The night he came, winter had begun. The wind howled outside the window and blew the snow into drifts against the panes. In the dark, the snow wasn't white like my name. It was blue, like the gems we would find in hyacinth flowers that Mother always told us we must leave there and not bring home, no matter how pretty they looked. Rose had a few, though, in a collection of pretty things she kept tucked away.
That night, Rose was away on the kitchen floor. She'd taken a handful of the acorns we put away in the fall and was playing marbles with a squirrel she'd brought home. I could feel the little wooden acorn skins flick against her nails, feel the squirrel's soft tail-fur brush under her fingers, even as I was looking the other way, at Mother gazing out the window toward the stars.
Mother had such a sad look on her face that night. That mood came on her from time to time. We were both used to it, and Rose didn't think much about it, but it always struck me, and that night I went and snuggled up under the quilt with her and tried to distract her with something nice. "Mother, read us a story."
She showed me a smile. "All right, Snow, dear," and she got a book from the shelf and then rejoined me under the quilt, while acorns still skittered over the kitchen floor.
I still don't know why she picked some of the stories she did, but later I understood the one she picked that night. This is the part of it I remember.
"'"O Giver of Blessings," the Minstrel prayed, "grant that even these small broken fragments of the Sampo, the miraculous Mill of Fortune, may take root and flourish and bring joy and plenty to this land."
"'Then, taking the pieces reverently in his hands, he planted them in the soil, and before his very eyes, his prayer was answered. From the fragments sprang up rich crops of rye and barley, and fruits and vegetables of all kinds, and rich pasture for animals, and so the Land of Heroes again became the land of plenty and peace.
"'But that was not all. As the Minstrel watched, his eyes became very bright and his vision wonderfully clear. He saw all the other fragments of the Sampo, and he watched each one as it was carried East, West, North, or South and left upon some strange, unheard-of shore. Like the Sampo itself, they poured out wealth in many forms and in endless profusion. From them sprang wonderful trees, bearing delicious fruits and gorgeous flowers, and all the plenty of wood and meadow, and also numberless beautiful and priceless objects — pearls and precious stones, fine silks, and gold and silver.
"'Some of the fragments were carried up into the air and away among the stars, and there—'"
"It doesn't say that," Rose suddenly called from the kitchen. "I was looking."
And I blinked — blinked the eyes that had been looking.
"It's a very old story," Mother said, "from before people lived out among the stars, but I thought we mustn't forget those people now."
We're the ones who are living out among the stars, you know, I told Rose, in our private way. If people back home read the story that way, maybe they'll think of us.
How do you know that was home? How do you know this isn't home, and they brought us back here from somewhere else, hm?
Well, I didn't really know. "Home" feels like the center of the galaxy, and everywhere else feels like "out among the stars," but maybe "home" is just a matter of the first thing you remember.
The first thing I remember… I remember it barely, the way you remember a dream. I remember the room where the walls were flat and white and perfectly squared, but stained and battered. I remember the food that came in metal cans. Sometimes the ghost of its taste still wafts across my tongue and I wish I could have it again just once, but there's nothing like that here. I remember Mother sitting beside my bed spooning it into my mouth when I was too weak to get up.
And I remember, when Mother was at work, the long few feet to the window, crawling and pushing a chair into place and pulling myself up onto it so I could look over the sill and down and down. The window was high, high up in the air, and down on the ground, there was a fence, and pavement like flat, gray stone with cracks here and there, and there were always boxes and bags and things.
One thing down there always caught my eye, up against the fence. It was a little bit green. Once, in the summer, it had a little white spot on it. It looked almost like a dead animal, but I knew it was alive, and then, if I stayed and looked until Mother got back from work, I would see her push the bags and boxes over it to cover it up, but I knew it was there.
That's what I remember, until Rose came.
I remember her even when Mother's belly got round. She probably explained to me how a baby was growing inside her, but she didn't have to tell me, because I could hear it even then. Rose didn't sound like a person then, but as time went on she sounded like something alive, and I remember I started to go much farther than the few feet to the window that used to seem so far. Wherever Mother was in the house, I would go to her and listen to the life inside her. Finally Rose was born, and I was so strong then I could help take care of her.
That was when Mother first started having those moods, or something like them. She told me she was so glad that I was stronger, but she would look out the window, and her eyes were far away. She didn't seem sad, then, exactly, but something was wrong.
When I looked out the window like I used to, the cracks in the pavement had turned into seams of lush green forcing its way through, and that little dead-looking thing I always used to notice… It had gotten bigger and stronger just as I did, and before I knew it, it was a dark green bush as tall as the fence, and the white spots grew bigger than before, until they flowered into roses. And down beside it, at the foot, there was another clump, smaller then, but the same dark, healthy green — and this one spotted with red.
It was after that that the strange men came. They took me away to a place with metal walls and narrow, metal-railed beds. Even the people seemed to be made of metal; I couldn't even see their faces behind the shiny suits they wore. I remember how I would cry when they poked me with needles, and then it all gets fuzzy, because I was getting sick again. I got too weak to get up from the narrow bed, and they had to wheel me around and I watched the lights go past on the ceiling…
And then they brought Mother and Rose. They didn't tell me they'd brought them, but I knew, and I got away and ran to them.
We never went back to the old home again. The next place we went was on the ship that brought us here. We were on it for months and months watching the stars out the window. I remember enjoying the trip, but I kept thinking of the rose trees below the window and missing them.
And then the very first night I went to bed in this cabin that they built for us here, the very first morning I woke up and ran out into the yard, there they were, out in front, the rose-trees, white and red.
They left us here. Just me and Mother and Rose, like before. Rose was still just a baby then, too young to remember. This place is the first thing she remembers, so to her, it's home. And in a way, to me, it's home, too. It's been almost twenty summers now.
Of course, Rose actually remembers everything I remember, but just catching the reflection, it's not the same. When we were smaller, once I wandered off and found just one strawberry and I ate it myself, and Rose cried and sulked until we found a whole patch of them and she could have some, too.
"From now on," I told her, "everywhere we go, we'll go together." And I knew we had to stay together, because I knew what had happened when they took us apart.
"For as long as we live!" Rose insisted, being at a dramatic age.
"And what one has, she must share with the other," Mother added, and she was right.
I didn't feel sorry for Rose, if that was the only life she remembered. It's better here, I would tell her, and I knew she believed it, because she knew I believed it. We went outside in every season but winter, and walked in the cool grass and found plenty of sweet things to eat. The animals came to our hands, and we would stroke their soft, warm fur and talk to them.
Sometimes we took birds or squirrels or rabbits home to sing for Mother or to play with, and sometimes we took them home for Mother to cook, but we thought no more of that than of picking flowers, and we didn't wonder that even so, the birds would light on the branches above us and sing, and the rabbits would eat clover from our hands and the squirrels play games with us with their acorns. But if we found a fox with a mouse in its teeth, it lowered its head as if to apologize for such violence.
In the summer we even slept the night outside in the softness of the grass, and had deer lay down beside us to keep us warm. Once we did that and woke up to find a great stag standing over us, and when we looked, we found that he had stood between us and the edge of a cliff, as if to protect us from falling.
