CONTENTS
GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES. 5
SIXTEEN - THE INDEX OF THE OVERSOUL. 192
I owe many debts in the creation of this work, some more obvious than others.
My wife, Kristine, as always was my reader of first resort; with this book, however, she was joined in this labor by our oldest son, Geoffrey, who proved himself to be a reader of great insight and an editor with a good eye for detail. The world has too few good editors. I’m proud to have found another one.
I must also thank the many friends working with me on other projects, who waited patiently until this book was finished, so that I could return to other labors too long delayed. And thanks, again and always, to my agent, Barbara Bova, who proves that it is possible to do good business with a good friend
Most names have diminutive or familiar forms. For instance, Gaballufix’s near kin, close friends, current mate, and former mates could call him Gabya. Other nicknames are listed here. (Again, because these names are so unfamiliar, names of female characters are set off in italics.):
Dhelembuvex-Dhel
Dol-Dolya,
Drotik-Dorya
Eiadh-Edhya
Elemak-Elya
Hosni-Hosya
Hushidh-Shuya
Issib-Issya
Kokor-Koya
Luet-Lutya
Mebbekew-Meb
Nafai-Nyef
Obring-Briya
Rasa-(no diminutive)
Rashgallivak-Rash
Roptat-Rop
Sevet-Sevya
Shedemei- Shedya.
Truzhnisha- Truzhya,
Vas-Vasya
Volemak-Volya
Wetchik-(no diminutive; ‘s family title)
Zdorab-Zodya
For the purpose of reading this story silently to yourself, it hardly matters whether the reader pronounces the names of the characters correctly. But for those who might be interested, here is some information concerning the pronunciation of names.
The rules of vowel formation in the language of Basilica require that in most nouns, including names, at least one vowel be pronounced with a leading y sound. With names, it can be almost any vowel, and it can legitimately be changed at the speaker’s preference. Thus the name Gaballufix could be pronounced Gyah -BAH-loo-fix or Gah-BAH- lyoo-fix; it happens that Gaballufix himself preferred to pronounce it Gah-B YAH-loo-fix, and of course most people followed that usage.
Dhelembuvex[thel-EM-byoo-vex]
Dol[DYOHL]
Drotik [DROHT-yik]
Eiadh[AY-yahth]
Elemak [EL-yeh-mahk]
Hosni[HYOZ-nee]
HushM[HYOO-sheeth]
Issib [IS-yib]
Kokor[RYOH-kor]
Luet[LYOO-etJ
Mebbekew [MEB-bek-kyoo]
Nafai [NYAH-fie]
Obring [OB-rying]
Rasa.[RAHZ-yah]
Rashgallivak [rahsh-GYAH-lih-vahk]
Roptat [ROPE-tyaht]
Sevet[SEV-yet]
Shedemei[SHYED-di-may]
Truzhnisha[troozh-NYEE-shah]
Vas [VYAHS]
Volemak [VOHL-yeh-mak]
Wetchik [WET-chyick]
Zdorab [ZDOR-yab]
The master computer of the planet Harmony was afraid. Not in a way that any human would recognize-no clammy palms, no dry mouth, no sick dread in the pit of the stomach. It was only a machine without moving parts, drawing power from the sun and data from its satellites, its memory, and the minds of half a billion human beings. Yet it could feel a kind of fear, a sense that things were slipping out of its control, that it no longer had the power to Influence the world as it had before.
What it felt was, in short, the fear of death. Not its own death, for the master computer had no ego and cared not at all whether It continued to exist or not. Instead it had a mission, programmed into it millions of years before, to be the guardian of humanity on this world, If the computer became so feeble that it could no longer fulfill Its mission, then It knew without doubt-every projection it was capable of making confirmed it-that within a few thousand years humanity would once again be faced with the one enemy that could destroy it: humanity Itself, armed with such weapons that a whole planet could be killed.
Now is the time, the master computer decided. I must act now, while I still have some influence in the world, or o world will die again.
Yet the master computer had no idea how to act. One of the symptoms of its decline was the very confusion that kept it from being able to make a decision. It couldn’t trust it’s own conclusions, even If it could reach one. it needed guidance. It needed to be clarified, reprogrammed, or perhaps even replaced with a machine more sophisticated, better able to deal with the new challenges evolving among the human race.
The trouble was, there was only one source it could trust to give valid advice, and that source was so for away that the Oversoul would have to go there to get it. Once the Oversoul had been capable of movement but that was forty million years ago, and even inside a stasis field there had been decay. The Oversoul could not undertake its quest alone. It needed human help.
For two weeks the master computer searched its vast database, evaluating the potential usefulness of every human being currently alive. Most were too stupid or unreceptive; of those who could still receive direct communications from the master computer, only a few were in a position where they could do what was needed.
Thus it was that the master computer turned its attention to a handful of human beings in the ancient city Basilica. In the dark of night as one of the master computer’s most reliable satellites passed overhead, it began its work, sending a steady stream of information and instructions in a tightbeam transmission to those who might be useful in the effort to save a world named Harmony.
Nafai woke before dawn on his mat in his father’s house. He wasn’t allowed to sleep in his mother’s house anymore, being fourteen years old. No self-respecting woman of Basilica would put her daughter in Rasa’s household if a fourteen-year-old boy were in residence- especially since Nafai had started a growth spurt at the age of twelve that showed no signs of stopping even though he was already near two meters in height.
Only yesterday he had overheard his mother talking with her friend Dhelembuvex. “People are beginning to speculate on when you’re going to find an auntie for him,” said Dhel.
“He’s still just a boy,” said Mother.
Dhel hooted with laughter. “Rasa, my dear, are you so afraid of growing old that you can’t admit your little baby is a man?”
“It’s not fear of age,” said Mother. “There’s time enough for aunties and mates and all that business when he starts thinking about it himself.”
“Oh, he’s thinking about it already,” said Dhel. “He’s just not talking to you about it.”
It was true enough; it had made Nafai blush when he heard her say it, and it made him blush again when he remembered it. How did Dhel know, just to look at him for a moment that day, that his thoughts were so often on “that business”? But no, Dhel didn’t know it because of anything she had seen in Nafai. She knew it because she knew men. I’m just going through an age, thought Nafai. All boys start thinking these thoughts at about this age. Anyone can point at a male who’s near two meters in height but still beardless and say, “That boy is thinking about sex right now,” and most of the time they’ll be.
But I’m not like all the others, thought Nafai. I hear Mebbekew and his friends talking, and it makes me sick. I don’t like thinking of women that crudely, sizing them up like mares to see what they’re likely to be useful for. A pack animal or can I ride her? Is she a walker or can we gallop? Do I keep her in the stable or bring her out to show my friends?
That wasn’t the way Nafai thought about women at all. Maybe because he was still in school, still talking to women every day about intellectual subjects. I’m not in love with Eiadh because she’s the most beautiful young woman in Basilica and therefore quite probably in the entire world. I’m in love with her because we can talk together, because of the way she thinks, the sound of her voice, the way she cocks her head to listen to an idea she doesn’t agree with, the way she rests her hand on mine when she’s trying to persuade me.
Nafai suddenly realized that the sky was starting to grow light outside his window, and here he was lying in bed dreaming of Eiadh, when if he had any brains at all he’d get up and get into the city and see her in person.
No sooner thought of than done. He sat up, knelt beside his mat, slapped his bare thighs and chest and offered the pain to the Oversoul, then rolled up his bed and put it in his box in the corner. I don’t really need a bed, thought Nafai. If I were a real man I could sleep on the floor and not mind it. That’s how I’ll become as hard and lean as Father. As Elemak. I won’t use the bed tonight.
He walked out into the courtyard to the water tank. He dipped his hands into the small sink, moistened the soap, and rubbed it all over. The air was cool and the water was cooler, but he pretended not to notice until he was lathered up. He knew that this chill was nothing compared to what would happen in a moment. He stood under the shower and reached up for the cord-and then hesitated, bracing himself for the misery to come.
“Oh, just pull it,” said Issib.
Nafai looked over toward Issib’s room. He was floating in the air just in front of the doorway. “Easy for you to say,” Nafai answered him.
Issib, being a cripple, couldn’t use the shower; his floats weren’t supposed to get wet. So one of the servants took his floats off and bathed him every night. “You’re such a baby about cold water,” said Issib.
“Remind me to put ice down your neck at supper.”
“As long as you woke me up with all your shivering and chattering out here-”
“I didn’t make a sound,” said Nafai.
“I decided to go with you into the city today.”
“Fine, fine. Fine as wine,” said Nafai.
“Are you planning to let the soap dry? It gives your skin a charming sort of whiteness, but after a few hours it might begin to itch.”
Nafai pulled the cord.
Immediately ice-cold water cascaded out of the tank over his head. He gasped-it always hit with a shock-and then bent and turned and twisted and splashed water into every nook and crevice of his body to rinse the soap off. He had only thirty seconds to get clean before the shower stopped, and if he didn’t finish in that time he either had to live with the unrinsed soap for the rest of the day-and it did itch, like a thousand fleabites- or wait a couple of minutes, freezing his butt off, for the little shower tank to refill from the big water tank. Neither consequence was any fun, so he had long since learned the routine so well that he was always dean before the water stopped.
“I love watching that little dance you do,” said Issib.
“Dance?”
“Bend to the left, rinse the armpit, bend the other way, rinse the left armpit, bend over and spread your cheeks to rinse your butt, bend over backward-”
“All right, I get it,” said Nafai.
“I’m serious, I think it’s a wonderful little routine. You ought to show it to the manager of the Open Theatre. Or even the Orchestra. You could be a star.”
“A fourteen-year-old dancing naked under a stream of water,” said Nafai. “I think they’d show that in a different kind of theatre.”
“But still in Dolltown! You’d still be a hit in Dolltown!”
By now Nafai had toweled himself dry-except his hair, which was still freezing cold He wanted to run for his room the way he used to do when he was little, jabbering nonsense words-”ooga-booga looga-booga” had been a favorite-while he pulled on his clothes and rubbed himself to get warm. But he was a man now, and it was only autumn, not winter yet, so he forced himself to walk casually toward his room. Which is why he was still in die courtyard, stark naked and cold as ice, when Elemak strode through the gate.
“A hundred and twenty-eight days,” he bellowed.
“Elemak!” cried Issib. “You’re back!”
“No thanks to the hill robbers,” said Elemak. He walked straight to the shower, pulling off his clothes as he went. “They hit us only two days ago, way too close to Basilica. I think we killed one this time.”
“Don’t you know whether you did or not?” asked Nafai.
“I used the pulse, of course.”
Of course? thought Nafai. To use a hunting weapon against a person?
“I saw him drop, but I wasn’t about to go back and check, so maybe he just tripped and fell down at the exact moment that I fired.”
Elemak pulled the shower cord before he soaped. The moment the water hit him he yowled, and then did his own little splash dance, shaking his head and flipping water all over the courtyard while jabbering “ooga-booga looga-booga” just like a little kid.
It was all right for Elemak to act that way. He was twenty-four now, he had just got his caravan safely back from purchasing exotic plants in the jungle city of Tish-chetno, the first time anyone from Basilica had gone there in years, and he might actually have killed a robber on the way. No one could think of Elemak as anything but a man. Nafai knew the rules: When a man acts like a child, he’s boyish, and everyone’s delighted; when a boy acts the same way, he’s childish, and everyone tells him to be a man.
Elemak was soaping up now. Nafai-freezing still, even with his arms folded across his chest-was about to go into his room and snag his clothes, when Elemak started talking again.
“You’ve grown since I left, Nyef.”
“I’ve been doing that lately.”
“Looks good on you. Muscling up pretty well. You take after the old man in all the right ways. Got your mother’s face, though.”
Nafai liked the tone of approval in Elemak’s voice, but it was also vaguely demeaning to stand there naked as a jaybird while his brother sized him up.
Issib, of course, only made it worse. “Got Father’s most important feature, fortunately,” he said.
“Well, we ail got that,” said Elemak. “All of the old man’s babies have been boys-or at least all his babies that we know about.” He laughed.
