Chapter 5

Again it was the children who found it, or rather found that it was happening. They were all playing in Boulder Valley. Pattie and Jason were in charge of some of the even smaller children—the ones who had been born on the journey—Jason’s sister Mary, and Malcolm’s smallest, Bob, and some others. All the grownups were in a conference of some kind, and Sarah and Joe seemed to count as grownups now. The children were in Boulder Valley, playing at climbing up the boulders, and sliding off them again. Pattie had a picnic, the usual iron-rations picnic, in a gray tin from the ship’s stores, and she was spreading it out for them on a cloth on the grass. Square gray hard biscuits, and gray-brown chocolate, and pink pasty guava jam. Pattie liked playing fathers, it made her feel grownup. She saw Mary some way off and called her back.

“Come and slide on this stone, Mary. We’re just ready to eat.”

“I’m not sliding on that one,” Mary said. “It pushed me off.”

“Oh, rubbish, Mary! Come on!”

“It did, it did!” said Mary, coming back all the same when she saw the picnic. “I climbed up it and it shrugged itself and made me fall off.”

Jason looked at it with interest, biting a biscuit. “Its shape looks different from before,” he said. So Pattie stared at it too. And while they were all looking, a crack appeared in the stone. It just tore open a little way, and there was an inside like a piece of wet gray velvet.

“I don’t like it here!” wailed Mary. “Let’s go home!” The stone tore some more. Tore, and moved; not that it moved on the ground, but it moved inside, like a person in a sleeping bag shifting arms or legs.

“Let’s go now!” said Pattie.

They left the picnic just where it was, and began to go, scrambling up the sloping side of Boulder Valley, toward the path to Shine. But, as they went, all the stones in the valley were moving. They were heaving, and shuddering, and tearing open. A very big one lay close to the path home, and as they got near, they saw it had opened right down the middle, and a draggled silver-gray wing, with dark purple blotches on it, lay like a tablecloth across the path.

“We’ll be all right,” said Pattie very bravely, “if we just run. When I say ‘now.’ Now!”

And they ran. They ran around the edge of the spread wing, and reached the top of the slope, and stopped for breath, and looked back. All over the bowl of the valley the stones were tearing, and crumpling, and showing soft, furry wings. On the farther side of the valley, one giant moth had got all the way out, and was half fluttering, half crawling on the ground, fanning its wings in the sun. They were losing the damp look and turning a bright dusty silver marked with crimson. Very near them, just below where they stood, the moth whose wing had lain in their way was fighting his body free of the crumbling stone. He was thick gray, and furry, but he had front arms, and a round head like a person, and he was actually looking at them, with dark red, vacant, lidless eyes. He made Pattie feel very frightened and sick, and she screamed and took Mary’s hand and ran and ran away.

They all ran, screaming and crying into the grownups’ meeting, and some of the men took guns, and all the people ran back up the hill toward Boulder Valley. But Pattie sat and thought. Now that she wasn’t looking at them any more, she wasn’t sick at the moth people, even when she remembered she had climbed all over them. She went and asked Jason’s mother, who was trying to calm the babies down: “What do moths eat? Will they eat us?”

“Heavens, no,” said Jason’s mother. “Moths on Earth ate nectar from flowers, I think. Not meat!”

So Pattie went to the cupboard in her hut, and fetched a pan of the lovely tree candy, and started out after the others to Boulder Valley. And as she got to the edge of the village, the moth people began to fly overhead. Their huge beating wings made a wind that stroked Pattie’s face and flattened her hair back from her forehead just like wind at home. All those years closed inside the spaceship, and the time on the new planet, had made Pattie forget the air could move, the air could touch you, as the quiet air of the new place never did. But the eight-foot span of dozens of pairs of wings made the air into wind. Over Pattie’s upturned face a great flock of them came, wheeling and turning in the air over Shine, and over the green-turning-gold of the colony’s precious wheat field, fluttering down and around, as though they were looking.

One of the huge things alighted just in front of Pattie. It had a round head, halfway between a person’s head and a wrinkled walnut; it had trembling antennae, which bent and quivered toward her. It had six legs to stand on, and its body was furry, silver-furry. It folded its wings together above its body, and stood. Pattie closed her eyes, took three steps forward, and put the pan of candy on the ground, and then took three steps back and opened her eyes.

The moth felt forward toward the candy, and then began to eat it, unrolling a long black tongue and twisting it around the pan. Then it sort of dipped to her, as if bowing, and spread its lovely wings, and flew so close over Pattie’s head she ducked. And then she looked up and saw all the grownups coming back in a group, and watching her being brave and kind.

