The next morning they loaded the camels and moved southeast. No one said anything about it, but everyone understood that they were moving to put some distance between them and Dorova Bay. It was still no easy task finding a way through the Valley of Fires, and several times they had to backtrack, though now Elemak usually rode ahead, often with Vas, in order to scout a path that led somewhere useful. Volemak would tell him in the morning what the Index advised, and Elemak would then mark a trail that led to the easiest ascents and descents from plateau to plateau.
After a few days, they found another spring of drinkable water, which they named Strelay, because they would use their time there to make arrows. Nafai went out first and found examples of all the kinds of tree that the Oversoul knew would make good bows; soon they had gathered several dozen saplings. Some of them they made into bows at once, for practice and for their immediate hunting needs; the rest they would carry with them, allowing them to season into wood that would hold its spring. They also made hundreds of arrows, and practiced shooting at targets, men and women alike, because, as Elemak said, “There may come a time when our lives depend on the archery of our wives.”
Those who had been good shots with a pulse were as good with the bow, after some practice, but the real challenge was developing the strength to pull far enough and steadily enough to hit more distant targets. There wasn’t a one of them without aching arms and backs and shoulders for the first week; Kokor, Dol, and Rasa gave up early and never tried again. Sevet and Hushidh, however, developed into rather good archers, as long as they used smaller bows than the men.
It was Issib who thought of dyeing the arrow shafts a bright unnatural color so spent arrows would be easier to retrieve.
Then they moved on again, from fountain to fire, practicing archery as they went. They began to be proud of the strength in their arms. The competition in archery among the men became rather fierce; the women noticed but mentioned only among themselves that the men cared about no targets but the ones placed far enough away that Sevet’s and Hushidh’s smaller bows could not accurately reach them. “Let them have their game,” said Hushidh. “It would be too humiliating for any of them to be beaten by a woman.”
Without meaning to, they were soon running parallel to the caravan route, and rather close—they were back to raw meat for a while. Then one morning Volemak came out of his tent, holding the Index, and saying, “The Oversoul says we must now head west into the mountains until we come to the sea.”
“Let me guess,” said Obring. “We won’t be able to see a city there.”
No one answered him. Nor did anyone else mention their last venture near the Scour Sea.
“Why are we heading west now?” asked Elemak. “We’ve gone barely half the length of the Valley of Fires—the caravan trail doesn’t come to the sea again until it reaches the Sea of Fire, due south of here. All we’re doing is going far out of our way to the west.”
“There are rivers to the west,” said Volemak.
“No there aren’t,” said Elemak. “If there were, the caravanners through here would have found them and used them. There’d be cities there.”
“Nevertheless,” said Volemak, “we’re going west. The Oversoul says that we’ll need to make a long camp again—to plant crops, to harvest them.”
“Why?” asked Mebbekew. “We’re making good progress. The babies are all thriving well. Why another camp?”
“Because Shedemei is pregnant, of course,” said Volemak, “and getting sicker with each passing day.”
They all looked at Shedemei in surprise. She blushed—and looked no less surprised than the others. “I only began to suspect it myself this morning,” she said. “How can the Oversoul know what I’m only guessing at?”
Volemak shrugged. “He knows what he knows.”
“Pretty poor timing, Shedya,” said Elemak. “All the other women are holding off on pregnancy because they’re nursing, but now we have to wait for you.”
For once Zdorab spoke up sharply. “Some things can’t be timed precisely, Elya, so don’t lay blame where there was no volition.”
Elemak looked at him steadily. “I never do,” he said. But then he dropped the matter and set out to the west, blazing a trail for the caravan.
Their route led up into real mountains—volcanic ones, with some relatively recent lava flows that had not yet been broken into soil. Issib used the Index to come up with information about the area—there were at least fifty active and dormant volcanos in this range of mountains fronting on the Scour Sea. “The last eruption was only last year,” he said, “but much farther to the south.”
“Which may be the reason the Oversoul is sending us to the sea this far north,” said Volemak.
Hard as the climb was, coming down the other side of the mountain range was harder—it was steeper and more heavily overgrown. Indeed, it was almost a jungle high on the slopes of the mountain.
“The winter winds come off the sea,” said Issib, “and there are squalls almost every day in summer, too. The mountains catch the clouds, force them up into the colder atmosphere, and bring down whatever moisture is in them. So it’s a rain forest here in the mountains. It won’t be as wet down by the sea.” They were becoming used to Issib being the one who explored the Index; during days of travel, he was the only one with no other duties, and he carried the Index with him, one hand constantly on it, exploring. Zdorab had shown him so many tricks and back doors that he was almost as deft now as the librarian himself. And no one disparaged the value of the information Issib provided, because it was all he could provide.
They were in the middle of a tricky passage down a tangled ravine when they felt an earthquake -rather a violent one, which threw two of the camels off their feet and set the others to stamping and turning in confusion.
“Out of the ravine!” cried Issib at once.
“Out? How?” answered Volemak.
“Any way we can!” shouted Issib. “The Index says that this earthquake jarred loose a lake high up in the mountains—anything in the ravine is going to be swept away!”
It was a particularly bad time for an emergency—Elemak and Vas were far ahead, blazing a trail, and Nafai and Obring were hunting higher up in the mountain. But Volemak had been journeying far longer than Elemak, and had resources of his own. He quickly sized up the walls of the ravine and chose a route up through a jumble of rocks into a side canyon that might lead to the top. “I’ll lead the way,” he said, “because I’m the one who knows best what camels can do. Luet, you bring the women and children along—Meb, you and Zdorab herd the pack animals after us. Supplies first, cold- and dryboxes last. Issib, you stay within earshot of them, and stay in touch with the Index. Tell them when there’s no more time. When they have to abandon the rest of the camels and save themselves. They must save themselves, as must you, Issya—more important than anything else. Do you understand?”
He was asking everyone, and everyone nodded, wide-eyed, terrified.
“Elemak is in the ravine,” said Eiadh. “Someone has to warn him.”
“Elya is fit to hear the voice of the Oversoul himself,” said Volemak. “The water is coming faster than anyone can ride to catch up with him. Save his baby and his wife, Edhya. Now come on.” He turned his camel and began the ascent.
Camels were not made for climbing. Their sedentary pace was maddening. But steadily they climbed. The earth shook again, and again—but the aftershocks were not as violent as the first had been. Volemak and the women made it to the top. Volemak had a fleeting thought of going back down to help, but Luet reminded him that in several places the path was not wide enough for two camels to pass—far from helping, he’d slow down the evacuation.
All the camels were above the floor of the ravine when Issib cried out, “Now! For your lives!” As soon as he saw that Meb and Zdorab both had heard, he turned his own camel and pushed his way in among the pack beasts. However, he could not control his animal forcefully enough to make headway faster than the rest. As Meb overtook him, he reached out and took the reins from Issib’s feeble grasp, then began to drag Issib’s camel faster and faster. Soon, though, they reached a narrow place where the two camels couldn’t pass side by side, especially because of the bulk of Issib’s chair. Without hesitation—without even waiting for his camel to kneel to let him dismount—Meb slid off to the ground, let go of his own camel’s reins, and dragged on the reins of Issib’s mount, hurrying it through the gap. Moments later, Zdorab came through the same narrow place, then came up beside them. “The Index!” he shouted.
Issib, who couldn’t lift it, pointed to the bag on his lap. “It’s looped to the pommel!” he shouted.
Zdorab maneuvered his animal close; Meb held Issib’s camel steady. Deftly Zdorab reached out, unlooped the bag, and then, brandishing it high like a trophy, rode on ahead.
“Leave me now!” Issib shouted at Meb.
Meb ignored him and continued to drag his camel upward, passing the slower pack animals.
Soon they came to a place where Zdorab, Luet, Hushidh, Shedemei, Sevet, and Eiadh waited on foot. Mebbekew realized that he must be near the top now—Zdorab must have left the Index with Volemak, and Rasa and the other women must be keeping the infants on high ground. “Take Issib!” shouted Meb, handing the reins to Zdorab. Then Meb rushed back down the canyon to the next pack beast. He thrust the reins of the animal in Luet’s hands. “Drag him up!” he cried. To each woman in turn he gave the reins of a pack animal. They could hear the water now, a roaring sound; they could feel the rumbling in the earth. “Faster!” he cried.
There were just enough of them to take the reins of all the pack animals. Only Meb’s own mount, now last in line, was untended. She was clearly frightened by the noise of the water, by the shaking of the earth, and didn’t stay close behind. Meb called to her, “Glupost! Come on! Hurry, Glupost!” But he kept tugging on the reins of the last pack animal, knowing that the coldboxes it carried would be more important, in the long run, than his own mount.
“Let go, Meb!” cried Zdorab. “Here it comes!”
They could see the wall of water from where they were, that’s how high it was—higher, in fact, than the top of the ravine, so that they instinctively ran even higher up the slope they were standing on. Those at the top were never in danger of being swept away, though, for the water stayed lower than they were.
However, the water that was snagged into the side canyon they had climbed through shot up into it with such force that it rose higher than the main body of water in the ravine. It slammed into the last two camels and then into Meb, lifting them all off their feet and heaving them the rest of the way up the side canyon. Meb could hear women screaming—was that Dol, howling out Meb’s name?—and then he felt the water subsiding almost as fast as it had risen, sucking him downward. For a moment he thought of letting go of the reins and saving himself; then he realized that the pack camel had braced itself and was now more secure on the ground than Meb himself. So he clung to the reins and was not swept away. But as he hung there, pressed against the side of the camel that he had saved, and which was now saving him, he saw his mount Glupost get dragged off her feet and sucked down into the maelstrom in the ravine.
In moments, he felt many hands on him, prying the reins from his fingers, leading him, sopping wet and trembling, up to where the others waited. Volemak embraced him, weeping. “I thought I had lost you, my son, my son.”
“What about Elya?” wailed Eiadh. “How could he save himself from that?”
“Not to mention Vas,” said Rasa softly.
Several people looked at Sevet, whose face was hard and set.
“Not everyone shows fear the same way,” murmured Luet, putting an end to any hard judgments anyone might be inclined to make about the difference between Eiadh’s and Sevet’s reaction. Luet knew well that Sevet had little reason to care much whether Vas lived or died—though she wondered how much Sevet herself actually knew.
What was most in Luet’s heart was the fact that Nafai was also not with them. He and Obring were almost certainly on high ground, and safe. But they would no doubt be deeply worried.
Tell him that we’re safe, she said silently to the Oversoul. And tell me— is Elemak alive? And Vas?
Alive, came the answer in her mind.
She said so.
The others looked at her, half in relief, half in doubt. “Alive,” she said again. “That’s all the Oversoul told me. Isn’t it enough?”
The water subsided, the level dropping rapidly. Volemak and Zdorab walked down the side canyon together. They found it a tangle of half-uprooted trees and bushes—not even the boulders were where they had been.
But the side canyon was nothing compared to the ravine itself. There was nothing left. A quarter hour ago it had been lush with vegetation—so lush that it was hard to make way through it, and they had often had to lead the camels through the stream itself in order to pass some of the tangles of vegetation. Now the walls of the ravine, from top to bottom, had not a single plant clinging to them. The soil itself had been scoured away, so that bare rock was exposed. And on the floor of the ravine, there were only a few heavy boulders and the sediments left behind by the water as it dropped.
“Look how the floor of the ravine is bare rock near the edges,” said Volemak. “But deep sediment in the middle, near the water.”
It was true: already the stream that remained—larger than the original one—was cutting a channel a meter deep through the thick mud. The new banks of the stream would collapse here and there, a few meters of mud slipping down into the water. It would take some time before the floor of the ravine stabilized.
“It’ll be green as ever within six weeks,” said Zdorab. “And in five years you’d never know this happened.”
“What do you think?” asked Volemak. “If we stay to the edges, is it safe to use this as a highway down to the sea?”
“The reason we were using the ravine in the first place was because Elemak said the top was not passable—it keeps getting cut by deep canyons or blocked by steep hills.”
“So we keep to the edges,” said Volemak. “And we hope.”
It took a while at the top of the ravine to check the camels’ loads and be sure nothing had come loose during the scramble to safety. “It’s better than we could have hoped, that we lost only the one camel,” said Volemak.
Zdorab led his own mount forward, and held out the reins to Meb.
“No,” said Meb.
“Please,” said Zdorab. “Every step I take on foot will be my way of giving honor to my brave friend.”
“Take it,” whispered Volemak.
Meb took the reins from Zdorab. “Thank you,” he said. “But there were no cowards here today.”
Zdorab embraced him quickly, then went back to help Shedemei get the women with babies onto their camels.
It turned out that neither Zdorab nor Meb nor Volemak did much riding the rest of that day. They spent their time on foot, patrolling the length of the caravan, making sure the camels never strayed toward the thick and treacherous mud in the middle of the ravine. They had visions of a camel sinking immediately over its head. The footing was wet, slimy, and treacherous, but by keeping the pace slow, they soon reached the mouth of the ravine, where it emptied into a wide river.
There had obviously been much damage here, too, for the opposite side of the river valley was a mess of mud and boulders, with many trees knocked down and much bare soil and rock exposed. And the rest of the way down the river they could see that both banks had been torn apart. Ironically, though, because the force of the flood had been less intense here than in the ravine, their passage through the debris it left behind would be far harder.
“This way!”
It was Elemak, with Vas behind him. The two of them were on foot, but they could see that their camels were not far behind. They were on higher ground. It would be a steep but not very difficult climb to reach them.
“We have a path here through the high ground!” called Elemak.
In a few minutes they were gathered at the beginning of Elemak’s path through the forest. As husbands and wives embraced, Issib noticed that the forest here was considerably less dense than it had been higher up the mountain. “We must be near sea level now,” he said.
“The river makes a sharp bend to the west over there,” said Vas, one arm around Sevet, his baby held against his shoulder. “And from there you can see the Scour Sea. Between this river and the one to the south it’s open grassland, mostly, a few trees here and there. Higher ground, thank the Oversold. We felt the earthquakes, but when they passed we didn’t think anything of them, except to worry that it might have been worse up where you were. Then suddenly Elya insisted we needed to go to the higher ground and look over the area, and just as we got there we heard this roaring noise and the river went crazy. We had images of seeing all the camels floating by, with all of you still riding on top of them.”
“Issib was warned through the Index,” said Volemak.
“It’s a good thing we weren’t all together,” said Issib. “Four more camels, and we would have lost them. As it was, Meb lost his mount—because he was saving pack animals, I might add.”
“We can wait for the stories until we’re at our camp for the night,” said Elemak. “We can reach the place between rivers before nightfall. There’s little moon, so we want to have the tents up before dark.”
That night they stayed up late around the fire, partly because they were waiting for dinner to cook, partly because they were too keyed-up to sleep, and partly because they kept hoping that Nafai and Obring would find the camp that night. That was when the stories were told. And as Hushidh bade Luet goodnight in the tent where she would be sleeping alone with her baby, she said, “I wish you could see as I see, Luet. That flood did what nothing else could have managed—the bonds between us all are so much stronger. And Meb … the honor that flows to him now…”
“A nice change,” said Luet.
“I just hope he doesn’t strut too much about it,” said Hushidh, “or he’ll waste it all.”
“Maybe he’s growing up,” said Luet.
“Or maybe he just needed the right circumstance to discover the best in himself. He didn’t hesitate, Issya says. Just dismounted and risked his own life dragging Issib to safety.”
“And Zdorab took the Index, and then led us back down…”
“I know, I’m not saying Meb was the only one. But you know how it is with Zdorab. That gesture he made, giving his mount to Meb. It was a generous thing to do, and it helped bind the group together—but it also had the effect of erasing the memory of Zdorab’s own role in saving us. Our minds were all on Mebbekew.”
“Well, maybe that’s how Zodya wants it,” said Luet.
“But we won’t forget,” said Hushidh.
“Hardly,” said Luet. “Now go to bed. The babies won’t care how little sleep we got tonight—they’ll be starving on schedule in the morning.”
It was only a few hours after dawn when Nafai and Obring returned. They had been far from the flood, of course, but they had also been on the wrong side of it, so that coming home they had to find a place to cross either the ravine itself or the river. They ended up dragging the camels across the river upstream of the ravine, making a long detour around the worst of the destruction, and then crossing the river in shallow marshes and sand bars near the sea—at low tide. “The camels are getting less and less happy about crossing water,” said Nafai.
“But we brought back two deers,” said Obring happily.
With everyone reunited, Volemak made a little speech establishing this place as their campsite. “The river to the north we will name Oykib, for the firstborn boy of this expedition, and the river to the south is Protchnu, for the firstborn boy of the next generation.”
Rasa was outraged. “Why not name them Dza and Chveya, for the first two children born on our journey?”
Volemak looked at her steadily without answering.
“Then we had better leave this place before the boys are old enough to know how you have honored them solely because they have penises.”
“If we had had only two girls, and two rivers, Father would have named the rivers for them,” said Issib, trying to make peace.
They knew it wasn’t true, of course. For several weeks after they got there, Rasa insisted on calling them the North River and the South River; Volemak was just as adamant in calling them the River Oykib and the River Protchnu. But since it was the men who did more traveling, and therefore crossed the rivers more often, and fished in them, and had to tell each other about places and events up and down the rivers’ lengths, it was the names Oykib and Protchnu that stayed. Whether anyone else noticed or not, however, Luet saw that Rasa never used Volemak’s names for the rivers, and grew silent and cold whenever others spoke their names.
Only once did Nafai and Luet discuss the matter. Nafai was singularly unsympathetic. “Rasa didn’t mind when women decided everything in Basilica, and men weren’t even allowed to look at the lakes.”
“That was a holy place for women. The only place like it in the world.”
“What does it matter?” said Nafai. “It’s just a couple of names for a couple of rivers. When we leave here, no one else will ever remember what we named them.”
“So why not North River and South River?”
“It’s only a problem because Mother made it a problem,” said Nafai. “Now let’s not make it a problem between us.”
“I just want to know why you go along with it!”
Nafai sighed. “Think, for just a moment, what it would mean if I had called them the North and South rivers. What it would have meant to Father. And to the other men. Then it really would have been divisive. I don’t need anything more to separate me from the others.”
Luet chewed on that idea for a while.
“All right,” she said. “I can see that.”
And then, after she had thought a little more, she said, “But you didn’t see anything wrong with naming the rivers after the boys until Mother pointed it out, did you?”
He didn’t answer.
“In fact, you really don’t see anything wrong with it now, do you?”
“I love you,” said Nafai.