Nafai hated it when Elemak talked about Father that way. Everyone knew that Father was a chaste man who only had sex with his lawful mate. And for the past fifteen years that mate had been Rasa, Nafai’s and Issib’s mother, the contract renewed every year. He was so faithful that women had given up coming to visit and hint around about availability when his contract lapsed. Of course, Mother was just as faithful and there were still plenty of men plying her with gifts and innuendoes-but that’s how some men were, they found faithfulness even more enticing than wantonness, as if Rasa were staying so faithful to Wetchik only to goad them on in their pursuit of her. Also, mating with Rasa meant sharing what some thought was the finest house and what all agreed was the finest view in Basilica. I’d never mate with a woman just for her house, thought Nafai.
“Are you crazy or what?” asked Elemak.
“What?” asked Nafai.
“It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here and you’re standing there sopping wet and buck naked.”
“Yeah,” said Nafai. But he didn’t run for his room- that would be admitting that the cold was bothering him. So he grinned at Elemak first. “Welcome home,” he said.
“Don’t be such a show-off, Nyef,” said Elemak. “I know you’re dying of the cold-your dangling parts are shriveling up.”
Nafai sauntered to his room and pulled on his pants and shirt It really bothered him that Elemak always seemed to know what was going on in Nafai’s head. Elemak could never imagine that maybe Nafai was so hardened and manly that the cold simply didn’t bother him. No, Elemak always assumed that if Nafai did something manly it was nothing but an act. Of course, it was an act, so Elemak was right, but that only made it more annoying. How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character? Besides, it wasn’t completely an act. For a minute there, seeing Elemak home again, hearing him talk about maybe killing a man on his trip, Nafai had forgotten that he was cold, had forgotten everything.
There was a shadow in the doorway. It was Issib. “You shouldn’t let him get to you like that, Nafai.”
“What do you mean?”
“Make you so angry. When he teases you.”
Nafai was genuinely puzzled. “What do you mean, angry? I wasn’t angry.”
“When he made that joke about how cold you were,” said Issib. “I thought you were going to go over and knock his head off.”
“But I wasn’t mad.”
“Then you’re a genuine mental case, my boy,” said Issib. “ Ithought you were mad. He thought you were mad. The Oversoul thought you were mad.”
“The Oversoul knows that I wasn’t angry at all.”
“Then learn to control your face, Nyef, because apparently it’s showing emotions that you don’t even feel. As soon as you turned your back he jammed his finger at you, that’s how mad he thought you were.”
Issib floated away. Nafai pulled on his sandals and criss-crossed the laces up around his pantlegs. The style among young men around Basilica was to wear long laces up the thighs and tie them together just under the crotch, but Nafai cut the laces short and wore them knee-high, like a serious workingman. Having a thick leather knot between their legs caused young men to swagger, rolling side to side when they walked, trying to keep their thighs from nibbing together and chafing from the knot. Nafai didn’t swagger and loathed the whole idea of a fashion that made clothing less comfortable.
Of course, rejecting fashion meant that he didn’t fit in as easily with boys his age, but Nafai hardly minded that. It was women whose company he enjoyed most, and the women whose good opinion he valued were the ones who were not swayed by trivial fashions. Eiadh, for one, had often joined him in ridiculing the high-laced sandals. “Imagine wearing those riding a horse ,” she had said once.
“Enough to make a bull into a steer,” Nafai had quipped in reply, and Eiadh had laughed and then repeated his joke several times later in the day. If a woman like that existed in the world, why should a man bother with silly fashions?
When Nafai got to the kitchen, Elemak was just sliding a frozen rice pudding into the oven. The pudding looked large enough to feed them all, but Nafai knew from experience that Elemak intended die whole thing for himself. He’d been traveling for months, eating mostly cold food, moving almost entirely at night-Elemak would eat the entire pudding in about six swallows and then go collapse on his bed and sleep till dawn tomorrow.
“Where’s Father?” asked Elemak.
“A short trip,” said Issib, who was breaking raw eggs over his toast, preparing them for the oven. He did it quite deftly, considering that simply grasping an egg in one hand took all his strength. He would hold die egg a few inches over the table, then clench just the right muscle to release the float that was holding up his arm, causing it to drop, egg and all, onto the table surface. The egg would split exactly right-every rime-and then he’d clench another muscle, the float would swing his arm up over the plate, and then he’d open the egg with his other hand and it would pour out onto the toast. There wasn’t much Issib couldn’t do for himself, with the floats taking care of gravity for him. But it meant Issib could never go traveling the way Father and Elemak and, sometimes, Mebbekew did. Once he was away from the magnetics of the city, Issib had to ride in his chair, a clumsy machine that he could only ride from place to place. It wouldn’t help him do anything. Away from the city, confined to his chair, Issib was really crippled.
“Where’s Mebbekew?” asked Elemak. The pudding was done-overdone, actually, but that’s the way Elemak always ate breakfast, cooked until it was so soft you didn’t need teeth to eat it. Nafai figured it was because he could swallow it faster that way.
“Spent the night in the city,” said Issib.
Elemak laughed. “That’s what he’ll say when he gets back. But I think Meb is all plow and no planting.”
There was only one way for a man of Mebbekew’s age to spend a night inside the walls of Basilica, and that was if some woman had him in her home. Elemak might tease that Mebbekew claimed to have more women than he got, but Nafai had seen the way Meb acted with some women, at least. Mebbekew didn’t have to pretend to spend a night in the city; he probably accepted fewer invitations than he got.
Elemak took a huge bite of pudding. Then he cried out, opened his mouth, and poured in wine straight from the table jug. “Hot,” he said, when he could talk again.
“Isn’t it always?” asked Nafai.
He had meant it as a joke, a little jest between brothers. But for some reason Elemak took it completely wrong, as if Nafai had been calling him stupid for taking the bite. “listen, little boy,” said Elemak, “when you’ve been out on the road eating cold food and sleeping in dust and mud for two-and-a-half months, maybe you forget just how hot a pudding can be.”
“Sorry,” said Nafai. “I didn’t meant anything bad.”
“Just be careful who you make fun of,” said Elemak. “You’re only my half- brother, after all,”
“That’s all right,” said Issib cheerfully. “He has the same effect on full brothers, too.” Issib was obviously trying to smooth things over and keep a quarrel from developing.
Elemak seemed willing enough to go along. “I imagine it’s harder on you ,” he said. “Good thing you’re a cripple or Nafai here probably wouldn’t have lived to be eighteen.”
If the remark about being a cripple stung Issib, he didn’t show it. It infuriated Nafai, however. Here Issib was trying to keep the peace, and Elemak casually insulted him for it. So, while Nafai hadn’t had the slightest intention of picking a fight before, he was ready for one now . Elemak’s having counted his age in planting years instead of temple years was a good enough pretext. “I’m fourteen,” said Nafai. “Not eighteen.”
“Temple years, planting years,” said Elemak. “If you were a horse you’d be eighteen.”
Nafai walked over and stood about a pace from Elemak’s chair. “But I’m not a horse,” said Nafai.
“You’re not a man yet, either,” said Elemak. “And I’m too tired to want to beat you senseless right now. So fix your breakfast and let me eat mine.” He turned to Issib. “Did Father take Rashgallivak with him?”
Nafai was surprised at the question. How could Father take the estate manager with him, when Elemak was also gone? Truzhnisha would keep the household running, of course; but without Rashgallivak, who would manage the greenhouses, the stables, the gossips, the booths?
Certainly not Mebbekew-he had no interest in the day-to-day duties of Father’s business. And the men would hardly take orders from Issib-they regarded him with tenderness or pity, not respect.
“No, Father left Rash in charge,” Issib said. “Rash was probably sleeping out at the coldhouse tonight. But you know Father never leaves without seeing that every-thing’s in order.”
Elemak cast a quick, sidelong glance at Nafai. “Just wondered why certain people were getting so cocky.”
Then it dawned on Nafai: Elemak’s question was really a back-handed compliment-he had wondered whether Father had put Nafai in charge of things in his absence. And plainly Elemak didn’t like the idea of Nafai running any part of the Wetchik family’s rare-plant business.
“I’m not interested in taking over the weed trade,” said Nafai, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m not worried about anything at all,” said Elemak. “Isn’t it time for you to go to Mama’s school? She’ll be afraid her little boy got robbed and beaten on the road.”
Nafai knew he should let Elemak’s taunt go unanswered, shouldn’t provoke him anymore. The last thing he wanted was to have Elemak as an enemy. But the very fact that he looked up to Elemak so much, wanted so much to be like him, made it impossible for Nafai to leave the gibe unanswered. As he headed for the courtyard door, he turned back to say, “I have much higher aims in life than skulking around shooting at robbers and sleeping with camels and carrying tundra plants to the tropics and tropical plants to the glaciers. I’ll leave that game to you.”
Suddenly Elemak’s chair flew across the room as he jumped to his feet and in two strides had Nafai’s face pressed against the doorframe. It hurt, but Nafai hardly noticed the pain, or even the fear that Elemak might hurt him even worse. Instead there was a strange feeling of triumph. I made Elemak lose his temper. He doesn’t get to keep pretending that he thinks I’m not worth noticing.
That game , as you call it, pays for everything you have and everything you are,” said Elemak. “If it wasn’t for the money that Father and Rash and I bring in, do you think anybody’d pay attention to you in Basilica? Do you think your mother has so much honor that it would actually transfer to her sons? If you think that, then you don’t know how the world works. Your mother might be able, to make her daughters into hot stuff, but the only thing a woman can do for a son is make a scholar out of him.” He practically spat the word scholar. “And believe me, boy, that’s all you’re ever going to be. I don’t know why the Oversoul even bothered putting a boy’s parts on you, little girl, because all you’re going to have in this world when you grow up is what a woman gets.”
Again, Nafai knew that he should keep his silence and let Elemak have the last word. But the retort no sooner came to his mind than it came out of his mouth. “Is calling me a woman your subtle way of telling me you’ve got some heat for me? I think you’ve been out on the road too long if I’m starting to look irresistible.”
At once Elemak let go of him. Nafai turned around, half-expecting to see Elemak laughing, shaking his head about how their playing sometimes got out of hand. Instead his brother was standing there red-faced, breathing heavily, like an animal poised to lunge. “Get out of this house,” said Elemak, “and don’t come back while I’m here.”
“It’s not your house,” Nafai pointed out.
“The next time I see you here I’ll kill you.”
“Come on, Elya, you know I was only joking.”
Issib floated blithely between them and cast an arm clumsily across Nafai’s shoulders. “We’re late getting into the city, Nyef. Mother will be worried about us.”
This time Nafai had sense enough to shut his mouth and let things go. He did know how to hold his tongue-he just never remembered to do it soon enough. Now Elemak was furious at him. Might be angry for days. Where will I sleep if I can’t go home? Nafai wondered. Immediately there flashed in his mind an image of Eiadh whispering to him, “Why not stay tonight in my room? After all, we’re surely going to be mates one day. A woman trains her favorite nieces to be mates for her sons, doesn’t she? I’ve known that since I first knew you, Nafai. Why should we wait any longer? After all, you’re only about the stupidest human being in all of Basilica.”
Nafai came out of his reverie to realize that it was Issib speaking to him, not Eiadh. “Why do you keep goading him like that,” Issib was saying, “when you know it’s all Elemak can do to keep from killing you sometimes?”
“I think of things and sometimes I say them when I shouldn’t,” said Nafai.
“You think of stupid things and you’re so stupid that you soy them every time.”
“Not every time.”
“Oh, you mean there are even stupider things that you don’t say? What a mind you’ve got! A treasure!” Issib was floating ahead of him. He always did that going up the ridge road, forgetting that for people who had to deal with gravity, a slower pace might be more comfortable.
“I like Elemak,” said Nafai miserably. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t like me.”
“I’ll get him to make you a list sometime,” said Issib. “I’ll paste it onto the end of my own.”