After that, we put a big pan of tree candy on the ground outside Shine, as a friendship present to the moth people, and we went and stood, to be scarecrows, scare-moths, around the edges of the field of wheat. For the moth people kept flying, filling the air with the silky sound of wings, and all circling around Shine, as though they were full of curiosity about it. Of course, by and by, some of them fluttered down, as if they were going to settle on the nodding heads of wheat, and then the Guide fired his gun. Just into the air, just to frighten them. They all fluttered up again, and beat around and around. When that had happened three times, they seemed to understand we didn’t want them landing on the wheat, and they kept away. There were a lot of them eating the candy we had given them. Pattie thought it was unkind to fire guns to frighten them, but the Guide told her the wheat was so brittle that anything would break and crush it down, and we couldn’t afford to risk it.

“Ah, why bother?” growled Arthur. “We’ve got eyes. We can all see what is happening to the wheat.”

Pattie picked a stem of wheat to look at it closely. Within the folded leaf, the grains were swelling and hardening. She peeled the leaf off, and saw the close-packed grains within. They had edges. She pulled them off the stalk and tumbled them on the palm of her hand. Little shining green glass hexagons, like beads. The wrong shape. Hard and faceted like glass. Pattie looked up from the beads in her hand across the field. It was just turning from pale green-gold to yellow like the crust on bread. It was ripening as it ought to, but it was too shiny, too transparent. Pattie felt frightened. The wheat field was more frightening than the moths.

When it got dark that day, the people of Shine went home to bed, and a watch was set for the first time since the land survey came home. But the moth people didn’t sleep, they flew. The soft pulse of their wings beat around Shine all night, and brushed across the glassy walls of the huts. Father said they were drawn by the lights of the fires and the jellyfish lamps. Their shadows flitted across, blanking out the warm glow that showed from neighboring houses, passing and repassing, blundering into the house walls and making them shake. After a while, people put out the lamps, and damped down the fires, and the moth people were quieter. Malcolm came visiting Father that evening. They talked in the darkness. Malcolm was excited.

“Those very slow biorhythms that showed up on the scanner,” he said. “I thought they must have been some kind of mistake, some kind of malfunction in the computer. But I’ll bet now they weren’t—they were the sleep rhythms of these moths in the chrysalis stage!”

“Do you think they are any danger to us, Malcolm?” asked Father.

“That I can’t say,” said Malcolm. “Maybe not. They aren’t likely to be a competing form of life. They don’t seem hostile, do they?”

“Just curious,” said Father. “Think—supposing they have consciousness of some kind—they go to sleep on an empty planet, and wake up to find us!”

“What I’d like to know is what they eat at the grub stage,” said Malcolm.

“Do they have to have a grub stage?” asked Father.

“Well, who knows?” said Malcolm. “Who knows anything here? We must watch them closely, that’s all.”

The moth people were with us for three days. We tried to talk to them, but it didn’t work. The grownups tried very hard. They made lots of funny noises, through a loud-hailer. They tried sign language. The moth people sometimes flew around, and sometimes settled, and looked at us, but they didn’t seem to understand. We might have thought they were stupid if it hadn’t been for them joining in the hopscotch. We were all playing hopscotch—the children, that is—down on the lake shore, and a moth person came and made a lot of little flights and landings, alongside us, as though he were jumping, too. So we laughed, and began to play ring-around-a-rosy, and the moth people came and fluttered round us in a ring outside our ring. So then we played Lambeth Walk, all making a long line, and stamping along the beach, and they made a line too, and came with us. We were very happy, and we laughed a lot. Some of the grownups came down and watched. Then the moth people began a game of their own, flying in corkscrews, winding around and around each other. We jumped into the air, and twisted as we fell, as though we were trying their game, and we laughed and rolled around on the beach. Sarah ran into the water, and swam, to see if they would share that too, but they didn’t seem to like to go near the water. So in the end we were all just dancing. Arthur brought out his squeeze-box, and played creaky music, and children and grownups and moth people all danced around, and we were singing “In and out the dusty bluebells…you shall be my master!” Pattie was even brave enough to go and tap one of the moth people, and sing “Pitter patter pitter patter on your shoulder!” to it. It didn’t really have a shoulder, so she dibbled her fingers where its head joined its body, and it swept its wings up and down and up again at her.

At last, when it got dark, we brought out pans of tree candy and gave it to them, and went indoors to our evening meals. Father said it was amazing the moth people didn’t talk, and Pattie told him she thought they did—she could just hear them making squeaking noises to each other, very high and faint. Father and Joe decided it was very high frequency sound that only young ears could pick up.