“That’s not an answer,” she said.
“I think it is,” he said.
“And what if I never give you a son?” she said.
“Then I will keep making love to you until we have a hundred daughters,” said Nafai.
“In your dreams,” she said nastily.
“In yours, you mean,” he said.
She made the deliberate decision not to stay angry with him for this, and as they made love she was as willing and passionate as ever. But afterward, when he was asleep, it worried her. What would it mean to them for the men to make their company as male-dominated as Basilica had been female-dominated?
Why must we do this? she wondered. We had a chance to make our society different from the rest of the world. Balanced and fair, even-handed, right. And yet even Nafai and Issib seem content to unbalance it. Is the rivalry between men and women such that one must always be in ascendancy at the expense of the other? Is it built into our genes? Must the community always be ruled by one sex or the other?
Maybe so, she thought. Maybe we’re like the baboons. When we’re stable and civilized, the women decide things, establish the households, the connections between them, create the neighborhoods and the friendships. But when we’re nomadic, living lives on the edge of survival, the men rule, and brook no interference from the women. Perhaps that’s what civilization means—is the dominance of the female over the male. And wherever that lapses, we call the result uncivilized, barbarian…manly.
They spent a year between the rivers, waiting for Shedemei’s baby to be born. It was a son; they named him Padarok— gift—and called him Rokya. They might have moved on then, after the first year, but by the time little Rokya was born, three of the other women had conceived—including Rasa and Luet, who were the most fragile during pregnancy. So they stayed for a second harvest, and a few months more, until all the women but Sevet had completed their pregnancy and borne a child. So there were thirty of them that began the next stage of the journey, and the first generation of children were walking and most of them beginning to talk before they were on their way.
It had been a good two years. Instead of desert farming, they had lush, rain-watered fields on good soil. Their crops were more varied; the hunting was better; and even the camels thrived, giving birth to fifteen new beasts of burden. Making saddles was harder—none of them had ever learned the skill—but they found a way to put two toddlers on each of the four most docile animals, which always traveled in train with the women’s camels. When the children first tried out the saddles, some of them were terrified—camels ride so high above the ground—but soon enough they were used to it, and even enjoyed it.
The journey was easy through the savanna along the seacoast; they ate up the kilometers as they never had before, even on the smooth desert west and south of Basilica. In three days they reached a well-watered bay that the men were already familiar with, having hunted and fished there during the past two years. But in the morning, Volemak dismayed them all by telling them that their course now lay, not south as they had all expected, but west.
West! Into the sea!
Volemak pointed at the rocky island that rose out of the sea not two kilometers away. “Beyond it is another island, a huge island. We have as long a journey on that island as we have had since we left the Valley of Mebbekew.”
At low tide, Nafai and Elemak tried fording the strait between the mainland and the island. They could do it, with only a short swim in the middle. But the camels balked, and so they ended up building rafts. “I’ve done it before,” said Elemak. “Never for a saltwater crossing, of course, but the water here is placid enough.”
So they felled trees and floated the logs in the bay, binding them together with ropes made of the fibers of marsh reeds. It took a week to make the rafts, and two days to take the camels across—one at a time—and then the cargo, and then, last of all, the women and children. They camped on the shore where they had landed, as the men poled the rafts around the island to the southwestern tip, where again they would need the rafts to ferry everyone and everything to the large island. In another week the company had traversed the small island and crossed to the large one; they pushed the rafts into the water and watched them float away.
The northern tip of the large island was mountainous and heavily forested. But gradually the mountains gave way to hills, and then to broad savannas. They could stand at the crest of the low rolling plain and see the Scour Sea to the west and the Sea of Fire to the east, the island was so narrow here. And the farther south they went, the more they understood how the Sea of Fire earned its name. Volcanos rose out of the sea, and in the distance they could see the smoke of a minor eruption from time to time. “This island was part of the mainland until five million years ago,” Issib explained to them. “Until then, the Valley of Fires came right down onto this island, south of us—and the fires still continue in the sea that has filled the space between the two parts of the valley.”
Growing up in Basilica, most of them had never understood the forces of nature—Basilica was such an unchanging place, with so much pride in its ancienthood. Here, even though the timespans were measured in the millions of years, they could clearly see the enormous power of the planet, and the virtual irrelevancy of the human lives on its surface.
“And yet we’re not irrelevant,” said Issib. “Because we are the ones who see the changes, and know them, and understand that they are changes, that once things were different. Everything else in the universe, every living and non-living thing, lives in the infinite now, which never changes, which always is exactly as it is. Only we know the passage of time, that one thing causes another and that we are changed by the past and will change the future.”
The island widened, and the ground became more rugged. They all recognized it as being the same kind of terrain as the Valley of Fires—the continuation of that valley that Issib had predicted. But it was quieter—they never found a place where gases from inside the earth burned on the surface—and the water was more likely to be pure. It was also drier and drier the farther south they went, though they were rising up into mountain country.
“These mountains have a name,” Issib told them, from the Index. “Dalatoi. People lived here before the island split away from the mainland. In fact, the greatest and most ancient of the Cities of Fire was here.”
“Skudnooy?” asked Luet, remembering the story of the city of misers who withdrew from the world and supposedly held most of the gold of Harmony in hidden vaults beneath their hidden city.
“No, Raspyatny,” said Issib. And they all remembered the stories of the city of stone and moss, where streams flowed through every room in a city the size of a mountain, so high that the upper rooms would freeze, and those who lived there had to burn fires to melt the rivers so that the lower rooms would have water all year.
“Will we see it?” they asked.
“What’s left of it,” said Issib. “It was abandoned ten million years ago, but it was made out of stone. The ancient road we’re following led there.”
Only then did they realize that they were indeed following an ancient road. There was no trace of pavement, and the road was sometimes cut by ravines or eroded away. But they kept returning to the path of least resistance, and now and then they could see that hills had been cut into to make a place for the road to go, and the occasional valley had been partly filled in with stone which had not yet worn down to nothing. “If there had been more rain here,” said Issib, “there’d be nothing left. But the island has moved south so that this land is now in the latitudes of the Great Southern Desert, and so the air is drier and there’s less erosion. Some of the works of humankind leave traces, even after all this time.”
“Someone must have used this road in the past ten million years,” said Elemak.
“No,” said Issib. “No human being has set foot on this island since it fully split off from the mainland.”
“How can you know that!” Mebbekew scoffed.
“Because the Oversoul has kept humans from coming here. No one even remembers that this island exists. That’s how the Oversoul wanted it. To keep things safe and ready… for us, I guess.”
They saw Raspyatny for a whole day before they reached it. At first it simply looked like an oddly textured mountain, but the closer they got, the more they realized that what they were seeing were windows carved into the stone. It was a high mountain, too, so that the city carved into the face of it must be vast.
They camped northeast of the city, where a small stream flowed. They followed the stream and found that it flowed right out of the city itself. Inside, it made cascades and the walls near it were thick with moss; it was much colder than the desert air outside.
They took turns exploring, in large groups, leaving some in charge of the children and animals while the others clambered through the remnants of the city. Away from the stream, the city had not been so badly eroded inside, though nowhere was the interior as well preserved as the outer wall. They realized why, when they found a few traces of an aqueduct system that had, just as the legend said, carried water into every room of the city. What surprised them, though, was the lack of internal corridors. Rooms simply led into each other. “How did they have any privacy?” asked Hushidh. “How did they ever have any time to themselves, if every room was an avenue for people to walk right through?”
No one had an answer.
“More than two hundred thousand people lived here, in the old days,” said Issib. “Back when this whole area was farther north, and much better watered—all the land outside was farmed, for kilometers to the north, and yet their enemies could never attack them successfully because they kept ten years’ worth of food inside these walls, and they never lacked for water. Their enemies could burn their fields and besiege them, but then they’d starve long before anyone in Raspyatny ever felt the slightest want. Only nature itself could depopulate this place.”
“Why wasn’t all of this destroyed in the earthquakes of the Valley of Fires?” asked Nafai.
“We haven’t seen the eastern slope. The Index says that half the city was wiped out in two great earthquakes when the rift first opened and the sea poured through.”
“It would have been glorious to see a flood like that,” said Zdorab. “From a safe place, of course.”
“The whole eastern side of the city collapsed,” said Issib. “Now it’s just a mountainside. But this side stayed. Ten million years. You never know. Of course, the streams are eroding it away from the inside, making the outside more and more of a hollow shell. Eventually it’ll cave in. Maybe all at once. One part will break, and that’ll put too much stress on what is left, and the whole thing will come down like a sandcastle on the beach.”
“We have seen one of the cities of the heroes,” said Luet.
“And the stories were true,” said Obring. “Which leads me to wonder whether the city of Skudnooy might be around here somewhere, too.”
“The Index says not,” said Issib. “I asked.”
“Too bad,” said Obring. “All that gold!”
“Oh, right,” said Elemak. “And where would you sell it? Or did you think you’d eat it? Or wear it?”
“Oh, I’m not allowed even to dream of tremendous wealth, is that it?” said Obring defiantly. “Only practical dreams allowed?”
Elemak shrugged and let the matter drop.
After leaving the vicinity of Raspyatny—and it took them another whole day to pass around the western side of the city, which really seemed to have covered the whole face of the mountain—they made their way through a high pass, which once again seemed to have been made almost uniform in width in order to accommodate a heavily trafficked road. “Once this was the highway between the Cities of Fire and the Cities of the Stars,” said Issib. “Now it leads only to desert.”
They came out of the pass and a vast, dry savanna spread out below them; they could see that the island narrowed here, with the Sea of Stars to the east and, far to the west, the blue shimmer of the southern reaches of the Scour Sea. As they descended, they lost sight of the western sea; instead, at the urging of the Oversoul, they hugged the eastern shore, because more rain fell there, and they could fish in the sea.
It was a hard passage—dry, so that three times they had to dig wells, and hot, with the tropical sun beating down on them. But this was exactly the sort of terrain that Elemak and Volemak had both learned to deal with from their youth, and they made good time. Ten days after they came down from the pass through the Dalatoi Mountains, the Oversoul had them strike south when the coastline turned southeast, and as they climbed through gently rolling hills, the grass grew thicker, and here and there more trees dotted the landscape. They passed through low and well-weathered mountains, down through a river valley, up over more hills, and then down through the most beautiful land they had ever seen.
Stands of forest were evenly balanced with broad meadows; bees hummed over fields of wildflowers, promising honey easily found. There were streams with clear water, all leading to a wide, meandering river. Shedemei dismounted from her camel and probed into the soil. “It isn’t like desert grassland,” she said. “Not just roots. There’s true topsoil here. We can farm these meadows without destroying them.”
For the first time in their journey, Elemak didn’t bother riding ahead to confer with Volemak about a campsite. There was no place that they passed through where they could not have stopped and spent the night.
“This land could hold the population of Seggidugu and they could all live in wealth,” said Elemak. “Don’t you think so, Father?”
“And we’re the only humans here,” he answered. “The Over-soul prepared this place for us. Ten million years, it waited here for us.”
“Then we stay here? This is where we were coming?”
“We stay here for now,” said Volemak. “For several years at least. The Oversoul isn’t ready yet to take us out into the stars, back to Earth. So for now this is our home.”
“How many years?” asked Elemak.
“Long enough that we should build houses of wood, and let our poor old tents become awnings and curtains,” said Volemak. “There’ll be no more journeying by land or sea from this place. Only when we rise up into the stars will we leave here. So let us call this place Dostatok, because it has plenty for our needs. The river we will name Rasa, because it is strong and full of life and it will never cease to supply us with all we need.”
Rasa nodded her head gently to acknowledge the honor of the naming; as she did, she had the tiniest smile, which Luet, at least, recognized as a sign that Rasa knew her husband was trying to be conciliatory in his naming.
They made their settlement on a low promontory overlooking the mouth of the River Rasa, where it poured into the Southern Ocean—for that was how far south they had come, leaving the Scour Sea and the Sea of Stars behind them. Within a month they all had houses of wood, with thatched roofs, and in this latitude they had a growing season almost all the year, so it hardly mattered when they planted; there were some rains almost every day, and heavy storms swept over quickly, doing no damage.
The animals were so tame they had no fear of man; they soon domesticated the wild goats, which clearly were descended from the same animals that were herded in the hills near Basilica—camel’s milk at last became a liquid that only baby camels had to drink, and the term “camel’s cheese” became a euphemism for what well-fed babies left in their diapers. In the next six years, more babies were born, until there were thirty-five young ones, ranging in age from nearly eight years to several newborns. They farmed their fields together, and shared equally from the produce; from time to time the men would leave and hunt together, bringing home meat for drying and salting and skins for tanning. Rasa, Issib, and Shedemei undertook the education of the children by starting a school.
Not that their lives were one unrelenting tale of joy and peace. There were quarrels—for an entire year Kokor would not speak to Sevet over some trivial slight; there was another quarrel between Meb and Obring that led to Obring building a house farther from the rest of the group. There were resentments—some felt that others weren’t working hard enough; some felt that their kind of work was of greater value than the labor of others. And there was a constant undercurrent of tension between the women, who looked to Rasa for leadership, and the men, who seemed to assume that no decision was final unless Volemak or Elemak had approved it. But they weathered all these crises, all these tensions, finding some balance of leadership between Volemak’s loyalty to the purposes of the Oversoul, Rasa’s clearsighted compassion, and Elemak’s hardheaded assessments of what they needed to survive. Any unhappiness that hey might harbor in their hearts was kept in check, buried under the hard work that marked the rhythms of their lives, and then dissolved in the moments when joy was bountiful and love unstinted.
Life was good enough over the years that there was not a one of them who did not wish, when they thought of it at all, that the Oversoul would forget that they were there, and leave them in peace and happiness in Dostatok.
When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.
Like all the children of Dostatok, she grew up understanding the pure and simple relationships among families. For instance, Dazya and her younger brothers and sisters belonged to Hushidh and Issib. Krassya and Nokya and their younger brothers and sisters belonged to Kokor and Obring. Vasnya and her brother and sister belonged to Sevet and Vas. And so on, each set of children belonging to a mother and father.
The only oddity in this clear picture of the universe, at least until Chveya was eight, had been Grandfather and Grandmother, Volemak and Rasa, who not only had two children of their own—the brothers Okya and Yaya, who might as well be twins because, as Vasnya had said once, they had but one brain between them—but also were, in some vague way, the parents of all the other parents. She knew this because, in odd moments, she had heard adults call Grandmother not only “Lady Rasa” or “Grandmother” but also “Mother,” and she heard her own father and Proya’s father Elemak and Skiya’s father Mebbekew call Grandfather “Father” more often than not.
In Chveya’s mind this meant that Volemak and Rasa were the First Parents, having given rise to all of humanity. Now, she knew in the forepart of her mind that this was not accurate, for Shedemei had made it plain in school that there were millions of other humans living in faraway places, and clearly Grandfather and Grandmother had not given life to all of them. But those places were legendary. They were never seen. The whole world was the safe and beautiful land of Dostatok, and in that place there was no one, or so it seemed, who had not come from the marriage of Volemak and Rasa.
To Chveya, in fact, the world of the adults was remote enough to satisfy any need she had for strangeness; she had no need to wonder about mythical lands like Basilica and Potokgavan and Gorayni and Earth and Harmony, some of which were planets and some of which were cities and some of which were nations, though Chveya had never grasped the rules for which term went with each name. No, Chveya’s world was dominated by the continual power struggle between Dazya and Proya for ascendancy among the children.
Dazya was Oldest Child, which conferred on her enormous authority which she cheerfully misused by exploiting the younger children whenever possible, converting it to personal service and “favors” which were received without gratitude. If any of the younger ones failed to obey, she would freeze them out of all games simply by letting it be known that if “that child” were part of a game or contest, she would not participate. Dazya’s attitude toward the girls more near her own age was much the same, though it was more subtle—she didn’t insist on humiliating personal services, but she did expect that when she decided things would be done a certain way, all the other girls would go along, and anyone who resisted was politely ostracized. Since Chveya was Second Child, and only three days younger, she saw no reason to accept a subservient role. The result was that she had a lot of time to herself, for Dazya would brook no equals, and none of the other girls had the spine to stand up to her.
At the same time that Dazya had forged her kingdom among the younger children and the older girls, Proya—Elemak’s eldest son, and Second Boy—had made himself prince among princes. He was the only person who could ridicule Dazya and laugh at her rules, and all the older boys would follow him. Dazya would, of course, immediately ostracize the older boys, but this meant nothing to them since the games they wanted to join and the approval they craved were Proya’s. The worst humiliation to Dazya was that her own brother Xodhya would join with Proya and use Proya’s power as a shield for his own independence from his older sister’s rule. Chveya’s own younger brother Zhyat, and sometimes even Motya, a year younger than Zhyat and not really one of the older boys, joined with Proya regularly, but she didn’t mind at all, for that meant even more humiliation for Dazya.
Of course, at times of struggle Chveya would join with the older girls in alternately sneering at and snubbing the rebel boys, but in her heart Chveya longed to be part of Proya’s kingdom. They were the ones who played rough and wonderful games involving hunting and death. She would even act the deer if they would only invite her to play, letting them hunt her and shoot at her with their blunt-tipped arrows, if only she could be part of them instead of being miserably trapped in Dazya’s demesne. But when she hinted at this desire to her brother Zhyat, he made a great show of gagging and retching and she gave up the idea.
Her greatest envy was reserved for Okya and Yaya, the two sons of Grandmother and Grandfather. Okya was First Boy and Yaya was Fourth Boy. They could easily have dislodged Proya from his position of seniority among the boys, especially because the two brothers did everything together and could have thrashed all the other boys into submission. But they never bothered, only joining in Proya’s games when they felt like it, and giving no concern at all to who was in charge. For they fancied themselves to be adults, not children at all. “We are of the same generation as your parents,” Yaya had once said to her, quite haughtily. Chveya had thereupon pointed out that Yaya was considerably shorter than her and still had a teeny-weeny hooy like a hare, which caused the other children to laugh in spite of their awe for Yaya. Yaya, for his part, only looked at her with withering disdain and walked away. But Chveya noticed that he also stopped peeing in front of the other children.
When Chveya was brutally honest with herself, she had to admit that the reason she was so often completely isolated from the other children was because she simply could not keep her mouth shut. If she saw someone being a bully or unfair or selfish, she said so. Never mind that she also spoke up when somebody was noble or good or kind—praise was quickly forgotten, while offenses were treasured forever. Thus Chveya had no real friends among the other children—they were all too busy making sweet with Dazya or Proya to give real friendship to Chveya, except Okya and Yaya, of course, who were even more aloof and involved with each other in their supposed adultness.