And then in the evenings and in the wintertime, we helped Mother in our little cottage. Every morning Rose would make a wreath with one white rose and one red from the rose trees in the yard, and in the evening I would polish the copper kettle, humming and whistling, until it shone like a mirror of pink gold.
Sometimes Mother would watch me and shake her head. "What is it?" I asked once, "shouldn't I polish it?"
And she said, "Oh, polish it all you want. I couldn't do it like you do." There she shook her head again. "You have no idea how hard it would be for me to get it like that."
I didn't think anything of it then, didn't realize that our powers were easing the work, and that this wouldn't have been such a sweet idyllic life for people who weren't like us. But for us, it seemed sweet enough.
But sometimes, when we talked to the animals, there would come a little waft of sadness or frustration that they couldn't answer, that we didn't have anyone except Mother and each other to talk back and forth with.
And sometimes, Mother would look out the window with those sad eyes, the way she did that night.
She had finished the story of the Mill of Fortune that was broken but blessed the world with its scattered fragments, and she was just taking another book from the shelf when there came a knock on the door.
Mother gasped and jumped. Her hand sprang to her breast, and the book tumbled to the floor.
We both looked up. Not since we came to live in the cottage here had I seen Mother look like that. Rose had never seen it, not that she could remember for herself. Maybe that's why she was the one who got up and went to the door.
When I think of it, it strikes me that no one had ever knocked on the door of our cottage before, but Mother had read us stories where it happened, so Rose knew it meant that someone wanted to come in. But she looked at Mother before she did anything.
"You… You'd best open the door for whoever it is," Mother said.
Rose did open the door, and standing there was a big black bear. The light from inside cast him gold in the front, the darkness from outside left his back as an inky blot, smudged over with blue splotches of snow clinging to his fur.
Mother's shoulders fell a couple of inches, but still, we just stared. We'd never had reason to be afraid of any of the animals — not even a bear on its hind legs — but none of them had ever knocked on our door before. It was more curious than frightening. Only Rose's squirrel was frightened, and ran to the top of the kitchen shelves and up into the rafters.
This bear made a little dip of his head like a bow, and leaned in around the door post and looked around at all three of us. His eyes were black and shining, and somehow very intelligent, but at that moment they were wide with a kind of gentle concern, as if watching us to make sure he did the right thing.
And then the bear spoke.
"Ladies, may I please come in?"
Mother caught her breath again, more quietly, and blinked at him — and then she straightened. Not the stiff straightening of fright; her hand relaxed against her chest, but she seemed to grow taller in an easy, graceful way.
"Yes, of course, good bear," she said. "Please come in and warm yourself by the fire."
With another dip of his head, the bear dropped to his four feet, and Rose, who had never been afraid of anything, led him in.
I quickly picked Mother's book up from the floor and then remembered how Mother always told us we must be kind and polite to anyone we might meet. I set the book aside and curtsied. "Pleased to meet you. I'm Snow White. This is my sister, Rose Red, and our mother."
"Honored to make your acquaintance," he said, with another bow, and after all the years of listening to storybooks, I caught a not-quite-humble graciousness in his voice and gesture that was somehow… princely.
Mother and I shook out the hearth rug and arranged it on the floor for him. "Not too close to the fire, now," Mother said. "We wouldn't want our guest to burn his handsome fur."
"Thank you," the bear said, and settled himself on the rug with quite a human sigh of relief. "I was half-frozen out there. Bears are supposed to sleep through it, I know, but I guess I'm an insomniac."
Rose squelched a little laugh.
"Oh," I said, "there's snow in your coat. You'll get wet and catch cold."
"I'm afraid I can't reach it like this."
"Shall we brush it off for you?"
"Yes, please."
Rose fetched the broom and the dustpan and knocked the snow off, and I got a cloth and my own hairbrush to dry it and smooth his fur again. Rose joined in smoothing him just with her hands, and I suppose that's how she was the one to start it.
All the time I was brushing him, I felt like there was something fascinatingly bothersome about his fur, like seeing a blemish and feeling the nagging need to burst it, despite any scruple good advice or good manners might have to keep you from doing it. I did hold back, but Rose finally couldn't take it — the feeling was worse because we both saw it, it was echoing between the two of us, and finally she took a fistful of his pelt and yanked on it.
My hands itched to do the same thing, but I held my breath when she did it.
The bear didn't start at all. He just laughed, and when Rose yanked his fur again he laughed more. At that I couldn't resist joining in. I yanked and pulled and dug hard with the hairbrush, and then Rose took the broom again and fairly beat him with it.
"Now, girls!" Mother chided.
"Oh, let them be," the bear said easily. "This hide is thicker than that."
His permission turned it into a game, and we giggled as we harried his fur and he sat happy and patient. When he'd finally had enough, he laughed again. "Come on, let me keep my skin," he said. "I'm going to need it a little bit longer."
"Yes, girls, settle down," Mother agreed. She seemed uncomfortable with our behavior no matter what the bear had said. "Now, sit down and the guest can have our story together with us." She picked up the book she'd dropped before.
"Oh, oh, but you'll have to start over," Rose said. "Right from the beginning. He hasn't heard them all like we have."
Yes, we'd been so isolated all our lives that we thought Sleeping Beauty was ours and ours alone.
But the bear didn't argue, and neither did Mother, and she started back from the beginning of the lowest shelf, with all the stories we'd heard since we were little girls, and we, having satisfied ourselves somewhat in harassing the bear's fur, sat on the floor and leaned back against his warm body as Mother read to us, and he listened right along with us, with his dark eyes bright.
Before the first story was done, even Rose's squirrel had curled up next to him, and from that night, he was part of the family. In the morning he went out, and I asked him "won't you come again?" and he said that he would, and he did, every night all through the winter.
It made that winter feel like spring, and in a way it was like spring. As we got to know him, we were watching a new life — new to us — unfold before our eyes like a flower in the sun, and the unexpected sound of his laughter was as thrilling as the first twitter of spring birdsong.
I say it was thrilling, and it was, but sometimes Rose felt that better and more purely than I did. For me it was confusing the first time Mother was reading a story and suddenly the bear's body rumbled against my back and he laughed. The princess had just thrown the Frog Prince against the wall.
"It isn't funny," I said. "Frogs are delicate; she could have killed him."
"Oh, he was asking for it," the bear said. "He knew how to break the curse and he was trying to push her over the edge. Good thing he got that princess — some people will just put up with anything, and then where would he be?"
I'd never thought of it that way. As he felt more and more at home, he said more and more things like that. We imagined that he'd never heard our stories before, but it felt more as if we were the ones hearing them for the first time.
The winter passed that way, like no winter had ever passed before, but finally the blue and white melted back to show gray trees and black mud, and the first shoots of green, the first flowers of the new year braved the leftover snow.
But at the same time, a change came over our new friend. When we opened the door one night, the bear wouldn't come in, but sat out in front of the house, looking up at the sky, and we all bundled up in our coats and brought dinner outside, and we brought the lamp so Mother could read, but he was still distracted.
At first it made me think of Mother, of the sad way she would look out at the stars, but when I looked carefully at his face, I knew that this was different. I didn't see sadness in his eyes, but determined attention.
