 
DAUGHTER OF ORION

Alfred D. Byrd

Daughter of Orion

Alfred D. Byrd

Copyright 2009 Alfred D. Byrd.

Smashwords Edition

Some Rights Reserved.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is my own take on the concept of super-powered aliens from a lost world learning to live among us "earth-humans." I freely acknowledge that elements of this work were inspired by the television series _Roswell_ and _Smallville,_ and by the ultimate source of inspiration for tales of super-powered aliens from a lost world, the incomparable tales of the People by Zenna Henderson, most recently collected in _Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson_ (Nesfa Press, 1995).

In the words of Mirabelle Gordon, born Mira Das-Es:

_On a barren expanse of desert in northern Utah, under_ Thil-i An Om, _'The Stars of the Great Crystal-Shaper,' which the earth-humans call Orion, the eight of us sent to the earth from a dying world have met as a group for the first time. In the golden glow of a circle of_ bil-i lus, _light-crystals,_ _I look at seven faces turned towards me._

The faces have a sameness owing to their unearthly origin. Framed by hair of strawberry blond, they're round and as pale as moonlight, with full lips, short, tip-tilted noses, and wide-set eyes of aquamarine. The seven faces look for guidance to me, at nineteen years of the earth the oldest of the eight.

_In a soft voice, Par-On, the youngest, my intended, speaks to me._ _"We're here, Mira, to learn of our past and of our future together. Only you know the full story of those times. Tell us what we need to know."_

I nod, but pause before I start the night's activities. Although it's I who'll tell the others what they need to know, it'll be Par who'll tell them and me what we must do. I look at a long object, wrapped in silk, by his feet. How far that object has come to be here tonight! It'll be my story's end.

To my surprise, Dala, the shy one, breaks in. "Yes, Mira, tell us! You know that I've run all of the way from South Carolina to be here tonight."

To no surprise of mine, Kuma, a born fighter, sneers at Dala. "Poor baby! Do your footsies hurt you? Maybe, you should lie down while the rest of us celebrate the festival."

Some of the others laugh. Dala is about to protest when I say, "Hush!" I feel relief when everyone else hushes and turns his or her eyes back to me. "In a few days," I go on to say, "the Message will come. When it does, we must be ready to do the Work for which our people sent us here.

_"As part of the Work, we must recall who we are. Tonight, we're here to reenact a festival that the_ Tan, _our people, did on the Homeworld whenever these stars" -- I point at Orion's Belt and Sword -- "dominated the night sky. The_ Tan _sang, danced, and retold the tale of its origin. Does each of you recall the words of the song that I taught you?"_

_Seven heads nod._ _As I start to sing of a crystal-ship that brought three lives to a world now lost, seven voices join my voice. Both Dala and Lona, the mystic, have the song's words down. Kuma and the four boys, though, stumble over the words, which they sing in an accent of the American English that's filled their mouths for the past nearly fourteen years. Still, the eight of us are singing together, as those who sent us here meant for us to sing._ We'll get better, _I promise myself._

_The dance, I believe, will go better than the song went. I've shown everyone else the festival's_ bil kel-al, _its_ _memory-crystal, to fix in his or her mind the steps that as couples and as a community we eight must do. I regret our lack of musicians to play traditional bone-flutes, harps, and drums for the dance. The instruments must lie in Par's hidden chambers till a future beyond the Work. Tonight, we dancers must hear the crystal's music in our minds. Maybe, when we have children..._

Rising, each of us girls exchanges bows with her intended: shy Dala with solid, trustworthy Van-Dor; mystical Lona with wise, artistic Sil-Tan; fierce Kuma with dour, brooding Un-Thor; I with Par, a mystery to me. Born to rule us all, he's a stranger to us all. We must learn who he is before the Message comes.

Each boy and girl spins around each other, and then parts from his or her partner. We spin faster than any earth-human can spin; we leap higher than any earth-human can leap. We come together as couples, and then join hands in a ring of eight.

_The dance's message is clear to me. The_ Tan, _the People,_ _is born as individuals who come together as couples, and these come together as the community. The dance tells the_ Tan's _story for seven thousand years on_ Ul, _the Homeworld, till it ended, sending just eight lives to a world indescribably strange to them._

Dance over, the eight of us sit in a circle for the telling of the tale of origin. Again, seven faces look at mine. I'm the one who's viewed all of the memory-crystals and read all of the books that came to the earth in the crystal-ships. Also, as the oldest, I'm the one who best recalls Ul. I gather my thoughts --

Dour, brooding Un mutters, "We're sweating now, but before Mira stops speaking we'll all be cold."

Par shakes his head. "None of us needs ever be cold. Each of you should be carrying a heat-crystal. You know what to do with it."

As each of my seven companions takes a crystal from his pocket or from her purse, I take one out, too. Each of us calls up the strongest, strangest of our gifts, the crystal-shaping gift, and focuses it on his or her crystal. In our hands, eight crystals grow red hot.

Par, setting his crystal onto the ground before him, gives Un an unreadable smile. "You should stay warm now, don't you think?" As dour Un nods, Par turns his gaze to me. "We're ready, Mira. Tell us our story."

Thinking of Ul, I start to speak.

When you opened your eyes at birth on the Homeworld, you first saw sand. To the left and to the right, ahead and behind, _bas,_ as we Tani call sand, lay in all directions from the rocky outcrops where we huddled for shelter. Whenever I read Shelley's line, "The lone and level sands stretch far away," I think of vanished Ul.

Our name for where we lived was _ka-bas,_ 'all-sand,' the Desert. In the Desert, the sand lay not only around us, but also above us. Even at the best of times, Ul's sky had a mustard-colored tinge from fine sand borne on high. At the worst of times, a wind rose, howling around the rocky outcrops and blasting them with sand that brought even noon the night's darkness. We called the wind _wis bas,_ 'wind of sand,' the Sandstorm.

Survival on Ul required some of us -- brave, unlucky souls -- to enter the Desert to seek crystals, metal, and water. Not all who entered the Desert came home. Those of you learning to read the genealogies may've noticed over and over in them the lines _wa-tak-il na-ka-bas,_ 'he died in the Desert,' and _wa-tak-il na-wis bas,_ 'he died in the Sandstorm.' The Homeworld was no place for the weak.

I've said that the Desert lay in all directions from the People's homes, but the Desert was far from being the universe as we Tani saw it. The Desert, in fact, just formed a ring around one face of Ul. Inwards from the ring, the land rose till the air grew too thin to be breathed. Just at the limit of breathability lay a ring of frost that doughty souls called "frost-gatherers" collected and brought home.

Outwards from the ring of Desert in every direction, the land sank till it reached a zone of dense air where violent winds ever swirled. We called this zone _nel wis-i,_ The Wall of Winds. In it lay mists, marshes, and strange, poisonous life that slew unwary travelers. The zone, though it held water and life, held no hope of a home for the Tan. Brave souls, though, went to the Wall of Winds for treasures to be brought to the People. As you've read in the genealogies the words _wa-tak-il na-nel wis-i,_ you know that not all of the brave souls made it home.

What lay beyond the Wall of Winds, none of the Tan knew till Ul's last years.

The light-crystals' glow shows me puzzled looks. Par-On speaks, I think, for the rest of my listeners as he says, "I gather from the memory-crystals and the books that the Homeworld was strange, but I don't see how a world like the one that you just described can exist."

I smile at him. "I can tell you how, if you don't mind a brief astronomy lesson." I sweep my gaze over the others. "It's late, but I know that you can handle this."

I hear moans, but they sound playful to me.

~~~

At every solar system's heart lies a star. Ul's was a red dwarf that the earth's astronomers call Wolf 1061. We Tani called it _Lus Im,_ Holy Light. It's about thirteen point eight light-years from the earth in the constellation Ophiucus.

Many red dwarfs are flare stars, shooting out vast clouds of ionized gas that'd fry any otherwise livable world. Luckily for the Tani who lived near it, Wolf 1061 is a stable red dwarf. It might've shone gentle, unvarying light onto Ul for trillions of years, if the Homeworld had survived.

Astronomers will tell you that any world near enough a red dwarf to bear life will be tidally locked, showing one face always to the red dwarf and the other face always to outer darkness. Ul, though, had a twenty-four hour day, almost the same as the earth's.

Impossible, you say? Not at all! Although Ul was part of Holy Light's solar system, the Homeworld didn't revolve around Holy Light. Instead, the Homeworld was a moon of a gas giant that the Tan didn't discover till about forty years before Ul ended. The gas giant was a red world that lay behind the Homeworld from the People's vantage. With us Tani's typical flair for nomenclature, we named the gas giant _Nas-Ul,_ 'behind the Homeworld.' I saw Nas-Ul just once, briefly, as I was flying away from a world falling to pieces.

Ul was tidally locked to Nas-Ul, which it circled every twenty-four hours. On the Homeworld's outer face, where Nas-Ul never shone, Holy Light rose and set just like the earth's sun. On the Homeworld's inner face, where Nas-Ul always hung at zenith, Holy Light also rose and set, but was eclipsed by the gas giant several hours each day at midday. Because of the daily eclipse on the inner face, it was far colder than the outer face. Where cold air met hot in the Wall of Winds, winds always raged.

The gas giant's gravity, which tidally locked Ul's rotation, also stretched the Homeworld into a shape like a football's. The Homeworld had a high tidal bulge on its inner face and a high tidal bulge on its outer face. Between the bulges lay a ring of low land encompassing the world's north, east, south, and west poles. In this ring, under the dense air of the Wall of Winds, lay most of the world's water. Most of the rest of it had snowed out onto glaciers on the world's inner face. Hence, we poor Tani, on the world's dry outer face, gathered dew and scraped frost from rocks.

Couldn't we, with our crystal-ships, have moved water from the Wall of Winds and the inner face? We tried to move it, but I'm getting ahead of my story.

My mind goes, as it often goes, to one of my visits to Dr. Ventnor in his tiny, book-lined office above a shady quadrangle at the Ohio State University. The visit occurred when I was ten, having been on the earth four years. Sitting by Dr. Ventnor's window, I was watching students toss a Frisbee as he asked me what I recalled of the Homeworld and how I was adjusting to this world.

The Frisbee made me think of the Crossing from there to here. Abruptly, I said, "Why did the Homeworld break up?"

Dr. Ventnor raised a gull-winged brow over an ebon eye. I peered at his long, square-jawed face, with skin of the color of a Starbuck's vanilla frappucino, and with a gulf of baldness that went back and back till it left just a fringe of white hair around his skull's base. Not for the first time I wondered why he resembled the Colonel.

_Dr. Ventnor gave me a crooked smile. "The Colonel tells me, Belle" -- Dr. Ventnor was using my earth-name, not my birth-name -- "that you read_ National Geographic _cover to cover and watch the Learning Channel religiously. Do you know what a Roche Limit is?"_

I shrugged. "When a little world gets too near a big world, the big world's tidal pull tears the little world apart."

Dr. Ventnor grinned at me. "You'll go far, Belle. Ul, your homeworld, was actually inside Nas-Ul's Roche Limit. Till the Tan came along, though, Ul was safe there. It was a rocky moon of a gas giant. A dense enough rocky world is safe from tidal destruction.

"When Dor-Sad learned how to make the great crystals, the forces that the Tan used to mine glaciers, raise the crystal-city, and send crystal-ships from star to star began to liquefy Ul. In time, what gravity began, gravity ended."

So Grandfather really was guilty, _I thought. Dor-Sad, his world's Einstein, had said so to me, but I'd hoped that he was wrong._ _Now, I had to accept that a man who'd wanted to turn Ul into a paradise had turned it into a graveyard, a Saturn's ring of death. As Einstein's granddaughter, I'd inherited his guilt, as well as the Work that he and the rest of the Tan had sent me to the earth to do._

_A tear splashed on a bare, pale knee as I watched the Frisbee soar._ Find a better world this time, _I thought,_ one that'll last forever.

"The earth is safe, isn't it?" I murmured.

Dr. Ventnor was silent a moment. When he spoke again, he asked me of school.

What we Tani had on Ul was little. We had three species of domestic animals: the _gur-i,_ which filled the place of cattle; the _har-i,_ which filled the place of sheep; and the _lex-i,_ which filled the place of horses. Ul's horses were carnivores with faces like those of greyhounds, but were gentle, faithful creatures nonetheless.

We had twelve species of plants for food, clothing, timber, paper, and medicine. Some plants, we grew in pots; other plants, we raised in tiny plots of soil that we tended and watered by hand. We talked to the plants. As we watered each plant, we told it, _"Su ze bul kol-il ux-es,"_ 'This is water to help you grow.' Tradition-bound, we never wondered whether the water would work just as well without the words. Ul's plants are gone, but I still talk to the earth's plants as I water them.

We had _bu,_ a bluish gel that turned dead bodies and plant matter into soil. Dr. Ventnor told me that _bu_ is a form of nanotechnology. Each Tan looked forward, at the end of a life of about a hundred and eighty of the earth's years, to being put into _bu_ pits. Turned into soil, he or she would stay part of the community as a plant and then as that which ate the plant. We may not have known much, but we knew ecology.

What we had and knew, though, would've been too little for survival without our crystals. Not all of us could make or use them. The gift to do so ran from mother to child in bloodlines of which records have been kept seven thousand years. The presence or absence of the gift divided the Tan into the _An-i,_ the Crystal-Shapers, and the _Kum-i,_ the Companions. For seven thousand years, the Ani made light-crystals, heat-crystals, healing-crystals, and memory-crystals that kept civilization, such as it was, alive. For forty years, the Ani made the great crystals...

The Ani ruled the Tan. The Ani, though, didn't live in mansions behind razor-wire apart from their subjects as the earth's rulers live. The Ani and the Kumi lived in the same tunnels, ate the same food, shared the same tasks, and gave their sons and daughters in marriage to each other as if the gift made no difference to one's status.

_In the light-crystals' glow, dour, brooding Un-Thor shakes his head. "The gift did make a difference, though. The eight of us whom the Tan sent to the earth are all_ Ani."

Par-On nods. "So we are. Please, though, don't judge our ancestors till Mira's story ends. You'll know then all that they did to save all that they could of the Homeworld."

Mystical Lona furrows her brow. "I'm old enough to recall the Homeworld. I can testify that what Mira has said of it is true. Now that I've lived thirteen years on the earth, though, Ul's ecology sounds far too simple to have evolved."

Un snorts. "In some ways, it sounds so. In other ways, it's far too complex. Does nanotechnology just evolve?"

Wise, artistic Sil-Tan raises a hand. "Were we as powerful on Ul as we are on the earth?"

_I shake my head._ _"We're far stronger and faster here than we were there. Our crystal-shaping gift has grown, too. Don't ask me why! I once asked Dr. Ventnor that question. He speculated on a type G star's radiation and the earth's magnetic field, but in the end he had to say, 'I don't know.'"_

Shy Dala's eyes get big. "Wow! Imagine his saying that!"

~~~

Now that you have some background, I can move into memory. Surely, it won't surprise you that my first memory is of sand.

One afternoon when I was four years old, I was supposed to be setting out for Gam Tol, the Tan's chief settlement, to be betrothed to Par-On, a baby whom I hadn't met; but it seemed to me that I'd be going nowhere. Standing with my relatives in the lee of a spur of rock, I gazed at a sky that raced and swirled. Years later on the earth, I'd pour butterscotch pudding into water in a blender and turn it on. What spun in the blender looked just like that sky.

I glanced at my relatives. All of us, from youngest girl to oldest man, were dressed alike in turbans, long scarves, and loose, long-sleeved smocks belted over long skirts. The clothing was maybe unfashionable by American standards, but it kept the sand outside us.

One learned to tell one's relatives by their eyes. With me were my father and my mother; my father's grandfather, the settlement's _kan,_ or chieftain; and my mother's father, Dor-Sad, the world's Einstein. All of us but him stood still and gave the _wis bas_ the look of worried resignation that Tani had always given sandstorms. Grandfather Dor-Sad, though, fidgeted, and bounced up and down on his heels.

"Tell me again, Dor-Sad," my great-grandfather, the _kan,_ said, "how your crystal-ships can fly from star to star, but can't take off in a sandstorm."

"There's no sand between the stars," Dor-Sad said in a tone that I fear wasn't altogether polite.

I giggled. My mother shushed me, but couldn't keep me from thinking that Grandfather was telling a made-up story. If sand could fill the sky, how could even the stars be safe from sand?

I looked at the crystal-ship, shielded from the _wis bas_ by hides of _gur-i._ Only when I reached the earth did I learn how absurd it was to cover a starship with cowhides. I visualized what lay below them. A crystal-ship resembles a kite-shaped diamond with highlights of red and blue. I visualized myself entering the ship and rising in it over the sand into a realm where the stars ever shone --

Grandfather broke up my reverie. "In fertile lands on the earth" -- that day he didn't call it 'the earth,' but _Ul Har,_ the inhabited world of the Sheep Constellation -- "water keeps the sand in check, so that there are no sandstorms. There one can travel when one wants to. Someday, when we bring water here and make the land bloom, the _wis bas_ will be no more."

"Maybe, someday," the _kan_ said. "Today, though, the wind is just getting stronger. It'll soon be time for evening sacrifice. Let's go in and prepare for it. If we're lucky, Mira can set out in the morning."

It was actually two mornings later when the sky cleared, keeping just the faintest of mustard tinges to show us Tani that the _wis bas_ would someday return. I was nearly jumping out of my skin with excitement as the crystal-ship opened like a clamshell, and Grandfather lifted me aboard.

Saying, "Take care to touch none of the crystals, Mira," he set me down in a cramped space amid altered amethysts, citrines, and topazes. He helped my father and my mother aboard, and then joined us peas in a pod. When my father complained of how cramped he was, Grandfather said, "On flights between stars, a ship can hold just one. I've removed the sleeping-crystal, the speaking-crystal, and most of the power-crystals to give you what room there is. Someday, I'll try again to make a big ship..."

His voice trailed off. He was alluding to a sad, but important story. I'll tell you that story later, as just now, in this story, I was filled with joy as the crystal-ship rose from the sand. The rocky outcrop where I'd spent all of my life fell away below me. My father whimpered, clinging to my mother and burying his head on her shoulder; but she and I, daughter and granddaughter of Ul's Einstein, gazed eagerly at a world that began to turn round below us. Feeling no sense of acceleration as desert, frost, and airless rock sped past, I paid Grandfather's running monologue no heed.

I wish that I had paid it heed. Who knows how much he told me that we Tani could now use?

All too soon, the flight ended, but another marvel awaited me. Rising from the desert atop a mesa, a cathedral of clear crystal scattered Holy Light's crimson rays in a thousand glorious hues. I was seeing Gam Tol in its glory, two years before the Homeworld's end. America has shopping malls as large as Gam Tol was, but, to a four-year-old girl who'd come from a hole in a rock, the city was splendiferous.

"Someday," Grandfather said, "every Tan will live in just such a city."

My father looked humbled, but my mother smiled with clear pride, as likely I smiled, for it was her father, my grandfather, who'd built the crystal-city.

As the crystal-ship settled before the city's gate, three figures of majesty emerged from it. The first was a woman, lovely and tall. The second was a baby whom she held in her arms. The third, who drew my eye, was a man, tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome beyond words. It pleases me that Par-On is growing into his spit and image. The tall man wore a crown of gold from which three crystal-tipped spires shot up and swept back. Einstein's granddaughter, I knew the crystals as a light-crystal, a healing-crystal, and a memory-crystal.

We peas in a pod emerged from our pod and stood before the three majestic figures. Grandfather, who, of course, knew them, introduced them to the rest of us in the traditional order, starting with the youngest. Thus, I met the baby, Par-On; his mother, Luna Nel-Rav; and his father, Sor-On, _Kan Tan,_ the People's High Chieftain.

Bowing my head, I crossed my arms over my chest, knelt on my right knee, and murmured, _"Lon-al lu-es, Kan Tan Sor-On."_ For the linguistically challenged among you, I'll translate that phrase as, "Joy to you, High Chieftain of the People, Sor-On." Learn that phrase before the night ends!

I must've done well, for both Sor-On and Luna smiled at me. Baby Par, though, just waved his chubby arms and made a strange yodel.

The royal couple led the royal guests into the royal city, where things became a blur for me. I recall only being bathed and dressed in the finest robes that I'd worn.

As my mother put them onto me, the ground shook. Everyone cried out till it stopped shaking. When it grew still again, someone muttered that it'd never shaken in the old days, but now shook ever more often. My mother, looking haughty, said, "My father will learn why the ground is shaking and make it stop."

Sorry, Mother, he didn't.

Once dressed, I was led to a magnificent chamber of green crystal where the royal family sat on thrones on a high dais amid a crowd in its best finery. Luna put Par into my arms. Sor-On, placing his hand onto his son's forehead, spoke words for him; then I spoke for myself words that my great-grandfather, the _kan_ of his tiny settlement across the airless rise from mighty Gam Tol, had coached me to say.

After I'd spoken my words, the crowd called for me to kiss Par. When I did, he gave me the biggest raspberry of my life. As I frowned and wiped baby spit from my mouth, the crowd, laughing and cheering, said that I'd know good fortune with my husband.

After the wedding, dancing lasted till the time of evening sacrifice, when _Kan Tan_ Sor-On with his own hands slew a _gur_ and poured out its blood onto the sand as an offering to Holy Light as it was setting. Cooks, butchering the _gur¸_ roasted its flesh with heat-crystals and served it up to the wedding party. I ate a small girl's share of _gur;_ Par, poor boy, got just some broth.

Thus began my time as a member of the Tan's royal court.

_The light-crystals' glow shows me raised hands._ _I call first on solid, trustworthy Van-Dor, seated by shy Dala._

"When are you going to tell us of the big crystal-ship?" Van asks me.

Par-On breaks in by royal right. "I've been wondering why my father was High Chieftain in Gam Tol, but your great-grandfather was chieftain in his settlement. Shouldn't my father have been too young to reign?"

_Wise, artistic Sil-Tan strokes his chin. "In the genealogies that came to the earth with me, the words_ wa-tak-il na-nel wis-i _appear after the names of Sor-On's father and grandfather."_

"You're right, Sil," I said. "Those two did die in the Wall of Winds. As for Par and Van, there's one answer to both of your questions."

"Before you give it," fierce Kuma says, "could we get some snacks? Your story promises to be long."

_I nod. From her backpack, Kuma hands around strips of beef jerky. Shy Dala, too, opens her backpack, and hands around candy bars._ No earth-human, _I think,_ will mistake Tani for health-food nuts.

When everyone but me is munching, I start. "What I'm about to tell you is nowhere fully written down in the records that came here with us. I must piece it together from what I overhead as a girl on the Homeworld, from allusions on the memory-crystals, from --"

"We trust you, Mira," mystical Lona says.

"You're kind. What I'm about to tell you occurred just before I was born, three years before Par was born. For days and weeks Dor-Sad and a team of the strongest crystal-shapers poured all of their gift into making one giant crystal-ship. It was, if I have the figures right, as long and as wide as a football field. The ship could carry hundreds of passengers or hundreds of tons of cargo."

"It could've carried hundreds of Tani here from Ul," Dala murmurs.

_"It could've, if Dor-Sad could've made power-crystals large enough to take it across the stars. When he made the ship, though, the little crystal-ships had explored all of the neighboring stars and found there just useless worlds, ruined worlds, and the earth, which the then_ Kan Tan _, Par's great-grandfather Yar-On, had decided to let alone."_

"Why did he decide to do that?" dour, brooding Un-Thor asks me.

"Because he feared that the earth-humans would never give us a place here without a fight, and the Tan had never fought a war."

In sudden silence, my listeners stiffen. Some of them, I fear, are about to say that the Tan is fighting its first war now. I go on quickly. "My grandfather made the giant ship, not to settle another world, but to improve his own world. Twice, the giant ship flew to the glaciers on Ul's inner face, under Nas-Ul's fearsome light. From the inner face, the giant ship brought back hundreds of tons of ice to make the Desert bloom."

"I bet that the dew-gatherers and the frost-gatherers feared for their livelihood," Un mutters.

_"They'd have found better jobs in the new economy that the_ Kan Tan _and my grandfather were planning. Sadly, it never came to be. On the giant ship's third voyage, Yar-On and his son, Par's grandfather, went along to oversee founding a permanent mining settlement on the inner face. The voyage went well till, in space above the Wall of Winds, the ship's hull cracked. Don't ask me why; no one ever learned. The pilot had to take the ship down, as it was losing air. The last word over the speaking-crystals was that the ship was breaking apart in strong gusts."_

Seven long faces meet my gaze. "Didn't the Tan look for the ship?" Dala asks me.

_"For six years, till the world ended. No trace of the giant ship was ever found." I turn to Par. "In any case, now you know why your father was_ Kan Tan."

_Un scowls. "Why wasn't_ your _grandfather on the ship, Mira?"_

_"He never told me why he wasn't."_ Before his world ended, _I think,_ he must've wished that he had been.

Lona strokes her chin. "When are you going to get to the Tan's origin, Mira? All that the records say of it reads like myth."

I smile at her in relief at her having gotten me off an uncomfortable subject. "By good fortune, what you want to know comes next."

~~~

Soon after I'd come to Gam Tol, there was a night like this. After a feast of evening sacrifice, all of us in the crystal-city came out onto the mesa under a clear night sky in which _Thil-i An Om,_ the Stars of the Great Crystal-Shaper, rode high. We sang old songs, danced the dance that we've just danced here, and settled down to hear stories.

That night, Grandfather Dor-Sad told them. He told first the ones that Lona said read like myths: the tales that from the Stars of the Great Crystal-Shaper came down a crystal-ship carrying a man and his two wives, the elder a Crystal-Shaper and the younger a Companion. With the three Tani in the ship came the three species of livestock, the twelve species of plants, and a jar of _bu._ Landing on the mesa on which the crystal-city now stood, the three founded the old, underground city of Gam Tol, from which the Tan would spread throughout the ring of Desert.

Dor-Sad's audience murmured approval; he'd told his story well. He went on, though.

"All of you know that, throughout the seven thousand years of the Tan's history, many have sought the crystal-ship that brought our ancestors here. Others have tried to make crystal-ships, but all failed till, through the wisdom that Holy Light gave me, I learned the secret of making the great crystals, some forty years ago.

"In the crystal-ships that the Tan could at last make again, brave souls went to the stars to find the world from which our ancestors came. The explorers flew first towards _Orion"_ \-- yes, he actually used the English word, which I heard then the first time -- "but found in its direction only barren worlds where life had never taken root. Expanding their search, the explorers found ruined worlds where life had once been, but had been extinguished in inconceivable cataclysms."

Poor Grandfather, all too soon you would conceive of them. That night, though, he was unaware of his words' irony.

He went on. "When we Tani did find a world with life, we found it, not with the crystal-ships, but with the speaking-crystals. When we turned these towards a dim star in the Sheep Constellation, we heard a babble of voices, none of which we could understand. Following them to their source, we found _Ul Har,_ or _the earth,_ as its inhabitants call it. This is a world where water is as common as sand, and whose inhabitants are billions to this world's thousands."

Murmurs of disbelief greeted Dor-Sad's last sentence. Smiling, he went on. "You doubt me, but those who've gone to _the earth_ \-- your _Kan Tan_ among them -- can bear witness to what I say. Although the _humans,_ as _the earth's_ inhabitants call themselves, are shaped like us, they're inwardly different from us. In behavior, they're nothing at all like us. Whereas we have one appearance, one language, and one faith in Holy Light, the _humans_ have many appearances, many languages, and many faiths.

"The _humans'_ manyness divides them. Some of them even kill each other as individuals and as whole communities. The _humans_ have even made means of killing that can destroy this whole mesa in a flash of light."

Murmurs of disbelief mingled with murmurs of fear. Dor-Sad's audience looked at the _Kan Tan_ and sighed when he nodded.

One brave soul called out, "Are we descended from such horrors?"

"As far as I know, no," Dor-Sad said. As his audience relaxed, he went on to say, "The _humans_ are inwardly different from us, lack our gift of crystal-shaping, and are just now learning to cross the stars. Whatever the _humans'_ origin is, it's separate from ours."

"Let them stay separate from us!" another brave soul called out.

Dor-Sad shook his head. "In time, they'll find us. We must be ready to deal with them. Wisely, _Kan Tan_ Yar-On, who walks with Holy Light, decided that the Tan should secretly study and travel to _the earth._ _Kan Tan_ Sor-On follows his grandfather's wise policy. The Tan has made contacts in a land called _America,_ from which our brave travelers have brought back wonders to show us both the promise and the threat of _Ul Har."_

I had many questions. I've no doubt that many others had many more questions, but all of these went by the wayside as Dor-Sad produced his wonders. They formed a grab-bag of items that are now parts of my daily life, but were then like visions of heaven. There was a box that made sounds and showed moving pictures. There was a woodwind vastly more complicated than the Tan's best bone-flute. There was a two-wheeled metal frame on which Dor-Sad assured his listeners they could ride as if on a _lex._ None wished to try the metal steed.

Among other items there were pictures of _humans_ \-- red and yellow, black and white, as the song goes in Sunday-school. One picture showed a set of scantily clad _humans_ standing on a strip of sand between a patch of grazing-plant and a strange sky-colored expanse that stretched to the horizon.

"Look!" I called out. "The _humans_ have blue sand."

Grandfather snickered. "That's water, Mira."

I nodded as if I believed him, but, of course, I didn't.

Wise, artistic Sil-Tan is frowning at me. "Your account raises more questions on the Tan's origin than it answers."

"It's the best that my grandfather could do. Dr. Ventnor would tell me his own thoughts on origins, but they come later in the story."

_To myself, I think,_ Dor-Sad also had more thoughts on origins, but they, too, must come in their proper time.

~~~

Ul had no saying like "Idle hands are the devil's workshop," as idle hands were inconceivable there. Even as a child of the royal household, I was ever busy.

First, I had to help Luna feed, clothe, and bathe her son, my future husband, Par-On. He had a distressing tendency to spit breakfast cereal -- _gal-pu,_ 'grain-fruit,' as we Tani called it -- into my face, a tendency that I hope he's outgrown.

Second, I had to help the Kumi groom _lex-i,_ gather grazing-plant for them to eat, pick _pu_ berries, sweep sand out of doorways, and wash dishes. With sand, of course! I can't tell you how it shocked me to see my first kitchen sink.

Third, I had to learn to read. The Tan script, as some of the rest of you are learning, is ideographic, with over six hundred signs. I began to learn them when I came to Gam Tol. If you'll excuse my patting myself on the back, I'd learned most of them before I left the Homeworld. Still, of Einstein's granddaughter, the Tan expected much.

No one wasted paper on children learning to write. Instead, we used sticks to write in sand. The older among you know what I mean. The rest of you must envision us boys and girls standing around a sandpit while a stern teacher oversaw us. As she held up a flat stone on which she'd painted a sign, we children had to draw it in the sand. Lavish with praise, swift with sarcasm was my teacher.

The first sign that every child learned was the sign for 'sand.' Every child giggled as the teacher showed him or her that sign -- a horizontal line drawn from left to right. Any Tan who looked out a door or window knew that that sign perfectly described sand.

