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  Ingathering: The Complete People Stories

  by Zenna Henderson

  “This useful and enjoyable collection reprints all of the People stories, including four that didn't appear in Henderson's two People books (Pilgrimage; The Book of the People; The People: No Different Flesh) and one that is new to print. One of the few female writers during SF's earlier years, Henderson provides a warm, emotional voice, prefeminist yet independent, examining issues of identity, loneliness, nostalgia and caring. The People series, written between 1952 and 1975, also present a strong regional sensibility, depicting a rural Southwest as alien and charming as the People's own planet.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  Zenna Henderson is best remembered for her stories of the People which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from the early ’50s to the middle ’70s. The People escaped the destruction of their home planet and crashed on Earth in the Southwest just before the turn of the century. Fully human in appearance, they possessed many extraordinary powers. Henderson’s People stories tell of their struggles to fit in and to live their lives as ordinary people, unmolested by fearful and ignorant neighbors. The People are “us at our best, as we hope to be, and where (with work and with luck) we may be in some future.”

  Like so may of her characters Zenna Henderson was a teacher. She worked in various schools through her life, generally as a first-grade teacher, though at one time or another she taught other elementary grades and some High School.

  Again, like her characters, she was born and raised in Arizona and lived most of her life there, though she taught for a year in Connecticut and for two years in France. In Arizona, she taught at a Japanese relocation camp during World War II, and, much later, at Fort Huachuca. She taught at a semi-ghost mining town “where the kids brought jars of water to school when the water pressure was too low to make it up to the hill-top school house, and they had to unlock the Little Houses left over from a much earlier era.”

  Her first story of the People, "Ararat," was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1952. It was her second published science fiction story and was destined to begin a series of stories which would span her writing career.

  Zenna Henderson's stories of the People are among the most-loved and remembered series in Science Fiction.

  Ingathering

  * * *

  The Complete People Stories of

  Zenna Henderson

  edited by Mark and Priscilla Olson

  NESFA Press

  Post Office Box 809

  Framingham, MA 01701-0809

  www.nesfapress.org

  [email protected]

  1995

  © 1995 by The Estate of Zenna Henderson

  Introduction

  © 1995 by Priscilla Olson

  Chronology

  © 1995 by Mark and Priscilla Olson

  Dust jacket illustration

  © 1995 by Elizabeth Rhys Finney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic, magical or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  NESFA® is a registered trademark of the

  New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.

  First Hardcover Edition, 11th Printing, Dec 2018

  ISBN: 978-0-915368-58-7 (hardcover) [1995]

  ISBN: 978-1-61037-341-8 (ebook) [March 2020]

  The editors dedicate this book to

  Anthony R. Lewis, F.N., Ph.D., F.B.I.S.

  who created NESFA in his own image

  and

  George Flynn

  Fan and Master Proofreader

  who for years has sought to keep us

  —both fannishly and typographically—

  on the straight and narrow.

  Thank you.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction by Priscilla Olson

  Interlude: Lea 1

  Ararat

  Interlude: Lea 2

  Gilead

  Interlude: Lea 3

  Pottage

  Interlude: Lea 4

  Wilderness

  Interlude: Lea 5

  Captivity

  Interlude: Lea 6

  Jordan

  No Different Flesh

  Interlude: Mark & Meris 1

  Deluge

  Interlude: Mark & Meris 2

  Angels Unawares

  Interlude: Mark & Meris 3

  Troubling of the Water

  Interlude: Mark & Meris 4

  Return

  Interlude: Mark & Meris 5

  Shadow on the Moon

  Tell Us a Story

  That Boy

  Michal Without

  The Indelible Kind

  Katie-Mary’s Trip

  The People Series

  Chronology of the People stories

  by Mark & Priscilla Olson

  Introduction

  Priscilla Olson

  I’m a science fiction fan. Like many others, I started reading science fiction as an adolescent, and discovered Zenna Henderson then. Adolescence isn’t easy, but the People helped some of us make it through....

  Remember what those years were like? Like I said, adolescence isn’t at all easy—how can it be? You’re changing even faster than the world is, and that’s pretty scary. You don’t seem to fit in anywhere. You explore all of the nuances of loneliness, and know it’s never (ever) going to get any better.

  If you were a protofan, it was even worse. Some of us were lucky and eventually found science fiction fandom. It was (and is) a place where we could actually belong! Perhaps some of the things of our youth could be left behind then: things like the People stories—and need and hope....

  The cynics among us might think it out of fashion to admit a liking for Zenna Henderson’s unabashedly sentimental stories. To them, being separate-from-others—being an individual alone—is a sign of maturity. Perhaps they do not believe in redemption, of any kind. They feel no need to look through the eyes of the Outsider to see themselves.

  But—there’s need! (Feel it resonate.) The finer points of humanity—our aloneness—don’t go away when we grow up.

