The First Town Meeting

While Lina slept, the three town leaders were holding a meeting. They sat at a table in the tower room of the town hall, which looked out over the plaza. Mary's hands were clasped tightly in front of her. Ben scowled, his gray eyebrows bunched together, deepening the two lines between them. Wilmer pulled nervously on one ear and looked from Mary to Ben and back to Mary.

"They can't stay here," said Mary. "There are too many of them. Where would we put them? How would we feed them?"

"Yes," said Wilmer. "But where can they go?"

No one spoke. They had no answer for that question. Outside the settlement of Sparks, the Empty Lands stretched for miles in all directions.

"They could go up to Pine Gap," said Wilmer. "Maybe."

Mary snorted and shook her head. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "That's at least two weeks' walk away. How could these feeble people travel that far? How could they carry enough food with them? Where would theyget enough food, unless we emptied our storehouse and gave them everything?"

Wilmer nodded, knowing she was right. The people of Sparks knew of only three other settlements, and they'd heard from the roamers that those places were smaller and poorer than Sparks. Their inhabitants wouldn't want extra mouths to feed, either.

The three of them gazed out the window and down at the moonlit plaza, filled with strange sleeping people from a city under the earth. Four hundred of them, with no food, no possessions to speak of, and nowhere to go.

"What I fail to understand," said Ben, "is why this particular misfortune has happened to us." He paused, looked into the air to his left, and frowned. This was a habit of his; he seemed to need a pause and a frown every now and then to put together his thoughts. Wilmer and Mary had gotten used to waiting through these pauses. "I don't see that we deserve it," Ben went on after a few seconds, "having labored as diligently as we have. And just when we are starting to prosper at last, after so many years of . . . well, adversity is a mild word for it."

The others nodded, thinking of the hard years. There'd been winters when people shivered in tents and ate chopped-up roots and shriveled nuts. There had been years of drought and plagues of tomato worms and devastating crop failures that meant people had nothing to eat for months but cabbage and potatoes. There had been times when people had to work so hard to stay alive that they sometimes died just from being too tired to go on. No one wanted to go back to those times.

"So what do we do," said Mary, "if they can't stay and they can't go? What is the right thing to do?"

The others sat silent.

"Well, there's the Pioneer," said Wilmer. "As a temporary solution."

"True," said Ben.

"A good thought," said Mary, and Wilmer beamed. "So what about this," Mary went on. "We'll let them stay in the Pioneer. We'll give them water and food-we do have some extra in the storehouse. In exchange, they work-they help in the fields, they help with building, they do whatever there is to do. We'd have to teach them how. As far as I can see, they know nothing. After a while, when they're stronger, and when they know better how to get along, they can move on. They can set up their own village somewhere else."

"We'll have to watch them carefully if we let them stay," said Ben. "They're strange. We don't know what they might do."

"They seem fairly ordinary to me," said Mary. "Except for the business about living in a cave."

"You believed that?" said Ben.

Mary shrugged. "The question is, shall we let them stay?"

"How long would we have to keep them," asked Wilmer, "before they were ready to go?"

"I don't know. Maybe six months? Let's see. It's near the end of Flowering now." Mary counted out the months on her fingers. "Shining, Burning, Browning, Cooling, Falling, Chilling. They could stay through the summer and fall seasons and leave at the end of Chilling."

"That would mean they'd be on their own for the winter," Wilmer pointed out.

"That's right," said Ben. "Are you suggesting we should keep them even longer? We'll be stretching ourselves to keep them at all."

They fell silent again, considering this.

Finally Mary spoke. "Shall we let them stay for six months, then?" she said. "And teach them as much as we can?"

No one really liked this idea. They thought of the food the refugees would need, which would mean less for their own people, and the bother of teaching them all the skills they'd need to survive on their own. Each one-Mary, Wilmer, and especially Ben-wished the unfortunate cave people would simply vanish.