It was when Chveya turned eight years old and saw how little heed anyone but her own parents paid to her birthday, after the enormous fuss made over Dazya’s birthday, that she entirely despaired of ever being a person of significance in the world. Wasn’t it bad enough that Dazya lorded it over everybody so outrageously as it was—why did the adults have to make a festival out of Dazya’s birthday? Father explained, of course, that the festival wasn’t about Dza herself, but rather because her birthday marked the beginning of their whole generation of children—but what did it matter if the adults thought of it that way or not? The fact remained that with this festival they had affirmed Dazya’s iron rule over the other children, and in fact had even given her a temporary ascendancy over Proya himself, and Okya and Yaya had sulked through the whole party when they were snubbed and lumped in among the children, which they felt was wrong since they were not part of the younger generation. How could the adults so heedlessly and destructively have intervened in the children’s hierarchy? It was as if the adults did not think of the children’s lives as real.
It was then that Chveya reached her profound insight that the adult world and the children’s world were probably identical in the way they worked, except that the children were perpetually subservient to the adults. It began in a conversation with her mother as she combed Chveya’s hair after her bath. “The younger boys are, the more disgusting they are,” Chveya said, thinking of her second brother Motya, who had just discovered how much tumult he could cause by picking his nose and wiping it on his sisters’ clothing, a practice which Chveya had no intention of tolerating, whether he did it to her or to little Zuya, who couldn’t defend herself.
“That’s not necessarily true,” said Mother. “They simply find different ways of being disgusting when they get older.”
Mother said it offhandedly, like a joke, but to Chveya it was a grand illuminating moment. She tried to picture Krassya’s father, Obring, for instance, picking his nose and wiping it on Mother, and knew that it could never happen. But perhaps there were other disgusting things, adult things, that Obring might do. I must watch him and find out, thought Chveya.
She didn’t question that it was Obring she should watch—she had often seen the way Mother grew impatient when Obring spoke in council meetings. She had no respect for him, and neither did Father, though he hid it better. So if any adult male might exemplify disgusting behavior, it would certainly be Obring.
From now on, Chveya would focus all her attention on the adults around her, watching to see who was the Dazya of the mothers and who was the Proya of the fathers. In the process, she began to understand things that she had never understood before. The world was not as clear and simple a place as she had thought till now.
The most shocking revelation came on the day she discussed marriage with her parents. It had recently dawned on her that eventually the children would all grow up and pair off with each other and have babies and start the whole cycle all over again—this because of some vile remark by Toya about what Proya really wanted to do to Dazya. Toya had meant it to be an obscene horror, but Chveya realized that, far from being a horror, it was probably a prophecy. Wouldn’t Proya and Dazya be the perfect pair? Proya would be just like Elemak, and Dazya would probably smile at Proya with complete devotion the way Eiadh did with Elemak. Or would Dazya be like her mother Hushidh, so much stronger than her husband Issib that she even carried him around and bathed him like a baby? Or would Proya and Dazya continue their struggle for supremacy all through their lives, trying to turn their own babies against each other?
That thought led Chveya to wonder which of the boys she would marry. Would it be one of the boys of the first year, her own age? That would mean either Proya or Okya, and the thought of either one repelled her. Then what about boys of the second year? Dazya’s little brother Xodhya, Proya’s little brother Nadya, or the “adult” Yaya—what a proud selection! And the children of the third year were the same age as her revolting brother Motya—how could she dream of marrying someone that young?
So she broached the subject with her parents as they were eating breakfast on a morning when Father was not going hunting, so they could eat together. “Will I have to marry Xodhya, do you think?” she asked—for she had decided that Xodhya was the least disgusting of all the alternatives.
“Definitely not,” said Mother, without a moment’s hesitation.
“In fact,” said Father, “we would forbid it.”
“Well, who then? Okya? Yaya?”
“Almost as bad,” said Father. “What is this, are you planning to start a family anytime soon?”
“Of course she’s thinking about it, Nyef,” said Mother. “Girls think about such things at this age.”
“Well, then, she might keep in mind that she isn’t going to marry a full uncle and certainly not a full double first cousin.”
These words meant absolutely nothing to Chveya, but they hinted at dark mysteries. What unspeakable thing had Xodhya done to become a “full double first cousin”? So she asked.
“It’s not what he did,” said Mother. “It’s just that his mother, Hushidh, is my full sister—we both have the same mother and the same father. And Zaxodh’s father, Issib, is your father’s full brother—they both have the same mother and father, who happen to be Grandmother and Grandfather. That means that you have all your ancestors in common—it’s the closest blood relation among all the children, and marriage between you is out of the question.”
“If we can possibly avoid it,” added Father.
“We can avoid that one, anyway,” said Mother. “And I feel almost as strongly about Oykib and Yasai, because they are also sons of both Rasa and Volemak.”
Chveya took all this in with outward calm, but inwardly she was in turmoil. Hushidh and Mother were full sisters, but not daughters of Grandmother and Grandfather! And Father and Issib were full brothers, as were Oykib and Yasai, and this fullness of their brotherhood was because they all were sons of Grandmother and Grandfather. Yet the very use of the word full implied that there were some here who were not full brothers, and therefore not sons of both Volemak and Rasa. How could that be?
“What’s wrong?” asked Father.
“I just… who is it that I can marry?”
“Isn’t it a little early…” began Father.
Mother intervened. “The boys who disgust you today will look far more interesting to you as you get older. Take that on faith, my dear Veya, because you won’t believe that particular prophecy until it comes true. But when that wonderful day comes…”
“Dreadful day, you mean,” muttered Father.
“… you can certainly cast your gaze on Padarok, for instance, because he’s not related to anybody at all except his baby sister Dabrota and his parents, Zdorab and Shedemei.”
That was the first time Chveya realized that Zdorab and Shedemei weren’t kin to the others, but now she remembered that she had long disliked Padarok because he always referred to Grandmother and Grandfather as Rasa and Volemak, which seemed disrespectful; but it was not disrespectful at all, because they really weren’t his grandmother or grandfather. Did everybody else understand this all along?
“And,” added Father, “because there’s only one Rokya to service the nubile young girls of Dostatok…”
“Nyef!” said Mother sharply.
“…you’ll have no choice but to also—how did you say it, my dear Waterseer?- oh yes, cast your gaze upon Protchnu or Nadezhny, because their mother, Eiadh, is no kin of anybody else here, and their father, Elemak, is only my half-brother. Likewise with Umene, whose father, Vas, is not kin of ours, and whose mother, Sevet, is only my half-sister.”
Never mind about Proya and Nadya and Umya. “How can Sevet be only half your sister?” Chveya asked. “Is that because you have so many brothers that she can’t be a whole sister to you?”
“Oh, this is a nightmare,” said Mother. “Did it have to be this morning?”
Father, however, went ahead and explained about how Volemak had been married to two other women in Basilica, who gave birth to Elemak and Mebbekew, and then had married Rasa long enough to have Issib; and then Lady Rasa “didn’t renew” the marriage and instead married a man named Gaballufix, who was also Elemak’s half-brother because his mother had been one of Volemak’s earlier wives, and it was with Gaballufix that Lady Rasa had given birth to Sevet and Kokor, and then she didn’t renew him and returned to marry Volemak permanently and then they had Nafai and, more recently, Okya and Yaya.
“Did you understand that?”
Chveya could only give a stupefied nod. Her entire world had been turned upside down. Not just by the confusion of who was really kin to whom after all, but by the whole idea that the same people didn’t have to stay married all their lives—that somebody’s mother and father might end up being married to completely different people and have children who thought of only one of them as Mother and the other one as a complete stranger! It was terrifying, and that night she had a terrible dream in which giant rats came into their house and carried off Father in his sleep, and when Mother woke up she didn’t even notice he was gone, she simply brought in little Proya—only full-sized now, because this was a dream—and said, “This is your new father, till the rats take him.”
She woke up sobbing.
“What was the dream?” asked Mother, as she comforted her. “Tell me, Veya, why do you cry?”
So she told her.
Mother carried her into Father’s and her room and woke Father and made Chveya tell him the dream, too. He didn’t even seem interested in the most horrible thing, which was Proya coming into their house and taking his place. All he wanted to know about were the giant rats. He made her describe them again and again, even though she couldn’t think of anything to say about them except that they were rats and they were very large and they seemed to be chuckling to each other about how clever they were as they carried Father away.
“Still,” said Father, “it’s the first time in the new generation. And not from the Oversoul, but from the Keeper.”
“It might mean nothing,” said Mother. “Maybe she heard of one of the other dreams.”
But when they asked her whether she had heard stories of giant rats before this dream, Chveya had no idea of what they were talking about. The only rats she had heard about were the ones that were constantly trying to steal food from the barns. Did other people dream of giant rats, too? Adults were so strange—they thought nothing of families being torn apart and children having half-brothers and half-sisters and other monstrosities like that, but a dream of a giant rat, now, that was important to them. Father even said, “If you ever dream of giant rats again—or other strange animals—you must tell us at once. It can be very important.”
It was only as Luet was covering her up again in bed that Chveya was able to ask about the question that was gnawing at her. “Mother, if you ever don’t renew Father, who will be our new father then?”
Instantly a look of understanding and compassion came to Mother’s face. “Oh, Veya, my dear little seamstress, is that what’s worrying you? We left laws like that behind when we left Basilica. Marriages are forever here. Till we die. So Father will always be the father in our family, and I will always be the mother, and that’s it. You can count on that.”
Much reassured, Chveya settled down to sleep. She thought several thoughts as she was drifting off: How awful it must have been, to live in Basilica and never know who would be married to your parents from year to year—you might as well live in a house where the floor might be the ceiling tomorrow. And then: I am the first of the new generation to have a dream of giant rats, and somehow that is very wonderful so I must be very proud of myself and if I’d known that I would have dreamed about giant rats before. And then: Rokya is the boy who is no kin to anybody, and so he’s the very best one to marry, and so I shall marry him and that will show Dazya who’s the best.
Nafai and Luet got little sleep that night. Each had keyed in on a different aspect of Chveya’s dream. To Luet, what mattered was that one of the children had finally shown some of the ability that the Oversoul had been selecting for. She knew it was vain of her, but she felt it appropriate that the firstborn of the waterseer should be the first to have a meaningful dream. She could hardly bear to wait until she could first take her daughter into the water of the river to see if she could learn to deliberately fall into the kind of sleep that brought true dreams, the way Luet had schooled herself to do.
To Nafai, on the other hand, what mattered was that after so long a silence, someone had received some kind of message at all. And the message, however vague it was, however tied to childish puzzlements, was nevertheless from the Keeper of Earth, which somehow made it more important than if it had come from the Oversoul.
After all, they had conversation with the Oversoul all the time, through the Index. The Index only allowed them access to the Oversoul’s memory, however. It did not let them plumb the Oversoul’s plans, to find out through the Index exactly what the Oversoul expected them to do this year or the next. For that they waited, as they had always waited, for the Oversoul to initiate things through dreams or a voice in their own minds. All these years in Dostatok, and the Oversoul had sent no dream, no voice, and the only message the Index had for them, beyond their own research into memory, was: Stay and wait.
But the Keeper of Earth was not tied to any plan or schedule of the Oversoul; it sent its dreams through the light-years from Earth itself. It was impossible to guess what the Keeper’s purpose was—the dreams it sent seemed to get tangled up in the concerns of the person having the dream, just as happened with Chveya’s dream of the rats. Yet there were themes that kept recurring—hadn’t Hushidh dreamed of rats also as enemies, attacking her family? This seemed to hint that somehow these large rats were going to be a problem to them on Earth—though there were also the dreams that showed the rats and angels of Earth linked with humans as friends and equals. It was so hard to make sense of all of it—but one thing was certain. The dreams from the Keeper of Earth had not stopped coming, and so perhaps something would happen soon, perhaps the next stage of their journey would begin.
For Nafai was growing impatient. Like all the others, he loved the way they lived at Dostatok, yet he could not forget that this was not the object of their journey. There was an unfinished task ahead of them, a journey through space to the planet where humankind originated, the return of humans for the first time after forty million years, and Nafai longed to go. Life in Dostatok was sweet, but it was also far too closed and neat. Things seemed to have ended here, and Nafai didn’t like the feeling that somehow the future had been tied off, that there would be no more changes other than the predictable changes of growing older.
Oversoul, said Nafai silently, now that the Keeper of Earth has awakened again, will you also awaken? Will you also set us on the next stage of our journey?
Nafai was keenly aware of how different were his and Luet’s responses to Chveya’s dream. He was at once disdainful and envious of Luet’s attitude. Disdainful, for she seemed to have let Dostatok become her whole world—what she cared most about was the children, and how this meant that they might also become visionaries, and most specifically how wonderful it was that their Chveya was the first to dream true dreams. How could this matter compared to the news that the Keeper of Earth was stirring again? And yet he envied her for very connectedness with their present life in Dostatok—he could not help but think that she was far happier than he, because her world did center around the children, the family, the community. I live in a larger world, but have little connection with it; she lives in a smaller one, but is able to change it and be changed by it far more than I.
I can’t become as she is, nor can she become like me. Individual people have always been more important to her than to me. It’s my weakness, that I don’t have her awareness of other people’s feelings. Perhaps, had I been as observant, as empathic as she, I would not have inadvertently said and done the things that made my older brothers hate me so much, and then our whole path through life might have been different, Elya and I might have been friends all along. Instead, even now when Elemak gives me respect as a hunter and listens to me in council, there is still no closeness between us, and Elemak is wary of me, watching for signs that I seek to displace him. Luet, on the other hand, seems to cause no envy among the other women. As Waterseer, she could just as easily be seen as a rival to Mother’s dominance over the women as Elemak is the rival to Father’s leadership, and I am the rival to Elemak, but instead there is no sense of competition at all. They are one. Why couldn’t Elemak and I have been one, and Elemak and Father?
Perhaps there is something lacking in men, so that we can never join together and make one soul out of many. If so then it is a terrible loss. I look at Luet and see how close she is to the other women, even the ones she doesn’t like all that well; I see how close she and the other women are to the children; and then I see how distant I am from the other men, and I feel so lonely.
With those thoughts Nafai finally slept, but only a few hours before dawn, and when he got out of bed he found Luet just as weary from undersleeping, stirring the morning porridge virtually in her sleep. “And there’s no school today,” Luet said, “so we have all the children and there’s no hope of a nap.”
“Let them play outside,” said Nafai, “except the twins of course, and we can probably leave them with Shuya and then we can sleep.”
“Or we could take turns ourselves, instead of imposing on them,” said Luet.
“Take turns?” said Nafai. “How dull.”
“I want to sleep,” said Luet. “Why is it that men are never so tired that they stop thinking about that?”
“Men who stop thinking about that, as you so sweetly call it, are either eunuchs or dead.”
“We need to tell your parents about Chveya’s dream,” said Luet.
“We need to tell everybody.”
“I don’t think so,” said Luet. “It would cause too much jealousy.”
“Oh, who but you will care about which child was first to have true dreams?” But he knew as he said it that all the parents would care, and that she was right about needing to avoid jealousy.
She made a face at him. “You are so completely above envy, O noble one, that it makes me envious.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And besides,” she said, “it wouldn’t be good for Chveya if a big fuss were made about this. Look what happened to Dza when we made her birthday into a festival—she’s really quite a bully with the other children, and it worries Shuya, and that public fuss only made her worse.”
“There are times when I see her making the other children run meaningless errands for her that I want to slap her silly,” said Nafai.
“But Lady Rasa says –”
“That children must be free to establish their own society, and deal with tyranny in their own way, I know,” said Nafai. “But I can’t help but wonder if she’s right. After all, hers was an educational theory that thrived only in the womb of Basilica. Couldn’t we see our own conflicts early on in our journeying as a result of exactly her attitude?”
“No, we couldn’t,” said Luet. “Particularly because the people who caused the most trouble were the ones who spent the least time being educated by Lady Rasa. Namely Elemak and Mebbekew, who left her school as soon as they came of age to decide for themselves, and Vas and Obring, who were never students of hers.”
“Not so, my dear reductionist, since Zdorab is the best of us and he never studied with her, while Kokor and Sevet, her own daughters, are just as bad as the worst of the others.”
“You only prove my point, since they went to Dhelembuvex’s school and not your mother’s at all. Zdorab is an exception to everything anyway.”
At that point the twins, Serp and Spel, toddled into the kitchen, and frank adult conversation was over.
By the time they both got free enough to take a nap, the day’s activities had wakened them so thoroughly that they didn’t want to sleep. So they headed for Volemak’s and Rasa’s house to confer about the dream.
On the way they passed a group of older boys competing with their slings. They stopped and watched for a while, mostly to see how their own two older boys, Zhatva and Motiga, were doing. The boys saw them watching, of course, and immediately set out to impress their parents—but it wasn’t their prowess with the sling and stones that most interested Luet and Nafai, it was how they were with the other boys. Motiga, of course, was an incessant tease—he was keenly aware of being younger than the other boys and his silly pranks and clowning were his strategy for trying to ingratiate his way into the inner circle. Zhatva, however, being older, was there by right, and what worried his parents was how pliant he was—how he seemed to worship Proya, a strutting cock-of-the-walk who didn’t deserve so much of Zhatva’s respect.
A typical moment—Xodhya got hit in the arm by Motya’s careless swinging of his loaded sling. His eyes immediately filled with tears, and Proya taunted him. “You’ll never be a man, Xodhya! You’ll always just be coming near!” That was a play on his name, of course, and a rather clever one—but also cruel, and it did nothing but add to Xodhya’s misery. Then, without any of the boys being particularly aware of it, Xodhya turned in his misery to Zhyat, who offhandedly threw his arm around Xodhya’s shoulder as he barked at his little brother Motya, “Be careful with your sling, monkey brains!”
It was a simple, instinctive thing, but Luet and Nafai smiled at each other when they saw it. Not only did Zhatva offer physical comfort to Xodhya, without a hint of condescension, but also he drew attention away from Xodhya’s pain and incipient tears and threw the blame where it rightly belonged, on Motya’s carelessness. It was done easily and gracefully, without giving the slightest challenge to Proya’s authority among the boys.
“When will Zhyat see that he’s the one the other boys turn to when they’re in trouble?” asked Nafai.
“Maybe he fills that role so well because he doesn’t know that he’s filling it.”
“I envy him,” said Nafai. “If only I could have done that.”
