For the second time in less than a year, Alison used the power of Ormingat, a weak strain admittedly, but adequate for use on this Earth. This time her reason was more urgent. This time she felt not the slightest guilt: the power was passing from like to like, from mother to daughter.
Nesta was lying stiffly on the sofa, still in her outdoor coat. Her eyes were open but glazed and she was trembling in every limb. She had just seen her father disappear into the earth. An ordinary, solid human being had been sucked into nothingness, before her very eyes. This was shock on a massive scale. The heart might fail with it; the brain might snap.
‘Heal hands,’ said Alison urgently, touching the slim fingers that quivered uncontrolled. The hands grew still and the body turned limp.
‘Heal little heart,’ said Allison as she gently undid the buttons on Nesta’s coat and drew unresisting arms from each sleeve.
‘Heal mind and soul and understanding,’ she said, holding her daughter’s head between her hands.
For moments that seemed interminable, nothing happened.
‘Mind and soul and understanding, heal!’ Alison said quite harshly, willing the power to be strong enough.
Then she gave a sigh of relief as her daughter’s eyes lost their trancelike gaze.
Nesta looked directly at her mother and said sharply, ‘Why did you never tell me about this before? I had a right to know.’
Alison sat down beside her daughter on the sofa, one arm round her shoulders. Dusk had turned to dark and the room was lit only by the firelight.
‘Children cannot be told things that they might even accidentally betray,’ she said.
‘I am nearly thirteen,’ said Nesta. ‘I am not a child.’
‘No,’ said her mother, ‘but you are not far from childhood.’
‘And all that about the Faraway Planet?’ said Nesta, remembering the old story and trying to make sense of it. ‘You muddled it all up with the elves and the shoemaker. And you let me go on thinking that you came from Boston. You don’t come from Boston?’
‘No,’ said her mother. ‘We have never been anywhere near Boston. When I told you that story you really were a child and I was bound to tell you childish things. The truth was disguised as fiction because that was deemed safer – to plant a hint in your mind, like a seed buried in soil. The real fiction was always Boston, not just for you but also for the world outside. And it had to sound as genuine as possible.’
‘But you told me you lived on St Botolf’s Street and that Granny Morgan’s house was high up on Beacon Hill,’ said Nesta, dredging up what she had long believed were facts. ‘You showed me on the map. You said how you took rides in the Swan Boats on the pond in the park, and played tag on Boston Common when you were very young. Was that all made up?’
‘You won’t understand this,’ said Alison, feeling cornered by these questions. ‘It is almost impossible to explain. But we do remember Boston as if we had been there. Sometimes we ourselves find it difficult to distinguish between genuine and implanted memories. For our time on Earth, the implanted memories are stronger. They have to be.’
‘And you never flew on Concorde?’ said Nesta, nervously rucking up memories as if they were made of cloth.
‘We think we did,’ said her mother, ‘but we know we didn’t. That is a dichotomy we have learnt to live with.’
At a stroke, Nesta was deprived of the whole of her family history. She had long accepted the early deaths of her grandparents, each from different causes and at different times. Her Granny Morgan had been the last to die: back there in Boston, of heart disease, when Nesta was just four years old.
After that, so she had been told, her parents had lost all contact with their old home. Neither parent had ever laid claim to brothers or sisters, just friends; and friendship fades. ‘People change, and move off in different directions. They lose touch,’ her father had said. So the broken ties had been neatly shrugged off; but the history was still comfortably there, giving shape and form of life. Now all of it was blown away and, as far as Nesta could see, there was nothing else to put in its place. The emptiness was unbearable.
A dark thought came uninvited into her heart and soul. If she had no ancestors, no earthly place of origin, where then was God?
‘I don’t want to know this,’ she sobbed, clenching her hands so that her nails bit into the palms. ‘It’s a dream. It has to be.’
‘It’s not a dream,’ said her mother gently, ‘and it is not bad, not at all bad. The story of the Faraway Planet was mostly true: we did come here in that spaceship and it really is no bigger than a handball. There is nothing bad or sinister about it – it is simply Ormingat science. It is not magic. Our experts know how to do things that the people of Earth cannot begin to comprehend.’
‘I am one of the people of Earth,’ said Nesta. ‘I was born here in York. I have never travelled out of England.’
‘That won’t always be so,’ said her mother. ‘You were destined from birth to travel far and to come into your own.’
Then Alison went on to explain that very soon, much sooner than they had anticipated, it was quite probable that they would all be going to Ormingat. They would enter the spaceship together and travel home. They would become their true selves, body and soul.
The idea of ‘going home’ to this Faraway Planet seemed dreadful to Nesta. The thought of it made her angry. Her parents who claimed to be such upright tellers of truth had been living a lie for years and years! She felt betrayed and confused.
‘All I have ever wanted was to be like everybody else!’ she said. ‘When I was bullied at school, the thing I minded most was being different. This is worse; this is much, much worse. I don’t want to believe you. And I don’t want to change into some sort of alien.’
Alison held her closer and sighed.
‘It’s not what you think,’ she said. ‘It isn’t sudden or terrible. The journey home will take three years. On that journey, the shape and texture of your body will very, very gradually change, no more than that. I just wanted to let you know that the change will be a good one. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.’
Nesta sat upright. Shaking off her mother’s arm.
‘You don’t even know if I have an “Orpingat” body,’ she said abruptly. ‘The body – or whatever you call it – I have now is the one I was born with. And you and Father might be able to “diminish”, but you can’t be sure that I can.’
‘You can,’ said her mother firmly. ‘We know you can. When you were six months old I had to take you into the spaceship to be presented and have your name entwined with you.’
‘Entwined? Nesta?’ said her daughter.
‘Neshayla,’ said Alison softly, in the same strange voice she used in naming the Faraway Planet, and, though it was spoken deliberately low, its tone was till unearthly. Even the English words were coloured by the proximity of this voice. They bore an accent distinctly foreign. ‘And I am Athelerane.’
‘And Father?’ said Nesta, fascinated in spite of herself.
‘He is Maffaylie.’
The voice that vibrated on these names made Nesta shiver.
Alison got up, put on the light and closed the curtains.
‘I think we should have supper now and go to bed,’ she said in her normal mid-Atlantic accent. ‘It may be some days before your father returns. It is better if we sleep. We can talk more tomorrow.’
Nesta did not sleep. She lay in the darkness and tried to remember every detail of the Faraway Planet story. She prayed for the problem to go away. Please God, let me sleep now and wake up tomorrow morning to find that none of this is true.