It was a long but familiar road from the Wetchik house to Basilica. Until the age of eight, Nafai had always made the round trip in the other direction, when Mother took him and Issib to Father’s house for holidays. In those days it was magical to be in a household of men. Father, with his mane of white hair, was almost a god-indeed, until he was five Nafai had thought that Father was the Oversoul. Mebbekew, only six years older than Nafai, had always been a vicious, merciless tease, but in those early years Elemak was kind and playful. Ten years older than Nafai, Elya was already mansize in Nafai’s first memories of Wetchik’s house; but instead of Father’s ethereal look, he had the dark rugged appearance of a fighter, a man who was kind only because he wanted to be, not because he was incapable of harshness when it was needed. In those days Nafai had pleaded to be released from Mother’s household and allowed to live with Wetchik-and Elemak. Having Mebbekew around all the time would simply be the unavoidable price for living in the place of the gods.
Mother and Father met with him together to explain why they wouldn’t release him from his schooling. “Boys who are sent to their fathers at this age are the ones without promise,” said Father. “The ones who are too violent to get along well in a household of study, too disrespectful to abide in a household of women.”
“And the stupid ones go to their fathers at age eight,” said Mother. “Beyond rudimentary reading and arithmetic, what use does a stupid man have for learning?”
Even now, remembering, Nafai felt a little stab of pleasure at that-for Mebbekew had often bragged that, unlike Nyef and Issya, and Elya in his day, Meb had gone home to Father at the age of eight. Nafai was sure that Meb had met every criterion for early entry into the household of men.
So they managed to persuade Nafai that it was a good thing for him to stay with his mother. There were other reasons, too-to keep Issib company, the prestige of his mother’s household, the association with his sisters-but it was Nafai’s ambition that made him content to stay. I’m one of the boys with real promise. I will have value to the land of Basilica, perhaps to the whole world. Perhaps one day my writings will be sent into the sky for the Oversoul to share them with the people of other cities and other languages. Perhaps I will even be one of the great ones whose ideas are encoded into glass and saved in an archive, to be read during all the rest of human history as one of the giants of Harmony.
Still, because he had pleaded so earnestly to be allowed to live with Father, from the age of eight until he was thirteen, he and Issib had spent almost every weekend at the Wetchik house, becoming as familiar with it as with Rasa’s house in the city. Father had insisted that they work hard, experiencing what a man does to earn his living, so their weekends were not holidays. “You study for six days, working with your mind while your body takes a holiday. Here you’ll work in the stables and the greenhouses, working with your body while your mind learns the peace that comes from honest labor.”
That was the way Father talked, a sort of continuous oratory; Mother said he took that tone because he wasn’t sure how to talk naturally with children. But Nafai had overheard enough adult conversations to know that Father talked that way with everybody except Rasa herself. It showed that Father was never at ease, never truly himself with anyone; but over the years Nafai had also learned that no matter how elevated and hortatory Father’s conversation might be, he was never a fool; his words were never empty or stupid or ignorant. This is how a man speaks, Nafai had thought when he was young, and so he practiced an elegant style and made a point of learning classical Emeznetyi as well as the colloquial Basyat that was the language of most art and commerce in Basilica these days. More recently Nafai had realized that to communicate effectively with real people he had to speak the common language-but the rhythms, the melodies of Emeznetyi could still be felt in his writing and heard in his speech. Even in his stupid jokes that earned Elemak’s wrath.
“I’ve just realized something,” said Nafai.
Issib didn’t answer-he was far enough ahead that Nafai wasn’t sure he could even hear. But Nafai went ahead and said it anyway, speaking even more softly, because he was probably saying it only to himself. T think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It’s a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don’t exist until you say them.”
“A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed.”
So Issib was listening, after all.
“For a big strong guy you sure take a long time getting up Ridge Road to Market Street,” said Issib.
“I was thinking,” said Nafai.
“You really ought to learn how to think and walk at the same time.”
Nafai reached the top of the road, where Issib was waiting. I really was dawdling, he thought. I’m not even out of breath.
But because Issib had paused there, Nafai also waited, turning as Issib had turned, to look back down the road they had just traveled. Ridge Road was named exactly right, since it ran along a ridge that sloped down toward the great well-watered coastal plain. It was a clear morning, and from the crest they could see all the way to the ocean, with a patchwork quilt of farms and orchards, stitched with roads and knotted with towns and villages, spread out like a bedcover between the mountains and the sea. Looking down Ridge Road they could see the long line of farmers coming up for market, leading strings of pack animals. If Nafai and Issib had delayed even ten minutes more they would have had to make this trip in the noise and stink of horses, donkeys, mules, and kurelomi, the swearing of the men and the gossip of the women. Once that had been a pleasure, but Nafai had traveled with them often enough to know that the gossip and the swearing were always the same. Not everything that comes from a garden is a rose.
Issib turned to the west, and so did Nafai, to see a landscape as opposite as any could possibly be: the jumbled rocky plateau of the Besporyadok, the near- waterless waste that went on and on toward the west. A thousand poets at least had made the same observation, that die sun rose from the sea, surrounded by jewels of light dancing on the water, and then settled down in red fire in the west, lost in the dust that was always blowing across the desert. But Nafai always thought that, at least where weather was concerned, the sun ought to. go the other way. It didn’t bring water from the ocean to the land-it brought dry fire from the desert toward the sea.
The vanguard of the market crowd was close enough now that they could hear the drivers and the donkeys. So they turned and started walking toward Basilica, sections of the redrock wall shining in the first rays of sunlight. Basilica, where the forested mountains of the north met the desert of the west and the garden seacoast of the east. How the poets had sung of this place: Basilica, the City of Women, the Harbor of Mists, Red-walled Garden of the Oversold, the haven where all the waters of the world come together to conceive new clouds, to pour out fresh water again over the earth.
Or, as Mebbekew put it, the best town in the world for getting laid.
The path between the Market Gate of Basilica and the Wetchik house on Ridge Road had never changed in all these years-Nafai knew when as much as a stone of it had been changed. But when Nafai turned thirteen, he had readied a turning point that changed the meaning of that road. At thirteen, even the most promising boys went to live with their fathers, leaving their schooling behind forever. The only ones who remained behind were the ones who meant to reject a man’s trade and become scholars. When Nafai was eight he had pleaded to live with his father, at thirteen he argued die other way. No, I haven’t decided to be a scholar, he said, but I also haven’t decided not to be. Why should I decide now?
Let me live with you, Father, if I must-but let me also stay at Mother’s school until things become clearer. You don’t need me in your work, the way you need Elemak. And I don’t want to be another Mebbekew.
So, though the path between Father’s house and the city was unchanged, Nafai now walked it in the other direction. The round trip now wasn’t from Rasa’s city house out into the country and back again; now it was a trek from Wetchik’s country house into the city. Even though he actually owned more possessions in the city- all his books, papers, tools, and toys-and often slept three or four of the eight nights of the week there, home was Father’s house now.
Which was inevitable. No man could call anything in Basilica truly his own; everything came as a gift from a woman. And even a man who, like Father, had every reason to feel secure with a mate of many years-even he could never truly be at home in Basilica, because of the lake. The deep rift valley in the heart of the city-the reason why the city existed at all-took half the space within Basilica’s walls, and no man could ever go there, no man could even walk into the surrounding forest far enough to catch a glimpse of the shining water. If it did shine. For all Nafai knew, the rift valley was so deep that sunlight never touched the waters of the lake of Basilica.
No place can ever be home if there is a place within it where you are forbidden to go. No man is ever truly a citizen of Basilica. And I am becoming a stranger in my mother’s house.
Elemak had spoken often, in years past, about cities where men owned everything, places where men had many wives and the wives had no choice about renewing their marriage contracts, and even one city where there was no marriage at all, but any man could take any woman and she was forbidden to refuse him unless she was already pregnant. Nafai wondered, though, if any of those stories was true. For why would women ever submit themselves to such treatment? Could it be that the women of Basilica were so much stronger than the women of any other place? Or were the men of this place weaker or more timid than the men of other cities?
Suddenly it became a question of great urgency. “Have you ever slept with a woman, Issya?”
Issib didn’t answer.
“I just wondered,” said Nafai.
Issib said nothing.
“I’m trying to figure put what’s so wonderful about the women of Basilica that a man like Elya keeps coming back here when he could live in one of those places where men have their way all the rime.”
Only now did Issib answer. “In the first place, Nafai, there is no place where men have their way all the time. There are places where men pretend to have their way and women pretend to let them, just as women here pretend to have their way and men pretend to let them.”
That was an interesting thought. It had never occurred to Nafai that perhaps things weren’t as one-sided and simple as they seemed. But Issib hadn’t finished, and Nafai wanted to hear the rest. “And in the second place?”
“In the second place, Nyef, Mother and Father did find an auntie for me several years ago and to be frank, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
That wasn’t what Nafai wanted to hear. “Meb seems to think it is.”
“Meb has no brain,” said Issib, “he simply goes wherever his most protuberant part leads him. Sometimes that means that he follows his nose, but usually not.”
“What was it like?”
“It was nice. She was very sweet. But I didn’t love her.” Issib seemed a bit sad about it. “I felt like it was something being done to me, instead of something we were doing together.”
“Was that because of ...”
“Because I’m a cripple? Partly, I suppose, though she did teach me how to give pleasure in return and said I did surprisingly well. You’ll probably enjoy it just like Meb.”
“I hope not.”
“Mother said that the best men don’t enjoy their auntie all that much, because the best men don’t want to receive their pleasure as a lesson, they want to be given it freely, out of love. But then she said that the worst men also don’t like their auntie, because they can’t stand having anyone but themselves be in control of things.”
“I don’t even want an auntie,” said Nafai.
“Well, that’s brilliant. How will you learn anything, then?”
“I want to learn it together with my mate.”
“You’re a romantic idiot,” said Issib.
“Nobody has to teach birds or lizards.”
“Nafai ab Wetchik mag Rasa, the famous lizard lover.”
“I once watched a pair of lizards go at it for a whole hour.”
“Learn any good techniques?”
“Sure. But you can only use them if you’re proportioned like a lizard.”
“Oh?”
“lt’s about half as long as their whole body.”
Issib laughed. “Imagine buying pants.”
“Imagine lacing your sandals!”
“You’d have to wrap it around your waist,”
“Or loop it over your shoulder.”
This conversation carried them through the market, where people were just starting to open their booths, expecting the immediate arrival of the fanners from the plain. Father maintained a couple of booths in the outer market, though none of the plains farmers had the money or the sophistication to want to buy a plant that took so much trouble to keep alive, and yet produced no worthwhile crop. The only sales in the outer market were to shoppers from Basilica itself, or, more rarely, to rich foreigners who browsed through the outer market on their way into or out of the city. With Father on a journey, it would be Rashgallivak supervising the set-up, and sure enough, there he was setting up a cold-plant display inside a chilled display table. They waved at him, though he only looked at them, not even nodding in recognition. That was Rash’s way-he would be there if they needed him in some crisis. At the moment, his job was setting out plants, and so that had all of his attention. There was no rush, though. The best sales would come in the late afternoon, when Basilicans were looking for impressive gifts to bring their mate or lover, or to help win the heart of someone they were courting.
Meb once joked that people never bought exotic plants for themselves, since they were nothing but trouble to keep alive-and they only bought them as gifts because they were so expensive. “They make the perfect gift because the plant is beautiful and impressive for exactly as long as the love affair lasts-usually about a week. Then the plant dies, unless the recipients keep paying us to come take care of it. Either way their feelings toward the plant always match their feelings toward the lover who gave it to them. Either constant annoyance because he’s still around, or distaste at the ugly dried-up memory. If a love is actually going to be permanent the lovers should buy a tree instead.” It was when Meb started talking this way with customers that Father had banned him from the booths. No doubt that was exactly what Meb had been hoping for.
Nafai understood the desire to avoid helping in the business. There was nothing fun in the slugwork of selling a bunch of temperamental plants.
