The Alliance Between the First Ones and the Others is the Tribe’s decision in Year 34 to admit a smaller neighboring community, despite fears of infection and resistance to strangers. The vote enlarged a population whose members had become increasingly close kin, and it established a lasting division within the united Tribe: the First Ones and the Others. The debate turns on a recurring post-disaster choice—whether safety means avoiding risk or finding a way to live with it.

Background and Stakes

By Year 34, the Tribe had grown from the handful of survivors who gathered around San Lupo Drive. In Year 4, Ezra returned with Molly, Jean, Ralph, and Evie; by the end of that year, Em had given birth to Roger, and the community numbered seven adults and four children, as well as Evie. The arrivals had already made the group a collection of families rather than a single household. Over the ensuing years, children grew up within a very small population, and the circumstances that once seemed temporary became the basis of a society.

The proposed union answered a pressing demographic problem. In recent years, fewer girls than boys had been born, leaving some young men without potential wives. At the same time, the population had become so interrelated that, as Ish recognized, everyone had to marry a cousin. He worried that continued intermarriage might be dangerous. The newcomers therefore represented not only additional numbers but a possible widening of the community’s marriage network. That practical hope competed with the fear that contact with outsiders could bring disease.

That fear had a history. The Great Disaster had been a rapidly spreading illness that appeared in multiple centers of civilization, and the bacteriologist interviewed in the Old Times could offer no certain account of its origin. Later, Ish had worried that bubonic plague among rats could reach people through fleas. The Tribe had also lived through the devastating Year 22 epidemic: by the time it was in full course, Ezra and five children were stricken, and Ish believed it was typhoid. The infected community’s exposure through shared meals, flies, and poorly constructed latrines made disease a concrete memory, not an abstract argument. Jack, Ralph, and Roger, the oldest of the younger men, remembered that year when the new proposal came.

The Messenger and the Assembly

The other community was smaller and lived across the north of the Bay. Its messenger came with a proposal of union. Ish kept the young man at a distance, explicitly wary of a repetition of the earlier Charlie episode, and questioned him to gather as much information as he could. He then called a meeting. The sequence shows how the Tribe tried to manage risk: the messenger was heard, but first treated as a possible source of danger rather than welcomed without scrutiny.

The assembly became a dispute over what the newcomers might cost and what their presence might make possible. Fear of illness mingled with prejudice against people whose customs were unfamiliar; curiosity about those differences pushed in the opposite direction. The wish to strengthen the Tribe and to find wives for young men gave the proposal urgency. Ish’s concern about kinship added a longer horizon to the debate: the issue was not only the immediate size of the community, but the consequences of its limited marriage choices for future generations.

The sides were not divided simply between cautious elders and eager young people. Ish and Ezra opposed admission. The men who remembered Year 22—Jack, Ralph, and Roger—supported them. But the younger, especially unmarried men pressed for union, drawn by the prospect of meeting women from another community. The arguments joined experience of epidemic, wariness of strangers, demographic need, and personal hope in a single decision. No side could claim that its concerns were imaginary; the vote required the Tribe to decide which risks it was willing to bear.

Em’s Appeal and the Vote

Em intervened after the opposing positions had been made clear. Her hair was wholly gray, but the account emphasizes the steadiness of her voice and the effect of her presence on the assembly. She reminded them that she had made the same point before: “Life is not lived by denying life. Our sons and grandsons will need wives. Perhaps death will come also, but that too we must face.” Her appeal did not dismiss the danger. Instead, it refused to let fear of possible death become a reason to refuse the conditions necessary for life to continue.

The vote was unanimous in favor of admitting the newcomers. The change in the assembly is presented as more than a victory for one faction: Em’s words give the group courage to act despite its acknowledged uncertainty. The decision also places the Tribe’s future ahead of the original survivors’ understandable wish to protect the community they had managed to preserve. Admission carries risk, but continued isolation carries its own costs, including a shrinking pool of possible spouses and the danger of marriage among ever closer relatives.

Consequences and Significance

In this instance, the feared epidemic did not follow the union in the form the opponents anticipated. The only epidemic was measles among the Others, and they recovered. This outcome does not prove that the decision was free of danger; it shows that the result differed from the catastrophic possibility the assembly had imagined. The episode’s balance is therefore neither triumphal nor falsely reassuring: the Tribe acts in the presence of uncertainty, and chance does not deliver the worst outcome.

Afterward, the unified Tribe retained an internal division, described as two clans: the First Ones and the Others. Intermarriage joined the communities, while children belonged to their father’s clan. Ish wondered whether descent might instead follow the mother, as it did among many groups regarded as primitive, but the old American tradition remained strong enough to determine the practice. The newcomers were admitted without their former identity simply disappearing; the resulting society held a shared membership and a continuing distinction at once.

The alliance marks a shift from a community organized around the original survivors toward one able to absorb another group and preserve its difference within the whole. Its stakes are unusually plain: disease might come, but without new partners and a larger population the Tribe’s future was constrained in another way. Em’s intervention gives that tension its clearest formulation. The vote makes risk part of collective life rather than a reason to withdraw from it, while the later clan custom records how the encounter altered the Tribe’s social structure.