~~~
When darkness freed me, I went on screaming.
I stopped, though, at the strangeness of the sky around me. Behind me, a blazing yellow glare; below me, a lesser yellow glare on blue and white cut by a curving line that moved rearward second by second; above me, a bone-white disk mottled with gray shading into black.
Amid my horror and terror, recognition bloomed in my mind. "Moon," I murmured, recalling a word that I'd learned from Sesame Street.
Recognizing the moon let me recognize the sun behind me and the earth below me. The curving line between light and dark kept moving ever rearward as the earth grew. I was going to land at night, I grasped.
Some of you may recall reentry's wonder and terror. For the benefit of those of you who don't, let me say that I saw no fiery wake and felt no crushing weight. One of Grandfather's great crystals must've dissipated heat and annulled inertia by a means yet unknown to the earth's physicists. As the sun's glare faded astern, I saw pools and strands of light crossing the land below me. Now, I know that the light came from cities and highways. Then, I feared that it came from melted rock in rifts and volcanic craters. Had I come from one doomed world to another?
Doomed or not, it was where I'd land. Big clusters of light moved behind and to the left of me as the ship came down towards a patch of relative darkness. This held two small, closely spaced pools of light amid a net of silvery threads. I'd learned the English word river, but still thought of it as a made-up-story word. I had no way to grasp that I was seeing the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland Rivers, or that the pools of light were Cairo, Illinois, and Paducah, Kentucky.
The ship landed south of Paducah in an open field near a house. From this came a man whom I recognized with dull joy as the Colonel, and a slender, white-haired woman whom I took as his wife. With them came a tiny four-legged creature that jumped up and down, and ran in circles.
Numbly, I thought to say in Tan speech, "Ship, open." When the upper part of its hull raised, warm air bearing the unmistakable scent of water -- as much water as air, I felt -- struck my face. It was an unseasonably warm night in February, and a thunderstorm, as you may recall, was on the way. Just then, I feared that I might drown in the air.
The Colonel, smiling at me, lifted me from the ship and set me onto unnaturally soft ground. On Ul, I'd walked only on rock and sand; soil, I had to get used to! The strange four-legged creature made shrill yelps as it ran back and forth before me. Terrified of it, I turned for reassurance to the Colonel.
"Welcome to the earth, Mira!" he said. "This is my wife, Annabel. She'll take you indoors while I stow away what you brought with you, and hide the ship."
The strange yelping creature put its forepaws onto one of my legs. "What's that?" I said, pointing at the creature.
"Major, our dog. He's a schnauzer. Let him sniff your hand."
I knew the word dog from Sesame Street, but most of the rest of the speech made no sense to me. When I held out my left hand to Major, though, he fell silent, sniffed my hand, and began to wag a nub of a tail.
"Now scratch behind his ears."
I scratched. Major wagged harder.
The Colonel's smile widened. "You've made a friend for life. Go with Annabel, Mira. She'll make you comfortable till I put things away."
She took my hand and led me towards the house, while Major trotted at my heels. As I walked with her, she spoke to me continuously in a soft, cheery voice.
"Mira is a lovely name, but you'll need a name of this world. We can use your old name as part of your new name. Would you like to be called Mirabelle?" When I nodded she went on to say, "Your family name will be Gordon; that's the Colonel's last name. You can go on calling him Colonel, as even his friends call him that. Please call me Mom, though, as I'll be your adoptive mother."
Mom's rush of words got me into the house and to the kitchen table. I gazed in incomprehension at more furniture and belongings than I'd seen in one place. Is Colonel Kan Ul Har, king of the earth? I thought.
"Would you like food, Belle?" Mom asked me. When I blinked in incomprehension, she went on to say, "Belle is short for your new name, Mirabelle Gordon. Would you like food? There are peaches in the refrigerator."
I nodded, not knowing what peaches were, but reassured by receiving hospitality. Mom set before me a bowl of yellow slices in liquid, along with what I knew from Sesame Street as a saucer and a fork. Not knowing how to use them, I picked up a slice of peach with my fingers.
Indescribable sweetness filled my mouth. Behind my numb exterior, I felt joy at coming to a world that had peaches, and sorrow at knowing that no one whom I'd left behind would taste them. Mechanically, I chewed and swallowed.
"Are you thirsty, Belle? Would you like water?"
I nodded. She took a glass out of a cabinet and then moved to something that drove amazement through my numb exterior. The Colonel had the wonder called faucet! When Mom turned a handle by this, water gushed from it, swiftly filled the glass, and flowed over its lip in a stream that went on and on. I felt awe at how much water Mom was offering Holy Light. Imagine how disillusioned I was when I learned that she was just running the water to get it cold!
When Mom handed me the glass, I took a sip from it and offered it to her. Smiling sweetly, she said, "Thank you, Belle, but the water is all for you."