If I end my studies, thought Nafai, I’ll have to work every day at one of these miserable jobs. And it’ll lead nowhere. When Father dies Elemak will become the Wetchik, and he would never let me lead a caravan of my own, which is the only interesting part of the work. I don’t want to spend my life in the hothouse or the dryhouse or the coldhouse, grafting and nurturing and propagating plants that will die almost as soon as they’re sold. There’s no greatness in that.
The outer market ended at the first gate, the vast doors standing open as they always did-Nafai wondered if they could even close anymore. It hardly mattered-this was always the most carefully guarded gate because it was the busiest. Everybody’s retinas were scanned and checked against the roster of citizens and rightholders. Issib and Nafai, as sons of citizens, were technically citizens themselves, even though they weren’t allowed to own property within the city, and when they came of age they’d be able to vote. So the guards treated them respectfully as they passed them through.
Between the outer gate and the inner gate, between the high red walls and protected by guards on every side, the city of Basilica conducted its most profitable business: the gold market. Actually, gold wasn’t even the majority of what was bought and sold here, though moneylenders were thick as ever. What was traded in the gold market was any form of wealth that was easily portable and therefore easily stolen. Jewels, gold, silver, platinum, databases, libraries, deeds of property, deeds of trust, certificates of stock ownership, and warrants of uncollectible debt: All were traded here, and every booth had its computer to report transactions to the city recorder- the city’s master computer. In fact, the constantly shifting holographic displays over all the computers caused a strange twinkling effect, so that no matter where you looked you always seemed to see motion out of the corner of your eye. Meb said that was why the lenders and vendors of the gold market were so sure someone was always spying on them.
No doubt most of the computers here had noticed Nafai and Issib as soon as their retinas were scanned at the gate, flashing their names, their status, and their financial standing into the computer display. Someday that would mean something, Nafai knew, but at the moment it meant nothing at all. Ever since Meb ran up huge debts last year when he turned eighteen, there was a tight restriction on all credit to the Wetchik family, and since credit was the only way Nafai was likely to get his hands on serious money, no one here would be interested in him. Father could probably have got all those restrictions removed, but since Father did all his business in cash, never borrowing, the restrictions did nothing to hurt him-and they kept Meb from borrowing any more. Nafai had listened to the whining and shouting and pouting and weeping that seemed to go on for months until Meb finally realized that Father was never going to relent and allow him financial independence. In recent months Meb had been fairly quiet about it. Now when he showed up in new clothes he always claimed they were borrowed from pitying friends, but Nafai was skeptical. Meb still spent money as if he had some, and since Nafai couldn’t imagine Meb actually working at anything, he could only conclude that Meb had found someone to borrow from against his anticipated share in the Wetchik estate.
That would be just like Meb-to borrow against Father’s anticipated death. But Father was still a vigorous and healthy man, only fifty years old. At some point
Meb’s creditors would get tired of waiting, and Meb would have to come to Father again, begging for help to free him from debt.
There was another retina check at the inner gate. Because they were citizens and the computers showed they not only hadn’t bought anything, but hadn’t even stopped at a booth, they didn’t have to have their bodies scanned for what was euphemistically called “unauthorized borrowing.” So in moments they passed through the gate into the city itself.
More specifically, they entered the inner market. It was almost as large as the original market, but there the resemblance ended, for instead of selling meat and food, bolts of cloth and reaches of lumber the inner market sold finished things: pastries and ices, spices and herbs; furniture and bedding, draperies and tapestries; fine-sewn shirts and trousers, sandals for the feet, gloves for the hands, and rings for toes and ears and fingers; and exotic trinkets and animals and plants, brought at great expense and risk from every corner of the world. Here was where Father offered his most precious plants, keeping his booths open day and night.
But none of these held any particular charm for Nafai-it was all the same to him, after passing through the market with little money for so many years. To him all that mattered were the many booths selling myachiks, the little glass balls that carried recordings of music, dance, sculpture, paintings; tragedies, comedies, and realities, recited as poems, acted out in plays, or sung in operas; and the works of historians, scientists, philosophers, orators, prophets, and satirists; lessons and demonstrations of every art or process ever thought of; and, of course, the great love songs for which Basilica was known throughout the world, combining music with wordless erotic plays that went on and on, repeating endlessly and randomly, like self-creating sculptures in the bedrooms and private gardens of every household in the city.
Of course, Nafai was too young to buy any love songs himself, but he had seen more than one when visiting in the homes of friends whose mothers or teachers were not as discreet as Rasa. They fascinated him, as much for the music and the implied story as for the eroticism. But he spent his time in the market searching for new works by Basilican poets, musicians, artists, and performers, or old ones that were just being revived, or strange works from other lands, either in translation or in the original. Father might have left his sons with little money, but Mother gave all her children-sons and nieces no more or less than mere pupils-a decent allowance for the purchase of myachiks.
Nafai found himself wandering toward a booth where a young man was singing in an exquisitely high and sweet tenor voice; the melody sounded like it might be a new one by the composer who called herself Sunrise-or at least one of her better imitators.
“No,” said Issib. “You can come back this afternoon.”
“You can go ahead,” said Nafai.
“We’re already late,” said Issib.
“So I might as well be later,”
“Grow up, Nafai,” said Issib. “Every lesson you miss is one that either you or the teacher will have to make up later.”
“I’ll never learn everything anyway,” said Nafai. “I want to hear the song.”
“Then listen while you’re walking. Or can’t you walk and listen at the same time?”
Nafai let himself be led out of the market. The song faded quickly, lost in music from other booths, and the chatter and conversation of the market. Unlike the outer market, the inner market didn’t wait for farmers from the plain, and so it never closed; half the people here, Nafai was sure, had not slept the night before, and were buying pastries and tea as their morning supper before going home to bed. Meb might well be one of them. And for a moment, Nafai envied him the freedom of his life. If I am ever a great historian or scientist, will I have freedom like that? To rise in the mid-afternoon, do my writing until dusk, and then venture out into the Basilican night to see the dances and plays, to hear the concerts, or perhaps to recite passages of the work I did myself that day before a discerning audience that will leave my recitation abuzz with discussion and argument and praise and criticism of my work-how could Elemak’s dirty, wearying journeys ever compare with such a life as that? And then to return at dawn to Eiadh’s house, and make love to her as we whisper and laugh about the night’s adventures and triumphs.
Only a few things were lacking to make the dream reality. For one thing, Eiadh didn’t have a house yet, and though she was gaining some small reputation as a singer and reciter, it was clear that her career would not be one of the dazzlingly brilliant ones; she was no prodigy, and so her house would no doubt be a modest one for many years. No matter, I will help her buy a finer one than she could afford on her own, even though when a man helps a woman buy property in Basilica the money can only be given as a gift. Eiadh is too loyal a woman ever to lapse my contract and close me out of the house I helped her buy.
The only other thing lacking in the dream was that Nafai had never actually written anything that was particularly good. Of course, that was only because he had not yet chosen his field, and therefore he was still testing himself, still dabbling a little in all of them. He’d settle on one very soon, there’d be one in which he would show himself to have a flair, and then there’d be myachiks of his works in the booths of the inner market.
The Holy Road was having some kind of procession down into the Rift Valley, and so-as men-they had to go all the way around it; even so, they were soon enough at Mother’s house. Issib immediately left him, floating his way around to the outside stairway leading up into the computer room, where he was spending all his time these days. The next younger class was already in session out on the south curve of the pillared porch, catching the sunlight slanting in. They were doing devotions, the boys slapping themselves sharply now and then, the girls humming softly to themselves. His own class would be,. doing the same thing inside somewhere, and Nafai was in no hurry to join them, since it was considered vaguely impious to make a disturbance during a devotion.
So he walked slowly, skirting the younger class on the porch, pausing to lean on a pillar out of sight as he listened to the comfortable music of small girlish voices humming randomly, yet finding momentary chords that were lost in the moment they were discovered; and the staccato, broken rhythms of boys slapping their trousered legs, their shifted arms and chests, their bare cheeks.
As he stood there, a girl from the class suddenly appeared beside him. He knew her from gymnasium, of course. It was the witchling named Luet, who was rumored to have such remarkable visions that some of the ladies of the Shelf were already calling her a seer. Nafai didn’t put much stock in such qjagical stories-the Oversoul couldn’t know the future any more than a human being could, and as far as visions were concerned, people only remembered the ones that by sheer luck happened to match reality at some point.
“You’re the one who’s covered with fire,” she said.
What was she talking about? How was he supposed to answer this kind of thing?
“No, I’m Nafai,” he said.
“Not really fire. Little diamond sparks that turn to lightning when you’re angry.”
“I’ve got to go in.”
She touched his sleeve; it held him as surely as if she had gripped his arm. “She’ll never mate with you, you know.”
“Who?”
“Eiadh. She’ll offer, but you’ll refuse her.”
This was humiliating. How did this girl, probably only twelve, and from her size and shape definitely not a young woman yet, know anything about his feelings toward Eiadh? Was his love that obvious to everyone? Well, fine, so be it-he had nothing to hide. There was only honor in being known to love such a woman. And as for this girl being a seer, it wasn’t too likely, not if she said that Eiadh would actually offer herself to him and he would turn her down! I’m more likely to bite my own finger off than to refuse take the most perfect woman in Basilica as my mate.
“Excuse me,” Nafai said, pulling his arm away. He didn’t like this girl touching him anyway. They said that her mother was a wilder, one of those filthy naked solitary women who came into Basilica from the desert; supposedly they were holy women, but Nafai well knew that they also would sleep with any man who asked, right on the streets of the city, and it was permissible for any man to take one, even when he was in a contract with a mate. Decent and highborn men didn’t do it, of course- even Meb had never bragged about “desert worship” or going on a “dust party,” as couplings with wilders were crudely called. Nafai saw nothing holy in the whole business, and as far as he was concerned, this Luet was a bastard, conceived by a madwoman and a bestial man in a coupling that was closer to rape than love. There was no chance that the Oversoul really had anything to do with theft.
“You’rethe bastard,” said the girl Then she walked away. The others had finished their devotions-or perhaps had stopped them in order to listen to what Luet was saying to him. Which meant that the story would be spread all over the house by dinnertime and all over Basilica before supper and no doubt Issib would tease him about it all the way home and then Elemak and Mebbekew would never let him forget it and he wished that the women of Basilica would keep crazy people like Luet under lock and key instead of taking their stupid nonsense seriously all the time.
When he got inside he headed for the fountain room, where his class would be meeting all through the autumn. From the kitchen he could smell the preparations for dinner, and with a pang he remembered that, what with his argument with Elemak, he had completely forgotten to eat. Until this moment he hadn’t felt even the tiniest bit hungry; but now that he realized it, he was completely famished. In fact, he felt just a little lightheaded. He should sit down. The fountain room was only a few steps away; surely they would understand why he was late if he arrived not feeling well. No one could be angry at him. No one could think he was a lazy slackwit if he was sick. They didn’t have to know that he was sick with hunger.
He shuffled miserably into the room, playing his faintness to the hilt, leaning against a wall for a moment as he passed. He could feel their eyes on him, but he didn’t look; he had a vague idea that genuinely sick people didn’t easily meet other people’s gaze. He half-expected the teacher of the day to speak up. What’s wrong, Nafai? Aren’t you well?
Instead there was silence until he had slid down the wall, folding himself into a sitting position on the wooden floor.
“We’ll send out for a burial party, Nafai, in case you suddenly die.”
Oh, no! It wasn’t a teacher at all, one of the easily fooled young women who were so very impressed that Nafai was Rasa’s own son. It was Mother here today. He looked up and met her gaze. She was smiling wickedly at him, not fooled a bit by his sick act.
“I was waiting for you. Issib is already on my portico, He didn’t mention that you were dying, but I’m sure it was an oversight.”
There was nothing left but to take it with good humor. Nafai sighed and got to his feet. “You know, Mother, that your unwillingness to suspend your disbelief will set back my acting career by several years.”