  And yet, those who are turned off by the “mawkishness” of Zenna Henderson’s stories might be surprised by the excellence of the writing itself. She displays an impressive ability to evoke place, while her dialogue and descriptive prose are a match for the stripped-down language of any popular modern-day stylist. Regardless of whether you are a cynic or not, Valancy’s calling up the storm (“Ararat”) is a powerful image marking Zenna Henderson as a master of her craft. And that’s just one of many.

  Aside from that, “Gilead” will still make me cry, and “Wilderness” may convince me that (just maybe) hope was left in the box. For, above all else, these are the stories of people—of us. And they are the stories of us at our best, as we hope to be, and where (with work and with luck) we may be in some future....

  These are the stories of the People. They are not my people, precisely—but like the children of Bendo, I remember the Home.

  Ingathering

  Interlude: Lea 1

  The window of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized, faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior. “Look,” she thought, “I still have a face.” She tilted her head and watched the wan light slide along the clean soft line of her cheek. There was no color except darkness for the wide eyes, the crisp turn of short curls above her ears, and the curve of her brows—all were an ou
t-of-focus print against the outside darkness. “That’s what I look like to people,” she thought impersonally. “My outside is intact—an eggshell sucked of life.”

  The figure in the seat next to her stirred.

  “Awake, deary?” The plump face beamed in the dusk. “Must have had a good nap. You’ve been so quiet ever since I got on. Here, let me turn on the reading light.” She fumbled above her. “I think these lights are cunning. How’d they get them to point just in the right place?” The light came on and Lea winced away from it. “Bright, isn’t it?” The elderly face creased into mirth. “Reminds me of when I was a youngster and we came in out of the dark and lighted a coal-oil lamp. It always made me squint like that. By the time I was your age, though, we had electricity. But I got my first two before we got electricity. I married at seventeen and the two of them came along about as quick as they could. You can’t be much more than twenty-two or three. Lordee! I had four by then and buried another. Here, I’ve got pictures of my grandbabies. I’m just coming back from seeing the newest one. That’s Jennie’s latest. A little girl after three boys. You remind me of her a little, your eyes being dark and the color your hair is. She wears hers longer but it has that same kinda red tinge to it.” She fumbled in her bag. Lea felt as though words were washing over her like a warm frothy flood. She automatically took the bulging billfold the woman tendered her and watched unseeingly as the glassine windows flipped. “... and this is Arthur and Jane. Ah, there’s Jennie. Here, take a good look and see if she doesn’t look like you.”

  Lea took a deep breath and came back from a long painful distance. She stared down at the billfold.

  “Well?” The face beamed at her expectantly.

  “She’s—” Lea’s voice didn’t work. She swallowed dryly. “She’s pretty.”

  “Yes, she is,” the woman smiled. “Don’t you think she looks a little like you, though?”

  “A little—” Her repetition of the sentence died, but the woman took it for an answer.

  “Go on, look through the others and see which one of her kids you think’s the cutest.”

  Lea mechanically flipped the other windows, then sat staring down into her lap.

  “Well, which one did you pick?” The woman leaned over. “Well!” She drew an indignant breath. “That’s my driver’s license! I didn’t say snoop!” The billfold was snatched away and the reading light snapped of. There was a good deal of flouncing and muttering from the adjoining seat before quiet descended.

  The hum of the bus was hypnotic and Lea sank back into her apathy, except for a tiny point of discomfort that kept jabbing her consciousness. The next stop she’d have to do something. Her ticket went no farther. Then what? Another decision to make. And all she wanted was nothing—nothing. And all she had was nothing—nothing. Why did she have to do anything? Why couldn’t she just not—? She leaned her forehead against the glass, dissolving the nebulous reflection of herself, and stared into the darkness. Helpless against habit, she began to fit her aching thoughts back into the old ruts, the old footprints leading to complete futility—leading into the dark nothingness. She caught her breath and fought against the horrifying—threatening...

  All the lights in the bus flicked on and there was a sleepy stirring murmur. The scattered lights of the outskirts of town slid past the slowing bus.

  It was a small town. Lea couldn’t even remember the name of it. She didn’t know which way she turned when she went out the station door. She walked away from the bus depot, her feet swift and silent on the cracked sidewalk, her body appreciating the swinging rhythm of the walk after the long hours of inactivity. Her mind was still circling blindly, unnoticing, uncaring, unconcerned.

  The business district died out thinly and Lea was walking up an incline. The walk leveled and after a while she wavered into a railing. She clutched at it, waiting for a faintness to go away. She looked out and down into darkness. “It’s a bridge!” she thought. “Over a river.” Gladness flared up in her. “It’s the answer,” she exulted. “This is it. After this—nothing!” She leaned her elbows on the railing, framing her chin and cheeks with her hands, her eyes on the darkness below, a darkness so complete that not even a ripple caught a glow from the bridge lights.

