've got news for you," said Low, close to my ear. "We are crazy. And I dare you to prove it."

"Hoh! As though it needed any proof!"

"I dare you." His laughter tickled my cheek.

"How?" I breathed defiantly.

"Let's not go up the stairs," he hissed. "Let's lift through the air. Why waste the energy when we can-?"

He held out his hand to me. Suddenly sober I took it and we stepped back to the gate and stood hand in hand, looking up.

"Ready?" he whispered, and I felt him tug me upward.

I lifted into the air after him, holding all my possible fear clenched in my other hand.

And the rosebush reached up and snagged my hair.

"Wait!" I whispered, laughter trembling again. "I'm caught."

"'Earth-bound!" he chuckled as he tugged at the clinging strands.

"Smile when you say that, podner," I returned, feeling my heart melt with pleasure that I had arrived at a point where I could joke about such a bitterness-and trying to ignore the fact that my feet were treading nothing but air. My hair freed, he lifted me up to him. I think our lips only brushed, but we overshot the porch and had to come back down to land on it. Low steadied me as we stepped across the railing.

"We did it," he whispered.

"Yes," I breathed. "We did."

Then we both froze. Someone was coming into the yard. Someone who stumbled and wavered and smashed glassily against the gatepost.