Review written for ClubReading.com by Barbara
The People’s spaceship crashed to Earth a long time ago, and they dispersed, easily blending in because, outwardly, they appeared no different from humans. Now their descendents, having lost the knowledge of where they’re from, try desperately to fit in with the “natives,” but they have powers such as telepathy and telekinesis, and fitting in is not always easy. This is the story of their struggle to accept themselves. Because Pilgrimage has long been out of print and because you’ll have a difficult time finding it, there’s a link to Ingathering: The Complete People Stories. This is not “hard” science fiction; rather it’s soft and very human, and even those of you who don’t normally read science fiction will enjoy it.
EXCERPT FROM Pilgrimage: The Book of the People:
We’ve had trouble with teachers in Cougar Canyon. It’s just an accommodation school anyway, isolated and so unhandy to anything. There’s really nothing to hold a teacher. But the way the People bring forth their young, in quantities and with regularity, even our small Group can usually muster the nine necessary for the county superintendent to arrange for the schooling for the year.
Of course I’m past school age, Canyon school age, and have been for years, but if the tally came up one short in the fall I’d go back for a postgraduate course again. But now I’m working on a college level because Father finished me off for my high-school diploma two summers ago. He’s promised me that if I do well this year I’ll get to go Outside next year and get my training and degree so I can be the teacher and we won’t have to go Outside for one any more. Most of the kids would just as soon skip school as not, but the Old Ones don’t hold with ignorance and the Old Ones have the last say around here.
Father is the head of the school board. That’s how I get in on lots of school things the other kids don’t. This summer when he wrote to the county seat that we’d have more than our nine again this fall and would they find a teacher for us, he got back a letter saying they had exhausted their supply of teachers who hadn’t heard of Cougar Canyon and we’d have to dig up our own teacher this year. That “dig up” sounded like a dirty crack to me since we have the graves of four past teachers in the far corner of our cemetery. They sent us such old teachers, the homeless, the tottering, who were trying to piece out the end of their lives with a year here and a year there in jobs no one else wanted because there’s no adequate pension system in the state and most teachers seem to die in harness. And their oldness and their tottering were not sufficient in the Canyon where there are apt to be shocks for Outsiders-unintentional as most of them are.
We haven’t done so badly the last few years, though. The Old Ones say we’re getting adjusted, though some of the nonconformists say that the Crossing thinned our blood. It might be either or both or the teachers are just getting tougher. The last two managed to last until just before the year ended. Father took them in as far as Kerry Canyon and ambulances took them on in. But they were all right after a while in the sanatorium and they’re doing okay now. Before them, though, we usually had four teachers a year.