It thrilled me to learn the signs, for the Tan painted them onto every rocky surface to record stories, poems, and history. Now, I could start to understand the world around me. Books were scarce -- I think that most of the royal library came here in our poor eight crystal-ships -- but we Tani didn't miss books as long as we had paint and walls.

One day, while class was in session, Sor-On came in. He'd been gone from the city for days, rumor said to the earth. We children hoped that he'd tell us a story or show us some new marvel from there.

He did, in a way. Taking a stick in hand, he drew in the sand a shape that I now know to call a teardrop. "This," he said, "is the sign for _rain."_

Puzzled, but obedient, we children repeated the strange word. It fell to me, as his prospective daughter-in-law, to say, "What is _rain,_ _Kan Tan?"_

He gave me a crooked smile that I found wonderful. _"Bul kad-il me-yar,"_ he said. 'Water that falls from the sky.'

We children giggled, thinking that he was telling us a made-up story. Still, obedient, we copied the sign for rain.

Maybe, he hoped to bring rain to Gam Tol. Sadly, not rain, but ash, would fall there before the Homeworld's end.

_I'd recall Sor-On's words when I first saw rain. I saw it my first night on the earth. The Colonel and Mom, as his wife had bidden me call her, were asleep in the room beside mine, and I was lying awake on the strange bed that they'd given me, when, through a window of a crystal called_ glass, _I saw a flash of light. A few seconds later came a rolling rumble that shook the Colonel's house._

_I feared that the new world to which I'd come was about to end, too. Proud of my heritage, though, and in awe of the Colonel, I didn't call for help. By me, a strange creature called_ dog, _which had crawled into bed with me, whimpered. I stroked its head. I think that comforting_ dog _comforted me more than I comforted it._

After a while, I heard tiny objects striking the window. Going to it, I saw crystal streaks running down it. Looking through the window, I saw on a stony surface outside it puddles starting to form, and ripples spreading over the puddles.

"Bul kad-il me-yar," _I murmured._ _"Rain."_

Sor-On had been telling the truth. I thought of him, and of Grandfather Dor-Sad, both of whom had seen rain, but would never see it again. I thought of Luna, and of my birth-parents, and of my lost classmates, none of whom had seen rain, and now never would see it. I thought of the seven others who'd come to the earth when I came, and wondered whether, wherever they were, they, too, were seeing rain.

The rain drew tears from me. To hide the sound of my making them, I hid my face in a cushion, but, after a moment, I felt a soft touch on my back. Looking up, I saw Mom, who took my face onto her shoulder and let me finish crying there.

Rain became magical to me. It helped me recall the Homeworld and mourn it.

While I was learning signs, Sor-On and Dor-Sad had been talking with each other of training children to become an ambassadorial corps for communicating with the earth. One night, in the Chamber of Green Crystal, Sor-On told his court of his idea.

That night, I was part of the court. As royal daughter-in-law-to-be, I had to learn how to help rule a world. I gathered that it took much to rule one, even so tiny a one as Ul. Mostly, in court, though, I had to hold Par-On and keep him quiet. I wasn't always successful at the latter duty. Still, when the royal heir let out a yelp, everyone else just smiled indulgently. I can't imagine how spoiled he'd have become if he'd grown up on Ul.

I myself let out a yelp when Sor-On announced that I'd be part of the corps. I saw myself flying in a crystal-ship to a world that to my naïve girlish mind seemed paradise. Maybe, the earth is paradise, but paradise, as I learned in Sunday school, has forbidden fruit and a serpent.

Much of my training as an ambassador was watching moving pictures and listening to sounds on the box from the earth, the box that I learned to call _television set._ Dor-Sad and his band of crystal-technicians had learned how to link this to power-crystals. I didn't get to see broadcast TV. I've since read that astronomers doubt whether the earth's broadcasts reach as far as Wolf 1061. Even if they did, I doubt that Sor-On would've let children see the horrors that earth-humans call entertainment.

What I did get to see was videotapes of _Sesame Street._ Just as if I were an ordinary American girl, I learned to speak and read English by watching Bert and Ernie. _Sesame Street_ showed me rain, standing water, and the greatest of all marvels, the thing called _faucet_ from which water flowed whenever one wanted it; but, little skeptic that I was, I thought these wonders parts of a made-up tale. After all, I knew that animals didn't speak.

Travelers to the earth had also brought back a handful of children's books and flashcards. These would form a meager set of possessions in the eyes of an American child, but, to my fellow ambassadors-in-training and me, they seemed treasures out of the Arabian Nights. Maybe, they were, but keep in mind that the world of the Arabian Nights is an uncomfortable home.

Television, books, and flashcards worked well for me. When I began second grade, I'd actually be ahead of most of my classmates.

_In the light-crystals' glow, a hand goes up. Wise, artistic Sil-Tan says, "If_ Kan Tan _Sor-On was forming an ambassadorial corps, he must've planned peaceful contact with the earth-humans. How did he mean for you ambassadors to make that contact?"_

I sighed. "I don't recall that either he or my grandfather ever clearly said how. Maybe, we ambassadors formed more of a hope than a plan."

"Still," mystical Lona says, "in the end we, Tani must speak with the earth-humans."

I nod. She, like me, was part of the corps. I know the hope in her heart.

Par-On, born to lead the Tan, speaks softly. "In the end, we will speak, but at a time and in a manner of our choosing. We must be sure of not failing those who sent us here."

~~~

One day, excitement filled Gam Tol. Through the city ran word that an explorer had returned from a ruined world with artifacts of an alien civilization.

After evening sacrifice, all in the city \--ten thousand of us, fully a tenth of Ul's inhabitants -- stayed in the Hall of Evening Sacrifice to listen to the explorer and look at what he'd brought us. As a member of the royal family I got to sit on the dais near him. I gazed with adoration at a brave man who alone had flown a crystal-ship across the stars to a dead world. His name, Pen-Har, deserves to be recalled.

He reminded us of his not having been the first to visit the ruined world, which circled a yellow star that he called by its earth-human name, _Tau Ceti._ Others before him had gone to the ruined world and marveled at its landscape of death. In an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with no trace of oxygen -- Pen-Har used the earth-human names for the gases, as the Tan's speech had no names for them -- dead animals lay among stands of dead plants as if time had stopped.

Some of you may be about to ask me, "Why hadn't everything rotted?" None of us Tani on Ul thought of that question, as none of us had ever seen anything rot. Whatever died lay where it fell till recyclers put it into recycling pits, where _bu_ turned it into soil. The Colonel and Dr. Ventnor would tell me that nothing rotted where the Tan lived because there were no bacteria there. Clearly, our ancestors had brought none to Ul from their world in Orion. Luckily for the earth, as we children brought no alien bacteria with us.

The Colonel and Dr. Ventnor, though, would have no explanation why nothing had rotted on the ruined world of Tau Ceti. Any answer to that question must await another expedition there, if there can ever be one.

"But to our tale," as Robert Burns wrote. Grandfather Dor-Sad broke into the explorer's tale to say that some unknown force must've suddenly removed all of the oxygen from the ruined world's atmosphere, but none of us had the patience to listen to our world's Einstein just then. Pen-Har the Explorer went on.

He told us of cruising through the lifeless world's air till he found a city. This was not a pueblo, like Ul's cities, or a sprawling metropolis, like America's cities, but a city of tunnels driven into the walls of a wide pit dug deeply into rock. Landing his ship on the pit's floor amid a lifeless garden where bodies sprawled, he dressed himself in a pressure suit of earthly design and got out. Wandering across the pit's floor and peering with a light-crystal into tunnels, Pen-Har took pictures with a digital camera and picked up a few small items of interest.

Before we saw the wonders from Tau Ceti, Grandfather got a chance to impress us with more wonders from the earth. Hooking the camera to a computer, he hooked the computer in turn to a projector. Both camera and projector, he hooked, in a way that I wish I could recall, to a power-crystal. When the hall's light-crystals were quenched, the projector cast pictures onto a huge square of the finest white wool, hung from a wall of the chamber.

We Tani oohed and aahed like earth-humans watching fireworks as pictures of the dead city appeared before us. Its dead inhabitants looked like us or the earth-humans, except that the _Lil-i_ \-- the Others, as we called the dead world's inhabitants -- were all bald. They wore gorgeously dyed and embroidered long robes, along with gold jewelry and gemstones. The Others' tunnels held fine furniture and shelves upon shelves of books.

Pen-Har had brought several of these with him. I myself got to handle one that night. Turning its pages, I gazed at columns of symbols that looked to me like the earth-humans' musical notes, which I'd seen on _Sesame Street._ In Ul's last days, many pored over the symbols, but none understood them. Sadly, _Kan Tan_ Sor-On put none of the Others' books aboard the crystal-ships that carried Ul's last survivors here. Some here might've read the books, if only those persons had had the chance to.

Pen-Har brought home other items -- brooches and bracelets of exquisite workmanship; a strange metal flute that made weird, mournful tones when one of the royal flutists tried to play it; and a statue, maybe a foot high, of what I guess was jade. The statue depicted a tall, broad-shouldered man whose high forehead, wide-set eyes, and solemn features made us Tani call him "The Wise One." Thinking of him and his long-dead kin, I gave him an offering of tears. I was not the sole Tan to give him it.

During the talk, the slide show, and the display of alien artifacts, the hall shook twice from tremors. By now, none of us heeded them. I say, "None of us," but I did see Sor-On and Dor-Sad give each other sad-eyed looks. My father-in-law and my grandfather gave each other like looks as someone wondered aloud whether the Tan's world could die as the Others' world had died.

As a five-year-old girl, I didn't know what to make of those looks. Now, I wonder whether Sor-On and Dor-Sad already knew what would happen to the Homeworld in just a year.

_When I was twelve, the Colonel and Mom took me on another of my semiannual visits to Dr. Ventnor. They left me with him while they went to antique shops in Columbus. As I'd been assiduously reading_ National Geographic, Scientific American, _and astronomy texts to come to terms with who I am, my mind teemed with questions._

They came down to one. "Dr. Ventnor, how could the earth-humans, the Tani, and the Others all look alike?"

He gave me his crooked smile, which I loved, as he said, "You watch science-fiction, don't you? Don't all aliens look human?"

I gave him a raspberry of which baby Par-On would've been proud.

Dr. Ventnor chuckled. "All right, Belle, what are the possible answers to your question?"

I shrugged. "Convergent evolution or intelligent design."

He nodded. "What would evolutionary biologists say of outwardly human life's independently arising three times within a radius of less than thirty light-years?"

"Nothing that Mom would approve of my saying."

He laughed a rich, deep laugh that made shivers run up and down my silly adolescent spine. "It seems to me that you favor intelligent design, Belle. Do you believe that God made man, Tan, and the Others all in His image?"

I frowned. "The hymns to Holy Light speak only of the Tan's creation. The Bible speaks only of the creation of earth-humans and angels."

"True, Belle. Still, how do you know that the Tani and the Others aren't angels? Doesn't the Bible speak in Genesis Six of angels, called the sons of God, that came to the earth and had hybrid children, the men of renown, with human women? Wouldn't Tani or Others make sense as the angels in that passage of Scripture?"

Now, Dr. Ventnor was toying with me. I'd learned that he and the Colonel had run secret experiments on Tan tissue. They'd learned that, though we Tani have the same internal organs that earth-humans have, our bones consist of carbon filament, which also forms cell walls around cells in which DNA is wound onto stacks of protein disks like the disks in a hard-drive. Too, our genetic code, though it has many codons in common with the earthly genetic code, codes for two extra amino acids. Even then, I knew enough of biology to say that there could be no half-Tan, half-earth-human children.

I gave Dr. Ventnor a haughty sniff that I'd learned from Mom, daughter of an antebellum family from Virginia. "You're the one who's been watching science-fiction if you believe in alien-human hybrids."

"Touché, _Belle!_ _I concede your point on Tan-human hybrids, but can you rule out Other-human hybrids?"_

I shrugged. "For all that I know, the Others could've been earth-humans."

Dr. Ventnor raised a gull-winged brow. "How, Belle?"

I shrugged again. "Maybe, passing aliens seeded some earth-humans onto the world of Tau Ceti, or maybe there was once an advanced civilization on the earth that colonized the Others' world."

"What became of the advanced civilization?"

"The Flood? The fall of Atlantis?"

Dr. Ventnor pursed his lips. "Your speculations might explain the Others, but what of the Tan?"

I felt silly, but said what I'd been thinking. "Maybe, we Tani were genetically engineered by the aliens or the advanced civilization. Maybe, we're androids designed to live on marginal worlds."

Dr. Ventnor again laughed the deep, rich laugh. "Now, who's been watching science-fiction? Still, Belle, you've covered just about every possible answer to your question. I'm telling you the truth when I say that I can answer it no better than you did."

He did know more than he was telling me, but I wouldn't learn it till the Colonel was dead, and my own life was falling apart.

~~~

About a month after the explorer had brought back artifacts of the Others, more excitement stirred Gam Tol: a living alien was coming to the city. Imagine the sweeping, putting away, and polishing that went on as the day of his coming neared! Lona and Van-Dor needn't imagine, as they were there. Par-On was, too, but I doubt that a three-year-old was worrying about preparing the city for a guest.

Grandfather told me how the alien would reach Ul. An explorer would fly a crystal-ship to the earth and stay there while the alien flew here on _autopilot —_ it took Grandfather a while to explain the strange English word to me — and stay here a month before he flew back to the earth to let the explorer come home. Envying both the explorer and the alien, I wished that I could grow up fast to go to the earth soon.

Just before twilight one day, the city's inhabitants gathered on the mesa to watch a crystal-ship land on it. When the ship opened, out of it stepped a tall, bald-headed man with sand-colored skin. He wore what I now know was an Army dress uniform with a wealth of hard-earned medals. He was the Colonel.

I'd received the high honor of being his official greeter. Kneeling on my left knee before him, I offered him a cup of water as I said, in carefully memorized English, "On behalf of the Tan, welcome to Ul! Please take this water as a sign of our hospitality."

Smiling at me, he said something that I'm ashamed to say I can't recall; then he drank the water. All of it, though by custom he was supposed to hand most of it back to me so that both I and the _Kan Tan_ could drink of it, too. I looked at Sor-On for direction. He mimed my drinking from the empty cup, so I held it to my lips and handed it to him.

The crowd cheered as if all had gone well.

The Colonel watched with approving eyes the evening sacrifice and ate of it as he sat on the high dais with the royal court and the ambassadorial corps. He ate Tan food with no harm, just as we Tani eat earth-human food with no harm. The common-origin theory looks ever better, but I digress.

The Colonel spent much of his time in Gam Tol with the _Kan Tan_ and my grandfather, and was gone from Gam Tol much of the time on a tour of the Desert. One day, though, I got to give the Colonel the grand tour of the city. Holding Par's hand with one hand and the hand of a shy little _an_ girl named Dala, who'd come to live in the city, with the other hand, I led the Colonel from the eastern gate, where we Tani poured out water to Holy Light each morning, to the western gate, where we slew a _gur_ or a _har_ on high occasions.

I showed him the stables for _lex-i_ , the pens for _gur-i_ and _har-i,_ the greenhouses for each of the twelve species of plants, the granaries and the cellars, the cooling towers for precipitating moisture from the air, the manufactories for making useful items from wood, bone, and hides, the recycling pits, and the shops where _an-i_ technicians used their gifts to turn varieties of quartz into the crystals that kept the Tan alive. The Colonel told me how impressed he was with the city's neatness and organization. "You Tani would make good soldiers," he said.

He also, to my delight, praised how well I spoke English. He'd learned some Tan speech, but I found it easier to talk with him in his own language than to listen to him mangle mine.

"I'm going to be ready for the earth when I go there," I said to him with my besetting sin of vanity.

He gave me a delightful smile. "I bet that you will be, Mira."

Years later he'd tell me that he saw me as the child that he and Mom had never been able to conceive. He'd get me as that child, at unimaginable cost.

I took him also to see the statue of the Wise One and the Others' books. These had a special niche in the Hall of Evening Sacrifice. As he gazed at the statue and at the books' musical-note script, tears leaked from his eyes.

Straining my English to its limit, I said, "It's kind of you to give strangers an offering of tears."

He blinked at me. "What? Ah, right, Mira."

He looked sad, too, when he felt tremors grow in frequency and intensity during the month of his visit. From the vantage of my nineteen years, I see that he, like Sor-On and Dor-Sad, knew full well what was going on.

Soon none of us could deny that something bad was going on. The tremors, which had just been shaking dust from tunnels' ceilings, now began to shake things down. A crystal tower fell in the city's southeast corner. Sor-On declared parts of the city off limits; even in the rest of it we Tani eyed ceilings with unease. When a tunnel collapsed in one of the outlying settlements, eight persons died. When a water tank ruptured in another outlying settlement, a woman spent so long under water that she came out of it a corpse.

We ambassadors, hearing of her death, spoke in whispers the English word _drowned._ Other Tani spoke to each other of an unprecedented phrase by the woman's name in the genealogies: _wa-tak-il-a na-bul,_ 'she died in water.'

Both by royal decree and on our own volition we survivors began to spend as much time outdoors as we could. That time grew ever less as days passed, for the _wis-i bas,_ the sandstorms, grew ever more frequent and fierce. Mixed now with sand was a strange powdered rock that we'd never seen. Rumor brought word that rifts were opening in the world. From the rifts flowed rivers of melted rock; from the rifts gushed clouds of powdered rock. All learned to call a rift by the English word _volcano._

All of us looked to Sor-On and Dor-Sad to make things right. They were ever talking in private with each other or with Dor-Sad's loyal band of technicians. Many of these went on mysterious voyages in crystal-ships.

These, the rest of us Tani guessed, were going to the earth. From there we expected deliverance. The earth-humans had, after all, given us the words _tremor_ and _volcano._ The earth-humans, who knew of catastrophes like those afflicting us, must've faced and survived them. The earth-humans knew how to deal with them. Through the earth, we believed, Sor-On and Dor-Sad would save us.

I was the most faithful in believing that they would. They did save me, along with the seven of you. To the rest of the Tani they gave only the illusion of hope. In memory I sometimes see the stay-behinds, ghosts of another world, gazing at me. Sometimes they say to me, _Keep the Tan alive, Mira._ At other times they say, _Why you?_

~~~

If you've been keeping track of us in this story, five of us -- Par-On, Lona, Van-Dor, Dala, and I -- were already together in Gam Tol. Now, three days before the eight of us left Ul forever, the other three of you appeared. Par and I had been betrothed two years by now. Circumstances far less happy than the royal betrothal had been saw three more betrothals: Dala to Van, Lona to Sil-Tan, and Kuma to Un-Thor. I ate sacrificial _gur_ and danced on Ul one last time.

The betrothals gave us Tani hope. This was rife in the city even as the tremors grew ever harder and more frequent, and powdered rock threatened to bury what still stood on the mesa. Some said that Holy Light would still the tremors and seal the volcanoes. Some said that Dor-Sad would bring from the earth a wondrous artifact to heal the world. Some said that the earth-humans would come take us away in starships so that we could live on endless plains where livestock fed on grazing-plant watered by the sky.

I myself believed that Ul was doomed, but that Grandfather would find his own way to get the Tan to the earth. Of what that way was, I had no inkling till, the afternoon before I left for the earth, Grandfather called me to him in the shelter of a still standing crystal spire.

Tears stood in his eyes as he said, "Forgive me, Mira."

"Forgive you for what, Grandfather? You're the wisest and best man whom I know."

He shook his head. "I'm the man who destroyed Ul."

"How can you say so?"

"This world never shook before I learned to make the great crystals. It might've gone on just as it was more years than our people's numbers can count. Making and using the great crystals, though, changed the world's insides so that Nas-Ul can finish its work of destroying it."

"I don't understand, Grandfather."

"You don't now, but you'll remember what I said. When you're old enough to understand, you'll get from me a writing telling you how worlds end. When you read it, you will understand what happened here. When you do, please don't hate me for what I've done. Please say that you'll forgive me."

I said it, and he hugged me. Blinking back tears, I said, "You're going to save the Tan, aren't you? You're going to find a way to send the Tan to the earth."

He gave me a wan smile. "Some of the Tani, Mira. Tonight, the _Kan Tan_ will tell you what he plans to do."

Someone called Grandfather away to help save the city a few hours more. I went from him with terror, but also with hope.

That night, after the _Kan Tan_ had made evening sacrifice, he asked me to walk with him to the Chamber of Green Crystal, amazingly still intact. With him and me went a single crystal-technician -- Lona's mother, one of Grandfather's best. I didn't know why she was there just then; only just the other day did I learn that she'd recorded on a memory-crystal Sor-On's talk with me. Par-On and Kuma have viewed it with me. They can assure the rest of you of my repeating the _Kan Tan's_ words exactly.

Seated on the throne, he wore the three-spired crown as he looked down at me. "Mira, you've been a dutiful child and a good companion to my son. Your studies have shown me that some of your grandfather's intelligence has come to you. I think that you understand, better than most of your neighbors understand, what's happening to this world. In a few days, life on it will end as it shakes itself apart. No force less than Holy Light can stop _tak-al Ul."_

When he said, "The Homeworld's death," it became real to me as it hadn't been. I felt what I now know as cold despair flow through me. I wanted to fall onto the dais, shriek with terror and rage, and cry all of the tears within me. Sor-On's gaze, though, sad and weary as it seemed to me, was calm and commanding, holding me to his purpose. "Yes, _Kan Tan,"_ I said weakly.

He nodded in a way that reassured me. "Tomorrow, as soon as there's a clearing in the fall of _ash"_ \-- he used the English word -- "I'll send you and Par-On to the earth. With you will be going the three sets of children betrothed the other day."

I felt weak with relief, but also with sorrow. "Only they, _Kan Tan?"_

He sighed. "Just eight crystal-ships can make the Crossing."

I licked my lips. "All of us going are _an-i._ What of the _kum-i?"_

"I've saved what I can. In time, you'll find new companions on the earth. Please listen, beloved Mira. You and the seven going there with you conserve all of the _an-i's_ bloodlines and gifts. These, as you'll learn, are far more powerful on the earth than they are here. With the books and the memory-crystals that I'm sending with you, you'll have all of the Tan's knowledge. With it, when you come into your gifts, you can be a great blessing to the earth-humans."

"Yes, _Kan Tan._ What do you want us to do?"

He gave me a sad-looking smile. "Three tasks, Mira. Remember the Homeworld. Perpetuate the People. Save the earth."

I repeated aloud the words as he said them to me: " _Ti-kel-es Ul. Ti-suv-es Tan. Ti-rem-es Ul Har."_ Those of you who know our people's speech know that Sor-On gave me his commands in the singular: I myself was supposed to do what he commanded. Maybe, now, some of you will grasp why I've been obsessive.

As I thought of his commands, I found the last one puzzling. "How am I supposed to save the earth?"

"The ones to whom I'm sending you and the other seven will teach you what you must know. I'm sending you, Mira, to the Colonel, since he asked me for you. You're to honor him as your _sin-per,_ your foster-father, and his wife as your _sin-per-a._ The other children will go to other sets of parents whom the Colonel has picked for them. The Colonel and the other foster-parents will keep you safe till it's time for your Work to start."

"Why can't I live with the other Tani, _Kan Tan?"_

"You must learn to live as an earth-human, and you must stay safe. Eight strange children showing up in one place would make the earth-humans ask too many questions. The earth is dangerous."

"I don't understand."

"I know that you don't now, Mira. Please trust me, and please trust the Colonel. On his advice, I'm separating you children. He'll make clear to you, Mira, why separating you children is needful."

I nodded reluctantly. "When will the Work start?"

"Your ship will reach the earth in under a day. Already, your grandfather is using the speaking-crystals to send a message to the earth, a _radio_ message, but it'll take thirteen point eight years to get there. Your first task in the Work is to ensure that the earth-humans hear the Message. Your experiences on the earth will teach you how to carry the Work on afterwards."

I nodded again, though filled with doubt. "How will I ensure that the earth-humans hear the Message?"

"The earth will teach you how. Listen, I must tell you one more key thing. Our knowledge, gifts, and great crystals are dangerous to the earth-humans. Till you start the Work, you must never speak of Ul or the Tan, display your gifts, or show the books, the memory-crystals, or the ships to anyone unless the Colonel says it's safe for you to. The ships themselves will stop working when they reach the earth. To keep their secrets out of the earth-humans' hands, Dor-Sad has rigged the power-crystals, the sleeping-crystals, the speaking-crystals, and the brain-crystals to shatter."

Pride overcame fear within me. "I understand, _Kan Tan."_

He smiled at me and kissed me on the forehead. "I know that you understand, Mira. Go put my son to bed, and get some sleep yourself, if you can. As soon as possible after morning sacrifice, you and the other seven must leave."

~~~

The next morning, when Holy Light appeared as a dim bruise on the eastern horizon, my fellow Tani and I knelt on both knees, promised to serve Holy Light with duty, loyalty, and truthfulness, and poured out water onto the sand. Even at our last sunrise on Ul, we Tani kept the traditions of seven thousand years.

The wind was low when we rose, and no ash was falling. With a swiftness that I now find incredible, I kissed Par-On good-bye and handed him to Sor-On and Luna. They gazed at him a moment, kissed him, said, _"Lar-in-i es, bar-in-i,"_ 'We love you, our son," and placed him aboard the first of the crystal-ships. It closed upon him, rose like a leaf, tilted its bow at the sky, and rushed heavenwards, dwindled to a dot, and was gone.

With a pang for which I lack words, I stared at where the ship had vanished while around me parents wept, and other ships shot skywards. I came from my reverie when Luna knelt before me and took me in her arms.

"Take care of my son," she murmured.

I promised her that I would take care of him. I didn't know then that thirteen years would pass before I saw him again.

Suddenly, my own parents were hugging and kissing me, and telling me that they loved me. Sor-On lifted me aboard the last of the crystal-ships and said, "Be faithful to the Work, Mira."

I nodded.

He stepped aside. My grandfather, looking bleak, took his place. In a broken voice, he murmured the last words that I heard on Ul: _"Ti-kel-es in-i!"_

'Remember us.'

The crystal-ship closed upon me and began to rise. As, amid feelings that I couldn't name, I stared and stared through its clear hull, I saw the _Kan Tan,_ my grandfather, my parents, and other Tani looking up at me. They dwindled away, the crystal-city's broken shell dwindled away, and the mesa on which it stood dwindled away.

At last, I glimpsed the true scale of Ul's agony. Clouds of ash hid most of the world's outer face, but, through them, I saw craters and rivers of lava, miles wide. As the ship kept rising, I saw that the clouds shot far into space against the backdrop of a reddish glow surrounding the world. For a moment, I puzzled over this glow; then I grasped that I was seeing Nas-Ul, the gas giant that the Homeworld circled. Nas-Ul's gravity, helped by the great crystals, had at last destroyed its too close moon.

I wish that I could say I was brave. Hammering with my fists on the ship's crystal hull, I screamed over and over _"Mi-el?" --_ 'Why?'

Amid one of my screams, the sleeping-crystal cut in. Darkness took me.

_In the light-crystals' glow. I see stunned faces on my listeners. Some of them were too young when they left Ul to recall clearly what had happened. To even Lona and Van-Dor, nearly as old as I, the events of_ tak-al Ul, _the Homeworld's death, must've become like images in a dream. In my own mind, I suppressed those events while I pretended to be an earth-human girl. Telling them brought them back to me as if I were reliving them. Thus do I fulfill Sor-On's command, "Remember the Homeworld!"_

Shy Dala murmurs, "What do you think became of the rest of the Tani when we left?"

"I don't know. I don't know whether Sor-On and Dor-Sad told them what was happening. I think, though, that, on some level, the other Tani knew that their world was ending. I guess that they went on with tradition as well as they could go on. I hope that knowing that some Tani had escaped to the earth and would remember them lightened their last hours."

"How long do you think those were?" wise, artistic Sil-Tan murmurs.

"Days, at most, as Sor-On told me. Maybe, we'll learn how long when the Message comes. I know that Grandfather would've broadcast till the very end."

I don't tell my companions of a dream that's haunted me thirteen years. In it, I'm standing, again a small girl, at the foot of the dais in the Chamber of Green Crystal as the world shakes around me. Sor-On is seated on his throne, with Luna, my parents, and my grandfather by him. As the shaking worsens, the five turn on me empty eyes; then my relatives vanish from view in a rain of green crystal.

How often my screams awoke a household till I learned not to scream! Maybe, tonight will exorcize that dream.

Dour, brooding Un-Thor shakes his head. "I don't understand why so few of us got out. The ships could've returned to Ul on autopilot and brought more Tani here. For that matter, the ships could've been taking Tani to the earth all along. Didn't you say that there were many flights to the earth before we left?"

I catch sharp glances from Par-On and fierce Kuma, who, besides me, alone know what the earlier flights to the earth had been doing. Those flights may've hastened Ul's end, but they may also have hastened the Tan's rebirth. I give Kuma and Par a faint smile as if to say, "Later!" They nod.

"I suspect," I say to Un, "that Dor-Sad didn't try to bring the ships back from the earth once we reached it because he feared that atmospheric conditions on Ul had deteriorated too much to let the ships land there on autopilot. As for what the earlier flights to the earth did, I can tell you, but it comes later in the story.

"Just now, I must tell you of our arrival on the earth."

~~~

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."

~~~

What the Colonel wanted me to see was the crystal-ship. It stood in a stall in the barn, a stall just like one in which we Tani had kept _lex-i_ and _gur-i_ back on Ul. At the thought of them, tears leaked from my eyes. I wiped the tears away with the back of a sleeve.

The Colonel stared at the ship. "Last night, Belle, I told the ship to fly itself here and open itself while I got the crystals and books out of it. Once I'd put them into a safe, I told the ship to close itself. This morning, before dawn, I'd meant to have the ship fly itself to a shelter for long-term storage, but the ship didn't answer my commands. If you look through its hull, you'll see why the ship didn't."

When I peered through the hull, I saw that the great crystals within -- red, purple, green, and gold -- each bore a fine network of cracks. "The _Kan Tan_ told me that when the crystal-ships got here their crystals would break so that they wouldn't fall into wrong hands."

"The last messenger who came here told me so, too. Can you lift the ship, Belle?"

I tried to. I raised its front end, but the rear end's weight made it slide from my hands. "It's too --"

I stopped, not knowing the word that I needed.

"Slippery?" the Colonel said. When he explained the word to me, I nodded. "Maybe you can slide the ship up a ramp into a truck," he murmured, stroking his chin. "You can try to some night soon. The ship really should be somewhere safer than here."

To make a long story short, one night soon I did slide the ship up a ramp into a truck. The Colonel drove it to an underground storage facility where it stayed till a little over a year back.

Just then, looking at the ship made me think of a question that, if I hadn't felt so numb, I would've asked far sooner. "Did the other Tani get here safely? Is Par-On all right? What about Lona, Van-Dor, and Dala?"

Sorry, you other three! I'd met you just three days before and barely knew your names.

"All of them got here safely," the Colonel said. "Each of them is with his or her adoptive parents, who'll keep him or her safe till time for all of you to be reunited."

