By Any Other Name

By Wesa

Series: Crossover War of the Worlds/ The People

Rating: G

Category: Angst (?)

Disclaimers: War of the Worlds characters belong to Paramount and Strangis & Strangis. The concept of The People belonged to the late Zenna Henderson until her death; I don't know who owns it now. I have nothing but admiration for those who created these characters and concepts, and I mean no disrespect. I'm not making any money from this; this is just for my own entertainment and for the entertainment of those who want to read it. This part is based almost entirely upon Ms. Henderson's story Troubling of the Water.

By Wesa.

We came to this haven in the sky when our Home died. We didn't know of this world before; we came far, far. At the last we came too fast. We are not space travelers. The big ship that found this world got too hot. We had to leave it in our life-slips, each by himself. The life-slips got hot, too. I was burning! I lost control of my life-slip and fell -

When I first wakened again, it was to pain, agonizing pain from my burns. Someone was carefully lifting me by my back and shoulders, but even his gentleness wasn't enough. I think I moaned and asked why he wasn't Lifting me; didn't he realize how much pain he was causing by touching my burned shoulder? Then a cup of water touched my blistered mouth and I gulped it down eagerly. The man asked me a question, just one word and a repeat, but I had no idea what he had said. I shook my head once, but the pain of the movement was too much, and I guess I passed out again.

Each time I woke, for the first few days, my burns had been anointed with something and my bandages changed. I realized that these were inhabitants of the world I had seen from the sky. They were gentle and kind, but I had no idea what they looked like. Were they like the People? Or were they monsters, in form if not in behavior? Did they have two heads? Six eyes? Eight legs? Well, no, I knew better than that. I could hear them moving around the house, and it was obvious that they walked with a two-legged gait. Still, I was afraid.

Each day, they oiled my burns and changed my bandages, but even with the bandages off I couldn't see. Although they were short of water themselves, they always urged me to drink more. Within days I was able to sit up and even eat a little of the food they brought me. I couldn't complain about their kindness; I bit back all complaints even when they changed the dressing on my badly burned left shoulder, even when the scabs across my left cheek cracked and bled. What did they think of that? Had they ever seen red blood before?

One day they all rushed outside; I could feel their hopes, their prayers, and I tried to follow, to join them, but I could only make it as far as a chair near a window. I guess it was a window. Heat from the summer outside poured oppressively through a place on the wall. I could almost feel the light washing over my hands. I sat in the chair and waited for them to come back.

They carried me back to my little bed and the father had some kind of a discussion with the boy, then went back outside. The boy tugged at my unburned right arm until he got me to sit upright and swing my feet over the edge of the bed. Hesitantly I reached out and touched his face. He didn't seem to mind, so I quickly examined all of his features: eyes, two; nose, one; mouth, one, right under the nose where it should be. His head was roundish; he had hair mostly on top, a little on the sides. He had two ears, on opposite sides of his head. He had a slender neck and two shoulders. I rested my hands on them and sighed in relief.

He laughed and spoke, and I caught an image from his mind of a creature with horns sprouting from its temples, curled twice and with shiny black tips. I probed his temple with my fingertip, and he sat back with an exclamation of surprise. His parents and young sister came back then, and I lay back down, exhausted in my relief. They were people after all. Maybe not quite the same as the People, but not monsters.

The mother of the family was about to have a baby; I had to take some of the burden of my care off her. From the boy - I had learned his name was Barney - I had also learned about the Little House outside. With his help to get there, I would no longer need to use the bedpan. I could do that much.

Through our brief contact, Barney had apparently learned my name, too, because they started calling me Timothy. My Lifting when Barney had led me to the Little House had upset his mother, so each time I got up after that I worked hard at taking steps again. It would be poor gratitude for me to repay all their kindness with such worries.

Barney lent me some of his clothes, and soon I was able to join them at the table for their meals. Little Merry talked happily to me, whacking at my arm with her spoon; fortunately she was seated to my right. I listened intently to everything that was said, and after a while I figured out that Merry couldn't yet speak their language either. Most of what she said was just a baby's babbled experiments with the sounds she could make. After that I concentrated on the words that Barney and his parents said.

