The house the Gwynns had ‘inherited’ had come to them complete with rather old-fashioned, comfortable furniture. Over the years, they had made few changes. In this respect perhaps they demonstrated that, deep down, they continued to feel that they were just visitors to the planet with no absolute right to place or property. To Nesta, on the other hand, this lack of change had always been reassuring.
But we’re really Americans, aren’t we? And you and Daddy came from Boston.
Nesta was sitting in the big, green armchair, automatically drinking the tea her mother had handed her, and those were the thoughts that came uppermost to her mind. The old green leather armchair was somehow linked to eternity. Ormingat was in the province of the elves and the shoemaker.
Matthew was about to speak, but Nesta spoke first. She brushed her fine hair back from her brow, leant forward and said, ‘What is it like?’
Matthew smiled back at her.
‘Not so bad,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s like going very fast down a steep chute. You feel a bit dazed afterwards: I’m still rather light-headed; but it soon wears off. You don’t really know that you have changed size at all because you are always the same to yourself.’
‘No, Dad,’ said Nesta impatiently. ‘That’s not what I am talking about. What is it like inside this ship? What does it look like? How would you manage to live there for three years? It was three years you said the journey took?’
‘Round about that,’ said Matthew. ‘But have no worry on that score. The ship is clearly split into two hemispheres. In one, there is spacious living accommodation in the style of Earth. In fact, our quarters don’t look vastly different from the rooms in this house.’
‘But three years confined like that! Even if it is comfortable, it must be very strange. Like being in prison.’
‘Not really,’ said Alison, speaking as a researcher recalling some academic fact. ‘There is so much to see and do. Then there are periods of suspension that can last for much longer than sleep on Earth. We go away into ourselves and return revived.’
Nesta put her face in her hands and tried desperately to make some sense of what her parents were saying. She tried to reach their level of calm, though her mind was saying, This can’t be true. She almost felt as if she were playing along with some grotesque pretence. But she knew she had seen Matthew diminish, and nothing could alter that. The memory not only frightened her; it made her feel physically sick.
‘And what about the other hemisphere?’ she said at length. ‘You said there were two.’
‘The other,’ said her father slowly ‘is pure Ormingat. It is a space laboratory such as you have never seen, not even in the most sci-fi of sci-fi movies. I am not even sure that I can explain it to you properly. Separate “space” and “laboratory”. Think of the space as an area restful, flowing and beautiful. And the laboratory is all illusion. What needs to appear appears. The illusions come and go, like tides ebbing and flowing. Two things there remain fixed. At a height above, so that you raise your head to look at it, there is a communications cube that glows and speaks. On the base of the laboratory, so that you must look far down, is something like the dial of a clock, midnight blue and set with jewels like stars in the sky. Other lights circle it with what looks like no sort of order, but gradually they will fall in line and that will be the moment of take-off. Such is the mechanism that eventually will act as a trigger to detonate the rockets that send the ship back into space. It was set to reach its critical point at the exact moment we were meant to leave Earth. I check the setting every year. Last June, it had six and a half Earth years to go before every one of its eighty lights would join in line to form the arrow. Each light represents a quarter of a year.’
‘And the rockets cannot be detonated till that moment, fixed from the outset by those who know how the clock runs – which we don’t. So for us to leave before our time is impossible,’ said Alison, seeing this as a definite cause for delay. There were reasons, strong reasons, for wanting to go; there were reasons, stronger reasons, for hoping to stay till the proper and appointed time.
Matthew smiled. Already the thought of returning to his own planet was a tingle of excitement in his soul.
‘We don’t have to wait. The years have melted and blended. The communicator has given us a new return date. And I have checked it against the clock. We have just seven days before the ship’s main rocket detonates.’
He looked at Nesta, reached across and gripped her hand.
‘You cannot realize how wonderful that is!’
Nesta drew back.
‘Of course she can’t,’ said Alison sharply. ‘She was born here. She needs time to get used to the idea. A week is far too little. We were to tell her next year. She was meant to have five years of knowing. This is unfair.’
Nesta’s face went white. Her mind was searching about for lucid thoughts.
‘So what do we do for the week? How do we live through it, knowing?’
‘It won’t be a week just waiting,’ said her father. ‘We enter the ship four days from now. On Wednesday, at sunset, we leave this house never to return. We settle into our new quarters ready for the journey to begin.’
Alison was watching her daughter’s face, seeing the terror that was below the surface.
‘Enough, Mattie,’ she said. ‘I think we have had enough for one night.’
When Alison went to say good night to Nesta, now tucked up in bed and longing to find oblivion in sleep, she leant over her and said softly. ‘Don’t worry, my darling. Don’t dwell on thoughts of rockets and detonators. Love is a fuel that goes a lot further. Wherever we are, we are together.’
She turned out the light, stood briefly in the doorway and found herself whispering, ‘Nallytan, Neshayla ban,’ words that had fallen into disuse in these latter years. Then in her too, as in Mattie, something of excitement stirred. I am not American after all. I am not a true member of this muddled, restless Earth.