CHAPTER 6-7

 

THE GREEN BOOK

 

by Jill Paton Walsh

CHAPTER 6-7

After the lovely romp that evening, we expected them to come the next morning. But they didn't, and they weren't flying around above us as they had been every day since they hatched out. So in the af­ternoon we went to look for them.

 

They were all gath­ered in Boulder Valley—Boulder Valley all smooth and stoneless now. They were settled on the round slopes of the valley, row upon row of them, all round the curving valley sides, wings folded above their heads, and all facing the circular flat valley floor, looking toward the view of the lake and the distant mountain. And on the valley floor a small group of them were slowly moving, and opening and closing their wings.

 

Anybody would have known how special it was. It felt very hushed, and intense, and though we could not hear the performers, we could tell that the rest of the moths were listening—listening in that way that made words huge and grand, as the people of Shine had listened to Father reading from the Grimm storybook.

 

The whole lot of us gathered now, standing on the valley rim, outside the assembly of moth people, watching and staring, drawn into the circle by the feeling, but shut out hopelessly from understanding. There seemed to be a play going on—speeches, and then slow solemn dances, little bursts of flight, little ringing movements, and amazing, spec­tacular movements of dozens of wings.

 

"A drama," said the Guide, bemused.

"A mystery play," said Father. And we settled to watch, sitting on the rough hillside, and staring. It seemed to Pattie that it all went on a very long time. She didn't want to leave, go home, play instead. But it made her feel terribly lonely, not to understand at all.

 

At last, when the afternoon was halfway over, the players, the dancers on the stage, suddenly rose in flight, in a great spiraling column of wings that mounted and mounted, blazing red and silver in the sun, and the moth audience began to join in, rushing forward down the hillside onto the stage, and then mounting in flight with the others, so that the column of wheeling wings soared higher and higher and seemed to reach a vanishing point in the bright sky. Like a great kite with a long, long tail, flying upward. And when the leaders had finally flown high enough to draw the very last followers off the ground, the column leveled out, and flew away across the lake, toward the mountain.

 

Behind them in Boulder Valley they left silence. For though their drama had been soundless, and the great rapt fluttering crowd of them had made no noise, the living hush of their play and the dead silence of the empty valley were quite different.

 

Somewhere over the lake, the cloud of moths broke line and flew onward in a random scattering. Mal­colm, watching them through the only pair of field glasses, said, "They're in pairs now. That must have been a mating dance!"

 

We all stood for a little while, feeling lost and dis­appointed, just as it had felt when suddenly there were missing pages in the Grimm story. And we all went home and ate, though it wasn't really hunger that was making us feel empty.

 

The moth people were gone all the rest of that day, and all night. We missed their shadows flitting be­tween the huts, their scudding shadows cast across the fireshine and lampshine between neighbors. And the next day, too, they were gone. The grownups found themselves things to do, but everyone was restless, and the children suddenly found their games boring with no moth friends to join in.

 

And then toward evening they began to come back. Or some of them did. Fewer than half as many. They came straggling, flying low over the still water, and as though they were sick or exhausted, or heavily laden. We could see that they were struggling, that their bodies were swollen and heavy, and some of them could not keep aloft, but touched the water, first just with wing tips, and then, as they struggled and failed to fly higher, with wet wings they stuck to the lake surface, trapped and helpless.

 

We could only help some, only those that fell into the water just near the edge; the grownups waded in and pulled them onto the shore. But many of them died, floating and sinking far out.

 

Those we had saved dragged themselves, crawling, along the land toward Boulder Valley. The lucky ones who were still airborne flew there. Not more than a quarter of them made it, Peter reckoned. Pattie and Jason hoped more would come home the next day. We left the survivors resting in the rapid dusk.

 

But the next morning when we went back, carry­ing tree candy, they were all dying. They had shed their wings, which lay stretched like colored cloths across the valley slopes; and they had laid eggs—lots of brown boulders, scattered like rocks on the hill­sides. They would not eat our candy but lay curled up and quiet, looking very shrunken and ugly and small without their wings. Pattie cried for them bitterly.

 

"How long will it be before more of them hatch out?'' she asked Father when he tried to comfort her.

"I don't know, Pattie," he said. "How can we tell? As Peter said, we don't know anything here. But I think it will be a long time, a very long time."

"Why, Father?" asked Sarah.

"Because the bodies, and the shed wings from the last generation of them, had rotted away to nothing when we got here, and only the boulders were left. And I'm almost sure the boulders were much bigger before they hatched than the new ones are. I think they must have quite a lot of growing to do while they are boulders. And I don't suppose boulders grow fast. It might be years before they come again, and I'm afraid we shan't be here to see it."

"You mean, because the wheat has gone wrong?" said Sarah.

"Yes, Sarah, because of that," he said, very sadly.

 

It still looked lovely, though. While the moth people had taken Pattie's mind right off it, the ripen­ing had burnished the bronzed wheat to gold, and then to a crusty brownness, like baked bread. The day came for cutting it, using a whirring thing with knife blades on it that Father and Malcolm had made. Then everyone had to help, putting gloves on to keep from cutting their hands, and walking along the fallen swaths of wheat, picking it up, and piling it in witches' hats to dry.