Each night after the evening meal was over and the dishes cleaned up and put away, they all sat around the table and read aloud from different books. Of course I didn't understand any of the stories at the time, so I just sat and listened to the words, struggling to make any kind of sense of them. But after they read their stories, they always prayed. I figured out right away that they were praying. The words had a different cadence to them, and their voices were deeply respectful. After the first night, I joined in as best I could, making the Sign in the air with my right hand at the beginning and end of their prayer time. I could only do it one-handed, since my left shoulder wasn't working yet because of the deep burns.

Although I couldn't speak or understand their language, I could communicate, to a limited degree, with Barney. I was able to let him know when I was thirsty, and when I needed to go to the Little House. I could tell him what foods I liked and what I didn't much care for. And I began to know that this worried him.

Barney had other worries, too. Their land was in the midst of a drought that was killing their crops and their animals, and on top of that, his mother's pregnancy was nearing its natural end. This worried Barney because, aside from him and his little sister Merry, his mother had borne five children that had been Called back into the Presence almost immediately after birth. The whole family, except Merry of course, was afraid this baby would be taken from them also.

Then the mother's pregnancy was over, and when the birth came close, the father sent Barney to take Merry and me out away from the house to give them some privacy. I could feel Barney's wordless prayers, and when eventually his anxiety made prayer impossible, he talked. Although I couldn't understand the words, I got the sense of what he was saying. He told me everything about the ranch and the orchard and the drought. He told me about all the little dead babies and how healthy Merry was but how worried they all were for the new baby until he ran out of words and sat there under his favorite little tree hugging Merry and crying into her hair.

From the house there came this terrible feeling of great need. Barney was too close to the pain, but maybe I could help. I Lifted back through the orchard, sensing the trees, but keeping my arms outstretched in front of me in case I missed the placement of one. By the time I reached the house, though, Barney was there, putting Merry in her playpen and helping me with the door latch. Inside, the mother was trying to catch her breath while the father desperately labored to bring back his son, even though he had already returned to the Presence.

Although in the following days I did all I could to ease their grief, the lights of hope and joy had gone out of the house. They all did only what had to be done to continue living, and even Merry stood quietly in her playpen, just staring out into the baking heat. Barney and his father had buried the little boy on a nearby hill under a small tree, and when the mother was well enough we all went up there and prayed for him. I held her hand all the way up and all the way back, offering her what little comfort I could communicate through touch, the feeling that the Power will make things right, that sorrow is only a shadow, the knowledge that the baby was Called back into the Presence.

My ability to communicate with Barney and, in a limited way with his mother, angered Barney's father. Barney came to me one night without the water he knew I wanted and told me that he wasn't allowed to get me any water until I asked for it aloud, in words, in their language. I put two fingers on his wrist, trying to better understand what I had to learn to say.

The next day, Barney's father left early to go buy drinking water. This was a new idea for me, this buying things, necessary things. Arts, yes. Crafts, yes. But buying water? I didn't understand. I could have gotten a cup of water for myself, of course, but if they had to buy water, maybe I shouldn't. Late in the morning, I felt confident enough in the words Barney had told me I must say to get a cup and take it out onto the porch where Barney sat despondently. "I'm thirsty," I said slowly and carefully. "I want a drink, please."

Barney scrambled to his feet, the smile he wore getting through to me even though I couldn't see it. His mother came to the door and asked a question, and Barney replied happily, calling me Timmy for the first time. We went back into the house and he dipped a cup of water for me.

"Thank you," I said, and drank it all before I put the cup down by the bucket and went back to the porch.

They needed water. There was water nearby; I could sense it, but I couldn't tell exactly where the sensation was coming from. So, while Barney, Merry, and their mother napped in the noonday heat, I got a cup of water from the bucket and took it outside, trying to hone my sense of it. I was so intent on it that when Barney came around the corner of the house looking for me, he startled me. He sat on the ground beside me, and as I touched his wrist I felt his concern and his dismay as he chastised me for playing in their scant ration of water.

I poured what remained in the cup at the base of a struggling plant that was somehow important to Barney's mother, got to my feet with Barney's help, and told him, "Walk!" With Barney steering me clear of holes and the prickly plants that grew naturally here, we covered the ground, back and forth, back and forth. Finally I told him, "I'm thirsty. I want a drink please," and we went back to the house.

The next morning we covered the area on the other side of the house, back and forth, back and forth. Both Barney and his mother wondered what I was doing, I knew that, but I hadn't enough words to explain, so I said nothing.