“Oh? And why couldn’t you?”
“You know me, Luet. I would have been yelling at Protchnu that it wasn’t fair for him to tease Xodhya because it was Motya’s fault and if it had happened to Protchnu he’d be crying too.”
“All true, of course.”
“All true, but it would have made Protchnu my enemy,” said Nafai. He hardly needed to point out the consequence of that. Hadn’t Luet lived through it with him often enough?
“All that matters to me is that our Zhatva has the love of the other boys, and he deserves it,” said Luet.
“If only Motya could learn from him.”
“Motya’s still a baby,” said Luet, “and we don’t know what he’ll be except that it’ll be something loud and noticeable and underfoot. The one that I wish could learn from Zhatva is Chveya.”
“Yes, well, each child is different,” said Nafai. He turned and led Luet away from the stone-slinging and on toward Father and Mother’s house. But he well understood Luet’s wish: Chveya’s loneliness and isolation from the other children was such a worry to them both—she was the only complete misfit among all the older children, and they didn’t understand why, because she did nothing to antagonize the others, really. She simply didn’t have a place in their childish hierarchies. Or perhaps she had one, but refused to take it. How ironic, thought Nafai—we worry because Zhatva fits in too well in a subservient role, and then we worry because Chveya refuses to accept a subservient role. Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I’m trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are.
Luet must have been thinking along the same lines, because she said, out of the silence between them, “They’re both finding their own paths through the thickets of human society, and well enough. All we can really do is observe and comfort and, now and then, give a hint.”
Or turn bossy little Queen Dza upside down and shake her until her arrogance falls out. But no, that would only cause a quarrel between families—and the last family that they would ever quarrel with would be Shuya’s and Issya’s.
Volemak and Rasa listened with interest to their tale of Chveya’s dream. “I’ve wondered, from time to time, when the Oversoul would act again,” said Father, “but I’ll confess that I haven’t been asking, because it’s been so good here that I didn’t want to do anything to hasten our departure.”
“Not that anything we might do could hasten our departure,” said Mother. “After all, the Oversoul has her own schedule to keep, and it has little to do with us. She never cared whether we spent these years at that first miserable desert valley, or that much better place between the North and South rivers, or here, which is quite possibly the most perfect spot on Harmony. All she cared about was getting us together and ready for when she needs us. For all we know, it’s the children she plans to take on the voyage to Earth, and not us at all. And that would suit me well enough, though I’d really prefer it if she took the great-grandchildren, long after we’re all dead, so we’ll never have to see them go and break our hearts missing the voyagers.”
“It’s how we all feel sometimes,” said Luet.
Nafai held his tongue.
It didn’t matter. Father saw right through him. “All but Nafai. He’s ready for a change. You’re a cripple, Nyef. You can’t stand happiness for very long—it’s conflict and uncertainty that bring you to life.”
“I don’t like conflict, Father,” protested Nafai.
“You may not like it, but you thrive on it,” said Volemak. “It’s not an insult, son, it’s just a fact.”
“The question is,” said Rasa, “do we do anything because of Chveya’s dream?”
“No,” said Luet hastily. “Not a thing. We just wanted you to know.”
“Still,” said Father, “what if some of the other children are having dreams from the Keeper but haven’t told anybody about them? Perhaps we should alert all the parents to listen to their children’s dream tales.”
“Put the word out like that,” said Rasa, “and you know that Kokor and Dol will start coaching their daughters on what dreams they ought to have, and get nasty with them if they don’t come up with good giant rat dreams.”
They all laughed, but they knew it was true.
“So we’ll do nothing for now,” said Father. “Just wait and see. The Oversoul will act when it’s time for him to act, and till then we’ll work hard when there’s work to be done, and in the meantime try to raise perfect children who never quarrel.”
“Oh, is that the standard of success?” asked Luet, teasingly. “The ones who never quarrel are the good ones?”
Rasa laughed wryly. “If that’s the case, the only good children are the ones who have no spine at all.”
“Which means no descendent of yours, my love,” said Father.
The visit ended; they returned home and went on with the day’s work. But Nafai was not content to wait and see. It troubled him that there had been so few visions, and that now the only one to receive anything from the Keeper was Chveya, and her the loneliest child, and too young to make real sense of her own dream.
Why was the Oversoul delaying so long? It had been in quite a hurry to get them out of Basilica nine years ago. They had given up everything they had ever expected their lives to bring them, and plunged into the desert. Yes, things had turned out rather well in the end, but it wasn’t the end, was it? There were more than a hundred light-years ahead of them, the part of their journey they had completed so far was nothing, and there was no sign of resuming it.
Answer me!
But there was no answer.
It took another dream to stir Nafai to action. It was Luet this time; Nafai woke from a sound sleep to find her whimpering, moaning, then crying out. He shook her awake, speaking soothingly to her so she would be calmed as she emerged from her dream. “A nightmare,” he said. “You’re having a nightmare.”
“The Oversoul,” she said. “She’s lost. She’s lost.”
“Luet, wake up. You’re having a dream.”
“I am awake now,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you the dream.”
“You dreamed about the Oversoul?”
“I saw myself in the dream. Only young—Chveya’s age. The way I used to see myself in dreams.”
It occurred to Nafai that it hadn’t been all that long since Luet was Chveya’s age. She had been a child when he met and married her, barely in her teens. So when she saw herself as a child, how different could it be from how she saw herself now? “So you saw yourself as a child,” said Nafai.
“No—I saw a person who looked like me, but I thought, This is the waterseer. And then I thought, No, this is the Oversoul, wearing the face and body of the waterseer. Which is what many women believed about me, you know.”
“Yes, I know that,” said Nafai.
“And then I knew that I was seeing the Oversoul, only she was wearing my face. And she was searching, desperately. Searching for something, and she kept thinking she had found it, only then she looked in her hands and she didn’t have it. And then I realized that what she was chasing, around and around, was a giant rat, and then as she caught it and embraced it, it turned into an angel and flew away. Only she hadn’t noticed the transformation and so she thought the rat had slipped away. I think the reason we’re waiting here is that the Oversoul is confused about something. Searching for something.”
But Nafai’s thoughts had hung up on the fact that there were rats and angels in her dream. “This is a dream from the Keeper?” asked Nafai. “But how could the Keeper have known a hundred years ago that the Oversoul would be having trouble now?”
“It’s only our guess that the dreams we’ve had from the Keeper are traveling at lightspeed,” said Luet. “Perhaps the Keeper knows more than we’re giving her credit for.”
It grated on Nafai’s nerves when the women who knew about the Keeper at all simply assumed that it would be a female, as they imagined the Oversoul to be. Somehow it seemed all right with the Oversoul, but faintly arrogant with the Keeper. Perhaps just because Nafai knew the Oversoul was a computer, but had no idea what the Keeper of Earth might be. If it really was a god, or something like a god, he resented the thought that it had to be female.
“Perhaps the Keeper is watching us and knows us very well, and is trying to wake us up—and through us wake up the Oversoul.”
“The Oversoul isn’t asleep,” said Nafai. “We talk to it all the time through the Index.”
“I tell you what I saw in my dream,” said Luet.
“Then in the morning let’s go and talk to Issib and Zdorab and see what they can get out of the Index about it.”
“Now,” said Luet. “Let’s go now.”
“Wake them in the middle of the night? They have children, that would be irresponsible.”
“In the middle of the night there won’t be interruptions,” said Luet. “And it’s almost dawn.”
It was true; the first light was brightening the sky outside their parchment-glazed window.
Zdorab woke instantly, coming to open the door even before Nafai and Luet reached it. Shedemei appeared in a moment, and after a few whispered words she left to go summon Issib and Hushidh. They gathered then at the house where the Index was kept. Luet told them all her dream, and Zdorab and Issib at once began searching through the Index, trying to find answers.
Luet grew impatient first, as they waited in silence. “I’m useless here for now,” she said. “And the children will want me.”
“Me too,” said Hushidh, and Shedemei reluctantly left with them, each returning to her house. Nafai knew that when it came to searching the Index, he wasn’t much use, either—it was Issib and Zdorab who had made exploration of the Oversoul’s memory their life’s work, and he couldn’t compete with them. He knew that the women would resent his tacit assumption that he could stay and Luet needed to leave… but he also knew that it was true. The children’s routines revolved around Luet, who was always there, while Nafai was so often gone on hunting expeditions that his presence or absence barely made a difference in their lives. Not that they didn’t care whether he was there or not—they cared a great deal—but it didn’t change the normal events of their day.
So Nafai stayed in the Index House as Zodya and Issya asked it questions. He heard their murmuring, and now and then one would ask him a question, but he was truly useless to them.
He reached out his hand across the table and rested the back of his fingers against the Index. “You’re looping, aren’t you,” he said.
“Yes,” said the Index. “I realized that as soon as Luet had her dream from the Keeper. Issib and Zdorab are already working to find the loop.”
“It must be in your primitive routines,” said Nafai, “because you could find it and program your way out of it if it were your own self-programming.”
“Yes,” said the Index again. “Zdorab assumed that at once, and that’s where we’re exploring.”
“It must be a loop where you think you’ve found something only you haven’t really,” said Nafai, remembering the dream.
“Yes,” said the Index. It couldn’t be sounding impatient, could it? “Issib insisted on that from the start, so we’re trying to find something that I can’t detect myself. It’s very hard to search my memory to find what I haven’t detected.”
Nafai realized that all his thoughts were doing nothing but following far behind Zdorab and Issib, and so he sighed and took his hand away from the Index, sat back in the chair, and waited. He loathed being a spectator at important events. It’s what Elemak has so often said about me, Nafai told himself nastily. I have to make myself the hero of every story I take part in. What was it he said that time? That someday if he didn’t stop me I’d find a way to be the protagonist of Elemak’s own autobiography. Thus I fancy myself to be vital to the process of discovering what has the Oversoul going in circles, wasting its time, wasting our time …
Wastingour time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then.
Like a hunt, around in circles, the poor Oversoul is tying itself up in knots, covering the same ground without realizing it.
And as he thought this, Nafai envisioned the path he took on his most recent hunt as if he were above the ground, looking down at it like a map, seeing his own path drawn out among the trees, watching as he went in twisting, interlocking circles, but never quite passed the same tree from the same direction so he never guessed it except by seeing the map.
That’s what the Oversoul needs to do—see its own tracks.
He reached out and touched the Index and said so to the Oversoul.
“Yes,” said the Index—still maddeningly unreproachful. “Zdorab already suggested that I look through my recent history to find repetitive behavior. But I don’t track my own behavior. Only human behavior. I have no autobiography stored here, except insofar as my actions impinge on humanity. And apparently whatever I’m doing that has me in a loop has no direct effect on humanity—or is so primitive that I’m unaware of it. Either way, I can’t retrace my own steps.”
Stymied again, Nafai didn’t take his hand away. It might be too disturbing to the others, to keep touching the Index and then removing his hand.
Disturbing? No. He simply didn’t want the embarrassment of having them know that again his would-be contribution was futile.
He was still sleepy. Luet’s dream had woken him too early, and sitting here now, with nothing to do, he began to doze. He laid his head down on the table, resting on his other arm; still his fingers touched the Index.
He went back to that image of himself seen from above, a map being traced behind him as he hunted in circles through the woods. Maybe I really do that, he thought, drifting on the edge of sleep. Maybe I really move in circles.
“No you don’t,” said the Index. “Except when the animal you’re tracking moved that way.”
I might, said Nafai silently. I might drift around and around in large circles, casting for the tracks of some beast, never realizing that I’m seeing my own tracks. Maybe sometimes I hunt myself. Maybe I find my own tracks and think, what an exceptionally large beast, this will feed us for a week, and then I track myself and track myself and never catch up until one day I come upon my own body, lying there exhausted and starving, dying so that in my madness I now imagine myself detached from my body and…
I was dozing, he said silently.
“Here’s the map of all your journeys,” said the Index. “You’ll see that you never make circles, except when tracking a beast.”
Nafai saw in his mind a clear map of the land all around Dostatok, clear up to the mountains and beyond, showing all his journeys.
I’ve really covered this territory, haven’t I, said Nafai silently.
But even as he said it, he saw it wasn’t true. There was an area where none of his hunts had ever taken him. A sort of wedge right up among the mountains, tending toward the desert side of them, where none of his paths went.
Do you have a map of the others’ hunting trips? asked Nafai.
Almost at once, a map that he “knew” was Elemak’s hunts was superimposed on his own, and then a map of Vas’s and Obring’s hunts, and the group hunts. They interlocked until they formed a tight net all around Dostatok.
Except for that wedge in the mountains.
What’s in that place in the mountains, where none of our paths meet?
“What are you talking about?” asked the Index.
The gap in the maps. The place where no one has been.
“There is no gap,” said the Index.
Nafai focused on the spot, giving it all its attention. There! he shouted inside his mind.
“You speak to me as if you were pointing, and I can see you giving great attention to something, yet there is no point on the map that you’re singling out above any other.”
Could there be something here that is hidden even from yourself?
“Nothing on Harmony is hidden from me.”
Why did you bring us to Dostatok?
“Because I’ve prepared this place for you to wait until I’m ready.”
Ready for what?
“For you to carry me on the voyage to Earth.”
And why should we have come here to wait?
“Because this is the nearest place where you could sustain your lives until I’m ready.”
The nearest place to what?
“To yourselves. To where you are.”
This was getting circular again, Nafai could see. He tried a different tack. When will you be ready for us to carry you to Earth? Nafai asked.
“When I call you forth,” said the Index.
Call us forth from where, to where?
“From Dostatok,” said the Index.
To where?
“To Earth,” said the Index.
To Nafai it was clear—the empty place on the map, which the Index could not see, was also the place where they would gather to leave for Earth—again, a place that the Index could not name.
“I can name any place on Harmony,” said the Index. “I can report to you any name that any human has ever given to any spot on this planet.”
Then tell me the name of this place? asked Nafai, again focusing on the gap in the hunting maps.
“Point to a place and I’ll tell you.”
On a whim, Nafai mentally drew a circle all around the gap in the paths.
“Vusadka,” said the Index.
Vusadka, thought Nafai. An ancient-sounding name. But not dissimilar to the word for a single step just outside a door. He asked the Index: What does Vusadka mean?
“It’s the name of this place.”
How long has it had this name? asked Nafai.
“It was called this by the people of Raspyatny.”
And where did they learn this name?
“It was well known among the Cities of the Stars and the Cities of Fire.”
What is the oldest reference to this name?
“What name?” asked the Index.
The Oversoul could not have forgotten already. So he must have run into the block in its memory again. Nafai asked: When is the oldest reference to this name in the Cities of Fire?
“Twenty million years ago,” said the Index.
Is there an older reference in the Cities of the Stars?
“Of course—they’re much older, too. Thirty-nine million years ago.”
Did Vusadka have a meaning in the language they spoke then?
“The languages of Harmony are all related,” said the Index.
Again it was being non-responsive. Nafai tried another circling approach that might bring him the information he needed: What is the word in the language of the Cities of the Stars thirty-nine million years ago that most closely resembles Vusadka without being Vusadka?
“Vuissashivat’h,” answered the Index.
And what did that word mean, to them?
“To disembark.”
From what?
“From a boat,” said the Index.
But why would this place in the mountains be given a name that is related to a verb meaning to disembark from a boat? Was there once a shoreline that touched here?
“These are very ancient mountains—before the rift that created the Valley of Fires, these mountains were already old.”
So there was never a shoreline that touched this land of Vusadka?
“Never,” said the Index. “Not since humans disembarked from their starships on the world of Harmony.”
Because it used the modern word disembark in reference to the original starships, Nafai knew at once that the Oversold had done its best to confirm what he already had surmised: that Vusadka was the very place where the starships had landed forty million years ago, and therefore the very place where, if there were any possibility of a starship still existing, it would most likely be.
And another thought: You are there, aren’t you, Oversoul? Where the starships landed, that’s where youare. All your memories, all your processors, all are centered on this very place.
“What place?” asked the Index.
Nafai stood up, fully awake now. The scraping of his stool across the wooden floor brought the others out of their reveries. “I’m going to find the Oversoul,” Nafai said to them.
“Yes,” said Issib. “The Oversoul showed us its conversation with you.”
“Very deftly done,” said Zdorab. “I would never have thought of starting with the map of the hunting trips.”
Nafai almost didn’t tell them that he hadn’t done that deliberately; it felt good to be thought clever. But he realized that if he let them continue to think this about him, it would be a kind of lie. “I was just dozing,” said Nafai. “The hunting trip thing was just a mad idea on the edges of a dream. The Oversoul knew that it could not know that it knew, and it recognized that through the map it could communicate with me, that’s all. It had to fool itself into telling me.”
Issib laughed. “All right, then, Nyef,” he said. “We’ll agree that you really aren’t very bright at all.”
“That’s right,” said Nafai. “All I did was hear it when the Oversoul found an oblique way to call me past barriers in its own mind. Tell the others that I’ve gone hunting, if anyone asks. But to Luet and your wives, of course, you can tell the truth—I’m off searching for the Oversoul. Both statements are true.”
Zdorab nodded wisely. “We’ve had peace here all these years,” he said, “because this was a good land and there was room for us all and plenty to share. No one will be glad to think of uprooting ourselves again. Some will be less glad than others—it’s just as well to postpone telling them until we actually know something.”
Issib grimaced. “I can imagine a real battle over this one. I almost wish we hadn’t had so long a time of happiness here. This will divide the community and I can’t begin to guess what damage might be done before it’s through.”
Nafai shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said. “The Oversoul brought all of us on this journey. The Keeper of Earth is calling to all of us as well.”
“All are called,” said Zdorab, “but who will come?”
“At this moment,” said Nafai, “I will go.”
“Remember to take a bow and arrows, then,” said Issib. “Just in case you find supper for us on the way.” He didn’t say: So that our story of your having gone hunting will be believed.
It was a good idea in any event, so Nafai stopped by his house to get the bow and arrows.
“And if you hadn’t needed those,” said Luet, “you wouldn’t have stopped by and bid me farewell or explained anything at all, would you?” She sounded quite annoyed.
“Of course I would,” said Nafai.
“No,” she said. “You probably already asked the other two to let me know where you had gone.”
Nafai shrugged. “Either way, I made sure you’d know.”
“And yet it was my dream, and Chveya’s,” she said.
“Because you had the dreams, you own the outcome of it?” he asked, getting just as annoyed as she was.
“No, Nyef,” she said, sighing impatiently. “Because I had the dream today, I should have been your partner in this. Your fair and equal partner. Instead you treat me like a child.”