"You're watching for something," I said.
He nodded.
"What is it?" Rose asked.
It took him a moment to reply. "A falling star."
And so we watched with him long into the night. Mother didn't even bother with a story; she finally went back inside. The sky turned pure black, and the stars came out. I got so cold and tired I thought I would have to go in, too, when I caught Rose's sudden excitement.
"There!" she cried.
And I looked up just in time to see a white light streak across the sky.
"Ohh!" said the bear. "Not the one I'm looking for, but…"
"But let's make wishes!" she said.
"Mine's a secret," he told her, without having to think.
And I felt odd. I knew I should be wishing for something, but I couldn't say what it was, so I just told them I was tired and headed back inside, feeling cross with myself.
Behind me as I went, Rose was undaunted. "I wish for some strawberries! I haven't had any all winter!"
The next day, when the bear had left for the day and Rose was bringing firewood in, she actually found some strawberries that had sprung up in the little protected place between the woodpile and the house.
It wasn't many nights that we watched before we saw the one he was looking for. The sky was still slate-blue and no other star was showing when it came, not as a streak across the sky, but as a flickering light descending straight down, somewhere beyond the wooded hills. I had a feeling as if maybe I had seen something like it before, but I couldn't remember for sure.
"There it is," the bear said. For all he'd finally seen what he was looking for, he said it with a sigh.
"Ladies, I'm afraid this is goodbye."
My breath froze in my breast. I sat stunned, not even believing what I'd heard.
Rose found her voice first. "What? Why?"
"Not everything that comes out in the springtime is good," he said. "I have a job to do."
And I knew at once that it would be no use arguing with him, but he must have seen my face fall, because he turned his head toward me.
"Just for the summer," he said. "Next winter I'll come back again."
Next winter seemed a long, long way away. I was still silent.
"It's not fair," Rose declared, hot tears coming into her eyes.
"No, it's not, but it's what I have to do," the bear said. "Come on, let's not let our last night be like this. Let's go in and have a good time, like any other night, huh?"
It was too late to see him off with a party, but we could at least make it a night like any other night.
Mother grew silent and distant when she heard the news, though. When it came time and we tried to bring her back to us with a story, she got up, walked slowly to the bookshelf as if not quite sure where she was going, and then in the last step, she turned her back on the books and shrugged.
"You've heard all of these," she said. "Why don't you tell us a story, good bear? I'm sure you have some new stories for my girls that will be good for them to hear."
The bear turned his bright, black eyes toward Mother, and the two of them gazed at each other, unblinkingly. They were speaking to each other in that moment as surely as Rose and I spoke to each other in silence, and only later did I understand even a whisper of what was passing between them then.
"Hm…" the bear mused. "Let me see now…" And he looked out the window, out at the stars, and this time it was more like the way Mother would look at them. Then he took a deep breath and began.
"Once upon a time," he said, "there was a beautiful blue planet. Green plants grew on every shore of it, and it was full of animals, and good things grew for people to eat. In between the green lands there were vast oceans, blue as jewels and teeming with fish and living things. The people had enough to get by, but as time went on, they saw ways to get more and more. Some of those ways were all right, but some of them were very reckless — things that poisoned the land, things that couldn't go on forever, but people did them anyway. In time, some of the land was flooded by the rains or sunk in the sea, and other parts turned into desert. The ocean turned to acid, and a lot of the things people needed to survive started to die out.
"But then, something miraculous happened. Certain people started to be born who had a special power that made life wherever they went. Wherever they walked, green grass sprang up; wherever they lived, the weather turned mild, and it spread to their neighbors, too. No one knew why those people had started being born. Scientists tried to understand it, and they tried to understand how best to use their powers to make things better for everyone, but at the same time, a lot of people were scared of them, because they didn't understand them, and their power could do frightening things, too, and some of them used it badly.
"Eventually, because people were afraid, they had their governments control the people with the power, to keep normal people safe and to use the power for the good of everyone. Of course they said they meant well, but before long the ESPers — that was what they called the people with the power," he added; in places he was forgetting to make it sound like a story. "Before long they were being treated like slaves, and if they made any trouble they would be taken and experimented on and killed, and before long, too, the people who were in control of them realized that they were the ones who had the power now, and instead of using it to make life better for everyone, they could use it for themselves.
"…Because the ESPers' power didn't only make living things spring up, it was a way to get valuable things out of the soil; even if it was too dispersed for mining to pay off, with the ESPers' power, the roots of the plants would gather it together, whether it was nutrients in the soil that could be used for fertilizer, or if it was valuable things like gold and jewels.
"And so instead of healing the planet, they were sent off to remote worlds where they could extract things from the soil and create riches for a few people back home.
"That was how thing were. And finally, the people had enough. Some of the ESPers managed to get loose and tried to save their kind, and some of the normal people rose up and demanded justice, and then the thing happened that the leaders were most afraid of. The ESPers realized that they wouldn't get anywhere as long as all the normal people were afraid of them, and the normal people realized that they could never get anywhere as long as the Directorate was controlling the ESPers, so they joined together, and they started rescuing ESPers and fighting. In the places they controlled, they tried to be more careful about restoring the land — and there were ESPers too with special powers. Like… there was one who could change people into animals so they could get into places and not be recognized. Slowly they started trying to build a new society, and it was always hard because they were always being set back by attacks, but they were able to do some good things…"
He stopped, like he didn't know what to say next. Any other story, we might have asked, "So then what happened? Who won in the end?" but we didn't, because we understood that this was a different kind of story, and it didn't have an end.
None of us said anything.
That night, instead of going up to bed, we curled up against the bear's warm fur, there on the floor. We lay awake for a long time, and I could already tell that the story had done something to Rose, even she didn't say anything or even know what it was yet.
I don't know when I fell asleep, but dawn was slanting in through the window when he nudged us awake and nuzzled us goodbye.
And then he left, until the next winter as he said. We didn't want to let him go, and it seemed like it was hard for him to leave, too. In the end, Mother opened the door for him and he ran out — and as he did, the black fur of his flank caught against the latch, and it tore. I caught my breath, expecting blood — but there was no blood. Instead there was just a flash of creamy autumn-gold, and I watched it flicker with each bound he took as he ran off into the trees.
When he was gone, our lives went back to normal. Or not normal, but the way they'd been before, which didn't seem normal anymore. Springtime had always been our favorite time, when we could finally go out after being shut in all winter, and we could watch the green shoots and buds come out, and all the fresh colors. But somehow, when I would pick a bright flower and think "wouldn't I like to take this home and show him?" then the very next moment I would realize that I couldn't, and somehow its color seemed to fade away.
Rose didn't even see it in the first blush. She seemed to look right past everything, with her face closed off, even from me.
Very gently and privately I nudged at her to tell me what was wrong. Finally we were out picking some of the first berries of the season, and Rose was fairly ripping them off the bramble and cutting her hands on the thorns.
Stop it! I took her by the shoulder. You can't go on like this! You don't deserve it and neither does the bramble.
The bramble!? she demanded. Somehow that cut through to it, and tears sprang to her eyes. She swung out with a torn-off vine still in her hand. It's not even — none of this is even real!