I didn't know then how he knew that each of you was safe; I just trusted him. I guess that overnight many phone calls had been made, or many e mails had been exchanged. Just then I had another question. "Why can't we Tani see each other now?"

The Colonel looked sad. "Didn't Sor-On tell you that you Tani would have to stay apart so that your adoptive parents could keep you safe?"

"He did, but I didn't understand why. It sounded to me as if you earth-humans would hurt us, but I didn't understand why. Why would one person hurt another?"

The Colonel sighed. "You grew up in Paradise, Belle. Now, you've been cast out of the Garden."

I blinked at words that made no sense to me. "I don't understand, Colonel."

"I know that you don't, Belle. It'll take time for you to learn the meaning of what I just told you. When you do learn, you'll know why you must hide, learn to act like everyone else around you, and stay apart from your fellow Tani till you're old enough to start the Work."

The Colonel was right, as he almost always was. I can't resist stating an irony that understanding the earth has taught me. The earth-humans were born in the Garden and cast out into a desert. We Tani were born in the Desert and cast out into a garden. Maybe, one's birthplace is paradise, and each of us is trying to get back to his or her own vision of it.

When Mom got home, she made breakfast. I had bacon, scrambled eggs, grapefruit, toast and jelly, and milk. I felt as if I wouldn't need to eat for another three days. I've never gotten used to how much Americans eat.

After the meal, she taught me how to take a shower. This filled me with such awe that I felt I was meeting Holy Light in person. I'd taken the equivalent of sponge baths on high occasions on the Homeworld, but I'd never conceived of bathing in falling water that ran down a drain. The earth's riches are amazing! When I'd dried off, Mom dressed me in panties, a jersey, sweat pants, socks, and boots. She'd guessed my shoe size by eye and gotten it right.

Once I was dressed, she and the Colonel took me on a drive in their car. Having flown in crystal-ships, I took the car in stride, but the world through which the car traveled was an endless marvel. I passed rolling fields filled with grazing-plant and wood-plants -- all right, from now on I'll call them _grass_ and _trees._ I passed cattle and horses, which again reminded me of Ul's lost livestock. I passed houses and barns in endless profusion, and strange buildings, each nearly as large as Gam Tol had been. These were schools, factories, and warehouses.

I soon learned that Paducah is a small town by American standards.On my first full day on the earth, that small town seemed to me a universe.

The Colonel and Mom took me to Wal-Mart, where they bought me clothes, shoes, and other necessities, as well as, to my delight, books and Disney and Dreamworks DVD's. These would make me popular with earth-human girls who'd soon come by the Colonel's to see me.

Don't think for a moment that I took Wal-Mart in stride! To my girlish eyes, it looked as if it held more goods than all of Ul's settlements had held. I gazed wide eyed at wonders in every aisle and grew too awed to speak.

From the vantage of thirteen years later, I feel guilty at how the earth's material wealth drove the Homeworld from my mind just then. My parents, Grandfather Sor-On, and the other Tani -- all were dying just then, but I had thought for nothing but Disney princesses on goods now mine. Still, Sor-On had sent me to the earth for life, not death. Maybe, I was doing his will.

My wide-eyed look and silence helped when the Colonel and Mom met friends and acquaintances, and told them what the Colonel would tell me was my cover story. I was Amira, an Afghan war-orphan whom the Colonel and Mom had adopted as their daughter. They'd named me Mirabelle to combine part of my own name with part of Mom's, but I was going by the name Belle.

When persons said that I didn't look Afghan, Mom told them that I had genetic conditions called _albinism_ and _scleroderma,_ but these wouldn't keep me from enjoying a normal life. Mom's listeners nodded at her words, shook my hand, and welcomed me to America. When I murmured, "Thank you," my Tan accent just helped the cover story. I defy you to find one American in a hundred who can tell an Afghan accent from a Tan accent.

You're nodding. All of you, of course, had cover stories like mine, and the Colonel and Dr. Ventnor obtained for you adoption papers that'd let each of you, like me, become a naturalized American citizen. Maybe, someday, each of us can again be openly accepted as such.

But to our tale. When the Gordon family got through shopping at Wal-Mart, the Colonel and Mom took me through Paducah to where I saw something like a box with a house atop it sitting on a wide gray strip that stretched away past the horizon to the left and to the right. With awe, I grasped that I was seeing what an illustrated book had told me was a _ship floating_ on a _river._ "Is all of that water?" I squeaked out.

"That's the Ohio River," the Colonel said. "A few miles west of here, it flows into the Mississippi. That's even bigger than the Ohio."

"Would you like to get out and walk beside the river, Belle?" Mom said.

I would. I dipped my hand into chilly water, gaped at a dead fish on the shore and at birds flying by, wept awhile on Mom's shoulder, and watched barges float downstream towards mysterious places called St. Louis and New Orleans, or upstream to Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Actually seeing these cities would rob them of their mystery, but I'm getting ahead of myself again.

After a while, I got cold, and the Colonel and Mom drove me home. I was ready, though, to try to be an earth-human girl.

~~~

It took me a while to get over my weepiness and withdrawnness. Now that I've taken AP Psychology and read more than may be good for me, I see that I was a victim of post-traumatic stress, survivor's guilt, culture shock, and simple grief. It's a wonder that I didn't curl into a ball.

I owe what mental stability I have to the Colonel and Mom. They kept me busy and were shoulders for me to cry on. Most of you others were also lucky in your adoptive parents, so you know what I mean.

To help me work through my grief, Mom got me to talk of life on Ul. In time, she began to record what I said. My talks became as good an oral history of a world as a six-year-old child can tell. In time, I'd type out my talks and put them with the Colonel's own reminiscences of his visit to Ul and the photographs that he'd taken there. Maybe, when the Work is done, I'll publish all of this material so that the earth-humans can know something of who we Tani are.

The Colonel brought out for me memory-crystals and books from Ul. As my crystal-shaping gift hadn't awoken, the crystals were inert in my hands. The books, though, I could read. I read them aloud in Tan speech for the Colonel and Mom, and translated them into English. The Colonel and Mom asked questions of me till all three of us were sure of understanding the books fully. Thus, I improved my knowledge of my adoptive parents' language, and they learned mine.

Actually, I didn't long read from the books themselves. They were far too valuable as artifacts, the Colonel told me, for daily use. He scanned them into a computer, and I read from its screen. The books themselves, he locked up.

I know now that, in each crystal-ship that brought one of us to the earth, Sor-On put eight memory-crystals and eight books. The inventory list for the crystals and the books came to the earth with Par-On. As a girl, though, I had no way to know that the Colonel had hidden from me a book and a crystal. Why he was hiding them, how they reached me, and what they held I'll tell you in due time.

One day, when the Colonel and Mom set out before dawn with me in the car, they drove and drove. They got onto a road that was two roads running in opposite directions -- I know now that it was Interstate 24, but keep in mind that I was a war-orphan just in from Afghanistan! -- and drove towards the rising sun. I did morning sacrifice by pouring water from a moving car's window. I felt good about myself when the Colonel told me that I was _inventive._

In time, the car crossed the Tennessee River, and shortly thereafter the Cumberland, and kept going east through rolling countryside that seemed to me endless. Once in a while, large green signs marked turnoffs to towns, but the car stopped at none of these.

The Colonel and Mom told me that the three of us were going to spend several days away from home. I'd get to see mysterious, wonderful places called _zoo, aquarium,_ and _museum,_ but first I'd have to see a _specialist._ If anyone asked me why I was seeing him, I was supposed to say that he was treating my _albinism_ and _scleroderma._ By now, I knew what those words meant, but it was unclear to me why I needed treatment for having pale, hard skin like any other Tan. I did enjoy wearing the sunglasses that Mom had bought me, though. They made the sky look like Ul's.

After what seemed to me an endless drive, the Colonel stopped at a place called Elizabethtown, where I had my first hamburger; then he began driving north. My eyes bulged at the endlessness of Louisville and a while later at the greater endlessness of Cincinnati. It awed me, too, that the Ohio River still ran so far from Paducah. Some hours later there rose ahead a city even larger than Louisville and Cincinnati.

That was, of course, Columbus. The three of us spent the night in a hotel there. I marveled at a world with whole huge buildings just for guests.

In the morning, we went to the Ohio State University. The specialist was, of course, Dr. Ventnor. He was a professor of psychology, but he was hiding his light under a bushel. He never told the university that employed him that he was the world's expert on xenobiology.

Seeing him astonished me. He might've been the Colonel in a laboratory smock. When I'd been introduced to him, I piped out, "Are you the Colonel's brother?"

Dr. Ventnor, the Colonel, and Mom all chuckled. "Why do you ask that question, Belle?" Dr. Ventnor said in a voice that might've been the Colonel's.

"Because you look and sound alike."

"Don't judge persons by how they look, Belle. I understand that, to a Tan, all humans may look alike. To humans, though, all Tani look like brothers and sisters."

Note that he avoided my question. He was, as I'd learn in time, misleading even in his evasion. The Colonel and Mom told me that they'd leave me with Dr. Ventnor awhile, but would take me to dinner and a movie later on.

All of you surely recall your first visits to Dr. Ventnor. He looked at eyes, ears, and throat with fearsome implements, and took blood. The blood-drawing, he'd give up when a needle bent before breaking my skin.

Mostly, though, he asked questions. It made me feel good about myself for so clearly powerful a man to show interest in me. He asked me of my life's tiniest details and seemed pleased by what I told him.

I, of course, asked him of the rest of you. Sadly, but firmly, he denied my request to rejoin you, but thrilled me by telling me that he'd just seen Dala and Sil-Tan. He told me that they were having trouble adjusting to the earth, but they had good parents who'd help them adjust in time. He told me details of Dala's and Sil's daily life -- puppies, swing-sets, and preschool. Only much later did I grasp that he never gave me the slightest clue to where either of you were.

When the Colonel and Mom got back, they told me to sit outside while they spoke with Dr. Ventnor in private. I didn't know why they made me sit outside, as I could hear through a closed door just fine.

"Belle," Dr. Ventnor said, "is showing remarkably little depression and dissociative behavior. I'd say that she's adjusting to the earth well. Feel free to introduce her to the social situations that you have in mind."

"Can I start to train her?" the Colonel said.

"Yes. Just keep in mind that, if she follows the same course of development that the Tani followed on Ul, it'll be six years before she can do what you need her to."

The Colonel sighed. "I just hope that we can wait that long."

When the Colonel and Mom came out of Dr. Ventnor's office, I pretended to have been reading a magazine. I felt that it'd be unwise to reveal that I'd overheard what was said in private. Honest Desert-child that I'd been, I'd picked up let's-pretend in no time.

~~~

The first social situation to which the Colonel and Mom took me was church.

I'd seen church buildings on car trips. The Jackson Purchase, the land between the Tennessee River and the Mississippi River where Paducah lies, has church buildings on about every corner. When I'd asked what the buildings were, Mom told me that they were houses where God, Who had created the heavens and the earth, was worshiped.

"Is God the same as _Lus Im,_ Holy Light?" I said.

Mom and the Colonel looked at each other. "Some would say one thing, some another," the Colonel said to me. "You must decide for yourself."

The Colonel and Mom bought me a book of illustrated Bible stories, which I read cover to cover. The stories filled me with wonder, terror, and puzzlement in about equal measures. If I understood what I was reading, the point of the book was that God had created earth-humans good, but they'd gone bad, hurting each other in ways that shocked the innocent Desert-child that I was. God, though, out of love for the earth-humans, had come to the earth as one of them to save them.

_Why didn't God come save the Tani?_ I wondered.

I hoped to learn the answer to that question when the Colonel and Mom took me to church. Mom took me first to Sunday school, where she left me with a cute, perky young woman named Miss Cindy. She, who'd somehow learned my cover story, introduced me to other six-year-old girls as a war-orphan whom Colonel Gordon had adopted. The other girls looked at me with wide eyes that seemed to me impressed.

I stared in turn at two of the other girls, who had fair skin, reddish hair, and sea-blue eyes much like mine. The girls did have freckles, which, as you know, I don't, but back then I thought that I might get them. Later, when I got home, I'd ask Mom whether those girls were somehow related to the Tani.

Mom shook her head. "Those girls look like you because their ancestors came from Ireland."

The Colonel, overhearing my talk with Mom, chuckled. "It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the Irish are related to the Tani."

It took me a while to get the gist of his humor. I doubt that I've ever truly grasped it.

But to our tale. Miss Cindy had us girls bow our heads while she said a prayer; then she led us in a song. Afterwards, she used cloth figures on a board to tell us of Daniel in the Lion's Den.

This story had fascinated me in the children's book, as I'd seen lions at the Cincinnati Zoo and read on them everything at home. I found it hard to grasp creatures that hunted and ate flesh with no human help. On Ul, the _lex-i_ had eaten flesh, but only what we Tani had given them. For that matter, at home, Major ate only what the Colonel and Mom gave him.

Miss Cindy's lesson was that we girls should be brave and always tell the truth. As a Desert-child, I wondered what there was besides the truth. The earth would teach me.

When she finished her lesson, she showed us part of a movie in which vegetables played the parts of Daniel, King Darius, and his evil advisors. The earth-humans' imagination astounded me. We Tani had talked to plants, but we'd never dreamed of their talking back.

When Sunday school ended, Mom came to take me upstairs to sit with her and the Colonel in morning service. A choir sang, and everyone sang, and a preacher prayed, and the preacher taught. His lesson that morning was that Christ was the light that came into the world. I was excited, thinking that he was saying that God was Holy Light, Whom we Tani had served seven thousand years. When the preacher said how the Light could save the lost, and invited anyone who believed to come forward to profess faith in Jesus and be baptized, I almost went.

Something that the preacher had said made me pause. I resolved to wait till I could ask the Colonel of it. Finding him alone later at home, I said, "Colonel, the preacher said that Jesus can save anyone who's a son or a daughter of Adam. Am I a daughter of Adam? I don't recall that name from the tale of how the Tan came to be. I guess that what I'm asking is, 'Am I human?'"

The Colonel gave me a look of inexpressible sorrow that I didn't then understand. "Belle, that's another question that you must answer for yourself."

The second social situation to which the Colonel and Mom introduced me was the Girl Scouts. The Colonel, comparing the Tan calendar with the human calendar, determined that I was about to turn seven, so I started as a Brownie Scout.

The den mother of the troop to which Mom took me was Miss Cindy, my Sunday-school teacher. Most of the girls in her troop were members of the church to which the Colonel and Mom took me, including the two Irish girls, Kendra and Millie. They and I, we learned, shared a fascination with Disney characters, _Animal Planet,_ tales of super-powered, super-smart girls, and computers. We became fast friends, along with a cute, perky Korean girl named Emily, who shared our fascination. The four of us became known as _nerds_ and _geeks,_ but were proud of the titles.

Did I tell my friends that I was super-powered and super-smart? I didn't have to; they were smart enough to figure out on their own that I was. I was good at hiding my speed and sharpness of hearing as I grew, but my strength and resistance to injury came out. The Colonel came up with a new condition called _tetany_ to explain why my muscles were so tight. Given that he was the one saying the word, everyone in Paducah bought it. It pays to be known as a war hero in a conservative countryside.

I didn't, though, tell my friends that I was an alien from lost Ul. All of them, I think, would've believed me, been delighted to have an alien as a friend, and kept my secret, but the Colonel counseled me not to tell it. When they asked me of life before I was adopted, I told them of Ul, but was careful to call it Afghanistan and crystal-ships _helicopters._ When I read up on Afghanistan in the encyclopedia and in _National Geographic,_ I saw that parts of that land were enough like Ul for my stories of it to work there.

In any case, Emily, Kendra, Millie, and I went to troop meetings and on field trips together, and cooperated and competed intensely to earn badges. It amazes me how useful what I learned in earning these has been to the life that I now live.

In time, school, the third social situation to which the Colonel and Mom introduced me, began. It delighted me to go to it, as I'd loved studying on Ul. Studying on the earth made this world seem homelike.

Before I began school, I had to take tests. When I finished these, the Colonel and Mom met in a closed office with persons called _principal_ and _counselor._ Sitting outside the office, I looked at a book on wildlife of the Serengeti. You smile. Yes, again, a closed door didn't keep me from hearing.

"Belle is a gifted student, Mr. and Mrs. Gordon," the principal said. "She already reads at a sixth-grade level. Granted that her math skills are average, I'd recommend getting her tutored with those and skipping her to a higher grade."

I felt sad, as I guessed that skipping grades would part me from Emily, Kendra, and Millie. The Colonel and Mom, though, put their foot down on my skipping grades. They wanted me to develop normally --

You laugh now, but it seemed possible to me back then.

When I began school, I almost wished that I had skipped grades. The work bored me out of my skull.

As the Colonel's daughter, though, not to mention Dor-Sad's granddaughter, I dared not get less than an A in any subject. I grew expert at gazing raptly at a teacher and listening to her or him with half an ear while I recalled Ul, wondered what the rest of you were doing, and daydreamed of what I'd do when I came of age and fully into my powers. When the teacher called on me, I knew the right answer; when she or he asked general questions of the class, mine was the first hand up.

One of the first four hands. Emily, Kendra, and Millie were just as competitive as I was. The rest of the second grade, and of every grade to come, resented the four of us; but we didn't mind resentment as long as we had each other.

Shortly after I'd begun school, I saw Dr. Ventnor the second time. While the Colonel and Mom shopped for antiques, Dr. Ventnor gave me my physical.

At its end, I smarted off to him. "So, Doctor, are my _albinism,_ _scleroderma,_ and _tetany_ improving?"

He made for the first time in my hearing the rich, deep laugh that I loved. "They're doing just fine, Belle."

"Mom makes me wear sunglasses and sunscreen when I'm outdoors. Do I really need them?"

"Maybe not, but everyone else as pale as you are wears them to avoid sunburn and damaged eyes."

"Why are all of the Tani pale?"

"Because of the color of Ul's sun. The earth's sun is a yellow star that puts out a lot of ultraviolet light. That can cause skin and eye damage. The dark skins that most humans have or can develop give them some protection against UV, and those who can't produce dark skin need sunscreen. Wolf 1061, though, is red and produces little UV. Living seven thousand years under a red star, the Tani either never had dark skin or lost the ability to produce it."

I saw a chance to get Dr. Ventnor to talk of things on my mind. I'd asked the Colonel of them, too, but I hoped that Dr. Ventnor would tell me what the Colonel wouldn't or couldn't.

"Are there aliens other than Tani on the earth?"

Dr. Ventnor blinked. "Why do you ask that question, Belle?"

"I keep hearing of superheroes, flying saucers, crop circles, cattle mutilations --"

"Where do you hear of such things?"

"On TV, in magazines, on the Internet \--"

"Ah. You're a busy girl, Belle. Well, superheroes are just myths -- stories that humans make up to tell of their hopes and fears. As for flying saucers, besides the crystal-ships in which you Tani came here, there's been nothing like them on the earth in the lifetime of anyone now alive. Any crop circles or cattle mutilations are the works of human pranksters."

He'd distracted me from my original question, you'll note. Maybe, though, I distracted myself. "How can you say that there are no superheroes? Don't I have some of their powers? I'm strong and fast. When I grow up, I'll have the crystal-shaping gift."

"So you will. On the other hand, you won't be able to fly, or shoot webs from your hands, or see through walls..."

He went on quite a while with a list of things that I wouldn't be able to do. The list didn't impress me. Even at seven years old, I knew that not everyone can do everything, but I could do more than most.

"Not many earth-humans know of us Tani. How did you and the Colonel learn of us?"

"Ah. We believed that ones like you might come. When you came, we knew what to look for."

In time, I learned that he'd told me the truth, but not all of it. Just then, I asked him how you others were doing, and when I could see you, and he told me fine and someday. To make a long story short, I asked the same questions and got the same answers for many years to come.

~~~

Now, I'll fast-forward through several years. I kept palling around with Emily, Kendra, and Millie. I kept going to church, doing well in school, and racking up badges in Girl Scouts. Whenever meetings or badge requirements called for skits, short stories, or poems to be written, I was the go-to girl. I began to put my Girl Scout work onto the Internet, along with stories of Ul disguised as reminiscences of Afghanistan or fiction on the Fall of Atlantis.

I kept bugging the Colonel and Dr. Ventnor about where you others were and when I could see you. You know the drill.

One change to my life was that the Colonel began to train me to use my gifts. He tested me to learn how much I could lift, how high I could jump, how well I could climb and swim, and how fast I could run. At my full speed, running shoes came apart around my ankles; then I had to stop because my soles tore up. They healed quickly, but they hurt.

He also tested how far and how accurately I could throw. The answer to those questions was, embarrassingly for me, "Far, but not accurately." When I first tried to throw a softball at a target on a side of the barn, the ball vanished from sight over the barn's roof. I learned from the Colonel's reaction to my toss that ROFL can describe real behavior. It felt good to me to make the Colonel laugh, even if he was laughing at me.

He also taught me skills from his special-forces manuals. I could sneak through woods, pick locks, rappel down walls, and cut phone lines with the best of them. Trusting soul that I was, I failed to wonder why a good Southern Baptist Girl Scout needed such skills.

Using them, I began to sneak out of the house at night and run throughout the Jackson Purchase. I ran barefoot to cut down on expenditures for shoes. As I got older, my feet hardened till I could run from Paducah to Mayfield and back, a distance of over forty miles, in ten minutes. Two hundred and forty miles an hour is a snail's pace by today's standards, but I was proud of it then.

Life went on. I almost forgot that I was a girl from another world, till the day when the crystals awoke.

~~~

One day, when I was twelve, I awoke to halos around things. Specifically around electronic items -- the light-fixture overhead, my reading lamp, my computer, my clock-radio, the television at my bed's foot...

I panicked, wondering whether I was sick, and, if so, what I should do. Tell the Colonel and Mom, so that they could take me to a doctor? Yeah, right! "Gee, Belle, your respiration rate is normal, but we can't get a pulse or a blood pressure on you."

Suppose that the doctor took X-rays of me. What fun!

Yes, I thought of Dr. Ventnor, but I'd learned that he was no medical doctor, just a psychologist playing xenobiologist. A nice guy if I wanted someone to hold my hand...

Not yet, thank you! I got up and did my normal routine. Lights flickered around me, as Mom noted in a worried tone, but I made the school bus on time. On the bus, Emily chatted with me of everyday things and said nothing of green spots on my forehead. She would've told me of them if I'd had them.

At school, though, nothing went right in terms of computers. Every one that I tried to use crashed on me. I'd brought my laptop to school, but, when I tried to turn it on, I got the blue screen of death. When I tried to reboot my laptop, it didn't even give me the blue screen.Kendra and Millie, looking at the laptop for me, told me that its hard-drive had crashed. Wonderful! As an übernerd, I'd backed up all of my files, but, now, I'd have to do chores for a month to earn money for a new hard-drive.

When I got home, I was in a foul mood. After supper, I slunk to my room and lay on my bed. I wanted to get on line and moan to the cyberworld of my woes, but I feared that, as soon as I booted up my desktop, I'd fry its hard-drive, too. Belle, having sinned, was purged from civilization.

I lay on my bed and gazed at halos. As I glanced around my room, my eye went to the brightest halo, an intense pinkish glow atop my dresser. My heart pounded in my armored chest. "The memory-crystal!" I said in a tone of wonder.

The Colonel had kept all but one of my memory-crystals locked up in a safe in the barn. One, though, I kept with me to remind me of the Homeworld. For six years, the crystal had just lain on my dresser. Emily, Kendra, and Millie had handled the crystal countless times. When they'd asked me what it was, I told them that it was a good-luck charm from Afghanistan.

I, too, had handled the crystal countless times, but it'd never glowed or awoken in me any memories but those already in my head. Now, though, the crystal's pinkish glow drew me like moth to flame. I rose, padded across the carpet, and took the crystal in my hand...

_In the Hall of Evening Sacrifice, I sat at a long stone table standing at a right angle to the dais. I'd just finished eating, as the_ kum _women were taking away dishes._

When I turned my gaze to the dais, Sor-On, wearing the three-spired crown, was rising. My gaze was directed at him, but my wonder at those seated by him: lovely Luna, his wife; Par-On, his son, in her arms; Dor-Sad, my grandfather; and I myself, Mira Das-Es, a five-year-old girl giving her grandfather a look of adoration.

_When I grew aware of what Sor-On was saying, I gathered that he was telling the Tale of Origins, how the First Ancestors -- Par; his_ an _wife, Dira, and his_ kum _wife, Ruka -- had come from the stars in a crystal-ship to settle the Desert of Ul. I listened with joy to the tale of how the three colonists had built a home on a hostile world and brought children into it, but I felt greater joy in anticipation of what was to come._

"Now," Sor-On said when his story-telling was done, "let us go out onto the mesa, and sing and dance to honor the First Ancestors."

_I rose, both the I who'd watched from the common tables and the I who'd been seated on the dais, and followed everyone else through the great double doors of clear, pale violet at the hall's western end. In chill night air, I huddled with my neighbors as we turned our eyes skywards. There, in unchallenged glory, hung_ Thil-i An Om, _the Stars of the Great Crystal-Shaper._

A memory within a memory told me that Orion looked on Ul almost identical to how it looks on the earth.

Ten thousand voices united, my neighbors and I sang of our dedication to what the First Ancestors had taught us of Holy Light, the principles of duty, loyalty, and truthfulness, and the foundations of worship, community, and family. I felt no longer an isolated life at a deadly desert's mercy, but part of a common life with no end.

Song over, the common life broke into individuals who sought their places on the mesa. As musicians began to play bone-flutes, lutes, and drums, I found myself heading for where the royal family had gathered. Sor-On handed Mira his crown; Luna handed her Par-On. Mira took the crown into her left arm, the baby into her right. It delighted me to see her kiss him and him wave his chubby arms.

My gaze went to the royal couple. Each of them began to spin in place as an individual; then they spun into each other's arms and became a couple. Around them, three other sets of individuals spun into couples. The royal couple opened their arms to these, and the four dances of two became a single dance of eight.

Across the plateau, what the royal couple had begun was repeating itself. I gazed across rings of eight spinning under a starlit sky till my gaze was drawn to a new dance. Mira had risen and was spinning in place, crown in one arm, baby Par in the other. Grinning, he waved his chubby arms.

My gaze rose to the serene majesty of the Great Crystal-Shaper. Its stars blazed and then faded...

I was standing before a dresser, a fading crystal in my right hand. Tears streamed from my eyes. I flung myself onto my bed and sobbed helplessly, silently for what seemed to me hours.

I'd almost forgotten who I was. I'd almost forgotten that those who'd danced one last time under Orion had sent me to the earth for a purpose.

Now, I recalled the Work and the Message, and resolved to prepare for them.

Voices murmuring in the light-crystals' glow interrupt me. "That was the memory-crystal that you showed us to get us ready for tonight!" mystical Lona murmurs.

"You must've told Dr. Ventnor of our being able to wipe hard-drives," wise, artistic Sil-Tan says. "He warned me of it just before I turned twelve."

Lona shakes her head. "Dala and I told Dr. Ventnor, after we'd met Mira, and she'd told us how to use the crystals."

"You must've set to work learning of them at once, Mira," shy Dala says. "When I met you, you were already able to make light-crystals."

"I was, and I did set to work at once. One of my Tan books told the secrets of crystal-shaping. I worked on learning them night after night, after the Colonel and Mom had gone to bed. Luckily for me, once my crystal-shaping gift had awoken, I needed just four hours of sleep a night.

"I won't say much of crystal-shaping just now, though. Instead, I'll tell you how the War to Save the Earth began."

Dour, brooding Un-Thor gives me a wolfish grin. "At last, the story's good part!"

Some of us, _I think sourly,_ have a different opinion from yours about it.

~~~

The War to Save the Earth began with running.

As I've said, I'd been slipping out of my bedroom at night and running around the Purchase. Now that I needed scant sleep, I began to run farther afield. On nights when I had no sleepovers or other late activities, I'd cross the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and run as far out I-24 or the Western Kentucky Turnpike as I could in an hour. The distance got longer each night.

Sometimes, too, I did off-road running. Those of you who've tried this know that it can be an adventure.

One night, at full speed, I entered a patch of black fog and ran into a tree full tilt. The tree was a pine, about twenty feet tall; I took it down. It did a number on me, too. I lay on the ground and wept for my pain and my stupidity, and especially for how much the dead Tani would hate me for ruining myself for the Work. After a while, though, my skin and my bones crawled back into place, and I was able to rise and run home. When I got there, I looked just fine.

One night, as I was running across a field, I crested a rise to find a stock pond in my path. Ignorantly, I tried to slow down, but I took several strides across the pond's surface before I ditched. As I crawled from the pond, I felt a fool. I ran from the scene of my shame as quickly as possible. As I ran, my clothes dried, and my mind began to work. I figured that, if I didn't break stride, I could run on water...

The Ohio, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Mississippi became my highways. By land or by sea, as the saying goes, I could now reach St. Louis, Louisville, Nashville, or Memphis in under an hour. I could explore them a couple of hours and still make it home in time to get all of the sleep that I needed before my clock-radio went off, and Mom called me to breakfast.

In the cities, I practiced special-forces skills. I climbed up buildings, ran across rooftops, jumped from rooftop to rooftop, peered through skylights and windows, and climbed down buildings. Kuma and Un-Thor, who've done their own share of night-time prowling, can tell the rest of you what a sense of power it gives you.

One night in Louisville, while I was in a part of town where maybe a thirteen-year-old girl shouldn't have been just then, I was crossing a rooftop when I heard blows and screams in an alley below me. Stopping to look there, I saw that a man had a woman shoved up against a brick wall. As I watched, he pressed his left forearm against her throat while with his right hand he yanked up her skirt.

Tan speech has no word for _rape,_ but, even in sheltered Paducah, I'd learned the word on the earth. Halos flared around everything as I leaped from the rooftop. The woman saw me, and her eyes got big as I fell; then her assailant looked up at me.

As I landed, he pulled out a knife, but, before he could use it, I slapped him across the face. His eyes got big, his face went slack, and the knife clattered on concrete. I picked him up and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. "When someone says no, it means no!" I screamed in his face.

I flung him against the brick wall, and he oozed down it to the concrete. Turning to the woman, I said, "Can you run?" When she nodded, I said, "Go get help!"

As she ran off, I began to shake. _What if I killed that man?_ I thought. Kneeling, I felt his neck and found a pulse there. My crystal-shaping gift had turned on. It gave me a strange sense of being able to feel all of his internal organs. I gathered that his spine was intact -- amazingly so; I could easily have snapped his neck while I was shaking him -- but his right humerus was broken where I'd squeezed his arm, and I'd broken several ribs on his left side where he struck the wall.

I stood, debating whether to carry him to an emergency room, till I heard a siren coming. I clambered back to the rooftop, from which I saw the erstwhile assault victim guiding a police car into the alley.

I ran then, not stopping till I reached my own bed. There, I lay shivering till the clock-radio came on.

_Dour, brooding_ _Un-Thor laughs harshly. "You must've gotten over the shivering fits. As I've heard things, you did a lot of night-time rescues before you got caught."_

"I'm getting there," I say crossly.

~~~

One evening, as I was sprawled across my bed and studying geometry, a knock sounded at my bedroom's door.

"Belle, may I come in?" the Colonel said.

"Door's open." I sat up as he took a seat at my computer desk. "What can I do for you, Colonel?"

"Have you been going out at night, Belle?"

I showed him no change of expression at the start of a long-anticipated talk. "Why do you ask, sir?"

His eyes flicked the briefest of instants towards my bedroom window. Likely, none but a trained Tan could've caught his gesture.

"Don't insult my intelligence, Belle. Also, while I'm asking questions, why have you stopped telling me news of the weird?"

For years, I'd been scanning the Internet for stories of unusual events in hope that one of them would lead me to one of you. Sadly, the earth is so full of unusual events that they buried any of yours. I'd told the Colonel of them in hope that he might, against all reasonable expectation, give something away; but he truthfully, I suspect, denied knowing anything behind the events.

_Do not go gentle into that good night,_ Dylan Thomas wrote. "I've been telling you news of the weird, sir."

"You've been omitting key stories. For instance, the story of a woman in Louisville rescued from attempted rape by a masked girl who leaped from a three-story building and flung the woman's assailant against a wall."

"That story sounds like something from a superhero comic book, sir."

The Colonel gave me the faintest of smiles. "The story of rival street gangs in East St. Louis. They were disarmed and flung about a basketball court by a masked figure who moved faster than humanly possible."

"Didn't I see that scene in a Jackie Chan movie, sir?"

The Colonel chuckled dryly. "By the way, the only wisdom that the masked figure showed in both cases was wearing a mask to preserve her secrecy."

I guessed, then, that the Colonel wouldn't like the real reason for my mask: to keep from getting windburn at three hundred miles an hour. Vanity, thy name was Belle!

The Colonel went on. "The story of a drug dealer in Topeka, Kansas. He was flung, hogtied with his own sports jacket, through a police station's front door, along with a suitcase full of Oxycontin, his list of contacts, and a murder weapon."

My eyes got big. "I had nothing to do with that incident, sir." Whoever had done it had style. One of yours, Un-Thor? I thought so.

The Colonel laughed his deep, rich laugh. "Some would say that your denial of complicity in the last incident implies your admission of complicity in the former incidents. Why don't you and I stop playing games? As I mention more incidents, answer to them either 'guilty' or 'not guilty.'"

When I nodded, the Colonel said, "The appearance of a suitcase full of cash on the doorstep of a homeless shelter in Louisville."

"Guilty, sir. May I ask, though, why you link that incident to me?"

"Because, the same night when the suitcase appeared in Louisville, a suitcase full of cash had vanished from the scene of a busted drug deal near Elizabethtown, just a short hop down I-65 from the home of the Cardinals. At the drug deal, a masked figure streaked across an open field, slapped the buyer and the seller senseless, tied them up with Bungee cords, pushed their cars over a hill into a culvert, dialed 9-1-1 on the seller's cell phone, and, without speaking to the dispatcher, left the phone open at the crime scene while she ran off north."

"Guilty, sir."

The Colonel stared at me. "You don't carry Bungee cords on the off-chance that you'll need them to tie up perpetrators, do you, Belle?"

I shook my head. "I got the Bungee cords out of the trunk of one of the cars."

"Improvisation, then. Another small point in your favor. The _modus operandi_ of slapping persons and pushing cars over a hill recurs in the story of drunken teenagers who, about to drive under the influence, were suddenly assaulted by what they called a Tasmanian devil."

"Guilty, sir, but I don't like the name."

"Why did you attack drunken teenagers?"

"I feared that they might kill someone if they drove." From this vantage, my words bear bitter irony.

The Colonel asked me of twelve more incidents. I pled guilty to ten, not guilty to two. As these occurred around Kansas City and bear the hallmarks of your flamboyant style, Un, I'll judge you guilty unless proven innocent. The Colonel had missed just three incidents that he could've pinned onto me.

I awaited the Colonel's judgment. Grounding for life? Shipping me off to Area 51 to be vivisected? I wished that I hadn't watched so much TV.

"You have ability and training, Belle, and, now, you're showing initiative. Granted that you're making amateur mistakes, you show promise. Still, I doubt that your current escapades are what Sor-On had in mind when he told you, 'Save the earth.' Would you like to do work more in line with his command?"

My heart leapt. "Are you sending me on missions, sir?"

The Colonel gave me his thinnest smile. "Here's your first."

Huntsville, Alabama, was farther along the Tennessee River than I'd gone, but, given that I was leaving home with the Colonel's knowledge and blessing, the city was an easy two-hour run. Huntsville is home to many high-tech, high-security sites, such as Cummings Research Park, Marshall Space Flight Center, Redstone Arsenal, Thornton Research Park, the U. S. Army Missile Command, and the U. S. Space and Rocket Center.

The Colonel sent me to none of these, but to a small factory south of town near Byrd Spring Lake. The factory might've made anything -- vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, dog toys. What it did make, I didn't know when I went there. The Colonel had said that I had no need to know. When I got home, I did look up on line what the factory makes. I'll say only that it must be a cover for the factory's real products, none of which show up on Wal-Mart's shelves.

My target wasn't the factory itself, but one of its offices, which held computers. My mission was to wipe their hard-drives.

Let me correct an erroneous statement that Lona made. I did tell the Colonel of my crystal-shaping gift as soon as it awoke. Telling him was the same as telling Dr. Ventnor. Why the good doctor didn't tell Dala and Lona of my crystal-shaping gift, but did tell Sil-Tan later on, is one life's mysteries. The Colonel and Dr. Ventnor told me much in their last days, but not all. What they took with them into eternity, none of us will ever know.

But to our tale. I approached the factory from the south, from the river. The factory was surrounded by barbed wire, but, without breaking stride, I leapt over this. The entrance to the factory's office wing required a key card for entry, but, under the Colonel's supervision, I'd learned to mimic key cards with the crystal-shaping gift.

A security camera was trained on me when I entered the office wing. I made a mental note to scramble the camera's records as I left. The office holding the computers also required a key card for entry, but you know the drill.

Frying hard-drives when one actually means to fry them is quick work for a developed Tan. As I fried them, I wondered how the factory had backed up the hard-drives. Off-site, on a server or magnetic tape, I guessed. Would my next mission be to fry back-up media?

After I'd left the office, I'd begun to search for the security cam's feed when I heard cars screech to a halt outside. Heading for the office wing's outer door, I saw red and blue lights flashing. The police, though, hadn't yet made it through the locked gate in the barbed-wire fence. Hidden by my Ninja black, I sprinted across a parking lot, leapt over the fence, and headed for the Tennessee River. _Catch me if you can!_ I thought.

Trembling with excitement, I had to stop for rest at Muscle Shoals. As I huddled in a riverbank's shelter and looked up at stars amid racing clouds, I wondered whom I was serving. The CIA? The NSA? Whoever it was, why was it attacking a site inside the United States?

The Colonel had given me just a thin smile when I'd asked him those questions. "You don't need to know now, Belle. I promise, though, that I'll tell you when the time comes."

He would tell me at his life's end in a way that only a Tan could understand. Just then, he had something else to tell me. My _Catch me if you can_ was premature, as I caught an earful from the Colonel when I got home. A squad of raw recruits would've melted like butter at the dressing down that I got for not thinking that the security cam might've had a live feed and that police cars answering a silent alarm would run silently.

I doubt that anyone got all A's when the Colonel was the teacher. Still, no one connected daring industrial sabotage in Huntsville, Alabama, with an eighth-grade Girl Scout in Paducah, Kentucky. After refresher courses, I was ready for more missions.

~~~

I'd gone on five more of these, and wiped a slew of hard-drives, when one morning at breakfast the Colonel said to me, "Do you have anything planned tonight?"

"Not really. I was thinking of going to Emily's to study \--"

"Could you go another time? Guests are coming from out of town. I want you to meet them."

Without showing my fascination, I felt it. The Gordons often entertained guests from Paducah, but seldom guests from out of town.

"Certainly, sir." After all, the Colonel had been courteous enough to ask me.

Thinking of the guests, I got so distracted at school that I answered a question in class by saying that Shakespeare had written _Oedipus Rex._ My fellow students who knew the answer, as well as the teacher, stared at me as if I'd grown a red rubber nose.

In the halls after class, Emily whispered to me, "Are you sick, Belle? That's the first time that I've heard you miss a question like that."

"Sorry, Em. My mind is in the clouds. The Colonel has guests from out of town coming in tonight."

"They must be some guests to put you off your feed. Tell me all tomorrow!"

I was standing on the front porch with the Colonel and Mom -- Major, no longer frisky, at our feet -- when a car drove up. Three persons got out of it. They were a man as military looking as the Colonel, a lovely blonde woman, and a girl who swallowed my eyes. She had moon-pale skin, a round face, full lips, strawberry-blonde hair, and eyes of pale aquamarine. She might've been my reflection in a mirror, if I'd been two years younger than I was.

I grew aware of the Colonel's speaking. "Pete, Melissa, Delia, this is my daughter, Mirabelle. Belle, this is my old army buddy, Captain le Mars, his wife, and their daughter, Delia."

Delia, the Colonel called her, but I'd known her by another name when I led her around by the hand on his visit to Ul. In Tan speech, I blurted out, _"Mi su-es Dal-a?"_

She gazed at me with enormous eyes and bit her lips. After a moment she said, _"La, su-in Dal-a. Mi su-es Mir-a?"_

I could only nod at her.

The Colonel beamed. "No doubt, you two girls will have much to say to each other. Just now, Annabel has supper ready. None of us wants it to get cold."

The six of us repaired to table, as the saying goes in Victorian novels. After grace, which Captain le Mars said at the Colonel's request, the Colonel and the Major swapped war stories while Mom and Mrs. le Mars smiled at each other, and Dala and I stared at each other with enormous eyes. I recall nothing of what I ate till I swallowed the last bite of lemon meringue pie.

At meal's end, the Colonel, with a knowing smile, said, "Belle, would you like to show Delia your room?"

Would I! I asked her the question. Hardly had she said yes when I was dragging her upstairs in my eagerness to talk with her. Once she was in my room, though, I didn't talk with her, but caught her up in a hug that would've collapsed an earth-human's lungs. Dala, though, is made of stern stuff.

"I can't believe that it's you, Dala!" I said at last. "Do you remember me?"

She nodded slowly. "The time before seems like a dream to me, but I remember you from it. You were a princess, I think, but you were always kind to me. You always had a baby boy with you, and you were somehow married to him. What a strange world, where babies got married! I think that I got married the day before I came to the earth, but I can't recall my husband's name."

"Van-Dor. He was a student in school with me in Gam Tol, the crystal-city, where you and I lived together. Do you know where any of the others are?"

Dala shook her head. "Dr. Ventnor tells me of them sometimes when I visit him, but he's never told me where they are. I guess that, since Daddy is friends with your dad, Daddy knew where you were all along, but he never told me."

"Maybe, our parents are starting to bring us together. Where do you live, Dala?"

"Bennettsville, South Carolina."

"Where's that?"

She shrugged. "About as far from anywhere else as a place can be."

"Some say that of Paducah. Maybe, the Colonel and Dr. Ventnor scattered us Tani in places as remote as they could find."

Dala and I compared notes awhile on life in Bennettsville and life in Paducah. As we spoke, Major, who'd taken some time to make it upstairs, crawled onto my bed with Dala. She stroked him the rest of the time while she and I talked.

After a while, Dala said, "You said that you and Van-Dor went to school in the time before. Did you learn how to read the books that came with us? I have eight of them, but I can't read them. I'd learned just a few words before I came here."

Smiling, I picked up a whiteboard and drew a horizontal line on it. "Do you recall this sign?"

It delighted me for her to giggle. "That's the sign for _bas,_ sand. That's the first sign that I learned."

"I can teach you more signs if you want to learn them."

She did want to. She and I exchanged phone numbers and e mail addresses so that I could teach her long distance. At last, I had a lifeline to one of my own people. I would teach her to read.

Just then, she had a dreamy look in her eyes. "There were all kinds of crystals where we lived, weren't there? Crystals of power! I have eight pink crystals that came in my ship, but they don't do anything anymore."

"Those are _bil-i_ _kel-al,_ memory-crystals. When your crystal-shaping gift awakes, they'll show you sights and sounds of the Homeworld. Do you see the pink crystal on my dresser? It shows the Dance that the Tan did when Orion was high in the sky."

Dala nodded. "The grown-ups spun in circles till the red sun came up, didn't they? There were all kinds of other crystals, too. Light-crystals, heat-crystals --"

"I have some light-crystals. Would you like one?"

Without awaiting her answer, I opened my dresser's top drawer and took out a large, clear crystal that began to shine with bright yellow light as I touched it. "This'll shine for hours unless I turn it off," I said as I put it into Dala's hands.

"Amazing, Mira! Did this come with you in your ship?"

Pride, I confess, made my voice purr. "I made it myself from directions in one of the old books."

I got a chance of which I'd dreamed -- the chance to brag to another Tan of my exploits. Dala's face began to fall, though, as these went on.

"I'm sorry, Dala. You must do special things, too."

She shrugged. "I did run to Savannah, Georgia, and back once. It'll be a while before I can run again, though. Two nights ago, I was trying to run to Charlotte, North Carolina, when I stepped onto some twisted metal -- part of a muffler, I think -- that tore up my right foot. I had to call Daddy to come drive me home. My foot is healing, but it's a few days away from being healed."

I nodded. "You'll heal almost at once when your crystal-shaping gift kicks in. May I see your foot, Dala?"

Taking off her right sneaker, she showed me a sole gashed nearly to the bone. Wanting to test whether my diagnostic gift worked as well on a Tan as it worked on an earth-human, I took Dala's wounded foot into my hands. To my astonishment, power flowed out of me. The wound closed before my eyes.

"Wow, Mira! Are you a miracle-worker?"

I shook my head. "I didn't know that I could heal. Healing must be a function of how the crystal-shaping gift works on this world, as I've found no records of healings by hand in the old books. On the Homeworld, Crystal-Shapers needed healing-crystals to heal others. Maybe on this world, though, all of us will be able to heal by hand when we grow up."

Dala sighed. "I wish that I could hurry."

Mom knocked on the door and said that it was time for Dala and me to go to bed. We asked to sleep in my bed just as we'd shared a bed on Ul. We did scant sleeping, though. We talked in whispers till the light-crystal faded, and dawn was near.

I dragged through school the next day, and told Emily, Kendra, and Millie that I'd met a fellow war-orphan from Afghanistan, a girl with the same genetic conditions that I had. Dala and her family stayed one more night, which she and I also filled with talk. The le Mars family left for South Carolina after breakfast the next morning, but Dala and I had our lifelines to each other and used them often.

In the light-crystals' glow, wise, artistic Sil-Tan raises a hand. "My question is for Dala. Your earth-father was a military officer. What did Captain le Mars teach you?"

"Not to fight, if that's what you're asking. Daddy taught me wilderness-survival skills, and ways to escape attackers, but none of the breaking and entering and trashing things that Mira learned."

Par-On gives Dala a look of interest. "What did you do with your gifts before you met Mira?"

Dala shrugs. "Little things. Cleaning up stretches of highway and leaving bagged waste to be picked up. Pushing junked cars and trucks out of fields and streams to the side of the road to be towed off..."

Fierce Kuma sniffs. "I've never understood why you did such things."

"Dr. Ventnor told me that I came to the earth to save it. I did what I thought saving the earth meant."

Par nods. "I believe that what Dala did is part of what my birth-father meant when he told Mira, 'Save the earth!'"

All but two of the rest of us nod at Par's words. Kuma and dour, brooding Un-Thor, who might be inclined to dispute them, at least voice no objection to them.

Mystical Lona strokes her chin. "I read about those road-cleanings and car-movings on the Internet, but I never associated them with a Tan till I actually met you, Dala."

I sighed. "Neither did I, it shames me to say."

Kuma grins. "I was the only one of us to figure out where others were with the Internet."

I nod at her. "I'm getting to your part of the story. There's much more to tell before you enter it, though."

~~~

Once I'd met Dala again, I corresponded with her regularly, and helped her by e mail and by cell phone learn how to use her crystal-shaping gift. It thrilled me to get descriptions of the visions of Ul that she'd seen, and pictures of light-crystals that she'd made.

I couldn't hide from Emily, Kendra, and Millie that I was spending much time on line and on the phone with Dala, or Delia as I called her around them. I told them that she was my distant cousin, as she is -- she's my second-cousin once-removed; check the genealogies! We _an-i,_ we Crystal-Shapers, were never many; all of us are related to one another within five generations. I also told my friends that Dala and I were trying to find our roots in Afghanistan.

"We're happy for your finding your roots," Emily said.

Kendra and Millie nodded. "Yes, it's very Girl Scout thing to do," Millie said.

"Someday," Kendra said, "maybe you and Delia can return to your homeland and help others like you."

Yes, irony is sometimes a byproduct of deception.

While I was corresponding with Dala, palling around with my friends, pulling down all A's in college-prep and AP courses, going to church regularly, and racking up badges in the Girl Scouts, I was also doing secret missions for the Colonel. These averaged about one every three weeks, and involved extensive briefing and reconnaissance beforehand, and extensive debriefing afterwards. Gone were spontaneous rescues and busts!

I should say, "They were supposed to be gone." One night, as I was running home through western Kentucky, somewhere between Bowling Green and the Cumberland River, I heard dogs yelping, and one dog cry out in pain and terror. Along with the dog sounds came sounds of men shouting and laughing. The sounds came from a pool of light deep in some woods.

Running at five hundred miles an hour, one tends to overshoot things. Circling, I came upon the woods from the west.

What met my eyes in them filled me with horror and outrage. In a circle of light from headlights of pick-up trucks, burly, bearded men surrounded a pair of black dogs tearing at each other's throats. A couple of men were tending a wounded dog, two dogs that I guessed were dead and later learned were lay on the ground, and more dogs huddled in cages in the trucks' beds.

All of the Colonel's training left me as I reverted to my instincts of my early sneaking-out days. Dressed and masked in Ninja black, I rushed into the clearing and began to slap hairy faces till they all lay on the ground. I broke open the cages to free the dogs; then I either overturned the trucks or pushed them down a hillside. One truck, for a reason that I didn't then grasp, burst into flame. Luckily, it rolled into a deep, water-filled pit and posed no danger of starting a forest fire. Bad Girl Scout on me if I had started one! No cookies for Belle!

My work done, I dialed 9-1-1 on a cell phone and left it on the ground. Looking at the wreckage that I'd wrought, I thought, _The Colonel won't like this._

I ran on home, went to bed, and made the in retrospect foolish decision to say nothing unless he said something first. In the morning, I said to him, "Mission accomplished, Colonel."

Giving me a cold eye, he said, "We'll talk of your mission when you get home this evening."

_Busted,_ I thought. Not for the first time, I wondered whether he read minds.

At school, I was a nervous wreck. Emily, Kendra, and Millie turned out to be as good at reading me as the Colonel was. At lunch, they gave me looks both puzzled and concerned. Emily said, "What's wrong, Belle? Are you coming down with something?"

"Yes," Millie said, "you acted in Latin class as if you were on another world."

I held in an urge to grit my teeth. "I think that the Colonel is going to ground me."

My three friends gave each other wide-eyed looks. "You, the ultimate daddy's girl?" Kendra said to me.

I racked my brains for a safe reason for the grounding. "I blew off studying for AP Psych to sneak out to watch _Ice Age."_

Another exchange of wide-eyed looks. "I guess that Belle is human after all," Emily said.

"Why didn't you call us, Belle?" Millie said plaintively. "We might've gone with you."

"Because, as a good friend," Kendra said, "Belle didn't want to get us grounded, too."

That was I, Belle the superhero.

When I got home, the Colonel awaited me on the front porch. In a tone of deadly calm, he said, "Let's go talk in the barn. I don't want to disturb your mother."

Nodding, and feeling my guts turn to water inside me, I followed him to the barn. When we stood inside it, I said, brightly and foolishly, "Do you want to debrief me on my mission --"

"Which mission, Belle? Your scheduled mission to retrieve and burn files, or your unscheduled mission to break up a dogfight?"

"I'm sorry, sir! I'll never do --"

"Mirabelle!" he said softly. As I hushed, he kept speaking. For the next two hours, the Colonel, without swearing, raising his voice, or repeating himself, gave me a dressing down that would've been legendary in the special forces had it become known.

Foolishly, I'd jeopardized the safety of myself, my family, and the rest of my people. Foolishly, I'd acted on emotion, not reason. Foolishly, I'd acted with no plan. Foolishly, I'd endangered future success for present satisfaction. Foolishly, I'd lost sight of the big picture over a minor detail that would keep happening despite what I did. Foolishly --

I could go on with "foolishlies" quite a while. When the Colonel was done with them, he said in a conversational tone, "Have you understood me, Belle?

"Yes, sir."

"You and I will say no more of this matter. Let's go to supper."

I went to supper and ate all that was set before me, but tasted none of it. In the Colonel's house, though, no one dared not clean her plate.

At least, I didn't get grounded. My friends were relieved for me.

Par-On smiles at me. "Someday soon, Mira, before we start the Work, you must tell us the whole list of foolishlies. It'll no doubt save us grief in the long run."

"It will. Just now, though, another of us is about to enter the story."

~~~

One night, a mission took me father north and west than I'd ever gone, to Madison, Wisconsin. There, I was to break into an antique dealer's shop, take from his safe a locked, lacquered wooden case of about twelve by nine by two inches, and deliver the case unopened to Dr. Ventnor at his house in Upper Arlington, Ohio, just west of the Ohio State University. As that night I followed tradecraft that the Colonel had drilled into my thick head, the breaking and entering and safe-cracking went well.

After leaving Madison, I began to run south along I-39 to give Chicago a wide berth. It was a clear night of a full moon, Dr. Ventnor was going to let me sleep over the next day, and it felt good to lope along at three hundred mph. As I loped, I wondered what the lacquered case held. Having learned a healthy respect for the Colonel's debriefings, I dared not open the case.

I'd turned left at Bloomington, Illinois, and was running east along I-74 when I heard a girlish voice shout in the moonlight, _"Ti-shev-es, Tan-a!"_ For those of you whose Tan speech isn't up to speed, let me add that those words mean, "Stop, woman of the Tan!"

I wanted to stop. In fact, it took a magnificent recovery from a stumble for me not to fall flat onto my face. Fear of the Colonel, though, kept me on task. Filled with wonder and frustration, I kept heading for Ohio.

My stumble, though, had given one of you time to run after me. Nearly on my heels came a second cry of _"Ti-shev-es!"_

_I am entitled to rest,_ I told myself.

Slowing to a stop, I heard footsteps grow louder and die behind me. Turning, I saw a ghost from Ul. The one who'd called me wore a turban, scarf, smock, and long skirt just like those once worn on the Homeworld.

_"Mi-tan su-es?"_ I squeaked out. "Who are you?"

"Earth-name or birth-name?"

"I've never heard those terms, but I think I know what they mean. Both, please."

To make a long story short, I was meeting Lona Kul-Ved, or Lonnie Stormgren, then of Urbana, Illinois. Recalling me better, it shames me to say, than I recalled her, she knew that she was meeting Mira Das-Es, but I told her that she was also meeting Mirabelle Gordon of Paducah, Kentucky. She and I hugged each other and cried on each other's shoulders awhile, but I'll pass over the hugging and crying so that Un-Thor won't barf.

When we stopped the touchy-feely stuff, I said, "How did you happen to see me?"

"I was sitting on a hilltop and meditating to clear halos from my eyes when I heard something rush by and saw a glowing figure running faster than anyone else but I could run. I figured that it had to be a Tan, and it was."

I see a blank look on Par-On, who's still new to some things. When we Tani run really fast, we start radiating in a wavelength that earth-humans can't see, but we can. I suspect that it's infrared, but we'll have to test whether it is when the Work is well in hand.

"Did you say that you can see halos?" I asked Lona. "Wonderful! Your crystal-shaping gift is awaking!"

"I thought that it might be."

Recalling that Lona was nearly as old as I, I thought that her gift was awaking late. Talking with you others, though, I've learned that it can turn on as early as twelve or as late as fifteen. Early or late seems to make no difference to how strong the gift is.

"Haven't you tried viewing the memory-crystals?" I asked Lona.

She shook her head. "I wanted to learn to control the gift first. I was afraid of shorting them out, as I shorted out the entertainment center at my aunt's house."

I laughed. "Been there, done that, except that I erased hard-drives. The memory-crystals will stabilize your gift."

"Wonderful! Would you like to come home and view them with me?"

"I'd love to, but I'm on a deadline. I must deliver this box to Dr. Ventnor before he leaves to teach tomorrow morning."

Lona gave me a hopeful look. "Could I run to Columbus with you? You and I could talk on the way."

I gave her a look of disbelief. "Can you get away on the spur of the moment?"

She shrugged. "After blowing out the entertainment center, I'd best stay away from home tonight. Besides, Mom is tied up with her new boyfriend. She won't even notice that I'm gone. I can call on my cell phone in the morning to say that I spent the night with a friend."

_I wonder whether the Colonel knows how lax security is in these parts,_ I thought. "Come on, then."

Lona and I set off east at an easy pace, maybe two hundred miles an hour -- a pace that let us hear each other's words over the wind in our face. "I gather that you've kept up your Tan speech," I said to Lona. "Can you still read the old books?"

She could. I learned of her life in what seemed to me one of the hippie communes of which I'd read, she learned of my regimented life under the Colonel's thumb, and I told her what I knew of Dala's life. Lona and I lamented not having found each other before. As Urbana and Paducah are just over two hundred miles apart, and both of us were fond of night running, we might often have passed each other unseen.

As dawn was rising, I knocked on Dr. Ventnor's back door. When he opened it, he took the box from me and said, "About time, Belle. What kept you?"

I pointed with my chin over my left shoulder. "I met a long-lost relative on the road."

Dr. Ventnor winced, taking in Lona, but forced out a grin. "Ah, well. Who found whom?"

Lona grinned back. "I found Mira. Two down, five to go."

Dr. Ventnor sighed. "Told Lonnie of Delia, did you, Belle? Well, come in, ladies. I was making breakfast for two, but I think that there's enough for three."

A hand goes up. "What became of the box?" Dala asks me.

"Dr. Ventnor locked it into a safe without offering to show it to Lona and me."

Fierce Kuma gives Dala a haughty look. "Un and I have seen what was in the box, but it'll be awhile before Mira gets around to talking of its mysterious contents, as she might say."

Par-On looks at Lona. "Could you tell us something of your life before you met Mira?"

"When my ship landed, I was taken in by Donald Stormgren and his then wife Brenda. They lived on a farm near Battle Creek, Michigan, and raised Halloween pumpkins and Christmas trees. The farm went bust after a few years, and Don and Brenda split up. Don went off to California, where he worked in a vineyard in Napa Valley, and Brenda took me to live with her sister in Urbana. Things were free and easy there, as Mira has let on."

Par frowns. "Mira mentioned your mother's boyfriend. Did she let him in on your secret?"

"She let none of her boyfriends in on it. She was a good mother in her own way: she kept me fed and clothed, helped me keep my secret, sent me to school, and took me to see Dr. Ventnor."

Dour, brooding Un-Thor raises a brow. "What did she teach you to do with your gifts?"

"Nothing, sad to say. What she taught me was to weave dreamcatchers, cast the Tarot and horoscopes, and raise organic vegetables. I doubt that any of those skills is useful to the Work."

Par smiles. "We'll always need vegetables, and you've no doubt learned much from Mira in the four years while you've known her."

~~~

Soon, Lona came to visit me, and the Colonel invited her to dine with the family. She seemed astonished at how neat and well run all was, but also happy to be where all worked. Mom took to her at once; the Colonel was his most courtly and charming around her.

I, in turn, visited Lona's home, but never got used to the chaos in which Brenda, her boyfriend, her sister, and a host of hangers-on lived. As a Desert-child and the Colonel's daughter, I required discipline.

Inspired by Lona's outgoingness, I did develop a streak of daring. "Now that Dala and Lona have both been here," I said to the Colonel one night, "wouldn't it be nice for all eight of us Tani to get together?"

The Colonel gave me a sad-looking smile. "I understand what you want, Belle, but it can't happen. Delia needed your example to teach her self-confidence, and I'm happy for your meeting Lonnie by chance, but I can't bring the rest of you Tani together just yet. I'm bound by Sor-On's requirement that you children be reared apart so that you can stay safe, learn to function as members of human society, and develop independent judgment."

I sighed at the Colonel's quoting me the party line. I brightened, though, as he went on to say, "Still, I see no reason why you, Delia, and Lonnie can't all get together here."

Phone calls, text messages, and e mails went back and forth. Lona would run to Paducah, and Dala would be flown there, to spend a whole weekend with me. I marveled at Dala's getting to fly. The Colonel had told me that I could never travel outside the country or be a passenger on a commercial flight lest I show up on Homeland Security's computers. Yes, I did wonder why I was a secret from Homeland Security, and I did ask the Colonel that question. You can just guess how he answered it.

I marveled in a different way when I learned that Dala, by the Colonel's arrangement, would fly on a private jet \-- a neat, if costly, way to avoid airport security. Still, I never heard the Colonel moan over money.

While he drove off to pick Dala up at a private airfield, I awaited Lona's coming. After a while, I glimpsed a blur of motion zigzagging from cover to cover. I smiled. When Lona made it to the front porch, I said, "You'd have got here just as soon if you'd jogged in a straight line."

Lona grinned. "I'm a Tana. I can never do anything simply."

After a while the Colonel drove up with Dala. Soon, three Tan girls were seated with him and Mom around the kitchen table.

Emily, Kendra, and Millie were there, too. I'd told them that two of my cousins from Afghanistan were coming to see me, and my three friends just had to see them.

"As Girl Scouts," Kendra had said to me, "we're supposed to be 'friendly and helpful, considerate and caring.'"

"I bet that Delia and Lonnie will have wonderful stories to tell us," Emily had said.

"Besides," Millie had said, "maybe they can help us earn the Global Awareness badge."

_More like the First Contact badge,_ I'd thought, but kept my thought to myself.

The six of us girls could say nothing to each other over dinner. Talk at table consisted, as always, of the Colonel's asking everyone else questions on her life, and of her answering them. In the Gordon household, the difference between a debriefing and dinner was that dinner came with food. It was Mom's food, though, which made the debriefing worth while.

After dinner, we six girls ran upstairs and, to hide our talk from any listening devices, played music as loudly as the Colonel would let us play it. Given how the Colonel always knew what was going on in my mind, I'd begun to suspect that he'd bugged my room.

In e mails, I'd given Dala and Lona the heads-up that Ul was Afghanistan, crystal-ships were helicopters, and there were no such persons as _Tan-i_ or _an-i._ I hoped that Dala and Lona wouldn't give away too much to my friends, who _were_ Honor Roll students.

Emily, Kendra, and Millie did ask a few questions on Afghanistan and a few more on Bennettsville, South Carolina, and Urbana, Illinois. Mostly, though, my three friends talked of boys, whom they'd begun to date in the past year or so.