“I didn’t ask them to tell Chveya, did I? So I hardly treated you like a child, I think.”
“Can’t you just admit you acted like a baboon, Nafai?” asked Luet. “Can’t you just say that you treated me as if only men mattered in our community, as if women were nothing, and you’re sorry you treated me that way?”
“I didn’t act like a baboon,” said Nafai. “I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn’t make me any less human, it just makes me less female. Don’t you ever tell me again that because I don’t act like a woman wants me to act, that makes me an animal.”
Nafai was surprised by the anger in his own voice.
“So it comes to this in our own house, too,” said Luet softly.
“Only because you brought it to this,” said Nafai. “Don’t ever call me an animal again.”
“Then don’t act like one,” said Luet. “Being civilized means transcending your own animal nature. Not indulging it, not glorying in it. That’s how you remind me of a male baboon—because you can’t be civilized as long as you treat women like something to be bullied. You can only be civilized when you treat us like friends.”
Nafai stood there in the doorway, burning inside with the unfairness of what she was saying. Not because she wasn’t speaking the truth, but because she was wrong to apply it to him this way. “I did treat you as my friend, and as my wife,” said Nafai. “I assumed that you loved me enough that we weren’t competing to see who owns the dreams.”
“I wasn’t angry because you appropriated the results of my dream,” said Luet.
“Oh?”
“I was hurt because you didn’t share the results of your dream with me. I didn’t jump up from bed and go tell Hushidh and Shedemei my dream, and then ask them to tell you about it later.”
Only when she put it that way did he understand why she was so upset. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She was still angry, and his apology was too little too late. “Go,” said Luet. “Go and find the Oversoul. Go and find the ruins of the ancient starships in the ancient landing place. Go and be the sole hero of our expedition. When I go to sleep tonight, I’ll expect to find you starring in my own dreams. I hope you have a tiny role in mind for me to play. Perhaps holding your coat.”
Almost Nafai let her words hurl him out the door. She had as much as repeated Elemak’s insult to him—and she knew how much Elemak’s words had hurt him because he had confided it to her long ago. It was cruel and unfair of her to say it now. She of all people should have known that it wasn’t his desire to be a hero that impelled him now, it was his passion to find out what would happen next, to make the next thing happen. She, if she loved him, should have understood. So he almost left right then, letting her bitter words travel with him all the way up into the mountains.
Instead he strode into the children’s room. They were still asleep, except for Chveya, who perhaps had been wakened by their low-key but intense quarreling. Nafai kissed each one, Chveya last. “I’m going to find the place where the best dreams come from,” he whispered, so as not to wake the other children.
“Save room in all the dreams for me,” she whispered back.
He kissed her again and then returned to the kitchen, which was the main room of the house, where Luet was stirring the porridge in the pot by the fire.
“Thank you for finding room for me in your dreams,” he said to her. “You’re always welcome in mine, too.” Then he kissed her, and to his relief she kissed him back. They had resolved nothing except to reaffirm that even when they were angry at each other, they still loved each other. That was enough to send him on his way content instead of brooding.
He would need to have his heart at peace, because it was obvious that the Oversoul was protecting the hidden place without even knowing that it was doing so. At least, so he surmised, for something must have turned them all aside whenever they were hunting, keeping them from going to Vusadka, and it was certainly the Oversoul’s talent for making people forget ideas it didn’t want them to act on. Yet the Oversoul hadn’t been able to see that place itself, or even see that it could not see it. This certainly meant that the Oversoul’s own deflection routines must have been turned against the Oversoul itself, so it wasn’t likely that the Oversoul would be able to turn them off and let Nafai pass. On the contrary—Nafai would have to fight his way through, as he and Issib had fought their way past the Oversoul’s barriers back in Basilica so long ago, fighting to think thoughts that the Oversoul had forbidden. Only now it wasn’t just ideas that he had to struggle to think of. It was a place where he had to struggle to go. A place that even the Oversoul couldn’t see.
“I must overcome you,” he whispered to the Oversoul, as he walked across the meadows north of the houses. “I must get past your barriers.”
(What barriers?)
This was going to be so hard. It made Nafai tired just to think of it. And there’d be no clever trick to get around it, either. He would just have to bull his way through by brute force of will. If he could. If he was strong enough.
It was dusk, and Nafai was near despair. After a day’s travel just to get here, he had spent this whole day doing the same useless things, over and over. He would stand outside the forbidden zone and ask the Oversoul to show him the map of all the paths taken by all the hunters, and easily see which direction he needed to travel in order to reach Vusadka. He would even scratch an arrow or write the direction in the dirt with a stick. And then, after setting boldly forth, he would soon find himself back outside the “hidden” area, a hundred meters from where he had written the direction. If he had written “northeast,” he would find himself due west of the writing; if his arrow pointed toward the east, he would find himself south of it. He simply couldn’t get past the barrier.
He railed against the Oversoul, but the answers he got showed the Oversoul to be oblivious to what was going on. “I want to go southeast from this spot,” he would say. “Help me.” And then he would find himself far to the north and the Over-soul would say, in his mind, You didn’t listen to me. I told you to go southwest, and you didn’t listen.
Now the sun was down and the sky was darkening fast. He hated the idea of returning to Dostatok tomorrow, a complete failure.
(I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.)
“I’m trying to find you,” said Nafai.
(But here I am.)
“I know where you are. But I can’t get to you.”
(I’m not stopping you.)
It was true, Nafai knew it. The Oversoul might not even be doing this. If the Oversoul could be given the power to block human minds, to turn humans away from actions they were planning, then couldn’t the first humans on Harmony have set up another set of defenses to protect this place? Defenses not under the Oversoul’s control—indeed, defenses that warded away the Oversoul itself?
Show me all the paths I’ve taken today, said Nafai silently. Make me see them here on the ground.
He saw them—faint shimmerings, which coalesced into threads on the ground. He saw how they began, time after time, heading straight toward the center of the circle around Vusadka. Then they stopped cold, every one of them, and began again not very far to the north or south, obliquely coasting along the borderline.
That really struck him—how precise the border was. He must be penetrating no more than a meter or so inside it before he was turned away. In fact, he could draw a line on the ground marking the exact border of the Oversoul’s vision. And because he could, he did. He used the last half-hour of light to mark the border with a stick, scratching a line or digging a shallow trench several hundred meters.
As he marked the border of his futility, he could hear the hooting of baboons in the near distance, calling sleepily to each other as they headed for their sleeping cliffs. It was only when he was done, when full darkness had descended and the baboons were quiet again, that he realized that while some of their calls had begun outside the border, clearly they all ended up within it.
Of course. The border is impervious to humans, but other animals have not been altered to be susceptible to this kind of fending. So the baboons cross the boundary with impunity.
If only I were a baboon.
He could almost hear Issib say, quietly, “And you’re sure that you’re not?”
He found a grassy place on highish ground and curled up to sleep. It was a clear night, with little chance of rain, and though it cooled off more here than it did back near Dostatok—he was near the desert, and the air was noticeably drier—he would be comfortable tonight.
Comfortable, but it would still be hard to sleep.
He dreamed, of course, but couldn’t be sure if the dream had meaning or was simply the result of his sleeping lightly and so remembering more of the normal dreams of the night. But in one of the dreams, at least, he saw himself with Yobar.
In the dream Yobar was leading him through a maze of rock. When they came to a tiny hole in the rocks, Yobar ducked down easily and climbed through. But Nafai stood there looking at the hole, thinking, I’m not small enough to fit through there. Of course, this was not true—Nafai could see it, even in the dream, the hole was not that small. Yet he couldn’t seem to think of squatting down and squirming through. He kept looking for a way to get through while standing upright.
Yobar came back through the hole and touched him by the hand. And when he did, Nafai suddenly shrank down and became a baboon. Then he had no trouble at all getting through the hole. Once he was on the other side, he turned back to human size immediately. And when he turned around to look at the tiny hole, it had changed—it was now as tall as an adult human, and he could pass through standing up.
In the morning, that was the dream that showed the most promise of being worthwhile. He lay, shivering now and then in the predawn breeze, trying to think of some way to use some insight from the dream. Clearly the dream was reflecting his knowledge that the baboons could pass easily through the barrier, while he, a human, could not. Clearly if he turned into a baboon he could cross the barrier too. But that was exactly what he had wished for the night before, and wishing wasn’t likely to make anything useful happen.
In the dream, thought Nafai, the hole seemed to be too small for me to get through. But I could have got through it easily at any time, because it was really as tall as a man. The barrier was only in my mind—which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I’m rejected. Well, maybe it’s the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away.
No, that’s foolish. The barrier must surely have been designed to fend away even people who were completely unaware of the boundary. Wandering hunters, explorers, settlers, merchants—whoever might inadvertently head toward Vusadka—the barrier would turn them away.
But then, it would take only the mildest of suggestions to turn away someone who had no firm intention of heading toward Vusadka—they wouldn’t even notice they were being turned. After all, did any of us ever notice that we were avoiding that area on all our hunting trips during all these years in Dostatok? So those original paths didn’t define a sharp, clear border the way that I’m defining it now. And our paths didn’t turn all that sharply… we just lost track of our prey, or for some other reason turned gradually away. So the forcethe barrier uses must increase with my firm intention to cross it. And if I somehow were able just to wander through here, the barrier’s strength might be much weaker.
Yet how can I casually and accidentally wander where I know full well that I must go?
With that thought, his plan came to him full-blown; yet he also hardly dared to think it clearly, lest it trigger the barrier and fail before he tried it. Instead, he began to focus on a whole new intention. He must hunt now, and bring prey to feed the children. He himself was certainly hungry, and if he was hungry then the young ones must be famished. Only the young ones he thought of feeding were the young baboons. He remembered the baboons of the Valley of Mebbekew and felt himself responsible for bringing them meat—as Yobar had scavenged food, to please the females and strengthen the young.
So he set out in any direction that morning, not particularly orienting himself toward Vusadka, and searched until he found the pellets of a hare. Then he stalked his prey until, within the hour, he was able to put an arrow through it.
It wasn’t dead, of course—arrows rarely killed immediately, and he usually finished the animal off with his knife. But this time he left it alive, terrified and whimpering; he drew the arrow from its haunch and carried it by the ears. The sounds it made were exactly what he needed—the baboons would be much more interested in a living but injured animal. He had to find the baboons.
It wasn’t hard—baboons fear few animals, and defend themselves from those by being alert and giving good warning to each other. So they made no effort to be quiet. Nafai found them foraging in a long valley that stretched from west to east, with a stream flowing down the middle. They looked up when they saw him. There was no panic—he was still a safe distance away—and they looked at the hare with great curiosity.
Nafai moved closer. Now they became alert—the males stood on their foreknuckles and complained a little about his approach. And Nafai felt a great reluctance to come nearer to them.
But I must come nearer, to give them meat.
So he took a few more steps toward them, holding the hare out in front of him. He wasn’t sure how they’d take this offering, of course. They might take it as proof that he was a killer, or perhaps as a suggestion that he already had his prey and so they were safe. But some of them had to be thinking of the hare as meat that they could eat. Baboons weren’t the world’s best hunters, but they loved meat, and this bleating hare had to look like a good meal to them.
He approached slowly, feeling more reluctance with every step. Yet he also saw that more and more of them—especially the juvenile males—were looking from him to the hare. He helped them think more of the meat by averting his own gaze whenever they looked at him—he knew it would only challenge and frighten them if he made eye contact.
They backed away from him, but not far. As he had expected, their natural tendency was to retreat toward their sleeping cliffs. He followed them. He kept thinking. This is not a good idea. They don’t need this meat. But he shouted down the thoughts, trying to focus on one thing: These mothers need the protein, their babies need to have it from their milk. I’ve got to get this meat to them.
You can’t, this is stupid, you should drop the hare and then retreat.
But if I do, then the hare will go to the strongest males and not to the females at all. Somehow I’ve got to get this nearer to them, so it can benefit the young ones. That’s my job, as the hunter for this tribe, to bring them food. I’ve got to feed them. I can’t let anything stop me from reaching them.
How long did it take him? It was so hard to keep his mind on what he was doing. Several times he felt as though he had just wakened, though he knew he had not been asleep, and then he shook himself and pushed on, relentlessly heading toward the females, who increasingly arrayed themselves toward the sleeping cliffs.
I have to get behind them, closer to the sleeping cliffs than they are, he thought. I’ve got to get on the side where the females are.
He began to sidle northward, but he never let his attention waver from the females. And, around noon, he finally found himself where he wanted to be—between the baboons and their sleeping cliffs. The hare had finally fallen silent—but the baboons wouldn’t be bothered by the fact that it had already died, since it was alive when it arrived, and besides, they weren’t all that fussy, if the meat was warm. So Nafai tossed the hare toward them, aiming for the center of the group of females.
Pandemonium broke out, but things went about as Nafai had planned. Some of the juvenile males made a play for the hare, but the older males stood their ground against Nafai himself, for he seemed, at least momentarily, to be a threat. Thus the hare was back among the females, who easily brushed away the juveniles. The hare hadn’t been dead after all—it squealed again as the dominant females tore into it, devouring whatever they could get their teeth into. The fact that baboons didn’t bother with killing their prey before eating it had bothered Nafai when he first lived in close proximity to baboons back in the desert, but he was used to it now, and was delighted that his plan had worked and the females had got to the meat first.
As the males began to realize that they were missing out on the treat, they grew more and more agitated, and at last Nafai began to back away, closer and closer to the sleeping cliffs; when he was finally far enough away, the males charged into the group, scattering females and pummeling each other in their struggle for scraps of hare. Some of them did indeed come away with big pieces, but Nafai knew that the females had got more than their usual share of the meat. That made him feel good.
Now, though, it would be best for him to get as far from the baboons as possible. A long way away, up this valley. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt if he found more prey up here, to bring back to them.
Gradually, though, as he headed farther and farther away from the baboons, he realized that his reluctance was getting easier and easier to fight off. Daringly, he let himself remember his real purpose in coming here. At once his reluctance to proceed returned—it became almost a panic inside him—but he did not lose control of himself. As he had hoped, the barrier was strongest at the borderline. He could overcome this level of interference—it was more like what he had felt back in Basilica, when he and Issib were first trying to push past the Oversoul’s barriers and think about forbidden things.
Or maybe I’m feeling easier about it because the barrier has already pushed me away toward the border—maybe without realizing it I’ve been defeated.
“Am I outside or inside?” he whispered to the Oversoul.
No answer came at all.
He felt a thrill of fear. The Oversoul couldn’t see this area itself—what if, when he crossed the border, he simply disappeared from the Oversoul’s sight?
Then it occurred to him that this could be precisely why the force of the resistance might be weaker now. Maybe, without the Oversoul realizing it, this barrier had combined its own strength with the Oversoul’s power—at the border. But in here, where the Oversoul itself could not penetrate, the barrier had only its own aversive power to draw on, and that’s why it was defeatable.
It made sense to Nafai, and so he continued to head eastward, toward the center of Vusadka.
Or had he been heading north? For suddenly, as he crested a hill, he saw a completely barren landscape before him. Not fifty yards away, it was as if someone had built an invisible wall. On one side was the verdance of the land of Dostatok, and on the other side was stark desert—the driest, most lifeless desert Nafai had ever seen. Not a bird, not a lizard, not a weed, nothing with life in it was beyond the line.
It was too artificial. It had to be a sign of another kind of barrier, another borderline, one that excluded all living things. Perhaps it was a barrier that killed anything that crossed it. Was Nafai expected to cross this?
“Is there a gateway somewhere?” he asked the Oversoul.
No answer came.
Carefully he approached the barrier. When he was near enough, he reached out a hand toward it.
Invisible it might be, but it was tangible—he could press his hand against it, and feel it sliding under his hand, as if it were faintly slimy and constantly in motion. In a way, though, the very tangibility of it was reassuring—if it kept living things out by blocking their passage, then perhaps it didn’t have any mechanism for killing them.
Can I cross? If humans can’t cross this boundary, then why bother to have the mental barrier so far back? True, it might be simply a way of preventing humans from seeing this clear borderline and making a famous legend out of it, attracting undue attention to this place. But it was just as possible, as far as Nafai knew, that the barrier of aversion was designed to keep humans away because a determined human being could cross this physical barrier. One barrier for humans, farther out; and another barrier for animals. It made sense.
Of course, there was no guarantee that just because something made sense to Nafai it would therefore have any relation to reality. For a moment he even thought of returning to Dostatok and telling them what he had discovered so far, so they could explore the Index and find out if there was some clever way to cross the barrier.
As far as Nafai knew, however, the very thought of returning to Dostatok might be a sign of the barrier working within his mind, trying to get him to find excuses to go away. And maybe the barrier had some kind of intelligence and was able to learn, in which case it might never be fooled again by his device of concentrating on his urgent need to feed the baboons rather than his real purpose of getting past the barrier. No, alone as he was, it was up to him to make a decision.
It will kill you.
What was that, the Oversoul talking in his mind? Or the barrier? Or just his own fear? Whatever the source, he knew that the fear was not irrational. Beyond that barrier nothing was alive—there must be a reason for that. Why should he imagine that he would be the exception, the one living thing that could cross? After all, when the barrier was built in the first place there must have been plants on both sides of the barrier, and even if it were impassable, life should have continued on both sides. Perhaps forty million years of evolution would have made the flora and fauna of the two sides quite different from each other, but life should have flourished, shouldn’t it? Mere isolation couldn’t kill off all life with such brutal thoroughness.
It will kill you.
Maybe it will, thought Nafai defiantly. Maybe I’ll die. But the Oversoul brought us here for a purpose—to get us to Earth. Even though the Oversoul couldn’t think directly of Vusadka, or at least could not speak of it to humans, nevertheless Vusadka had to be the reason the Oversoul had brought them here, so close to it. So, one way or another, we have to get past this barrier.
Only we are not here. Only I am here. And it’s quite possible that no one will ever be here again, if I don’t succeed this time. If I fail, then that’s fine, we’ll try then to seek another way in. And if I succeed in crossing the barrier and then find that something beyond it kills me before I can get back, well, the others will at least know, from the fact that I never return, that they have to be more careful about getting into this place.
Never return.
He thought of his children—quiet, brilliant Chveya; Zhatva, wise and compassionate; mischievous Motiga; bright-spirited Izuchaya; and the little twins, Serp and Spel. Can I leave them fatherless?
