Chapter 7

Everyone was happy. There was lots of work to do. Everyone went up to the field to gather and stack the wheat, the next day, and for days afterwards. Father said he wouldn’t need to build a mill, because the grain was so easy to grind, but every family needed a pair of stones for grinding flour, and they had to be found and shaped. We needed a big bunker to store the grain, some to eat, and some for next year’s growing. By and by, Father went and fetched some moth wings from Boulder Valley, all faded and limp, and Malcolm brewed up something to steep them in that made them into a kind of stringy soup; and then we dried out the fibers by pouring the soup through a tray of sand and leaving it to dry in the sun, and then the fibers could be spun into thread, using a funny thing like a top on a stick that Father made. He was going to make a loom next. We would all have red and gray mottled clothes out of moth cloth, when our Earth things wore out. We were looking rather ragged already.

When the harvest was in, and we were getting used to our own good bread, we began to see that winter was coming. It got very cold, not just at night, and the leaves on the trees turned black and fell off. All the redness in the forest darkened and the gray grass lost its shine.

The grownups decided we would need to share all the food, depending on how many there were to feed in each family.

“We have enough,” the Guide said. “Enough for us all to live, to live quite well.”

“Enough food, yes,” said Father, “But the plan didn’t give us all we need.”

“You must stop hankering after books, brother,” the Guide told him. “All that has gone beyond recovery.”

“We had better record the shares we are giving out,” said Peter. “We can get paper from the spaceship. There must be some computer printout lying around there that we could write on.”

But nobody wanted to go and look for it. It seemed as though we didn’t want to remember we had come like refugees from so far away; we wanted to feel that Shine was our home, where we would be, and had always been.

Father thought of something. “What about that empty book of Pattie’s?” he said. “We could use that.”

“No, Father,” said Pattie. “Please don’t. Please, it’s mine!

“An empty book, Pattie?” said Father. “No use to anyone. And needed for something important. We all have to share, you know that. Joe, go and get it.”

Pattie hid her face, and slipped away from the center of the group. Joe brought the book from under her pillow in the hut, and Father opened it.

And it was full. It was full of writing, very large and round and shaky.

“Heavens!” said Father. “What’s this?” He read for a few moments. “It’s a story,” he said. “About here, about us. It has the moth people in it, and the hexagonal wheat!”

“Read it to us,” said Jason’s mother, and others joined in. “Read it to us!” Lots of people, the people of Shine, gathered around Father with the open book in his hand, all eager, and ready to make the words huge with listening to them.

Father turned back and back in the green book to the very first page, and began to read:

“Father said, ‘We can take very little with us’…”