Around noon we went back to the house and sat on the porch steps, listening to Merry gurgle at us. "I'm thirsty. I want a drink, please," I told Barney. When he brought it, I touched his wrist and told him, "Thank you," adding, "It's sure hot!"

"It sure is!" he agreed, startled by the new words.

I drank the water slowly, studying it as I did, and poured the last drop into my palm, rolling the fingers and thumb of my other hand in the dampness, making sure that what I sensed was correct. I got up and went to the playpen, reaching for Merry but turning my face to Barney. He did what I wanted and moved his sister and her playpen up onto the porch, then I sat down in the dirt where the pen had been and began digging with my hands.

Barney took Merry into the house to get her cleaned up for dinner. When he came back, I had made some progress, but not nearly enough; the dirt I had scraped away kept falling back into the hole. He moved it farther away, then took my right arm and lifted, telling me it was time to eat. After dinner I went back to the hole I had started, and Barney, realizing that I was going to continue digging, brought me a knife with a broken blade and the old spoon Merry played with.

All afternoon I dug, then scraped the dirt out and dug again. By evening, I was sitting shoulder-deep in the hole. When the air had cooled as much as it ever did at night, we heard the jingle of the harness, the creak of the wagon, and the plop-plop of the footfalls of the animals that pulled it as Barney's father returned. Barney and his mother went to meet him at the gate. They seemed less relieved than I expected, and even from where I was, down in my hole, I realized that fewer than half the barrels were filled with water. They took care of the...the "horses," and put the wagon with its barrels in the barn before Father realized I was digging. He wasn't pleased with my choice of a location, and stomped into the house.

Barney helped me out of the hole. I was covered with dirt, and Father was almost finished with his supper before I was clean enough to go into the house. As we sat around the table after supper, instead of reading as they usually did, they just talked. I listened, my fingers on Barney's wrist so that I could understand. Mama hoped the ponds would fill while we used the water Father had brought home. Father said nothing in response, and Barney thought about the buckets of water the horses had drunk so quickly that evening. Eventually Father spoke about deciding where to go when the water was gone, then he opened the Holy Book from which he read each evening. "'For in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.'" He shut the Book hard, close to tears at this last painful blow to hope.

Barney touched my right shoulder, and we crept to bed.

I couldn't sleep. There was water below, if I could only make them understand that. Then I realized: I couldn't see, so what did it matter if I dug at night? It would be cooler than in the day anyway. And with the family asleep, I could get the dirt out of the hole my way, without upsetting anyone.

I dug for a long while, then I heard Father's voice. After a moment, Barney replied, and there was another exchange. Then Barney came to the edge of the hole and called down to me to come up. I came up obediently, Lifting straight up out of the hole I had dug and landing on the porch next to Father, who stumbled back a couple of steps. Barney cried out in terror, but Father just turned and went into the house. Barney guided me to the bench at the table, and we sat across from Father. With his hand gingerly gripping on my wrist, Barney asked why I was digging; his father wanted to know.

I struggled to find words until I remembered the words from the Holy Book. "'Shall waters break out and streams in the desert,'" I told them happily.

But Father didn't like my answer, and forbade me to dig further. I turned to Barney in protest, and he actually stood up to his father, asking what harm I was doing. But Barney was so frightened by doing it that he was almost nauseous. He explained to his father what we had done before I started digging. They argued until they both stood, on opposite sides of the table. I could feel them glaring at one another.

Father's eyes dropped first, and Barney was nearly overwhelmed with sorrow. He dropped back down to the bench beside me and cried because his will on this issue was stronger than his father's. Father circled the table, no longer angry, and put his hand on Barney's shoulder. Gently he told us to go back to bed. Barney hugged him, and we went.

Next morning, they began to help me dig. They called it a well now, perhaps to bolster their hopes. By evening we were down more than twice as far as Father was tall, and we had found only silt and an occasional group of round river rocks. The ladder was barely long enough for Father and Barney to get out of the well. They decided that it was time to quit, but just then I found something. Barney called to me to come up, but I knelt and turned my face up to him, running my hand over the surface of what I had found.