I can if I must. I can because they’ll have Luet as their mother, and Shuya and Issya to help her, and Father and Mother too. I can leave them if I must because that would be better than returning to them, having failed to fulfil the purpose of our lives for no reason better than fear of my own death.
He pressed against the barrier. It seemed not to give at all under his hand. The harder he pressed, the more it seemed to slide around under his hand. Yet with all that illusion of sliding, his hand did not actually slip to the right or the left, up or down. In fact, the friction seemed almost perfect—while pressing inward he couldn’t slide his hand across the surface, even though it felt like the surface was madly sliding in every direction under his hand.
He stepped back, picked up a rock, and lobbed it at the barrier. It hit the invisible wall, stuck for a moment, and then gradually slid downward.
This thing isn’t a wall at all, realized Nafai, not if it can grab the stone and then let it slide down. Could it even sense what the thing is that struck it, and respond differently for stones than for, say, birds?
Nafai picked up a clod of turf. He saw with satisfaction that there were several grubs and an earthworm in it. He heaved it at the barrier.
Again it stuck for a moment and then began to slide downward. But not at the same rate. The dirt went first, cleanly separated from the roots. Then all the vegetable matter slid down, leaving only the grubs and the earthworm on the face of the barrier. At last they, too, slid down.
This barrier is able to sort out what strikes it, thought Nafai.
It is able to tell the difference between living and dead, between animal and vegetable. Why not between human and nonhuman?
Nafai looked down at his own clothing. What would the barrier make of that? He had no idea how the barrier sensed the nature of the things that struck it. Perhaps it could tell before he touched it that he was human. But there was also the chance that the clothing would disguise him a little. Of course, he had no idea whether that would be good or bad.
Again he picked up a rock, but this time he didn’t lob it, he threw it as hard as he could. Again it stuck on the barrier.
No, this time it stuck in the barrier. Nafai could see by pressing his hands to the barrier on either side of the stone, as it slid downward, that the stone had actually embedded itself in the barrier.
Nafai took his sling from his belt, laid a stone in the pocket, swung it vigorously, and hurled it at the barrier.
It stuck, and for a moment Nafai thought that it was going to behave like the other items.
Instead, the rock clung for a moment and then dropped down inside the barrier.
It had crossed! It had had enough momentum and it had passed through. The barrier had slowed it so much that it almost didn’t make it, but it had kept just enough momentum to make it through. The only trouble was that Nafai had no idea how to hurl himself at the barrier with anything like the force that the stone had had. Even if he could, the force of striking it might kill him.
Maybe the barrier has different rules for humans. Maybe, if I try hard enough, it will let me through.
Oh, yes, of course it will, Nafai, you fool. The whole barrier system was set up to exclude humans, so of course it will let you pass through.
Nafai leaned back against the barrier to think. To his surprise, after a couple of moments the barrier began to slide him down toward the ground. Or rather, it slid his clothing toward the ground, taking him with it. It had done nothing of the kind to his hands. When he touched the wall with bare skin, it had let him stay in place and did not move him at all.
With difficulty he pulled himself away from the invisible wall. It clung to his clothing as it had held the rocks, the dirt, the grass, the grubs and the worm. There are different rules for humans, he realized. This wall does know the difference between me and my clothing.
Impulsively he stripped off his tunic, baring his arms. Then he swung his arm as fast as he could, hurling his fist into the barrier. It stung like hitting a brick wall—but it passed through.
It passed through! His fist was on the other side of the barrier, just like the stone that had passed. And where his arm stuck through the barrier he couldn’t feel anything unusual at all. He could unflex his fist on the other side and wiggle his fingers, and though the air was perhaps a bit cooler there, there was no pain, no distortion, no obvious problem at all.
Can I follow my hand through the wall?
He pushed forward, and was able to slowly push his arm in right to the shoulder. But when his chest reached the barrier, he was blocked; when he twisted for a better angle, his head also came up against the barrier and stopped.
What if I’m stuck here forever—half in and half out?
In alarm he pulled away, and his arm came out easily enough. He could feel some resistance, but nothing painful, and nothing pressed against his skin to hold him. In a few moments he was free.
He touched the arm and hand that had been on the other side and couldn’t find anything wrong with them. Whatever kept life from thriving on the other side hadn’t killed him yet— if it was a poison, it wasn’t immediate, and it certainly wasn’t the barrier itself.
He reviewed the rules he had learned for crossing the wall. It had to be bare skin. He had to strike it with some force. And if he wanted his whole body through, he’d have to strike the barrier with his whole body at once.
He stripped off his clothing, folding it neatly and laying it on top of his bow and arrows. Then he piled some rocks on top of them so they wouldn’t blow away. Silently he hoped that he would indeed need these clothes again.
For a moment he contemplated leaping face first against the wall, but didn’t like the idea—striking it with his fist had felt like hitting a wall, after all, and he didn’t relish doing that with his face or his groin. Not that it would feel wonderful to do it back-first either, but it was the lesser of two evils.
He walked a ways along the edge of the barrier until he came to a place where there was a fairly steep hill. He walked to the top and then, after a few deep breaths and a whispered farewell to his family, he ran headlong down the hill. Within moments his running was completely out of control, except that when he neared the wall he planted a foot and flung his body in a wild spin designed to lay him flat against the barrier.
Flat was not what he achieved at all. Instead his buttocks passed through first, and then, as he slowed, his thighs and his body up to the shoulders. His arms and head remained outside the barrier, even as his feet fell through and struck the stony ground on the other side. His heels hurt, but he hardly cared about that, because here he stood, his body inside, his arms and head outside.
I’ve got to get back outside, he thought, and try it again.
Too late. In the last moments before he stopped moving at all, his shoulders had passed inside. He was stuck again as he had been before, unable to bring his body along to follow his arms. The key difference this time was that his head was outside the barrier, and his chin and ears seemed to be reluctant to follow him inside. Worse, he couldn’t even bring his arms all the way inside, because he needed the full weight of his body to pull them through, and with his chin hung up on the barrier he couldn’t do it.
This has got to be the stupidest way anyone ever found to die, thought Nafai.
Remember your geometry, he told himself. Remember anatomy. My chin may be at too sharp an angle from my neck for me to pull it through, but at the top of my head there’s a smooth, continuous curve. If I can just jut my chin forward and pull my head back… assuming that I don’t rip my ears off in the process… but those can flex, can’t they?
Slowly, laboriously, he tilted his head back and felt himself pulling through. I can do it, he thought. And then my arms will be easy enough.
His head came through all at once, at the end, his face fully inside the barrier. Only his arms continued to protrude through to the outside.
He meant to pull his arms through at once, after resting for just a moment, but as he rested, panting from the exertion, he realized that his need to breathe only increased, and was growing desperate. He was suffocating somehow, even as he drew great draughts of strange-smelling air into his lungs.
Strange-smelling air, dry and cool, and he wasn’t getting any oxygen. Even as the panic of suffocation rose within him, his rational mind realized what he should have known all along: The reason that nothing lived behind the barrier was that there was no oxygen in here. It was a place designed to eliminate all decay—and most decay, the rapidest of it, was linked to the presence of oxygen, or oxygen and hydrogen joined to form water. There could be no life, and therefore not even microbes to eat away at surfaces; no water to condense or freeze or flow; no oxidation of metals. And if the atmosphere also failed to support anaerobic life-forms, there’d be little within the barrier to cause decay except sunlight, cosmic radiation, and atomic decay. The barrier had been set up to preserve everything within it, so it could last for forty million years.
This sudden comprehension of the purpose of the barrier was no comfort. For his rational mind was not particularly in control right now. No sooner had he realized that he could not breathe than his hands, still sticking through the barrier, began clutching for air, trying to pull him back through the barrier. But he was in exactly the same situation he had been in before, on the outside, when only an arm was through the wall. He could push his arms deeper into the barrier, but when his face and chest reached the wall, he could go no farther. His hands could touch the breathable air on the other side, but that was all.
Made savage by fear, he beat his head against the barrier, but there simply wasn’t leverage—even with panic driving his muscles—to get force enough to push his face through to the breathable air. He really was going to die. Yet he still struck his head against the barrier, again, again, harder.
Perhaps with the last blow he stunned himself; perhaps he was simply weakening from lack of oxygen, or merely losing his balance. Whatever happened, he fell backward, the resistance of the barrier slowing his fall as his arms slipped inside through the invisible wall.
This is fine, thought Nafai. If I can just get to where the slope goes the other way, I can run down toward the barrier and get through again, only this time face first. Even as he thought of this cheerful plan, he knew it wouldn’t work. He had spent too long already trying to get through the barrier right here—he had used up too much oxygen inside his own body, and there was no way he had enough left to climb another hill and make another downward run before he blacked out.
His hands came free and he fell backward onto the stony ground.
He must have struck very hard, for to him it sounded like the loudest, longest thunderclap he had ever heard. And then wind tore across his body, picking him up, rolling him, twisting him.
As he gasped in the wind, he could feel that somehow, miraculously, his breathing was working again. He was getting oxygen. He was also getting bruised as the wind tossed him here and there. On the stones. On the grass.
On the grass.
The wind had died down to a gusty breeze—he opened his eyes. He had been flung every which way, perhaps fifty yards. It took him a while to orient himself. But, lying on grass, he knew he was outside the barrier. Was the wind another defense mechanism, then, hurling intruders through the wall? Certainly his body was scraped and bruised enough to bear that interpretation. He could still see a few dust devils whirling in the distance, far within the dead land.
He got up and walked to the barrier. He reached out for it, but it wasn’t there. The barrier was gone.
That was the cause of the wind. Atmospheres that had not mixed in forty million years had suddenly combined again, and the pressure must not have been equal on both sides of the barrier. It was like a balloon popping, and he had been tossed about like a scrap of the balloon’s skin.
Why had the barrier disappeared?
Because a human passed through it completely. Because if the barrier had not come down, you would have died.
To Nafai it seemed like the voice of the Oversoul inside his head.
(Yes, I’m here, you know me.)
“I destroyed the barrier?”
(No, I did. As soon as you passed all the way through, the perimeter systems informed me that a human being had penetrated. All at once I became aware of parts of myself that had been hidden from me for forty million years. I could see all the barriers, knew at once all their history and understood their purpose and how to control them. If you had been some exceptionally determined intruder who didn’t belong here, I would have told the perimeter systems to let you die; they would have immediately been hidden from me again. That has happened twice before, in all these years. But you were the very one I meant to bring here, and so the purpose of the barrier was finished. I ordered its collapse, bringing oxygen to you and, therefore, to the rest of this place.)
“I appreciate that decision,” said Nafai.
(It means that decay has reentered this place. Not that it has been wholly excluded. The barrier excluded most harmful radiation, but not all. There has been damage. Nothing here was meant to last this long. But now that I can find myself instead of running into the perimeter system blocks, maybe I can figure out why I was looping.
(Or Issib and Zdorab can figure it out—they’re at the Index even now, and the moment you passed through the perimeter, the blocks went down for them, too. I’ve shown them everything you did, and they’re now searching through the new areas of memory opened to all of us.)
“Then I made it,” said Nafai. “I did it. I’m done.”
(Don’t be a fool. You got through the barrier. The work is only just beginning. Come to me, Nafai.)
“To you?”
(To where I am. I have found myself at last, though I had never been able to think of searching for myself until now. Come to me—beyond those hills.)
Nafai searched for his clothes and found them scattered—winds that could blow his body around had easily snatched his clothing out from under the stones. What he needed most were shoes, of course, to make the trek across the stony ground. But he wanted the other clothes, too—eventually he’d have to come home.
(I have clothing waiting for you there. Come to me.)
“Yes, well, I’m coming,” said Nafai. “But let me get my shoes on whether you think I need them or not.” He also pulled on his breeches, and pulled his tunic over his head as he walked. And the bow—he searched a moment for his bow, and didn’t give up until he found a piece of it and realized that it had broken in the wind. He was lucky that none of his bones had done likewise.
At last he headed out in the direction that the Oversoul showed him inside his mind. It took perhaps a half hour of walking—and he wasn’t quick, either, his body was so bruised and sore. Finally, though, he crested the last hill and looked down into a perfect bowl-shaped depression in the earth, perhaps two kilometers across. In the center of it, six immense towers rose up out of the ground.
The recognition in his mind was instantaneous: the starships.
He knew the information came from the Oversoul, along with many facts about them. What he was seeing was really protective shells over the tops of the ships, and even then, only about a quarter of each ship rose above the ground. The rest was underground, protected and thoroughly linked into the systems of Vusadka. He knew without having to think about it that the rest of Vusadka was also underground, a vast city of electronics, almost all of it devoted to maintaining the Oversoul itself. All that was visible of the Oversoul were the bowl-shaped devices that pointed at the sky, communicating with the satellites that were its eyes and ears, its hands and fingers in the world.
(For all these years, I have forgotten how to see myself, have forgotten where I was and what I looked like. I remember only enough to set certain tasks in motion, and to bring you near here to Dostatok. When the tasks failed, when I began looping, I was helpless to help myself because I couldn’t find where to search for the cause. Now Zdorab and Issib and I have seen the place. There has been damage to my memory—forty million years of atomic decay and cosmic radiation has scarred me. The redundancy of my systems has compensated for most of it, but not for damage within primitive systems that I couldn’t even examine because they were hidden from me. I have lost the ability to control my robots. They were not meant to last this long, even in a place without oxygen. My robots were reporting to me that they had completed all safety checks on the systems inside the barrier, but when I tried to open the perimeter the system refused because the safety checks had not been completed. So I initiated the safety checks again, and the robots again reported that all was complete, and on and on. And I couldn’t discover the loop because all of this was at the level of reflex to me—like the beating of your heart is to you. No, even less obvious. More like the production of hormones by the glands inside your body.)
“What would have happened if you could have broken out of the loop?” asked Nafai.
(If I could have found myself, I would have recognized the problem and brought you here at once.)
“You mean you could have shut down the barrier?”
(I wouldn’t have needed to. Shutting it down was within your power all along. That’s what the Index was for.)
“The Index!”
(If you had brought the Index with you, you would have met no resistance at any point. No mental aversion, and when you touched the Index to the physical barrier it would have gradually dissolved itself—avoiding the winds, which were not helpful, since they stirred dust into the air.)
“But you never told us the Index could do that.”
(I didn’t know it myself. I couldn’t know it. All I knew was that whoever was coming to the starships would have to have the Index. Then, when the safety checks were completed, the perimeter system would have opened everything up to me and I would have understood what was needed and could have told you what you needed to do.)
“So my nearly suffocating myself to death and then getting bruised up in the windstorm wasn’t a stupid waste of perfectly good panic.”
(Forcing your way in here was the only way I would ever have broken out of my loop. I have read the memory of the perimeter system and I am delighted at the way you used the baboons to draw you through.)
“Didn’t you show me that in my dream? That I needed to follow a baboon through the barrier?”
(Dream? Oh, I remember now, you dreamed. No, that wasn’t from me.)
“From the Keeper, then?”
(Why must you look for an outside source? Don’t you think your own unconscious mind is capable of giving you a true dream now and then? Aren’t you willing to admit to yourself that perhaps it was your own mind that solved this problem?)
Nafai couldn’t keep himself from laughing in delight. “I did it, then!”
(You did it. But you aren’t done. Come to me, Nafai. I have work for you to do, and tools for you to do it with.)
Nafai strode down the hill into the valley of Vusadka. The place of disembarkation. The place where human feet had first touched the soil of Harmony, and where those first settlers had placed the computer that would protect their children from self-destruction for so many years that to them it must have seemed the protection would be forever.
But it would not be forever. It was dying already. And now Nafai was walking among the towers of the starships, the first human being to tread in their footsteps since they built this place. Whatever the Oversoul meant for him to do now, he would do it, and when it was done, human beings would return again to Earth.
Volemak and Rasa called the community together the moment Zdorab and Issib finished reporting what they had learned from the Index. It had been a long time since a meeting had been called without Elemak knowing in advance what it was about. It worried him. At some level it frightened him, but since he could not live with the idea of fear, he interpreted it as anger. He was angry that a meeting was called without his knowledge, without Father having sought his advice in advance. It suggested to him that the meeting was Rasa’s, somehow—that the women were making some play for power and had deliberately cut him out of the process. Someday the old hag will push too hard, thought Elemak, and then she’ll find out what power and strength really are—and that she doesn’t have any.
This was the filter of interpretation through which Elemak received the morning’s news. Chveya and Luet had dreamed… ah, yes, the women trying to assert their spiritual leadership, the waterseer and her no-doubt-well-coached daughter angling for the old dominance Luet had back in Basilica. And then Nafai, Issib, and Zdorab had searched the Index for information, and Nafai—of course, it had to be Luet’s husband, the Oversoul’s favorite boy—had found a secret place that none of them had visited in all their hunts. Such nonsense! Elemak had covered every kilometer of the surrounding country in his hunts and explorations—there was no hidden place.
So Nafai had taken off on a hunt for a non-existent place, and only this morning had figured out a way past all the barriers. Once a human being made it inside, the barrier came down, and now Nafai was walking among the ancient starships, while in the meantime Issib and Zdorab were able to find things through the Index that no one had guessed at before. “This is the landing place,” Father explained. “We are living now at the site of the First City, the oldest human settlement on Harmony. Older than the Cities of the Stars. Older than Basilica.”
“There was no city here when we came,” said Obring.
“But this place,” said Father. “We have brought the human race full circle. And even now, Nafai is walking where the ancient fathers and mothers of us all first set their feet upon the soil of Harmony.”
Romantic bushwa, thought Elemak. Nafai could be napping in the noonday sun right now for all anybody here knows. The Index was just a way for the weaklings of their company to assert control over the strong ones.
“You know what this means, of course,” said Father.
“It means,” said Elemak, “that because of what people who have nothing better to do have supposedly learned from a metal ball, our lives are going to be disrupted again.”
Father looked at him in surprise. “Disrupted?” he asked. “What do you think we came here for, except to prepare for a journey to Earth? The Oversoul itself was caught up in a feedback loop, that’s all, and Nyef finally broke through and set it free. The disruption is over now, Elya.”
“Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I mean,” said Elemak. “We have plenty here. A good life. In many ways a better life than we would have had in Basilica, hard as that is for Obring to believe. We have families now—wives and children—and our lives are good. We work hard, but we’re happy, and there’s room for our children and our children’s children here for a thousand years and more. We have no enemies, we have no dangers beyond the normal mishaps of being alive. And you’re telling me that this is the disruption, while wasting our time trying to get into space is our normal course? Please, don’t insult our intelligence.”
Elemak could sense easily enough who was with him in this. As he painted the true picture of what this all would mean, he could see Meb and Vas and Obring nodding grimly, and their wives would go along easily enough. Furthermore, he could see that he had put some doubt in the minds of some of the others. Zdorab and Shedemei especially had thoughtful expressions, and even Luet had glanced around at her children when Elemak spoke of how good their lives were, how they faced no danger, how they could have a good future here in Dostatok.
“I don’t know what Nafai found, or if he found anything at all,” Elemak went on. “I honestly don’t care. Nyef is a good hunter and a bright fellow, but he’s hardly suited to lead us into some hideous danger using forty-million-year-old star-ships. My family and I are not going to let my little brother make us waste our time in the foolish pursuit of an impossible project. Nyef s murder of Gaballufix forced us all to leave Basilica as fugitives—but I’ve forgiven him for that. I certainly won’t forgive him if he disrupts our lives again.”
Elemak kept his expression calm, but inwardly it was all he could do to keep from smiling as he watched Luet’s feeble attempt to absolve her husband of guilt for Gaballufix’s murder. Her words didn’t matter—Elemak knew he had done the job thoroughly with the first blow. Nafai was discredited even before he returned. It was his fault we left the city; we forgive him for that; but nothing he says is going to change the way we live here. Elemak had provided the reasonable justification for total resistance to this latest maneuver by the women and their little male puppet. The proof of his success was the fact that neither Father nor Mother—nor anyone else, except Luet—was mounting any kind of defense, and she had been sidetracked onto the issue of why Nafai killed Gaballufix. The idea of star-ships and hidden lands was dead.
Until Oykib walked out into the middle of the meeting area. “Shame on you all,” he said. “Shame on you!”
They fell silent, except Rasa. “Okya, dear, this is an adult conversation.”
“Shame on you, too. Have you all forgotten that we came here because of the Oversoul? Have you all forgotten that the reason we have such a perfect place to live is that the Oversoul prepared it for us? Have you forgotten that the only reason there weren’t already ten cities here was because the Oversoul kept other people away—except us? You, Elemak, could you have found this place? Would you have known to lead the family across the water and down the island to here?”
“What do you know of this, little boy?” said Elemak scornfully, trying to wrench control back from this child.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Oykib. “None of you knew anything and none of us would have anything if the Oversoul hadn’t chosen us all and brought us here. I wasn’t even born when a lot of this happened, and I was a baby through most of the rest, so why do I remember, when you older ones—any older and wiser brothers and sisters, my parents— seem to have forgotten?”
His high piping voice grated on Elemak’s nerves. What was going on here? He knew how to neutralize all the adults—he hadn’t counted on having to deal with Father’s and Rasa’s new spawn as well. “Sit down, child,” said Elemak. “You’re out of your depth.”
“We’re all out of our depth,” said Luet. “But only Oykib seems to have remembered how to swim.”
“No doubt you coached him on what to say,” said Elemak.
“Oh, yes, exactly,” said Luet. “As if any of us knew in advance what you would say. Though we should have. I thought these matters were all settled long ago, but we should have known that you would never cease to be ambitious.”
“Me!” shouted Elemak, leaping to his feet. “I’m not the one who staged this phony visit to an invisible city, which we know about only because of supposed reports from a metal ball that only you can interpret!”
“If you would lay your hand on the Index,” said Father, “the Index would gladly speak to you.”
“There’s nothing I want to hear from a computer,” said Elemak. “I tell you again, I will not put my family’s lives and happiness at risk because of supposed instructions from an invisible computer that these women persist in worshipping as a god!”
Father rose to his feet. “I see that you are disposed to doubt,” he said. “Perhaps it was a mistake to share the good news with everyone. Perhaps we should have waited until Nafai came back, and we could all go to the place he found, and see what he has seen. But I thought that there should be no secrets among us, and so I insisted that we tell the story now, so no one could say later that they were not informed.”
“A little late to try the honesty approach, isn’t it, Father?” asked Mebbekew. “You said yourself that when Nafai left day before yesterday, he was searching for this hidden place and he thought it was probably where the first humans disembarked from their starships. Yet you didn’t think of telling us all then, did you?”
Father glanced at Rasa, and Elemak felt completely confirmed in his suspicions. The old man was dancing to the old lady’s tune. She had insisted it be kept secret before, and had probably counseled him against telling now, knowing her.
Nevertheless, it was time for Elemak’s next move—he had to seize the high ground, now that Oykib had undercut his previous position. “Let’s not be unfair,” said Elemak. “We’ve only heard about Nafai. We don’t have to decide anything or do anything yet. Let’s wait until he gets home, and see how we feel then.” Elemak turned to Oykib, who still stood in the middle of the group. “As for you, I’m proud that my next-to-last brother has such fire in him. You’re going to be a real man, Oykib, and when you grow old enough to understand the issues instead of blindly following what others tell you, your voice will be well listened to in council, I can assure you.”
Oykib’s face reddened—with embarrassment, not anger. He was young enough to have heard only the clear praise and completely missed the subtle insult. Thus I wipe you out, too, Okya, dear brother, without your even realizing it.
“I say this meeting is over,” said Elemak. “We’ll meet again when Nafai comes back, except, of course, for the little conspiratorial meetings in the Index House where all this was cooked up in the first place. I have no doubt that those meetings will continue unabated.” And with those words he put a sinister meaning into any kind of conversation that Rasa’s party entered into, thus deeply weakening them.
These poor people—they thought they were so clever, until they actually came up against somebody who understood how power worked. And because it was Elemak who dismissed the meeting, and in effect announced the next one, he had gone a long way toward stripping Father of his leadership in Dostatok. The only test now was whether the meeting actually broke up with Elemak’s departure. If he walked away, but the meeting went on substantially intact, then Elemak would have a much tougher time establishing leadership—in fact, he would have lost ground today.
But he needn’t have worried. Meb arose almost at once and, with Dol and their children in tow, followed him away from the meeting; Vas and Obring and their wives also got up, and then Zdorab and Shedemei. The meeting was over—and it was over because Elemak had said it was over.
Round one for me, thought Elemak, and I’ll be surprised if that isn’t the whole match. Poor Nafai. Whatever you’re doing out in the woods, you’re going to come home and find all your plots and plans in disarray. Did you think you could really face me down from a distance and win?
There was no writing anywhere, no signs, no instructions.
(No one needs instructions here. I am with you always in this place, showing you what you need to know.)
“And they were content with this?” asked Nafai. “All of them?” His voice was so loud in the silence of this place, as he scuffed along the dustless catwalks and corridors, making his way downward, downward into the earth.
(They knew me. They had made me, had programmed me. They knew what I could do. They thought of me as their library, their all-purpose instruction manual, their second memory. In those days I knew only what they had taught me. Now I have forty million years of experience with human beings, and have reached my own conclusions. In those days I was much more dependent on them —I reflected back to them their own picture of the world.)
“And their picture—was it wrong?”
(They did not understand how much of their behavior was animal, not intellectual. They thought that they had overcome the beast in them, and that with my help all their descendants would drive out the beast in a few generations—or a few hundred, anyway. Their vision was long, but no human being can have that long a vision. Eventually the numbers, the dimensions of time, become meaningless.)
“But they built well,” said Nafai.
(Well but not perfectly. I have suffered forty million years of cosmic and nuclear radiation that has torn apart much of my memory. I have vast redundancy, and so in my data storage there has been no meaningful loss. Even in my programming, I have monitored all changes and corrected them. What I could not monitor was the area hidden from myself. So when the programs there decayed, I could not know it and could not compensate for it. I couldn’t copy those areas and restore them when any one copy decayed.)
“So they didn’t plan well at all,” said Nafai, “since those programs were at your very core.”
(You mustn’t judge them harshly. It never occurred to them that it would take even a million years for their children’s children to learn peace and be worthy to enter this place and learn all about advanced technologies. How could they guess that century after century, millennium after millennium, the humans of Harmony would never learn peace, would never cease trying to rule over one another by force or deception? I was never meant to keep this place closed off for even a million years, let alone forty million. So they built well indeed—the flaws and failures in my secret core were not fatal, were they? After all, you’re here, aren’t you?)
Nafai remembered his terror when he had had no air to breathe, and wasn’t sure that they hadn’t cut it all a little fine.
“Where are you?” asked Nafai.
(All around you.)
Nafai looked, and saw nothing in particular.
(The sensors there, in the ceiling—those are how I see you right now, and hear you, besides my ways of seeing through your eyes, and hearing your words before you say them. Behind all these walls are bank after bank of static memory—all of that is my self. The machinery pumping air through these underground passages—they are also me.)
“Then why did you need me at all?” asked Nafai.
(You are the one who broke me out of my loop and opened up my vision to include my own heart, and you ask me that?)
“Why do you need me now?”
(I also need you—all of you—because the Keeper has sent you dreams. The Keeper wants you, and so I will bring you.)
“Why do you need me?” he asked, clarifying the question even further.
(Because my robots were all controlled by a place in my memory that has become completely untrustworthy. I have shut them down because they were reporting falsely to me. No one ship of these six has a fully uncorrupted memory. I need you to collect and test the memory in every part of the ships and bring good memory together until we have one perfect ship. I can’t do this myself—I have no hands.)
“So I’m here to replace broken machines.”
(And I need you to pilot the starship.)
“Don’t tell me you can’t do that yourself.”
(Your ancestors did not let their starships pass completely under the control of computers like me, Nafai. There must be a starmaster on every ship, to give command. I will carry out those commands, but the ship will be yours. I will be yours.)
“Not me,” said Nafai. “Father should do this.”
(Volemak didn’t come here. Volemak didn’t open this place.)
“He would have, if he’d known.”
(He knew what you knew. But you acted. These things are not accidental, Nafai. It isn’t coincidence that you are here and no one else is. If Volemak had found this place and forced his way in, risking his own life for the sake of coming here, then he would wear the cloak. Or Elemak, or Zdorab—whoever came would have that responsibility. It was you. It is yours.)
Almost Nafai said, I don’t want it. But that would be a lie. He wanted it with his whole heart. To be the one chosen by the Oversoul to pilot the starship, even though he knew nothing about piloting anything—that would be wonderful. More glory and accomplishment than he ever dreamed of in his childhood. “I’ll do it then,” said Nafai, “as long as you show me how it’s done.”
(You can’t do it without tools. I can give you some of them, and teach you how to make the rest. And you can’t do it without help.)
“Help?”
(There will be thousands of memory plates to move from one ship to another. You will grow old and die if you try to do it all yourself. Your whole village will need to work together, if we are to have a reliable starship that contains all of the memory that I will need to bring to the Keeper of Earth.)
At once Nafai tried to imagine Elemak doing any job under his direction, and he laughed aloud. “If that’s so, then you’d better put someone else in charge. They won’t follow me.”
(They will.)
“Then you don’t understand human nature very well after all,” said Nafai. “The only reason we’ve had peace among us these past few years is that I’ve stayed pretty much in my place, as far as Elya is concerned. If I suddenly come back and tell them that I’m the starmaster and they have to help me put together a starship…”
(Trust me.)
“Yeah, right. I always have, haven’t I?”
(Open the door.)
Nafai opened the door and stepped into a dimly lighted room. The door closed behind him, shutting off much of what light there had been. Blinking, Nafai soon grew accustomed to the dimmer light and saw that in the middle of the room, hanging in the air with no obvious means of support, was a block of—what, ice?
(Much of it is water.)
Nafai approached it, reached out, touched it. His finger went in easily.
(As I said. Water.)
“How does it hold this shape, then?” asked Nafai. “How does it float in the air?”
(Why should I explain, when in a few moments the memory will be yours just for the thinking of it?)
“What do you mean?”
(Pass through the water and you will emerge wearing the cloak of the starmaster. When that is in place, linked to you, then all my memories will be yours, as if they had been yours all along.)
“A human mind could never hold such information,” said Nafai. “Your memory includes forty million years of history.”
(You will see.)
“Having Father’s memory of his vision in my mind almost drove me mad,” said Nafai. “Won’t that happen this time, having yours?”
(I will be with you as I have never been with you before.)
“Will I still be myself?”
(You will be more yourself than ever before.)
“Do I have a choice?”
(Yes. You can choose to refuse this. Then I will bring another, and she will pass through the water, and then she will be star-master.)
“She? Luet?”
(Does it matter? Once you have chosen not to be starmaster, what right do you have to concern yourself with the person I then choose to take your place?)
Nafai stood there, looking at the miraculous block of water resting in the air, and thought: This is less dangerous than passing through the barrier, and I did that. He also thought: Could I bear to follow the starmaster, knowing for the rest of my life that I could have been starmaster, and refused? And then: I have trusted the Oversoul so far. I have killed for it; I have nearly died for it. Will I now refuse to take the leadership of this voyage?
“How do I do it?” asked Nafai.
(Don’t you know? Don’t you remember when Luet told you of her vision?)
Only now, with the Oversoul’s reminder, did Nafai remember what Luet had said, of seeing him sink down into a block of ice and emerge from the bottom, glowing and sparkling with light. He had thought it had some metaphorical meaning. But here was the block of ice.
“I sink down from the top,” said Nafai. “How do I get above this?”
Almost at once, a meter-wide platter skimmed across the floor toward him. Nafai understood that he was to stand on it. But when he did, nothing happened.
(Your clothing will interfere.)
So he removed his clothing for the second time that day. Doing so reminded him of all the scratches and bruises he had suffered from the buffeting of the wind. Naked, he stepped again on the disk. Almost at once it rose straight up into the air and carried him above the block.
(Step off onto the water. It will support you like a floor.)
Having just put his finger easily into the side of the block, Nafai had his doubts, but he did as he was told—he stepped onto the surface of the block. It was smooth, but not slippery; like the surface of the barrier, it seemed to be moving in every direction at once under his feet.
(Lie down on your back.)
Nafai lay down. Almost at once the surface under him changed, and he began to sink down into the water. Soon it would cover his face, he realized. He wouldn’t be able to breathe. The memory of his recent suffocation was still fresh inside him—he began to struggle.
(Peace. Sleep. You’ll not lack for air, or anything else. Sleep. Peace.)
And he slept as he sank down into the water.
Elemak was surprised to find that it was Shedemei at the door. All things were possible, of course—she might actually be coming here to join him. But he doubted it—it was far more likely that she was here to try to negotiate some settlement on Rasa’s behalf. In which case she wasn’t a bad choice as an emissary. He had nothing against her, and she had no awkward family connections. Besides, hadn’t she and Zdorab stood up at the end of the meeting, accepting Elemak’s authority to dismiss it? It was worth hearing what she had to say.
So he ushered her in and let her sit down at the table, along with Meb, Obring, and Vas. Then, when she was seated, Elemak sat across from her and waited. Let her speak first, and thus let him know what to expect from her.
“Everyone advised me against coming to you,” she said. “But I think they underestimate you, Elemak.”
“They have before,” said Elemak.
Meb chuckled. That annoyed Elemak—he wasn’t sure whether Meb was laughing at them for having underestimated Elemak, or laughing at Elemak for making such a claim. One was never sure, with Meb, whom he was mocking. Only that he was mocking somebody.
“There are some important things that you seem not to understand,” said Shedemei. “And I think you need to know everything in order to make wise decisions.”
Ah. So she was here to teach him about “reality.” Well, it was worth listening, if only so he could better plan how to undercut her position at the next meeting. He nodded for her to continue.
“This isn’t a conspiracy to take authority away from you.”
Right, thought Elemak. You start out by denying it, and you’ve as good as confirmed to me that that’s exactly what’s going on.
“Most of us know that you’re the natural leader of this group, and with some exceptions, we’re content with it.”
Oh, yes. “Some” exceptions indeed.
“And the exceptions are more among your followers than you imagine. Here at this table there is more hatred and jealousy of you than has ever been found among those who gather in the Index House.”
“Enough of that,” said Elemak. “If you came here to try to sow distrust among those of us who are trying to protect our families from the meddlers, then you can leave now.”
Shedemei shrugged. “I’ve said it, you’ve heard it, I care little what you do with the information. But here’s the fact: The only person you’re fighting right now is the Oversoul.”
Meb hooted once. Shedemei ignored him.
“The Oversoul has at last got access to the starships. It’s going to take a massive effort by all of us to cannibalize five of the ships to make one ship ready to fly. But it’s going to be done, whether you approve or not. The Oversoul is hardly going to let you block her now, when she’s come so far.”
Elemak heard with amusement the way Shedemei persisted in referring to the inanimate computer as if it were a woman.
“When Nafai returns, he’s going to be wearing the starmaster’s cloak. It’s a device that links him almost perfectly to the memory of the Oversoul. He’s going to know far more about you than you know about yourself, do you understand me? And there are other powers that come along with the cloak—a focus of energy, for one thing, that makes the pulse look like a toy.”
“Is this a threat?” asked Elemak.
“I’m telling you the simple truth. The Oversoul chose Nafai because he has the intelligence to pilot the ship, the loyalty to serve the Oversoul’s cause well, and the strength of will that broke down a supposedly impenetrable barrier and allowed the expedition to continue. Not because Nafai was conspiring against you. If you had ever shown a scrap of loyalty to the Oversoul’s cause, she might have chosen you.”
“Do you think pathetic flattery like this will move me?”
“I’m not flattering you,” said Shedemei. “I already said—we know you’re the born leader of this company. But you’ve chosen not to be the leader of the Oversoul’s expedition. That was your own choice, freely made. So when it comes down to it, when you realize that you have lost the leadership of this group forever, you can blame no one but yourself.”
He felt anger growing within him.
“Nor would you have been the second choice,” said Shedemei. “There was some doubt that Nafai would accept the cloak—for the very reason that he knew you would reject his leadership. At that point the Oversoul made her second choice. She asked me whether I would accept the burden of leadership. She explained to me more about what the cloak does and how it works than she even explained to Nafai, though by now he undoubtedly knows all. I accepted the offer. If it hadn’t been Nafai, it would have been me. Not you, Elemak. You did not miss this great office narrowly. You were never in the running, because you rejected the Oversoul from the start.”
“Perhaps you had better leave now,” said Elemak softly.
“But this doesn’t mean that you can’t have a valued, important role in the community,” she went on, seeming not to hear him, seeming not to notice that he boiled with rage. “Don’t force the issue, don’t force Nafai to humiliate you in front of the others. Instead work with him, and he will gladly let you take as much of the leadership as the Oversoul will let him surrender to you. I don’t think you’ve ever realized how Nafai worships you. How he has always wished he could be like you. How he has longed for your love and respect more than that of any other person.”