 

The first day we were cutting it, Malcolm took an armful of the stalks and laid them on the ground and beat them till the husks fell off the grains. Then he shook the grains in a sieve, to get rid of the chaff, and got a pile of hexagonal yellow beads, shining like golden glass.

 

People came down from working in the field and looked at it and shook their heads. They went inside their houses, and all the doors were shut, and the silence was like the silence left behind when the moth people flew away. In our hut, Father sat with his head in his hands, and the little blue bottle of last-resort pills in front of him.

 

But Sarah said, "I'm going to try, I'm going to try, I'm going to try!" She stole a handful of the glass beads, and rubbed them between two stones, and they fell easily into a dry white powder that smelled good. She sent Pattie for a ladle of lake water, and mixed a dough, and rolled it out thin, and made a pancake, and cooked it on the fire.

 

Then, when it looked done, she broke it into four pieces, and gave one to Pattie and one to Joe, and bit into one herself, leaving Father's share in the pan. Oh, it tasted good! We ate it in three bites. Then Sarah took the last piece to Father.

 

"No, Sarah, pet," he said. "No. It can't be eaten. It's like ground glass—it will be like poison to us. It will kill us in terrible agony if we eat it . . ."

"We have eaten it, all three, Father," said Sarah.

"It tastes good," Pattie said.

Father went very white. "Oh, my dears," he said. Then he said, "Listen, if it begins to hurt you, I will give you these pills at once. But let's sit together for a bit now."

 

We sat till Pattie fell asleep, leaning over against Father. She half woke when he carried her to bed. Dimly she saw that the Guide was there, and Malcolm, taking away the last quarter of the pan-baked bread, and Jason's mother sitting beside Sarah. Pattie fell fast asleep the moment Father laid her down in her bunk. "Does your tummy hurt, Pattie?" he asked her, but she barely heard him ask, and she was too far asleep to tell him.

 

And she woke up in the morning feeling fine, and hungry, to the best day on Shine so far. For Sarah was well, and Joe was well, and all the grownups were laughing, and teasing poor Malcolm. "Well," he was saying, "it looks granular under the micro­scope, that's all I can say!"

But every family was rubbing grain between stones, and making pan bread for breakfast.

"Well, planet," said the Guide, smiling at the mountain. "Get used to us. We are here to stay. And now for harvest home.''

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 7

 

Everyone was happy. There was lots of work to do. Everyone went up to the field to gather and stack the wheat, the next day, and for days afterwards.

 

Father said he wouldn't need to build a mill, because the grain was so easy to grind, but every family needed a pair of stones for grinding flour, and they had to be found and shaped. We needed a big bunker to store the grain, some to eat, and some for next year's grow­ing.

 

By and by, Father went and fetched some moth wings from Boulder Valley, all faded and limp, and Malcolm brewed up something to steep them in that made them into a kind of stringy soup; and then we dried out the fibers by pouring the soup through a tray of sand and leaving it to dry in the sun, and then the fibers could be spun into thread, using a funny thing like a top on a stick that Father made.

 

He was going to make a loom next. We would all have red and gray mottled clothes out of moth cloth, when our Earth things wore out. We were looking rather rag­ged already.

 

When the harvest was in, and we were getting used to our own good bread, we began to see that winter was coming. It got very cold, not just at night, and the leaves on the trees turned black and fell off. All the redness in the forest darkened and the gray grass lost its shine.

 

The grownups decided we would need to share all the food, depending on how many there were to feed in each family.

"We have enough," the Guide said. "Enough for us all to live, to live quite well."

"Enough food, yes," said Father, "But the plan didn't give us all we need.''

"You must stop hankering after books, brother," the Guide told him. "All that has gone beyond re­covery." 

"We had better record the shares we are giving out," said Peter. "We can get paper from the space­ship. There must be some computer printout lying around there that we could write on."

 

But nobody wanted to go and look for it. It seemed as though we didn't want to remember we had come like refugees from so far away; we wanted to feel that Shine was our home, where we would be, and had always been.

 

Father thought of something. "What about that empty book of Pattie's?" he said. "We could use that."

“Father," said Pattie. "Please don't. Please, it's mine!"

"An empty book, Pattie?" said Father. "No use to anyone. And needed for something important. We all have to share, you know that. Joe, go and get it."

 

Pattie hid her face, and slipped away from the center of the group. Joe brought the book from under her pillow in the hut, and Father opened it.

 

And it was full. It was full of writing, very large and round and shaky. "Heavens!" said Father. "What's this?" He read for a few moments. "It's a story," he said. "About here, about us. It has the moth people in it, and the hexagonal wheat!"

 

"Read it to us," said Jason's mother, and others joined in. "Read it to us!" Lots of people, the people of Shine, gathered around Father with the open book in his hand, all eager, and ready to make the words huge with listening to them.

 

Father turned back and back in the green book to the very first page, and began to read:

"Father said, 'We can take very little with us . . .