“That’s all right, Nafai, dear. Your acting career would set back Basilican theatre by centuries,”
The other students laughed. Nafai grinned-but he also scanned the group to see who was enjoying it most. There was Eiadh, sitting near the fountain, where a few tiny drops of water had caught in her hair and were now reflecting light like jewels. She wasn’t laughing at him. Instead she smiled beautifully, and winked. He grinned back-like a foolish clown, he was sure-and nearly tripped on the step leading up to the doorway to the back corridor. There was more laughter, of course, and so Nafai turned and took a deep bow. Then he walked away with dignity, deliberately running into the doorframe to earn another laugh before he finally made it out of the room.
“What’s this about?” he asked Mother, hurrying to catch up with her.
“Family business,” she said.
Then they passed through the doorway leading to Mother’s private portico. They would stay, as always, in the screened-off area near the door; beyond the screen, out near the balustrade, the portico offered a beautiful view of the Rift Valley, so it was completely forbidden for men to go there. Such proscriptions in private houses were often ignored-Nafai knew several boys who talked about the Rift Valley, asserting that it was nothing special, just a steep craggy slope covered with trees and vines with a bunch of mist or clouds or fog blocking any view of the middle where, presumably, the sacred lake was located. But in Mother’s house, decent respect was always shown, and Nafai was sure that even Father had never passed beyond the screen.
Once he was through with blinking, coming out into bright sunlight, Nafai was able to see who else was on the portico. Issib, of course; but to Nafai’s surprise, Father himself was there, home from his journey. Why had he come to Rasa’s house in the city, instead of going home first?
Father stood to greet him with an embrace.
“Elemak’s at home, Father.”
“So Issya informed me.”
Father seemed very serious, very distant. He had something on his mind. It couldn’t be anything good.
“Now that Nafai is finally here,” said Mother, “we can perhaps make some sense out of all this.”
Only now, as he seated himself in the best shade that wasn’t already taken, did Nafai realize that there were two girls with them. At first glance, in the dazzling sunlight, he had assumed they were his sisters, Rasa’s daughters Sevet and Kokor-in that context, an assembly of Rasa and her children, Father’s presence was surprising, since he was father only to Issib and Nafai, not to the girls. But instead of Sevet and Kokor, it was two girls from the school-Hushidh, another of mother’s nieces, the same age as Eiadh; and that witchling girl from the front porch, Luet. He looked at her in consternation- how had she got here so quickly? Not that he’d been hurrying. Mother must have sent for her even before she knew that Nafai had arrived.
What were Luet and Hushidh doing in a conference about family business?
“My dear mate Wetchik has something to tell us. We’re hoping that you can-well, at least that Luet or Hushidh might-”
“Why don’t I simply begin?” said Father.
Mother smiled and raised her hands in a graceful, elegant shrug.
“I saw something disturbing this morning,” Father began. “Just before morning, actually. I was on my way home on the Desert Road-I was out on the desert, yesterday, to ponder and consult with myself and the Oversoul-when suddenly there came upon me a strong desire-a need, really-to leave the trail, even though that’s a foolish thing to do in that dark time between moonset and sunrise. I didn’t go far. I only had to move around a large rock, and it became quite clear to me why I had been led to that spot. For there in front of me I saw Basilica. But not the Basilica I would have expected, dotted with the lights of celebration in Dolltown or the inner market. What I saw was Basilica ablaze.”
“On fire ?” asked Issib.
“A vision, of course. I didn’t know that at first, mind you-I lunged forward; I was intending to rush to the city-to rush here and see if you were all right, my dear-”
“As I would certainly expect you to do,” said Mother.
“When the city disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Only the fire remained, rising up to form a pillar on the rock in front of me. It stood there for the longest time, a column of flame. And it was hot-as hot as if it had been real. I felt it singeing me, though of course there’s not a mark on my clothing. And then the pillar of flame rose up into the sky, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it became a star moving across the sky, and then disappeared entirely.”
“You were tired, Father,” said Issib.
“I’ve been tired many times,” said Father, “but I have never seen pillars of flame before. Or burning cities.”
Mother spoke up again. “Your father came to me, Issya, because he hoped that I might help him understand the meaning of this. If it came from the Oversold, or if it was just a mad sort of waking dream.”
“I vote for the dream,” said Issib.
“Even madness can come from the Oversoul,” said Hushidh.
Everyone looked at her. She was a rather plainish girl, always quiet in class. Now that Nafai saw her and Luet side by side, he realized that they resembled each other closely. Were they sisters? More to the point, what was Hushidh doing here, and by what right did she speak out about family matters?
“It can come from the Oversoul,” said Father. “But did it? And if it did, what does it mean?”
Nafai could see that Father was directing those questions, not at Rasa or even at Hushidh, but at Luet! He couldn’t possibly believe what the women said about her, could he? Did a single vision turn a rational man of business into a superstitious pilgrim trying to find meanings in everything he saw?
“I can’t tell you what your dream means,” said Luet.
“Oh,” said Father. “Not that I actually thought-”
“I f the Oversoul sent the dream, and if she meant you to understand it, then she also sent the interpretation.”
“There was no interpretation.”
“Wasn’t there?” asked Luet. “This is the first time you’ve had a dream like this, isn’t it?”
“Definitely. This isn’t a habit of mine, to sec visions as I’m walking along the road at night.”
“So you aren’t used to recognizing the meanings that come along with a vision.”
“I suppose not.”
“Yet you were receiving messages.”
“Was I?”
“Before you saw the flame, you knew that you were supposed to turn away from the road.”
“Yes, well, that.”
“What do you think the voice of the Oversoul sounds like? Do you think she speaks Basyat or puts up signposts?”
Luet sounded vaguely scornful-an outrageous tone of voice for her to adopt with a man of Wetchik’s status in the city. Yet he seemed to take no offense, accepting her rebuke as if she had a right to chastise him.
“The Oversoul puts the knowledge pure into our minds, unmixed with any human language,” she said. “We are always given more than we can possibly comprehend, and we can comprehend far more than we’re able to put into words.”
Luet had a voice of such simple power. Not like the chanting sound that the witches and prophets of the inner market used when they were trying to attract business. She spoke as if she knew, as if there was no possibility of doubt.
“Let me ask you, then, sir. When you saw the city on fire, how did you know it was Basilica?”
“I’ve seen it a thousand times, from just that angle, coming in from the desert.”
“But did you see the shape of the city and recognize it from that, or did you know first that it was Basilica on fire, and then your mind called forth the picture of the city that was already in your memory?”
“I don’t know-how can I know that?”
“Think back. Was the knowledge there before the vision, or was the vision first?”
Instead of telling the girl to go away, Father dosed his eyes and tried to remember.
“When you put it that way, I think-I knew it before I actually looked in that direction. I don’t think I actually saw it until I was lunging toward it. I saw the flame , but not the burning city inside it. And now that you ask, I also knew that Rasa and my children were in terrible danger. I knew that first of all, as I was founding the rock-that was part of the sense of urgency. I knew that if I left the trail and came to that exact spot, I’d be able to save them from the danger. It was only then that it came to mind what the danger was, and then last of all that I saw the flame and the city inside it.”
“This is a true vision,” said Luet.
Just from that? She knew just from the order of things? She probably would have said the same thing no matter what Father remembered. And maybe Father was only remembering it that way because Luet had suggested it that way. This was making Nafai furious, for Father to be nodding in acceptance when this twelve-year-old girl condescendingly treated him like an apprentice in a profession in which she was a widely respected master.
“But it wasn’t true,” said Father. “When I got here, there was no danger.”
“No, I didn’t think so,” said Luet. “Back when you first felt that your mate and your children were in danger, what did you expect to do about it?”
“I was going to save them, of course.”
“Specifically how ?”
Again he closed his eyes. “Not to pull them from a burning building. That never occurred to me until later, as I was walking the rest of the way into the city. At the moment I wanted to shout out that the city was burning, that we had to-”
“What?”
“I was going to say, we had to get out of the city. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say at first. When it started, I felt like I had to come to the city and tell everybody that there was a fire coming.”
“And they had to get out?”
“I guess,” said Father. “Of course, what else?”
Luet said nothing, but her gaze never left his face.
“No,” Father said. “No, that wasn’t it.” Father sounded surprised. “I wasn’t going to warn them to get out.”
Luet leaned forward, looking somehow more intense, not so-analytical. “Sir, just a moment ago, when you were saying that you had wanted to warn them to get out of the city-”
“But that wasn’t what I was going to do.”
“But when you thought for a moment that-when you assumed that you were going to tell them to get out of the city-what did that feel like? When you told us that, why did you know that it was wrong?”
“I don’t know. It just felt . . . wrong?
“This is very important,” said Luet. “How does feeling wrong feel ?”
Again he closed his eyes. “I’m not used to thinking about how I think. And now I’m trying to remember how it felt when I thought I remembered something that I didn’t actually remember-”
“Don’t talk,” said Luet.
He fell silent.
Nafai wanted to yell at somebody. What were they doing, listening to this ugly stupid little girl, letting her tell Father-the Wetchik himself, in case nobody remembered-to keep his mouth shut!
But everybody else was so intense that Nafai kept his own mouth shut. Issib would be so proud of him for actually refraining from saying something that he had thought of.
“What I felt,” said Father, “was nothing.” He nodded slowly. “Right after you asked the question and I answered it-. Of course, what else-then you sat there looking at me and I had nothing in my head at all.”
“Stupid,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. To Nafai’s relief, he was finally noticing how disrespectfully Luet was speaking to him.
“You felt stupid,” she said. “And so you knew that what you’d just said was wrong.”
He nodded. “Yes, I guess that’s it.”
“What’s all this about?” said Issib. “Analyzing your analysis of analyses of a completely subjective hallucination?”
Good work, Issya, said Nafai silently. You took the words right out of my mouth.
“I mean, you can play these games all morning, but you’re just laying meanings on top of a meaningless experience. Dreams are nothing more than random firings of memories, which your brain then interprets so as to invent causal connections, which makes stories out of nothing”
Father looked at Issib for a long moment, then shook his head. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “Even though I was wide awake and I’ve never had a hallucination before, it was nothing more than a random firing of synapses in my brain.”
Nafai knew, as Issib and Mother certainly knew, that Father was being ironic, that he was telling Issib that his vision of the fire on the rock was more than a meaningless night dream. But Luet didn’t know Father, so she thought he was backing away from mysticism and retreating into reality.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “It was a true vision, because it came to you the right way. The understanding came before the vision-that’s why I was asking those questions. The meaning is there and then your brain supplies the pictures that let you understand it. That’s the way the Oversoul talks to us.”
“Talks to crazy people, you mean,” Nafai said.
He regretted it immediately, but by then it was too late.
‘‘Crazy people like met” said Father.
“And I assure you that Luet is at least as sane as you are,” Mother added.
Issib couldn’t pass up the chance to cast a verbal dart. “As sane as Nyef? Then she’s in deep trouble.”
Father shut down Issib’s teasing immediately. “You were saying the same thing yourself only a minute ago.”
“I wasn’t calling people crazy,” said Issib.
“No, you didn’t have Nafai’s-what shall we call it?- pointed eloquence?
Nafai knew he could save himself now by shutting up and letting Issib deflect the heat. But he was committed to skepticism, and self-control wasn’t his strong suit. “This girl,” said Nafai. “Don’t you see how she was leading you on, Father? She asks you a question, but she doesn’t tell you beforehand what the answer will mean-so no matter what you answer, she can say, That’s it, it’s a true vision, definitely the Oversoul talking.”
Father didn’t have an immediate answer. Nafai glanced at Luet, feeling triumphant, wanting to see her squirm. But she wasn’t squirming. She was looking at him very calmly. The intensity had drained out of her and now she was simply-calm. It bothered him, the steadiness of her gaze. “What are you looking at?” he demanded.
“A fool,” she answered.
Nafai jumped to his feet. “I don’t have to listen to you calling me a-”
“Sit down!” roared Father.
Nafai sat, seething.