I felt disgust when Millie began giving a play by play of a snogfest with a boy named Roger. Emily, who, to the best of my knowledge, hadn't yet kissed a boy, said in an arch tone, "Too bad you can't get a badge in Kissing, Mil. You could give lectures to the Cadettes."

Disgust became dismay when Millie, maybe to draw attention from herself, turned to Dala and Lona. "What of you two? Have you begun dating?"

Dala, as you might guess, clammed up and looked embarrassed. Lona said merely, "I have no time to date just now."

"Oh, I hope that you're not like Belle," Kendra burbled out. "She's so wrapped up in Scouting and church activities and trying to become valedictorian and get a National Merit Scholarship that she barely has time to breathe. Winning a scholarship and getting into a top school are good things, but not if you never have a life."

I bit my tongue. I was betrothed to Par-On, somewhere in the wide world. Having a relationship with an earth-boy, even if it were permissible or desirable, would be cheating. I could hardly tell my three friends, though, that I was betrothed to a space alien. If I'd tried to tell them that I was betrothed to an Afghan boy whom I hadn't seen in eight years, they'd just have chanted together, "Join the Twenty-First Century, Belle!"

To get my friends off of an uncomfortable subject, I suggested watching a DVD. They had to go home in the middle of the movie; but Dala, Lona, and I kept watching it till we fell asleep, three Tan girls innocently sharing a bed as we'd shared one on the Homeworld.

In the morning, after breakfast, we'd planned to view my memory-crystals in my room's privacy. Yes, even then, we knew that we Tani are unresponsive to the outside world while we're viewing them, but the Colonel and Mom were downstairs to keep watch over us, so I felt that it'd be safe for all three of us Tan girls to hold a crystal at the same time so that we could view it together.

While I was getting out the seven crystals that I had, Dala murmured, "Your friends are nice, Mira, but they're really obsessed with boys. Your friends do raise a big question, though. Where are the boys who came with us? I've often asked Daddy and Dr. Ventnor that question, but neither of them will answer it for me."

"I know what you mean, Dala," Lona said. "About Dr. Ventnor, that is. Brenda knows nothing but what he tells her."

Having met her, I could believe what Lona was saying of her. "How did you end up with Brenda, anyway?"

Lona shrugged. "I gather that Dr. Ventnor helped her and Don through crises in their lives and introduced them to each other, but the story changes each time that I hear it from Brenda, and Dr. Ventnor just says, 'Patient confidentiality.' I guess that Don and Brenda took me in because Dr. Ventnor asked them to take me."

"Your daddy knows where the boys are, doesn't he, Mira?" Dala said.

"Knows, yes; tells me, no."

Lona stroked her chin. "We can make a guess about where they are. The three of us got sent to small towns -- Battle Creek, Paducah, Bennettsville. I bet that the boys got sent to small towns, too."

Dala sighed. "America has lots of those."

Lona's eyes got big. "I've got it! I can't believe that I didn't think of it sooner. The three of us can stake out Dr. Ventnor's office. All of the others will come there in the end."

I was about to make objections when Dala made them for me. "How can we stake out his office if we don't know when the others will be there? Maybe, you can spend days away from home whenever you want to, but the Colonel and Daddy keep close tabs on Mira and me. Besides, I bet that Dr. Ventnor has thought of our staking out his office and is just waiting for us to try it."

Lona looked at me, and I nodded. Seeing her look of dejection, I decided to let out a secret. "I might have a lead on one boy," I said slowly. I told Dala and Lona of the strange crime-fighting events in Topeka and Kansas City.

Lona frowned at me. "Why haven't you checked them out?"

"Haven't had time. Maybe next summer."

In time, both Lona and I would scour northern Missouri and eastern Kansas for the crime-fighter. It'd take a better hunter than either of us, though, to find you, Un-Thor.

But to our tale. Dala murmured, "A fourth girl came, too, didn't she? I can't recall her name."

Lona nodded. "Me neither. She showed up at the last minute and married a boy who came at the last minute, too."

"Her name was Kuma," I said, "and his was Un-Thor."

Lona frowned at me again. "Kuma? I thought that she was an _an-a,_ like the three of us."

I shrugged. "Her name means 'companion,' but she was of Crystal-Shaper ancestry. Don't ask me to explain things."

"Maybe the crystals will help us understand," Dala said.

Compulsively, the three of us viewed crystals, one after another.

The first crystal was the one of the dance under Orion.

"I recall that dance," Lona said with a sigh. "It fell whenever Orion was high in the night sky. It seemed to me, though, that that dance fell every couple of weeks. How could Orion be high so often?"

_"Thil-i An Om_ were high once every time that Nas-Ul went around Lus Im," I said. "Nas-Ul had to be really close to that star for the Homeworld to be warm enough for life, so years were really short there."

Dala sighed. "I bet that you got your Girl Scout badge in Astronomy."

I felt warm inside. "I did get it, thank you."

_The second crystal showed Tani grooming, feeding, and riding the greyhound-like_ lex-i.

"Till now I'd forgotten what it was like to groom _lex-i,"_ Lona said. "They looked fearsome, but were gentle."

I nodded. "Sor-On's _lex,_ Sandstorm, used to lick me when I groomed him. He also didn't mind letting little girls curl up by him and go to sleep. He kept us warm on cold Desert nights. You and I slept by him a few times, Dala. Do you remember him?"

"I wish that I did. Why did the Tan keep _lex-i?"_

"In the days before crystal-ships, the _lex-i_ carried messages and urgently needed supplies from settlement to settlement." _If only we'd kept to_ lex-i, _we might be riding them still._

_The third crystal showed_ Kan Tan _Sor-On sitting on his throne and listening to advisors._

"What was Sor-On?" Dala says. "A king or a president?"

"I'd call him an emperor," Lona said, "since he ruled a world."

I shook my head. _That world's population was less than Louisville's._ "The word 'emperor' implies a ruler who rules by conquest. Sor-On couldn't be an emperor, as he never conquered anything."

As Dala and Lona gave me looks telling me that I'd been pedantic, I smiled wryly at them. "Sorry. I'm taking Latin, and, as the Colonel's daughter, I must know everything Roman. Sor-On was a king, as his title was hereditary, but he never acted on his own. He always consulted the other _an-i,_ the heads of families, and the masters of guilds."

"Will Par-On be king of the Tani on the earth?" Dala said.

"If we ever find him," I murmured.

The fourth crystal showed schoolchildren, Lona and I among them, learning to read.

"Did you notice that tall, serious-looking boy standing by the teacher, Dala?" I said. "That was your _ti-thar,_ your husband-to-be, Van-Dor."

Dala looked wistful. "Do you think that he'll like me?"

"No one couldn't like you, Dala," Lona said.

The fifth crystal, my favorite, showed an ensemble of bone-flutists, harpists, and drummers playing what sounded to me like a concerto.

"That was lovely," Dala said. "I've got a crystal showing a concert, too, but the music on it is all different from what's on your crystal, Mira _._ "

"I've got a crystal of Queen Luna singing to a harpist's accompaniment," Lona said. "I've also got a songbook with what I think is musical notation for both voice and harp."

"I've got a book with illustrations for making musical instruments," Dala said. "I can't play or sing, though. Does either of you two have musical talent?"

"I tried to learn the recorder once," Lona said, "but didn't get far."

"I sing along in church," I said, "but Kendra and Millie tell me that I sound like a wasp caught in a windowpane. Still, maybe one of my children will be a musical genius who'll learn to play the old music again."

The sixth crystal showed Par-On's and my betrothal.

"What happened when babies betrothed to each other grew up?" Dala said. "Did they have to go through a wedding ceremony?"

I shook my head. "When a betrothed girl's parents felt that she and her _ti-thar_ had become mature enough to handle adult responsibilities, they just began living together."

Dala frowned. "What they did may've worked on the Homeworld, but, here, won't we have to go through a wedding ceremony?"

Lona and I looked at each other and shrugged. "Let's find the boys before we cross the marriage bridge," I murmured.

The seventh crystal showed the three betrothals on the day before eight crystal-ships carried eight children to the earth.

After viewing the last crystal, Dala, Lona, and I hugged each other and cried awhile. Dala wiped her nose and said, "The Homeworld was peaceful. Despite the Desert, I always felt safe there, as I've never felt safe here. Whenever Daddy watches the news, there are wars and riots and murders and genocides. My older brother, Mommy and Daddy's birth-child, is going on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan. There were no wars on Ul, were there?"

Lona and I looked at each other. "None in the histories that I've read," I said. "Have you read of any, Lona?"

She shook her head. "I have read of a few crimes, but the criminals got sent into the Desert."

"Did they return from there?" Dala said, wide eyed.

"Not all of them. The ones who did return generally acted better than before."

Dala nodded. "I'm glad of our having come here, as bad as this world is, but I don't know what I'm doing here. What am I supposed to do with my life?"

Lona looked at me. "Mira can tell us. She seems to have life figured out. Winning a scholarship, going to a big school -- isn't that what Kendra said?"

"Those are my plans. Keep in mind, though, that in my junior year of college the Message will come."

I had to explain to Dala and Lona that, three days before the crystal-ships had left Ul the last time, Grandfather Dor-Sad had begun to broadcast a radio message to the earth. Who knew how it would affect the earth-humans to get a message from a dying world?

Lona stroked her chin. "I guess that, when the Message comes, we'll start the Work, whatever it is. What do you know of it, Mira?"

I told her and Dala what Sor-On had told me the night before he sent me to the earth. Lona shook her head. "What he said is beautiful, but vague. What did he mean by, 'Save the earth'?"

I sighed. "I've often asked myself that question. I've decided that he might not fully have known what he meant. I gather that he, Dor-Sad, and the other explorers had come here just a few times and met in secret with a small contact group. What they learned of the earth came largely from that group --"

"That being Dr. Ventnor, the Colonel, Captain le Mars, and the others who took in alien children?" Lona said.

"I don't see who else it could've been."

"Then they must know how we're supposed to save the earth!" Dala piped out. "I bet that the Colonel is training you how to, Mira."

"Training me, but not telling me."

Lona pursed her lips. "I wonder for whom we're really working?"

Dala looked puzzled. "For the government, don't you think? The Colonel and Daddy are both army officers, and Dr. Ventnor --"

"I don't think so," Lona said. "The Colonel and Captain le Mars are both retired, and none of the three of us has ever met a potential higher-up. Our caretakers do all in their power to keep us away from doctors, the police, and any other government officials. I think that there's a hidden agenda around us."

"What kind of agenda?" Dala said.

The three of us talked of the question till lunch, and after lunch till supper, but came up with only conjectures.

After supper, we talked of our daily lives, and watched more DVD's. In the morning, we went to church with the Colonel and Mom; then Dala and Lona left for home, and I returned to preparing for a future in which I'd never live.

In the light-crystals' glow, dour, brooding Un-Thor shakes his head at me. "Didn't you ask the Colonel of the secret agenda?"

"Not in so many words. He'd never have answered a question on something like that. After Dala and Lona left, as soon as I found the Colonel alone, I did ask him, 'Sir, what does what I'm doing have to do with Sor-On's command to save the earth?'

"The Colonel didn't even look up from his newsmagazine. 'You're destroying sensitive information that in wrong hands could imperil later, more aggressive phases of your operation.'

"Military-speak at its best! 'I don't understand, sir.'

"He did look up then, giving me a level gaze. 'A time will come for you Tani when Dr. Ventnor and your adoptive parents will no longer guide you. You'll then have to determine for yourselves how to implement Sor-On's command. Till then, you need to learn obedience and discipline, along with basic skills and knowledge of the earth.'

"I held in most of a sigh. 'When will that time be?'

"The Colonel looked sad. What he said next astonished me. 'Don't rush that time, Belle. I don't know what you'll go through once you start the Work, but your life will never again be as simple as it is now. Don't waste this time. You have a chance for happiness that may never come again. Spend it with your friends.'"

~~~

If only I could've spent it with them! With the sudden senselessness of sorrows on the earth, one of my friends was lost to me. As a boy was driving Emily home from a date one night, a drunk driver, running a red light, ran into the passenger's side of the boy's car and killed her at once.

I've never been brave in the face of bad news. As I'd cried out "Why?" as I was watching the Homeworld break up, so I cried out "Why?" when I learned of Emily's death. No one gave me a reason either time.

Mom's arms embraced me, then I was crying in a tangle of arms with Kendra and Millie, then I was looking at Emily's body in a box, then I was listening to others say what she'd meant to them, then I was stammering out what she'd meant to me, and then I was leaving her body behind in the box and listening for a voice that I'd never hear again.

Through many days to come, I sleepwalked. I did my schoolwork, took part in Girl Scout meetings, and went to church, but felt disconnected from all of those activities. I hung with Kendra and Millie, but we found little to say or do.

I went on missions for the Colonel. Cut off from my feelings, I accomplished the missions perfectly. Through the fog in which I moved, I thought to myself, _Does being dead inside make me the perfect soldier?_

I was saving the earth, though I myself was lost.

One night, as I was coming home from breaking into a warehouse and frying electronic devices about which I neither knew nor cared, I saw ahead of me a sprawling structure of chrome and glass standing under sodium lamps amid a parking lot. The structure proclaimed itself southern Illinois's biggest liquor outlet.

Stopping before it, I gazed through a picture window at rows and rows of beer, wine, and spirits. _Did a place like this,_ I thought, _sell the drunk the bottle that killed Emily?_

The floodgates of my emotions opened, freeing rage. On it was borne my crystal-shaping gift, wilder and more powerful than I'd felt it. Above me, the sodium lamps burst and went out. In front of me, the picture window shattered and blew in. In the store, the bottles of beer, wine, and spirits shattered, too. A flame rose in a pool of liquor and at once engulfed the store's interior.

Panicked, I ran. After about a mile, I leapt onto a grocery store's roof and shivered awhile. When I heard sirens start to wail in the distance, I looked over the roof's parapet. The fire engines might as well have stayed home. Before the first engine came, the store's roof had fallen in in a shower of sparks.

When I got home, I set my clock-radio to alarm while I could catch the Colonel at work in the barn before breakfast. When he saw me enter the barn, he raised a brow. He didn't need say to me, _The news must be bad if you're up early._

"Colonel, I accomplished the mission, but there was a complication afterwards."

When he nodded, I told him of my stopping before the liquor store, of my feeling rage over Emily's death, and of my releasing crystal-shaping gift and torching the place. "I'm sorry, sir. I acted with no plan --

To my astonishment, the Colonel took my left hand between his hands. "Belle, you wouldn't be human" -- he gave me a wry smile -- "if you didn't feel anger over your friend's needless death. You didn't know that your anger could affect your gift as it did. What you must do now is learn to control your anger. Given how it affects your gift, your anger can destroy -- or save. Make sure of your being the one who decides what it does."

The Colonel and I went in to breakfast. Buoyed by the Colonel's understanding and acceptance of me, I resolved to do henceforth only what he told me to.

My resolution, I broke that very night. As, pondering life without Emily, I sat on a rise above I-24, I saw a car racing east at what had to be a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

Catching up with the car and running beside it, I knocked hard on its driver's-side window. As the driver turned to me eyes that were mad moons of fright, I ripped off my mask and screamed at him, "Slow down! You'll kill someone."

Whether he tried to kill me or just lost control of his car, he hit me with its driver's side and flung me onto the median. More startled than hurt, I lay listening to his brakes squeal and watching him weave from lane to lane till he stopped on the shoulder about a mile down the road. He got out and stared back along the road awhile, and then got back into his car and drove on at a rate that I believed would not exceed the speed limit again that night.

I rose and trotted west towards home. On the way there, I pondered telling the Colonel what I'd done. After a time, though, I thought, _The driver will never tell anyone what happened. Even if he does tell, who'll believe him?_

~~~

If the Colonel did hear of my chasing down the car, he said nothing to me of the incident. Life went on after Emily's death. Kendra and Millie began to drift apart from me, though, as they spent ever more time on boys -- ever less on Scouting, church, and study dates.

Sadly, Major, no pup when I'd met him eleven years before, failed to awake one morning. His family buried him under an apple tree at the rear of the Gordon farm. Onto a stone that I buried with him, I painted in Tan script the words, _"Wa-su-es kum mir lu-kal lar-in-i es,"_ 'You were a faithful companion to all of us who loved you."

By nights, I slipped out to the tree and sat under it as I tried to peer into the future and make sense of what I was supposed to do. One night, as I was walking towards the tree, I glimpsed a glowing blur of motion swiftly heading for me. Something as diamond-hard as I am struck me and bowled me over.

At once, I was grappling with that something on the ground. A fist, striking my face, bent it in till it began to flow back into shape.

Hurt, but angry, I writhed, clawed, and rolled till I got into position to thrust both arms up and out to break my assailant's hold on me. I got in a short right cross to the jaw that stilled my assailant. Flinging my assailant into the air, I kicked up into an armored gut.

For an instant, I saw my assailant starfished against the sky before he or she (sorry, I'd had no time for a gender check!) landed in a heap some yards off. Running to my assailant, I stripped off his or her ski mask and looked into a face that might have been my own.

The Tan girl, pale about the lips, was gasping for breath in a way that alarmed me. Laying my hand atop her solar plexus, I let crystal-shaping gift flow into her. After a moment, her wheezing eased, and she spoke to me.

"What did you just do?"

"I healed you with crystal-shaping gift. Kuma, I presume?"

"How do you know who I am?"

"Four of us Tan girls came to the earth. I've met Dala and Lona, and I know that I'm Mira, so only Kuma is left."

"Wow. You must've done well on your ACT's."

I felt a warm glow inside. "I did do well on them, thank you."

"Where'd you learn to fight so well?"

"The Colonel taught me from his special-forces manual."

"You must've been an A student."

I was liking Kuma better all the time. Just then, she looked wide eyed over my shoulder. Turning to see what had caught her gaze, I noticed first a gleam of metal. This was part of a nine-millimeter automatic in the Colonel's hand.

"I didn't hear you come up," I said to him softly.

"You weren't supposed to, Belle." His eyes flicked to the girl over whom I was kneeling. "You're Camille, I take it."

I hadn't got around to asking her earth-name. The Colonel, as usual, was ahead of me.

He invited Kuma/Camille indoors. Mom got up and served everyone milk and pie. As the four of us ate this, I learned that Kuma was Camille Delacroix of Dothan, Alabama. All right, the Colonel had already known her earth-identity, but I hadn't!

"You ran a long way to be here tonight, Camille," Mom said softly.

"I didn't mind running a little ways to meet one of my own kind." Kuma had a Deep South accent to go with her way of speaking.

"How did you find me?" I asked her.

"From the Internet! I Googled the set of search terms _Afghanistan, orphan, albinism, scleroderma,_ and _tetany,_ and up popped your Web site. Your picture on it was a dead giveaway. I figured that the poems and stories of Afghanistan and Atlantis stood for what happened to the world where you and I were born."

I glanced uneasily at the Colonel. He gave me a thin smile. He'd hinted strongly to me of my Web site's being a security risk, but hadn't quite told me to take it down. Taking it down now would be closing the barn door after the horse had fled.

"Why did you attack my daughter?" Mom asked Kuma.

"I was following tradition among superheroes. When two of them meet, they have a fight to find out about each other. After the fight, they become friends."

_Note to self,_ I thought. _My children will never read superhero comics._

Mom sniffed. "A Whitman Sampler says friendship better than a fight says it."

"I'll remember that, Mrs. Gordon. I don't think that Belle minded the fight, though. She beat the snot out of me."

Like became love just then. Still, loving Kuma would never be easy.

She spent the night with me. When I asked her of her crystal-shaping gift, she told me that Dr. Ventnor had told her that I'd learned to control it with the memory-crystals. As soon as she'd begun to see halos, she viewed her whole set of crystals. She managed not to blow out a single light-bulb, much less a hard drive.

"Lucky you," I murmured. Still, I was glad of my experience's having saved younger Tani some of my problems.

When I asked her what was on her crystals, she could give me only vague impressions of growing plants, telling tales to children, and pouring out water to the rising sun. I frowned. Were her crystals blurred, or were her perceptions of them?

I had an idea. _"Ru nal-es nal Tan, mi la?"_ I said to her.

Her eyes got big. "You're speaking the speech in the crystals, aren't you?"

I nodded. I'd asked her, "You don't speak Tan speech, do you?" Her response to my question was as good as answering it "No." Still, it made sense to me that she didn't. She was barely older than Par-On, who'd been three years old, three years younger than I, when Ul ended. It was unlikely that she recalled any of her childhood tongue; she certainly could never have learned to read.

I smiled at her. "I can teach you to speak our people's language, and to read the old books."

She sighed. "Another class." She gave me a wry smile. "I'm not an A student like you, Belle. Still, you won't be grading me, will you?"

She and I lay awake a while longer as she told me of her life on a small farm in southeast Alabama. Her adoptive parents gave her much freedom. She often camped out in the woods at night, or spent the night at a friend's house and called her parents in the morning. "You're just farther away than most of my friends are," Kuma said. "My parents won't mind that I've come here."

I doubted her statement. In the morning, though, at breakfast, she did call her parents, and they let her spend the day with me. Both the Colonel and Mom looked outraged at Kuma's lack of supervision, but smiled sweetly at her.

After breakfast, I did teach her a few words of Tan speech and at least the sign for "sand." Mostly, though, she wanted to learn things from the Colonel's special-forces manual. It felt good for me to play the Colonel. I taught Kuma only skills to protect her from harm. The girl who'd greeted me by knocking me down and punching me in the face needed no lessons in destruction.

Ironically, it wasn't Kuma who'd bring ruin...

I'm getting ahead of my story again. About mid-afternoon, I talked her into viewing my set of memory-crystals with me. It fascinated her to see her betrothal ceremony, of which she'd kept no memory, and to learn that somewhere she had a husband-to-be named Un-Thor.

"Do you know where he is?"

I shook my head. "I think that one of the boys lives somewhere in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, or Iowa. Lona and I have looked there for him, but we haven't found him."

"Why there?"

I told her of the outrageous crime-fighting events in those states. Kuma, to my dismay, looked delighted. "I hope that it is Un-Thor who lives there. He sounds as if he knows what to do with his gifts."

I gave her the Colonel's best frown. "We're supposed to use our gifts only as Dr. Ventnor and our parents tell us to. Using them recklessly endangers us all."

"Of course, Mira!" Kuma said in such a bright tone and with such a bright smile that I doubted her wholly.

After supper, she ran off into the night, I hoped home. I wished to run with her...

"That girl," Mom said in her best Southern matriarch's voice, "is running wild. It's a shame that her parents give her no discipline."

The Colonel nodded. "Still, our Belle will be a good influence on her."

~~~

Ever an optimist, the Colonel. Kuma often showed up in the dark and spent a night or a weekend with me. I was glad of her company, for Kendra and Millie, though in no way growing unfriendly to me, were drifting apart from me. Boys...

Over time, Kuma learned from me to read and speak _nal Tan,_ to use the correct name of Tan speech. Mostly, though, she wanted to watch superhero movies and practice special-forces skills. She wormed out of me tales of my early free-lance missions and of my current assignments from the Colonel.

Going to him, she begged him for assignments of her own. Gently but firmly, he told her, "Not yet." From a look in her eyes I gathered that she took "Not yet" as "As soon as possible."

As a consolation prize for her not getting to go on missions with me, I took her to meet Lona. Kuma liked the Bohemian air of Lona's house. I guessed that it was much like Kuma's. She was bright and friendly towards Lona, but, from Lona, I sensed towards Kuma a coolness that I didn't understand.

I also gave Kuma Dala's address. Soon, I was getting from Bennettsville calls and e mails complaining of the strange child disrupting Dala's life. Both Lona and Dala began in their e mails to me to refer to the "Kuma action-figure."

Telling the Colonel and Mom of the problems among my fellow Tani, I sought permission to have all three in for a sleepover. The Colonel smiled at me. "A summit conference, do you say?"

This time, even Dala ran to my house. My three visitors came out of the dark just before breakfast, napped afterwards, and joined me in my room.

The four of us watched a superhero movie, which sparked a debate over how we Tani should use our gifts. Kuma said, "We need to help the earth-humans --"

"We needn't help them by hitting them!" Dala cried out. Her words' intensity stunned me. Clearly, Kuma had rubbed her the wrong way. "We can help them by cleaning up their world," Dala went on to say. "It's our world, too, now, you know."

"Not all of us can be the Warrior Twins like you and Mira," Lona said to Kuma. I felt shocked. I'd never thought of myself as a warrior, but, somehow, I'd gotten tagged as one. "We should use our gifts to rescue earth-humans from disasters, and to build things," Lona went on to say.

"The boy who does all of the crime-fighting would disagree with you," Kuma called back.

Her statement at least had the virtue of turning a fight over gifts into a discussion of boys. The four of us girls guessed that, as all of us lived east of the Mississippi, all of the boys lived west of it. Clearly, three of the boys were living quietly, but one was doing daring deeds and avoiding detection.

"A regular Scarlet Pimpernel," Lona murmured in a sour tone.

"I hope that he's Un-Thor," Kuma said. "If I must have a husband, a warrior-husband is what I want."

Dala rolled her eyes. "We need to find him before he gets us all into trouble."

"Lona and I have tried to find him," I said stiffly. "The West is big."

"I'll gladly join the search," Kuma said brightly.

"I can't run away from home all of the time as you other girls do," Dala said, "but I can do Web searches and let the rest of you know their results."

At least, the four of us had found common ground on searching for the wild boy, as we at first called the crime-fighter. Alone or in pairs, Lona, Kuma, and I scoured his haunts for him, but never found him.

One night, though, while Kuma and I were watching a movie with Lona at her house, Dala called. "I just read on line news of a wild-boy event outside Bettendorf, Iowa. Witnesses at a fancy nightclub reported seeing a masked figure dressed in black pick up a Porsche and fling it a hundred yards through the air. The car caught on fire as it flew."

Lona, Kuma, and I looked at each other. "A flying, burning car sounds like our boy's work," I said.

The three of us ran through the dark and scoured the Quad Cities till dawn. We saw no sign of the wild boy, though we did break up a mugging.

As we ran back to Lona's house, she muttered, "He could've been watching us from the rooftops all along, and we'd never have seen him."

Kuma smiled. "I'll find him yet, just you wait and see!"

Par-On holds up a hand and turns to Un-Thor. "Just why did you throw a car and set it on fire?"

Dour, brooding Un-Thor shrugs. "The car belonged to a drug-dealer who'd done some killings. Destroying it put fear into him."

"Such a public display of your Tan gifts, with no preconceived plan, put yourself and the rest of us Tani at risk."

"Mira said so, too, when I met her. I understand now what you and she are saying. Luckily for me, the police blew off eyewitnesses and put down the car's destruction to a firebomb." Un chuckles. "The police thought that the eyewitnesses had hallucinated when they said that a boy who just happened to be standing behind the car when it blew up had actually thrown it."

Dala sniffs. "The Internet believed the testimony. There must be a thousand Web pages on your exploit."

Un gives her a wry smile. "According to the Internet, everyone and his dog is a space alien, or a member of some global conspiracy. The Internet has given us Tani perfect cover for who we are and what we do. Still, you, Mira, and Par are right in saying that I got cocky. Sorry, Mira hadn't taught me tradecraft yet."

~~~

One evening, after supper, the Colonel called me into his office. An office visit to him was always bad news.

"Dr. Ventnor has told me," the Colonel said, "that Camille's parents worry about her. Her grades, poor to start with, are falling; and she's spending ever more time away from home."

I nodded. Given how much time Kuma was spending with me, and her disdain for learning anything but what interested her, the Colonel's words made sense to me.

"Also, Belle, there's been a number of disturbing events in the southeastern states -- events that I fear are Camille's works."

"Why do you say so, Colonel?"

"They're works that only one of you Tani could do. Delia, the only Tan besides Camille who lives in the area, wouldn't soil her hands with such works. You, who would, have been doing no extracurriculars but your search for the boys."

I hadn't told the Colonel of that search, but, by now, I was used to his knowing what no one had told him. "Could you tell me of the works, sir?"

"Item one: as a drug-dealer's plane is taking off at night from a private airfield, a bola made of a pair of boulders tied together by a liana flies out of the dark, tangles the plane's prop, and makes the plane ditch across a highway."

I whistled. "Clever!"

The Colonel snorted. "But not wise."

I'll spare you his speech on endangering the Tani. You should be able to give that speech yourself by now.

Speech over, I said, "I still don't see why you're pinning the bola on Kuma. It sounds like the M. O. of whichever of the boys has been pulling the jobs in Jesse James Country. Maybe, he's moved his sphere of operations."

The Colonel gave me his thin smile. "Don't insult my intelligence, Belle."

"You know who the boy in question is, don't you, sir? Is he working for you now?"

"Nice try, Belle. Item two: hard drives and magnetic tapes belonging to an alleged money-launderer are mysteriously wiped."

"Power surge, sir?"

"Some would call the Tan crystal-shaping gift a power surge. Item three: a truck, waiting at a red light at a busy intersection, is mysteriously ripped open. Contraband auto parts from a chop shop spray across five lanes of pavement. The truck is ripped open from the inside, and witnesses report a black streak erupting from the rip."

"How did she rip open a truck?" I muttered.

The Colonel's thin smile widened. "I suspect that you could rip open a truck with your bare hands. Is Camille your inferior in physical strength?"

I rubbed my jaw. "Not noticeably, sir."

"Item four: ..."

The items went on quite a while. I won't give Kuma any more of a swelled head than she has by repeating them all. When the Colonel had run out of items, he said to me, "Why do you think that Camille does these things?"

"Because she's an 'action-figure,' as Delia and Lonnie call her. Because she's grown up reading superhero comics and watching superhero cartoons and movies, and she thinks that fighting crime is what someone with her gifts should do. Because she believes that her husband-to-be, Un-Thor, is behind the heroic deeds, as she sees them, in Jesse James Country, and she wants to impress Un with deeds of her own when she meets him."

The Colonel sighed. "Likely, you're right, Belle. I want you to use whatever influence you have with Camille to get her to give up these unauthorized activities."

I sat straight backed with my hands in my lap. "May I speak freely, sir?"

The Colonel sucked his teeth. "Yes."

"Sir, if you want her to give up her unauthorized activities, you need to replace them with authorized ones. Grant her request for you to train her in the same techniques that you taught me. Let her come along on some of my missions at first; then give her missions of her own."

"You may be right, Belle. Let me sleep on your request. I'll give you my answer to it in the morning."

In the morning, he granted it. Before, though, he could start Kuma's training, there happened a terrible event that would make all of his plans seem empty.

I pause. "Before I go on, Kuma should have a chance to speak."

Par-On looks at her. "Where did you get the idea for the bola?"

She shrugs, looking pleased with herself. "I'd seen it in cartoons. It looked like something that'd work in real life."

Dala sniffed. "Were you really trying to impress Un?"

Kuma is doing her usual bad job of acting coy. "It never hurts to have a resumé, as Mira says."

_Wise, artistic Sil-Tan looks at dour, brooding Un-Thor._ "Did _Kuma impress you?"_

"Taking down a plane, ripping open a truck? Yeah, she's what you want at your side in our line of business."

