other wing.
He stepped around the girl so that she could see him and when she saw
him there was no start of surprise. And that, he knew would be quite
natural, for she must be accustomed to it-someone coming up behind her and
supenly being there.
Her eyes were radiant and there was, he thought, a holy look upon her
face, as if she had experienced some ecstasy of the soul. And he found
himself wondering again, as he did each time he saw her, what it must be
like for her, living in a world of two-way silence, unable to communicate.
Perhaps not entirely unable to communicate, but at least barred from that
free flow of communication which was the birthright of the human animal.
There had been, he knew, several attempts to establish her in a state
school for the deaf, but each had been a failure. Once she’d run away and
wandered days before being finally found and returned to her home. And on
other occasions she had gone on disobedience strikes, refusing to co-operate
in any of the teaching.
Watching her as she sat there with the butterfly, Enoch thought he knew
the reason. She had a world, he thought, a world of her very own, one to
which she was accustomed and knew how to get along in. In that world she was
no cripple, as she most surely would have been a cripple if she had been
pushed, part way, into the normal human world.
What good to her the hand alphabet or the reading of the lips if they
should take from her some strange inner serenity of spirit?
She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and
autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was,
in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in
an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that
Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he’d ever held it.
And there she sat, with the wild red and gold of the butterfly poised
upon her finger, with the sense of alertness and expectancy and, perhaps,
accomplishment shining on her face. She was alive, thought Enoch, as no
other thing he knew had ever been alive.
The butterfly spread its wings and floated off her finger and went
fluttering, unconcerned, unfrightened, up across the wild grass and the
goldenrod of the field.
She pivoted to watch it until it disappeared near the top of the hill
up which the old field climbed, then she turned to Enoch. She smiled and
made a fluttery motion with her hands, like the fluttering of the red and
golden wings, but there was something else in it, as well-a sense of
happiness and an expression of well-being, as if she might be saying that
the world was going fine.
If, Enoch thought, I could only teach her the pasimology of my galactic
people-then we could talk, the two of us, almost as well as with the flow of
words on the human tongue. Given the time, he thought, it might not be too
hard, for there was a natural and a logical process to the galactic sign
language that made it almost instinctive once one had caught the underlying
principle.
Throughout the Earth as well, in the early days; there had been sign
languages, and none so well developed as that one which obtained among the
aborigines of North America, so that an Amerindian, no matter what his
tongue, could express himself among many other tribes.
But even so the sign language of the Indian was, at best, a crutch that
allowed a man to hobble when he couldn’t run. Whereas that of the galaxy was
in itself a language, adaptable to many different means and methods of
expression. It had been developed through millennia, with many different
peoples making contributions, and through the centuries it had been refined
and shaken down and polished until today it was a communications tool that
stood on its own merits.
There was need for such a tool, for the galaxy was Babel. Even the
galactic science of pasimology, polished as it might be, could not surmount
all the obstacles, could not guarantee, in certain cases, the basic minimum
of communication. For not only were there millions of tongues, but those
other languages as well which could not operate on the principle of sound
because the races were incapable of sound. And even sound itself failed of
efficiency when the race talked in ultrasonics others could not hear. There
was telepathy, of course, but for every telepath there were a thousand races
that had telepathic blocks. There were many who got along on sign languages
alone and others who could communicate only by a written or pictographic
system, including some who carried chemical blackboards built into their
bodies. And there was that sightless, deaf, and speechless race from the
mystery stars of the far side of the galaxy who used what was perhaps the
most complicated of all the galactic languages-a code of signals routed
along their nervous systems.
Enoch had been at the job almost a century, and even so, he thought,
with the aid of the universal sign language and the semantic translator,
which was little more than a pitiful (although complicated) mechanical
contrivance, he still was hard put at times to know what many of them said.
Lucy Fisher picked up a cup that was standing by her side-a cup
fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark-and dipped it in the spring. She
held it out to Enoch and he stepped close to take it, kneeling down to drink
from it. It was not entirely water-tight, and water ran from it down across
his arm, wetting the cuff of shirt and jacket.
He finished drinking and handed back the cup. She took it in one hand
and reached out the other, to brush across his forehead with the tip of
gentle fingers in what she might have thought of as a benediction.
He did not speak to her. Long ago he had ceased talking to her, sensing
that the movement of his mouth, making sounds she could not hear, might be
embarrassing.
Instead he put out a hand and laid his broad palm against her cheek,
holding it there for a reassuring moment as a gesture of affection. Then he
got to his feet and stood staring down at her and for a moment their eyes
looked into the other’s eyes and then turned away.
He crossed the little stream that ran down from the spring and took the
trail that led from the forest’s edge across the field, heading for the
ridge. Halfway up the slope, he turned around and saw that she was watching
him. He held up his hand in a gesture of farewell and her hand gestured in
reply.
It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had
seen her, a little fairy person of ten years or so, a wild thing running in
the woods. They had become friends, he recalled, only after a long time,
although he saw her often, for she roamed the hills and valley as if they
were a playground for her-which, of course, they were.
Through the years he had watched her grow and had often met her on his
daily walks, and between the two of them had grown up an understanding of
the lonely and the outcast, but understanding based on something more than
that-on the fact that each had a world that was their own and worlds that
had given them an insight into something that others seldom saw. Not that
either, Enoch thought, ever told the other, or tried to tell the other, of
these private worlds, but the fact of these private worlds was there, in the
consciousness of each, providing a firm foundation for the building of a
friendship.
He recalled the day he’d found her at the place where the pink
lady’s-slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking
any of them, and how he’d stopped beside her and been pleased she had not
moved to pick them, knowing that in the sight of them, the two, he and she,
had found a joy and a beauty that was beyond possession.
He reached the ridgetop and turned down the grass-grown road that led
down to the mailbox.
And he’d not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how
it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly’s wing had been torn and
crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing and
then it had been whole again and had flown away.
8
Winslowe Grant was on time.
Enoch, as he reached the mailbox, sighted the dust raised by his old
jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought,