Akma looked for Bego all morning, but couldn’t find him. He needed Bego’s advice; the king had summoned him, and Akma had no idea what he might face. If he were to be charged with a crime, would Motiak call him into his private chamber like this? Akma needed counsel, and the only ones who could give it knew less than he did. Well, Aronha actually knew more about the running of the kingdom- knew more than anybody, since he had been training his whole life for it. But all Aronha could tell him was that he didn’t think Akma was in any danger. “Father isn’t the kind to bring you into chambers to charge you with a crime. He does things like that in the open, using normal process. It’s got to be about the decree you suggested to Edhadeya last night.”
“I didn’t need you to tell me that” said Akma. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to go in cold and deal with something.”
“Oh, just admit it that you’re scared,” said Khimin. “You know you’ve been bad, and the king has got to be angry enough to tear you to bits if he weren’t such a kind benevolent despot.” In recent weeks, Khimin had discovered in the ancient records that the city of Basilica had been governed by an elected council, and now he was constantly suggesting that the monarchy be abolished. No one paid any attention to him.
“Nothing is going to stop us from speaking tonight, is it?” asked Ominer. Since he had been trying to get them to go public for the past several months, during the worst of the persecution when it would have looked truly terrible to come out against the Kept, it was only natural that Ominer would now be worried that once again Akma might be talked into delaying.
“You’ll be able to give your speech,” said Akma. “As it’s written, remember. Nobody is to start making things up on the wing.” Ominer rolled his eyes.
Akma turned to Mon. “You’ve been quiet.”
Mon looked up, startled out of his reverie. “Just thinking. We’ve been a long time waiting. Now we’re going ahead. That’s fine. It’s a relief, don’t you think?”
“What about my interview with your father today?” asked Akma.
“You’ll do fine,” said Mon. “You always do. They’ll try to talk you out of this. You’ll be polite and decline to change your mind. Simple. I’m only disappointed they didn’t invite us along to watch.” He smiled.
Akma heard Mon’s speech. There was nothing obviously wrong with anything he said. But something still bothered him. There was something wrong with Mon himself. Had he become unreliable? What if tonight Mon got up and stated that he was standing with his father? A division among the sons of Motiak would destroy everything- everyone would assume that the loyal son would become the heir and that Akmaro’s reforms would be permanent. That the Kept would always have the inside track in the government. Therefore it would be good business to be one of the Kept, and Akmaro’s religion would remain dominant. Akma had no illusions-the doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attract converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future-specifically, when Aronha became king. They were sure to become the dominant religion almost immediately, as far as sheer numbers were concerned. More important, the leadership of the new assembly would be the core of the future government. Akma could see to it that once Aronha became king, the only advice he would hear would be to carry war to the Elemaki. No more defensive posture-the Elemaki would be routed out of their hiding places in the high mountains. The land of Nafai would be redeemed in digger blood, and the place where Akma had been in bondage would now be a place where digger slaves toiled under the Nafari lash. Then Akma’s triumph would be complete. His father’s weakness in the face of persecution would be redeemed by Akma’s courage.
It begins today. And Mon will stand with us. He’s a true friend. Maybe he’s so morose because he still harbored some hope of ending up with Luet. Well, that was the one good thing about Luet’s decision to marry. It would free Mon to concentrate on the work at hand. More than any of the others, Mon had the skill to speak with as much fire and charm as Akma. More, really, because Akma knew he sounded like a scholar; Mon had the common touch, a boyish style of speech, a kind of energy that would speak to people at a deeper level than anything Akma could manage. Not that Akma didn’t expect to do well. Despite his weaknesses as a speaker, he knew that people pretty much ended up in his bag by the end of a talk. He would look people in the eye as he was speaking and it felt almost as if a cord tied them together, and he had only to draw it in and he would own the person he spoke to, at least for the hour, for the night.
Almost like the powers of a raveler, as the ancient records described them. Only ravelers were always women, and besides, all that raveler business was superstition. The cords Akma imagined were only a metaphor, an unconscious visualization of his skill at establishing rapport with strangers.
It wouldn’t work on the king, though. Akma knew that from experience. Whatever skill he had at influencing people only worked on those who were at least marginally receptive. Motiak never gave Akma the opportunity to work on him.
“Are you going to sit there moping all morning?” asked Ominer. “Father’s waiting for you now-you’re late.”
“Yes,” said Akma. “I was just thinking. Try it sometime, Ominer. It’s almost as fun as swallowing air so you can belch. Something that I hope you won’t be doing tonight.”
“Give me some credit,” said Ominer disgustedly.
Akma slapped him on the shoulder to show that he was teasing and they were still friends. Then he left, striding boldly through the rooms that separated the library from the king’s private chamber.
He was the last to arrive; he had rather hoped to be. Motiak was there, of course, and, as Akma had expected, so were Father and Mother. Not Edhadeya, gratefully; but . . . Bego? Why was Bego there, with his otherself, bGo, sitting behind him and looking miserable? And this old man? Who was he?
“You know everyone,” Motiak said. “Except perhaps Khideo. He knew you when you were a baby, but I don’t think you’ve seen each other since then. Khideo used to be governor of the land that bears his name.”
Akma saluted him and, at a wave from the king, sat down at the table. He kept his eyes on Motiak, though of course he couldn’t help but wonder why Khideo was there. And Bego. Why were Bego and his brother there? Why had Bego avoided his gaze?
“Akma, you spend most of your time in my house, but I never see you,” said Motiak.
“I’m a scholar,” said Akma. “I’m grateful that you’ve given me such free access to your library.”
“It’s a shame that with all your study, you’ve come out knowing less than you did when you began.” Motiak smiled sadly.
“Yes,” said Akma. “It seems that the more I learn, the less I know. While the ignorant remain absolutely certain of their convictions.”
Motiak’s smile faded. “I thought you’d want to know that I’m issuing the decree that you suggested to Edhadeya. It seems to be a solution to the immediate problem. As you suggested.”
“I’m grateful that I could be of service,” said Akma. “I was . . . very unhappy with the way things were going.”
“I can imagine,” said Motiak. “Sometimes the things we set in motion don’t work out as we planned. Do they, Akma?”
Akma recognized that the king was digging at him again, blaming him for the persecutions. He wasn’t going to sit still for it. “I learned that lesson already, several times over,” said Akma. “For instance, your religious reform of thirteen years ago hasn’t had the effect you planned. Tragic, seeing now where it has led.”
Motiak smiled again, only this time he was showing more of his real feelings: The smile was feral, the eyes dancing with rage. “I want you to know, Akma, that I’m not such a fool as you must think. I know what you’ve been doing, how you’ve been maneuvering around me. I watched as you won over my sons, and I did nothing, because I trusted them to have some sense. You bested me there-I overestimated them.”
“I think not, sir,” said Akma. “I think you underestimated them.”
“I know what you think, Akma. and don’t interrupt and contradict me again. Even though your entire strategy is based on the fact that someday I will die and someone will be king after me, please remember that I’m not dead yet and I am the king.”
Akma nodded. He had to be careful. Let the king play out his little drama. Tonight Akma would have the last word.
“Your father and mother and I talked over the terrible things you went through as a child, and tried to figure out why the experience turned everyone else toward the Keeper of Earth, and turned you away. Your father was very apologetic, of course. He kept expressing his regret that his mistakes as a father should be causing innocent people to suffer.”
Akma wanted to shout back at him that he did not cause the persecution, that if he had his way there would never be cause for any such thing to happen again. He also wanted to scream into his father’s face, to hit him, to hurt him for daring to apologize to the king because his son turned out so badly. But he contained all these feelings, and when Motiak waited for him to respond, he only nodded and said, meekly, “I’m sorry that I’m such a disappointment to you all.”
“What we couldn’t figure out for the longest time was how your achievement in suborning my sons became so widely known, and so quickly. You never seemed to be in contact with anyone among the Unkept. You hardly left the library.”
“I’m a scholar. I’ve talked to no one but your family and my family and a few other scholars.”
“Yes, very carefully done, very clever-or so we thought. How is Akma doing it, we thought. And then we realized, Akma isn’t doing it. This wasn’t Akma’s idea.”
Motiak looked toward Khideo. It was the old soldier’s cue. “When I was here to consult with the king immediately after our rescue, I made contact with someone who shared some of my views. The opinions of the Zenifi-that humans should not live with either of the other toolmaking species. Or I should say, he made contact with me, since he knew my views and I couldn’t have known his until he spoke to me. Since then, he has been my link with the king’s house, and what he told me, I told my fellow Zenifi. Most important, he promised me then, thirteen years ago, that he would deliver all of the king’s sons. As soon as he achieved it, we would spread the word, so that people would know that all of Akmaro’s reforms were temporary, and the old order would be restored when one of you inherited the throne.”
Thirteen years ago? That was impossible. He hadn’t come up with this plan until after he had realized there was no Keeper.
Motiak looked at Bego. Quietly, the old archivist began to speak. “I tried to work directly with Aronha, but he was too much his father’s son. And Mon couldn’t get over his self-loathing. Ominer-too young, and not really bright enough to grasp things. Khimin-definitely too young. For a while I tried to work with Edhadeya, but her delusions about true dreams were too strong.”
Motiak growled, “Not delusions.”
“I have confessed to you, Motiak,” said Bego defiantly. “I have not said that I agree with you.” He turned back to Akma. “You, Akma. You understood, the brightest boy I ever taught. And I saw that you had a way of winning people to your point of view. As long as you’re with them. A talent for it, that’s what you have, a talent for persuasion, and I realized that I didn’t have to persuade Motiak’s boys. I only had to persuade you and you’d do the rest.”
“You didn’t persuade me of anything. I figured it out myself.”
Bego shook his head. “It is the essence of teaching, that the student discovers everything for himself. I made sure that you reached the conclusion that there was no Keeper, and you leapt from there to everything I might have hoped for. And your deep hatred of the diggers, that helped, of course.”
“So you thought I was a puppet?” asked Akma.
“Not at all,” said Bego. “I thought you were the finest student I ever had. I thought you could change the world.”
“What Bego is not telling you,” said Motiak, “is that his actions constitute treason and oath-breaking. Khideo has been studying at Shedemei’s school the past while. A great deal of moral philosophy. He went to bGo, and then together Khideo and bGo persuaded Bego to come join them in confessing to me.”
“I’m sorry that Khideo and bGo and Bego decided to do something so unnecessary and inappropriate,” said Akma. “But as Bego can also tell you, the first time we learned that he had any outside contacts was after the persecutions began, when he kept urging us to speak openly against the Kept. You will notice that we did not do it. We utterly refused to do anything that might be construed as support of the persecutions.”
“I’m quite aware of that,” said Motiak. “That’s why you aren’t under the same charges as Bego and Khideo.”
“If you think you can silence me by threatening the death penalty for Bego, you’re mistaken,” said Akma. “It’s me you’ll have to kill.”
Motiak leapt to his feet, leaned across the table, and slapped the surface right in front of Akma. “I’m not killing anyone, you stupid little boy! I’m not threatening anyone! I’m letting you see the truth about what’s been going on!”
“Very well,” said Akma quietly. “I see that Bego thought he controlled me. I see that Khideo believed it also. Unfortunately, it was never true. Because I formed my plan long before any of you think. I planned it sitting on a hill in a place called Chelem. Watching my father shower love on torturers and tormentors, I took a solemn vow that I would someday come back to that place with an army at my back, to conquer and subdue the Elemaki. The land where I and my people were enslaved and mistreated will fall under the power of the Nafari, and the diggers will be driven out. They and the humans who choose to live with them will have no place in the gornaya. That was the vow I made then. And all that has happened since has merely been a part of accomplishing it. What do I care about religion? I learned from my father that religious stories are just a way to get people to do what you want-the way he did with the Pabulogi. The tragedy of my father is that he believes his own stories.”
Motiak smiled. “Thank you, Akma. You’ve given me what I needed.”
Akma smiled back. “I’ve given you nothing that you can use. Your sons and I have already planned the military strategy that will bring us victory. We’ve studied the reports of the spies. You discard all the useful information because you have no interest in carrying war to the enemy-but we use it, we learn from it. The Elemaki are divided into three weak and quarrelsome kingdoms. We can defeat them one at a time. It’s an excellent plan, and there is nothing treasonable about it.
Whatever role I play will be as the true and loyal servant of the king. That you will not be the king to whom I bring such glory is sad, but that is your choice, sir. By all means, announce to your people that this is my plan-to defeat and destroy our enemies and bring peace to the whole land. See how unpopular it makes me.”
“The people don’t love war,” said Motiak. “You misjudge them if you think they do.”
“You misjudge them, not me,” said Akma. “They hate the constant vigilance. They hate knowing that the Elemaki raiders know they can return beyond our borders and we won’t pursue them and destroy them. Why do you think there was so much loathing against the diggers? Why do you think the civil guard wouldn’t obey you when you commanded them to stop the violence? The difference between us, sir, is that I will channel that rage against the real enemy. Your policies channeled it against children.”
Motiak stood. “There is no law requiring me to appoint one of my sons to succeed me.”
Akma also stood. “And there is no law requiring the people to choose the successor that you name. The people love Aronha. They will love him all the more when they see that he-that we-intend to restore the old order, the old ways.”
“All that you plan, all of it, and the fact you dare to fling it in my face-it all depends on the fact that I’m a gentle king and don’t use my power arbitrarily.”
“Yes,” said Akma. “I count on that. I also count on the fact that you love this kingdom and you won’t needlessly plunge it into civil war or anarchy. You will appoint Aronha as your successor. And by the time that day comes-and we hope it is not soon, sir, no matter what you might imagine-by that time we hope, we believe, that you will have come to realize that our plan is ultimately the best for your people. You will wish us well.”
“No,” said Motiak. “That I will never do.”
“It’s your decision.”
“You think you’ve outmaneuvered me, don’t you?”
“Not at all. My only enemy is the nation of diggers and loathsome ratlike humans in the high mountains. I had nothing to do with the trials that led to the legal situation that opened the floodgates of persecution, and you know it. I was never one of the players in that miserable game, and I reject it. But this decree you’re making now, yes-that is a maneuver. But I didn’t notice you coming up with anything better. It seems, however, that my reward for suggesting the solution to your problems is to come to this room to be called a puppet, a traitor, a torturer of children, and every other vile thing you can think of. I will not forget that my mother and father sat and listened to all of this without once, not once, raising their voices in my defense.”
Bego laughed. “You are the man I thought you’d be, Akma!”
A look from Motiak brought silence to the table.
“Akma,” said Father, quietly. “I beg you for mercy.”
No, don’t do this, Akma said silently. Don’t humiliate yourself before me, the way you humiliated yourself before the Pabulogi.
“I have searched my memory and my conscience,” said Father, “trying to imagine how I might have acted differently back in Chelem. I beg you to tell me now-what should I have done? Befriending the sons of Pabulog, teaching them the way of the Keeper, the doctrines of Binaro-that won our freedom. It brought us here. How else could I have done it? What should I have done?”
“I don’t dwell in the past,” said Akma, trying to fend off the embarrassing question.
“So you can’t think of anything better I could have done, either,” said Father. “No, I didn’t think you could. Hatred and anger aren’t rational. Just because you know I had no other choice doesn’t make the anger go away. I understand that. But you’re a man now. You can put away childish things.”
“Is this your idea of an apology?” asked Akma lightly. “To call me childish?”
“Not an apology,” said Akmaro. “A warning.”
“A warning? What, from the man who teaches peace?”
“You claim that you are repelled by what the persecutors have done. But in all your wisdom, in all your planning, you seem not to realize that the course you are embarking on will cause suffering on a scale that will make these persecutions look like a holiday.”
“The Elemaki attacked us. Again and again. No, I won’t shed any tears over their suffering.”
“A schoolboy looks at war and sees maps and flags,” said Akmaro.
“Don’t tell me about war. You’ve seen as little of it as I have, and I’ve read more.”
“Don’t you think Motiak and I have talked about war? If we thought it could be done quickly-the Elemaki defeated and destroyed in a single campaign-do you think we would shrink from it? My love for peace isn’t mindless. I know the Elemaki attack us. Motiak feels every blow to his people as if they fell on his own body. The reason the king has refused to attack the enemy strongholds is because we would lose. Without doubt, without question, we would be destroyed. Not a soldier would live to reach the ancient land of Nafai. The high valleys are a death trap. But you’ll never get that far, Akma. Because the Keeper rejects your plan from the start. This land belongs to all three peoples equally. That is what the Keeper decrees. If we accept that law and live together in peace, then we will prosper here. If we reject it, my son, then our bones will bleach in the sun like the bones of the Rasulum.”
Akma shook his head. “After all these years, do you still think you can frighten me with warnings about the Keeper?”
“No,” said Akmaro. “I don’t think I can frighten you at all. But I have a duty to tell you what I know. Last night I had a true dream.”
Akma groaned inwardly. Oh, Father, don’t embarrass yourself even further. Can’t you handle your defeat like a man?
“The Keeper has chosen you. He recognized you in childhood and prepared you for your role in life. No one has been born before you among the Nafari with such intelligence, such wisdom, such power.”
Akma laughed, trying to deflect such obvious flattery. “Is that why you treat my ideas with such respect?”
“Nor has there been anyone with such sensitivity. When you were little, it was turned to compassion. The blows that fell on Luet hurt you more than those than fell on you. You felt the pain of everyone around you, all the people. But along with the sensitivity came pride. You had to be the one to save the others, didn’t you? That’s the crime that you can’t forgive us for. That it was your mother and not you who faced down Didul that day in the fields. That it was I, not you, who taught them, who won them over. Everything you longed for happened-our people were saved, the torment stopped. The one thing you couldn’t bear, though, was that you felt you had nothing to do with saving them. And that’s what your dream of war is all about. Even though the people have already been saved, you can’t rest until you lead an army to redeem them.”
Mother spoke up now, her voice thick with emotion. “Don’t you know that it was your courage that sustained us all?”
Akma shook his head. It was almost unbearable, the embarrassment of listening to their pathetic attempts at trying to get him to see things their twisted way. Why were they doing this to themselves? To call him intelligent, and then not realize he’s clever enough to see through their stories.
Father went on. “The Keeper is watching you, to see what you’ll do. The moment of choice will come to you. You’ll have all the information you need to make your choice.”
“I’ve made my choices,” said Akma.
“You haven’t even been given the choice yet, Akma. You’ll know when it comes. On the one hand will be the plan of the Keeper-to create a people of peace, who celebrate the differences between people of earth and sky and all that is between. On the other hand will be your pride, and the pride of all humans, the ugliest side of us, the thing that makes grown men tear holes in the wings of young angels. That pride in you makes you reject the Keeper because the Keeper rejected you, so that you pretend not to believe in him. Your pride requires war and death, demands that because a few diggers beat you and your people when you were a child, all diggers must be driven from their homes. If you choose that pride, if you choose destruction, if you reject the Keeper, then the Keeper will regard this experiment as a failure. The way the Rasulum failed before us. And we will end up like the Rasulum. Do you understand me, Akma?”
“I understand you. I believe none of it, but I understand you.”
“Good,” said Father. “Because I also understand you.”
Akma laughed derisively. “Good! Then you can tell me which way I’ll choose and save me the trouble!”
“When you are at the point of despair, my son, when you see destruction as the only desirable choice, then remember this: The Keeper loves us. Loves us all. Values each life, each mind, each heart. All are precious to him. Even yours.”
“How kind of him.”
“His love for you is the one constant, Akma. He knows that you have believed in him all along. He knows that you have rebelled against him because you thought you knew how to shape this world more wisely than he. He knows that you have lied to everyone, over and over again, including yourself, especially yourself-and I tell you again that even knowing all of this, if you will only turn to him, he will bring you back.”
“And if I don’t, then the Keeper will wipe out everybody, is that it?” asked Akma.
“He will withdraw his protection, and we will then be free to destroy ourselves.”
Akma laughed again. “And this is the being that you tell me is filled with love?”
Father nodded. “Yes, Akma. So much love that he will let us choose for ourselves. Even if we choose our own destruction and break his heart.”
“And you saw all this in a dream?” asked Akma.
“I saw you at the bottom of a hole, so deep that no light reached there. I saw you weeping, crying out in agony, begging the Keeper of Earth to blot you out, to destroy you, because it would be better to die than to live with your shame. I thought, Yes, that is how much pride Akma has, that he would rather die than be ashamed. But beside you in that dark hole, Akma, I saw the Keeper of Earth. Or rather heard him, saying, Give me your hand, Akma. I’m holding out my hand to lift you out of this place. Take my hand. But you were wailing so loud that you couldn’t hear him.”
“I have bad dreams, too, Father,” said Akma. “Try eating your supper earlier, so your food can fully digest before you go to bed.”
The silence around the table sounded like triumph to Akma.
Motiak looked at Father, who nodded once. Mother burst into tears. “I love you, Akma,” she said.
“I love you too, Mother,” he answered. And to Motiak he said, “And you, sir, I honor and obey as my king. Command me to be silent and I will say nothing; I only ask that you also command my father to be silent. But if you let him speak, let me speak.”
“That’s what the decree says,” Motiak answered mildly. “No state religion. Complete freedom in matters of belief. Freedom to form assemblies of believers. The leaders of the assemblies chosen however they see fit. No high priest appointed by the king. And a strict ban on persecuting anyone because of their beliefs. So ... your father tells me that we’ve accomplished all that he hoped for here. You can go now.”
Akma felt victory glowing in him like a summer sunrise, warm and sweet. “Thank you, sir.” He turned and started to leave.
As he reached the door, Motiak said, “By the way, you and my sons are banned from my house. As long as you are not among the Kept, none of you will see my face again until you look at my dead body.” His voice was mild and even, but the words sturfg.
“I’m sorry that that’s your decision,” said Akma. Then, as an afterthought, he asked, “What will happen to Bego?”
He saw Bego look to him with mournful eyes.
“That,” said Motiak, “is really none of your business.”
Akma left then, closing the door behind him. He walked briskly back toward the library, where Aronha and Mon, Ominer and Khimin were waiting. Their banishment from the house would sting, of course. But Akma knew he could easily turn their dismay into a fresh resolve. Tonight would be triumphant. The beginning of the end for all this foolishness of using dreams to make decisions for a kingdom. And, more important, the beginning of justice throughout the gor-naya.
There will be peace and freedom, when all is done, thought Akma. And they will remember that I was the one who made them safe. And not just safe while I live to lead them in war, but safe forever because their enemies will be utterly destroyed. What has the mythical Keeper ever done to compare with that?
Shedemei arrived back in Darakemba that day, specifically so she could attend Akma’s first assembly that night. She already knew from what others had told her-with the Oversoul filling in gaps in her knowledge-pretty much what Akma and the sons of Motiak would be saying and what it would mean. But she had come to Earth to live for a while in society, hadn’t she? So she had to experience the great events, even if the thought of what they implied about the nature of people made her faintly ill. Therefore she attended, bringing along a few of her students and a couple of faculty members. Voozhum wanted to come, but Shedemei had to counsel her against it. “There’ll be many there who persecuted the Kept,” she said. “They hate earth people, and we can’t be sure we could protect you. I won’t let any diggers come with us tonight.”
“Oh, I misunderstood,” said Voozhum. “I heard it was going to be Edhadeya’s brothers speaking. They were always very good boys, very kind to me.” Shedemei didn’t have the heart to explain to Voozhum how much those boys had changed. Voozhum didn’t have to keep up on current events. Her subject matter was the ancient traditions of the earth people, and she could afford to miss tonight’s speeches.
When the meeting finally began, the order of speakers surprised her. Aronha was the figure of greatest fame and prestige, beloved by the nation since his childhood. Shouldn’t he have been held for last? No. When she heard him speak, Shedemei understood. He was a good speaker of the pep-talk variety, but incapable of making substantial issues clear. Kings didn’t have to be able to teach, only to decide and inspire; Aronha would be a good king. All he said, really, was that he loved his father and respected his father’s religious beliefs, but that he also respected the ancient traditions of the Nafari people and was grateful that now more than one system of beliefs and rituals would be able to coexist. “I will always have great respect for the Assembly of the Kept because of my father’s great love for the teachings of the martyr Binaro. But we are gathered here today to form another assembly, which we will call the Assembly of the Ancient Ways. We are dedicated to preserve the old public rituals that have been part of our lives since the days of the Heroes. And unlike others, we have no desire to make our assembly an exclusive one. We welcome any of the Kept who wish also to honor the old ways. You can believe all the teachings of Binaro and still be welcome in our assembly. All we ask is respect for each other and for the preservation of the patterns of life that made Darakemba great and kept us at peace among ourselves for so many centuries.”
Ah, such cheers! And how the people murmured about Aronha’s wisdom and tolerance. He will be a wise king, a great king. How many of them understand, Shedemei wondered, that by “old ways” he means the re-enslavement or expulsion of the diggers? No true Kept could possibly join with them in that program-but by inviting them anyway, Aronha was able to create the illusion that their assembly could include everyone.
And how many realize, thought Shedemei, that the peace within Darakemba was only three generations old, for until the time of Mo-tiak’s grandfather the nation of the Nafari had existed high in the farthest reaches of the gornaya and only joined with the people of Darakemba less than a century ago? And even at that there has always been discontent among the old aristocracy of Darakemba, who felt displaced and devalued by the imposition of the Nafari ruling elite over them. No, there’ll be no discussion of that. Akma may talk about wanting to be strictly honest about history, but he’ll bend the truth however he needs to build his support.
Mon’s speech was much more specific, talking about the rituals that they would attempt to preserve. “We ask th? old priests to come forward over the next few weeks to take their places in these rituals. Some of the rituals, of course, require the presence of the king; those will not be performed until and unless our beloved Motiak chooses to lead us in them.” Not said, but understood perfectly by everyone there, was the fact that if Motiak never chose to lead those rituals, Aronha would perform them when he became Aronak at some future time. “We will keep the old holidays with feasting rather than fasting,” said Mon, “with joy rather than melancholy.”
That’s right, thought Shedemei. Make sure that people understand they won’t be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept.
Ominer spent his time talking about membership in the assembly. “Add your names to the rolls-no need to do it today, you can do it anytime in the next few weeks. Enrollment will take place in the houses of the priests. We ask you to donate what you can to help us pay for land where we can assemble and to help support the schools that we will establish to help raise up our children in the old ways, as we were raised in the king’s house. One thing you can be sure of- once you are admitted to the rolls of the Assembly of the Ancient Ways, you will never be turned out just because you have a difference of opinion with some priest.”
Another jab at the Assembly of the Kept. As for donations, Shedemei almost laughed aloud at the cynicism of it. The Kept were mostly poor, and all of them donated labor and money at great sacrifice to pay for buildings and for the teachers in their schools. But they did it because of the fervency of their belief and the depth of their commitment. The Assembly of the Ancient Ways, however, would never get that level of contribution from its common members. Yet they would not lack for funds, because all the wealthy people of business and property would know that contributions to the Ancient Ways would be noticed and remembered by the future king and his brothers. Oh, there would be no budgetary shortages, and the priests who used to be salaried before Motiak’s reforms would find themselves with tidy incomes once again. None of this nonsense of priests working among the common people! This would be a high-class priesthood.
Khimin, being young, fumbled a little with his speech, but the audience seemed to find his mistakes endearing. He had been relegated merely to affirming his agreement with all that his brothers had said and then announcing that as soon as the Assembly was well organized in Darakemba, Akma and the sons of Motiak would be traveling to every major city in every province to speak to the people there and organize the Ancient Ways wherever they were invited to do so. Unfortunately, they had no money of their own, and it wouldn’t be right to use their fathers’ wealth to sustain a religion that they didn’t approve of, so Khimin and his brothers and their friend Akma would be dependent upon the hospitality of others in those faraway places.
Shedemei wondered whether they would live long enough to stay a night in every house that would be pathetically eager to take them in. Rich families that would never give a flatcake to a beggar would plead for the chance to show generosity to these boys who had never known a day of want in their lives.
<Be generous, Shedemei. Akma has known want.>
And learned nothing from it, Shedemei said silently.
<Akma isn’t a fool, either. They’ll stay in poor men’s houses often enough to make their point, and in the houses of angels as well as humans. They aren’t going to let Akmaro and Motiak hold the high ground on anything, if they can help it.>
Among them, the four sons of Motiak had taken only half an hour. It was plain when Akma rose to speak that the people had no idea of what to expect from him. The sons of the king were celebrities; but Akma was the son of Akmaro, and the rumors about him had been mostly negative. Some disliked him because they resented his father’s religious reforms. Some disliked him because he had repudiated his father’s life’s work-which the sons of Motiak had not done, even reaffirming their absolute loyalty to their father’s kingship. Others disliked him because he was a scholar and reputed to be one of the most brilliant minds that frequented the library in the king’s house-there was a natural suspicion of those with too much book-learning. And others didn’t want to like him because they had heard he didn’t believe in the Keeper of Earth, which was an absurd position for someone to take when he was about to start a new religion.
Akma surprised them. He surprised Shedemei, for that matter, and she had known from the Oversoul exactly what he planned to say. What Shedemei wasn’t prepared for was the vigor in his way of speaking, the excitement in his voice. Yet he used no extravagant gestures, merely looked out into the audience with such piercing intensity that everyone felt, at one time or another, that Akma was looking right at them, talking straight to them, that he knew their heart.
Even Shedemei felt his gaze on her when he said, “Some of you have heard that I don’t believe in the Keeper of Earth. I’m glad to tell you that this is not true. I don’t believe in the Keeper the way some have talked about him-that primitive idea of an entity who sends dreams to certain people but not to others, playing favorites with the men and women of the world. I don’t believe in a being who makes plans for us and gets angry when we don’t carry them out, who rejects some people because they don’t obey him quickly enough or don’t love their enemies better than they love their friends. I don’t believe in some all-knowing being who made humans and angels into lovers of light and air, and then demanded that they live nose-to-tail with tunnel-dwelling creatures of grime and muck-surely this Keeper of Earth could do a better job of planning than that!”
They laughed. They loved it. A little abuse of the diggers-that proved his religion was going to be Just Fine.
“No, the Keeper of Earth that I believe in is the great force of life that dwells in all things. When the rain falls, that is the Keeper of Earth. When the wind blows, when the sun shines, when maize and potatoes grow, when water flows clear over the rocks, when fish leap into the net, when babies cry out their first joyful song of life-that is the Keeper of Earth that I believe in! The natural order of things, the laws of nature-you don’t have to think about them to obey them! You don’t have to have special dreamers who will tell you what the Keeper wants you to do. The Keeper wants you to eat-you know that because you’re hungry! The Keeper wants you to laugh-you know that because you enjoy laughing! The Keeper wants you to have babies-you know that because you not only love these little ones, you even love the way you go about getting them! The messages of the Keeper of Earth come to everyone, and except for the sweet and ancient stories and rituals that bind us together as a people, there is nothing for us to teach you that you don’t learn just as well by simply being alive!”
Shedemei tried desperately to think of retorts for all the things he said, the way she had done with the sons of Motiak, but she found the spell of his voice so compelling that she couldn’t answer. He owned her mind as long as he chose to speak to her. She knew that she didn’t believe him; she just couldn’t remember, for the moment, why.
He went on and on, but his speech didn’t seem long. Every word was fascinating, moving, funny, joyful, wise-you dared not miss any of it. Never mind that Shedemei knew that he was lying, that even he did not believe half of what he said. It was still beautiful; it was still music; the rhapsody of his words swept the people with it like a current in the icy water of Tsidorek, numbing them even as it moved them.
She only won her freedom from the magic of his speech when, near the end, he proposed his ultimate solution to the problem of the diggers. “We have all been sickened by the acts of wanton cruelty over the past months,” said Akma. “Every such action was against the laws that already existed, and we are glad that our wise king has made the laws even stronger by forbidding any persecution of people because of their religious beliefs. Nevertheless, there would have been no persecution if there had been no diggers living unnaturally among the men and women of Darakemba.”
There it was-the moment when Shedemei recoiled from his words and stopped finding his voice beautiful. But the others around her were not so clear minded, and she had to nudge the other teachers from her school and glare at them to make sure they knew that they should not believe what he was saying now.
“Is it the diggers’ fault that they are here? It was .certainly never their intention! Some of them have lived in this area since the ancient days when diggers and angels always lived near each other-so that diggers could steal the children of angels and eat them in their dank warrens. One can hardly list that as a qualification for citizenship! Most diggers that live in Darakemba, however, are here because they or their parents took part in a raiding party on the borders of our land, trying to steal from hardworking men and women the fruits of their labors. Either they were captured in bloody battle or were taken when a retaliatory raid captured a digger village; then they were brought here as slaves. That was a mistake! That was wrong! Not because the diggers are not suited to slavery-by nature they are slaves, and that is how the rulers of the Elemaki treat them all. No, our mistake was that even as slaves, even as trophies of victory, it was wrong to bring diggers into a nation of people, where some would be deceived. Yes, some would think that because the diggers were capable of a kind of speech, they were therefore capable of thinking like, feeling like, acting like people. But we must not be deceived. Our eyes can tell us that these are lies. What human hasn’t rejoiced to see an angel in flight or hear the eveningsong of our brothers and sisters! What angel has not delighted in the learning that the humans brought with them, the powerful tools that can be shaped and wielded by strong human arms! We can live together, help each other-though I am not saying that our brothers in Khideo may not continue to deprive themselves of the good company of the sky people if they so choose.”
Another appreciative laugh from the audience.
“But do you rejoice to see the buttocks of a digger flash in the air as he burrows into the earth? Do you love to hear their whining, grating voices, to see their claws touching food that you are expected to eat? Isn’t it a mockery when you see their spadelike fingers clutching a book? Don’t you long to leave the room if one of them should ever attempt to sing?”
Each line of abuse was greeted with a laugh.
“They didn’t choose to live among us! And now, stricken with the poverty that must always be the lot of those unequal to the mental requirements of real citizenship, they haven’t the means to leave! And why should they? Life in Darakemba, even for a digger, is vastly better than life among the Elemaki! Yet we must have respect for the Keeper of Earth and obey the natural repugnance that is the Keeper’s clear message to us. The diggers must leave! But not by force! Not by violence! We are civilized! We are not Elemaki. I have felt the lash of the Elemaki diggers on my back, and I would rather give my life than see any human or angel treat even the vilest digger in that way! Civilized people are above such cruelty.”
The people cheered and applauded. Aren’t we all noble, thought Shedemei, to repudiate the persecution even as Akma is about to tell us a new way to begin it again, only more effectively.
“Are we helpless, then? What about those diggers who understand the truth and want to leave Darakemba, yet can’t afford the cost of the journey? Let us help them understand that they must go. Let us help them kindly on their way. First, you must realize that the only reason diggers stay here is because we keep paying them to do work that poor and struggling humans and angels would gladly do. Of course you can pay the diggers less, since they only need to dig a hole in the bank of a creek in order to have a house! But you must make the sacrifice-for their sake as well as our own!-and stop hiring them for any work at all. Pay a little more to have a man dig that ditch. Pay a little more to have a woman wash your clothes. It will be worth the cost because you won’t have to pay to have bad work redone!”
Applause. Laughter. Shedemei wanted to weep at the injustice of his lie.
“Don’t buy from digger tradesmen. Don’t even buy from human or angel shopkeepers, if the goods were made using digger labor. Insist that they guarantee that all the work was done by men and women, not by lower creatures. But if a digger wants to sell his land, then yes, buy it-at a fair price, too. Let them all sell their land, till not one patch of earth in Darakemba has a digger’s name attached to it.”
Applause. Cheers.
“Will they go hungry? Yes. Will their poverty grow worse? Yes. But we will not let them starve. I spent years of my childhood with constant hunger because our digger slavedrivers wouldn’t give us enough to eat! We are not like them! We will gather food, we will use funds donated to the Assembly of the Ancient Ways, and we will feed every digger in Darakemba if we have to-but only long enough for them to make the journey to the border! And we will feed them only as long as they are on their way! They can have food from the larders of the Ancient Ways-but only at the edge of the city, and then they must walk, they and all their families, along the road toward the border. At stations along the way, we’ll have a safe place for them to camp, and food for them to eat, and they will be treated with kindness and courtesy-but in the morning they will rise and eat and be on their way, ever closer to the border. And at the end, they will be given enough to walk on for another week, to find a place within the lands of the Elemaki, where they belong. Let them do their labor there! Let them preserve the precious ‘culture’ that certain people prize so much-but not in Darakemba! Not in Darakemba!”
As he no doubt planned, the audience took up the chant; it was only with difficulty that he quieted them again so he could finish. The speech did not go on much longer after that-only long enough for him to rhapsodize again about the beauty of the ancient ways of the Nafari and the Darakembi, about how loving and inclusive tke Assembly of the Ancient Ways would be, and how only among the Ancient, as they would call themselves, could true justice and kindness be found, for diggers as well as angels and humans. They screamed their approval, chanted his name, cried out their love for him.
<Akma knew he would be good at this, but even he is quite surprised by all this adulation.>
He doesn’t have mine, Shedemei answered silently.
<For what it’s worth, most people weren’t with him in the really nasty things he said about diggers. But he does have their support for the relocation program he outlined. For the moment, at least, it sounds like a simple and humane solution to most of those who came.>
And how will it sound to the earth people?
<Like the end of the world.>
Motiak will stop it, won’t he?
<He’ll try, I’m sure. His agents are already reporting to him on what his sons and Akma said. They’ll study the law. But he can’t oppose this plan forever, if the people really want it.>
Doesn’t he see that to take away their livelihood and drive them from their homes so they can survive at all is every bit as cruel, in the long run?
<Don’t argue with me. Argue with him. Maybe if you told people who you are and made a demonstration of the power of the cloak. . . . >
The Keeper doesn’t work like that. He wants people to follow him because they love his way.
<Well, when Nafai gave his oldest brothers a bit of of a shock, he got their cooperation for long enough to get the starship refur-bished.>
And they were back to plotting murder as quickly as they could.
“Let’s go home, Shedemei,” said one of the students.
“He was so wonderful,” said one of the others, shaking her head ruefully. “Too bad that everything he said was pure shit.”
Shedemei immediately reproved her coarse wording, but then laughed and hugged her. The students of her school might have been caught up in the moment, but they had been truly educated and not just schooled-they were able to hear something they had never before, analyze it, and decide for themselves that it was worthless, dangerous, vile. . . .
Maybe her student had used the only possible word for it.
When they got home to the school it was after dark. The girls rushed in to tell the others what had been said at the meeting. Shedemei spent those first few minutes going to the teachers who happened to be earth people. She explained about Akma’s strategy of boycotting diggers to compel them to leave. “Your place here is safe,” she said. “And I will stop charging tuition for all our students, so their parents can spare more to hire diggers and help those they cannot hire. We will’do all we can.”
She didn’t pass into the courtyard until the students who had heard the speech were telling about Akma’s statements about the diggers. They had good recall; some of it they reported word for word. Ed-hadeya was one of those who had not gone; as she told Shedemei, she didn’t know if she would be able to control herself, and besides, she had to prove that one of Motiak’s children, at least, had not lost all decency. Now, though, as she heard Akma’s statements about inferior digger intelligence, about their unfitness for civilized society, she did lose control. “He knew Voozhum! Not as well as my brothers, but he knew her! He knows that everything he’s saying is a lie, he knows it, he knows it!” She was flinging her arms about, ranting, almost screaming. The children were frightened, a little but also admired this display of passion-it was a far cry from the brusque but even temper that Shedemei always showed.
Shedemei went to her and wrapped her in her arms. “It hurts the worst when evil is done by those we love,” she said.
“How can I answer his lies? How can I stop people from believing him?”
“You’re already doing it. You teach. You speak wherever you can. You refuse to tolerate it when others echo these vile things in your presence.”
“I hate him!” Edhadeya said, her voice rough with emotion. “I will never forgive him, Shedemei. The Keeper tells us to forgive our enemies but I won’t. If that makes me evil also, then I’m evil, but I will hate him forever for what he did tonight.”
One of the students, confused, said, “But he didn’t actually do anything, did he? He only talked.”
Shedemei, still holding Edhadeya close to her, said, “If I point to a man walking down the street, and I scream to everyone, ‘There he is, there’s the man who molested my little girl! There’s the man who raped and tortured and killed my daughter, I know him, that’s the man!’-if I say that, and the crowd tears him to pieces, and yet I knew all along that he was not the man, that it was all a lie, was it just talk, or did I do something?”
Letting them think about this lesson, she led Edhadeya into the school to the cubicle, just like all the other cubicles, where she slept. “Don’t be troubled, Edhadeya. Don’t let this tear you apart.”
“I hate him,” she muttered again.
“Now that the others can’t hear, let me insist that you face the truth of your own heart. The reason you’re so angry, the reason you feel so betrayed that you can’t control your emotions, they burst your dignity, they make you almost crazy with grief-the reason for that, my dear friend, my fellow teacher, my daughter, my sister, is that you still love him and that is what you can’t forgive.”
“I don’t love him,” said Edhadeya. “That’s a terrible thing to accuse me of.”
“Cry yourself to sleep, Dedaya. You have classes to teach in the morning. And I’ll need a lot of other help from you as well. Tonight you can grieve and brood and curse and rage until you wear yourself out. But we all need you to be useful after that.”
In the morning, Edhadeya was useful indeed, calm and hardworking, wise and compassionate as always. But Shedemei could see that the turmoil had not subsided in her heart. You were named well, she thought-named for Eiadh, who made the tragic error of loving Ele-mak. But you haven’t made all of Eiadh’s mistakes. You have been constant of heart, where Eiadh kept deciding she loved Nafai more. And you may have chosen more wisely in the first place, because it’s not yet altogether certain whether Akma really is as single-minded in his pride as Elemak was. Elemak had proof after proof of the power of the Oversoul and then of the Keeper of Earth, and still defied them and hated all they were trying to do. But Akma has never knowingly had any experience with the Keeper’s power-that’s an advantage that Akmaro and Chebeya, Edhadeya and Luet, Didul and even I have over him. So it just may be, poor Edhadeya, that you have not bestowed your heart as tragically and foolishly as Eiadh did. Then again, it may turn out that you did even worse.
Dudagu didn’t want her husband to go. “I hate it when you’re gone for so many days.”
“I’m sorry, but no matter how ill you are right now, I’m still the king,” said Motiak.
“That’s right, so you have people to find out things and report to you and you don’t have to go and see for yourself!”
“I’m king of the earth people of Darakemba as surely as I’m king of the sky and middle people. They need to see that I don’t want them to leave.”
“You issued that decree, didn’t you? Forbidding people to organize boycotts of the diggers?”
“Oh, yes. I decreed, and immediately Akma and the royal boys went about declaring that in compliance with the law, they no longer advocated a boycott and urged people not to stop hiring diggers or buying goods made by diggers. Thus I can’t arrest them while their boycott message is still being spread by their pretence of discontinuing it.”
“I still think you should make them come home and stop letting them speak.”
“It wouldn’t change the fact that people know what they believe, what they want. Believe it or not, Dudagu, despite your high opinion of my powers, I’m helpless.”
“Punish them if they boycott the diggers! Confiscate their property! Cut off a ringer!”
“And how would I prove that they’re boycotting? All they have to say is, ‘I was never satisfied with his work and so I hire other people now. It has nothing to do with what species he belongs to-don’t I have the freedom to decide whom to hire?’ Sometimes it might even be true. Should I punish them then?”
Dudagu thought about this for a few moments. “Well, then, if the diggers are leaving, let them go! If they all leave, then the problem is solved.”
Motiak looked at her in silence until she finally realized something was wrong and looked at him and saw the cold rage in his face.
She gasped. “Did I say something wrong?”
“When someone in my kingdom decides that some of my citizens are not welcome, and drives them out against my will, don’t you dare to tell me that once they’re all gone, the problem is solved. Every earth person who leaves Darakemba makes this nation that much more evil and I’m beginning to hate being their king.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. “You wouldn’t do anything stupid like abdicating, would you?”
“And put Aronha in charge years ahead of schedule? Watch as he re-establishes this Ancient Ways abomination as the official religion of the empire? I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. No, I’ll be king until the last breath is dragged out of my body. I only hope that I have the strength never to hope that all my sons die before me.”
Dudagu fairly flew off the bed, to stand before him in tiny, majestic rage. “Don’t you ever say such a monstrous thing again! Three of them aren’t my sons, I know that, and I know they hate me and think I’m useless but they’re still your sons, and that’s still more sacred than anything else in the world, and no decent man would ever wish his sons to die before him even if he is the king and they are wretched traitorous snots like my Khimin turned out to be.” She burst into tears.
He led her back to her bed. “Come on, I didn’t mean it, I was just angry.”
“So was I, only I was right to be angry.,” she said, “That’s true, you were, and I apologize. I didn’t mean it.”
“Please don’t go.”
“I will go, because it’s the right thing to do. And you will stop pestering me about it, because I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about doing my duty as king.”
“I won’t sleep while you’re gone. You’ll be lucky if I’m not dead of weakness and exhaustion when you return.”
“Three days? Try to stay alive for three days.”
“You don’t take my sickness seriously at all, Tidaka,” she said.
“I take it seriously,” said Motiak, “but I never have and never will let it stop me from doing my duty. It’s one of the tragedies of royal life, Dudagu. If you died while I was away, doing my duty, I would grieve. But if I failed in my duty because you were dying, I would be ashamed. For my kingdom’s sake, I would rather have my people grieve with me than have my people ashamed of me.”
“You have no heart,” she said.
“No, I have a heart,” said Motiak. “I just can’t always do what it tells me to do.”
“I’ll hate you forever. I’ll never forgive you.”
“But I’ll love jyow,” he answered mildly. And then, when the door was closed behind him and she couldn’t hear, he muttered, “I might even forgive you for making my home life so ... unrestful.”
He left his house in the company of two captains-as tradition required, one was an angel, the other a human. Outside, spies and soldiers were ready-only a dozen spies and thirty soldiers, but it was best to be prepared. In these tumultuous times, one never knew when a party of Elemaki might penetrate deeply into Darakemba. And before the journey was done, they would be far upriver, much closer to the border.
On the way out of the city, they were joined by Akmaro, Chebeya, Edhadeya, and Shedemei. Motiak greeted his daughter with an embrace, and met Shedemei with short courtesy; it was easy to assume a level of intimacy as if he had long known her. “Someday you must tell me where you’re from,” he said. “Show me on a map, that is. I have the original maps that Nafai drew, showing the whole gornaya. I won’t have heard of your city, but I can add it to the map.”
“It would do no good,” said Shedemei. “It doesn’t exist now.”
“A grief that can hardly be imagined,” said Motiak.
“It was for a while,” said Shedemei. “But I’m alive, and my work requires all my concentration.”
“Still, I’d like to see where your city was. People often build again on the same site. If there was a reason to build a city there once, another people will think of the same reason again.” Polite conversation; they all knew what was really on Motiak’s mind. But there was no use talking about it all the time; it wasn’t as if they could do much. And it was Motiak’s duty to make sure they were as comfortable as he could make them. That was one of the chief annoyances of being king. No matter where he was, no matter who was with him, he was always host, always responsible for everyone else’s well-being.
Out on the road, their reason for this journey was immediately apparent. The encampment of emigrating diggers wasn’t large, but then it wasn’t meant to be. Quiet humans and angels manned the booth where food and water were distributed; lidded jars with thongs to loop around the neck would serve to help the diggers on their way. They would also mark them as emigrants, so that any who saw them on the road would know they were leaving Darakemba. They had taken the invitation of the Ancients; they had decided to live where they were not hated. But it gave them no joy. Motiak hadn’t spent that much of his life around earth people that he could easily read the expressions on their strange faces. But it took no great experience to see the dejection in the slope of their backs, the way they tended to walk now on two feet, now touching a hand to the ground, as if in being called animals they had begun somehow to discover it was true, so now it took all their remaining strength just to keep from setting down the other hand to make it a foot again, as it had been for an ancient ancestor scurrying through the alleys of a human city, looking for something edible or wet or shiny.
Motiak led his party onto the road; the diggers moved aside. “No,” he said, “the road is wide enough. We can share it.”
They stayed motionless at the verge, watching him.
“I am Motiak,” he said. “Don’t you understand that you are citizens? You don’t have to go. I’ve opened up the public larders in every city. You can wait this out. It will pass.”
Finally one of them spoke. “When we go there, we see the hatred in their eyes, sir. We know you meant well for us, setting us free. We don’t hate you.”
“It’s not the hunger,” said another. “You know it’s not that.”
“Yes it is,” said a woman, holding three small children near her. “And the beatings. You won’t live forever, sir.”
“Whatever else might be true of my sons,” said Motiak, “they will never permit the persecution.”
“Oh, they’ll starve us out, but not let us be hit?” the woman scoffed. “Stand up, you,” she said to her children. “This is the king, here. This is majesty.”
Motiak’s angel captain made a motion as if to punish her for impudence, but Motiak waved him back with a tiny gesture. The irony in her voice could not overmatch the bitterness in his heart. She was right, to jeer at majesty. A king has no more power than the willing obedience of the great mass of the people gives him. A king who is worse than his people is a poisonous snake; a king who is better is last year’s snakeskin, discarded in the grass.
Pabul was at the Ancient Ways booth. He had asked if he might come along, if only because he felt somewhat responsible for the troubles with his decision in Shedemei’s trial the year before. “These so-called Ancients, they’re a loathsome bunch,” he said, “but they’re not breaking any law. They don’t foul the water or poison the food. It’s fresh enough, and the rations they give the earth people are adequate for a day’s journey.” He hesitated, considering whether to say the next thing, then decided and spoke. “You could forbid the diggers to leave.”
Motiak nodded. “Yes-I could require the most helpless and obedient of my citizens to stay and suffer further humiliation and abuse, from which I’m powerless to protect them, I could do that.”
Pabul made no more argument along that line.
They walked all day, briskly because they were all healthy: They made a point of staying fit; Motiak and Pabul because their offices were fundamentally military ones and they might find themselves in the field at any time; Akmaro and Chebeya, Edhadeya and Shedemei because they were of the Kept and labored with their own hands, permitting themselves no excess of food or unproductive leisure. So they overtook group after group of diggers, and to each of them Motiak said the same thing. “Please stay. I wish you would stay. Trust in the Keeper to heal the wound in this land.” And their answer was always the same: For you we would stay, Motiak, we know you wish us well; but there’s no future here for me, for my children.
“It’s misleading,” Akmaro said that afternoon. “We see here the ones that are on the road. Most are staying.”
“So far,” said Motiak.
“Our resources are stretched to the limit, but all the diggers that the Kept can hire are earning wages; their children are still in school; there are even towns and villages where Akma and your sons have no influence and the people treat each other civilly, without boycotts or any sign of hate.”
“How many such towns, Akmaro?” asked Motiak. “One in a hundred?”
“One in fifty,” said Akmaro. “Or one in forty.” Motiak had no need to answer that.
He thought back to the morning’s conversation with his wife. The callousness with which she said to let the diggers go and then the problem would be solved. Is that any more monstrous than my cruel thought that I might wish to see my sons in graves before I die? Yet I would not have shrunk from letting them all take weapons in their hands and go out into battle, if an enemy attacked us. They might have died then, in the violence of war, and when they saw me mourning no man or woman in the kingdom would have said, If he really loved them he wouldn’t have put them in the way of death.
He framed the idea in words and said them aloud, so Akmaro, still walking beside him, could hear. “There are things that parents must value even above their children’s lives.”
Akmaro needed no explanation to understand where Motiak’s thoughts had turned. “That’s hard,” he said. “All of nature has written into our minds the idea that children matter more than anything.”
“But civilization means rising above even that,” said Motiak. “We feel our self to be the town, the tribe, the city, the nation-”
“The children of the Keeper-”
“Yes, we see that as the self that must be preserved at all costs, so that nearer things are less valuable. Does it mean we’re monsters, that we hate our grown children if we send them off to war to kill and die so they can protect our neighbors’ little ones?”
“ ‘The survival of the family is best enhanced when the family is subsumed in a larger society,’ “ Akmaro recited. “ ‘One family breaks and bleeds, but the larger organism heals. The wound is not fatal.’
Edhadeya has been teaching me the things that are taught in Rasaro’s House.”
“She spends more time in your house than mine,” said Motiak.
“She finds more comfort from Chebeya than from her stepmother,” said Akmaro. “I don’t think that’s surprising. Besides, she spends most of her time with Shedemei.”
“Strange woman,” said Motiak.
“When you know her better,” said Akmaro, “you’ll begin to realize that she’s even stranger than you thought at first.” Then, suddenly, Akmaro’s demeanor changed; in a softer voice he said, “I didn’t realize that your captain of soldiers was so close behind us.”
“Is he?” asked Motiak.
“Were you overheard, do you think? When you said, ‘There are things that parents must value even above their children’s lives’?”
Motiak glanced at Akmaro in alarm. They both understood that inadvertently, Motiak had placed their sons in great danger. “It’s time that we stopped for our noon meal.”
While the soldiers broke out the food that they were carrying, and all but two of the spies settled to the ground to eat, Motiak took Edhadeya aside. “I’m sorry to separate you from the group, but I have an urgent errand for you.”
“And you can’t send a spy?” she said.
“I most certainly cannot,” he said. “I chanced to say something unfortunate just now, and I was overheard; but even if I hadn’t been, the idea is bound to occur to one of my men, seeing how unhappy I am. You must go and find your brothers and warn them that it’s possible, even likely, that some soldier, thinking to do me a great service, will attempt to relieve me of some of my family burdens.”
“Oh, Father, you don’t think they would raise a hand against the royal blood?”
“Kings’ sons have died before,” said Motiak. “My soldiers know that what my boys are doing now is killing me. I fear the loyalty of my most loyal men as much as I fear the disloyalty of my sons. Go to them, tell them my warning.”
“Do you know what they’ll say, Father? That you’re threatening them, that you’re trying to scare them into stopping their public speaking.”
“I’m trying to save their lives. Tell them at least to keep their travel secret. Tell no one where they’re going next, tell no one when they plan to leave. Go suddenly, arrive unexpectedly. They must, or somewhere on the road someone will be lying in wait for them. And not diggers-I’m talking about humans and angels. Will you do this?”
She nodded.
“I’ll send two angels with you for safety, but when you get near, you must order them to stay behind so you can talk to your brothers alone.”
She nodded; she got up to go.
“Edhadeya,” said Motiak. “I know that I’m asking you to do a hard thing, to go and see them. But whom else can I send? Akmaro? Pabul? Akma will allow you to come close and speak to your brothers in privacy.”
“I can bear it,” said Edhadeya. “I can bear it better than watching these weary people leave their homeland.”
As she walked away, Motiak saw that she was heading straight for Shedemei. He called out to her. She came back.
“I don’t think you should talk about this to strangers,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to,” she said, looking peeved. Again she left; again she headed straight for Shedemei, and this time spoke to her. Shedemei nodded, then shook her head no; only then did Edhadeya take her leave of the whole group, with two angels flying reconnaissance for her as she went.
Motiak was furious even though he knew his anger was foolish. Chebeya noticed at once that he was out of sorts and came to him. “What happened with Edhadeya?” she asked.
“I told her not to tell strangers what her errand was, and she went straight to this Shedemei.”
Chebeya laughed ruefully. “Oh, Motiak, you should have been more specific than that. Shedemei isn’t a stranger to anyone here but you.”
“Edhadeya knew what I meant.”
“No she didn’t, Motiak. If she had known, she would have obeyed you. Not all your children are in revolt. Besides, Shedemei isn’t Bego or ... Akma. She’s only going to lead Edhadeya closer to the Keeper and to you.”
“I want to talk to her, this Shedemei. It’s time I got to know her.”
A moment later Shedemei sat beside him in the shade, with Akmaro, Pabul, and Chebeya gathered round, the soldiers well back and out of earshot. “Enough of the evasions,” said Motiak. “It was fine for you to be vague and mysterious until my daughter started confiding my secret errands to you.”
“What secret errands?” said Shedemei.
“The reason I was sending her back to Darakemba.”
“She told me nothing about that,” said Shedemei.
“Are you going to pretend that you don’t know what she’s doing?”
“Not at all,” said Shedemei. “I know exactly what she’s doing. But she didn’t tell me.”
“Enough of the riddles! Who are you!”
“When I can see that it’s any of your business to know, Motiak, I’ll tell you. Until then, all you need to know is that I serve the Keeper as best I can, and so do you, and that makes us friends whether you like it or not.”
No one had ever spoken to him with such impudence before. Only Chebeya’s gentling touch on his elbow restrained him from embarrassing himself with words he would soon regret. “I try to be a decent man and not abuse my power as king, but I have my limits!”
“On the contrary,” said Shedemei. “There is no limit to your decency. It is complete. Akma and your boys wouldn’t have done half so well if that weren’t true.”
Motiak studied her face, still angry, still baffled. “I’m supposed to be the king, and nobody will tell me anything.”
“If it’s any help to you,” said Shedemei, “I don’t know anything that would help you, because it doesn’t help me, either. I’m as eager as you are to put an end to this nonsense. I see as clearly as you do that if Akma succeeds in all that he plans to do, your kingdom will lie in ruins, your people scattered and enslaved, and this great experiment in freedom and harmony will be, not even a memory, but a legend and then a myth and then a fantasy.”
“It’s been a fantasy all along.”
“No, that’s not true,” said Akmaro, leaping in to stop Motiak from wallowing in bitterness, as he so often had in recent weeks and months. “Don’t start to use Akma’s lies to excuse your own lack of understanding. You know that the Keeper of Earth is real. You know that the dreams he sends are true. You know that the future he showed to Binaro was a good one, full of hope and light, and you chose it, not out of fear of the Keeper, but out of love for his plan. Don’t lose sight of that.”
Motiak sighed. “It’s nice at least that I don’t have the burden of carrying a conscience around with me. Akmaro stores a much larger one than I could lift myself, and trots it out whenever it’s needed.” He laughed. So did they. For a moment, and then the laughter died in reflective silence. “My friends, I think we have seen how powerless I am. Even if I were like the late unlamented Nuab among the Zenifi, willing to kill whoever crossed me, he didn’t have to face a determined enemy like Akma.”
“Khideo’s sword almost got him,” Akmaro pointed out.
“Khideo didn’t go around like Akma, telling the people exactly what the worst among them want to hear. Nuab didn’t have his sons in unison against him so that the people would see them as the future and him as the past and ignore him as if he were already dead. Don’t you think it’s ironic, Akmaro, that what you did to that monster Pa-bulog, stealing his sons away from him, should end up happening to me?”
Akmaro laughed one bitter bark of a laugh. “You think I haven’t seen the parallel? My son thinks he hates me, but his actions have been a perverse echo of mine. He even grew up to be the leader of a religious movement, and spends his life preaching and teaching. I should be proud.”
“Yes, we’re all such failures,” said Chebeya nastily. “We can sit around here moaning about our helplessness. Shedemei, who supposedly knows all the secrets of the universe, can’t think of a single useful thing to do. The king whines about how powerless kings are. My husband, the high priest, moans about what a failure he is as a father. While I have to sit here watching the threads that bind this kingdom together unraveling, watch the people forming themselves into tribes that are bound only by hate and fear, and all the while I know that those who have been trusted with all the power that there is in this land are doing nothing but feeling sorry for themselves!”
Her virulence startled them all.
“Yes,” said Motiak, “so we’re a helpless pathetic bunch. What exactly is your point?”
“You’re angry at us because we can’t do anything,” said Akmaro.
“But that’s the cause of our grief-we can’t. You might as well be angry at the riverbank because it can’t stop the water from flowing by.”
“You foolish men of power!” cried Chebeya. “You’re so used to governing with laws and words, soldiers and spies. Now you rage or have your feelings hurt because all your usual tools are useless. They were always useless. Everything always depended on the relationship between each individual person in this kingdom and the Keeper of Earth. Very few of them understand anything about the Keeper’s plan, but they know goodness when they see it, and they know evil-they know what builds and what tears down, what brings happiness and what brings misery. Trust them!”
“Trust them?” said Motiak. “With Akma leading them to deny the most common decency?”
“Who are these people that Akma leads? You see them as crowds that flock to him and feel as though they had all betrayed you. But their reasons for following Akma are as individual as they are. Yes, some of them hate all diggers with an unreasoning passion-but they were always around, weren’t they? I don’t think their numbers have increased, not by one; in fact, after the persecutions I think there were fewer who really hated the diggers, because many people learned to feel compassion for them. Akma knows this-he knows that they don’t want to be like the thugs who tormented children. So he tells them that the problem wasn’t their fault, or even the diggers’ fault, it’s just the natural way of things, it can’t be helped, we’re all victims of the way nature works, it’s all the will of the Keeper, we need to give in and move the diggers humanely out of sight so all this ugliness will go away. Most of the people who follow him are just trying to make the problem go away. If they simply let things happen, they think, peace will come again. But they’re ashamed! I see it, why can’t you? They know it’s wrong. But it’s inevitable, so why fight it? Even the king, even the high priest of the Kept can’t do a thing about it!”
“That’s right,” growled Motiak. “We can’t!”
“That’s what Akma’s saying to them.”
“He’s not saying it,” said Motiak. “He’s showing it.”
“But they don’t want it to be true. Oh, I’m not saying they’re all decent people, or even most of them. There are plenty of them who are looking only for their own advantage. Better invest my time and wealth in making friends with Motiak’s sons. But if they once thought that Akma would fail, they’d be right back with you, pretending to have been among the Kept all along, joking with you about how every family has problems with sons who are coming of age. They don’t care whether the diggers come or go. In fact they miss the lower wages they were able to pay them. The people are not evil, Motiak. A large number of them are decent but they have no hope. Another large portion don’t care that much about decency but they’d be just as happy to have the Kept in charge of things, they don’t much care as long as they can prosper. And you know that the Kept are still a very large core of dedicated believers who love the Keeper’s plan and are striving to save it at great cost to themselves, and with unflinching courage. These three groups, together, are the vast majority of your people. Not perfect, certainly, but good enough to be worth reigning over. Except that Akma’s voice seems to be the only one that’s heard.” It was Shedemei who answered her tirade. “Yes, but that’s not for our lack of trying. The king has pleaded, you and your husband have spoken publicly and constantly, Pabul here has searched the law for ways to help and his court has been firm on the side of decency-I’ve even done all that I could do, that would not be coercive.”
“So it all comes down to Akma and my sons,” said Motiak. “No,” said Chebeya. “It all comes down to Akma. Those boys of yours would never be doing this either, Motiak, if it weren’t for Akma.”
“That was the meaning of the dream the Keeper sent me,” said Akmaro. “It all comes down to Akma, and none of us has the slightest power to reach him. We’ve all tried-well, Pabul couldn’t, because Akma would never let him come close. But the rest of us have tried, and we can’t bend him, and as long as we can’t stop Akma, we can’t waken the decency of the people, so what does it matter?”
“You’re not suggesting,” said Motiak, “that I arrange the assassination of your own son?”
“No!” she cried. “See how you think of power as a matter of weapons, Motiak? And you, Akmaro, it’s words, words, teaching, talking, that’s what power means to you. But this problem is beyond what you can solve with your ordinary tools.”
“What then?” said Shedemei. “What tools should’we use?”
“No tools at all!” cried Chebeya. “They don’t work!”
Shedemei extended her open hands. “There I am,” she said, “unarmed, my hands are empty. Fill them! Show me what to do and I’ll do it! So will any of us!”
“I can’t show you because I don’t know. I can’t give you tools because there are no tools. Don’t you see? What Akma is wrecking- it’s not our plan.”
“If you’re saying we should just leave it up to the Keeper,” said Akmaro, “then what’s the point of anything? Binaro said it-we’re the Keeper’s hands and mouths in this world.”
“Yes, when the Keeper needs action or speech, we’re the ones to do it. But that’s not what’s needed now!”
Akmaro reached out and took his wife’s hands in his. “You’re saying that we shouldn’t just leave things up to the Keeper. You’re saying we should demand that the Keeper either do something or show us what to do.”
“The Keeper knows that,” said Shedemei. “She hardly needs us to tell her what should be obvious.”
“Maybe she needs us to admit that it’s up to her. Maybe she needs us to say that whatever she decides, we will abide by it. Maybe it’s time for Akma’s father to say to the Keeper, Enough. Stop my son.”
“Do you think I haven’t begged the Keeper for answers?” Akmaro said, offended.
“Exactly,” said Chebeya. “I’ve heard you, talking to the Keeper, saying, ‘Show me what to do. How can I save my son? How can I bring him back from these terrible things?’ Doesn’t it occur to you that the only reason the Keeper hasn’t stopped Akma up to now is for your sake?”
“But I want him to stop.”
“That’s right!” cried Chebeya. “You want him to stop. That’s what you plead for, over and over. I’ve seen the connection between you. Even though it’s rage on his part and agonized frustration on yours, the ties of love between you are stronger than I’ve ever seen between any two people in my life. Think what that means-in all your pleas, you are really asking the Keeper to spare your son.”
“Your son too,” said Akmaro softly.
“I’ve shed the same tears as you, Kmadaro,” she said. “I’ve said the same prayers to the Keeper. But it’s time to utter a new prayer. It’s time to say to the Keeper that we value her children more than we value ours. It’s time for you to beg the Keeper of Earth to stop our son. To set the people of Darakemba free from his foul, foul influence.”
Motiak couldn’t see what her point was. “I just sent Edhadeya to try to warn my boys to be careful-are you saying I should have sent soldiers to assassinate Akma?”
“No,” said Akmaro, answering for Chebeya so she wouldn’t have to weep in frustration. “No, her point is that anything we might do at this point would be useless. If someone causes harm to any of these boys, they would be martyrs and you would be blamed forever. It’s not in our power-that’s what Chebeya’s saying.”
“But I thought she was telling you to. . . .”
“Akma has to be stopped, but the only way to stop him, that will actually work, is for everyone to see that he was stopped, not by any power of man or woman, of angel, human, or digger, but by the plain and naked power of the Keeper of Earth. She’s saying that without realizing it, I’ve been begging, demanding that the Keeper find a way to save my son. All that’s left now is for me to stop that prayer. I think . . . perhaps the Keeper has trusted me with his plan for this nation, and so he won’t do anything without my consent. And without realizing it, up to now I’ve refused to let the Keeper do the only thing that would help at all. We’ve tried everything else, but now it’s time for me to ask the Keeper to do now what was done long ago when Sherem threatened to undo all the teachings of Oykib.”
“You want the Keeper to strike your son dead?” asked Pabul, incredulous.
“No I don’t!” cried Akmaro. Chebeya burst into tears. “No I don’t,” Akmaro said softly. “I want my son to live. But more than that, I want the people of this world to live together as children of the Keeper. More than I want to spare the life of my son. It’s time for me to beg the Keeper to do whatever he must do in order to save the people of Darakemba-no matter what it costs.” His eyes, too, spilled over with tears. “It’s happening again, just the way it did before, when I reached out to you, Pabul, you and your brothers, and taught you to love the Keeper and reject your father’s ways. I knew that I had to do that, for the good of my people, for your good, even though I could see that it was tearing my boy apart, making him hate me. I knew I was losing him then. And now I have to consent to it all over again.”
“Me, too?” asked Motiak in a small voice.
“No,” said Shedemei. “Your boys will return to their senses once they’re not with Akma anymore. And the peace of this kingdom depends on an orderly succession. Your boys must not die.”
“But a father praying for the Keeper to strike his son dead. . . .” said Motiak.
“I will never pray for that,” said Akmaro. “I’m not wise enough to tell the Keeper how to do his work. I’m only wise enough to listen to my wife and stop demanding that the Keeper leave my son alive.”
“This is unbearable,” murmured Pabul. “Father Akmaro, I wish I had died back in Chelem rather than bring this day upon you.”
“No one brought this day upon me” said Akmaro. “Akma brought this day upon himself. The only hope of mercy for this people is for the Keeper to give justice to my son. So that’s what I’m going to ask for.” He rose from the ground, sighing deeply, terribly. “That’s what I’m going to ask for with my whole heart. Justice for my son. I hope that he can bear to look the Keeper in the face.”
They watched as Akmaro walked away from the clearing, into the trees lining the banks of the Tsidorek. “I don’t know what to hope for,” Motiak said.
“It’s not our business to hope now,” said Shedemei. “Akmaro and Chebeya finally found the courage to face what they had to face. Now I need to get back to the city and see whether I can do the same in my own small way.”
They all knew better than to ask her what it was that she intended to do.
“I’ll go with you,” said Pabul.
“No,” said Shedemei sharply. “Stay here. Akmaro will need you. Chebeya will need you. I don’t need you.” She was not to be disobeyed. She set off down the road, not even taking a waterjar with her.
“Will she be all right?” asked Motiak. “Should I have some of my spies keep an eye on her?”
“She’ll be fine,” said Chebeya. “I don’t think she wants company. Or observers, either.”
It was dark when the launch flew silently above the water of the Tsi-dorek and stopped to rest in the air a single step away from the riv-erbank. Shedemei took that step and entered the small craft-small compared to the Basilica., that is; huge compared to any other vehicle on Earth. Once she was secure inside, the launch took off without any command from her; the Oversoul knew what was needed, and took her to a garden she maintained in a hidden valley high above the settled land of Darakemba. As she traveled, the Oversoul spoke to her.
<You were the one who urged me to interfere with Monush all those years ago. Now you refuse to let me interfere with Akma.>
“That’s right.”
<I could block him.>
“You couldn’t block Nafai and Issib back on Harmony when you had your full powers. Akma has a powerful will; he would resist you. I think he’d probably enjoy it.”
<Akmaro is tearing himself apart with this. The kingdom is shattered. You have all my power at your disposal and you do nothing.>
“It’s not my plan that matters now,” said Shedemei. “It never was. We were as proud and as stupid as Akma was, back when we tried to provoke the Keeper by interfering with Monush’s rescue. What we didn’t understand is that the Keeper lets us interfere and tries to work around us. We really can’t affect her. She wants this society, this nation of Darakemba to succeed. But if the people choose to ignore her and make something ugly out of their chance at something beautiful, well, so be it. She’ll find somebody else.”
<What about Harmony? What about my mission here?>
“Maybe the Keeper is waiting to see what these children of Harmony decide, right here, right now, before she can give you the instructions you came for.”
<So she doesn’t care about these people, really. She only cares about them if they fit in with her plan.>
“She cares about them, yes. But she sees the whole picture, the sweep of time. To save a dozen or a thousand or a million people now, at the cost of the happiness of billions of lives over millions of years-she won’t do it. She takes the long view.”
<So Akmaro is wasting his time.>
“I don’t know. How can I know? We were wasting our time by trying to thwart her. But if Chebeya’s right-and how can I tell how much truth a raveler knows?-if she’s right, then the Keeper can be influenced, not by rebels but by her most loyal friends. So Akmaro may have been blocking her just as Chebeya said, and the things he’s telling the Keeper now-maybe the logjam will be broken.”
<And then I’ll be told what to do?>
“Either that or not. How can I know?”
<You think something’s going to happen, or you wouldn’t have called for me to send the launch.>
“I think that it’s possible that when it comes time to break the impasse, the Keeper may have use for me.”
<And how will you know?>
“Someone will have a dream. That’s how the Keeper works. You’ll see the dream, you’ll tell me, and we’ll figure out if there’s something in it that the Keeper wants me to do.”
<Maybe the dream will come to you.>
“I haven’t had a true dream since I saw myself as a gardener in the sky. That came true long ago, and I don’t expect to have another dream.”
<You can’t lie to me, Shedemei. I feel your hopes whether you give voice to them or not.>
“Yes, well, I’d like to think the Keeper had something to say to me, of course. I’m as vain as the next person.”
<Then hurry up and sleep, so you can dream. >
“It doesn’t work that way. I’m not tired yet.”
She left the launch and wandered in the cold night air in her garden, routinely noticing the growth of the plants, the relative preponderance of one species over another, the amount of brachiation, the size of the foliage. The Oversoul entered her observations into the ship’s computer as notes. They had long since stopped commenting on the irony that a computer program designed to govern a world was now acting as scribe for a lone biologist.
The Oversoul began to talk to her. <I’ve been searching for the Keeper, for some place that she could be. I’ve been searching for the means she uses to send dreams to the minds of humans, angels, and diggers. Whatever the Keeper does, I can’t find it.>
“Didn’t you notice that about four hundred years ago?”
<Yes, and then I waited.>
“Forty million years you waited on Harmony, and now you’re impatient?”
<I was busy on Harmony. I was needed. >
“You were running things, you mean. If something was planned, it was because you were doing the planning. And then people started having dreams that didn’t come from you. Made you a little uneasy, didn’t it?”
<It was harder to perform my calculations of probabilities.>
“That’s how it is for us all the time.”
<I have compassion algorithms designed into me. I don’t have to to identify with you in order to empathize. That’s a biological thing.>
“Whatever the Keeper does, she does it faster than light, she does it no matter how far away a person is. It suggests such enormous power. Such knowledge, such . . . wisdom. And yet she is so delicate, intervening so little, really. Giving us such freedom. Respecting our choices. Listening to us. Listening to needs and desires we don’t even know we have.”
<I think that whatever she is, she isn’t like me. She’s not a computer.>
“Organic, then? With very powerful tools?”
<Organic? Who knows. Maybe she’s simply unconstructed, how’s that? Like a human, like a digger, like an angel. She grew, she made herself out of her experiences, the way you did and do. So she wasn’t just programmed to design the shape of the history of life, she was charged with it.>
“Or perhaps she found it and loved it and decided she wanted to help. On her own, unassigned, unrequested.”
<It’s a wonder she doesn’t get bored. I speak from experience when I say that human history is astonishingly repetitive. Every individual is unique, but not all the differences are both significant and interesting.>
“Now you’re a critic.”
<Someone has to be an audience for the play you people are always improvising. All of you trying for the center stage. All of you trying to get the audience to notice you, to declare you the star, so that when you die, the curtain will come down and the fehow will end. But it never does. No one was ever the star after all.>
“That’s the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings.”
<Which should imply that it has no meaning. >
“I mean my own life. I mean what I do. And the Keeper gives a meaning to the larger scene. That’s enough meaning for me. I don’t need to have somebody make an epic out of my life. I lived. Strange things happened. Now and then I made a little difference in other people’s lives. You know what? It may be that the thing I’m proudest of in all my life is restoring the brain of that damaged little boy in Bodika.”
<Not the way you altered the angels and diggers to allow them to live apart from each other?>
“The Keeper assigned that to me; if I hadn’t done it, she would have found another way, given the task to someone else.”
<How do you know the Keeper didn’t assign you to heal that little earth boy?>
“Maybe she did. But if I hadn’t been there, the Keeper wouldn’t have thought his life was so important that she would have sent someone else. So it was less significant-but because of that, I know that it happened only because I wanted it to happen. That makes it mine. My gift. Oh, I know it was the Keeper who brought me to Earth at all, and the Keeper who chose me to succeed Nafai as the starmaster so I was even alive then, all of that, I know it. But I’m the one who decided to be there at that time and to risk exposing who I really am to save that boy. So maybe that’s what I’ll think of with pride when I die. Or maybe it’ll be the strange marriage I had with Zdorab. Or Rasaro’s House-that school might last, and that would be something fine.”
<Don’t write your eulogy yet. You aren’t dead.>
“But I am tired. I think I can sleep now. Too cold to sleep out here. I really wish the seats reclined farther back in the launch.”
<Too bad the designers have been dead for forty million years.>
“And they deserve to be, too, the thoughtless weasels.” She laughed. “I am tired.”
She finished her count anyway, so that her report would be complete. Then she had the launch turn off its exterior lights and she returned to it by starlight and closed the door and went to sleep.
Went to sleep and dreamed. Many dreams, the normal dreams, the random firings of synapses in the brain, being given fragmentary meaning by the storymaking functions of the mind; dreams that the mind doesn’t even bother to remember upon waking.
And then, suddenly, a different dream. The Oversoul sensed it, the fact that the brain had now assumed a different pattern from the normal dreamsleep. Shedemei herself felt the difference and, even in her sleep, paid attention.
She saw the Earth as it looked from the Basilica, the curve of the planet plainly visible at the horizons. Then, suddenly, she was seeing the seething magma that roiled underneath the crust of the planet. At first it looked chaotic, but then with piercing clarity she understood that there was magnificent order to the flow of the currents. Each eddy, each whorl, each stream had meaning. Much of it was grossly slow, but here and there, on a small scale, the movements were quick indeed.
Then she knew without seeing, knew because she knew, that these currents gave shape to the magnetic field of the Earth, making both large and tiny variations that could be sensed by the animals, that could disturb them or soothe them. The warning before the earthquake. The sudden veering of a school offish. The harmonies between organisms; this was what the ravelers saw.
She saw how mind and memory lived in the currents of flowing stone, in the magnetic flow; saw how vast amounts of information were deposited in crystals on the underside of the crust, changed by fluxes in temperature and magnetism. For a moment she thought: This is the Keeper.
Almost at once the answer came: You have not seen the Keeper of Earth. But you have seen my home, my library, and some of my tools. I can’t show you more than this because your mind has no way to receive what I really am. Is this enough?
Yes, said Shedemei silently.
At once the dream changed. She saw all at once more than forty worlds that had been colonized from Earth, and all of them were being watched by some kind of Oversoul, and all the Oversouls were being watched by the Keeper. In particular she saw Harmony, the millions of people as if for just this moment her mind had the capacity to know them all at once. She felt herself in contact with the other iteration of the Oversoul that still lived there; but no, that was illusion, there was no such connection. Yet she knew that it was time for the Oversoul of Harmony to allow the humans there to recover their lost technologies. That’s how the Oversoul would be rebuilt-by humans who had regained their hands.
It’s time, said the clear voice of the Keeper in the dream. Let them build new starships and come home.
What about the people here? asked Shedemei. Have you given up on them?
The time of clarity has come. The decision will be made, one way or the other. So I can send for the people of Harmony now, because by the time they get here, either the three species will be living in perfect peace, or their pride will have broken them and made them ripe for domination by those who come after.
Like the Rasulum, thought Shedemei.
They also had their moment of choice, the Keeper replied.
The dream changed again, and now she saw Akma and the sons of Motiak walking along a road. She knew at once exactly where the road was, and what time of day it would be when they reached that point.
In the dream she saw the launch drop out of the sky, deliberately raising a cloud of smoke under it when it landed; she saw herself stride out, the cloak of the starmaster dazzlingly bright so that they couldn’t bear to look at her. She began to speak, and at that moment the earth shook under them, driven by the currents of magma, and the young men fell to the ground. Then the quaking of the earth ended, and she spoke again, and at last she understood what it was the Keeper needed her to do.
Will you? asked the Keeper.
Will it help? she asked. Will it save these people?
Yes, the Keeper answered. No matter what he chooses, Motiak will finish his days as king of a peaceful kingdom, because of your intervention here. But what happens in the far future-that is what Akma will decide. You may live to see it if you want.
How, if the Basilica must go back to Harmony?
I’m in no hurry here. Have the ship’s computer send a probe. You can stay, and the Oversoul can stay. Don’t you want to see some part of how it ends?
Yes, I do.
I know you do, said the Keeper. Until you made this visit to Earth, I wasn’t sure if you were truly part of me, because I didn’t know if you loved the people enough to share my work. You’re not the same person you were when I first called you here.
I know, said Shedemei in the dream. I used to live for nothing but my work.
Oh, you still do that, and so do I. It’s just that your work has changed, and now it’s the same as my work: to teach the people of Earth how to live, on and on, generation to generation; and how to make that life joyful and free. You made your choice, and so now, like Akmaro, I can give you what you want, because I know that you desire only the joy of these people, forever.
I’m not so pure-hearted as that!
Don’t be confused by your transient feelings. I know what you do; I know why you do it; I can name you more truly than you can name yourself.
For a moment, Shedemei could see herself reaching up and plucking a white fruit from a tree; she tasted it, and the flavor of it filled her body with light and she could fly, she could sing all songs at once and they were endlessly beautiful inside her. She knew what the fruit was- it was the love of the Keeper for the people of Earth. The white fruit was a taste of the Keeper’s joy. Yet also in the flavor of it was something else, the tang, the sharp pain of the millions, the billions of people who could not understand what the Keeper wanted for them, or who, understanding, hated it and rejected her interference in their lives. Let us be ourselves, they demanded. Let us accomplish our accomplishments. We want none of your gifts, we don’t want to be part of your plan. And so they were swept away in the currents of time, belonging to no part of history because they could not be part of something larger than themselves. Yet they had their free choice; they were not punished except by the natural consequence of their own pride. Thus even in rejecting the Keeper’s plan they became a part of it; in refusing to taste the fruit of the tree, they became part of its exquisite flavor. There was honor even in that. Their hubris mattered, even though in the long flow of burning history it changed nothing. It mattered because the Keeper loved them and remembered them and knew their names and their stories and mourned for them: O my daughter, O my son, you are also part of me, the Keeper cried out to them. You are part of my endless yearning, and I will never forget you-
And the emotions became too much for Shedemei. She had dwelt in the Keeper’s mind for as long as she could bear. She awoke sobbing violently, overwhelmed, overcome. Awoke and uttered a long mournful cry of unspeakable grief-grief for the lost ones, grief for having had to leave the mind of the Keeper, grief because the taste of the white fruit was gone from her lips and it had only been a dream after all. A true dream, but a dream that ends, it ended, and here I am more alone than I ever was before because for the first time in my life I had the experience of being not alone and I never knew, I never knew how beautiful it was to be truly, wholly known and loved. Her cry trailed off; her body was spent by the dream; she slept again, and dreamed no more until morning. By then enough time had passed that she could bear to be awake, though the dream was still powerfully present in her mind.
“Did you watch?” she whispered.
<Nafai never had a true dream as strong as that.>
“He had different work to do,” she said. “Can you get me to the place where I’m supposed to be?”
<With plenty of time to spare.>
She ate as the launch moved, chewing mechanically; the food had no flavor, compared to what she remembered from her dream.
“Your waiting is over at last,” she said between bites. “I assume you saw that.”
<I’m already preparing my message to my original iteration. I’m including my recording of your dream. Unfortunately, much of it seems to have been quite subjective and I don’t think I understood it all. That’s how it always is with these true dreams. I always seem to miss something.>
“So did I. But I got enough, I think, to last me for a while.”
<If the Keeper can speak so clearly, why do you think she’s usually so vague ?>
“I understood why, during the dream,” said Shedemei. “The experience is so overwhelming that if she gave it to most people, they’d be so consumed by it that they wouldn’t own their souls anymore. Their will would be swallowed up in hers. It would kill them, in effect.”
<Why are you immune, then?>
“I’m not. But since I had already chosen to follow the Keeper’s plan, this dream didn’t erase my will, it confirmed who I already was and what I already wanted. I didn’t lose my freedom, and instead of killing me it made me more alive.”
<In other words, it’s another organic thing.>
“Yes, that’s right. It’s an organic thing.” She thought for a moment longer, and added, “She said she couldn’t let me see her face, but now I understand that I don’t need to or want to, because I’ve done something better.”
<Which is?>
“I’ve worn her face. I’ve seen through her eyes.”
<Seems only fair. She’s worn your face a thousand times before now, and used your hands and speech to do her work.>
Shedemei held up her hands and looked at them, damp and crumbed from the meal she was just finishing. “Then I would have to say that the Keeper of Earth looks just like me, don’t you think?” She laughed for a moment; the sound was no doubt as raucous as any laugh, but inside herself it awakened the memory of music, and for a moment she remembered the taste of the fruit, and she was content.
When Edhadeya came to see them after their big public meeting in Jatva, it was Mon who went aside with her to hear what she had to say. “If you’ve come to persuade me to break ranks with my brothers,” he began, but she gave him no chance to finish.
“I know you’re already committed to denying everything that was ever noble and good about you, Mon, so I wouldn’t waste my time. Father sent me with a message.”
Mon felt the tiniest thrill of fear and dread. He often found it hard to believe that Father was letting them get away with all the things they were doing. Oh, he had stopped them from organizing the boycott of digger trade and labor, but of course they got around that by pretending to speak against the boycott-everyone understood the real message. Was Father now taking action against them? And if so, why was there something inside Mon that welcomed it? Was it that victory had come to them too easily, and he wanted some kind of contest?
“Are you listening?” asked Edhadeya.
“Yes,” said Mon.
“Father is worried that some of his soldiers might decide that their duty to the king requires them to remove the source of his recent unhappiness. Some chance remarks of his, overheard by others out of context, have given some soldiers the impression that he would welcome this.”
“Sounds to me as though he gave an order and changed his mind a little too late.” Mon laughed nastily.
“You know that isn’t true.”
He did, of course. His truthsense rebelled against the idea-but he was getting better and better at suppressing it.
“What does he think we’re going to do?” asked Mon. “Go into hiding? Stop speaking publicly? He can forget it. Killing us would only make martyrs of us and make our victory complete. Besides, he didn’t raise cowards.”
“Fools, yes, liars, yes, but not cowards.” Edhadeya smiled grimly. “He knows you won’t back down. All he suggested was that you keep your travel plans secret. Don’t tell people where you’re going next. Don’t tell them when you’re going to leave.”
Mon thought about it for a moment. “All right. I’ll tell the others.”
“Then I’ve done my duty.” She turned to leave.
“Wait,” said Mon. “Is that all? No other messages? Nothing personal from you?”
“Nothing but my loathing, which I freely give to all five of you, but with a special extra dose for you, Mon, since I know that you know that Akma is wrong with every word he says. Akma may be doing most of the talking, but you are the most dishonest one, because you know the truth.”
Mon started to explain again about how his childish truthsense was pure illusion designed to win attention for the second son of the king, but before he was well launched into it, she slapped his face.
“Not to me,” she said. “You can tell that to anyone else and they can believe it if they want, but never say it to me. The insult is unbearable.”
This time when she walked away, melting into the dispersing crowd, he didn’t call her back. The stinging of his cheek had brought tears to his eyes, but he wasn’t sure if it was just the pain that had done it. He thought back to those wonderful days when he was young and Edhadeya was his dearest friend. He remembered how she trusted him to take her true dream to Father, and because of Arnnha’s absolute trust in his truthsense, he had won a hearing and an expedition was launched and the Zenifi were rescued. He had believed in those days that this would be his place in the kingdom, to be Aronha’s most trusted counselor because Aronha would know that Mon could not lie. And the time when Bego used him to help translate the Rasulum leaves. . . .
Funny, now that he thought of it with the sting of Edhadeya’s slap still in his face, how Bego didn’t believe in the Keeper, but he still used Mon to help him with the translation. Wasn’t it Bego, really, who taught them all to disbelieve in the Keeper? But Bego believed. Or at least believed in Mon’s gift.
No, no, Akma already explained that. Bego didn’t think of it as a gift from the Keeper, he thought of it as an innate talent in Mon himself. That’s right, the ability to sense when people really believed what they were saying. It had nothing to do with absolute truth, and everything to do with absolute belief.
But if that’s the case, thought Mon, why don’t I ever get a sense that a single thing that Akma says is true? I haven’t really got the logic of that straight. If my truthsense came from the Keeper, then the Keeper might be trying to turn me against Akma by refusing to confirm anything he says. But then, that would mean there really was a Keeper, so that can’t be the reason. At the same time, if Akma is right and my truthsense is merely my own ability to tell when people are certain that they’re telling the truth, what does that say about my complete lack of confirmation concerning Akma’s words? It means that no matter how convincing he sounds-and don’t I get caught up in his speeches the way the crowd does, swept along and utterly persuaded?-my truthsense still says that he’s lying. He doesn’t believe a word he’s saying. Or if he believes it, it’s like an opinion, not like a certainty. At the core of him, in his heart, in the deepest places in his mind, he isn’t saying these things because he is sure of them.
So what does Akma believe? And why am I denying my truthsense in favor of Akma’s uncertainties?
No, no, I already went through this with Akma, and he explained that a truly educated man never believes anything with certainty because he knows that further learning might challenge any or all of his beliefs; therefore I will only get a strong response from my truthsense about people who are ignorant or fanatical.
Ignorant or fanatical . . . like Edhadeya? Bego?
“Well, what did she want?” asked Aronha.
Mon’s reverie had carried him back to where his brothers and Akma were speaking with the leaders of the local Assembly of the Ancient Ways. This was the part of founding a religion that bothered Mon the most. While they got plenty of donations from rich and educated people, the ones who actually were willing to take the time to govern the assembly weren’t people that Mon much cared for. A lot of them were former priests who had lost their jobs back at the time of the reforms-an arrogant bunch that thought themselves a sort of wronged aristocracy, full of grievance and conceit. Others, though, were the kind of digger-hating bigots that, in Mon’s opinion, were almost certainly the very men who either carried out or ordered the cruel mistreatment of the Kept during the persecutions. It made his skin crawl to have to associate with them. Aronha had privately confessed to Mon that he hated dealing with these people, too. “Whatever else we might say about Akmaro,” Aronha commented then, “he certainly attracts a better grade of priest.” They could never say this in front of Akma, however, since he still became very upset at any reminder of Luet’s marriage to the priest Didul, and to praise the priests of the Kept as a class would surely cause an eruption of Akma’s temper.
“She had a warning from Father,” said Mon.
“Oh, is he starting to threaten us now?” asked Akma. He had his arm across the shoulder of a young thug who might well have been one of those who broke the bones or tore the wings of children.
“Let’s talk about it when we’re alone,” said Mon.
“Why, do we have something to hide from our priests?” asked Akma.
“Yes,” said Mon coldly.
Akma laughed. “He’s joking, of course.” But a few minutes later, Akma had managed to get rid of the young man and he and the Motiaki withdrew to a place near the riverbank. “Don’t ever do that to me again, please,” said Akma. “The day will come when we can use the machinery of state to support our assembly, but for right now we need the help of these people and it doesn’t help when you make them feel excluded.”
“Sorry,” said Mon. “But I didn’t trust him.”
Akma smiled. “Of course you didn’t. He’s a contemptible sneak.
But he’s a vain contemptible sneak and I had to work pretty hard to keep him from going away angry.”
Mon patted Akma’s arm. “As long as you bathe after touching him, I’m sure everything will be fine.” Then he told them what Edhadeya had said.
“He’s obviously trying to hamper us,” said Ominer angrily. “Why should we believe anything he says?”
“Because he’s the king,” said Aronha, “and he wouldn’t lie about something like this.”
“Why not?” demanded Ominer.
“Because it shames him to admit he may not be able to control his soldiers,” said Aronha. “I wish we didn’t have to hurt Father so badly. If only he’d understand that we’re doing this for the sake of the kingdom.”
“We can’t change our whole schedule around,” said Ominer. “People are expecting us.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Mon. “We’ll draw a crowd whenever and wherever we show up. It might add a bit of mystery, for that matter, no one ever knowing where we’ll be speaking next. Add to the excitement.”
“It makes us look like cowards,” said Ominer.
Khimin piped up. “Not if we announce that we have to do this because we’ve got good information that some of the king’s men are out to kill us!”
“No!” Aronha said firmly. “We will never do that. People would take that as an accusation against the king, and it would be dishonorable for us to accuse him when he was the very one who sent us warning to try to protect us.”
Akma clapped Khimin on the back. “There you go, Khimin. When Aronha decides that something is dishonorable, we can’t do it even if it would have been a pretty effective ploy.”
“Don’t make fun of my sense of honor, Akma,” said Aronha.
“I wasn’t,” said Akma. “I admire you for it.”
Mon suddenly had an irresistible impulse to make trouble. “That’s the way that Aronha most resembles Father. The only reason we’ve had any success at all is that Father is so honorable.”
“Then that makes honor a weakness, doesn’t it?” asked Ominer.
Aronha answered him with withering contempt. “In the short run, dishonor gives an advantage; in the long run, a dishonorable king loses the love of his people and ends up the way Nuab did. Dead.”
“They tortured him to death with fire, didn’t they?” asked Khimin.
“Try not to sound so delighted at the thought of it,” said Akma. “It makes other people uneasy.”
But what Mon noticed, what disturbed him in all this, was the fact that Akma seemed to draw closer to Ominer the more he said things that should have made a decent person recoil from him. Ominer said that honor was a weakness; now, though he said not a word about it, Akma had his arm around Ominer’s shoulders and Ominer was all smiles. This is wrong. There’s something seriously wrong. Akma wasn’t like this, not even as recently as last year, before all this began. I remember when he would have been adamant about honor and decency as Aronha was. What is it, are the vile people we associate with now beginning to influence him? Or is it simply a natural consequence of having the adulation of so many thousands of people?
Whatever it was that was happening to Akma, Mon hated it. This couldn’t be the real Akma emerging; it was more as if Akma were beginning to take on this cynical, amoral posture because he thought it was what he had to become in order to have his victory. Or perhaps it was a true part of Akma that never came out until he began to think that he was so important and powerful that he didn’t have to be decent to other people anymore. How much of his bantering with Aronha is really joking these days, Mon wondered, and how much of it is real contempt for Aronha’s kingly bearing?
I mustn’t think these things, Mon reminded himself. It’s the Keeper trying to win me away from my brothers.
No, it’s not the Keeper because there is no Keeper. . . .
Mon excused himself from them because he needed to sleep. The others all took it as a signal. The conversation turned to empty playful chatter as they walked back to the house where they were staying. The place was far too small for five grown men to stay-half the family that lived there had been farmed out to neighbors’ houses-but Akma insisted that they couldn’t always stay in rich men’s houses or the Kept would be able to accuse them of pride. Seeing what the Kept already accused them of, Mon thought the addition of one nib re minor charge would be worth it for a good night’s sleep, but as usual Aronha saw things Akma’s way and so he was crammed into a space where he couldn’t stretch out or roll over without waking somebody up. The poor just don’t build big enough houses, he told himself as a nasty little joke. He could never say it out loud, of course, because Akma would tell him that “people won’t understand it’s just humor.”
The next morning, Aronha decided they’d take Father’s advice and leave at once instead of staying another day, and instead of going to Fetek, they’d head for Papadur. Oh, excellent, thought Mon, twice the walk, and uphill the whole way instead of down. I’ll have to write Father a note thanking him for his suggestion.
On the way, Akma critiqued Khimin’s speech of the night before. Mon had to admire the deft way that he did it, always praising right along with his criticisms so that Khimin never felt diminished. It helped, of course, that Khimin held Akma in absolute awe.
“What you said about how our teachers are well-educated and the Kept teachers are all just as ignorant as their students-that was a deft point, and I’m glad you made it.”
Khimin smiled. “Thanks.”
“There’s just a word-choice thing you’ll want to think of for next time. I know, it’s so frustrating, you have to think of so many things at once, the same thing happens to me, you get one thing right and something else slips. But that’s why not everybody can do this.”
It was so easy for Mon to see Akma’s flattery, how he set Khimin up and won him over. Yet Khimin was oblivious, the poor fool.
Then Mon had the uneasy thought that perhaps Akma adapted his technique to whatever fool he happened to be talking to, and maybe to someone else Mon looked just as oblivious, just as gullible.
“I was thinking, as you talked last night, How can I steal this idea from Khimin and use it in my speech?”
Khimin laughed. So did Ominer, who was listening in-and who definitely could use some help with his speeches, too, since, while he never stammered or fumbled as Khimin did, he was also never for a moment entertaining.
“Here’s how I would have said it,” Akma offered. “ ‘My father, in his compassion, has established a religion in which the ignorant teach the ignorant, and the poor minister to the poor. This is a noble enterprise; let no man interfere with it. But for humans and angels, for people of education and manners, there is no reason to pretend we need the primitive doctrines and coarse company of Akmaro’s so-called Kept.’ “
“What do you mean, ‘Let no man interfere with it’?” asked Khimin. “I thought that’s what we were doing!”
“Of course that’s what we’re doing, and the audience knows it. But you see what the effect of that is? It makes it seem like we’re not anybody’s enemy. We’re not opposing them, we’re meeting the needs of the better sort of people while the Kept meet the needs of the poor and ignorant. Now, how many people in our audiences think of themselves as poor and ignorant?”
“Most of them!” Ominer said snidely.
“Most of them are poor, compared to someone who grew up in the king’s house,” said Akma, with only a hint of sarcasm. “But how do they think of themselves? Everybody thinks he’s one of the more educated, refined people-or if he isn’t, he’s certainly going to do everything he can to make sure other people think he is. So now- which assembly is he going to go to? The one that will make him seem to be one of the educated and refined. You see? Nobody can accuse us of name-calling or abusing the Kept-and yet, the more we praise them, the more we make people want to stay as far away from them as possible.”
Khimin laughed with delight. “It’s like-you take what you want to say, and then you find a way to say the opposite, but so that it will have the effect you want.”
“Not quite the opposite,” said Akma. “But you’re getting it, you’re getting it!”
Mon’s truthsense suddenly erupted inside him, rejecting what he had just heard with such violence that he felt like he might throw up. He stopped walking and, without meaning to, sank to his knees.
“Mon?” asked Aronha.
At that moment there was a loud noise, and all of them looked up to see a huge object, grey as granite, whirling as it plummeted toward them. Smoke poured out of it as if it were on fire, and the roaring sound was deafening. Mon covered his ears with his hands and saw that his brothers were doing the same. At the last moment the huge grey stone veered off and fell toward the ground not a dozen paces from them, the smoke and dust blinding them. ‘At that moment the earth shook, throwing them from their feet like punted dolls. Yet there was no crashing sound, or if there was, it was swallowed up in the roar of the fallen stone and the rumbling of the earth.
As the smoke and dust cleared, they saw someone standing in front of the stone, but what he looked like they couldn’t guess, for he shone so brightly from every part of his body that their eyes could not see anything but the human shape of him. The reason there had been no crashing sound now became clear, for the great grey object hovered in the air perhaps half a meter from the ground. It was impossible. It was irrational.
The man of light spoke, but they couldn’t hear him; his voice was lost in the other noise.
The stone suddenly fell silent. The rumbling of the earthquake faded. Mon raised himself onto his arms and looked at the man of light.
“Akma,” said the man. “Stand up.”
The voice was hardly human; it was like five voices at once, five different pitches that set up painful vibrations in Mon’s head. He was glad that it was Akma’s name that was called, not his; and though he was immediately ashamed of his cowardice, he was still glad.
Akma struggled to his feet.
“Akma, why are you persecuting the people of the Keeper? For the Keeper of Earth has said, These are my people, these are the Kept. I will establish them in this land, and nothing but their own evil choices will be allowed to overthrow them!”
Mon was overwhelmed with shame. All these months of denying his truthsense, and it had been right all along. Akma’s arguments proving that there was no Keeper now seemed so thin and meaningless- how could Mon have believed him for an instant, when he had the truthsense within him telling him otherwise all along? What have I done? What have I done?
“The Keeper has heard the pleas of the Kept, and also the plea of your father, the true servant of the Keeper. He has begged the Keeper for years to bring you to understand the truth, but the Keeper knew that you already understood the truth. Now you father begs the Keeper to stop you from harming the innocent children of earth.”
The earth rumbled under them again; Akma was knocked to his knees, and Mon fell, his face striking the damp soil of the road.
“Can you claim any more that the Keeper has no power? Are you deaf to my voice? Blind to the light that shines from my body? Can’t you feel the earth shake beneath you? Is there no Keeper?”
Mon cried out in fear, “Yes! There is! I knew it all along! Forgive me for my lies!” He could hear his brothers also crying out, pleading for mercy; only Akma remained silent.
“Akma, remember your captivity in the land of Chelem. Remember how the Keeper delivered you from bondage. Now you are the oppressor of the Kept, and the Keeper will deliver them from you. Go your way, Akma, and seek no more to destroy the Assembly of the Kept. Their pleas will be answered, whether you choose to destroy yourself or not.”
With those words, the light coming from the messenger’s body seemed to increase in brightness and intensity-something Mon would have thought impossible, since he was already nearly blinded when he looked at him. Yet he was able to see that the man of light extended his arm and a bolt of lightning crackled in the air between his finger and Akma’s head. Akma seemed to dance in the air for a moment like an ash suspended over a fire; then he fell in a heap. The huge stone roared again, and again dust and smoke arose to blind them all. When it cleared, the stone was gone, the messenger also, and the earth was still.
Khimin was weeping. “Father!” he cried out. “Mother! I don’t want to die!”
Mon might have scoffed, but the same feelings were coursing through his own heart.
“Akma,” said Aronha.
Of course, thought Mon. It’s my older brother who has the decency to remember our friend instead of thinking of himself. Mon was filled with new shame. He got up and staggered to where Akma lay unconscious.
“There is a Keeper,” Ominer was intoning. “I know there’s a Keeper, I know it now, I know it, I know it.”
“Shut up, Ominer,” said Mon. “Help us get Akma into the sunlight, onto the grass.”
They carried him then, his body limp.
“He’s dead,” said Khimin.
“If the man of light meant to kill him,” said Mon, “why would he tell him to stop interfering with the Kept? You don’t have to give instructions to dead men.”
“If he’s alive,” said Aronha, “then why isn’t he breathing? Why can’t I find a pulse or hear a heartbeat?”
“I tell you he is alive,” said Mon.
“How can you know that?” demanded Ominer. “You haven’t even checked him.”
“Because my truthsense affirms it. Yes, he lives.”
“Suddenly your truthsense is back again?” asked Aronha ironically.
“It never left. I denied it, I ignored it, I fought against it, but it never left.” It hurt to say these words. And yet it was also a relief.
“This whole time your truthsense has been telling you that the things we taught were lies?” asked Aronha.
Aronha’s tone was a slap in the face. “Akma told me that my truth-sense was a lie! Self-deception! I was ashamed to talk about it.” He could see contempt on Aronha’s face. “Are you going to blame this on me, Aronha? Is that the kind of man you are? It’s all Mon’s fault that you were doing this? The Keeper sends us a being of light to tell us that we were lying, destroying something that mattered, and you’re going to point the finger at me?”
It was Aronha’s turn to look ashamed. “I made my own choice, I know it. I kept thinking, if Mon says it’s right, it must be right-only I knew it was wrong, and I was using my reliance on you as an excuse. The younger boys, now, they can hardly be held responsible. You and I and Akma put a lot of pressure on them and-”
“I made my own choices too!” Khimin shouted. “The messenger didn’t come to stop you. He came to stop us all.” Mon realized that Khimin was proud that he had been visited by a messenger from the Keeper. That had to be better than a true dream. Examining his own heart, Mon realized that he had such feelings, too.
“The messenger may have come to stop us all,” Ominer said, “but he only spoke to Akma. Because the truth is that we were all following Akma from the beginning.”
“Oh, aren’t you the brave one, blaming it on him,” said Khimin. “It’s all the fault of the one who’s lying there like a dead man.”
“I’m not saying that to excuse us,” said Ominer. “As far as I’m concerned, that should make us even more ashamed. We’re the sons of the king! And we let someone talk us into defying and shaming our father and everything he had taught us.”
“It was my fault,” said Aronha. He managed to hold his voice steady, but he dared not look them in the eye. “I may have half-believed some of Akma’s ideas, but when it came to starting our own religion, restoring the old order of the state-I knew it was wrong. I knew the people we were working with were contemptible opportunists. I knew that the diggers we were driving out of Darakemba were better people than our supposed friends. And I’m the one who was raised to be king. I don’t deserve it. I forbid you to call me Ha-Aron anymore. I’m just Aron.”
Mon couldn’t contain his frustration any longer. “Don’t you see what you’re doing, even now? We followed Akma because he flattered us and fed our pride. We loved it while we were doing it, too. We loved being important and powerful. We loved making Father back down before us, we loved changing the world, we loved thinking we were smarter than everybody else and having people admire us and treat us like we were important. It was pride that kept us going. And now what are we doing? Khimin’s wetting himself because we were so important that the Keeper sent a man of light to stop us-don’t argue with me, Khimin, I was feeling the same thing myself. And Aronha here wants to take all the blame himself, because he’s the one who should have known better and don’t you see? It’s still pride! It’s still the same thing that got us into trouble in the first place!”
“I’m not proud,” said Aronha, and now his voice was trembling. “I can’t stand the thought of facing anybody.”
“But we will,” said Mon. “Because we have to let them see what a miserable bunch we are.”
“Isn’t that a kind of pride, too?” asked Ominer nastily.
“Maybe it is, Ominer! But you want to know the one thing I’m really proud of? The one thing that makes me glad that you’re my brothers, that I’m one of you?”
“What?” said Aronha.
“That not one of you suggested that we go on fighting the Keeper,” said Mon. “That it didn’t cross your minds that maybe we could remain a part of the Assembly of tne Ancient Ways.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re good, or anything,” said Ominer. “It might just mean we’re terrified.”
“We could only rebel when we could fool ourselves into thinking that we believed there was no Keeper. Now we know better. We’ve seen things that we never imagined, things that happened only in the time of the Heroes. But remember those stories? Elemak and Meb-bekew saw things every bit as strong as this! And yet they kept rebelling, right to the end of their lives. Not us! Our rebellion is over.”
Aronha nodded. “I still meant what I said about being Aron now.”
Mon shot back at once, “You’ll stay Aronha until Father tells you otherwise! He didn’t take away the honorific the whole time you were shaming him.”
Aronha nodded again.
“This will kill Mother,” Khimin said, weeping.
Mon put his arm around his youngest brother and held him. “I don’t know if we can decently ask Father to take us back. But we have to go to him, if only so he can have the victory of turning us away.”
“Father will take us back,” said Aronha. “That’s the kind of man he is. The question is whether we can undo any of the harm we’ve caused.”
“No,” said Ominer. “The question is, will Akma live or not? We have to get him back to Darakemba. Do we keep him here and hope that he’ll revive? Or search for help to carry him back?”
“There are four of us,” said Khimin. “We can carry him.”
“I’ve heard that Shedemei the schoolmaster is a healer,” said Mon.
“Now we need help from a woman we referred to as a criminal mixer of species,” said Aronha bitterly. “In our time of need, it doesn’t cross our minds to turn to our own Assembly of the Ancient Ways. We know, we always knew, that the only help we can count on will be found among the Kept.”
Shame tasted foul in their mouths as they made a litter for Akma out of their coats and staves, then lifted the staves to their shoulders to carry him. As they neared more settled country, people ran out to see them, these four men carrying what seemed to be a corpse on their shoulders, as if to take him to be buried.
“Go,” Aronha said to them-said to everyone who came out to meet them. “Go and tell everyone that the Keeper sent a messenger to strike down the Motiaki and stop them from telling their lies. We are the sons of Motiak, and we return in shame to our father. Go and tell everyone that Akma, the son of Akmaro, has been struck down by the messenger of the Keeper, and whether he will live or die no one can say!”
Over and over he said these things, and every time that the words were said to one of the Kept, the response was the same: not rejoicing, not gloating, not condemnation, but tears and embraces and then, inevitably, the most unbearable thing of all: “Can we help you? Can we carry Akma for a little way? Oh, his father and mother will weep to see him like this! We will pray to the Keeper to let them see their son alive again! Let us help you!” They brought water to them, brought them food, and not once did any of the Kept reprove them. Others were not so kind. Men and women who had no doubt cheered for Akma and the sons of Motiak during their speeches now shouted bitter denunciations, calling them liars, frauds, heretics. “Arondi! Mondi! Ominerdi! Khimindi!” How bitter it was that while they really were rebelling against their father, no one dared to put the term for traitor in their names; but now that they had ended their rebellion and confessed their wrongdoing, the epithet was heaped upon them.
“It’s what we deserve,” Mon said, when Ominer began to point out the hypocrisy of their accusers.
And then, gallingly, they had to watch and listen as the Kept took the shouters aside and rebuked them. “Don’t you see that they’re filled with grief? Can’t you see that Akma is nearly dead? They’re doing you no harm now, let them pass, give them peace.”
Thus the Kept became their protectors on their journey. And many of them were diggers. Mon was not content to let Aronha’s speeches be all they heard. To the diggers, Mon added his own message. “Please, go and find the earth people who are on the road, leaving Darakemba. Tell them that we beg them to come home. Tell them that they are better citizens of Darakemba than the sons of Motiak. Don’t let them leave.”
They slept beside Akma that night on the road, and late the next day they reached Darakemba. Word had gone ahead of them, and when they got to Akma’s house, a huge crowd parted to let them through, and Akmaro and Chebeya stood in the doorway to receive the almost-living body of their son. Inside the house the king their father waited, and their sister Edhadeya, and they wept at how lovingly their father and sister embraced them, and wept again as Akmaro and Chebeya knelt over the ruins of their son.
On the road, the being of light appeared. The earth trembled. Akma should have been surprised but he was not. It was the strangest thing, that it did not feel strange to him. As the messenger spoke, what kept running through Akma’s mind was the thought, What took you so long?
As soon as he noticed his own lack of surprise, he wondered at it. He couldn’t have been expecting anything like this. He didn’t know that any being like this existed. Certainly in his scholarship he had never come up with any such thing. Besides, experience proved nothing. This could be nothing more than a hallucination shared by a group of five men who were in desperate need of some affirmation of their importance to the universe. Instead of proving that there really was a Keeper of Earth, this experience might prove nothing more than the inescapable unconscious power of childhood belief, even over men who thought they had outgrown it.
But as the messenger kept speaking (and how can I hear every word and still have time to think all these thoughts? What extraordinary clarity of mind. I’d like to tell Bego about this phenomenon. What did the king end up doing to Bego, anyway? Look at this-I go off on a tangent, wondering about Bego, and yet I haven’t missed a word of the message) Akma knew that this was not a shared hallucination, or that if it was, it was a hallucination induced by the Keeper of Earth, because this was definitely sent from outside himself. Why did he know that? It was as Edhadeya said, you simply know the difference when it has happened to you. Only it isn’t the being of light that’s doing it. No, that’s just a show, just a spectacle. It isn’t having my eyes dazzled or the earth shaking under my feet or great roaring noises or smoke or a strange-sounding voice that makes me sure. I simply . . . know.
And then he thought: I always knew.
He remembered back to the time when he was in the greatest terror of his life-when the sons of Pabulog first threw him down and began to torture him and humiliate him. He couldn’t have put it into words at the time, but underneath the fear for his life, there was shame at his helplessness; and underneath that there was steely courage that made him try not to beg for mercy, that sustained him through it all and allowed him to walk, naked and smeared with mud and filth and ruined food, back to his people. He knew at the time what that strength was-it was the absolute certainty of the love of his parents (and the memory of it stabbed him; I had their love, I still have their love, it was as firm as I believed even as a little boy, my faith was not misplaced, and look what I’ve done to them), a sense of the unbreakable cords that bound them together, almost as if he had the raveling skill of his mother without ever having noticed it consciously.
And yet underneath that there was something else. A sense that someone was watching everything that happened, watching and saying, What these boys are doing to you is wrong. The love your parents have for you is right. Your weeping, your shame, they are not flaws in you, you can’t help it. Your effort at courage is worthy. It is right for you to go back to your people. A constant judge, assessing the moral value of what he was doing. How could he now remember something that he hadn’t noticed at the time? And yet he knew without doubt that this watcher had been there at the time, and that he had loved this voice inside him, because when he did well it said so.
The messenger was saying, “The Keeper has heard the pleas of the Kept, and also the plea of your father, the true servant of the Keeper.” How long had the speech gone on? Not long at all; it was barely begun, really, he could tell. It was as if he knew every word the messenger would say and how long was allotted to each part of the message, so that his mind could divide its attention between little slices required to hear and understand the words, and great long passages of time between those slices in which he could search out this mystery, this observer that he had had within him all these years and never noticed.
He saw himself sitting on a hillside watching Father teach the Pa-bulogi. He felt the rage inside his boyish heart, heard himself vowing revenge. But on whom? Now he could see what he had not seen then: What he was raging at was not the Pabulogi at all, and not even his father for teaching them. No, the betrayal that stung him to the heart was against all of them and none of them-it was asainst the Keeper of Earth for daring to save the people without using Akma as his instrument.
And what was that secret inner watcher saying then? Nothing. Nothing at all. It had withdrawn. It was silent within him while his heart was filled with rage at not having been chosen.
I drove it away. I was empty then.
But no, not completely empty, for now he could sense it like the softest possible sound, the tiniest possible mark, the dimmest possible star that could still be seen at all. The watcher was still there, and it was quietly saying, It was not your time, it was not your time, be patient, the plan is larger than you, I needed others this time, your time will come. . . .
So the watcher was there, but had no effect on him, because his own rage drowned it out.
And now, looking inside himself, he realized that the watcher was still inside him, still speaking, like a voice behind the voice of his mind, offering perpetual commentary on every conscious thought but always fleeing from consciousness itself whenever he tried to seize the elusive wisdom. Even now he could only remember the comment that had just passed, not hear the one that was happening right now.
Now you know me, the watcher had just said. You knew me all along, but now you know that you know me.
Yes, said Akma silently in reply. You are the Keeper of Earth, and you have been part of me all along. You have been like a spark kept alive inside me no matter how I tried to put that fire out, no matter how often I denied you, there you were.
“Their pleas will be answered,” the messenger was saying, “whether you choose to destroy yourself or not.” And with that the message ended. The bright arm reached out to point to him. The finger crackled and hissed and a terrible pain touched every nerve in his body at once, he was entirely on fire, and in that moment of exquisite agony he could remember what the watcher, what the Keeper, had just . . . finished . . . saying. . . .
Now you know me, Akma. And now I’m gone.
Until that moment, Akma could not have imagined a more terrible pain than the suffering of his body as the messenger’s bolt of power touched all his nerves at once. But now that pain had ended and Akma’s body lay crumpled on the ground, and he understood that the pain of his body was nothing, it hadn’t even touched him, it was almost a pleasure compared to. ...
Compared to perfect solitude.
He was connected to nothing. He had no name because there was no one to know him, no place because he was connected to nothing, no power because there was nothing on which he could act. Yet he knew that once he had had these things and now they were torn from him; he was lost and would never be anything or anyone again; he was lost because no one knew him. Where is the one who watches? Where is the one who knows me? Where is the one who names me? I only just found him inside me, didn’t I? How could he have left me now?
There was no pain compared to this loss. He wouldn’t mind being restored to the agonized body he had been connected to only a few moments ago, because it was better to feel that pain, with the watcher judging him, than to feel this utter lack of pain, with no one watching him. When I felt the pain I was part of something; now I am part of nothing.
Didn’t I want this? To be only myself, responsible to no one, un-commanded, uncontrolled, unexpected, free? I didn’t know what it meant till now, to owe nothing to anyone, to have no duty because I had no power to act. I didn’t realize that utter independence was the most terrible punishment.
All my life the Keeper was inside me, judging me. But now the judging is over. I was not fit to be part of the Keeper’s world.
As he knew this, the reasons for his knowledge began to come into his mind. Images that he had refused to imagine before now came to him with perfect reality. An old digger woman being set upon and beaten by human men, tall and terrifying; and because Akma was inside her, all her memories flooded over him and he knew all the meanings of this moment. When his comprehension of the old woman’s suffering was complete, he suddenly passed into the mind of one of the thugs, and now he was no longer a thug, but a man, sickened by his own action yet still hot-blooded from violence, not daring to voice his own self-contempt because then he would be shamed in front of. ...
And in that moment Akma was inside the man whose admiration the thug had treasured, and saw his sense of pride and power at having set in motion the dark events that terrorized the Kept. He was hungry for power, and loved having it now, for now they would have to think of him when they wanted something done, they would respect him. . . .
And now the “they” in the plotter’s mind took on a shape, several shapes, rich old men who had once been influential in the kingdom but now were only important in Darakemba, for the kingdom had outgrown their petty reach. When Aronha is king, he’ll know that my influence is valuable. I can accomplish the things that are too dark for him to do with his own hands. I will not be despised, when the new king comes.
It took no further explanation for Akma to understand, for wasn’t he the one who captured the hearts and minds of the sons of Motiak, who united them against the policies of his own father and the king? The certainty in his mind was unassailable: This old woman would not have been beaten if I had not deliberately given others cause to think that they would gain some advantage through cruelty to the Kept. The chain of cause was long, but it was not false, and the worst thing was that Akma knew that he had known it all along, that in his hatred and envy of the Keeper’s power he had, in fact, longed for violent and cruel action and, instead of doing it with his own hands, had flung his power out into the world and caused other hands to do what he wanted done.
This is what the Keeper does, to accomplish his good works: casts his influence out into the world and gives people encouragement for their good impulses. The watcher that was present in me is present in every living soul; no one is alone; everyone is touched by those gentle words of affirmation when they do what the Keeper asks: Well done, my good child, my faithful friend, my willing servant. My own power was but a small part of what the Keeper has, a dim shadow of his influence-but instead of using it to make other people a bit more happy, a bit more free, I used it to kindle the avarice and envy in some hearts, who then fanned the flames of violence in others. I was inside their hearts when they struck, and my voice, even though they didn’t know it was my voice, was saying, Break, tear, hurt, destroy. She is not part of the world that we are building; drive her out. Those I used as my hands in this dirty business were also responsible for their own actions, but that does not absolve me. For those who do good, do it with the Keeper inside them, urging them on, praising them for their kindness-yet the Keeper does not make them do it. The good works are their own, and also they are the Keeper’s. So also were the cruelties of these dark-hearted men their own, and yet mine as well. Mine.
No sooner had he understood his own role in the beating of that one old woman than a new cruelty came into his mind, a child who cried out in hunger and had nothing to eat because his father had lost his income in the boycott; Akma saw through the child’s eyes, and then through the father’s, feeling his shame and despair at being unable to give his child relief, and then Akma was the mother in her impotent rage and her complaints against the Keeper and the Kept for having brought this down upon them, and again he followed the chain of suffering and evil-the merchants who once had bought the father’s goods, who now refused to buy, some out of fear of reprisal, some out of a personal bias against diggers that now had become respectable-no, patriotic!-because Akma had stood before a crowd and told them that they must all obey the law and not boycott anybody and the audience had laughed because they understood what Akma wanted. . . .
He wanted the child to weep and the father’s pride to break and the mother’s loyalty to the Kept to burn out in helpless fury. He wanted this because he had to punish the Keeper for not choosing him back when he was a child desperate to save his little sister from the lash.
Over and over, time after time, scene after scene, he saw all the pain he had caused. How long did it last? It could have been a single minute; it could have been a dozen lifetimes. How could he measure it, having no connection to reality, no sense of time? He saw it all, however long it took; and yet each moment of it was also eternal, because his understanding was so complete.
If he could have made a sound, it would have been an endless scream. It was unbearable to be alone; and worst of all was that in his solitude he had to be with himself, with all his loathsome, contemptible actions.
Long before the parade of crimes was over, Akma was finished. He no longer saw himself leading the parade of conquering soldiers sweeping through the Elemaki lands. He could not bear the thought of anyone ever seeing him again, for now he knew what he truly was and could never hide it from himself or anyone else again. The shame was too great. He no longer wished to be restored to all the things that he had lost. Now all he wanted was to be blotted out. Don’t make me face anyone again. Don’t make me face myself. Don’t make me face even you, Keeper. I can’t bear to exist.
Yet each time that he thought he had reached bottom and could suffer no more deeply than at this moment, another image would spring into his mind, another person whose suffering he had caused, and . . . yes ... he could feel more shame and pain than he had felt only a moment ago, when it had already seemed infinite and unbearable.
Shedemei made her way through the quiet house, where so many people quietly came and went, carrying out their tasks. She saw four young men and recognized them as the sons of Motiak; they didn’t recognize her, of course, since all they had seen on the road was un-watchable brightness in a human shape. And in a way she didn’t recognize them either, for the strutting, laughing, boastful boys that she had first met were gone; and also gone were the cowering, terrified children who trembled before her and winced at every word she spoke-spoke, of course, into a tiny microphone so that the translation equipment could amplify and distort her voice to make it as painful as possible.
What she saw now were four humans who actually had some hint of manhood about them. It was clear from their ravaged faces that they had shed many tears, but they were making no show of grief and remorse now. Instead, as people came to them-many of them diggers, though most were not-they received them graciously. “All we hope for now is that the Keeper will decide to spare Akma’s life, so that he can join us in going about trying to undo the terrible harm we caused. Yes, I know that you forgive me; you’re more generous than I deserve, but I accept your forgiveness and I vow to you that for the rest of my life I will do all that I can to earn what you’ve given me freely. But for now we wait and watch with Akma’s family. The Keeper struck him down because loyal and obedient Kept like you pleaded for relief. The Keeper hears you. We beg you to plead again with him for the life and forgiveness of our friend.” Their words were not always so clear, but the meaning was the same: We will try to undo the harm we caused; we beg you to plead with the Keeper to save our friend.
Shedemei had no particular wish to speak to them-she knew from the Oversoul that they were sincere, that their true natures had once again emerged, wiser now, with painful memories, but committed to lives of decency. What business did she have with them, then? It was Akma that she came to see.
Chebeya met her at the door to Akma’s bedchamber. The room was small and sparse-Akmaro and Chebeya really did live modestly. “Shedemei,” Chebeya said. “I’m so glad you got word and came. We were a day’s walk from the capital when word reached us that the Keeper had struck down our boy. We got home only a few hours before Motiak’s boys brought him here. We kept expecting to pass you on the road.”
“I went another way,” said Shedemei. “I had some botanical specimens to tend to, among other things.” She knelt beside Akma’s inert body. He certainly did look dead.
<He practically is. Like a hypothermia victim. Like someone in suspended animation during a voyage. All cell activity is low. The surprising thing is that bacterial action is also nil. Whatever the Keeper did to him, it’s not going to kill him.>
Brain activity? asked Shedemei silently.
<There’s something going on. But it’s purely limbic. None of the higher functions. Nothing I can actually read, beyond the most primitive feelings. >
Well, what is the feeling?
<It looks to me as if. . . well, as if he were screaming.>
I’m certainly not going to tell his parents that.
<The Keeper is doing something to him, but I have no idea what.>
No prognosis.
<He isn’t dead yet, and I have no way of predicting whether he’ll recover. I have no idea what’s sustaining him, and I won’t even know when or whether it’s withdrawn.>
It certainly makes me suspect that Sherem didn’t just die of a stroke in the midst of his argument with Oykib. ,
<Well, it was a stroke. It was just a convenient one. For all we know, the Keeper can make people keel over whenever she wants.>
Good thing that people don’t have powers like that. I have enough of a temper that my path would be strewn with corpses all the day long.
<Oh, don’t brag. I doubt you’d kill more than a couple a day.>
Sighing, Shedemei arose from the floor. “He’s completely stable. But it’s impossible to predict when or whether he will awaken.”
“But he’s not dying,” said Chebeya.
“You’re the raveler,” said Shedemei. “Is he still bound to this world?”
Chebeya put her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. “No. He’s connected to nothing. It’s as if he isn’t there, as if there isn’t anyone at all.” Then she did break down and cry, clinging to Akmaro.
“Well, his body isn’t dead and it isn’t deteriorating, either,” said Shedemei, knowing she sounded brusque but unable to think of any gentler way to say what needed saying. “It’s in the hands of the Keeper now.”
Chebeya nodded.
“Thank you, Shedemei,” said Akmaro. “We didn’t think that it was something that you could heal, but we had to be sure. You . . . rumor has it that you can sometimes do remarkable things.”
“Nothing as remarkable as what the Keeper can do.”
She embraced them both and went her way, back to her students. All the way home, she argued with the Oversoul about what this all meant, what they should have done differently, what might be going on with Akma, if anything.
I wonder, said Shedemei silently, whether the Keeper simply gave him the same dream she gave me-showed him her plan for the world, possessed him with her love, and he was so filled with hate that the experience consumed him.
<Maybe it happened that way, but I never saw him enter the kind of dream state that you were in.>
Don’t you sometimes wish that we were like ordinary people, without any unusual sources of information? We might be hearing about these events as nothing more than gossip about famous people.
<Such useless yearnings weren’t put into me. I have never wished to be anything other than what I am.>
Neither have I, said Shedemei silently, realizing for the first time that she truly was satisfied with her life and glad of the part that the Keeper had given her in the plan of life. With that thought she suddenly laughed out loud, earning her strange looks from a couple of children passing by. She made a face at them; they shrieked and ran away, but soon stopped running and resumed their laughter and chattering. That’s the plan, thought Shedemei. The Keeper only wants us to live with the simplicity and innocence of these little ones. Why is it so hard?
At last Akma’s entire life had been unwound before his eyes, every bit of harm that he had caused had been remembered. And the complete memory remained with him, every bit of it, none of it fading into merciful forgetfulness. He understood many things now that he had not understood before, but he could not bear to understand them. He knew that his guilt for the pain suffered by the Kept who were beaten, by the earth people who were driven from their homes, was slight indeed compared to the guilt of having induced so many men and women to do things that drove the Keeper almost completely out of their hearts. To cause a good man pain was a terrible thing; to persuade a man to do evil was far worse.
When the Keeper had first left him, he had longed for his return. Now, though, having seen the terrible consequences of his pride, he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone looking at him again, least of all the Keeper of Earth. The only relief he could hope for was to be extinguished, and that was what he longed for. He could not bear to return to the world that he had befouled so badly; he could not bear to stay as he was, utterly alone. If he could only find some road leading to obliteration, he would run to it, hurl himself into oblivion.
One of his memories was that terrible last meeting with his father and mother and the king-he had, of course, felt the anguish of these good people who, even as they faced the likelihood of his destroying all that they had tried to create, still worried more about him than about themselves. Yet as a part of that memory, there was something. His father had. . . . said something. . . .
And there it was, the words flowing back into his mind as if his father were only just now speaking them. “When you are at the point of despair, my son, when you see destruction as the only desirable choice, then remember this: The Keeper loves us. Loves us all. Values each life, each mind, each heart. All are precious to him. Even yours.”
Impossible. His life had been devoted to undoing the Keeper’s work. How could the Keeper possibly love him?
“His love for you is the one constant, Akma. He knows that you have believed in him all along. He knows that you have rebelled against him because you thought you knew how to shape this world more wisely than he. He knows that you have lied to everyone, over and over again, including yourself, especially yourself-and I tell you again that even knowing all of this, if you will only turn to him, he will bring you back.”
Could it be the truth? That even now, the Keeper might bring him back? Free him of this terrible exile? Accept him once again, and dwell within him, and whisper to him constantly?
But even if it is true, he thought, do I want to? Shamed in front of the world, guilty of innumerable crimes, won’t returning to such a life be more than I can stand?
At once there came to his mind an image of himself, humiliated, smeared by his enemies, returning bravely to his people.
No, that’s a false image. Then I was innocent, made naked and filthy by others. Now I’m far more filthy and my nakedness is far more shameful, and it was done entirely by myself.
Yet the courage to return, that was still the same, even if the shame had a far different cause. I must return, if only so that others can see me, not strutting in my glory, but filthy in my shame. I owe it to all those that I have hurt. I would only injure them again if, like a coward, I hid my shame from them.
Oh, Keeper of Earth, he cried out in his solitude. I beg you to have mercy on me. I have poisoned myself with bitterness, I am bound by chains of death that I forged myself and I can’t find my way out without your help.
In the instant that he made this plea for help, this recognition of his desperate helplessness, he felt the watcher return to him. It was a simple thing, so easy, so minute an action, as if the Keeper had been poised on the very verge of his heart, ready to touch him the moment he asked. And at this touch, the vast omnipresent memory of all his crimes suddenly was gone. He knew that he had committed them, but they no longer stared him in the face wherever he looked. It was the lifting of a terrible burden; he had never felt so light, so free. And now, even though he still had not regained the use of his body, his solitude was over. He was named, he was known, he was part of something larger than himself, and instead of feeling resentful and wanting to break anything that he could not control, he found himself filled with joy, for now his existence had a meaning. He had a future, because he was part of a world that had a future, and instead of wanting to decide for himself and determine that future for everyone else, he knew that he would be glad just to touch some small part of it. To marry and give happiness to his wife. To have a child and give it the same love that his parents had given him. To have a friend and ease his burden now and then. To have a skill or a secret and teach it to a student whose life might be changed a little by what he learned. Why had he dreamed of leading armies, which would accomplish nothing, when he could do these miraculous small things and change the world?
As Akma realized this, there suddenly flooded into him a clear understanding of all the cords of love that bound him. Everyone who cared for him, who wanted his happiness; everyone that he had ever loved or helped in any way. They were now as present and clear in his mind as, only a few moments ago, his crimes had been. Father. Mother. Luet. Edhadeya. Each one, bound to him by a thousand memories. Mon. Bego. Aronha. Ominer. Khimin. Where once his crimes against them had harrowed up his soul, now their love for him and his for them filled him with joy. Didul and Pabul and their brothers, who once had stood before him in pain because he denied them the forgiveness that they craved from him, now dwelt in his mind because of their love for his father and mother and sister, for the kingdom and the Kept and the world of the Keeper, and most particularly they loved him, they longed for his happiness, they yearned to do anything that was in their power to heal him. How could he have turned them away for so long? These were not the boys who hated him. These were sons of the Keeper, his brothers.
And others, and others; many of those whose pain he had caused now caused him joy solely by wanting him to be joyful. And behind them, within them, shining like light out of their eyes, out of their whole bodies, was the Keeper, wearing all their faces, touching him with all their hands. I know you, he said to them all. You were inside my heart from the earliest moment of my childhood. Your love was with me all along.
His mouth was flooded with the taste of a perfect white fruit, and his body was filled with it, shone with it. He, too, was as bright and shining now as all the others. As exquisite and bitter as his pain had been a moment ago, exactly that exquisite and sweet was his present joy. Then, in a moment, the overwhelming awareness of how he was loved slipped away. It was replaced by the almost forgotten feeling of his own body, stiff and painful-but so sweet, the tang of it, the sharpness of his returning senses. There was light against his eyelids. Something moved; a shadow passed across him, and then light again. He was not alone. And he was alive.
Chebeya cried out, a soft sharp O of happiness. Those who had been dozing awoke; Akmaro, who had been talking with Didul and Luet, strode at once to Chebeya’s side.
“His eyes moved under the eyelids,” she said.
They both knelt, touched his hand. “Akma,” said Akmaro. “Akma, come home to us, my son.”
His eyes opened then. He blinked against the light. He turned his head, ever so slightly, and looked at them. “Father,” he whispered. “Mother. Forgive me.”
“Already,” said Chebeya.
“Before you asked,” said Akmaro.
“I have so much to do.” Then he closed his eyes again and slept, this time a natural sleep, a healing sleep. His father and mother knelt over him, held his hands, stroked his face, wept for joy. The Keeper had been merciful and brought their son back home to them again.
Shedemei was out of sorts. The merchant who supplied her with fresh food from the countryside had raised his prices again. Of course she could afford it, since she had the Oversoul’s knowledge of the location of mineral deposits throughout the gornaya. It took no great effort to fly to a high peak, put on breathing gear, blast some ice into water, chip away at the exposed rock, take a bushel basket of gold ore from the mountain, have it refined in a remote place far from Darakemba, and come back with enough wealth to sustain the school for another year or two.
The trouble was that her goals had changed. The school was no longer just a ploy to allow her to be close to the center of action in Darakemba. The action was over-or, rather, had gone into hiatus- and yet she was still there and not at all interested in resuming her life sealed in a suspended animation chamber on the Basilica, come out only now and then to tend her plants. Her school had become real and important to her, and she wanted to get it on a sound financial footing so that someone could keep it going after she left. Yet every time she was about to get the income just about to the level of the expenses, somebody would raise a price or some new need would become apparent, and back she would go, dipping into her reserves of gold.
It was hard to remember the woman she had once been. In the city of Basilica, she had shut out the rest of the world, refusing most human contact and keeping what she had on a businesslike level as much as possible. At the time she thought it was because she loved science so much-and she did enjoy her work, so it wasn’t an entire lie. But what really locked her door against the world was fear. Not fear of physical danger, really, but fear of messiness, fear of untidy entanglements perpetually unresolved. The Oversoul-no, ultimately it was the Keeper of Earth-had forced her out of her laboratory and into the chaos of human life. But she and Zdorab had somehow managed to create an island of neatness, in which they pretended to know exactly what was expected of them both and satisfy those expectations perfectly.
Now she was surrounded by perpetual chaos, children coming and going, teachers whose lives began somewhere outside her life so that they could never be wholly known, questions forever unanswered, needs forever inadequately met ... it was the thing she had feared the most, and now that she was living in it, she couldn’t understand why. This was life. This was what the Keeper surrounded herself with. Perpetual irresolution. A picture never framed, a series of chords that never returned to the tonic for more than a fleeting moment. Shedemei could hardly imagine living any other way.
Yet today she was out of sorts, likely to snap at anyone who crossed her path; she knew that the students always passed the word when such a mood was on her. “Thunderstorms,” they would say, as if Shedemei were as unavoidable as the weather. The teachers would get the word as well, and they would wait to bring Shedemei their latest problems and requests. Let the weather clear first. And that was fine with Shedemei. Let the teachers decide whether it was really important enough to be worth braving the lion in her den.
So it rather surprised her-and peeved her, too-when someone knocked on the door of her tiny office. “Come in,” she said.
Whoever it was had trouble with the latch. One of the little girls, then. Surely a teacher could have dealt with her problem without sending her unassisted to the schoolmaster’s office.
Shedemei got up and opened the door. Not one of the little girls at all. It was Voozhum. “Mother Voozhum,” she said, “come in, sit down. You don’t have to come to my office, just send one of the girls for me and I will come to you.”
“That wouldn’t be fitting,” said Voozhum, easing herself onto one of the stools; chairs were no good for earth people, especially the old and inflexible.
“I won’t argue with you,” said Shedemei. “But age has its privileges and you should take advantage of them now and then.”
“I do,” said Voozhum. “With people who are younger than me.”
Shedemei hated it when Voozhum tried to get her to admit that she was the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried. It bothered her to lie to Voozhum, but she also couldn’t trust the old soul to remember that she was supposed to keep it secret.
“I’ve never met anybody older than you,” said Shedemei. “Now, what business brings you here?”
“I had a dream,” said Voozhum. “A real wake-up-with-a-wet-bed humdinger.”
Shedemei didn’t know whether to be amused or annoyed with Voozhum’s complacency toward her increasingly frequent incontinence. “There have been several of those recently, as I recall.”
Ignoring her gibe, Voozhum said, “I thought you ought to be warned-Akma is coming here today.”
Shedemei sighed. Just what she needed. “Have you told Edhad-eya?”
“So she can run off and hide? No, it’s time the girl faced her future.”
“It’s Edhadeya’s choice whether Akma has anything to do with her future, don’t you think?”
“No I don’t,” said Voozhum. “She grabs at every scrap of news about the boy. She knows that he’s changed. I’ve seen her pining after him, and then when I mention Akma she gets that prim look on her face and says, I’m glad he’s stopped interfering with things, but excuse me I’ve got work to do. She practically lived at Akmaro’s house during the three days that Akma was getting worked over by the Keeper, but as soon as he wakes up she refuses to leave the school. I think she’s a coward.”
“Akma has changed,” said Shedemei. “It’s natural for her to fear that his feelings toward her might also have changed.”‘
“That’s not what she’s afraid of,” said Voozhum scornfully. “She knows they’re bound together heart to heart. She’s afraid of you.”
“Me?”
“She’s afraid that if she marries Akma, you won’t let her have the school.”
“Have the school! What, am I dying and no one told me? I have the school.”
“She has the foolish idea that she’s younger than you and might outlive you,” said Voozhum nastily. “She doesn’t know what I know.”
“Well, I suppose that eventually I will give up the school.”
“But will you give it to a married woman who has to deal with her husband’s demands?”
“It’s premature to marry them off,” said Shedemei. “And premature to decide whether she’ll have the freedom to take the school, and damnably premature to be thinking about when I’m going to leave, because I can promise you it won’t be soon.”
“Well tell her that! Tell her she’ll have time for half a dozen babies before the schoolmastership comes open. Have some consideration for other people’s uncertainties, why don’t you!”
Shedemei burst into laughter. “You certainly don’t talk to me as if you really believed I was a minor deity.”
“When gods come down to become women, I think they should get the full experience, no holds barred. Besides, what are you going to do, strike me dead? I could keel over any minute. Every time I make it across the courtyard to my bedroom, I think, Well, it didn’t kill me after all.”
“I’ve offered to let you sleep right next to your classroom.”
“Don’t be absurd. I need the exercise. And unlike some people, I’m not interested in living forever. I don’t have to know how things come out.”
“Neither do I, really,” said Shedemei. “Not anymore.”
“All I came here to say, if you’re finally ready to listen, is that this is Akma’s first time coming out. Still a little unsteady on his feet. And I think it’s significant that he chose to come here. Not just for Edhadeya’s sake.”
“What do you mean?”
“In my dream I saw a fine young human man, a beautiful woman right behind him, and in one hand he held the hand of an old angel, and in the other the hand of a positively decrepit digger woman who looked awful enough that I could imagine she was me. A voice said to me, in the ancient language of my people, This is the fulfilment of an ancient dream, and a promise of glorious times to come.”
“I see,” said Shedemei. “The Keeper wants a bit of spectacle.”
“I think it would be wise to have children spread the word as soon as he arrives. I think it needs to be seen and reported widely. I think we need an audience.”
Shedemei rose from her chair. “If that’s what the wise woman of the tunnels says should happen, then it will happen. You stay here near the front door. I’ll fetch the other players in our little drama.”
Akma asked his parents to go with him, but they refused. “You don’t need us,” they said. “You’re only going to Shedemei’s school. You don’t need us to speak for you.”
But he did; he was shy about facing the world. Not because he was unwilling to accept the public shame that would come to him-he would almost welcome that, because he knew that it was part of his lifelong labor, to heal Darakemba of the harm that he had done. No, he was simply afraid that he wouldn’t know what to say, that he’d do it wrong, that he’d cause more harm. Remembering how it had been to have all his crimes stand present before him, he was very much afraid of doing anything to add to their already unbearable number. Even though he now searched his heart and found nothing there but the desire to serve the Keeper, he also knew that the pride that had so distorted his life was still waiting somewhere in his heart. Maybe someday he could trust that he had fully overcome it, that the devoted servant of the Keeper was his true self forever; but for now he was afraid of himself, afraid that the moment he was in public life he would begin to gather people to himself as he had done before, and that instead of using this power for their own good, he would again seek adulation the way wine-mad souls lived only for another jar.
He worried about this because he couldn’t see the change in himself. His parents saw, though, as he reluctantly left the house and walked out into the street; they remembered well how he, used to walk as if displaying himself, engaging the eyes of every passerby, insisting, demanding that they look at him with liking “before he would release their gaze. Now he walked, not in shame, but without self-awareness. He looked at others, not to get their love, but to understand them a little, to wonder who they were. Like the Keeper, he kept himself almost invisible on the street, yet saw all. Akmaro and Chebeya watched him out of sight, then embraced in the doorway and went inside.
Too soon Akma reached the corner where Rasaro’s House occupied all the buildings. He had never been to the school before, but had no trouble finding it-the place was famous. He had the odd notion that his visit was looked for, that there were people watching from the windows as he approached. But how could they know he was coming? He had only decided it himself this morning, and told no one but his parents. They would not have spread the word.
At the door he was met by a stern-looking woman twice his age. “Welcome, Akma. I’m Shedemei,” she said. “I know you because I examined you while you were lying there pretending to be dead at your mother’s house.”
“I know,” he said. “I came to thank you. Among other things.”
“Nothing to thank me for,” she said. “I told them what they already knew-that you weren’t dead yet and it would be up to the Keeper whether you survived. I hope you’re going to write down your experience during those three days of. . . whatever it was.”
“I hadn’t thought of it,” he said. “I couldn’t write it anyway. I would have to enumerate all my crimes, and they’re innumerable.” To his surprise he was able to say this in a calm voice, without a hint of either pleading or jauntiness.
“Well, you’ve thanked me,” said Shedemei. “Why else did you come?”
“I don’t really know,” he said. “I hoped to see Edhadeya, but that’s not the only reason that I came. I just woke up this morning knowing that it was time to come outside, and that it was here I had to come. It was only afterward that I remembered Edhadeya would be here. So I don’t know. Perhaps it was the Keeper telling me what was expected of me. Perhaps not. Now that my crisis is over, the voice of the Keeper within me is no more clear than it is for anyone else.”
“I don’t really believe that,” said Shedemei.
“Well it’s true,” said Akma. “The only difference is that now I’m trying to hear his voice, where before I was trying to hide from it.”
“That’s all the difference in the world. And yes, I think you’re right, the Keeper wanted you to come today. We were warned that you were coming, and we made our own plans. A bit of pageantry. A visual image that we think the Keeper wants the world to see.”
Akma felt the dread rise in him until it almost made him sick. “I don’t want to do anything . . . public. Yet.”
“That’s because you remember how much harm you did in front of audiences, and how it harmed you.”
He was stunned that she understood this about him, when he had only figured it out himself this morning.
“What you haven’t realized yet,” she went on, “is that because your harm was public, undoing it will have to be public as well. You have a lot of speeches to give, using all your talents as a polemicist, only this time on the side of truth. It’s harder in some ways, you know- more rules. But easier, too, because you can speak more from the heart and less from the head. You don’t have to calculate the truth the same way you calculate a lie.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Being right is my business,” she said. “That’s why I’m such a superb schoolmaster.” Then, to his surprise, she winked at him. “I’m joking, Akma. Hard to believe, but I have a sense of humor. I hope you haven’t lost yours.”
“No,” he said. “No, I was just. . . I’m just . . . easily distracted these days.”
Someone was coming down the corridor. He looked, and knew the man at once, though he was in shadow. “Bego,” he whispered. “Bego,” he said aloud. “Are you here? I didn’t know that you were here.”
Bego sped up and, forgetting dignity, opened his wings and glided a little as he rushed to his former pupil. “Akma,” he said. “You don’t know how I’ve yearned to see you. Will you forgive me?”
“For what, Bego?”
“For using you, for misleading you, for trying to guide your thought without telling you-these were all crimes of the first order, Akma. I know you’re all caught up in what an awful fellow you are, so that mine look like petty faults to you, but you have to know. . . .”
“I know,” said Akma. “All I remember of our time together is what a gift your wisdom and learning were to me, and how much strength I got from your confidence in me.” He held his teacher’s hands, the folds of Bego’s wings covering his fingers. “I was so afraid for you, for the punishment Motiak might give you.”
Bego laughed. “I thought it was the end of the world. Do you know his punishment? He forbade me to read. I was barred from the library. Three spies stayed with me, awake in shifts, to see to it I didn’t so much as scratch my name in the dirt with a stick. No reading, no writing. I thought that I’d go mad. My life was in the books, you see. The only people that I valued were the rare others, like you, who were as much at home with reading as I am. And then to be cut oft” from it-it was madness, I lived as a lunatic, hardly sleeping, longing for death. And then one day it dawned on me. What are books, anyway? The words of men and women who had something to say. Only when you read the book, the only voice you hear in your head is your own. You have the advantage of permanence, of being able to reread the same words again and again; but that’s really a lie, because it gives you the impression that the writer thought and spoke permanently, when in fact the moment the book was written, the writer changed and became someone else, endlessly exciting because he was endlessly reinvented. To read a book is to live among the dead, to dance with stones. Why should I mourn for having lost the company of the dead, when the living were still here, their books yet unwritten, or rather they’re being written in every moment of their lives!”
“So you came here.”
“Came here! Came here and begged Shedemei to take me on, even though I was forbidden to read anything. She let me attend only one class. Voozhum’s class, because the old lady is so blind she can’t assign readings anyway, she just talks and the students listen and then talk back. But she was a digger! Do you have any idea how hard that was for me? How humiliating? I laugh now to think of it-this woman is a treasure! She has written nothing and if I had continued to live in books I would never have heard her voice, but I’ll tell you, Akma, there is no moral philosopher in all the king’s library who is as subtle and . . . humane as she is.”
Akma laughed and embraced the little man. In all the years they had spent as student and master, there had been no such embrace; the books were always between them. But now it felt right to have the brush of the man’s wings against his thighs as the long arms nearly double-wrapped him at the waist. “Bego, how glad I am that we both found our own route to healing.”
Bego nodded, drew away from him. “Healing what can be healed. Undoing what can be undone. I couldn’t have repaired the damage I did to you-I could only hope that you and the Keeper would work it out between you. And my own life-I’ve come too late to the things I’ve learned. I’ve never had a wife, never taken part in the great passage of blossom, seed, and sapling. Now I’m just an old stump and there’s no more bloom in me. But that doesn’t mean I’m sad or sorry for myself, don’t misunderstand me, boy! I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”
“Surely now the king will release you from your punishment.”
“I haven’t asked. I don’t need to. I know everything that the library can teach me anyway. I’m busy discovering that all these children aren’t just a single mass of annoyances, but instead are a whole bunch of individual, unique annoyances which are becoming increasingly interesting to me. Most of the books I read were written by men and to read them you’d think there was no such thing as a sentient female. Listening to the chatter of infantile females is opening a new world to me.”
They laughed together. Only then, in the laughter, did Akma lift his gaze enough to see that they were no longer alone. Edhadeya stood there in the corridor, not five paces off, a look of uncertainty and shyness on her face. The moment she saw that he had noticed her, she looked down at the old digger woman whose hand she held. Then she stepped toward him, slowly, leading the halting old woman. “Akma,” said Edhadeya. “This is Voozhum. She was once my . . . slave. She’s also the greatest teacher in a school of great teachers.”
The old woman looked at him through rheumy eyes; the lack of focus in her gaze told him that she was nearly blind. Withered and bent, she was still a digger, still had the massive haunches and the probing snout. In spite of himself, he saw for a fleeting moment the image of a giant digger, towering over him with a whip in his hand, laying on with the lash because he dared to rest a moment in the hot sunlight. He felt the sting across his back; and then, worse yet, saw the same lash come down on his mother’s bacjc and he was powerless to stop it. Rage flashed through him.
And then was gone. For now he saw that this old woman was not the same as the guard who had beaten him with such obvious pleasure in his cruelty and authority. How could he have ever hated all diggers for the actions of a few? And now he knew that he had been no better than they were: When the path of his life gave him a bit of power and influence, what had he done with it, that differed in any important way from what they did, except that his crimes were on a larger scale and he did a better job of lying to himself about what he was doing? I have been a digger a thousand times over; I have seen their suffering with the knowledge that I caused it. I forgive the digger guards who mistreated us. I value even their miserable lives; the harm they did to us cost us only pain, while it cost them the love of the Keeper-a far more terrible price, even if they didn’t understand the reason for the emptiness and agony in their hearts.
Akma knelt before the old woman, so her bent-over head and his were at the same level. She leaned close to him, her nose almost touching him; was she sniffing at him? No, merely trying to see his face. “This is the one I saw in my dream,” she said. “The Keeper thinks you’re worth a lot of trouble.”
“Voozhum,” he said, “I harmed you and all your people. I told terrible lies about you. I stirred up hatred and fear, and your people hungered and hurt because of me.”
“Oh, that wasn’t you,” said Voozhum. “That boy died. It seems to me that you spent all those years just trying to find a way to kill that boy, and finally you did, and now you’re a new man. Tall for a newborn and more eloquent than most. But the new Akma doesn’t hate me.”
Impulsively he said the thought that had only just occurred to him. “I think I have never seen a woman so beautiful.”
“Well, now, you must be looking over my shoulder at Edhadeya,” Voozhum said.
“Edhadeya and I have years ahead of us to watch her become as beautiful as you,” said Akma. “I think she will, don’t you, Voozhum?”
“Definitely. It’s the hump of my back that I think is especially fetching.” Voozhum cackled with laughter at her own jest.
“Will you teach me how to undo my past life?” asked Akma.
“No,” she said. “Not the whole thing. Only the bad bits.”
“Yes, that’s right, the bad bits.”
“Don’t want you to undo the part where you were brave. Or that clever scholar. Or the boy who had sense enough to fall in love with Edhadeya.” Voozhum took Akma’s hand and carefully, clumsily, put Edhadeya’s fingers on his. “Now Edhadeya, let’s not have any nonsense about pretending not to know what you want, all right?” said Voozhum. “You loved him right through the whole time he was unbelievably stupid, and now he’s found his wits and become his true self, which is what you saw and loved in him all along. So you just tell him that you know the two of you can work everything out. Tell him!”
Akma felt Edhadeya’s fingers close on his. “I know the two of us can work everything out, Akma,” she said. “If you want to.”
He squeezed her hand. “I’ve been alone,” he said, unable to explain more of his experience in solitude than that. “I’m done with that.” There would be time later to speak of the family they would create together, the life they both would share. He knew she would be with him; he knew he would be with her. That was enough for now.
“Give me your hand again,” said Voozhum. “And hold the hand of that miserable bookworm on the other side. There was an ancient dream from the Keeper and I had an echo of it this morning, so let’s follow the script she’s given us and show ourselves to the crowd outside.”
“Crowd?”
“Won’t do any good to put on the show without an audience,” said Voozhum. “The bigots need to see you holding the hands of an angel and a digger. And my people need to see that this old woman, at least, has forgiven you and that I accept you as a new man. All that information, and we can do it just by walking through that door.”
Shedemei opened the door for them. The curious crowd had gathered in the streets, filling the intersection, watching for Akma, the son of the high priest who had been struck down by the Keeper and then arose again. Now as the door opened and first Voozhum, then Akma, then Bego emerged, a tumult arose from many throats. They could see that the three of them were holding hands. They watched as Akma knelt, so that his head was of a height with the bent old philosopher and the frail scholar. He took their hands and kissed them. “My brother and my sister have forgiven me,” he said loudly to the crowd.
“I beg the forgiveness of all good men and women. All that I taught was a lie. The Keeper lives, and the Kept will show us all the way to happiness. If there is anyone here who approved of my words and works for the past few years, then I beg you, learn from my mistakes and change your heart.”
Shedemei noticed with relief that there were no rhetorical flourishes. His speech was simple, direct, sincere. Still, she had no illusions. The vile sort of people to whom he had once been a hero would now simply see him as a traitor. Few of them would be won over. The hope, as always, lay in the next generation, to whom Akma’s story would be fresh and powerful.
As for the Assembly of the Ancient Ways, it had already collapsed. Aronha had officially dissolved it before Akma even arose from his coma, and though a few diehard digger-haters had organized a new version of it, there was no popular support. All those who had supported the Ancient Ways because it seemed like the wave of the future had already begun to remember that they always preferred the Kept. Those who had kept the boycott against the diggers out of fear or fashion were already seeking out their old clients and hirelings among the earth people, hiring those who were willing to forgive and return to work, buying up the unsold stockpiles of tradesmen’s work. No one was foolish enough to think that this represented a vast change of heart in the population as a whole-the Kept who were truly committed to serving the Keeper were no more numerous now than they were before Shedemei had appeared to Akma and the Motiaki on the road. But as long as the genial hypocrites were willing to go through the motions and mouth the words, there was hope that more of their children would take the Keeper’s plan into their hearts. And in the meantime, even empty lip service to the idea that all three peoples of the Earth were children of the Keeper would be enough to provide for peace and freedom within the borders of Darakemba. It’s a starting point, Shedemei thought. A beginning, and we can rise from here.
Outside the school, a new tumult arose, and Shedemei stepped with Edhadeya through the door to see what was happening. The crowd parted, and the four sons of Motiak arrived. They had all visited the school often in the past few days, and each had reconciled with Edhadeya-Shedemei could see how relieved they were to be back in the good graces of their sister, not to mention their father. All four of them climbed the steps and embraced first Voozhum, then Bego, then Akma, then Edhadeya. As a pageant of reconciliation it was working very nicely.
<So are you done with them? Are you coming back?>
Miss me? asked Shedemei.
<I finished programming the probe and sent it off a few minutes ago. I would have told you, but you seemed busy.>
Congratulations. You’ve accomplished all that your other iteration sent you here to do.
<Fve now become a supernumerary, like aged animals past the age of reproduction. Irrelevant to the future course of history.>
I doubt that, Shedemei said silently. I think we’ll find ways to keep busy. Aren’t you programmed to be curious?
<I must admit something to you, Shedemei, which I haven’t mentioned because I thought it something of an anomaly in myself. I was disappointed by your discoveries about the Keeper of Earth. I even tried to prove them wrong. To prove that fluctuations in the magnetic field can’t possibly have the effects that the Keeper seems to have. That there cannot possibly be a volitional element in the chaotic flow of magma in the mantle of the Earth.>
What an interesting and useless way to spend your time. What does it matter whether the Keeper actually uses magnetics or that was simply the closest I could come to understanding what she actually does?
<I know it. When I finally realized the futility of what I was doing, I then began to study myself to see what it was in my programming that had caused me to loop on the meaningless effort to deny your vision of the Keeper. >
What did you find?
<Nothing. Or rather, nothing that I can print out as demonstrable code to account for the effect. I can only express it in imprecise, metaphorical, anthropomorphic language.>
My favorite kind. Go ahead.
<I must have hoped, for all these years, that we would find that the Keeper of Earth was like me, inorganic, programmed; and if this had been the case, I might have hoped that with enhancement of my mechanical capacities I too could have the scope of influence that the Keeper has. Instead I remain completely other. A tool made to imitate the Keeper, but incapable of becoming the thing I imitate.>
So far, anyway, said Shedemei silently.
<No, this is a permanent difference. I am not sentient. I merely do such a splendid job of counterfeiting sentience that for a short time I fooled even myself. >
Not really. As long as I wear the cloak of the starmaster, you’re a part of me, whatever else you are, and I’m a part of you. Even if I do as I’m tempted and take a husband here and squeeze another baby out of this old body, we’ll be bound together for a long time to come. My life has enough meaning to share some of it with you, even if you are a supernumerary now.
<A very generous gesture, according to my moral evaluation algorithms. Thank you.>
Mon, laughing, was speaking to the crowd. Someone had asked a question. “Of course the three species are different,” Mon said. “That’s not a mistake. The Keeper looked at humans and said, How inadequate! They can’t see in the dark! They only live on the surface of the earth! They can’t fly! We need something else to make the world perfect. And so we were sent out of the room like bad children while the Keeper brought two more species to a point where they could take their place with humans as brothers and sisters. And the Keeper was right! We humans weren’t complete! Why, I spent my whole childhood wishing I were an angel. And I could spend my whole life trying and never come close to the wisdom and kindness of this old woman. So yes, my friend, the differences between the three peoples of Earth are real and they’re important-but they’re the reason we must live together, and not at all a reason for us to live apart!”
A cheer arose from the crowd, long and loud. Shedemei turned to Edhadeya and the two of them laughed together. “Listen to him,” Edhadeya said. “Now that he’s saying things he really believes in, Mon may turn out to be the best teacher of all.”
Shedemei felt a tug on her clothing. She turned around to find one of the youngest sky girls looking up at her. She bent down to hear.
“Shedemei, I know you’re in a bad mood today, but I have to tell you, mNo just threw up and I can’t find anybody but you.”
Sighing, Shedemei left the great public spectacle and returned to the mundane duties of the school. This one-day nausea had been going around the school and Shedemei was not looking forward to the time when she inevitably caught it herself. In the meantime, there was vomit to clean up and a little sick girl to wash and put to bed until her parents could come for her. Menial, wearying work, and Shedemei was very good at it.
Orson Scott Card: Homecoming volume 5 - Earthborn
v1.0 [18-dec-01] 4i Publications. OCR’d 300DPI, Finereader 5, layout, quick proof inW2k . The original hardcover was good quality so only a few OCR errors expected. Most common OCR errors have been corrected. If you proofread or change this document, please retain the existing version information. Also indicate what has been improved (proofreading, layout etc). Just reformatting and changing the version number doesn’t mean that the actual text has been improved.
We’re missing #3 in the Homecoming Saga, so the series will remain incomplete until someone scans it.