“She just listened to you calling her a fraud,” said Father. “I appreciate how both of my sons are doing exactly what I wanted you here to do-providing a skeptical audience for my story. You analyzed the process very cleverly and your version of things accounts for everything you know about it, just as neatly as Luet’s version does.”
Nafai was ready to help him draw the correct conclusion. “Then the rule of simplicity requires you to-”
“The rule of your father requires you to hold your tongue, Nafai. What you’re both forgetting is that there’s a fundamental difference between you and me.”
Father leaned toward Nafai.
“I saw the fire.”
He leaned back again.
“Luet didn’t tell me what to think or feel at the time. And her questions helped me remember-helped me remember-the way it really happened. Instead of the way I was already changing it to fit my preconceptions. She knew that it would be strange-in exactly the ways that it was strange. Of course, I can’t convince you.”
“No,” said Nafai. “You can only convince yourself.”
“In the end, Nafai, oneself is the only person anyone can convince.”
The battle was lost if Father was already making up aphorisms. Nafai sat back to wait for it all to end. He took consolation from the fact that it had been, after all, merely a dream. It’s not as if it was going to change his life or anything.
Father wasn’t done yet. “Do you know what I actually wanted to do, when I felt such urgency to get to the city? I wanted to warn people-to follow the old ways, to go back to the laws of the Oversold, or this place would burn.”
“What place?” asked Luet, her intensity back again.
“This place. Basilica. The city. That’s what I saw burning.”
Again Father fell silent, looking into her burning eyes.
“Not the city,” he said at last. “The city was only the picture that my mind supplied, wasn’t it? Not the city. The whole world. All of Harmony, burning.”
Rasa gasped. “Earth,” she whispered.
“Oh, please,” Nafai said. So Mother was going to connect Father’s vision with that old story about the home planet that was burned by the Oversoul to punish humanity for whatever nastiness the current storyteller wanted to preach against. The all-purpose coercive myth: If you don’t do what I say-I mean, what the Oversoul says-then the whole world will burn.
“I haven’t seen the fire itself,” said Luet, ignoring Nafai. “Maybe I’m not even seeing the same thing.”
“What have you seen?” asked Father. Nafai cringed at how respectful he was being toward this girl.
“I saw the Deep Lake of Basilica, crusted over with blood and ashes.”
Nafai waited for her to finish. But she just sat there.
“That’s it? That’s all?” Nafai stood up, preparing to walk out. “This is great, hearing the two of you compare visions. I saw a city on fire. Well, I saw a scum-covered lake.”
Luet stood up and faced him. No, faced him down- which was ridiculous, since he was almost half a meter taller than her.
“You’re only arguing against me,” she said hotly, “because you don’t want to believe what I told you about Eiadh.”
That’s ridiculous,” said Nafai.
“You had a vision about Eiadh?” asked Rasa.
“What does Eiadh have to do with Nyeft” asked Issib.
Nafai hated her for mentioning it again, in front of his family, “You can make up whatever you want about other people, but you’d better leave me out of it.”
“Enough,” said Father. “We’re done,”
Rasa looked at him in surprise. “Are you dismissing me in my own house?”
“I’m dismissing my sons.”
“You have authority over your sons, of course.” Mother was smiling, but Nafai knew from her soft speech that she was seriously annoyed. “However, I see no one here in my house but my students.”
Father nodded, accepting the rebuke, then stood to leave. “Then I’m dismissing myself-I may do that, I hope.”
“You may always leave, my adored mate, as long as you promise to come back to me.”
His answer was to kiss her cheek.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
‘What the Oversoul told me to do.”
“And what is fire?”
“Warn people to return to the laws of the Oversoul or the world will burn.”
Issib was appalled. “That’s crazy, Father!”
“I’m tired of hearing that word from the lips of my sons.”
“But-prophets of the Oversoul don’t say things like that. They’re like poets, except all their metaphors have some moral lesson or they celebrate the Oversoul or-”
“Issya,” said Wetchik, “all my life I’ve listened to these so-called prophecies-and the psalms and the histories and the temple priests-and I’ve always thought, if this is all the Oversoul has to say, why should I bother to listen? Why should the Oversoul even bother speaking, if this is all that’s on his mind?”
“Then why did you teach us to speak to the Oversoul?” asked Issib.
“Because I believed in the ancient laws. And I did speak to the Oversoul myself, though more as a way of clarifying my own thoughts than because I actually thought that he was listening. Then last night-this morning-I had an experience that I never conceived of. I never wished for it. I didn’t even know what it was until now, these last few minutes, talking to Luet. Now I know-what it feels like to have the Oversoul’s voice inside you. Nothing like these poets and dreamers and deceivers, who write down whatever pops into their heads and then sell it as prophecy. What was in me was not myself, and Luet has shown me that she’s had the same voice inside her. It means that the Oversoul is real and alive.”
“So maybe it’s real,” said Issib. “That doesn’t tell us what it w.”
“It’s the guardian of the world,” said Wetchik. “He asked me to help. Told me to help. And I will.”
“That’s all temple stuff,” said Issib. “You don’t know anything about it. You grow exotic plants.”
Father dismissed Issib’s objections with a gesture.
“Anything the Oversoul needs me to know, he’ll tell me.” Then he headed for the door into the house.
Nafai followed him, only a few steps. “Father,” he said.
Father waited.
The trouble was, Nafai didn’t know what he was going to say. Only that he had to say it. That there was a very important question whose answer he had to have before Father left. He just didn’t know what the question was.
“Father,” he said again.
“Yes?”
And because Nafai couldn’t think of the real question, the deep one, the important one, he asked the only question that came to mind. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Keep the old ways of the Oversoul,” said Father.
“What does that mean?”
“Or the world will burn.” And Father was gone.
Nafai looked at the empty door for a while. It didn’t do anything, so he turned back to the others. They were all looking at him, as if they expected him to do something.
“What!”he demanded.
“Nothing,” said Mother. She arose from her seat in the shade of the kaplya tree. “We’ll all return to our work.”
“That’s all?” said Issib. “Our father-your mate-has just told us that the Oversoul is speaking to him, and we’re supposed to go back to our studies?”
“You really don’t understand, do you?” said Mother. “You’ve lived all these years as my sons, as my students, and you are still nothing more than the ordinary boys wandering the streets of Basilica hoping to find a willing woman and a bed for the night.”
“What don’t we understand here?” asked Nafai, “Just because you women all take this witchgirl so seriously doesn’t mean that-”
“I have been down into the water myself,” said Mother, her voice like metal. “You men can pretend to yourselves that the Oversoul is distracted or sleeping, or just a machine that collects our transmissions and sends them to libraries in distant cities. Whatever theory you happen to believe, it miakes no difference to the truth. For I know, as most of the women in this city know, that the Oversoul is very much alive. At least as the keeper of the memories of this world, she is alive. We all receive those memories when we go into the water. Sometime;’ they seem random, sometimes we are given exactly the memory we needed. The Oversoul keeps the history of the world, as it was seen through other people’s eyes. Only a few of us-like Luet and Hushidh-are given wisdom away from the water, and even fewer are given visions of real things that haven’t happened yet. Since the great Izumina died, Luet is the only seer I know of in Basilica-so yes, we take her very, very seriously.”
Women go down into the water and receive visions? This was the first time Nafai had ever heard a woman describe any part of the worship at the lake. He had always assumed that the women’s worship was like the men’s-physical, ascetic, painful, a dispassionate way of discharging emotion. Instead they were all mystics. What seemed like legends or madness to men was at the center of a woman’s life. Nafai felt as though he had discovered that women were of another species after all. The question was, which of them, men or women, were the humans? The rational but brutal men? Or the irrational but gentle women?
“There’s only one thing rarer than a girl like Luet,” Mother was saying, “and that’s a man who hears the voice of the Oversoul. We know now that your father does hear-Luet confirmed that for me. I don’t know what the Oversoul wants, or why she spoke to your father, but I am wise enough to know that it matters.”
As she passed Nafai, she reached up and caught his ear firmly, though not painfully, between her fingers. “As for the mythical burning of Earth, my dear boy, I’ve seen it myself. It happened. I can only guess how long ago-we estimate there’s been at least thirty million years of human history on this world we named Harmony. But I saw the missiles fly, the bombs explode, and the world erupt in flame. The smoke filled the sky and blocked the sun, and underneath that blanket of darkness the oceans froze and the world was covered in ice and only a few human beings survived, to rise up out of the blackness as the world died, carrying their hopes and their regrets and their genes to other planets, hoping to start again. They did. We’re here. Now the Oversoul has warned your father that our new start can lead to the same ending as before.”
Nafai had seen Mother’s public face-playful, brilliant, analytical, gracious-and he had seen her family face- frank of speech yet always kind, quick to anger yet quicker to forgive. Always he had assumed that the way she was with the family was her true self, with nothing held back. Instead, behind the faces that he thought he knew, she had kept this secret all the time, her bitter vision of the end of Earth. “You never told us about this,” whispered Nafai.
“I most certainly told you about it,” said Rasa. “It’s not my fault that when you heard it, you thought I was telling you a myth.” She let go of his ear and returned to the house.
Issib floated past him, mumbling something about waking up one morning to find that you’ve been living in a madhouse all your life. Hushidh went past him also, not meeting his gaze; he could imagine the gossip that she would spread in his class all the rest of the day.
He was alone with Luet.
“I shouldn’t have spoken to you before,” she said.
“And you shouldn’t speak to me again, either,” suggested Nafai.
“Some people hear a lie when they’re told the truth. You’re so proud of your status as the son of Rasa and Wetchik, but obviously whatever genes you got from your parents, they weren’t the right ones.”
“While I’m sure you got the finest your parents lad to offer.”
She looked at him with obvious contempt, and then she was gone.
“What a wonderful day this is going to be,” he said-to no one, since he was alone. “My entire family hates me.” He thought for a moment. “I’m not even sure that I want them to like me.”
For one dangerous moment, alone on the portico, he toyed with the idea of slipping past the screens and going to the edge, leaning out, and looking at the forbidden sight of the Valley of the Holy Women, casually referred to as the Rift Valley, and more crudely known as the Canyon of the Crones. I’ll see it and I bet I don’t even get struck blind.
But he didn’t do it, even though he stood there thinking about it for a long time. It seemed that every rime he was about to take a step toward the edge, his mind suddenly wandered and he hesitated, confiised, forgetting for a moment what it was he wanted to do. Finally he lost interest and went back inside the house.
He should have gone back to class-it’s what he expected to do when he went inside. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he wandered to the front door and out onto the porch, into the streets of Basilica. Mother would probably be furious at him but that was too bad.
He must have been seeing where he was going, since he didn’t bump into anything, but he had no memory of what he saw or where he had been. He ended up in the Fountains district, not far from the neighborhood of Rasa’s house; and in his mind, he had circled through the same thoughts over and over again, finally ending up not very far from where he started.
One thing he knew, though: He couldn’t dismiss this all as madness. Father was not crazy, however new and strange he might seem; and as for Mother, if her vision of the burning of Earth was madness, then she had been mad since before he was born. So there was something that put ideas and desires and visions into his parents’ minds-and into Luet’s, too, couldn’t forget her. People called this something the Oversoul, but that was just a name, a label. What was it? What did it want? What could it actually dot If it could talk to some people, why didn’t it just talk to everybody?
Nafai stopped across a fairly wide street from what might be the largest house in Basilica. He knew it well enough, since the head of the Palwashantu clan was mated with the woman who lived there. Nafai couldn’t remember her name-she was nobody, everyone knew she had bought the ancient house with her mate’s money, and if she didn’t renew his contract then even with the house she’d be nobody-but he was Gaballufix. There was a family connection-his mother was Hosni, who later on became Wetchik’s auntie and the mother of Ekmak. Between that blood connection and the fact that Father was perhaps the second most prestigious Palwashantu clansman in Basilica, they had visited this house at least once, usually two or three times a year since as long ago as Nafai could remember.