And in the very instant she said it, the vine in her hand withered brown.
We both stared at it, the two of us joined together like one mind transfixed by the shock, too deep and overwhelming for one of us to contain it.
Rose had been terribly right, and she'd been terribly wrong, and the withered vine struck her with anger and frustration at the universe, but also at herself, and I felt it all, and felt foolish not to have seen it sooner.
We'd both known, after the bear told his story, but I had put it away trying not to think about it, while Rose had thought about it every moment.
We were the ESPers from the story. If there had been any doubt, Rose's power over the vine was a final proof. We were the broken pieces of the Mill of Fortune, scattered among the stars to make riches out of this place.
— Out of this place that wasn't home. Rose knew that now, and even if my hand-me-down memories of home were of something as withered and dry as the vine, she suddenly felt she'd been cheated.
But the moment the vine died in her hand, she knew, too, that it had been real and alive. She let it fall in the still-green grass, stunned and regretful as an ordinary child who had accidentally killed a bird.
Out from the shock, our minds finally found words.
Why? Rose wondered, as tears ran down her cheeks. Why didn't I know? Why did Mother lie to us?
It stung as sharply as the thorns. Neither of us had ever questioned Mother before. But I felt that my own question, though quieter, was even more difficult.
What should we do?
We came home late that night, after dark, with early fireflies lighting our way. It had been tempting to stay out the night, but it wouldn't have helped, it would only have been putting off facing things, and finally, unable to sleep, we went home.
Mother knew instantly that something was wrong. She wasn't angry — she was never angry; was even she afraid of us? She made us a hot supper, and heated water for us to wash up, and when we were still silent and sleepless, she sat us under the quilt, and she looked at us, with her eyebrows drawn. Looking back, I think she knew that this was something new, that none of our old things could fix it, but what else did she have?
"Would you like a story?" she asked, softly.
I nodded. It would at least be something. Maybe she would pick a story we'd heard with the bear, and I could think more about what he'd said about it…
But Rose had other thoughts.
"No, not one of those," she said, as Mother turned toward the bookshelf. "I want you to tell us a real story, like the bear did."
I think Mother sighed then, but it was so soft it didn't make any sound, only I saw her shoulders settle for a moment, then she nodded gravely and came back and sat down between us, gathering us to her one on each side. She looked out at the stars like she used to do, like the bear had, and she opened her mouth a couple of times without saying anything, but then finally she told us.
"Once upon a time," she said, "there was a poor woman. She was young and in love, but neither she nor the man she was in love with had enough money to get married, so they kept living apart. They only met now and then, when they could catch some time together away from their work, but in time, a child was born.
"The child was a little girl, with blonde hair so pale it was almost white, and eyes blue like ice, but warm and kind" — and we knew that she was describing me even before she added, "and so they named her Snow White."
"For many years, Snow White was a sickly child, and weak, but her mother didn't dare take her to a doctor, because she already knew that Snow White was a special child. You see, in this story, too, there are special people who make living things sprout up wherever they go, and the poor woman had already seen, down in the alley below her window, something growing there. It was so small that she could cover it up and no one noticed it, but it shouldn't have been growing there, and she'd seen it, and she knew.
"So she tried her best to nurse her daughter on her own. That made it even harder to find time for the man she loved, but she still saw him sometimes, and in time another child was born, and this one with such auburn hair and bright, rosy cheeks that they called her Rose Red. When Rose Red came, suddenly Snow White became healthy and strong, as if she'd found a piece of her that had been missing until then. And the woman was happy, but she was also afraid, because as Snow White grew strong, the things growing outside became stronger, too, until there was no way to hide them anymore.
"The woman knew that they were going to come for her child, and when they did…" Mother's voice wavered, and she was silent for a moment. "When they did, the woman did a terrible thing. She knew that Snow White was special, and that she would wither like a flower if she was away from Rose Red, but she didn't know… If it were only Rose Red, maybe she would be all right, maybe she didn't have the power, and they wouldn't know, so she let them take Snow White, and she kept Rose Red and didn't say anything. But it didn't work. Rose Red had the power, too, and now they were watching closely, so before long all three of them were taken away together. And then the woman felt relieved that they were all together again, and that she hadn't gotten away with abandoning one daughter for the other, but she never forgot, it was always there like a thorn in her heart that she'd ever tried to do it.
"Soon they were sent away to a far-off world, and they were given a little cabin in the forest, where they lived like a family in a fairy tale, and the little girls were happy. Even the woman was happy, living in such a sweet, green place with her children, but she knew that something was wrong. Only she knew that something was wrong, and she never told her daughters, because she wanted them to be happy.
"Every summer, someone would come to collect the precious things that the plants brought to the surface, but they never saw him, and the woman told her daughters, if they ever did see him, she told them what she thought would keep them safe, to be polite to him, to do what he said. The woman knew that in other places, people were fighting them, and she felt like a coward, but she wanted more than anything to keep her daughters safe."
Mother paused for a moment, then went on. "Then, one winter night, there came a knock on the door.
"The woman was frightened, because she thought the only people who could possibly come knocking were the people who had sent them away, but when one of the girls opened the door, there was a bear, and the bear asked 'May I come in?'
"And because he spoke, the woman knew that he must really be a person — and that someone like her daughters must have turned him into a bear. And if that was so, she knew that he couldn't be one of the people who had sent them away, because those people would never let themselves be changed that way. They were so frightened and disgusted by the girls' powers that they would never come near them without special suits to protect them.
"So the woman knew that the bear was a rebel, that he was one of the ones who were fighting, and she was tired of being a coward. She knew it was a risk — she might be wrong about him, they might get caught helping him — but she let him in.
"He came every night, all through the winter, but he never asked them to help him fight, he just came like a friendly guest, and when winter ended and there was the chance of getting caught or making trouble for the woman and her daughters, he left.
"He would have left without a word, but on the last night, the woman said, 'tell us a story,' and he did tell them. He told the girls some of the things their mother had never told them. After he left, they asked her to tell them more, and she did."
And here Mother heaved a sigh. "…Because she knew that it was time. She still didn't want anything to happen to them, but she knew that it was time to let them decide for themselves."
We sat, like we had after the bear's story. None of us said anything.
Finally Mother sniffed and dabbed her eyes. "I'm going to go on to bed," she said, quietly. "You girls know how to put things away for the night…" And she got up and left us.
And like the night after the bear had told his story, we never went to bed. When we'd banked the fire, we curled up on the floor, facing each other across the empty hearth rug.
What should we do?
I was the one who lay facing the window, and after we'd lain there for a long time, I lifted my eyes, more bored than searching, and through the window I saw the stars.
And I realized, and I said it aloud: "We have to find him."
(As I write this, Rose insists that she was the one who thought it first and said it, but this is how I remember it. In either case…)
We had to find our bear. He was the one who had turned the page. He was the one who had opened our small lives onto the larger story, and it hurt as it opened, like a wound, but neither of us wished it undone. Neither of us could let the story end here.
And if he was out there fighting — fighting for us — then who could say if he would be back next winter? We couldn't just sit idly by.