_Lona and Dala exchange a look, but say nothing. They'll never like our line of business, I suspect, but they're coming to be resigned to it. Both of them are smart, powerful, and coachable._ They'll do well in the Work, _I think._

"What are your parents like, Kuma?" Par asks her. "You've never said much of them."

"There isn't much to say. They love me in their own way, but they've never given me much in the way of boundaries or rules. They work enough to earn themselves and me food, clothing, and shelter, but spend the rest of the time in front of the TV. I'm surprised by their actually telling Dr. Ventnor that they worried about me."

Solid, trustworthy Van-Dor shakes his head. "I wonder why persons like them took in a Tan child."

Kuma shrugs. "They'd been patients of Dr. Ventnor's. What he asked them to do, they did. They were loyal to him."

Lona nods. "All of our parents believed in Dr. Ventnor and the Colonel. They --"

Par holds up a hand. "As it was Mira who learned why the parents were loyal to Dr. Ventnor and the Colonel, and believed in them, she should tell the story. It's coming up soon, isn't it?"

I nod. Before I reach it, though, I must tell of something that was almost as devastating to me as the Homeworld's death had been.

~~~

When I'd first come to the earth, I'd been a frightened, withdrawn child. Part of my growth in courage and confidence had come from the Colonel's training me for the Work. Much of my growth, though, had come from Mom, a skilled psychologist, though she had no formal training as one.

She'd listened to me talk of my troubles, gotten me to talk of my feelings, and given me gentle advice that had led me through the many trials of adjusting to a strange culture in which unfamiliar, to me as a Tana, concepts of sickness, suffering, and violence hovered on the edges of everyday life.

Although I'd seen a world die, I hadn't conceived of Mom's mortality. Caught up in learning to use my gifts and in doing activities to make me successful among earth-humans, I failed to see what was going on with her. Free from sickness and physical suffering myself, I didn't know what to make of visits to the doctor, bottles of pills, and Mom's growing ever grayer and frailer. Potentially deathless on this world that enhances my gifts, I didn't think of her death.

This came to me out of the blue. One morning, as my clock-radio went off, I heard a shout downstairs, a strangled cry of "No, Annabel!" and a fearful prolonged sound that I couldn't identify. There was no reason why I should be able to identify it, as I'd never heard it. It was the Colonel's crying.

I ran downstairs to find Mom sitting stiff backed in a chair while the Colonel, holding one of her hands, knelt at her feet. I knelt by him and took Mom's other hand. It was cold. Dully, I grasped that she'd been dead some time.

The Colonel murmured to me, "She said that she was feeling tired and was going to sit down a few minutes before she began breakfast. She'd done so before, and I didn't think that things were different this time, so I went out to the barn to take care of things. When I got back here, she..."

I nodded. Surely she'd get up in a minute and start breakfast, and all would go on as it normally did.

Recalling healing Dala's foot and Kuma's chest, I resolved to try to heal Mom. Continuing to hold her hand with one hand, I placed my other hand onto her forehead and sent my crystal-shaping gift through her body. I felt her organs, her bones, and her blood vessels, in which the lifeblood was already congealing. I felt the blockage that had stilled her heart, but couldn't restart it.

"You're trying to call her back, aren't you, Belle?" the Colonel said softly. "She's not a crystal that you can shape, or a Tan that you can heal."

"Please let me do this, Colonel," I murmured.

"All right. You stay with her, Belle. I need to make calls to ... set things in motion."

What those things were I recalled from Emily's death. I won't repeat them now. After I'd failed to revive Mom, they went on to the inevitable conclusion of the Colonel's and my being driven home from the place where we'd left Mom's shell, and our entering a house now too big for us.

To have something to do, I began to prepare the Colonel and me a meal from food that kindly neighbors had brought by. As I set the Colonel's meal before him, he looked up at me.

"Belle, I need to tell you something important. Someday -- maybe not far off -- I'll have to go through what just happened to your mother --"

"Don't say so, Colonel."

"Be realistic, Belle. When I do go through it, call Dr. Ventnor at once. Before you do anything else, call him, and do exactly what he tells you to do."

"Why, sir?"

"He'll tell you why when the time comes. Will you do what I ask?"

Wanting to know more, but accepting that I wouldn't learn it just then, I nodded. I'd learned obedience as a child on Ul; the Colonel had taught me obedience every day since I'd come from there. Obedience didn't stop just for death.

~~~

Life went on awhile in the Gordon household. The Colonel worked in the barn, found missions for me, trained Kuma, and sent her and me on combined missions.

When I wasn't sabotaging advanced technology, I was doing Girl Scout activities, going to church, and studying. Although the Colonel had assured me of his having enough money to put me through any school to which I earned admission, I hoped to win a National Merit Scholarship. College and a career seemed possible to me then.

Neighbors remarked on how well the Colonel and I were taking Mom's death. Neither he nor I were given to being outwardly emotional, but I suspect that neither of us knew peace inside. I think that he and I carried on partly because neither of us wanted the other to say, "Your mother/Mom would've wanted us to do this."

Over time, the Colonel grew more reflective. He spoke less of what I should do, or even of why I should do it; rather, he spoke of a big picture of which I glimpsed but pieces.

One night, one of the last nights that he'd share with me, he waxed philosophical, talking of constellations wheeling overhead. (As it was early summer, Orion wasn't among them.) Dala, Kuma, and Lona, who were with me, showed scant interest, though, in star lore. Kuma asked the Colonel the by now age-old question, "Where are the boys, sir?"

He gave her a warm smile. "Safe at home, I hope."

I sighed. "I hate to make a pest of myself, sir, but where _is_ home?"

He chuckled. "Belle, I'd worry about you if you stopped being a pest. I hope that you'd worry about me if I gave in to your persistence. As part of the Work, you girls will have to do many tasks harder than finding the boys. Think of it as a test, one that you'll surely pass."

Even in his philosophical phase, he hewed to the party line. I was frustrated. "Will the boys be able to play their parts in the Work?"

He nodded. "Each of you, boy or girl, is developing skills that may be useful to it. I've trained you, Belle, for combat operations, as these will regrettably be necessary. Camille has shown aptitude for these, too, as has the boy whom you've begun to call the Scourge of Jesse James Country.

"I can't predict what course the Work will take. It may -- and I hope that it does -- require for its completion skills other than combat skills. It'll be the _Kan Tan's_ task to weave the skills of all of you Tani together to complete the work successfully."

"By the _Kan Tan,_ you mean Par-On, I suppose," I said. "Will he be ready for the Work?"

"He's getting training appropriate to his task, and doing quite well at his training."

I think that all four of us girls knew that the Colonel would say no more of Par that night. Dala turned talk to another topic. "Sir, I keep hearing that the Work will start when the Message comes. What does the Message say, and what effect will it have on the world?"

"I don't know specifically what the Message will say," the Colonel said slowly. He was fudging, as I'd learn all too soon. "How much it says, and how long it lasts, depends on how much time Belle's grandfather had to keep the speaking-crystals working after you children were launched.

"How the Message will affect the world, too, is unpredictable. It'll affect each person who hears it according to his or her nature. Some persons the Message will fill with awe; some, with hope; some, with fear. I can predict only that it'll profoundly shake the world's society, and fill it with debate and conflict in which you children will have a window of opportunity to move."

"The night before _Kan Tan_ Sor-On sent me here," I said, "he told me to ensure that the Message gets heard. What did he mean, sir?"

The Colonel looked sad. "This world needs to hear a message from another world, a dying world. Do whatever it takes, short of getting caught, to ensure that the Message gets heard. Shout warnings from rooftops, flood public squares with fliers, fill mailboxes with spam -- you children have imaginations; use them! Just be sure to tell the world to have radio telescopes pointed at Wolf 1061 in the time frame when the Message will start."

I see on some of your faces blank looks that I guess have to do with the phrase "time frame." I know the exact earth-date on which the Message began on Ul, but astronomers don't know the precise distance between Ul-that-was and the earth. Thus, the best that we Tani can tell the astronomers is a range of dates within which they should listen to Wolf 1061. Astronomy, like the rest of life, is filled with uncertainty.

But to our tale. Lona said, "Sir, what must we do when the Message comes?"

"Strike from the shadows and communicate from the shadows as long as you need to."

Dala blinked with what I took as misgivings. "Don't you mean, 'till the Work is done,' sir?"

The Colonel looked solemn. "When will you be done remembering the Homeworld, perpetuating the Tan, and saving the earth?"

Dala and Lona exchanged looks of worry. Kuma looked determined. "Surely, sir, there must be a point at which we'll be able to declare victory."

The Colonel gave me his warm smile. "Belle, what would _you_ see as victory?"

I pondered a moment. "We'll have victory when the earth-humans become our willing partners in the Work."

Dala looked hopeful. "Do you mean that we Tani will be able to live among them openly as their friends?"

Lona sniffed. "We'd hardly want to rear children in endless wartime."

Dala wore a far look. "What kind of world would we and the earth-humans share? A simple world, like Ul before the great crystals?"

Kuma looked disgusted. "Can't we ever return to the stars?"

The Colonel sighed. "You girls are asking me questions that I can't answer. It'll be you Tani who shape the world to come, for better or for worse. I've taught you techniques that'll be useful in the Work, but what'll be most useful is learning to plan, execute, and evaluate, as you'll someday soon have to determine your future on your own.

"I do have two pieces of hope for you. The first is that what Dor-Sad discovered, the secret of shaping and using the great crystals, can be rediscovered. The second piece of hope is that the great crystals endanger the earth only if you shape and use them on its surface. If you and the earth-humans can someday set up facilities to manufacture the great crystals in deep space, the universe will be open to you all.

"Now, I've told you all that I can tell you. I'm glad to have been able to leave you with hope."

When he said "leave" that night, I thought that he meant only that we girls should get to bed. From the vantage of the present, though, I suspect that he meant "leave" permanently, as indeed he would soon do.

~~~

One morning, while I was making breakfast, I had a sense of something's being wrong in the house. When I went to the barn, the Colonel wasn't there. Thinking that he might just have stepped out a moment, I called him and searched the grounds around the barn; then I recalled what was wrong. In my sleep, I hadn't heard his footsteps go downstairs from his bedroom.

I found him lying in bed. As I sank to my knees and let out a long, wordless moan, I had an irrelevant thought: _A man like him shouldn't die in bed._

I recalled his telling me to call Dr. Ventnor before I did anything else, but I was unready to act on that order. Although the Colonel was cold, I thought that, maybe this time, I'd come soon enough to save a loved one. Maybe, my gift had grown since I'd tried to recall Mom.

I took the Colonel's left hand in my left and lay my right on his forehead. I sent my crystal-shaping gift into him --

\-- and stopped, too stunned for words. I'd healed Dala and Kuma, and I'd tried to revive Mom. I knew the feel both of Tan and of earth-human.

The Colonel had been neither.

Filled with grief mingled with bewilderment, I called Dr. Ventnor at his home. When I heard his voice, I said, "Dr. Ventnor, this is Belle. I'm calling with bad news. The Colonel died in his sleep sometime last night. He --"

Dr. Ventnor broke in with words that made a kind of sense to me under the circumstances. "Are you alone, Belle?"

"Yes, Doctor. I --"

He went on with words that made no sense to me. "Listen carefully, Belle. The combination to the Colonel's safe is right thirty-two, left ten, right twenty-seven." He repeated the combination. "In the safe's top compartment is a cell phone decorated with an American flag. Speed-dial one on it."

As I gaped, Dr. Ventnor hung up. Hating myself for irreverence, I began to giggle. _This is more like what the Colonel's death should be,_ I thought.

It was the work of a moment to go to the safe, open it, and press star one on the phone. Dr. Ventnor's voice answered. "Hello, Belle, I'm sorry for your --"

"This is a secure line, I take it."

"Yes, Belle. The Colonel's body will need special handling --"

"Because he isn't human, and we don't dare let him be autopsied?"

Long silence came from the phone's far end. "Did he tell you so before he died?"

"After." I told Dr. Ventnor what my crystal-shaping gift had shown me of the Colonel.

"I should've known that your gift would tell you his nature. Your knowing it simplifies things. You must delay the finding of the Colonel's body till I get there. Dress him for a walk in the woods, hide him there, and call your neighbors and ask them whether they've seen him. Take your secure phone with you while you're searching the woods. I'll call Camille and ask her to meet me secretly just outside Paducah. The two of us will call you when we're ready to deal with the Colonel. Have you understood me?"

"Dress, hide, call, search."

"Good. I'm sorry, Belle, for our having to do things oddly. Although you can't yet know why, I grieve for the Colonel as deeply as you grieve. Both of us must hold in our grief awhile, till we can safely deal with it. I'll call you back when Camille and I have reached Paducah."

Thus, I did the most ghoulish thing that I've done in my short life so far: I dressed my dead adoptive father for a walk in the woods and hid him where only a skilled woodsman could find him. I doubt that Miss Cindy would approve of how I used my Girl Scout training.

Afterwards, I called my neighbors and told them of my fear that the Colonel had wandered off. I felt ghoulish again as some of them assured me of his safe return, and hypocritical accepting sympathy and offers of help. The sympathy, though, wasn't misplaced, just misdirected.

Several, including Kendra and Millie, volunteered to help look for him. I sent my two old friends where they'd have no chance to find him. As Girl Scouts, they knew the woods well. I didn't want them to have a bad memory.

At one point, I had to go off to cry. Thinking of a private place where I hadn't been for years, I ran there.

The shelter that held my crystal-ship was overgrown with shrubs and lianas. The ship, though, gleamed in deep gloom as if time had not passed for it. It was somehow both larger and smaller than I'd recalled it was. Its transparent hull was flawless, but the crystals within still bore the webwork of cracks that had stilled their function.

Kneeling by the ship, I lay my head on my crossed arms atop its hull and wept. With my tears, my crystal-shaping gift must've flowed out of me, for I felt one of the crystals within the ship change as crystals changed when I made them into light-crystals and heat-crystals. A dry, quiet voice spoke in my head. _Orders?_

My heart pounded within me. What orders could I give a ship that'd never again fly?

Or would it? _Run an internal diagnostic of the extent of your damage and go to standby till further notice._

Understood.

I felt the ship hum softly as I backed away from it into daylight. So far the day was the second strangest through which I'd lived. It'd just get stranger.

Towards dark, Dr. Ventnor called me from a motel just outside Paducah. Kuma, he told me, was with him.

"You can arrange for the body to be found now, Belle. In view of what's going to happen, it'd be best for you not to find the body yourself. As the Colonel's death occurred under unknown circumstances, his body will likely be taken to a coroner's office. As soon as you learn which one, call me and let me know."

Feeling ghoulish again, I moved the Colonel's body and put it into the path of a hunter who'd boasted of his experience as a medical corpsman in the Army. As things turned out, I was cruel to him. He was less brave over the Colonel's death than he'd been over deaths of which he'd told.

Still, he set in motion what had to be. I was nowhere near the body when it was found, or when police officers brought me news of its being found. The officers were kind to me, as were my friends and neighbors who tried to console me. I felt like a hypocrite, receiving their condolences. The death was real; the circumstances around it, anything but.

As soon as I learned where the Colonel's body would be taken, I called Dr. Ventnor. He made me repeat what I'd told him; then he was silent a long moment.

"Listen, Belle, you can't help Camille and me keep the Colonel's and your secret. Stay at the house and have friends with you who can, if need be, testify to where you were. Camille and I are going to substitute a body for the Colonel's. Once his body is secure, I'll show up at your house, as I have a public role, as well as my private one, to play in this matter. After the public funeral, you and I can have a private service appropriate for who he was."

Like much that I was hearing, Dr. Ventnor's words made scant sense to me, but I trusted him and Kuma. Thus, I stayed at the house and received calls and visits of consolation, along with food. Kendra and Millie came to keep me company and were present when a long-faced policeman showed up.

"Miss Gordon, there's been an accident with your father's body. There was an explosion and fire at the coroner's. Your father's body was badly burned."

I'll omit stressful details of how the undertaker came by and told me that my father's service would have to be closed casket. An explosion and fire sounded like Kuma's work. I guessed that some John Doe had been substituted for the Colonel. Just then, my mind was working poorly.

As friends and neighbors were stressing me out with arrangements for a closed-casket funeral and for "what'll become of poor, little Belle," Dr. Ventnor showed up at my front door. As I led him into the common room, all eyes got big at him. Millie, I suspect, spoke for everyone else when she asked him, "Are you the Colonel's brother?"

I had to choke back both laughter and tears at recalling my having asked Dr. Ventnor the same question.

He gave her his best professional smile. "No, I'm the specialist to whom he and Mrs. Gordon took Belle. Her parents arranged for me to become her legal guardian if they died. I'm here to ensure that Belle can stay to do her last year of high school here."

When Dr. Ventnor had said his piece, everyone took to him at once, as he'd solved the problem of "poor, little Belle." He was a tower of strength to me through the service in the church and the service at the graveside.

As veterans were folding a flag and firing a salute there, my mind, which had been fuzzy, clicked into gear. How, if the Colonel's body had to be stolen to prevent its being autopsied, had he ever had a distinguished military career?

_I'll have many questions for Dr. Ventnor after the funeral,_ I thought.

Before everyone dispersed, there was a reception at the house now mine. Amid the reception, Dr. Ventnor said to my friends and neighbors, "I'm taking Belle to Columbus with me a few days. I want to see how this stressful experience has affected her health. Besides, a change of scene will do her good."

_A change of scene,_ I thought, _will give me a chance to ask you those questions._

~~~

When I set off for Columbus with Dr. Ventnor, I was retracing a journey that I'd often taken. On my earlier visits to the city, I'd at first been a passenger while the Colonel and Mom drove; then, once I'd earned my driver's license, I'd shared the driving duties with them. Now, as familiar roads through Louisville and Cincinnati rolled past, Dr. Ventnor held the wheel of a black Lexus, and my destination wasn't he, but the truths that he and the Colonel had long kept from me.

"May I ask you a few questions, Dr. Ventnor?"

He gave me his rich, deep laugh. "A few? Surely you have far more than a few."

I began with what puzzled me most. "Whose body did you switch for the Colonel's? Even though the body that you left in his place was badly burned, any decent forensic pathologist would look up dental records and find other identifying marks that the fire hadn't touched. You shouldn't have been able to get by with the switch."

"You're right, Belle -- or you would be, if not for a special feature of the body that Camille and I switched for the Colonel's. You see, the substitute body was the body of the real Colonel Gordon."

I shook my head in disbelief. "Are you saying that the Colonel assumed the identity of a real colonel, and that the switch was actually restoring the true colonel to his rightful place?"

"Yes, Belle. The real Colonel Gordon had a distinguished career in the Special Forces, but suffered from post-traumatic stress and alcoholism. When the military referred him to me for treatment, I saw a strong resemblance between him and your adoptive father, and arranged for your adoptive father to learn of the real Colonel Gordon's life. When the real Colonel Gordon resigned from the service and died of his alcoholism, your adoptive father took his place."

I felt horror. "Do you mean that Mom was once married to another man, and lived with the man who took his place? Why did she go along with the switch? Did you somehow fool her?"

Dr. Ventnor sighed. "You've picked up the earth-human habit of jumping to conclusions, Belle. The real Colonel Gordon was single. Your adoptive father met and wooed your mother after he'd taken the real colonel's place. At one time, she'd been a patient of mine."

My mind reeled, as the saying goes. "What of Captain le Mars, Dala's father? He was an old Army buddy of the Colonel's. Does he know of the switch?"

"Yes. He helped the Colonel and me pull it off. He --"

"Was Captain le Mars a patient of yours?"

Dr. Ventnor grinned. "Nothing gets past you."

My mind was bouncing around like a marble on a roulette wheel. "How did you still have the true colonel's body? Did you keep it frozen in a locker for years till you needed it?"

"No, Belle. Any decent pathologist would know that a body had been frozen. I preserved Colonel Gordon's body with a Tan sleeping-crystal that your grandfather Dor-Sad gave me. A sleeping-crystal seems to suspend time."

Taking a deep breath, I plunged in. "For years, I've thought that you and the Colonel belonged to some black-ops agency training alien refugees as operatives. A strange idea, I know, but all on this world is strange to me. Now, it sounds to me as if you're part of a conspiracy acting on its own. How have you been able to get eight sets of adoptive parents to go along with it?"

"You Tani have a set of gifts. I have a set of my own. They're not as flashy as the Tan gifts, but just as useful."

"I don't understand."

"Open the glove compartment and take out what you find there. It'll help you understand."

Numbly, I obeyed his order. From the glove compartment, I took a lacquered wooden box about twelve by nine by two inches. The box had a lock, open.

"This is the box that I stole from the antiquities dealer in Madison, Wisconsin, the night when I met Lona, isn't it?"

"Open the box."

It held a book made of fine metal leaves bound with metal rings. On the leaves were signs in a script resembling musical notes.

Recalling a book once displayed in a niche in Gam Tol, I cried out, "This is the writing of the _Lil-i,_ the Others! Are you --"

"Yes, Belle. I have a long story for you, but, before you hear it, you must learn other things long kept from you. You must see two items at my house; then I'll tell you all that I know."

Frustrated with my ignorance, but eager to learn, I settled back in my seat. It'd be wonderful for life to make sense to me.

Dr. Ventnor and I talked of generalities the rest of the way to Columbus. At his house, he left me to watch the evening news while he made supper. The news was the run of political corruption, celebrity scandals, financial crises, wars in the earth's far corners, religious strife, and ecological catastrophe. I wonder that the news didn't clabber my guts. Maybe, my days on the earth have hardened me.

Supper -- beef stir-fry -- made up for the news. Dr. Ventnor and I filled the time between bites with polite talk of his work as a professor of psychology and of colleges to which I might go. I was thinking of the Ohio State University, to be near him. Water under the bridge, as the saying goes.

After supper, as Dr. Ventnor and I cleared the table and put dirty dishes into his dishwasher, he said, "I'll be busy this evening, Belle. I must prepare a lecture and do some administrative work that piled up while I was away. The evening won't be wasted for you, though. A safe in the guest bedroom holds a manila envelope containing the two items for you to see. The safe is electronic; you'll have no trouble with it. The items will give you plenty to ponder this evening. In the morning, I'll tell you the long story that I promised you."

Wishing him a good evening, I went to the guest bedroom and opened the safe with my crystal-shaping gift. The manila envelope bore writing that brought tears to my eyes. In the Colonel's spiky script were the words, _For Belle in the event of my death._

The envelope was thick and had a lump at its bottom. Opening the envelope, I found that its thickness had been due to several sheets of the linen-like cloth that the Tan had used as paper on the Homeworld. The sheets bore Tan script, which looked to me hastily drawn, and were, to my astonishment, clipped together. I assumed that a paperclip had been added to the sheets after they'd come to the earth.

When I tilted the envelope upside down to learn what the lump was, there slid into my hand a silken bag holding something hard, long, narrow, and faceted. Through the silk, I felt a memory-crystal's characteristic vibrations. Opening the bag's drawstring, I poured the crystal into my hand...

_I was in the Chamber of Green Crystal in Gam Tol. On a throne on the chamber's dais sat a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing the three-spired crown. He wasn't Sor-On, for Par-On's father stood at the_ Kan Tan's _feet, along with my grandfather, looking younger than I'd known him. I guessed that the_ Kan Tan _was Yar-On, Sor-On's grandfather. As he was ruling in the crystal-city, he had to be within three years of his death._

"Tell me more, you two," Yar-On said, "of this new world that you've been exploring, and of the strangers who greeted you there."

_Sor-on looked at Dor-Sad and motioned for him to talk._ "Kan Tan," _my grandfather said, "the inhabited world in the Sheep Stars is rich in water, vegetation, and livestock, and would be safe for the Tan if not for the world's inhabitants, the_ humans. _They're intelligent in their own way, as we guessed from their building the_ radios _that made our speaking-crystals speak across vast deserts of space. Altogether too often, though, the_ humans _use their intelligence to harm one another as individuals or in crowds, and to harm their world."_

_"Please understand, Grandfather," Sor-On said to Yar-On, "that, though many_ humans _show our virtues of duty, loyalty, and truthfulness, many others show forms of madness that would lead us to send them into the Desert."_

_Yar-On nodded. "It wasn't, though, these_ humans _who met you when your ships landed on the earth."_

_Again, Sor-on deferred to Dor-Sad. "No,_ Kan Tan. _As you ordered, our ships landed in areas far from large_ human _settlements. To our surprise, though, we learned that among the_ humans _lives a handful of strangers from a ruined world. These strangers have the gift of hearing other minds afar. When our ships neared the earth, the strangers heard in their minds the thoughts of our ships' brain-crystals and came in secret to meet us."_

"If I understood the tale that you told last night," Yar-On said, "the gift of these strangers is terrifying. Besides hearing thoughts afar, they can control the thoughts of those nearby."

_"Only of_ humans, Kan Tan. _Us Tani ,they can hear, but can't control."_

"A small blessing, then. Tell me again the warning that these strangers gave you."

_"To avoid the_ humans, Kan Tan. _If they catch us, the strangers say, the_ humans _will force us to do hard labor, cut us open to study us, or kill us at once. They'll learn our ships' secrets and come to this world to add its pitiful little to their much."_

_Yar-On turned to his grandson. "Do you agree with the strangers' assessment of the_ humans?"

_Sor-On spread his hands. "Grandfather, I told you last night of the sound-and-light performances that appear on the_ humans' televisions. _They show a world that looks as if the mad life within the Wall of Winds had grown mouths to speak and hands to shape."_

_"Yet you recommend that we keep studying these_ humans _and someday contact them?"_

"Grandfather, survival, in the long run, never means running from danger. We must face what threatens us and learn to manage it."

Yar-On stroked his chin. "I must give more thought to what you two have said. For now, limit your contacts on this new world to the strangers and those whom they control."

In my hand, the crystal went inert. Slipping it back into its silk bag, I thought, _This truly was something that I needed to see._ With a smile to myself, I added in thought, _I always knew that the Colonel could read minds._

I turned to the pages written in Tan script:

Dor-Sad wishes his beloved granddaughter, Mira Das-Es, prosperity and joy.

Many years may pass before you, my beloved granddaughter, read this message. I can't imagine what experiences you've had, or what you've become on the world where I'm sending you. I can but hope that the foster parents to whose care I commit you have shown you love and given you the guidance needed to overcome the trials to which your new homeworld has subjected you.

_I wish that there were another world where I could send you. Within the crystal-ships' reach, though, only Ul and Ul Har, which you've learned to call_ the earth, _remain as abodes of life, and Ul and its life are now ending._

_By now, you don't need me to tell you of the_ humans _of_ the earth, _with their many peoples, many languages, and many gods, all of them at odds with one another. You'll have learned that, though_ humans _as persons may be kind and generous, the_ human _people is dangerous to itself, dangerous to its world, and dangerous to the strangers who hide on that world._

_To deal with the_ humans _and to honor the will of your own people, who chose you to help carry on their memory through time, you must keep your mind on the Work and the Message. I know that_ Kan Tan _Sor-On plans to tell you of the Work before you leave for the earth, but I know also that a reminder of the Work won't come amiss._

_You must remember Ul. I know that, to survive on_ the earth, _you must learn and adopt its ways, but, in your new life, please don't forget your old homeworld's ways. Conserve the memory-crystals and the books sent with you, retain our speech, worship Holy Light each day at dawn, and dance under the stars when you can. Call out in the dark the names of us whom you've left behind so that we may live again in memory._

You must perpetuate the People. You and Par-On must beget and bear children to carry on the royal line of the Crystal-Shapers, and the other couples whom we're sending with you must beget and bear children to aid the royal line in the Work.

_You must save_ the earth. _There, your gifts of strength, speed, healing, and crystal-shaping, the_ An _birthright, will be magnified many times above what they are here. You'll need those gifts to keep both the People and the_ humans _alive._

_I'm sending_ the earth _a message, which will arrive in thirteen point eight of_ the earth's _years. The heart of this message, though, I'm telling you now, as it will shape the Work for which the People has sent you._

The crystal-ships have found nine worlds where life once flourished, but is no more. On all of those worlds lived intelligent beings much like us. It was the works of those intelligent beings that ruined their worlds.

_You're familiar, I know, with the world of the Others, where a work of their hands removed all of the_ oxygen _from the atmosphere. On other ruined worlds, other mechanisms ended life. It seems to me a rule that intelligent life shapes a means to destroy itself. You've seen this rule at work on Ul. The great crystals that I learned to shape destabilized this world to the point that Nas-Ul is tearing it apart. Now a tenth ruined world will join the first nine._

The earth _must not become an eleventh ruined world, lest the memories of the first ten die along with it._ The humans, _though, aggressive and divided as they are, are unlikely saviors for their world. You and your fellow Tani must use your gifts, when the Message comes, to persuade or compel_ the humans _to abandon, or never to develop,_ technologies _that threaten their world's existence._

_Do what the Work requires, beloved Mira, even if it may require killing those who oppose it. Those of the_ humans _who oppose the Work won't hesitate to kill you. Let the_ humans _teach you how to succeed at the Work. Without it, all will be lost._

Those to whom you and your fellow Tani will be entrusted are Others, or servants of the Others. The Others know of the Work, and will do what they can to aid it. They'll guide you awhile, but, past a certain point, you'll be on your own and must choose your own path. I pray to Holy Light for it to end in happiness for you, but I pray above all for it to end in the People's survival.

Remember us who sent you as you walk under Holy Light.