As he stood there, stupidly watching the front of that landmark building, he suddenly came alert, for without meaning to he had recognized someone moving along the street. Elemak should have been home sleeping-he had traveled all night, hadn’t he? Yet here he was, in mid-afternoon. For a panicked moment Nafai wondered if Elya was looking for him- was it possible that Mother had missed him and worried and now the whole family, perhaps even Father’s employees as well, were combing the city looking for him?
But no. Elemak wasn’t looking for anybody. He was moving too casually, too easily. Looking in no particular direction at all.
And then he was gone.
No, he had turned down into the gap between Cabal-Infix’s house and the building next door. So he did have a destination.
Nafai had to know what Elemak was doiog. He trotted along the street to where he had a clear view down the narrow road. He got there in time to see Elemak ducking into a low alky doorway into Gaballufix’s house.
Nafai couldn’t imagine what business Elya might have with Gaballufix-especially something so urgent that he had to go to his house the same day he got back from a long trip. True, Gaballufix was technically Elya’s half-brother, but there were sixteen years between them and Gaballufix had never openly recognized Elya as his brother. That didn’t mean, though, that they couldn’t start behaving more like close kinsmen now. Still, it bothered Nafai that Elemak had never mentioned it and seemed to be concealing it now.
Whether the question bothered him or not, Nafai knew that it would be a very bad idea to ask Elemak about it directly. When Elya wanted anybody to know what he was doing with Gaballufix, he’d tell them. In the meantime, the secret would be safe inside Elya’s head.
A secret inside somebody’s head.
Luet had known that Nafai was in love with Eiadh.
Well, it wasn’t all that secret-Luet might have guessed it from the way that he looked at her. But there on the front porch of Mother’s house, Luet had said, “Tou’re the bastard,” as if she were answering him for calling her a bastard. Only he hadn’t said anything. He had only thought of her as a bastard. It wasn’t an opinion he had expressed before. He had only thought of it at that moment, because he was annoyed with Luet. Yet she had known.
Was that the Oversoul, too? Not just putting ideas into people’s heads, but also taking them out and telling them to other people? The Oversoul wasn’t just a provider of strange dreams-it was a spy and a gossip as well.
It made Nafai afraid, to think that not only was the Oversoul real, but also that it had the power to read his most secret, transitory thoughts and tell them to someone else. And to someone as repulsive as the little bastard witchgirl, no less.
It frightened him like the first time he went out into the sea by himself. Father had taken them all on a holiday, down to the beach. The first afternoon there, they had all gone out into the sea together, and surrounded by his father and brothers-except Issib, of course, who watched them from his chair on the beach-he had felt the sea play with him, the waves shoving him toward shore, then trying to draw him out again. It was fun, exhilarating. He even dared to swim out to where his feet couldn’t quite touch the bottom, all the while playing with Meb and Elya and Father. A good day, a great day, when his older brothers still liked him. But the next morning he got up-early, left the tent and went out to the water alone. He could swim like a fish; he was in no danger. And yet as he walked out into the water he felt an inexplicable unease. The water tugging at him, pushing him; he was only a few meters from shore, and yet with no one else in the water, all by himself, he felt as if he had lost his place, as if he had already been washed out to sea, as if he were caught in the grasp of something so huge that any part of it could swallow him up. He panicked then. He ran to shore, struggling against the water, convinced that it would never let him go, dragging at him, sucking him down. And then he was on the sand, on the dry sand above the tide line, and he fell to his knees and wept because he was safe.
But for those few moments out in the water he had felt the terror of knowing how small and helpless he was, how much power there was in the world, and how easily it could do to him whatever it wanted and there was nothing he could do to resist it.
That was the fear he felt now. Not so strong, not so specific as it had been that day on the beach-but then, he wasn’t a five-year-old anymore, either, and he was better at dealing with fear. The Oversoul wasn’t an old legend, it was alive, and it could force visions into his own parents’ minds and it could search out secrets inside Nafai’s head and tell them to other people, to people that Nafai didn’t like and who didn’t like him.
The worst thing was knowing that the reason why Luet didn’t like him was probably became of what the Oversoul had told her about his thoughts. His most private thoughts exposed to this unsympathetic little monster. What next? Would Father’s next vision be Nafai’s fantasies about Eiadh? Worse yet, would Mother be shown?
On the beach, he had been able to run for shore. Where did you run to get away from the Oversoul?
You didn’t. You couldn’t hide, either-how could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn’t know what you were thinking?
The only choice he had was to try to find out what the Oversoul was, to try to understand what it wanted, what it was trying to do to his family, to him. He had to understand the Oversoul and, if possible, get it to leave him alone.
There would be no point in going back to Mother’s house so late in the school day. Explaining himself would probably take up what little time was left. Making excuses could wait until tomorrow.
Or maybe Nafai would never go back. There was a thought. After all, Mebbekew didn’t go to school. In fact he didn’t do anything, didn’t even come home if he decided not to.
When had that started? Was Meb already doing that sort of thing at fourteen? Well, whether he was or not, Nafai could start now and who was going to stop him? He was as tall as any man, and he was old enough for a man’s trade. Not Father’s trade, though-never the plant business. If you followed that trade long enough, you started seeing visions in the dark beside desert roads.
But there were other trades. Maybe Nafai could apprentice himself to some artist. A poet, or a singer- Nafai’s voice was young, but he could follow a tune, and with training maybe he could actually become good. Or maybe he was really a dancer, or an actor, in spite of Mother’s joke this morning. Those arts had nothing to do with going to school-if he was supposed to pursue one, then staying on with Mother was a waste of time.
That notion possessed him through the afternoon, carrying him south at first, toward the inner market, where there would be songs and poems to hear, perhaps some fine new myachik to buy and listen to at home. Of course, if he stopped attending school, Mother would no doubt cut off his myachik allowance. But as an apprentice there’d probably be some spending money, and if not, so what? He’d be doing a real art himself, in the flesh. Soon he would no longer even want recordings of art on little glass balls.
By the time he reached the inner market, he had talked himself into having no interest in recordings, now that he was going to be making a career out of creating the real thing. He headed east, through the neighborhoods called Pens and Gardens and Olive Grove, a few narrow streets of houses between the city wall and the rim of the valley where men could not go. At last he came to the place that was narrowest of all, a single street with a high white wall behind the houses, so that a man standing on the red wall of the city couldn’t see over the houses and down into the valley. He had only come this way a few times in his life, and never alone.
Never alone, because Dolltown was a place for company and fellowship, a place for sitting in a crowded audience and watching dances and plays, or listening to recitations and concerts. Now, though, Nafai was coming to Dolltown as an artist, not to be part of the audience. It wasn’t fellowship he was looking for, but vocation.
The sun was still up, so the streets of Dolltown weren’t crowded. Dusk would bring out the frolicking apprentices and schoolboys, and full dark would call forth the lovers and the connoisseurs and the revelers. But even now, in the afternoon, some of the theatres were open, and the galleries were doing good business in the daylight.
Nafai stopped into several galleries, more because they were open than because he seriously thought he might apprentice himself to a painter or a sculptor. Nafai’s skill at drawing was never good, and when he tried sculpture as a child his projects always had to have titles so people could tell what they were supposed to be. Browsing through the galleries, Nafai tried to look thoughtful and studious, but the artsellers were never fooled-Nafai might be tall as a man, but he was still far too young to be a serious customer. So they never came up and talked to him, the way they did when adults came into the shops. He had to glean his information from what he overheard. The prices astonished him. Of course the cost of the originals was completely out of reach, but even the high-resolution holographic copies were too expensive for him to dream of buying one. Worst of all was the fact that the paintings and sculptures he liked the best were invariably the most expensive. Maybe that meant that he had excellent taste. Or maybe it meant that the artists who knew how to impress the ignorant were able to make the most money.
Bored at last with the galleries, and determined to see which art should be the channel for his future, Nafai wandered down to the open theatre, a series of tiny stages dotting the broad lawns near the wall. A few plays were in rehearsal. Since there was no real audience yet, the sound bubbles hadn’t been turned on, and as Nafai walked from stage to stage, the sounds of more distant plays kept intruding into every pause in the one close at hand. After a while, though, Nafai discovered that if he stood and watched a rehearsal long enough to get interested, he stopped noticing any other noises.
What intrigued him most was a troupe of satirists. He had always thought satire must be the most exciting kind of play, because the scripts were always as new as today’s gossip. And, just as he had imagined, there sat the satirist at the rehearsal, scribbling his verse on paper-on paper- and handing the scraps to a script boy who ran them up to the stage and handed them to the player that the lines were intended for. The players who weren’t onstage at the moment were either pacing back and forth or hunched over cm the lawn, saying their lines over and over again, to memorize them for tonight’s performance. This was why satires were always sloppy and ill-timed, with sudden silences and absurd non sequiturs abounding. But no one expected a satire to be good-it only had to be funny and nasty and new.
This one seemed to be about an old man who sold love potions. The masker playing the old man seemed quite young, no more than twenty, and he wasn’t very good at faking an older voice. But that was part of the fun of it-maskers were almost always apprentice actors who hadn’t yet managed to get a part with a serious company of players. They claimed that the reason they wore masks instead of makeup was to protect them from reprisals from angry victims of satire-but, watching them, Nafai suspected that the mask was as much to protect the young actor from the ridicule of his peers.
The afternoon had turned hot, and some of the actors had taken off their shirts; those with pale skin seemed oblivious to the fact that they were burning to the color of tomatoes. Nafai laughed silently at the thought that maskers were probably the only people in Basilica who could get a sunburn everywhere but their faces.
The script boy handed a verse to a player who had been sitting hunched over in the grass. The young man looked at it, then got up and walked to the satirist.
“I can’t say this,” he said.
The satirist’s back was to Nafai, so he couldn’t hear the answer.
“What, is my part so unimportant that my lines don’t have to rhyme?”
Now the satirist’s answer was loud enough that Nafai caught a few phrases, ending with the clincher, “Write the thing yourself!”
The young man angrily pulled his mask off his face and shouted, “I couldn’t do worse than thisl”
The satirist burst into laughter. “Probably not,” he said. “Go ahead, give it a try, I don’t have time to be brilliant with every scene.”
Mollified, the young man put his mask back on. But Nafai had seen enough. For the young masker who wanted his lines to rhyme was none other than Nafai’s brother Mebbekew.
So this was the source of his income. Not borrowing at all. The idea that had seemed so clever and fresh to Nafai-apprenticing himself in an art to earn his independence-had long since occurred to Mebbekew, and he was doing it. In a way it was encouraging-if Mebbekew can do it, why can’t I?-but it was also discouraging to think that of all people, Nafai had happened to choose Mebbekew to emulate. Meb, the brother who had hated him all his life instead of coming to hate him more recently, like Elya. Is this what I was born for? To become a second Mebbekew?
Then came the nastiest thought of all. Wouldn’t it be funny if I entered the acting profession, years after Meb, and got a job with a serious company right away? It would be deliciously humiliating; Meb would be suicidal.
Well, maybe not. Meb was far more likely to turn murderous.
Nafai was drawn out of his spiteful little daydream by the scene on the stage. The old potion-seller was trying to persuade a reluctant young woman to buy an herb from him.
Put the leaves in his tea Put the flower in your bed
And by half past three
He’ll be dead-I beg your pardon,
Just a slip of the tongue.
The plot was finally making sense. The old man wanted to poison the girl’s lover by persuading her that the fatal herb was a love potion. She apparently didn’t catch on-all characters in satire were amazingly stupid- but for other reasons she was still resisting the sale.
I’d sooner be hung
Than use a flower from your garden.
I want nothing from you.
I want his love to be true.
Suddenly the old man burst into an operatic song. His voice was actually not bad, even with exaggeration for comic effect.
The dream of love is so enchanting!
At that moment Mebbekew, his mask back in place, bounded onto the stage and directly addressed the audience.
Listen to the old man ranting!
They proceeded to perform a strange duet, the old potion-seller singing a line and Mebbekew’s young character answering with a spoken comment to the audience.
But love can come in many ways! (I’ve followed him for several days.)
One lover might be very willing! (I know he plots her lover’s killing.)
The other endlessly delays!