And so, the next morning, we hugged our mother and told her goodbye. She packed bread and cheese for us, and told us to be careful and remember what she'd told us, and she kissed our cheeks. All of us cried, but before the morning was out, we set off.
At this point, from all the stories we heard growing up, I feel as if I should tell you about an arduous journey, but the word "arduous" really has no place in what happened. After all, we were walking across our own world. Yes, our shoes wore out, but there was always cool, soft grass to cushion our feet. No, the bread and cheese didn't last, but there were always fruits and nuts when we were hungry. There were always animals keeping us company, and curling up warm against us at night. If we came to a harsh slope, we would find tree roots ridged and twined down it like stairs or ladders.
As we went, there were only two things that made it difficult.
The first was that, even if the land itself was on our side, we were striking out away from everything we knew, away from Mother, away from how we'd always lived our lives. We were taking a risk in a way that we never had before. Sometimes the knowledge of it would come over us, and we would tremble with dread, and the dread would echo back and forth between us until one or the other stopped and said "No, we have to go on."
The other difficulty was that we had no idea where we were going.
When we set out, we aimed toward the wooded hill where we'd seen the "falling star" descend. We half-knew what that "star" must really have been, and we knew fully that it was our only clue to what our bear was doing and where he might have gone. As soon as we were among the trees, though, we lost track of the point we'd started out toward.
So we wandered through the woods and climbed any hill that seemed likely. Our shoes wore through, and our dresses grew shabby, although we didn't need to pay it much mind.
At last, one day when we'd climbed a hill and were looking around for anything to guide us, Rose pointed and cried "Look! There it is!"
I turned. For a moment there was nothing, and I had only the secondhand sight of a flashing point of light, and then there it was, flickering between the trees. It was almost like seeing a distant pond reflect the sun, but too narrow, constant and harsh.
"That must be the star that fell," Rose declared.
We knew nothing else that it could be, and we knew nowhere else to go, so we followed the light. Sometimes it would vanish, but it appeared again often enough for us to keep heading toward it, and as we went, the trees thinned, until we came out of the woods.
There at the edge of the trees, we looked down the slope and saw a wide meadow stretching out below us, but there was something very strange about it: across this meadow was an unnaturally straight line. Beyond that line it was full of color, green and pink and yellow and blue. But on the near side of the line, it was dark brown, and as we looked closer, we could see that the line was echoed in shadowed stripes across the brown, bare earth.
Then, as we watched, on one side of the meadow came a glimmer, and then the light we'd been seeing began to move slowly, right on the line, leaving another narrow stripe of black-brown behind it.
It's them! Rose declared — but privately, unwilling to raise her voice and risk being overheard even at this distance.
It was them. The ones our bear couldn't risk being caught by. He said he had "a job to do" — was he going to fight with them? What if he had already fought with them? What if he was hurt, or—?
We can't just ask 'have you seen a bear around here?' — we can't risk tipping them off, Rose broke in, interrupting my fearful thoughts with a welcome dose of practicality. Still… What should we do?
And I realized. My heart fluttered in my chest. We'll be kind and polite to them, like Mother said. Mother thought that was the best thing we could do to stay safe. If we could just meet them, we might find out something, if we could only stay out of trouble for now.
We'll play innocent and spy on them! Rose agreed.
And so we went, down toward the meadow.
As we drew closer, the glittering light became visible as part of a larger shape, like a beetle crawling back and forth, and the "star" we'd seen was really the gleam of its shiny shell. We had to get closer still before we began to realize how large it was — and how loud. It sounded not like a beetle, but like a swarm of bees, like that sound magnified a hundred times — you must remember that neither of us had ever heard an engine before. The size and the sound pushed my heart even faster.
But the ground was on our side. As we walked onto the wet-dark, furrow-striped soil, a green cushion still sprung up under our feet. New leaves and even flowers unfurled around us with each step, encouraging us forward even as the sound swelled to a roar and carried to us a strange, burning scent, and we could see something like legs but not like legs churning below the beetle-body, devouring plants and soil as it went…
And then, the beetle lifted its wings.
The thing really did open up like a beetle's wings, if the wings were on backward — it split in the front, and a half-dome of it pivoted up.
And then we could see the person inside. Of course he'd seen us, how could he miss that spreading green carpet? He stood up — wrapped in a suit that shone like metal. I gripped Rose's hand. The memories raced through my mind of that time so long ago, the metal people who'd taken me away to that metal place, and here was one of them riding atop that monster and looking down at us.
Did they all have bubbles on their heads like that? Rose asked, caught between my fear and her own amusement — because it was true. Where the figures in my memories had metal hoods, this one's head was covered not in metal but in glass, a sphere of it like a giant soap bubble. It might seem a slight difference, but it was reassuring, and it did look almost funny.
It looked even funnier when, instead of coming towards us, he just flailed his arms in some incomprehensible gesture as the beetle kept carrying him along. We had to jog alongside it to keep pace with him, which made him flail harder. Distorted by the bubble, we could see his mouth shouting, but through the glass and through the roar of noise it was impossible to hear. Rose darted in even closer with a hand cupped to her ear, trying to hear him, and he leaned toward us, gesturing more wildly than ever — so wildly that he lost his balance.
I felt my own cry of alarm in my throat, but I couldn't hear it over the din. The man tumbled, and then jerked to a stop and dangled from the side of the beetle, inches from the churning blades below it. Some kind of strap caught around his foot was the only thing keeping him from falling and being torn to bits. And what could we do? Even if we could risk trying to get him free, we couldn't get close.
Rose took my hand. She knew what to do. No one else but her could have shown it to me, because she didn't know it in words. She knew it in the sensation of the vine in her hand, of leaves unfurling under her feet, and she took my hand and pulled me with her as she forced that sensation forward, forced it out like a shout that could drown out the roar.
Gnarled green wood shot up from the ground below the beetle, so much that it bucked and shuddered and set the unfortunate man swinging perilously. Purple-thorned vines snaked around the churning legs. The roar turned to a voracious growl. Chips of wood and lashes of vine flew, but the beast halted. The sound turned more intense but quieter, banking and guttering like a fire in the wind. We felt heat surge out toward us, then smoke — black smoke with a sharp, toxic smell like nothing we'd ever known, and still we pressed forward, drawing up enough wood and vine to keep the dangling figure clear of danger, enough to strangle the threatening machinery. When it finally choked it sounded like a double-crack of close thunder — and then it went quiet.
After the constant roar, the quiet itself was unbelievably loud, and within it we could hear the voice muttering, muffled by the glass — "oh my god oh my god oh my god…"
Before I could hold out any caution, Rose was already scrambling up the wood and vines onto the beetle's back. I'll get him loose, you catch him.
But as I came close, the man started and set himself swinging again. "Agh! Don't touch me!"
I started back as a reflex, but Rose was already disentangling the strap. Before I could reach for him again, he plunged the last yard to the ground and landed right on the glass bubble. It didn't break, but he cried out in pain as the collar of it drove into his shoulders and he tumbled flat.
"Are you trying to break my neck, too!?" he demanded, and curled himself around to look at the beetle, which was now sitting motionless, sighing out dying waves of heat that withered the leaves of the thick hedge on which is now rested. "Oh, god, look what you've done!"