I blinked tears from my eyes as I struggled with grief and outrage. _How couldn't you have told me,_ Kan Tan _Sor-On,_ I thought, _that "Save the earth" meant "Conquer the earth"?_

~~~

The next morning, after breakfast, Dr. Ventnor took me on a drive. "We're going to join Camille where she's taken the Colonel's body. You and she must perform an observance and duty."

I just nodded. The car drove on through the outskirts of Columbus, though woodlands, and though central Ohio's endless cornfields.

"You've been quiet this morning, Belle. You also look tired. Did you sleep well?"

I sighed. "How could I the night when I learned that I've been drafted as a technology cop? Still, I understand now the training that the Colonel gave me." I glanced at Dr. Ventnor, his eyes fixed on a straight stretch of highway between white farmhouses. "Have you read the letter from my grandfather to me?"

"Yes, Belle."

"How do you happen to have it?"

"On the night when you came to the earth, when the Colonel was taking from your ship the books and the memory-crystals that came with you, he found notes from your grandfather attached to one of the crystals and to a sheaf of papers. The notes asked him to hide that crystal and those papers from you till you were ready to start the Work. Knowing how intelligent and inquisitive you are, the Colonel decided that it'd be safest to hide the items in question off site. He felt, too, that I needed to read the letter to know how best to guide you."

Taking a breath, I plunged into the deep. "When the Colonel visited the Homeworld, I took him on a tour of Gam Tol. We Tani had set up a shrine to display some artifacts that a crystal-ship had brought to Ul from a ruined world of Tau Ceti. We called that world's lost people 'the Others.' When the Colonel saw the Others' artifacts, he wept. I recall saying that it was kind of him to offer tears to strangers. They weren't strangers to him, though, were they? He was crying for his own people."

Dr. Ventnor nodded. "Sor-On and Dor-Sad knew the Colonel's true nature, but chose not to tell you of it. When the Colonel went to Ul, he wanted to learn how far we whom you Tani call the Others could trust you and whether we should help you. When he saw the shrine that you'd raised out of your poverty to strangers whom you thought dead, he knew that you were like us in the way that counted most: you cherished the past and worked to pass it to the future."

"How is it that the Others are on the earth?"

"Our name for ourselves is _Sethiparnen,_ which means 'Speakers and Makers.' We, like you Tani, built ships that flashed from world to world, though by different means from your power-crystals and brain-crystals. We, like you Tani, looked for other habitable worlds. Having lived under a sunlike star, though, we didn't think red stars worth probing, and so missed your world.

"This world, we did find, about five hundred of its years ago. Learning that its inhabitants looked like us and ate food that we, too, could eat, we infiltrated observers into it to learn whether openly meeting its inhabitants would be worth while, to trade with them, or, I'm ashamed to say, to conquer and enslave them."

I frowned. "If you were conquerors, why didn't you conquer the earth? Five hundred years ago, it could hardly have resisted the mind-control that you seem to have over earth-humans."

"The heads of the _Sethiparnen_ were debating conquest. Before, though, they reached a decision on it, my ancestors stationed on this world lost touch with our homeworld. Those of us left here lacked the technological base to build ships to return home to learn why our world no longer spoke to us.

"We married and bore children, and kept our knowledge of our homeworld till now. Sadly, though, our numbers have never been great. As generations passed, our fertility waned till in the Colonel's and my generation just three children were born." He smiled wryly. "All boys."

I felt a horror like that which the Homeworld's destruction had aroused in me. "I'm sorry! I --"

Dr. Ventnor shook his head. "I've come to accept the extinction of us _Sethiparnen._ In our last days, though, we've gotten the chance to help save two other peoples. When we heard in our minds your ships' brain-crystals, we hoped at first that they represented our own kind, returning beyond all hope. When we traced the brain-crystals to your ships' landing sites, though, we found there, not _Sethiparnen,_ but Tani."

"How did you talk with them?"

"Dor-Sad and his technicians had already learned a smattering of English from telecasts. It was enough to form a bridge over which our two peoples could reach each other. We warned Sor-On and Dor-Sad of the danger of contacting the humans directly, and Dor-Sad told us of his discovery of the ruined worlds. When your homeworld began to fall apart, Sor-On and Dor-Sad arranged with us to shelter eight lives to preserve the Tan and do the Work of saving this world from destruction. The rest of the story you know."

Overwhelmed by the death of worlds, I missed key questions that I should've asked just then. In any case Dr. Ventnor turned onto a dirt road -- long disused by the look of it \-- that ran through deep woods. The road ended at a sinkhole, by which stood a tent like one in which I'd often camped out.

As the car stopped, Kuma came from the tent. Giving Dr. Ventnor a subdued look with which I was unfamiliar on her, she said, "I've laid the Colonel out in the tunnel."

"Thank you, Camille. Please join Belle and me."

I had just a moment to think of the horror of Kuma's carrying the Colonel's body cross-country before Dr. Ventnor, holding the book that had been in the box that I'd stolen from the museum, led Kuma and me down a roughly shaped staircase. This went to the sinkhole's base, where a tunnel ran into darkness. Kuma, though, had brought along a pair of light-crystals, one of which she gave me. Awaking the crystals, she and I brought the darkness the sun's glow.

Just within the tunnel's entrance, three horizontal niches had been cut into one wall. In the farthest niche lay the Colonel, still dressed as I'd dressed him on the morning of his death. I felt grief at his not wearing his dress uniform and his medals -- greater grief at recalling that he'd never earned them. Whatever else about him had been false, though, I felt that his love for Mom and me had been real.

Over the Colonel's body Dr. Ventnor read from his book words that, though alien to me, sounded to me both majestic and forlorn. Afterwards, at Dr. Ventnor's prompting, I recited what I recalled of the Christian service for the dead.

Dr. Ventnor looked along the tunnel. "Here," he murmured, "lie all of the _Sethiparnen_ who've died on the earth. Those who died before the Colonel were sealed into rock by those who brought them here, but the Colonel was the last of us who knew how to shape stone. I fear --"

"Mira and I can seal him in," Kuma broke in to say. Her look of enthusiasm became one of shock as she turned to me. "I'm sorry, Mira! I didn't think of how you might feel. I can do it myself if you --"

Shaking my head, I forced out a smile. "The Colonel used work as an antidote to grief. It's right for me to use work so now."

Thus, Kuma and I used our crystal-shaping gift to weld flat sheets of the sinkhole's limestone into a covering for the Colonel's niche. When we were done, he lay behind a wall that looked as if it had long been there.

"Thank you, ladies," Dr. Ventnor said softly. "I regret that you'll have to perform this service twice more. When you do, please lay me in the niche beside the Colonel's, and the other of us _Sethiparnen_ in the niche nearest the exit."

I nodded, but was too overwhelmed just then to ask of the other. At Dr. Ventnor's request, Kuma and I covered the tunnel's entrance with sheets of fallen limestone; then we folded Kuma's tent and rode off with Dr. Ventnor to Columbus.

In the light-crystals' glow, wise, artistic Sil-Tan raises his hand. "Your account, Mira, raises questions. The first one that comes to mind is, 'How did the Others' book end up in a shop in Madison, Wisconsin?'"

I sigh. "So much was going on in my life that I never got around to asking Dr. Ventnor that question. I can only guess that the book had been lost or stolen, and that whoever found or stole it sold it to the antiquities dealer in Madison. I did learn from some Web research that the dealer had been auctioning the book on line when I stole it from him."

Dala frowns. "Why didn't Dr. Ventnor just buy it back?"

Dour, brooding Un-Thor snorts. "Why spend good money on what's yours when Mira the Marvelous can just take it back for you?"

I feel warm inside. "You're too kind," I murmur.

"Besides," solid, trustworthy Van-Dor says, "Dr. Ventnor couldn't have been sure of not being outbid in an on-line auction."

Lona shakes her head. "I still don't see, Mira, why the Colonel kept from you who he was all of those years."

I sigh. "I wish that he were here to answer that question."

_Sil strokes his chin. "There's still the last of the three_ Sethiparnen _boys. Maybe, he can answer the question."_

_I glance at Par-On and Kuma, who alone, besides me, know of the last of the_ Sethiparnen; _then my gaze goes again to the long bundle at Par's feet._

_He, following my gaze, gives me a wry smile; then he turns to his and my companions. "Mira will tell you of the last of the_ Sethiparnen, _but the story has far to go before it reaches him."_

Kuma, to my astonishment, shivers. "I wish that I needn't relive that story, but I guess I must. Still, parts of it are good."

~~~

After a night at Dr. Ventnor's house, Kuma ran home to Dothan, while Dr. Ventnor drove me home to Paducah. There, he stayed several days to fix in the minds of my friends and neighbors his role as my guardian; then he came and went as I began my senior year of high school and did Girl Scout and church activities. Sadly, I had much time for these, as the Colonel was no longer briefing me for missions, sending me on them, and debriefing me from them.

Sometimes, while Dr. Ventnor was staying at my house, Dala, Lona, Kuma, or all three would run in and spend a night or a weekend with him and me. I'd try to cook as Mom had cooked. Dr. Ventnor and the three girls praised my efforts at cooking, but they were poor beside Mom's. There are gifts besides those of the Tan and of the _Sethiparnen._

On nights when all five of us were at my house, we'd have wide-ranging talks on the background of the Tan and of the Others, of life as aliens hidden among humans, of the Work and of the Message, and of alternate futures: the earth destroyed, or the earth saved. Lest the sun rise before my tale ends, I'll repeat just one of those talks: the question of origins.

The talk began with a question from Lona. "Dr. Ventnor, Mira was telling me the other night of when she'd asked you where we Tani originated. How can Tani, Others, and earth-humans all look alike, yet be so different from each other?"

Dr. Ventnor gave her a wry smile. "I must give you the same answer that I gave Belle: I don't know. I'm fairly sure, though, of that question's answer lying on this world, rather than on your lost homeworld or my ruined homeworld. Belle, you learned Tan star-lore as a girl on Ul, and the Girl Scouts no doubt taught you this world's star-lore. I know that _Thil-i An_ _Om,_ the Stars of the Great Crystal-Shaper, from which you Tani say you came, correspond to Orion. To which constellation do _Thil-i_ _Har,_ the Stars of the Sheep, in which the sun appeared on Ul, correspond?"

"To Monoceros, the Unicorn."

"Where's that in relation to Orion?"

"Just east of it."

"Are you familiar with the relative motion of stars?" When I nodded, Dr. Ventnor went on to say, "Seven thousand years ago, when you Tani came to your homeworld, could the sun have lain in Orion from Ul's vantage?"

I shrugged. "I'd have to spend hours on a computer to answer that question."

"I think that its answer is 'yes,' as we _Sethiparnen_ also had on our homeworld a legend that we'd come from the stars, from a constellation that during our origin would've held the sun. I think that, despite the differences among earth-humans, Tani, and _Sethiparnen,_ all of us began on this world."

Dala spoke up softly. "Mira told me of part of that talk that you and she had. She said that you thought we Tani are androids."

Dr. Ventnor chuckled. "I was just speculating, Delia. Still, your being self-replicating androids would explain those magnificent carbon filaments that form your bones and let your skin and muscles heal in a blink."

Kuma grinned. "We Tani can be the Fighting Robot Women of Ul!"

Dala winced. Lona said in a sour tone, "You and Mira can be if you want to."

"I do have," Dr. Ventnor went on to say, "more evidence for the earthly-origin hypothesis. Belle's grandfather, Dor-Sad, and his crystal-technicians explored eight other ruined worlds besides my people's homeworld. From none of those eight other worlds did he bring home artifacts, but he and his fellow explorers did find bodies of those worlds' inhabitants, or statues or drawings of them. All of them were outwardly human."

Dala, Lona, and I looked at each other wide eyed. "How did Grandfather explain his finding?"

"He and I, on one of his visits to the earth, developed a model that neither of us could prove. The model is based on legends prevalent among earth-humans, and also among my people in ancient times. When you girls studied mythology in school, you may've noticed a common theme of older gods of chaos who give rise to younger gods of order, who fight against the gods of chaos and overcome them."

Kuma nodded. "Sure! Odin and the Frost Giants, Bel and Tiamat, Ra and Apep --"

Dala gave Kuma a look of respect. "You must've really been studying lately."

Lona sniffed. "Kuma knows of gods because they're in superhero comics."

I broke in quickly before Kuma and Lona began to fight. "Dr. Ventnor, in your and Grandfather's model, are the gods of chaos true aliens who came to the earth and engineered humans into new species like the Tani and the _Sethiparnen,_ the gods of order? Are you saying that your people and mine overthrew the gods of chaos? What happened to cause you and us to lose touch with each other, and to leave no gifted humans on the earth till you and we showed up?"

"Those are questions that Dor-Sad and I could never answer. Their answers may lie buried in the earth's far corners, or on the ruined worlds. Maybe, after the Message has come, and the Work has been done, you Tani and the earth-humans together can find the answers."

In a brief period of peace after the Colonel's death, a new Tan came to my house.

I was asleep one night when tapping at my window awoke me. Glancing at my clock-radio, I moaned; knowing from past experience who was tapping, I flung the window open. "Kuma, do you know that it's three twenty in the morning?"

Rushing into my bedroom, she gave me a hug that would've reduced an earth-human to splinters and goo. "Great news, Mira! I've found him! I've found him!"

"Found whom?" I gasped out.

"The Scourge of Jesse James Country!"

At my window appeared a Tan face with a man's square jaw. "Are you Par-On?" I said hopefully.

"Sorry, I don't know that name. I'm Andy Meadows, but my parents tell me that I was once called Un-Thor."

I was jealous of Kuma's having found her husband-to-be, not mine. Still, it was my duty to play hostess. Thinking of what Mom had done under circumstances like the present ones, I said, "We Tani have begun using our birth-names among ourselves, Un-Thor. I'm Mira, but please call me Belle if we're around earth-humans. Would you like to come down to the dining room, you and Kuma? I could whip you two up some breakfast."

Un grinned. "I'll never say no to that."

Downstairs, as I scrambled eggs and fried sausage, Kuma told me of her seeing a figure running at superhuman speed across rooftops in St. Louis, watching him torch a warehouse filled with illegal drugs, and chasing him down as he was heading west across Missouri. Telling him who she was, she begged him to come with her to meet _per-a Tan-i,_ his race's mother.

I blinked in astonishment at what Kuma had called me. As I'd been teaching her of the royal family, she'd learned that Luna, as wife of _Kan Tan_ Sor-On, had been called 'mother of the Tani,' but I'd never thought to apply that title to myself. Still, Par, wherever he was, was now by right of birth _Kan Tan._ I, as his betrothed wife, was entitled to the status that his mother had held.

Maybe, it was appropriate that as the Tani's mother I was serving two of them breakfast.

Over this, Un gave me an odd look. "Kuma was telling me that she and I are married. I don't recall much of that desert world, and I haven't been able to make out much from those crystals and those books. Is what she's saying true?"

I nodded. "You and Kuma are betrothed. I witnessed the ceremony of betrothal between you two three days before you came to the earth. You can see that ceremony for yourself on a memory-crystal that I have."

Un furrowed his brow. "What does that ceremony mean on the earth? Do Kuma and I have to go through another ceremony here, or do we just start playing house?"

I sighed. "Un, as far as the earth-humans know, we Tani don't exist. We can hardly sign up for marriage licenses. If we did so in a state requiring blood tests, just think of the fun that we'd have! I think that those who sent us here meant for us to follow Tan law in our private lives. In Tan law, a betrothed couple starts to live as husband and wife when both of their sets of parents agree on their being mature enough to. I'd say that on the earth, though, you'd best wait till you're eighteen."

Un looked relieved at my words, Kuma disappointed at them, but both he and she nodded. Sorry, Par! I usurped your prerogative as lawgiver, but a decision had to be made.

After the marriage decision, the three of us talked till dawn of our feats of combat. Un, clearly eager to extend them, said, "Mira, Kuma tells me that we Tani have a Work to do. When are we going to start it?"

Chafing from inaction, I was eager for a mission myself. I thought of a possible security breach that I'd long neglected, and a plan of action that could involve Lona and Dala as well as Kuma and Un. "I have something in mind," I said.

"Before I get to the plan, though," I say to the faces in the light-crystals' glow, "I should give Un-Thor a chance to tell us his background."

"Yes," gentle, artistic Sil-Tan says, "tell us how you became a midnight warrior. Was the Colonel training you in secret?"

Un shakes his head. "Never had a chance to meet him, I'm sorry to say. Seeing the good work that he did with Mira, I wish that I had had him as a teacher.

"No, I began the crime-fighting to please my dad -- my earth-father, as some of you would call him. He'd been a starting defensive linebacker in high school and a career Marine. On some level, he wanted a son who could follow him in sports and the military. I couldn't go out for football, since I'd have to take a physical that would give away my secret. Ditto for the Marines. With the crime-fighting, though, I won his respect. He's my number-one fan!"

I start to feel sorry for Un; then I see that his story might well be my own. Something deep inside us Tani \-- something that survived the Crossing -- honors parental authority, whether in father and mother, or in king and queen. That something might be our greatest strength -- or weakness. Time will tell.

Solid, trustworthy Van-Dor says, "Do you miss your days of solo action, Un?"

He shakes his head. "I'd come as far as I could on my own. I'm happy as part of a team. We Tani will need Kuma's enthusiasm and Mira's training and leadership when the Work truly starts."

Lona, who's been squirming during the tales of derring-do, vents her frustration. "Un, are you saying that all that we need for the Work is strength and aggressiveness? View the crystals! Read the books! We never treasured warlike deeds on the Homeworld. Is no place left for making things grow and seeking an inner wisdom?"

Before Un can answer her, Par-On speaks softly, but quickly. "Lona, we Tani will need all of the skills of each of us for the Work once the Message comes. We shouldn't treasure one person's skills over another's. Given this world's nature, though, we should all be grateful for the skills that Un, Mira, and Kuma have developed."

"Besides, Lona" Un says, "when push comes to shove, you can stand up for yourself with the best of us."

Lona bites her underlip and blinks back tears at I know what memory. Sadly, though, I must now start its story.

~~~

After Kuma had shown up with Un-Thor, I kept pestering Dr. Ventnor about where the other boys were. "What if, God forbid, something should happen to you?" I said. "How could Dala, Lona, and I find our _ti-thar-i,_ our husbands-to-be?"

Dr. Ventnor looked solemn. "If you mean, Belle, 'What if I die before you find the rest of the boys?' I could die. Keep in mind, though, that someday, sooner or later, I will; then you Tani will have to go on on your own. The Colonel always meant for you to find each other as an exercise in self-reliance. He made an exception in bringing Delia to meet you only because she needed your help to adjust to this world. Par-On, Sil-Tan, and Van-Dor, you other Tani must find yourselves."

I may've pouted. "I assume that, since they don't need my help to adjust to this world, they're doing fine wherever they are."

Dr. Ventnor gave me a wry smile. "Your grandfather once told me that a Crystal-Shaper can track down lost crystals with a speaking-crystal."

I frowned. I assumed that Dr. Ventnor was telling me that, if I found the boy's crystal hordes, I'd find the boys. "The crystal-shaping manuals that I've read don't describe how to make speaking-crystals, and all of them on the earth are broken. Are you saying that I can heal them?"

Dr. Ventnor chuckled. "You're asking me? I have some power over human minds, but none over your crystals. You must answer your question on your own."

Paranoid sneak that the Colonel had trained me to be, I'd told no one, not even Dr. Ventnor, of my having awoken my crystal-ship's brain-crystal. I thought of testing whether I could heal my ship's other crystals; then I thought of security, something about which I'd worried much lately, now that the Colonel wasn't overseeing it for me.

I felt that I should bring up the plan that I'd discussed with my fellow Tani. "Dr. Ventnor, I worry about the ships. They were hastily hidden, and a number of earth-humans know where they are. What if someone finds one of the ships by accident, or someone slips up, or turns against us Tani? Shouldn't the ships be moved to safer places?"

Dr. Ventnor gave me a level gaze. "I trust your judgment on them, Belle."

My judgment, wise or un-, was to move them. I asked Dala, Kuma, Lona, and Un-Thor to seek secure sites where we Tani could hide our cultural treasures. While, by day, I kept acting the part of a high-school senior, Girl Scout, and churchgoer, by night, I checked out potential secure sites that my scouts reported to me, and approved some of the sites.

I also, still telling no one else, slipped out to my ship's hiding place and re-awoke the brain-crystal. As I healed it further, it gave me specs on how healed power-crystals, sleeping-crystals, and speaking-crystals should look.

I debated whether I should first heal the ship's speaking-crystal so that I could use it to track down the boys' crystals; then I decided that hiding the ships whose locations I knew was most urgent, and I began to heal the ship's power-crystals.

Healing them was no one-night job! As I poured my crystal-shaping gift into the shattered power-crystals, the brain-crystal briefed me on how to use them. They could put out thrust to lift the ship into interplanetary space; a warp, for lack of a better word, to blink the ship from star to star; a force-field to protect the ship in flight; and an energy beam to deflect or destroy things in the ship's path.

Idly, I wondered what the beam could do to a typical two-story house. The brain-crystal gave me a sound-and-light show. Flash! Bang! Smoking crater!

"Oh, my!" I murmured. I decided not to tell my fellow Tani just then of the power-crystals' last feature.

Came a night when the power-crystals were fully healed and had fully recharged themselves from the earth's magnetic field. I ordered the brain-crystal to raise the ship's upper hull, gingerly sat among crystals healed and unhealed, and ordered the hull closed. Heart pounding, eyes streaming tears at memories of my two earlier flights on crystal-ships, I bade the ship rise.

Its flight was long and circuitous, exploiting an overcast night and every patch of darkness, but it was a crystal-ship's flight, a hopeful event for the Tani, but salvation or death for the earth. Laughter and tears warred on my face, joy and grief in my heart, till it was a wonder that I could safely steer the ship.

Still, I did, till it was stowed in an abandoned bunker that Kuma had found in a remote corner of the Purchase. I sealed the bunker's door till I needed the place again \-- all too soon, as things would turn out.

Having secured my own ship, I pondered whose next to secure. I decided on Lona's. Her divorced adoptive father's being out of touch in California and her adoptive mother's Bohemian household in Illinois struck me as the greatest security risk just then. I was prescient, as many of you already know. Whether my prescience helped or harmed us Tani, only Holy Light can say.

To move Lona's ship, I called together Dala, Kuma, Lona, and Un-Thor. Together we slipped off to the abandoned farm near Battle Creek, Michigan, where Lona's ship had been hidden nearly twelve years. With the combined crystal-shaping gift of five Tani, the ship's brain-crystal and power-crystals were healed and charged in a few hours.

I let Kuma, the smallest of us, ride with me in the ship while Dala, Lona, and Un ran point below it. The five of us Tani brought it safely to its hiding place deep under a pine barrens near Lake Michigan's shore. We jumped up and down and hugged each other at our mission's success.

"Who's next?" Kuma asked me.

"You, Dala, and Un are in stable situations. Let's put off moving your ships while I work on another project." I told my companions of what Dr. Ventnor had said speaking-crystals could do; then I went on to say, "Lona, you're the most advanced besides me in crystal-shaping. Could you slip away this weekend and help me heal my ship's speaking-crystal?"

Lona snorted. "Slip away? You've seen my household. I'll come with bells on."

Lona ran to my house on a Friday night. The next day, we read our two crystal-shaping manuals and talked of what we'd learned from healing brain-crystals and power-crystals. On Saturday night, we slipped through darkness to my crystal-ship's new hideout and healed its speaking-crystal. Tired from our work, we decided not to try to track down the three missing boys that night, but to come back the next night and try then. We had no idea that, before the next night had come, both Lona's personal world and mine would've ended.

~~~

Those worlds' end began with a phone call. As Lona and I lay asleep in my room at home, my cell phone began to play "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Opening an eye and the phone, I drowsily murmured into it, "Gordon residence."

A deep male voice said, "May I speak with Mirabelle Gordon?"

"This is she."

"Miss Gordon, this is Detective T. W. Kaminski of the Columbus Police Department. I'm calling you with bad news of your legal guardian, Dr. Emanuel Ventnor. Last night, he was shot to death in his home..."

Stunned, babbling out barely coherent questions in a way that would've earned me the Colonel's scorn, I learned of a home-invasion -- likely an attempted robbery by at least three assailants -- that had ended tragically in Dr. Ventnor's death and the burning of much of his house.

"I regret, ma'am, that there must be a full autopsy before the doctor's body can be released for burial."

"I understand, Detective." The word 'autopsy' had awoken me from panic into preparation for action.

The detective asked me whether I knew why robbers would've targeted the doctor's house. Having no reason yet to suspect what they'd been seeking, I said that I didn't. I made vague promises to come to Columbus, and the detective mentioned that he might call me again later. When I closed the phone, I met Lona's enormous stare and began to tell her what had happened; then I grasped that, given Tan hearing, she'd heard the detective as if he'd spoken in her ear.

_"Ti-rem-es in-i, Lus Im!"_ she gasped out. "'Save us, Holy Light!'" It awed me that, in a time of crisis, she'd reverted to speaking _nal Tan._ "What're we going to do?" she went on to say.

"Let me think. We must get Dr. Ventnor's body before it's autopsied; but you and I, to stand any chance to live a normal life from now on, must stay here and act as normal as we can under the circumstances. I'll call Kuma."

When I awoke her with my call, she sounded cross, but came alert as I told her of Dr. Ventnor's death. I went on to say, "Call Un-Thor and tell him to meet you near Columbus right away. Steal Dr. Ventnor's body before the autopsy starts, if you at all can. Also find and secure that book that he brought to the Colonel's burial.

"Bring both the body and the book to the quarry where the Colonel is buried, but hide with them in the woods above the quarry till dark. If Lona and I can at all join you there, we will; but, if we don't make it, go ahead and bury the body and seal it in."

"I understand, Mira. You can count on Un and me."

As things turned out, I could. Kuma and Un were perfect that day. It was I who failed the Tan.

Having set in motion the second alien body-snatching, Lona and I debated what we should do to act normal. In the end, we felt that normal persons in our situation on a Sunday morning would go to church. There, in Sunday school, we told my classmates of the new catastrophe in my life. They smothered Lona and me in prayer and expressions of sympathy, and suggestions for what'd become of "poor, little Belle." The class's teacher, a lawyer, made what would've been a good suggestion if all had gone well -- that I seek emancipation so that I could finish high school in Paducah.

In the morning service, the preacher announced my guardian's death and prayed for me. During the sermon, it shames me to say, I wondered how someone who could control earth-humans' thoughts had been killed by earth-humans. Had they knocked Dr. Ventnor out from behind? Had his gift been a subtle thing that took too long to work when it had to save his life? Was his gift just not up to telling three determined assailants, "Don't kill me!"? _I should ask the last of the_ Sethiparnen _those questions when I meet him,_ I thought.

I pondered a harsh lesson: having a gift doesn't make one invulnerable. Only too soon would that lesson get reinforced in my life.

After the service, kind souls offered to bring food to my house, come by and look after me, and even go with me to Columbus. I had no way -- and no reason -- to turn down clear expressions of Christian love. How could I have foreseen that they'd turn a disastrous situation from which I could've recovered into one that was irretrievably lost?

After morning service, Lona and I ate lunch with the church in its basement; then we went to my house for the last time that I've been there. Neighbors brought by food and prayed with us; Detective Kaminski called me again and asked me more questions, the point of which I missed. He said nothing of a second burglary of Dr. Ventnor's house or of his body's being snatched.

I told myself that Kuma and Un-Thor hadn't had time to reach Columbus and carry off their raids. Antsy, I paced the floor and likely drove Lona to distraction. Maybe, grief and worry dulled my mind's trained edge. Maybe, if I hadn't been distracted, things would've turned out better...

As things were, when a car roared down the road before my house and screeched to a halt in my driveway, I paid the car's unsettling sounds no heed, but thought only of churchmates bringing me more food. Dully, I did wonder at heavy footsteps running towards my front door, but I was unprepared for its being kicked open by three gun-wielding men in ski masks.

Guns pointed at me; then one of them turned towards Lona, just entering the common room from the kitchen. "Which of you is Lonnie Stormgren?" one of the home-invaders shouted.

"I'm Lonnie," I said, just a beat before Lona said, "I'm Lonnie."

The gunman made a sound of disgust. "You two look like clones at that. It doesn't matter which of you is Lonnie and which of you is Belle. Both of you are aliens who have those crystal-ships and those alien crystals and books Donnie told us about one night when we got him drunk. Show us where they are! They're worth millions to the right buyer."

Now, I knew that the home-invaders had learned of the Tan from Lona's long-lost adoptive father, and wanted money. The Colonel had taught me to play for time if I faced capture. In as conversational a tone as I could manage, I said, "How do you know of Belle?"

"I'm asking the questions!" the gunman said, along with a word that had never been uttered under the Colonel's roof but in reference to a real female dog. "Where are the alien ships?"

In a plaintive tone, Lona said, "You're the ones who killed Dr. Ventnor, aren't you?"

"We're wasting time!" the gunman shouted. "We need just one of you to get what we want."

His finger tightened on the trigger of his gun; it fired at me. He must've thought that Lona would be more likely to give him answers than I was. Now, I'm fast, and the Colonel had taught me of guns, but I wasn't fast enough to dodge a bullet. Although I could see it coming, and I twisted to get out of its way, it smashed into my right side just below my outstretched arm. Down, I went.

Dala, Kuma, Lona, Un-Thor, and I had debated whether we Tani are bulletproof. I'd forbidden my brother and my sisters to test the question. As the lone Tan so far to be struck by a bullet, let me answer the question truthfully for you: no and yes. No, for the bullet passed through my skin, muscle, and ribs into places best never visited by a bullet. Yes, for, even as the bullet went into me, I felt crystal-shaping force reorganizing and repairing bullet-damaged tissue, and pushing the bullet out of me.

Still, blood also came out of me, and agony flared through me. I was helpless till the bullet emerged through its entry wound. While I lay and writhed on the floor, I heard light footsteps cross it, three slaps ring out as loud as gunshots, and three bodies hit the floor.

When I raised my head, I saw Lona standing in the center of the floor, her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide. As I rose to my feet, I saw three bodies lying around her, their heads caved in on one side and lolling at unnatural angles. I heard Lona moaning out, over and over, "Oh, God, I didn't mean to do that!"

Beyond her, in the opening where the front door sagged on one hinge, I saw wide eyes of a man and a woman, neighbors who were also my churchmates. They must've come, brave, kind souls, to see what was happening to "poor, little Belle." The two ran when I met their gazes. Over their shoulders, one of them screamed out, "We're calling the police!"

For an instant, I thought of running after them to stop their calling; then tears of self-loathing and frustration burst from my eyes. Calling the police was what my neighbors were supposed to do. The coming of police, though, would start a legal process with no end that I could foresee. Lona had killed. Even if the courts ruled that she'd killed in self-defense, how could her secret, or mine, be kept?

"Lona," I said softly.

She moaned harder. "Oh, God, oh, God, what've I done?"

It shames me that I shook her, but fear drove me. "Lona, listen to me! We've got to leave here and never return. Before we leave, though, we've got to pack some things. Can you help me?"

She stared at me a moment and then nodded. I led her upstairs and put a backpack into her hand while I held another backpack. Moving at a run through the house, I stuffed items into the backpacks: rolled coins, cash, the Colonel's pistol and some ammunition, the family albums, my laptop, my collection of light-crystals and heat-crystals, some changes of clothes...

When I heard sirens, I ran downstairs and poured a whole jug of Clorox over my blood on the common room's floor. Weeping for what the Clorox would do to pristine hardwood, I ran back upstairs, where I led Lona through my bedroom window and along the roof. Jumping from it, she and I ran past the barn and through the woodlot behind it, and headed south. Although I bit my lips and blinked back tears, I wasn't Lot's wife: I didn't look back at a place that had been more my home than even the Homeworld had. The house was mine, but who knew whether I'd reclaim it?

Farewell, valedictorian. Farewell, National Merit Scholarship. Farewell, college and career.