(Listen how the donkey brays!)
Oh, do not make the wrong decision!
(I think I’ll give this ass a vision.)
When I can take you to your goal!
(He’ll think it’s from the Oversoul.)
No limits bind the lover’s game.
(A vision needs a little flame . . .)
No matter how you win it,
Because your heart is in it,
You’ll love your lover’s loving still the same,
A vision from the Oversoul. Flame. Nafai didn’t like the turn this was taking. He didn’t like the fact that the old potion-seller’s mask had a wild mane of white hair and a full white beard. Was it possible that word had already spread so for and fast? Some satirists were famous for getting the gossip before anyone else-as often as not, people attended the satires just to find out what was happening-and many people left the satires asking each other, What was that really about?
Mebbekew was fiddling with a box on the stage. The satirist called out to him, “Never mind the fire effect. We’ll pretend it’s working.”
“We have to try it sometime,” Mebbekew answered.
“Not now.”
“When?”
The satirist got to his feet, strode to the foot of the stage directly in front of Meb, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed: “We . . . will ... do ... the ... effect . . . later!”
“Fine,” said Meb.
As the satirist returned to his place on the hill, he said, “And you wouldn’t be setting off the fire effect anyway.”
“Sorry,” said Meb. He returned to his place behind the box that presumably would be spouting a column of flame tonight. The other maskers returned to their positions.
“End of song,” said Meb. “Fire effect.”
Immediately the potion-seller and the girl flung up their hands in a mockery of surprise.
“A pillar of fire!” cried the potion-seller.
“How could fire suddenly appear on a bare rock in the desert?” cried the girl. “It’s a miracle^
The potion-seller whirled on her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, bitch! I’m the only one who can see this! It’s a vision!”
“No!” shouted Mebbekew, in his deepest voice. “It’s a special stage effect!”
“A stage effect!” cried the potion-seller. “Then you must be-”
“You got it!”
“That old humbug the Oversoul!”
“I’m proud of you, old trickster! Stupid girl-you almost fixed her.”
“Oh, it’s nothing much to take her-you’re the master faker!”
“No!”bellowed the satirist. “Not ‘take her!’ you idiot! It’s ‘take her,’ emphasis on take, or it doesn’t rhyme with faker !”
“Sorry,” said the young masker playing the potion-seller. “It doesn’t make sense your way, of course, but at least it’ll rhyme?
“It doesn’t have to make sense, you uppity young rooster, it only has to make money!”
Everybody laughed-though it was clear that the actors still didn’t really like the satirist much. They got back into the scene and a few moments later Meb and the potion-seller launched into a song-and-dance routine about how clever they were at hoodwinking people, and how unbelievably gullible most people were-especially women. It seemed that every couplet of the song was designed to mortally offend some portion of the audience, and the song went on until every conceivable group in Basilica had been darted. While they sang and danced, the girl pretended to roast some kind of meat in the flames.
Meb forgot his lyrics less than the other masker, and in spite of the fact that Nafai knew the whole sequence was aimed at humiliating Father, he couldn’t help but notice that Meb was actually pretty good, especially at singing so every word was dear. I could do that, too, thought Nafai.
The song kept coming back to the same refrain:
I’m standing by a fire
With my favorite liar
No one stands a chance
When he starts his fancy dancing
When the song ended, the Oversoul-Meb-had persuaded the potion-seller that the best way to get the women of Basilica to do whatever he wanted was to persuade them that he was getting visions from the
Oversoul. “They’re so ready for deceiving,” said Meb. “We’ll have all these girls believing.”
The scene closed with the potion-seller leading the girl offstage, telling her how he had seen a vision of the city of Basilica burning up. The satirist had switched to alliterative verse, which Nafai thought sounded a little more natural than rhyming, but it wasn’t as fiin. “Do you want to waste the last weeks of the world clinging to some callow young cad? Wouldn’t you be better off boffing your brains out with an ugly old man who has an understanding with the Oversoul?”
“Fine,” said the satirist. “That’ll work. Let’s have the street scene now.”
Another group of maskers came up on the stage. Nafai immediately headed across the lawn to where Mebbekew, his mask still in place, was already scribbling new dialogue on a scrap of paper.
“Meb,” said Nafai.
Meb looked up, startled, trying to see better through the small eyeholes in the mask. “What did you call me?” Then he saw it was Nafai. Immediately he jumped to his feet and started walking away. “Get away from me, you little rat-eater.”
“Meb, I’ve got to talk to you.”
Mebbekew kept walking.
“Before you go on in this play tonight!” said Nafai.
Meb whirled on him. “It’s not a play, it’s a satire. I’m not an actor, I’m a masker. And you’re not my brother, you’re an ass.”
Meb’s fury astonished him. “What have I done to you?” asked Nafai.
“I know you, Nyef. No matter what I do or say to you, you’re going to end up telling Father.”
As if Father wouldn’t eventually find out that his son was playing in a satire that was designed to dart him in front of the whole city. “What makes me sick,” said Nafai, “is that all you care about is whether you get in trouble. You’ve got no family loyalty at all.”
“This doesn’t hurt my family. Masking is a perfectly legitimate way to get started as an actor, and it pays me a living and wins me just a little tiny scrap of respect and pleasure now and then, which is a lot more than working for Father ever did!”
What was Meb talking about? “I don’t care that you’re a masker. In fact, I think it’s great. I was hanging around here today because I was thinking maybe I might try it myself.”
Meb pulled his mask off and looked Nafai up and down. “You’ve got a body that might look all right on stage. But you still sound like a kid.”
“Mebbekew, it doesn’t matter right now. You a masker, me a masker-the point is that you can’t do this to Father!”
“I’m not doing anything to Father! I’m doing this for myself.”
It was always like this, talking to Mebbekew. He never seemed to grasp the thread of an argument. “Be a masker, fine,” said Nafai. “But darting your own father is too low even for you!”
Meb looked at him blankly. “Darting my father?”
“You can’t tell me you don’t know.”
“What is there in this satire that darts him?”
“The scene you just finished, Meb.”
“Father’s not the only person in Basilica who believes in the Oversoul. In fact, I sometimes think he doesn’t believe all that seriously.”
“The vision, Meb! The fire in the desert, the prophecy about the end of the world! Who do you think it’s about?”
“I don’t know. Old Drotik doesn’t tell us what these things are about. If we haven’t heard the gossip then so what? We still say the lines anyway.” Then Meb got a strange, quizzical expression on his face. “What does all this Oversoul stuff have to do with Father?”
“He had a vision,” said Nafai. “On the Desert Road, this morning before dawn, returning from his journey. He saw a pillar of fire on a rock, and Basilica burning, and he thinks it means the destruction of the world, like Earth in the old legend. Mother believes him and he must already be talking to people about it or how else would your satirist know to include this bit in his satire?”
“This is the craziest thing I ever heard of,” said Mebbekew.
“I’m not making it up,” said Nafai. “I sat there this morning on Mother’s portico and-”
“The portico scene! That’s ... He wrote how the apothecary-that’s supposed to be father^
“What do you think I’ve been telling you?”
“Bastard,” whispered Meb. “That bastard. And he put me on stage as the Oversoul”
Meb turned and rushed toward the masker who played the apothecary. He stood in front of him for a few moments, looking at the mask and the costume. “It’s so obvious, I must have the brains of a gnat-but a vision!”
“What are you talking about?” asked the masker.
“Give me that mask,” said Mebbekew. “Give it to me!”
“Right, sure, here.”
Meb tore it out of the other man’s hands and ran up the hill toward the satirist. Nafai ran after him. Meb was waving the mask in front of the satirist’s face. “How dare you, Drotik, you pus-hearted old fart!”
“Oh, don’t pretend you didn’t know, my boy.”
“How would I know? I was asleep till rehearsal started. You put me on stage darting my father and it’s just coincidence that you didn’t happen to mention the fact, yes, I’m sure I believe that”
“Hey, it brings an audience.”
“What were you going to do, tell people who I am, after all your promises about keeping me anonymous? What are these masks supposed to mean anyway?” Meb turned to the others, who were clearly baffled by the whole thing. “Listen, people, do you know what this old pimple was going to do? He was going to dart my father and then tell people that it was me playing the Oversoul. He was going to unmask me!”
The satirist was obviously worried by this turn of events. Though most of the maskers’ faces were still hidden, they must be angry at the idea of a satirist exposing his maskers’ identities. So the satirist had to get things back under control. “Don’t waste a thought on this nonsense,” he said to the others. “I just fired the boy because he had the audacity to rewrite my lines, and now he wants to wreck the entire show.”
The maskers visibly relaxed.
Meb must have realized that he had lost the argument-the maskers wanted to believe the satirist because if they didn’t, they’d lose a paying job. “My father isn’t the liar,” said Meb, “you are.”
“Satire is wonderful, isn’t it,” said Drotik, “until the dart strikes at home.”
Meb raised the white-maned apothecary mask over his head, as if he was going to strike the satirist with it. Drotik flung up an arm and shied away. But Meb never meant to hit him. Instead he brought the mask down over his knee, breaking it in half. Then he tossed both pieces into the satirist’s lap.
The satirist lowered his arm and met Mebbekew’s gaze again. “It’ll take ten minutes for my maskmaker to put the beard onto another mask. Or were you trying to make a metaphorical threat?”
“I don’t know,” said Meb. “Were you trying to get me to metaphorically murder my father?”
The satirist shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a dart, boy. Just words. A few laughs.”
“A few extra tickets.”
“It paid your wages.”
“It made you rich.” Meb turned his back and walked away. Nafai followed him. Behind them he could hear Drotik sending the script boy to the wall to ask for maskers who thought they could learn a part in three hours.
Mebbekew wouldn’t let Nafai catch up with him. He walked faster and faster, until finally they were running full tilt along the streets, up and down the hills. But Mebbekew hadn’t the endurance to outlast Nafai, and finally he fetched up against the corner of a house, bowed over, panting, gasping for breath.
Nafai didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t meant to chase Meb down, only to tell him what he thought-that he’d been terrific, the way he put the satirist in his place, the way he called him a liar to his face and blasted every argument Drotik raised in his own defense. When you broke the mask in half, I wanted to cheer-that’s what Nafai meant to tell him.
But when he got close enough to speak, he realized that Meb wasn’t just panting for breath. He was crying, not in grief, but in rage, and when Nafai got there Meb started beating a fist against the wall. “How could he do it!” Meb was saying, over and over. “The selfish stupid old son-of-a-bitch!”
“Don’t .worry about it,” said Nafai, meaning to comfort him. “Drotik isn’t worth it.”
“Not Drotik, you idiot,” Meb answered. “Drotik’s exactly what I always thought he was except that now I’ve lost my job and I’ll never get another one, Drotik will spread the word on me that I walked out on a show three hours before lights.”
“Then who are you mad at?”
“Father! Who do you think? A vision-I can’t believe it, I thought Drotik would tell me that it wasn’t Father he was darting, it was somebody else, and what ever gave me the idea it was Wetchik, what kind of cheese-brained fool would come up with the idea that the honorable Wetchik was off getting visions from the amazing unbelievable Oversoul.
“Mother believes him,” said Nafai.
“Mother has renewed his contract every year since the year you were conceived, obviously she’s got a lot of judgment where he’s concerned! Do you believe him? Does anybody who hasn’t slept with him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know who knows about it.”
“Let me tell you something. Six hours from now the entire city of Basilica will know about it, that’s who knows about it. I want to kill him, the flatulent old pincushion!”
“Calm down, you don’t mean that-”
“Don’t I? Do you think I wouldn’t love to push this fist right through his face?” Meb turned around and screamed his next sentence at the passersby on the street. I’ll show you some visions, you pebble-headed weed-hauler!”
People were stopped on the street, staring.
“Right,” said Nafai, “Father’s embarrassing you”
“I didn’t ask you to follow me. You’re the one who chased after me, so if you don’t like being with me you can choke to death on your own snot, that’s perfectly all right.”
“Let’s go home,” said Nafai, mostly because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.