  The familiar, so reasonable voice was speaking again. Pain like this should be let go of just a momentary discomfort and it ends. No more breathing, no more thinking, no aching, no blind longing for anything. Lea moved along the walk, her hand brushing the railing. “I can stand it now,” she thought, “now that I know there is an end. I can stand to live a minute or so longer—to say good-by.” Her shoulders shook and she felt the choke of laughter in her throat. Good-by? To whom? Who’d even notice she was gone? One ripple stilled in all a stormy sea. Let the quiet water take her breathing. Let its impersonal kindness hide her—dissolve her—so no one would ever be able to sigh and say, That was Lea. Oh, blessed water!

  There was no reason not to. She found herself defending her action as though someone had questioned it. “Look,” she thought, “I’ve told you so many times. There’s no reason to go on. I could stand it when futility wrapped around me occasionally, but don’t you remember? Remember the morning I sat there dressing, one shoe off and one shoe on, and couldn’t think of one good valid reason why I should put the other shoe on? Not one reason! To finish dressing? Why? Because I had to work? Why? To earn a living? Why? To get something to eat? Why? To keep from starving to death? Why? Because you have to live! Why? Why? Why!

  “And there were no answers. And I sat there until the grayness dissolved from around me as it did on lesser occasions. But then—” Lea’s hands clutched each other and twisted painfully. “Remember what came then? The distorted sky wrenched open and gushed forth all the horror of a meaningless mindless universe—a reasonless existence that insisted on running on like a faceless clock—a menacing nothingness that snagged the little thread of reason I was hanging onto and unraveled it and unraveled it.” Lea shuddered and her lips tightened with the effort to regain her composure. “That was only the beginning.”

  “So after that the depths of futility became a refuge instead of something to run from, its negativeness almost comfortable in contrast to the positive horror of what living has become. But I can’t take either one any more.” She sagged against the railing. “And I don’t have to.” She pushed herself upright and swallowed a sudden dry nausea. “The middle will be deeper,” she thought. “Deep, swift, quiet, carrying me out of this intolerable—”

  And as she walked she heard a small cry somewhere in the lostness inside her. “But I could have loved living so much! Why have I come to this pass?”

  Shhh! the darkness said to the little voice. Shhh! Don’t bother to think. It hurts. Haven’t you found it hurts? You need never think again or speak again or breathe again past this next inhalation....

  Lea’s lungs filled slowly. The last breath! She started to slide across the concrete bridge railing into the darkness—into finishedness—into The End.

  “You don’t really want to.” The laughing voice caught her like a splash of water across her face. “Besides, even if you did, you couldn’t here. Maybe break a leg, but that’s all.”

  “Break a leg?” Lea’s voice was dazed and, inside, something broke and cried in disappointment, “I’ve spoken again!”

  “Sure.” Strong hands pulled her away from the railing and nudged her to a seat in a little concrete kiosk sort of thing. “You must be very new here, like on the nine-thirty bus tonight.”

  “Nine-thirty bus tonight,” Lea echoed flatly.

  “ ’Cause if you’d been here by daylight you’d know this bridge is a snare and a delusion as far as water goes. You couldn’t drown a gnat in the river here. It’s dammed up above. Sand and tamarisks here, that’s all. Besides you don’t want to die, especially with a lovely coat like that—almost new!”

  “Want to die,” Lea echoed distantly. Then suddenly she jerked away from the gentle hands and twisted away fr
om the encircling arm.

  “I do want to die! Go away!” Her voice sharpened as she spoke and she almost spat the last word.

  “But I told you!” The dim glow from the nearest light of the necklace of lights that pearled the bridge shone on a smiling girl-face, not much older than Lea’s own. “You’d goof it up good if you tried to commit suicide here. Probably lie down there in the sand all night, maybe with a sharp stub of a tamarisk stuck through your shoulder and your broken leg hurting like mad. And tomorrow the ants would find you, and the flies—the big blowfly kind. Blood attracts them, you know. Your blood, spilling onto the sand.”

  Lea hid her face, her fingernails cutting into her hairline with the violence of the gesture. This—this creature had no business peeling the bleeding scab off, she thought. It’s so easy to think of jumping into darkness—into nothingness, but not to think of blowflies and blood—your own blood.

  “Besides—” the arm was around her again, gently leading her back to the bench, “you can’t want to die and miss out on everything.”

  “Everything is nothing,” Lea gasped, grabbing for the comfort of a well-worn groove. “It’s nothing but gray chalk writing gray words on a gray sky in a high wind. There’s nothing! There’s nothing!”

  “You must have used that carefully rounded sentence often and often to have driven yourself such a long way into darkness,” the voice said, unsmiling now. “But you must come back, you know, back to wanting to live.”

  “No, no!” Lea moaned, twisting. “Let me go!”

  “I can’t.” The voice was soft, the hands firm. “The Power sent me by on purpose. You can’t return to the Presence with your life all unspent. But you’re not hearing me, are you? Let me tell you.

  “Your name is Lea Holmes. Mine, by the way, is Karen. You left your home in Clivedale two days ago. You bought a ticket for as far as your money would reach. You haven’t eaten in two days. You’re not even quite sure what state you’re in, except the state of utter despair and exhaustion—right?”