Farewell, Mirabelle Gordon. From now on, I'd be just Mira Das-Es, daughter of a lost world.

~~~

After a few miles, I had to stop running, as my side hurt where the bullet had entered it. Lona and I went to ground in a deep, dry ditch and huddled together.

Lona was trembling like someone on the verge of a breakdown. "Do you think that those men killed Don? Do you think that they killed Brenda?"

It seemed to me only too likely that the artifact-hunters had killed Lona's adoptive father after they'd learned of the Tan from him. In my shell-shocked state, though, I failed to grasp Lona's second question. "Why would they have killed Brenda?"

"They knew your earth-name, Mira. They knew where I was staying. Don couldn't have told them those things. Brenda, though..."

I pondered Lona's words. The hunters could've tortured my name and Lona's location out of Dr. Ventnor before they killed him, but Donald would've given the hunters Brenda's name and location as well as Dr. Ventnor's.

"Can we go to my house and learn whether Brenda's safe?" Lona said plaintively.

Sadly, I shook my head. "The police will be watching for us there. Besides, we need to meet Kuma and Un-Thor at the gravesite to let them know what's happened. I'll tell you what we can do. I have some phone cards; we can stop on the way to Ohio to call Brenda's house from a pay phone. We may just learn that she's OK."

By now, I was starting to doubt that she was, but Lona needed all of the encouragement that I could give her. She and I circled well south and west of Paducah and crossed the Ohio River into Little Egypt. By a gas station and convenience store just north of Cairo, Lona and I found a pay phone out of public view, and Lona called home the last time.

My heart leapt when I heard Brenda's voice answer the call. "Brenda," Lona said in a breathy whisper, "are you all right? Did the gunmen come there?"

"Lonnie, what's happened to you? The police have been here. They said that you killed three men. Did you?"

"Did those men come there?"

"No, Lonnie, but you've got to turn yourself in --"

I pressed down the phone's hook.

Lona gave me a look that I bet she gave the three gunmen in their life's last seconds. "Why did you hang up, Mira?"

"We don't have time to spend here. You know that Brenda is safe. Now, we need to get moving before someone sees us. We're fugitives, remember?"

Behind the gas station, a ravine led into woods. When I pointed along the ravine, Lona glowered at me some more, but set off running. I followed her.

She and I cut sharply northwest across southern Illinois and south-central Indiana. I had to stop several times for the pain in my side, but it got less at each stop. Resting, I tried to pirate some WiFi with my laptop. Once, I got lucky, and learned from news services that the suspected murderers of Dr. Ventnor, whose body had vanished from police custody, had been killed in Paducah, Kentucky, by a pair of teenage girls, Lonnie Stormgren and Mirabelle Gordon, who were wanted for questioning by the Columbus Police Department and the McCracken County Sheriff's Office.

"Guess there's no going home now," Lona moaned.

"Maybe, the others are safe for the time being," I murmured. "There's no mention of them in the news. We need to hurry, and catch Kuma and Un-Thor."

Lona and I reached the quarry just before sunset. I'd feared seeing it thick with police, but it was empty as I peered down into it from cover.

I nearly jumped into the quarry when I heard a rustle, and Kuma appeared by me. When she swept her gaze over Lona and me, her eyes got big. "Wow! You two look awful. What happened to you?"

I sighed. "Take us to Un-Thor. I don't want to tell the news twice."

Kuma led Lona and me to a deep ravine where Un lounged by a long, tarpaulin-covered bundle that I guessed was Dr. Ventnor's body. Quickly, I told Kuma and Un my news. They hugged Lona and me; then Un said, "What should we do now?"

"Have you seen any police activity around here?" I asked him. When he shook his head, I went on to say, "Let's do the funeral; then we'll need to hide for the night."

The four of us carried Dr. Ventnor's body into the quarry, removed the shingle covering the burial tunnel's entrance, and laid Dr. Ventnor's body into the second of the tunnel's two open niches. Kuma, I learned, had secured Dr. Ventnor's book while Un had secured the body.

Kuma had also, to my relief, secured a sleeping-crystal that Dr. Ventnor had hidden with the book. Dr. Ventnor had told me that he had the crystal, but in my grief and terror I'd forgotten it. Who knows how much damage it could've done in wrong hands?

Kuma handed me the book. In his last months, Dr. Ventnor had taught me the characters of _Sethiparnen_ writing. It had just thirty characters, as it was phonetic. I could sound out the book's words, even if I didn't know their meanings.

Thus, in a shadowy tunnel, as Kuma held a light-crystal beside me, I read over Dr. Ventnor the words that he'd read over the Colonel. I wished that I could do more for one who'd been the next to the last of his kind. As I read, my eyes strayed to the empty niche awaiting the last of his kind. I wondered whether we Tani would find him and lay him to rest. It saddened me to think that we might not.

When the words had run out, the four of us Tani said the Lord's Prayer and sang "Amazing Grace" together; then we sealed Dr. Ventnor's body into its niche and replaced the shingle over the tunnel's entrance. Shaking my head, I said, "We need to find shelter --"

"While you were on your way," Un said, "I did some scouting. About a mile west of here there's an old cellar in the side of a hill. The cellar isn't much, but it's dry and out of view. With some light-crystals and heat-crystals, the cellar should be OK."

"Sounds like heaven," I murmured.

The four of us slipped through dark woods to the cellar and made it livable with crystals. Once we'd shared water and food that Kuma and Un had brought in their own backpacks, we lay down.

With no warning, I broke down and blubbered for hours. My companions -- even Lona, who had as much reason to cry as I had -- held me and comforted me till my tears ran out, and the four of us lay in a ball and slept.

Even after the Homeworld's destruction, I'd never felt as bad as I felt that night. In the morning, though, I rose and returned to duty. May Holy Light send that no Tan ever again feel so bad!

~~~

The next morning, Kuma and Un-Thor ran home to Dothan and Omaha. They could safely stay there, and Dala in Bennettsville, as the names Camille Delacroix, Andy Meadows, and Delia le Mars never arose in the investigation into the deaths of Dr. Ventnor and the three artifact-hunters. Dr. Ventnor never actually used the names of any of his subjects in the files on alien physiology and psychology that the police found in his office.

Those files started a firestorm in the media. Talking heads debated endlessly whether Dr. Ventnor had just been running a hoax that blew up in his face, or really had been hiding alien children. Respectability favored the former model; numbers, the latter.

Lona and I became the faces of alien children, polite academic overachievers who'd killed and fled. On talk shows, some wondered aloud how such innocent-looking, doll-like faces could belong to killers. Others quoted the Biblical verse that even the devil can appear as an angel of light.

Pundits debated whether Lona and I were murderers who'd fled from guilt, or victims who'd fled from fear of persecution. Pundits debated even more fiercely whether we were really aliens, or just, as we'd claimed for twelve years, Afghan war-orphans with shared genetic anomalies. It helped our case that no alien artifacts or biological specimens had surfaced. At least, the Clorox had worked.

Even those of you who hadn't met me again on the earth heard of the alien-hunter scandal. It was the stuff of news features and talk shows for weeks on end. It didn't hurt the scandal that the California State Police found the body of Donald Stormgren bound and burned in an abandoned cabin near Mount Lassen. I held Lona while she cried for a man who'd left her long before.

I learned some of the news from filching discarded newspapers and stealing WiFi with my laptop, but most of it from Dala, Kuma, and Un when they brought Lona and me supplies. They brought these with their earth-parents' permission; as the avengers of Dr. Ventnor's death, Lona and I could do no wrong in his former patients' eyes.

Dala and Un were troubled, but supportive; Kuma, her usual light-hearted, outspoken self. "You know, you two," she said to Lona and me when she brought us much-needed panties and socks, "if you went onto some talk shows, you could earn enough money for us Tani to live like kings."

I was about to make a sour remark when Lona beat me to it. "Before or after we get cut open in Area 51?"

Detectives and reporters interviewed all of my and Lona's acquaintances. I was lucky enough to download a reporter's interview with Kendra and Millie on pirated WiFi.

"How do you feel about your friend's being a fugitive?" a blonde poodle-woman asked my two friends.

"It's just wrong!" Kendra called out. "What did Belle do but guard her home from men who'd already killed?"

"Now, everyone is saying that she's a space alien because that doctor in Columbus had those silly files," Millie said.

"Don't you believe that Belle might be an alien?"

"What if she is?" Kendra called out. "She's still a better human than most whom I know."

"She's a true friend," Millie said. "I just hope that she's all right wherever she is, and that she can come home soon."

By now, you should be able to guess that I wept when I saw that interview. I really wish that I'd trusted Kendra and Millie with my secret. I just hope that, when the Work is well in hand, I can tell them how much they mean to me.

I urged Kuma and the other Tani still living at home to keep a backpack handy at all times and to be ready to jump through the nearest window. As for Lona and me, we moved from shelter to shelter. We had the money that I'd taken from my house, and grew expert at finding lost coins and bills. When Dala brought us some hair dye, we dyed our hair black, which made us look even more alien than we are, but different from the pictures on the news. Some cheap reading glasses completed our disguises and let us shop at dollar stores for what we couldn't find.

Yes, I did put my Girl Scout training to use! Lona and I found edible roots and herbs in the woods, and caught with our bare hands fish that we baked with heat-crystals. It may sound strange for a fugitive to say so, but I felt guilty for fishing with no license, and for tickling fish, which is illegal almost everywhere. Still, Lona and I needed meat to go with our water cress, dandelion greens, and cattail tubers.

We weren't wholly inactive. We helped Dala, Kuma, and Un-Thor move and hide their crystal-ships, crystals, and books. Soon, Lona and I had three more shelters where we could hide.

~~~

As the hue and cry over missing alien girls died, and as time moved on into what should've been my freshman year of college, and as the coming of the Message drew ever nearer, I turned my mind to the Work. "Save the earth," _Kan Tan_ Sor-On had told me the night before his own world would end, but he'd given me no instructions on how to save it. I pondered the Colonel and Dr. Ventnor. They'd given me hints and training, but no clear plan of action.

In the end, as both of my _Sethiparnen_ tutors had told me, we Tani would have to decide for ourselves how to do the Work.

I asked my fellow Tani as individuals and as a group what they felt the Work should be. Dala and Lona argued for doing anonymous random acts of kindness; Kuma and Un-Thor, for fighting crime and corruption.

I shook my head. "Those are good deeds, and they may be part of the Work, but they won't keep the earth from going the way of Ul or the nine other ruined worlds."

Still, lacking a better plan, I let Dala and Lona pick up litter, and Kuma and Un-Thor break up muggings. I myself, alone or teamed with Kuma and Un, struck the kind of targets to which the Colonel had once sent me. I feared, though, that I was spinning my wheels.

One night, after a raid, Un-Thor was in a meditative mood. "When the Message comes, we'll really have to step up our activities. The earth-humans, though, will come after us with all that they've got. We may be able to take bullets --"

"One bullet," I said. "I wouldn't have liked my chance against a whole clip, and the earth-humans have weapons worse than bullets. RPG's, Hellfire missiles, Daisycutters --"

Un grinned. "You're going where I am, Mira. One of the ways for the earth-humans to destroy the earth is with weapons. If the earth-humans didn't have them --"

Kuma looked excited. "Are you talking of taking them from cold, dead fingers?"

I knew that she was joking, but, sometimes, the girl's bloodthirstiness scares me. Before I could address it, Un shook his head. "I'm talking of keeping weapons out of warm, live fingers."

I shook my head. "The weapons that could destroy the earth, the NCBW technologies, are beyond the reach of three of us jumping over walls."

Un shrugged at my negativism. "Those weapons are guarded by guys with guns and security cams. If we take those away, the big weapons are vulnerable."

Kuma nodded. "As the Colonel said, 'If you do what you can, you'll learn that you can do more than you thought you could.'"

I held in a sigh. I hate for someone to quote the Colonel to me, especially when that someone might just be right.

After more talk, I approved Un's plan. He, Kuma, and I began a campaign of disarmament. One night, a warehouse filled with killer ammunition -- dum-dum bullets, hollow-point rounds, flechettes -- went up in a series of spectacular explosions. Another night, a factory for manufacturing automatic rifles burned to the ground.

The Press went wild. Speculation centered on domestic terrorism or industrial sabotage. Television screens showed grainy images from security cameras that had caught persons dressed as Ninjas moving about doomed sites. None of the speculation spoke of missing alien children. Did innocent-looking, doll-like faces work in our favor again?

When things go well, one gets cocky. One night, as the three of us were trashing a factory for plastic armor and munitions, and fires had already broken out there, one of us -- I won't shame him or her by saying who -- knocked the relief valve off of a tank car filled with isopropylene. As highly flammable gas jetted out, I screamed, "Get out of here now!" Adding motion to emotion, I grabbed Kuma and Un-Thor and dragged them with me.

I stopped some distance from the factory to look back at it. Lying with me behind a ridgeline's partial shelter, Kuma giggled, while Un said in an infuriating drawl, "Mira, I think that you're overreac--"

The horizon went off like the flashbulb of the gods. Automatically, I counted. "One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi --"

Shortly after five, I went deaf. My companions and I bounced around like things that bounce around a lot. When we lay still again, and afterimages of a fireball had begun to fade on my retinas, Un gave me a stricken look. I'd have said to him, _As you were saying?_ but he wouldn't have heard me.

After a while, as legions of flashing lights began converging on the factory, the three of us Tani rose and ran off through darkness. When hearing returned, Un said to me in a weak voice, "Can we call this, 'Mission accomplished'?"

I glowered at him. "Don't expect style points!"

~~~

If you think that I'd put off the quest for the three missing boys, I hadn't -- not wholly. Whenever I could get on line, I looked for news of the weird that might involve them, and I asked my ship's brain-crystal for tips on how to find the boys through their troves of memory-crystals. When the ship told me that a search for memory-crystals with a speaking-crystal took low-level overflights of large amounts of terrain, I shelved the plan awhile. It would do me no good to find the boys, but destroy the earth.

Thus, the honors of finding the next two boys went to someone besides me. Late one night, Lona and I were lying in my ship's shelter and listening to music on a battery-operated radio when Kuma, with her usual abruptness, stepped into our light-crystals' glow. "Do I have a surprise for you two!" she called out.

"Your surprises involve explosions," Lona muttered.

Kuma grinned. "Not this time, though you just might burst at that!" Turning, she called through the shelter's entrance, "Come in, guys!"

Out of the darkness stepped two more Tani. One was tall, but slender, with a wistful look; the other, tall and broad-shouldered, with a wide forehead. My heart leapt as I recalled his features as the royal line's. "Are you Par-On?" I said hopefully.

He gave me a wry smile. "Sorry, no. I'm Van-Dor, or Vance Givens, as I'm known back on the ranch in Nevada. I thought that you'd recall me, Mira. I used to study with you and Lona back on the Homeworld."

Now that I looked at him closely, I could see the features of the big, quiet boy who'd learned signs and watched _Sesame Street_ with me in Gam Tol. Still, he does have royal blood, if you read the genealogies. He just wasn't Par. Hope had led me astray, likely not the last time.

Van gestured with his chin at the other boy. "This is Sil-Tan, or Bob Lake, as he's known in Taos, New Mexico. Kuma --"

I held up a hand. "You don't want to steal her thunder. Before we hear her story, though, let's greet each other in the Tan way. Van, you no doubt recall what that is."

He did recall, catching me up in a hug. This was followed by a round of hugs. At the end of these, Lona and Sil were slow to part as they gazed with questioning, but hopeful looks into each other's eyes. Yes, Lona had rejoined her husband-to-be, and Dala would no doubt soon meet hers. Mira, it seemed, was odd girl out.

"So, Kuma," I said, "you hold bragging rights again. How did you win them this time?"

"Just as I won them with you -- with the Internet. I came across a Web site of paintings of desert scenes, which showed men and women in Tan dress and bore writing in Tan script. The artist was Sil. I sent him an e mail suggesting that he and I meet --"

I shook my head. "When have you had time to run to Taos?"

"I didn't run there. Sil suggested meeting on neutral ground, so I met him and Van across the Mississippi in Helena, Arkansas."

Sil smiled wryly. "The meeting on neutral ground was Vance's idea. After the scandal over Dr. Ventnor's death, Vance figured that Kuma's e mail might be a trap, so he chose the meeting place to test her."

Van nodded. "Bob and I hid on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, but, when we saw Kuma run across it on water, we figured that she had to be legit. Running on water is a real feat, Kuma."

She shrugged. "Mira was the one who learned how to do it."

Lona and I gave each other stunned looks. Kuma, acting modest? To what strange world had we come?

I glanced at Sil. "Clearly, you were in touch with Van when Kuma's e-mail came. How had you met him? The West is so big."

"He found me. I'll let him tell the story.'

Van nodded solemnly. "The West may be big, but it has few places where you can cross the Grand Canyon. I figured that if I staked those places out I'd someday see a Tan run across one of them. One night, I saw Bob running across Hoover Dam, and I chased him down."

_Van and Sil will fit right in,_ I thought.

"Kuma," Van said, "mentioned to Bob and me a Message and a Work."

I began to bring the newcomers up to speed.

In the light-crystals' glow. I pause, sweeping my gaze across the seven other Tani. "I'm nearing our story's end, but I think that we have time to let Van and Sil tell their stories."

_Van-Dor shrugs. "There isn't much to my story. I live on a ranch with Mom and Dad. There, I learned to wrangle horses and kept up my knowledge of_ nal Tan. _In my spare time, I looked for other Tani, but found just Bob. I went twice a year to Columbus to see Dr. Ventnor, but I never met any of the rest of you there."_

Par-On nods sagely. "He did well, scheduling our visits so that they never overlapped. We could use his guidance now more than ever."

I shake my head. "He'd be unhappy if he thought we were still dependent on him."

Dala looks sad. "He liked to tell me, 'Cling to a crutch as long as you need it, but throw it away as soon as you can.' Still, I miss talking with him more than I can say."

Par looks at Sil-Tan. "What of your story?"

Sil shrugs. "It's soon told, just like Vance's. Taos is an artistic community, where I early on took up painting landscapes." He smiled. "Desert scenes, because those are what Taos offers. Vance and I were lucky, I guess. We got to live in places that reminded us of the Homeworld.

_"When I learned to view the memory-crystals, I began to add figures from them to my landscapes. I also began to put in Tan script for color, but, as I couldn't read it, I used what looked good to me. What looked good didn't make sense. Vance, when he met me, told me the error of my ways. When he looked at one of my most dramatic paintings, one of a_ lex _race, he asked me, "Why did you caption it, 'This is the way to peel a tuber'?"_

Amid laughter, Dala asks Sil, "Did you post your paintings on line in hope of their leading the rest of us to you?"

He nods. "They did lead you to me, in the end."

~~~

As time passed, and the seven of us Tani still found no sign of Par-On, I took a course of action that troubled me.

I'd been uneasy about healing the crystal-ships even as I'd healed them. I could never forget that it'd been the great crystals that weakened the Homeworld till Nas-Ul's tidal pull could destroy it. Certainly, I didn't want to repeat Ul's destruction on the earth!

I figured, though, that it'd been the forces used to shape the great crystals, and the forces used to drive the crystal-ships from star to star, that'd done the bulk of the damage to Ul. I figured that the earth, not lying within a gas giant's Roche Limit, could take moderate use of crystal-ships. To save what one loves, one must sometimes risk it for the sake of greater reward.

When I told my thoughts to the six other Tani with me, they accepted them. On my authority as interim leader till Par appeared, I ruled that we'd use the crystal-ships only in the Work to prevent the earth-humans from developing or using technologies that threatened their and our world's survival.

I must confess to you all that I didn't seek special permission from the rest of you for specific uses of my crystal-ship. A strange lightning strike that kept a supercollider from going on line, an explosion in a wing of a factory developing black-budget weapons -- now you know the story behind the stories. No doubt, you'll soon make your own. Take care, though, not to get drunk on power. To fly through darkness like a bat, to come upon your target from above, to unleash on it energies to take a ship from star to star, to circle your target and fly off, unseen -- that power is heady.

As the time of the Message neared, I broke my own rule. I felt that all of the Tan should be together under Par's leadership when the Message came. Finding him, I told myself, was strategically necessary for the Work, and justified a crystal-ship's use.

I felt that for the search I should have someone beside me. I chose Kuma. She fits into a crystal-ship with me, and, as Un-Thor said, she's someone whom you want at your side if things get tight. When I called her and asked her to join me on the search, she didn't say no.

Where to search was a big question. I assumed that we girls had been placed east of the Mississippi, you boys west of it, but there was much of the West left to search. Texas and California alone are countries in themselves.

"I have an idea!" Kuma piped out. "Un-Thor lives in Nebraska; Sil-Tan, in New Mexico; Van-Dor, in Nevada. I bet that Par-On also lives in a state that starts with N. That means North Dakota!"

"That's silly, Kuma! I have a feeling about the Pacific Northwest, though. Let's start there!"

All right, laugh, all of you! Who knew that the answer would be as simple as a letter of the alphabet?

"OK," Kuma said, "but we could swing through North Dakota on the way there."

"Good idea. We could head up to Minnesota and swing west through North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho on the way to Washington."

Under cover of darkness, Kuma and I set out north in my crystal-ship. We heeded the speaking-crystal closely to learn how far off it could detect my memory-crystals. Sadly, just ten miles.

"It'd take forever to quarter the West in twenty-mile-wide strips," Kuma muttered.

"And we'd be harming the earth with the quartering," I said. "Listen, it's not far out of our way for us to swing by Lona's shelter. It'll show us how far we can really pick up memory-crystals."

Flying low over Illinois, Kuma and I swung through southern Michigan and over Lake Michigan. We found that ten miles really was how far we could detect memory-crystals.

"Maybe," Kuma said, "we could write messages on the landscape. 'Par-On, where are you?'"

I sniffed. "I hope that you aren't suggesting crop circles." Could earth-humans really believe that aliens would come from the stars to vandalize the earth's food supply?

"Maybe, we could spray-paint the messages onto overpasses. The police would take Tan signs for gang symbols, I bet. We --"

Kuma's words were drowned in a squeal of static from the speaking-crystal. She and I, hands over ears, were helpless just then.

When the static died, I called out, "What was that?"

"A static burst characteristic of a power-crystal's full discharge," the brain-crystal told me. "The burst's intensity indicates that it was about a thousand miles off."

"Who was using a power-crystal?" I muttered.

"Unknown."

Kuma asked the brain-crystal a useful question. "Do you have a fix on the burst?"

"Three degrees north of our present heading."

"Head for the burst's source," I said.

The ship flew on over Lake Michigan and Wisconsin. Twice more, bursts came; the brain-crystal triangulated on them. After the third burst, my ears were ringing. As even Kuma was showing signs of distress, I shut the speaking-crystal down. It'd be poor strategy for me to let myself be deaf when I met the power-crystal's wielder.

When the crystal-ship began to descend, the only lights in sight showed a ranch house and some barns. The crystal-ship hid itself in a grove of pines; Kuma and I got out. Using all of the cover available to us, we slunk through darkness towards the house's front porch.

When we eyed it from the shelter of a wellhead about twenty yards off, we saw a man sitting in a rocking chair. Astonishment flared through me as I recognized him. "The Colonel!" I gasped out.

"Dr. Ventnor!" Kuma said beside me.

I should've expected the last of the _Sethiparnen_ to be near a power-crystal. Rising, I walked towards him. After a second, Kuma followed me. Kneeling on my left knee, and crossing my arms over my chest as I bowed my head, I said to the man on the porch, "Please, sir, could you tell me the name of the people that once lived on a world of Tau Ceti?"

The man made his kind's deep, rich laughter. "Why do you ask me a question to which you know the answer, Mirabelle Gordon? Welcome to you and to your friend, Camille Delacroix."

Kuma and I looked at each other. "If it please you, sir," I said, "the two of us go by our Tan names."

"Ah. Well, then, welcome, Mira Das-Es and Kuma Tel-Nur. You may call me Bill. Are you hungry or thirsty? I wasn't expecting guests, but I could rustle up something for you in no time."

"Please, Bill," I said, "could you tell us where Par-On is?"

"At work just now, but he'll be along shortly. You two might as well be comfortable while you await him."

Kuma and I followed Bill inside, where he fried us up some omelets. While he ate these with us, he told us that he'd learned of our lives from the Colonel and Dr. Ventnor, and was deeply grateful to us for our retrieving and burying their bodies. He himself, for the past thirteen years, had been training Par, or Parker Baines, as he was known in those parts, to lead his people in peace or war. Parker just then was expanding underground chambers housing artifacts of the Tan and of the _Sethiparnen._ He was using a power-crystal for excavations \--

"Excuse me, Bill," I said. "Is using a power-crystal safe? My grandfather told me that it was the great crystals that destroyed Ul."

"The earth is a sturdier world than your homeworld was," Bill said. "Besides, didn't you and Kuma yourselves use great crystals to get here in that crystal-ship that I heard fly up?"

"He has you there, Mira," Kuma said in an infuriating tone.

I nodded curtly, chagrined at having forgotten the _Sethiparnen's_ power to hear brain-crystals. Still, I hadn't known that Bill would be there.

"Of course, you're right, Mira, in saying that the great crystals are dangerous to the earth in the long run," Bill went on to say. "You and Parker will have to set strict standards --"

As Bill spoke, I heard a door open behind me. Turning, I saw in the doorway one in whom Sor-On's majesty and Luna's beauty were reborn.

Going to my right knee before him, I crossed my arms over my chest and bowed my head. _"Lon-al lu-es, Kan Tan Par-On,"_ I said. _"Su-in Mira Das-Es, ti-thar-a-es."_

For the benefit of you whose _nal Tan_ still needs work, I said, "Joy to you, Ruler of the Tan, Par-On. I'm your wife-to-be, Mira Das-Es."

He gave me a smile of majesty and beauty. "Joy to you, my wife-to-be! I suspect that you and I need to discuss much."

After the late meal, he led Kuma and me into the underground chambers where he'd been working. There, he showed us wonders that still dazzle my eyes.

The underground chambers held artifacts of the _Sethiparnen_ \-- books, jewelry, sculpture, and strange tools and machines. Here, on a larger scale, was the niche in Gam Tol that had brought the Colonel to tears and won us Tani the _Sethiparnen's_ favor. When I spoke aloud my hope that Bill could teach us to read the books and use the tools, Par-On said that he, too, hoped that Bill would have a chance to teach the rest of us Tani. If the Work took too long to give him that chance, though, Par knew some of the _Sethiparnen's_ lore and could pass it on.

In the chambers, I learned what the crystal-ships had been doing in Ul's last days as I looked on artifacts of the Homeworld all around me. Paintings on paper and hide awaited walls for their display. Bone-flutes, harps, and drums awaited players. Brain-crystals, speaking-crystals, and power-crystals awaited crystal-ships to hold them. Pots of _bu_ awaited a chance to turn dead organic matter into soil.

Most wonderful of all of the chambers' treasures, though, were not things, but persons. In the glow of sleeping-crystals, eight _Kum-i,_ four male and four female, awaited a dawn when they could rise to work. It'd be the earth's crops that they'd water, and the earth's horses, cattle, and sheep that they'd feed and groom, but the _Kum-i_ would find joy in service on the earth, I felt, as they'd found it on Ul. Their children could marry us _An-i's_ children, and they and we could be one people again as we had been.

When I spoke my thought aloud, Par said, "They can find joy in service if we make this a world where they can live in peace."

He took Kuma and me farther to show us a last artifact, one that has lain at his feet tonight as it awaited its part in our ceremony of rebirth as a people. Together, Par, Kuma, and I viewed his memory-crystals and read his books. Together, the three of us spoke of a time of testing behind us, of a time of war before us, and of a time of hope beyond the war.

~~~

Now, beyond the ring of light-crystals, dawn is rising. My tale is done, but we Tani must observe one more rite before we give Holy Light the offering of water.

"When Par-On and I had spoken," I say, "he sent me to summon you to this place, at this time, to recall what we are as one people, and to prepare ourselves for the Work soon to start. Now, you've heard our people's story, and you know of the Message to the earth and of the Work for which our people sent us here. Will you bind yourselves to the Work and follow our ancestral leader as he guides us in it?"

Some eagerly, some reluctantly, all say, "We will." Kuma hands me the bundle that has lain through the night at Par's feet. As I take off its wrappings, I reveal the most precious artifact that the Tan sent with us children to the earth -- the three-spired golden crown of the House of On. As I hold the crown over Par's head, I feed crystal-shaping gift into gold. Crystals of healing, light, and memory outblaze the dawn.

The others go to their right knees, cross their arms over their chests, and bow their heads. As one they say, "Joy to you, Ruler of the Tan, Par-On!" As I settle the crown onto Par's head, Kuma and Un-Thor say, "Joy to you, Ruler of the earth!"

As some of the others repeat the words, I think, _Par may have to rule this world to save it._

He doesn't repudiate the words. Rising, he says, "When we leave this place, we must start to spread the word that the Message is coming, and we must devote ourselves to the Work. Once we leave, our lives will be caught up in the Work for Holy Light knows how long to come.

"The Work will consume us. It may even exhaust us. We must accept the chance that not all of us will make it through the Work. When it daunts us, we must look back at ten lost worlds as the testimony of what awaits the earth if we let the Work fail. When it daunts us, we must look forward to its fulfillment, an age of peace that we Tani and the earth-humans will share as equals among the stars. For the sake of that testimony and that fulfillment, the Work is worth whatever it costs us.

"Now, before we leave, let's join as a people in our oldest and most sacred rite, the offering of water at dawn."

We kneel on both knees to the sun, just clearing the horizon, and hold out to the sun bowls of water. We bind ourselves anew to the old foundations of faith, family, and community, and to the old virtues of duty, loyalty, and truthfulness. We bind ourselves to the new imperatives to remember the Homeworld, to perpetuate the People, and to save the earth. We pour out most of the water, and drink the rest of it in honor of Holy Light, to join creation and Creator in compassion.

We gather our belongings and scatter to our homes to ready ourselves to fight for a world that, regardless of the cost, we'll never let go into darkness.

In a few days, children of the earth, a message will start to reach you from a dying world of Wolf 1061. In the message, you will learn of nine worlds that became ruined, and of one that fell apart, because intelligence built means of its own destruction.

When the Message comes, you will learn that you are not unique, but that there have been others like you, mortal, ever living on doom's edge, and subject to destruction at their own hands unless other hands guide them away from it. When the Message comes, you will react to it according to what lies in your hearts, moved by the divisions of ideology, nationality, language, and religion that have ever led you into conflict. Some of you will see doom, others will see hope, but all will see change.

In the day of the Message, we, the Tani, children of the dying world, will start the Work of ensuring that the earth does not follow the earlier ten worlds into death. In that day, the crystal-ships will rise, cutting from the earth what is driving it to its ruin. Sadly, some may die in the Work, but the rest will enter a future free from fear.

The Work will go on till we, the Tani, and you, our new Companions, can live together in peace. When that has come, you and we will work together to make the earth the paradise that you've always dreamed of its being. In time, you and we together will go to the stars to bring new life to the ruined worlds. With us as your guides, you'll live, free from fear of racial death, as long as the stars shine.

If you liked _Daughter of Orion,_ you can read more of my work at:

"Christian Writings by Alfred D. Byrd,"

<http://www.geocities.com/byrdthistledown>

I'm also the author of the following books, available from all major on-line booksellers:

Thistledown

Through the Gate of Horn: The First Thread of the Dhitha Tapestry

The Ghost of Pelfrey's Bend

On the Wings of Dream: The Second Thread of the Dhitha Tapestry

Trinity, Canon, and Constantine: Clear Light on the Early Church

Kabbalah for Evangelical Christians

and of the following books available from Lulu.com.

Asenath's Tale

At the Brink of War: The Fourth Thread of the Dhitha Tapestry

Between Two Fires

In the Fire of Dawn: The Third Thread of the Dhitha Tapestry

The Light

Perryville: An Epic of the American Civil War in Kentucky

The Road to Bull Run: An Epic of the American Civil War

A Song of the One

To Dream Atlantis