Barney came back down and looked at what I had found, then called to his father with such desolation in his voice that my heart nearly broke, and his father came down, too. We traced it again and again, but no matter which way we brushed away the dirt, no matter how far we poked into the sides of the well, there was solid rock. We were down to bedrock. The water was there, I could feel it, but it was on the other side of the rock.

Father and Barney climbed the ladder out of the well, and I Lifted out beside them. They had both lost hope. I put my hands on their shoulders and repeated emphatically, "'Shall waters break out and streams in the desert.'"

Father was angry with me. He thought I didn't understand what I was saying, that I was just repeating what he had read aloud the night before. Then Barney thought of something they had used to remove stumps from the pasture, and Father's hope was rekindled. He went to the barn, and when he returned, he sent Mama and Merry to shelter behind it. He made Barney stay away and keep me back, too, while he worked alone in the bottom of the well. Then he came up the ladder in a hurry, and Barney ran to help pull the ladder out, and we all hurried to shelter with Mama and Merry behind the barn.

I didn't understand. I knew Barney was cautious, if not exactly afraid, but he didn't really think about what was about to happen, and so I was unprepared when the explosion came.

My People had put explosives behind us after the Peace, but I knew about them. I knew they could be used for evil as well as for good, and when everyone else ran to see what had been wrought by the blast, I could only crouch behind the barn with my face pressed to my knees and my hands covering my head protectively. After a few minutes Barney came back to get me, his whole demeanor dejected. As we passed the well, I understood why. The blast had caved in the sides.

After supper when Barney brought their books to the table, I reached out and gathered them to me, stacking them carefully. I leaned my chin on the stack, thinking hard, and began to speak. "I have words enough now," I told them carefully. "I have been learning them as fast as I could. Maybe I will not have them always right, but I must talk now. You must not go away, because there is water."

Father closed his mouth, which had dropped open in astonishment, and said wearily, "So you have been making fools of us all this time!"

There was a pause while I found Barney's wrist and struggled to understand the meaning of Father's words. "I have not made fools of you," I told him. "I could not speak to anyone but Barney without words, and I must touch him to tell and to understand. I had to wait to learn your words. It is a new language."

"Where are you from?" Barney asked eagerly. "How did you get out there in the pasture? What is in the -" He broke off and I sensed that he had told no one about the box he had found.

"My cahilla!" I said excitedly. I had thought it was lost. Then I shook my head and turned back to the urgent business. I addressed Father once more. "I'm not sure how to tell you so you will believe. I don't know how far your knowledge -"

"Father's smarter than anyone in the whole Territory!" Barney said proudly.

"The Territory." I paused, trying to get a sense of 'Territory.' "I was thinking of your world - this world -"

"There are other planets," Barney said.

What a relief! "Then you do know other planets," I said. "Do you -" I had trouble finding a word. "Do you transport yourself and things in the sky?"

"Do we have flying machines?" Father asked, rephrasing my question. "No, not yet. We have balloons -"

I touched Barney's wrist again, and sighed. "Then I must just tell and if you do not know, you must believe only because I tell. I tell only to make you know there is water and you must stay." I told them about the Home, then, and the ships and the way our world had died. I told them about coming too fast into their atmosphere, and about the ship and the life slips burning. "I think maybe I will never see this new world," I said, putting my hands up to touch the bandages over my eyes.

"Then there are others like you, here on Earth," Father said slowly.

"Unless they all died in the landing," I agreed. "There were many on the big ship."

"I saw little things breaking off the big thing!" Barney cried out excitedly. "I thought they were pieces breaking off, only they - they went instead of falling!"

"Praise the Presence, the Name, and the Power!" I made the sign and dropped my hand back to Barney's wrist. "Maybe some still live. Maybe Lytha -"

Father was interested in my People, but wondered what our existence could have to do with his water problem. I explained as best I could about being able to sense the water below the ground, about the way it pushed so hard and was so cold. And I asked them to wait.

"Until our water is gone," Father compromised, "and until we have decided where to go.

"Now it's time for bed." He read a passage from their Holy Book about the wonder and glory of the heavens, and we retired to sleep.

I slept restlessly, thinking about my cahilla. Everything I had left of the Home was in that small box. And I thought about Lytha. Finally I called softly to Barney, since I couldn't reach his wrist, "Barney, my cahilla. You found my cahilla?"