Some gratitude. We just saved his life! Rose huffed as she climbed down.
I had to remind her: Mother told us to be polite to him. "I'm terribly sorry," I said to the man. "Are you hurt?"
"Hurt!? I—" He started as if the idea was ridiculous, then suddenly thought to check and looked down at himself. I only saw blood in one place, where a flying whip of thorn-vine had ripped his silver sleeve and grazed the skin underneath. When his eyes fell on the spot, he cried out again and grabbed at it in a panic — grabbed at the torn silver fabric and fumbled to fold it shut and cover the gap, more concerned for the suit than the wound.
Mother's story floated through my mind: "They were so frightened and disgusted by the girls' powers that they would never come near them without special suits to protect them…"
"I have my sewing kit with me," I told him. "I could stitch that up in just a minute. Or I could leave it here for you?"
I offered the needle and thread from my pocket — still keeping my scissors — but he didn't even glance at them. "Just go away! Just stay away from me, you little monsters!"
There was nothing else to do. I set the needle and thread on the ground for him, and we walked away. In that loud silence we could hear him muttering to himself as we went.
"…More than my job's worth — what am I going to do? Maybe they don't have to know…"
We made for the nearest trees, and once we were among them where the man couldn't see us, once the encounter was over, somehow that was when the thrill of the danger and sheer newness we'd just been through broke over us, like thunderclouds breaking open into rain.
Rose threw herself down among last year's fallen leaves and laughed. Did you see the look on his face? Over a ripped sleeve! And that noisy monster he had, it got what it had coming after what it did to that meadow. He was probably going to let it run over our bear, too.
It was true, I didn't feel sorry for the machine. I could feel a bit for the man; he really did seem more frightened than anything else. He'd only wanted us to go away — in hindsight I could hardly believe I hadn't understood the gestures. I could admit that he was kind of funny, but instead of laughing, I shuddered as I realized what we'd just been through. Anything at all could have happened.
And then, as the sweat cooled on me, I realized that in fact nothing had happened. We'd made it through safely, but any chance we might have had had slipped through our fingers. We didn't really know anything we hadn't known before.
We have to follow him.
This time it was certainly Rose who said it first — strange, it may have been that I had more compassion for the man's fear because I was more afraid of him myself. But I knew that Rose was right. We hadn't learned anything yet, and he was still our only clue.
So we went back to the edge of the trees where we could look out at the meadow, and we watched for him. As it began to grow dark, we worried that he might go when it was too dim for us to see him. But when he did go, he carried a light in his hand, a new "star" for us to follow, and so it wasn't hard to start sneaking along some way behind him, following the light and the sound of his grumbling, and another sound that he made, too, like shaking gravel.
It was the next morning when it got difficult. Then we could see him, and we could see that the shaking sound came from some sort of crate he carried, and it slowed him down. But with light everywhere, not just on him, he started to vanish among the trees, and we had to hang back further from him for fear that he would see us, or see the green that flourished around us, although we were trying to hold it back. When he crossed a clear, flat meadow, we were afraid to come out of the woods on one side until he was into them on the other, and that put us too far behind. We lost him.
But just when we wondered if we would have to give up, a few wolves crept out of the trees where he'd gone, and bobbed their heads at us and wheeled around to show us the way. It wasn't only the plants that were on our side. And so, with help, we followed him all through the morning.
The sun had crested in the sky when we saw light again, glittering through the trees, and the wolves left us after that, because from there we could find our own way.
This time, when we came to the edge of the trees and could see what was glittering, I caught my breath, half dazzled, half dreading.
The meadow below us had been scraped perfectly flat and covered with a rectangle of faded black paving — like the paving below the window, in that other world. On one side of the paving there was a house, not like our house where Mother was waiting, but perfectly square, like the house we'd lived in back then, like the houses there. Reminders of that place brought up inside me a sick, half-dizzy wave of nostalgia and fear and more things I couldn't name, maybe even anger was mixed into it somewhere.
But the house wasn't all. Standing on another side of the paving as if proudly displayed, there was the thing that had glittered, and the feeling of looking at it was pure awe.
It was somehow like the beetle, but larger. Instead of the churning blades underneath, it had only a few delicate legs that almost seemed too tiny to hold up its vastness, and yet it somehow looked weightless for its size, with its gleaming white skin and sweeping, darting shape. Its form somehow suggested a bird, or a leaf.
It suggested flight.
And that nudged another memory from so long ago, from the other place. The day we were sent away. The day we set out for here. Suddenly that moment came back to me clearly for me and Rose both to see. Maybe I should have been frightened, but what I knew then was that I was leaving the solid metal place, that for the first time in I-didn't-know-how-long, I was looking at the sky, and Mother's hand was in mine and Rose was cradled in her arm…
What I remembered was excitement and hope, as I looked at a sleek, gleaming shape just like what I was looking at now:
A ship. A ship that could fly between the stars.
We stayed in the trees and watched for the man to come out again — there was no use getting close to him, we could only wait until he left. And as we waited, we gazed at the ship, our two minds awash in formless dreams of where it might go, where we might go.
We could steal it while he's asleep! Rose said, when the sky had begun to darken. We could take it and fly away!
I didn't have to argue with her. She wasn't serious — or she was, but she knew better than to run off now to who-knew-where and leave Mother and the bear and all. But she really was thinking that maybe someday…
We took turns sleeping and keeping up the watch. Rose lay down first, and as I sat in the dark, I had time to think. There under the stars, I understood what the bear had been watching for at the end of winter. Not really a star at all, but this ship landing out among the hills, bringing one of the people he and Mother had told of in their stories. Of course it would be summer when they came, when the flowers came up bearing their gems, and of course Mother told us to leave the gems for them, to keep us out of trouble. Of course when they were here, the bear would have to go into hiding. Of course he would have to stay away from us, to keep us out of trouble…
I had already half-known. I'd already been told, and now I understood what I'd been told. As it all began to fall into place, nothing was a surprise, except maybe that the "enemy" would have turned out to be a funny little bubble-headed man.
The bear must have come in a ship like that himself, although there was no knowing when, or where that one was now — unless we could find him and ask him. I wanted to ask him.
It was Rose's watch the next morning when she shook me awake to see the man setting out across the pavement and away into the woods. We waited until we thought he was well away, and then we came out from our cover.
By this time we'd thrown away our worn-out shoes, and the pavement was hot and rough on our bare feet. Grass couldn't have broken through it this quickly, and even if it could have, we were still trying to hold it back and secret, almost like holding our breath.
We went to the ship first and went all around it and under it, marveling at it from every new angle, but we didn't see a way in, not without twining vines up to it, and we didn't want to do that, so we turned to the house. Sneaking into someone's house while they were gone hardly fit Mother's instructions to be polite, but what else could we do?
Don't touch anything, I told Rose. We'll leave everything just like we found it. But maybe we could find more clues. The thought flitted through my head: I just hoped we didn't find a bearskin.
When we went inside, there was no bearskin. There was only another wave of that sick nostalgia — because it was like stepping back in time. The flat, squared walls, the squared foam bed, the blank frame of a television set… Gray cupboards and shelves brought back all my memories of metal and plastic. There was even a cupboard door hanging open on a shadowy glimpse of the old canned food.