My eyes got big, but I drank the glass dry. No Tan wastes water!
The Colonel came in and had peaches with me. He told me that he'd told the ship to fly into a barn, and that he'd taken out the memory-crystals and books and stored them in a safe. Anticipating my story, I'll say that he gave me some of them back the next day, but withheld others till his death. As I had no clear idea of what Sor-On had put aboard the ship with me, I didn't miss the withheld items.
When the Colonel spoke of ship, books, and crystals, I just stared at him. "Belle can barely keep her eyes open, Colonel," Mom said.
"It is bedtime," he said. "Could you put her to bed?"
I wanted to say that I'd been up just a couple of hours. As Sor-On had foreseen, though, I'd gone sleepless the night before; and the stress of the launch, the Crossing, and the landing had made me wearier than I could imagine.
Mom did put me to bed. When she did, she tried to show me how to use a bathroom. I rebelled in horror when I grasped that she was telling me to relieve myself into water, an act of pollution that would get a Tan driven into the Desert. Yielding to my protest, Mom gave me a bedpan that night, and the next day brought in a litter box for me. It took me long to overcome my revulsion towards toilets. I felt that part of the Desert-child within me died when I did overcome it.
She got me into pajamas and a bed, and let Major get into it with me and curl up against me. When she turned out the lights, I, though deathly tired, lay awake and stroked Major till the storm came, rain freed my tears, and Mom held me till I fell asleep.
When I awoke, a bright glow filled my bedroom. Seeing that the glow was coming through a window across the room from me, I rose and padded over a soft surface that I'd learn to call carpet. Kneeling in the window (a bay window), I gazed across a rolling field at a fierce golden ball just over the horizon.
On Ul, Holy Light had risen as a deep-purple globe and still been tinged red when it'd crossed zenith. At my first dawn on the earth, the sun was already more intense than Holy Light had ever become. Blinking at the strange, bright sun that hurt my eyes, I wondered whether the sun was also Holy Light, and whether I should offer it morning sacrifice.
Feeling that it'd be inexpressibly sad for me not to, I ran into the kitchen. I met no one on the way there; the Colonel, I'd later learn, was out in the barn looking at the ship, and Mom had driven into Paducah to get me a litter box and clothes. I found a glass in a rack by the sink. Feeling fearfully daring, I held the glass below faucet, turned its handle, and filled the glass with water. The world didn't end.
Major at my heels, I went outdoors to where I could see the sun across the field; then I
knelt on both knees on the ground. An unaccustomed feeling of dampness seeped through my pajamas' knees, but I paid it no heed as I held out the glass to the sun and said morning prayer as every Tan old enough to know it had said it every morning for seven thousand years.
At the prayer's end, I added an innovation. Recalling the three commands that Sor-On had given me, I repeated them as pledges: "Ti-kel-in Ul," 'I will remember the Homeworld'; "Ti-suv-in Tan," 'I will perpetuate the People'; "Ti-rem-in Ul Har," 'I will save the earth.' So have I said morning prayer ever since I came to this world.
I poured the water onto the ground. Major sniffed the water and licked it. I wasn't sure of whether it was acceptable for a dog to lick the water of morning sacrifice, but I wasn't sure of whether it was unacceptable. I'd have to work hard to learn all of the earth's rules.
When I rose from the ground, I felt a seed of relief sprout amid my field of numbness. I also felt unaccountably strong. Looking around, I saw a huge pot holding a small tree. Setting the glass onto the ground, I went to the pot. I could barely span it with my arms, and it must've weighed hundreds of pounds, but, straightening my knees, I lifted it as if it were a basket of pu berries.
As I stood holding the pot, I saw the Colonel staring at me. Giving me an odd smile, he said, "Please put the pot down, Belle. You Tani are strong on the earth, far stronger than humans are, but you mustn't show others how strong you are. You have much to learn. Your mother and I can start to teach you after breakfast. Just now I need you to come see something."
Throughout the story of my arrival on the earth, my listeners have given me low murmurs and slight nods of agreement. I've been telling them a version of their own arrival.
Now dour, brooding Un-Thor interrupts me. "Why are we Tani stronger than we were on the Homeworld?"
"I don't know. Dr. Ventnor did much research on us, but never found a full answer to that question. Our strength is partly due to the carbon filament in our bodies and to our crystal-shaping gift, but there's something more to our strength. Dr. Ventnor felt that it has something to do with the sun or with the earth's magnetic field."
"How much stronger are we here than we were on Ul?" Par-On asks me.
"At least ten times, just as our crystal-shaping gift seems to me to be at least ten times stronger here than there. Also, as some of us have learned the hard way, we heal almost at once, even from injuries that'd kill an earth-human. On the Homeworld, we'd have healed over time, or died."
"If we heal at once," shy Dala asks me, "will we live forever?"
I give her a sour smile."No one can say that she's lived forever till forever ends."