‘I’m not going!’ said Nesta vehemently. ‘And nothing you say will make me.’
The Gwynns were together in the sitting room. Matthew and Alison sat in the armchairs either side of the hearth. Nesta was sharing the settee with Charlie, the sleek, black cat, and a fluffy-dog pyjama-case called Percy.
She sat up very straight and stared not at either parent but at the flames of the gas fire. She had said her say. Now it was their turn.
It was her mother who spoke first.
‘There’s not really a choice, you know,’ she said quite gently. ‘You are who you are. Deep down, you must have always known that you were special.’
Nesta frowned but said nothing. The truth of the remark made her shiver.
‘Your father was given some of the background to our situation when he went into the ship. It appears that only two Ormingat children have ever been born here on Earth and entwined with the home planet,’ her mother went on. ‘You are one of them. You were part of the reason why the child Tonitheen was sent here. The Ormingat scientists needed a ‘control’: they wanted to know whether an earthborn child would be any different from a child born on Ormingat and spending his formative years on Earth. Things, as you know, went wrong when the boy and his father were involved in that accident. Now caution has made our return home an imperative.’
‘It’s not my home,’ said Nesta sharply. ‘My home is here, where I was born and have always lived.’
‘That is how you feel now,’ said Alison. ‘But your deepest being truly does belong to Ormingat and when we get there you will recognize it immediately.’
At that moment, Nesta found herself remembering her mother’s fairytale description of the Faraway Planet, and she did not like it. She could not believe in those swirly soft towers and misty gates. It sounded too sickly sweet for words.
‘I don’t want to go there,’ said Nesta. ‘I don’t want to live in your marshmallow world. Earth is real. Ormingat sounds to me like a pathetic fairy story.’
Charlie, upset at the argumentative sound of Nesta’s voice, jumped down and slunk into the corner beneath the television set.
Matthew had sat silently listening. It seemed to him that Alison was not making the point very well. The old story was meant as a link, not an explanation.
‘We must tell her the truth,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair and looking earnestly from one to the other. ‘She is right. She is much too old for fairytales.’
Alison was startled.
‘What is the truth?’ she said. ‘Do we know it?’
‘We know what we know,’ said Matthew firmly. ‘And that has to be enough.’
‘Well, you tell, Mattie,’ said Alison. ‘I wouldn’t know how to start.’
‘We must start from what we really do know,’ said Matthew, ‘what is incontrovertible fact.’
Nesta gave her father a much kinder look than she had been able to give her mother. She knew absolutely that there were missing pieces in this jigsaw and she wanted them found and fitted into place.
‘Let’s begin with what you know, Nesta. You saw me disappear into the centre of the pond on Friday. You saw it with your own eyes and you were understandably shocked.’
Nesta nodded miserably.
‘When I went down into the ground, I entered the spaceship and it was exactly as I have described it. There I talked to a screen that glowed green whenever it spoke back to me. It spoke in English, because for the time I am on Earth, I am an English speaker. My memory of the language of Ormingat is very hazy. A few phrases remain, and they are the voice of Ormingat, a voice I see disturbs you when I give the planet’s name its proper sound. When you say Ormingat it comes out as an English word, with English intonation. When I say it, there is a sort of resonance that does not belong here. Ormingat.’
He said the word slowly and deliberately, smiling at his daughter as he did so.
‘Ormeen-in-ghat,’ said Nesta, trying and failing to get the right vibration.
She frowned.
‘How could I learn a whole new language when I cannot even manage to say one word correctly?’
‘The body changes on the journey home and the different atmosphere on our planet when we get there makes it all possible. On Ormingat, you will forget all but a residue of Earth words and accents.’
‘Then I would stop being me,’ said Nesta harshly.
‘No, sweetheart,’ said her father, ‘that could never happen. You are your wonderful self for ever, wherever you may be. Just let me continue. This time when I visited the spaceship, it was to sort out the matter of returning home. On my normal visits, I have taken the research your mother and I have worked on year in, year out since we came here, under the guise afforded us by the human work we do.’
‘That sounds like cheating,’ said Nesta.
‘Not really,’ said Matthew. ‘Our motives are pure. For us, knowledge is an end in itself.’
‘Then you should stay here and go on studying,’ said Nesta sulkily. ‘That would save us all a lot of bother.’
