Watchstar by Pamela Sargent Read Free Book Online Page B

nodded.
    “That is why we must go through a passage in the desert,” she continued. “I won't know exactly what happens there until I go through it myself, but I know one thing. Those who are able to control themselves and fit into our community return, and others do not.” As she spoke, she once again felt doubts about her own ability to survive.
    “But why must you sleep outside with no covering to train for that?”
    “Body and mind are one thing. It does no good to have mental control if the body fails. I have heard one can die returning from the ordeal. We must go with nothing, we must return with nothing.”
    Reiho slouched, resting his arms on his thighs. “It is very puzzling,” he said. “I do not know very much, but I do not understand how you can have these mental powers at all.”
    Daiya smiled. “And I don't understand why you do not,” she replied. “God gave us these powers so that we would no longer be separated from one another and the world, that is what we are told.”
    “But the power, the energy needed for such things must come from somewhere,” Reiho said. “Your bodies cannot provide it. Something else must generate it.”
    “God provides us with powers,” she said quickly, not knowing what the boy was talking about and afraid to ask. She stood up slowly, feeling weak and knowing she needed to sleep. Her stomach, which had been rumbling with hunger hours before, now sat inside her like a hollow space. “You tell me you live in the sky,” she went on, “and yet you ask me questions. What do you do, build villages on clouds?”
    “Of course not. We don't live there, we live above the clouds.”
    She said, “You cannot,” and turned to leave him.
    “We do, we live there, that is my home.”
    She turned her head and saw Reiho lift his arm and point his finger. She looked up to where he was pointing.
    He was pointing at the comet.

4

    Daiya awoke at dawn. The clearing was still clothed in shadows, but the sky was blue. Reiho was already up, standing in front of his vehicle. He held a small flat metallic object in his hand, passing it over the surface of the craft.
    She stood up and watched him, then turned to stir the embers of her fire. She scattered the burnt, blackened wood and covered it with dirt.
    She walked over to the boy. He stopped what he was doing and nodded at her. “Can you repair this thing?” she asked.
    “Oh yes, I have tools, and this shuttle can repair much of the damage itself, it's already doing so. Then I'll do what it cannot, and check things afterward.”
    She noticed that his words were more fluent today, though still heavily accented, and recalled that he had said something about learning her speech while asleep. “Then you will go,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “And you will not come back.”
    “I am not supposed to be here now.”
    She touched his mind. Again his form changed, becoming cylindrical and metallic. She sensed a wish: he wanted to return to Earth. They were both infected with curiosity.—You must not come back—she thought, pushing the words at him, but of course he could not read them.
    “There is something I must ask you,” she said, withdrawing her mind and seeing only the boy's body now. “It will sound strange to you, it's strange to me. When I look at you with my eyes, I see one thing, but when I sense you with my mind, there is something else where you stand.”
    Reiho drew his brows together. “What do you mean?”
    “Right now, I see a boy of flesh and bone. That's what my eyes see. When I reach out with my mind, I see an object, a thing like a machine, a body not of flesh but of metal, a thing which should not have life. That is how I first saw you.”
    The boy was silent.
    “Why do I see that?”
    “I'm not sure.” He peered at her closely. “Maybe it is because part of me isn't flesh. We are...” and he said a word she did not know.
    “Say that again, explain it,” she interrupted.
    “Part of us is not flesh and