This is just like… home.
The word rang hollow, but Rose took the meaning. I was born in a place like this?
When Rose found out that she was seeing a place like our old home for the first time, it was only natural. Our vow not to touch anything was forgotten in a moment.
The memories darted through my mind, and she caught at every one she could snatch and tried it for herself, and I was carried along, trying to make it all real again. We bounced on the bed, so spongy and smooth after our straw-stuffed beds back home. We found the remote control and tried the television. We wheeled and spun on a swivel chair. We stopped just short of eating the food. We pulled drawers in and out, and we tried the handle of every door. I found a bathroom — it had been so long since I'd seen a bathroom — and I turned on the faucets and looked in the mirror, into my own ice-blue eyes.
Come here, look at this! Rose called over the sound of the running water.
She'd found another room, and this one was completely blank of furniture or cabinets or anything except crates, stack after stack of them, filling half the room — crates like the one we'd seen the man carry back here.
Now that we could see them closely, we found that each one had an identical mark, and Rose and I puzzled at it. It wasn't exactly a picture, but it was something like a picture — an oval with a curved line across it, and inside the curve it was blue and green, outside the curve was black with white spots like stars, and there were words around it, words I'd never seen in Mother's books, but I sounded them out.
"Human and En-viron-mental Re-sources Direct-or-ate."
I knew it! He's one of them! Rose insisted. The bear called them the Directorate — the bad people in the story!
The ones who enslave people like us. The ones who sent us here.
Just then we heard a sound from outside — a muffled voice screaming.
We looked out the door and there he was in his silver suit, standing there screaming — because we'd forgotten to hold our breath. The pavement was breaking through with ridges of overflowing green and tangled over with vines. His head inside the bubble swept over the whole sudden garden, and when he turned toward the ship, the scream sharpened at the sight of vines twining up and around it.
Rose looked around the little house; no question for her now, he was one of the villains, and she was looking for something to throw at him or hit him with.
Mother told us we had to be nice to him! I insisted.
But!
There were a thousand shades of meaning in that "but!" — a thousand things I already knew. It was true, that man wasn't on our side, but somehow I still didn't want him to get hurt — and of course I was still afraid. I told myself we didn't know enough yet, that playing innocent was still the best thing we could do.
But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was already too late. Still, I didn't have a better idea, and Rose was willing to go along with me.
My heart pounded as I pushed the door open and peered out.
The movement caught his eye. "You!" he screamed. "What are you doing here, you stupid creatures!? What have you done!?"
As he approached us, he held off for a moment, then he wrenched the door open, took each of us by an arm and flung us roughly out of the shed, as if he wanted to get us as far from it as he could without touching us any longer than he absolutely had to.
"I'm going to have to clean all this off — don't you know what that is?" He turned back toward the ship again. "Oh, god, what if you've damaged it?"
"That- that's how you got here, isn't it? In that?" Rose asked. Her boldness pushed her to make some move, although her voice wavered.
He whipped around to look at us. "It's no business of yours what it is! Just stay away from it, you little monsters! Get out of here!"
He gave us another shove, with that same gingerly-rough disgust, but we only backed off one step — because I could see over his shoulder that the leaves stretched below the ship were shaking. Something was moving among them; something alive.
"Go! Go I said!"
When he was silent for a second, between breaths, there came a huff, and he looked over his shoulder as the thing among the leaves emerged, big and dark.
It was a black bear.
The man screamed. "Now look what you've done! These animals follow you around — well you can't bring them here! Get out, get out!" With one foot, he started toward the house, but the other foot seemed stuck. "Get out, I said!" And he grabbed my arm, and he slapped my face.
It was Rose who gasped, as the sting of it echoed between us. It echoed through the green vines traced over the pavement; it prickled them into purple thorns. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I was struck speechless, and the feeling froze in the vines, too, like steel.
The first one to speak was the bear — our bear.
"You people don't know how to treat anything, do you?" he growled.
The man turned. He looked at the bear; he looked around.
"You heard me," the bear told him.
For a moment he stood very still, and then he stumbled back and started to shake. "You— you're an inspector, aren't you? Listen, I can explain everything!"
The bear tossed it aside with a swing of his head and a thick, bearish huff. "You'll have a lot more than that to explain to me. I've got nothing to do with your filthy Directorate."
The man stepped back again. I didn't know if he was shaking more or less, just differently. "You… you're a rebel! Listen, you people need ships, right? You can have this one!" he said. "You can — you can have the jewels! Look in that shed, you'll find lots of them! Just let me radio for someone to get me, you can have it all!"
Another already-known piece fell into place, that shaking-gravel sound… All those crates in the house were full of flower gems.
The bear didn't say anything, he just kept lumbering forward.
The man took me and Rose each by an elbow. "Take the girls! You can have them! They're good ones, you'll have anything you want anywhere with these two!"
"What are you saying?" Rose demanded. "We can't leave Mother—!"
She cut off because the bear had started running, snarling with rage.
The man took a step back, and I thought he was about to turn and run — but he didn't.
He reached for his belt.
I don't know how I knew what he was doing, what it was that he had in his hand. Maybe somewhere, all those years before when they'd taken me away or when they'd put us on this ship, I'd seen a gun. I didn't remember it, but somehow I knew what the thing in his hand was for as he raised it toward the bear.
My still-pounding heart seemed to stop. It gripped into my chest like iron. There was nothing in my mind then — not even Rose, it seemed. In that moment I was beyond all thought with fear — but I didn't run, either.
Before I knew what I was doing, my hand was in my pocket, on the handles of my scissors. I knew there was no time for thorns to grow or wolves to come running. In an instant I had my own arm around the arm holding the gun, and I was looking at it, between the elbow and the shoulder — where the flying thorns had torn the sleeve. There was no hole there, and no seam; he must have put on a new suit instead of mending the old one. Somehow I noticed that, with a cool and instant awareness, as I swung the point of the scissors down on that very spot.
The next instant it was all confusion again. He screamed. There was blood. The gun fell. I scrambled for it, grabbed it, and leaped like a rabbit. My foot came down on cool, smooth grass, and I turned back to look.
The man was scrambling, too, trying to run — but what his feet found was not smooth grass, but thorn-vines prickling sharp as a slap, gripping hard as a shock. Tangled in them, he tripped and fell. He barely had time to twist his face upward, raise an arm and scream before the bear reached him, and with one powerful swipe of his paw—
The bubble tore away from the shoulders of the man's suit, and the collar of it caught against his chin and nearly carried his head with it. A sickening crunch took up most of the force, and a blow that should have sent the bubble flying only dropped it into the nest of thorns. The man lay still and quiet. From the angle of his head, I knew what had happened.
My mind was just beginning to unfreeze. I found that the scissors were still dangling from my fingers as I clutched the gun — and that Rose was less shocked than I was.
"Why did you do that?" I said.
"Had to," the bear answered. "He was ready to sell you two like cattle, sell out his mission to save his own skin — how long would it have been before he sold us out, too? In fact, I'm starting to think he was a regular weasel long before now."