"Your what?" he asked, his hand meeting mine as I groped to touch him. "Oh! That box thing. Yeah, I'll get it for you in the morning."

"Not tonight? It is all I have left of the Home. The only personal things we had room for-"

"I can't find it tonight," Barney said. "I buried it by a rock. I couldn't find it in the dark. Besides, Father'd hear us go, if we tried to leave now. Go to sleep. It must be near morning."

I sighed. "Oh, yes. Oh, yes." I lay back down, remembering that these people could not find things without being able to see them. "Sleep well."

After breakfast Barney's mother carefully oiled my scabs again, commenting that she was nearly out of bandages, and I suggested that if she could stand to look at me, she could leave the bandages off; maybe the light would come through.

Father and Barney and I discussed digging out the well again, but we didn't know how thick the bedrock was. I couldn't tell them, I only knew the water was there, not how far it was. If I could have platted it - but though I could feel the sun streaming through my fingers, I couldn't weave the design that would break the rock.

Barney found a piece of broken rock. All the other rocks we had found were round river rocks, so the blast had broken something ... but where was the water?

Barney took me out to the field where my life-slip had crashed, and he dug up my cahilla and put it into my hands. I opened it and felt the things inside: a ribbon from Lytha's hair; a flower we had found late that spring, only days before we left the Home ... After a while I closed my cahilla and hid my face against my arm while I cried. When I could, I asked Barney to bury my cahilla once again, since there was nowhere to put it in the house.

When we got back to the house, Father had dug a little, but the ground would no longer hold the shape of a well. Barney and his family discussed off and on all afternoon where to go. They began packing, since the barrels were emptying fast and the pools from which they had previously gotten water were drying, the mud curling in the sun.

After we had gone to bed, an idea occurred to me. Maybe I could sun-and-moonlight platt the next morning - But Barney told me that the moon was in the wrong phase. I would have to do without. I asked Barney to keep my cahilla if I was Called, then I waited for the family to go to sleep.

I Lifted out to the porch and sat there, Lifting the dirt out of the hole, holding back the sides, until I had it all the way down to the broken bedrock. I could feel the water pushing hard, hard, under the rock. I had to break it enough to let the water start through. I called on the Power again and tried and tried until finally a piece came loose and flew up. The force of the water was like when Father had blasted the rock. Exhausted, I went unconscious.

When I woke up, my face had been bandaged again. Barney told me I had been peeled raw. But I had been successful. There was a pond now, and a stream. The family had waked up when the water came blasting out. They had found me and gotten me to the barn, where most of their things were packed on the wagon, then Father and Barney had gone back again and again to get the rest of their belongings. Finally Father had tied a rope through the broken corner of the house where a big chunk of rock had gone through it, to keep the house from floating away.

So we didn't move, and now the main road through the valley goes through my adopted family's ranch for the sweetest, coldest water in the Territory. Father built a big new house among the young black walnut and weeping willow trees that surround the pond, and the orchard has begun to bear enough to be a cash crop.

And one day, a wagon coming from the other side of the valley stopped at the campgrounds below the pond. We went down after supper to exchange news. My eyes were open by then, but only a little light came in, not enough to see by.

Barney and Father and I talked to the man while Mama visited with his wife. I don't know what they were discussing, but I heard the woman say, "Abigail Johnson is a far cry from Marnie Lytha Something-or-other!"

Lytha? I cried without words. I stumbled toward the woman, but she fended me off. She wouldn't let me touch her wrist; I couldn't see ... "Where are you coming from?" I asked her.

"Margin," she told me.

"Margin," I repeated, shaking as I turned away. "Thanks." Barney and I moved off through the willows to the orchard. "How far is Margin?" I asked him.

His excitement was almost tangible. "Two days across Desolation Valley. It's a mining town in the hills."

"Two days!" I had to stop and cling to a small tree. "Only two days away all this time!"

"It might not be your Lytha," Barney warned. "It could be one of us. I've heard some of the wildest names! Pioneering seems to addle people's naming sense."

"I'll call," I decided. "I'll call, and when she answers-"

"If she hears you," Barney warned again. "Maybe she thinks everyone is dead like you did. Maybe she won't think of listening."

"She will think often of the Home," I told him, "and when she does, she will hear me. I will start now." I went back to the house and sat on the porch, calling to Lytha with all my heart and soul.