‘Yes,’ said her father, ‘but we can’t, and since we can’t we must accept and even welcome what we must do instead. In two days’ time we enter the ship. It seals and we prepare for the journey home. We use these days to get settled in before take-off. There is a time when we shall be in complete darkness as all the power in the ship is gathered in the thrust of leaving Earth’s orbit. After that, it is just a long, but interesting, journey home. There is so much to do as we become our true selves.’
‘Your true selves,’ said Nesta sharply.
‘And yours. You are our daughter. Whatever, whoever, we are, so too are you. You have to understand that.’
‘And what of Ormingat?’ said Nesta. ‘What is it really like?’
‘It is fair and just and good,’ said Matthew. ‘Of that I am quite, quite sure.’
‘But what does it look like, what does it feel like?’ said Nesta, pursuing the point her father knew she would, asking the question virtually impossible to answer.
‘I don’t know,’ said Matthew.
Nesta felt stunned at his words. What a terrible admission!
‘I have a human brain with human knowledge,’ Matthew went on. ‘A vision of Ormingat is outside my range.’
Nesta turned angrily to her mother.
‘What about the doors,’ she said, ‘and the walls that glowed?’
‘That was a story for a child, Nesta,’ said her mother. ‘I never pretended to you that it was true.’
‘And the twin suns, and the figure-of-eight orbit?’ said Nesta, remembering the story as well as she remembered ‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘Aladdin and His Lamp’, better perhaps because she had heard it more often.
‘I made them up,’ said her mother. ‘At least, I think I did. I am never quite sure. We might get back there and discover it was true after all.’
This was beyond Nesta’s understanding.
‘You said you were born there, grew up there, married there,’ she said. ‘If that is true, you must remember it.’
She turned to her father for an explanation.
‘I have no recollection at all of Ormingat,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there is a silver stream meandering down a pale blue hill, but I tend to imagine things. I know only that it is a good place and often I ache to see it again, to be there and to be part of it.’
‘But why do you not remember?’ Nesta insisted.
‘Let me just try to explain,’ said Matthew. ‘To human beings, the human brain seems infinite. It is not. The best memory in the world sometimes has to lose something to acquire new knowledge. So when we were endowed with human bodies for our time on Earth, you must not ignore the fact that we also had to have human brains. In them is embedded the knowledge of our fictional early lives in Boston. This is not simply a clever cover story. In a sense, we were there and the story is true.’
‘But no one in Boston will be able to remember you,’ Nesta objected. ‘Not if you weren’t really there.’
Matthew smiled wryly.
‘Well, we shall certainly never go to America: that might stretch the illusion too far. But if someone from Boston walks into the bank – it has happened, a few times – he or she will promptly be made to recall knowing me at Boston Latin, or meeting me at the University Club or some such. What is more, I shall share the memory and know exactly what to say. I believe I even worked a spell at State Street Bank – except I couldn’t have, no matter what this brain of mine might tell me.’
Nesta’s face was the picture of bewilderment. Matthew clasped her hand and said softly, by way of explanation, ‘That is the power of Ormingat: the power to create an illusion. It is a very, very small branch of Ormingatrig knowledge, the same knowledge that makes diminution possible, that makes travelling faster than the speed of light irrelevant. It is all part and parcel of our science.’
‘And that is why you cannot remember the place you were really born?’
‘That’s it. Our human brains are taken up with human knowledge. It is only within our deeper selves that intuition preserves a memory of the goodness and the love we know is there, waiting to welcome us home.’
Nesta suddenly felt exhausted.
Alison was quick to see her daughter’s tiredness, much quicker than Matthew.
‘Nesta needs time to get used to all these new ideas,’ she said. ‘We’ll have tea now and talk again later. That seems sensible to me. What do you think?’
‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘You’re right. Tea, Nesta?’
Nesta nodded but said no more. She had made her declaration; and she knew in her heart of hearts that nothing would make her change her mind.
Do they love me enough to change theirs?
‘What happens if you don’t go?’ she said.
‘If we are not on the ship when the countdown is completed, it will shoot off into space without us. Our contact with home will be broken for ever.’
‘Would they punish you?’
Matthew smiled wistfully.
‘To lose all possibility of returning to Ormingat would be punishment enough. I do not wish to grow old and die on this sad Earth.’
Nesta sat back, silenced.