"But he never really hurt us," I said. I thought I must sound ridiculous after stabbing him myself, but Rose came over and held me, mind and body, with a steadying sympathy. Even as the bear blinked his bright, black eyes at me, he did it very seriously.
"Snow, you have no idea," he said gently. "You're right, though. If he took one of their crummy jobs and tried to get what he could out of it, I guess I can't blame him for that. He was too dangerous to keep around, that's all."
We followed the bear as he headed for the house, and we opened the doors for him, because the handles weren't made for paws. Inside, he forced his claws under the lids of a few of those marked crates and pried them open, and sure enough, they were filled to the brim with flower gems.
"That's what I thought," he said. "He was holding out on the Directorate back on homeworld, hoping he'd find a way to get this all off the planet on the sly. And now he's left us a regular Island of Monte Cristo."
I didn't know why he said that; I had to read that story later, on my own.
We dipped our hands in the boxes; we'd never seen that many flower gems in one place, and feeling them flow hard and cool between our fingers started to soothe our nerves — especially Rose's. She started picking a few favorites, the way she always did, and the boxes were so full they spilled over and gems skittered over the floor.
"Careful, we're going to need those," the bear said.
"What's wrong with keeping some?" Rose argued. Mother's old reason to leave them alone was done with.
The bear looked at the huge pile of crates and shrugged and laughed at himself. "Oh, why not? Looks like there'll be plenty to go around — and more coming."
He shuffled back out of the storage room, and when we followed him out, we found him nosing and pawing at some of the drawers. He gave up and shook himself. "Ah, claws won't be much good for the rest of it… Hey, you two," he called over his shoulder. "I don't need you to leave me my skin this time."
I blinked at him. Rose grinned.
"You know what I mean." He presented to us the great side of his black pelt. It was the side with the tear, where the patch of gold still showed through.
We didn't need any more encouragement. Starting from the hole where he'd caught against the door latch, we pulled at the bear skin, and it tore — with no blood or grease, but just like tearing away soft, dry leather. And somehow, what was underneath wasn't shaped like a bear. Underneath was human skin as gold as autumn and as soft as spring. When we tore the bearskin away from around his hips, we found strange and fascinating things that Mother had told us about but that we'd never seen before. When we pulled it over his head, it came away around his scalp and left hair there just like his fur, coarse and sheeny and black, and then it tore away from his face. Instead of a bear snout, he had full, soft lips and a wide, soft nose, and his eyes were as black and bright as ever, but now they looked out at us from under smooth, elegantly folded eyelids.
He showed us a smile full of bright white teeth, and a blush came over his cheeks as he held the bearskin around his hips, where Rose was still looking. "Excuse me a moment, Ladies," he said, and ushered us graciously out the door.
We heard him rustling around among the drawers and cupboards, and when he came out, he'd found some clothes, although he didn't put on the silver costume or the bubble.
He headed for the ship.
"Sorry for all of that," I said, looking at the vines still twined all around it. "Maybe we could get them to come off."
"Or we could help pull them off, anyway," Rose added.
"As long as we can get the gangway open," he said. "All I need is the radio. One more ship will help, but we don't have to worry about that right now."
"We're staying here?" Rose asked.
Neither of us knew whether to be relieved or disappointed. Rose wanted to see homeworld, and she wanted to see other places, and I did, too, but neither of us wanted to leave Mother, and if our power was the only thing keeping the trees and flowers and animals here alive…
"We're staying for now," he said. "The Assembly was really hoping I'd succeed here. The chemical composition, atmosphere, distance from the star… Get a few more ESPers here, this place can be terraformed — made so it'll be fine on its own. I'd say you've made a good start on it already."
I blushed at the praise, while Rose jumped in excitement — she knew right away, this meant that someday we could have adventures without sacrificing our home here. She seized my arm and gave me a conspiratorial grin, and in the mirror of her mind I saw myself return the same look, closer to it than I normally would.
The bear — who wasn't a bear anymore — tried some kind of remote control, and a slice opened up in the belly of the ship. It hung against the vines for a moment, but finally it pivoted down and the tip of it, landing on the pavement, became the first of a flight of stairs, leading up and in — just like that day when I looked at the sky and held Mother's hand, and we set off toward a new life…
He led the way through to the cockpit and slid into the pilot's seat, then tinkered with some dials and pushed a button over and over, making rough static in what I already knew must be some coded pattern. More adjusting of dials, and he just stared at it, tense and waiting, and we caught the feeling and stared too, like the world was about to change, like all the changes we'd been through were at a tipping point and nothing would ever be the same again.
The control panel spoke. "We read you; report."
It was a woman's voice, strong and clear like I'd never heard a woman sound. Mother had come close at times, when she told us to stay together or to share, when she told the bear to tell us a story, but here was a woman who sounded like that all the time.
"Yoon reporting," our bear told her — so that was his name. "Made positive contact. Harvester is down. Time to move in. …Nkosi, is that you?"
"It's Commander Nkosi to you, mister. Are you still a bear?"
He laughed. "No, I met some nice ladies here who…" He pivoted in the seat and eyed us. His gaze reflected us back to ourselves almost as well as we reflected each other, and all at once we knew the way we were eyeing him. "Well they just couldn't wait to undress me," he said.
The woman laughed, and there was a noise behind her, not like the static, but a rumble. When I heard snatches of words in it, I realized that it was the sound of people — there were more people behind her, talking and laughing, more than three or four of them, more people than I'd ever seen or heard in one place before.
"We're on our way," Commander Nkosi said. "Try to behave yourself until we get there."
"We'll be waiting. Over and out." Yoon turned the dials off, then threw himself back into the seat and stretched his arms out with a big "Ahhh!" like the end of a hard day's work — a very hard day's work.
Finally he looked up at us. "It's a long trip. They won't be here for a few weeks, so we've got a little vacation until things get interesting around here."
"We have to get home and tell Mother everything that's happened," I said. I knew she'd be happy about the news — all the news.
"You'll have to introduce me to her properly now," he said, rising to join us.
We hovered close. I felt a mysterious warmth washing through me. Rose was the first one to feel the other thing, the flutter down in the bowl of her hips, but when I felt it from her, I caught it, too.
"I just realized I haven't thanked you yet, for saving my life back there." He said it more softly, but so close to my ear that it was envelopingly loud.
Rose took his other arm, leaned into him…
"Oh, but, you see," I told him, "our mother always said, 'what one has, she must share with the other.'"
"That's what I thought," he said.
His face was so close to mine that I felt his breath on my lips, but then, an inch away, he turned away from me and gathered Rose up in his arm and kissed her.
Of course I felt it all. I felt the soft warmth of his lips, the solid muscle of his body against her — and it wasn't quite like it was me, but I thought "yes, this way is best" — because it let me savor the anticipation.
I knew my turn was coming.
And somehow it fit perfectly, it just made the moment more complete, when I looked out the window and back at the ground below.
The tangle of vines tracing like lace over the pavement…
It had all burst out in white and red roses.
THE END
Author's Notes:
Thanks to beta readers Adam and LeaperSonata.
Note: The story passage about the Mill of Fortune is adapted from "The Sampo" by James Baldwin, which in turn is adapted from The Kalevala.