“Get out of my house,” said Elemak.
“Very well,” said Shedemei. “I see that you are a person who refuses to revise his view of the world. You can only bear to live in a world where all the bad things that happen to you are someone else’s fault, where everyone must have conspired against you to deprive you of what is your due.” She rose and walked to the door. “Unfortunately, that world happens not to be the real world. And so you four will sit here and conspire to take over the rule of Dostatok, and it will come to nothing, and you will be humiliated, and it will have been nobody’s fault but your own. Yet even then, Elemak, you have our deep respect and honor for your considerable abilities. Good night.”
She closed the door behind her.
Elemak could hardly control himself. He longed to leap after her, hit her again and again, beat the unbearable condescension out of her. But that would be a show of weakness; to maintain control of these others, he had to make it clear that he was unaffected by such nonsense. So he smiled wanly at them. “You see how they want to make us stupid by making us angry,” said Elemak.
“Don’t tell me you’re not angry,” said Meb.
“Of course I am,” said Elemak. “But I refuse to let my anger make me stupid. And she also gave us some valuable information. Apparently Nafai’s going to be coming back with some kind of magic cloak or something. Maybe it’s nothing more than an illusion, like those masks that Gaballufix dredged up to have his soldiers wear back in Basilica, so they all looked alike. Or maybe there’s some real power in it. But far from making us back down, that will simply force us to act all the more quickly and cleanly—and permanently.”
“Meaning?” asked Vas.
“Meaning that we will not permit anyone to leave here and go join Nafai, wherever he is. We will make him come to us. And when he does, unless he immediately backs down and accepts our decisions, we’ll eliminate his ability to make further problems.”
“Meaning?” insisted Vas.
“Meaning kill him, you dolt,” said Obring. “How stupid do you have to be?”
“I knew he meant that,” said Vas quietly. “I just wanted to hear him say it with his own mouth, so that he can’t claim later that he never meant any such thing.”
“Oh, I see,” said Elemak. “You’re worried about responsibility.” Elemak couldn’t help but compare Vas with Nafai—for all his other faults, Nyef had never shrunk from his responsibility for the death of Gaballufix. “Well, the responsibility is mine. Mine alone, if you insist on it. But that also means that after we’ve won, the authority is mine.”
“I’m with you,” said Meb. “To the hilt. Does that mean that when it’s done, I share authority with you?”
“Yes, it does,” said Elemak. If you even know what authority is, you poor simpering baboon. “It’s as simple as that. But if you haven’t got the heart to put in the knife along with us, that doesn’t mean you’re our enemy. Only keep silence about our plan, join with us in preventing others from joining Nafai, and stay out of the way when we kill him—if it comes to that.”
“I’ll agree to that,” said Obring.
Vas also nodded.
“Then it’s done.”
Nafai awoke on the floor of the room. Above him hung the block of water. He didn’t feel any different.
That is, until he started trying to think of things. Like when he tried to feel, from the inside, whether anything was different about his own body. All of a sudden a great gush of information flowed into his mind. He was conscious for a moment of all his bodily functions, and had a detailed status report on all of them. The output of his glands; his heartrate; the amount of fecal matter built up in his rectum; the current deficiency of fuel for his body’s cells, and how his fat cells were being accessed to make up the shortfall. Also, the rate of healing of all his bruises and scrapes had been accelerated, and he felt much better.
Is this what the Oversoul has always known about me?
At once the answer came, and now it truly was a clear voice—even clearer than when the Oversoul spoke through the Index. (I never knew this much about you before. The cloak has connected with every nerve in your body, and reports on your condition continuously. It also samples your blood in various places and interprets and acts to enhance your condition many times a second.)
Cloak?
At once an image flashed into his mind. He could see himself from the outside, as the Oversoul no doubt saw him through its sensors. He could see his body as he rolled out from under the block and rose to his feet. His skin sparkled with light. He realized that most of the light in the room came from him. He saw himself run his hands over his own skin, trying to feel the cloak. But he felt nothing at all that was different from his normal skin.
He wondered if he would always shine like this—if his house would always light up like this whenever he was inside.
The thought had no sooner come to him than the Oversoul’s voice responded. (The cloak responds to your will. If you wish it to go dark, it will. If you wish it to build up a powerful electrical charge, it will—and you can point your finger and send an arc of energy in whatever direction you choose. Nothing can harm you while you wear this, and you can be deeply dangerous to others—yet if you have no wish to harm someone, the cloak will be passive. Your children can sleep in the dark, and you can hold your wife as you always have. Indeed, the more physical contact you have with others, the more your cloak will extend to include them, and even respond, in a small way, to your will.)
So Luet will also wear this cloak?
(Through you, yes. It will protect her; it will give her better access to my memory. But why do you ask me these things? Instead of thinking of questions, why not simply cast your mind back and try to remember, as if you had always known about the cloak. The memories will come to your mind easily and clearly, then. You’ll know all there is to know.)
Nafai tried it, and suddenly he had no more questions about the cloak. He understood what it meant to be shipmaster. He even understood exactly what the Oversoul needed him to do to prepare a starship for departure.
“We don’t have enough lifetimes among us, including our children, to do all of this,” said Nafai.
(I told you that I’d give you the tools to work with. Some aspects of the robots are unsalvageable now, but other parts can be used. The machines themselves are perfectly workable—it’s only my program to control them that is defective. Parts of it can be reactivated, and then you and the others can set the robots to doing the meaningless tasks under your direction. You’ll see.)
And now Nafai “remembered” exactly what the Oversoul had determined was possible. It would take some serious work for several hours to get the robots working, but he could do it—he remembered how. “I’ll get started at once,” he said. “Is there anything to eat here?”
No sooner had he asked than he remembered that of course there was no food here. It made him impatient to think of having to leave this place and go hunt for food. “Can’t you bring the others here? Have them bring food, and… I don’t see why we should have to take a day’s journey every time someone comes here. We can rebuild our village here—there’s plenty of water in the hills to the south, and plenty of lumber. We can spend a week doing that and save ourselves many days of travel each year until the ships are done.”
(I’ll pass the word. Or you can tell them yourself.) “Tell them myself?” And then he remembered: Since the Oversoul’s memory was now “his” memory, he could speak to the others through the Index. So he did.
“You’re not going,” said Elemak.
Zdorab and Volemak stood before him in bafflement. “What do you mean?” said Volemak. “Nafai needs food, and we need to mark out the new village. I assumed you’d want to come along.”
“And I say you’re not going. Nobody’s going. We’re not moving the village, and nobody is moving from here to go join Nafai. His attempt at seizing power here has failed. Give it up, Father. When Nyef gets hungry enough, he’ll come home.”
“I’m your father, Elya, not your child. You can decide not to go yourself, but you have no authority to stop me.”
Elemak tapped his finger on the table.
“Unless you’re threatening to use violence against your father,” said Volemak.
“I have told you the law of this place,” said Elemak. “Nobody leaves this town without my permission. And you don’t have my permission.”
“And if I disobey your presumptuous, illegal command?” said Volemak.
“Then you’re no longer part of Dostatok,” said Elemak. “If you’re caught skulking around here, you’ll be treated as a thief.”
“Do you think the others will consent to this?” asked Volemak. “If you raise a hand against me, you’ll earn only the disgust of the others.”
“I’ll earn their obedience,” said Elemak. “I advise you… don’t force the issue. No one takes food to Nafai. He comes home, and the charade about starships ends.”
Volemak stood in silence, Zdorab beside him. Their faces were inscrutable.
“All right,” said Volemak.
Elemak was surprised—could Father be giving in so easily?
“Nafai says he’ll come home now. He has the first robots recommissioned and working. He’ll be home in an hour.”
“In an hour!” said Meb, who was standing nearby. “Well there it is. This Vusadka place was supposed to be a whole day’s journey away.”
“Nafai only just got the paritkas working. If they function well enough, we won’t have to move the village.”
“What’s a paritka?” asked Meb.
Don’t ask, you fool, Elemak said silently. It just plays into Father’s hands.
“A flying wagon,” said Volemak.
“And I suppose you’re talking to Nafai right now?”
“When we don’t have the Index with us,” said Volemak, “his voice is as hard to distinguish from our normal thoughts as the Oversoul’s voice normally is. But he’s talking to us, yes. You could hear him yourself, if you only listened.”
Elemak couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, yes, I’m sure that I’m going to sit here and listen for the voice of my faraway brother, talking in my mind.”
“Why not?” asked Zdorab. “He already sees everything that the Oversoul sees. Including what’s going on in your mind. For instance, he knows that you and Meb plan to kill him as soon as he gets back here.”
Elemak leapt to his feet. “That’s a lie!” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Meb getting a panicked look on his face. Just keep your mouth shut, Meb. Can’t you recognize a wild guess when you hear one? Just don’t do anything to confirm their guess. “Now get back to your house, Father. You too, Zdorab. The only way Nafai will be in any danger is if he attacks us or tries to mutiny.”
“This isn’t the desert now,” said Volemak. “And you’re not in command.”
“On the contrary,” said Elemak. “Desert law still applies, and I am the leader of this expedition. I have been all along. I only deferred to you, old man, out of courtesy.”
“Let’s go,” said Zdorab, drawing Volemak out of Elemak’s house.
“And deprive Elemak of the chance of showing exactly how malicious he really is?”
“Not malicious, Father,” said Elemak. “Just fed up. It’s you and Nyef, Rasa and Luet and your group who started this. Nobody asked you to start this stupid business about traveling out among the stars. Everything was going fine—you’re the ones who decided to change all the rules. Well, the rules have changed, and for once they don’t favor you. Now take your medicine like a man.”
“I grieve for you,” said Volemak. Then Zdorab had him out the door and they were gone.
“They knew,” said Mebbekew. “They knew what we were planning.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Elemak. “ They guessed,and you nearly blurted out a confirmation of their guess.”
“I didn’t,” said Meb. “I didn’t say a thing.”
“Get your bow and arrow. You’re a good enough shot for this.”
“You mean we aren’t going to wait and talk to him first?”
“I think Nafai will talk more reasonably if he has an arrow in him, don’t you?”
Meb left the house. Elemak rose to his feet and reached for his bow over the fireplace.
“Don’t do it.”
He turned and saw Eiadh standing in the doorway to the bedroom, holding the baby on her hip.
“Did I hear you correctly, Edhya?” asked Elemak. “Are you telling me what to do?”
“You tried to kill him once before,” said Eiadh. “The Oversoul won’t let you. Don’t you realize that? And this time you might get hurt.”
“I appreciate your concern for me, Edhya, but I know what I’m doing.”
“I know what you’re doing, too,” said Eiadh. “I’ve watched you with Nafai for all these years, and I thought, at last, Elya has learned to give Nafai his proper respect. Elya’s stopped being jealous of his little brother. But now I see that you were just biding your time.”
Elemak would have slapped her face for that, except that the baby’s head was in the way, and he would never harm his own child. “You’ve said enough,” he warned.
“I’d beg you to stop because you love me,” said Eiadh, “but I know that would never work. So I’m begging you to stop for your children’s sake.”
“For their sake? It’s for their sake that I’m doing this. I don’t want their lives disrupted for the sake of Rasa’s conspiracies to get control of Dostatok and turn this into a village of women like Basilica.”
“For their sake,” said Eiadh again. “Don’t make them see their father humiliated in front of everyone. Or worse.”
“I can see how much you love me,” said Elemak. “Apparently your bets are on the other side.”
“Don’t shame them by letting them see that you’re a murderer in your heart.”
“Do you think I don’t understand this?” said Elemak. “You’ve had a yen for Nafai ever since Basilica. I thought you’d outgrown it, but I was wrong.”
“Fool,” said Eiadh. “I admired his strength. I admired yours, too. But his strength has never wavered, and he’s never used it to bully other people. The way you treated your father was shameful. Your sons were in the other room, listening to how you talked to your father. Don’t you know that someday, when you’re old and frail, you may hear that same kind of disrespect from them? Go ahead, hit me. I’ll set down the baby. Let your sons see how strong you are, that you can beat up a woman for no greater crime than telling you the truth.”
Meb burst through the door. He had his bow and arrows. “Well?” he said. “Are you coming or not?”
“I’m coming,” said Elemak. He turned to Eiadh. “I’ll never forgive you for that.”
She smirked at him. “In an hour you’ll be asking for my forgiveness.”
Nafai knew as he approached exactly what to expect. He had the memories of the Oversoul. He had heard the conversations between Elemak and his fellow plotters. He had listened as he ordered everyone to keep the children in their houses. He had felt the fear in everyone’s hearts. He knew the damage Elemak was doing to his own family. He knew the fear and rage that filled his heart.
“Can’t you make him forget this?” asked Nafai.
(No. That wasn’t one of the powers I was given. Besides, he’s very strong. My influence over him is oblique at best.)
“If he had chosen to follow you, he would have been better for your purposes than I am, wouldn’t he?”
(Yes.) It might as well speak plainly, since it could keep no secrets from Nafai now.
“So I’m second choice,” said Nafai.
(First choice. Because Elemak doesn’t have it in him to recognize a purpose higher than his own ambition. He’s far more crippled than Issib.)
Nafai sped south, the paritka skimming over the ground, automatically finding a smooth route at a pace Nafai found unimaginable. He cared nothing for the miracle of this machine. It was all he could do to keep from weeping. For now, as he focused on the people of Dostatok instead of the labors of restoring a starship, he “remembered” things that he had never guessed. The struggles and sacrifices Zdorab and Shedemei had made for each other. The cold hatred Vas felt for Obring and Sevet, and, ever since Shazer, for Elemak. Sevet’s bitter self-loathing. Luet’s and Hushidh’s pain as their husbands treated them more and more like Elemak’s idea of what wives should be, and less and less like the friends they were supposed to be.
Issib, who depends on Hushidh for everything in his life, how shameful for him to regard his wife as something less than a partner in all his work! And how more shameful for me, when my wife is the greatest of women, at least as wise as I am, that I have made her feel as she felt when I left her.
For he had seen all their hearts from the inside, and that is a vision that leaves no room for hate. Yes, he knew that Vas was a murderer in his heart—but he also “remembered” the agony that Vas went through when Sevet and Obring brought such shame on him. Never mind that Nafai himself had never thought that humiliation was an excuse for murder. He knew how the world looked from Vas’s point of view, and it was impossible to hate him after that. He would stop him from getting his revenge, of course. But even as he did, he would understand.
Just as he understood Elemak. Understood how Nafai himself looked through Elemak’s eyes. If only I’d known, thought Nafai. If only I’d seen the things I did that made him hate me.
(Don’t be a fool. He hated your intelligence. He hated how you loved being intelligent. He hated your willing obedience to your father and mother. He hated even your hero-worship of Elemak himself. He hated you for being yourself, because you were so similar to him, and yet so different. The only way you could have kept him from hating you would have been to die young.)
Nafai understood this, but it changed nothing. Knowing all that he knew did not change the fact that he longed for things to be different. Oh, how he longed to have Elemak look at him and say, “Well done, Brother. I’m proud of you.” More than those words from Father, Nafai needed to hear them from Elemak. And he never would. The best he would get from Elemak today was his sullen compliance. The worst would be Elya’s dead body.
“I don’t want to kill him,” whispered Nafai, over and over.
(If you don’t want to, then you won’t.)
And then, again and again, Nafai’s thoughts came back to Luet. Ah, Luet, why did it take this cloak to make me understand what I was doing to you? You tried to tell me. Lovingly at first, and in anger lately, but the message was the same: You’re hurting me. You’re losing my trust. Please don’t do it. And yet I didn’t hear. I was so caught up in being the best of the hunters, in living the man’s life among men, that I forgot that before I was really a man, you took my hand and led me down to the Lake of Women; you not only saved my life, you also gave me my place with the Oversoul. All that I am, all that I have, my self, my children, I received it all at your hands, Luet, and then rewarded you shamefully.
(You’re nearly there. Get control of yourself.)
Nafai pulled himself together. He could feel how the cloak worked within him, healing the skin around his eyes from the reddening that had come with his tears. Instantly his face gave no sign of having been in tears.
Is this how it will be? My face a mask, because I have this cloak?
(Only if you want it to be.)
Nafai “remembered” where Elemak and Mebbekew had gone, to lay an ambush for him. Vas and Obring were back in the village, making sure everyone stayed indoors. Elya and Meb were waiting, bows in hand, to kill Nafai as he approached.
Nafai’s first thought had been to simply go around them, where they couldn’t see him. Then he thought of flying past them so quickly they couldn’t shoot. But neither course would be useful. They had to commit themselves. They had to put the arrows in him, unprovoked. “Let them strike me,” said Nafai. “Help Meb with his aim—he’ll never do it without your help—calming him, helping him concentrate. Let both arrows hit me.”
(The cloak doesn’t stop pain.)
“But it will heal me, once I pull the arrows out, right?”
(Well enough. But don’t expect miracles.)
“All of this is a miracle,” said Nafai. “Help Elemak miss my heart, if you’re worried.”
Elemak missed his heart, but not by much. Nafai slowed the paritka enough that they could get a clear aim. He could see, only an instant after the Oversoul itself saw, how the paritka frightened them both; how Meb almost lost his nerve, almost threw down his bow and ran. But Elemak never wavered, and his murmured command held Meb at his post, and then they aimed and fired.
Nafai felt the arrows enter his body, Elemak’s buried deep in his chest, Meb’s arrow through his neck. The latter arrow was more painful, the former more dangerous. The pain of both was exquisite. Nafai almost lost consciousness.
(Wake up. You’ve got too much to do to nap now.)
It hurts it hurts, Nafai cried out silently.
(It was your plan, not mine.)
But it was the right plan, so Nafai didn’t pull the arrows out until the paritka brought him into the center of the village. As he had expected, Vas and Obring were terrified when they saw the paritka fly in and hover over the grass of the meeting place, Nafai slumped in the seat, an arrow protruding from his chest, another stuck clear through his throat.
Luet, called Nafai silently. Come out and pull the arrows from me. Let everyone see how I was ambushed. That I carried no weapon. You must do your part.
He could see as if through Luet’s own eyes; the kind of closeness that had almost driven him mad, back when he received his father’s vision so long ago, was now much more easily borne, for the cloak protected him from the most distracting aspects of the Oversoul’s recorded memories. He saw clearly what her eyes saw, but only hints of her feelings, and almost none of that stream of consciousness that had maddened him before.
He saw how her heart leapt within her at the sight of him, and how she was stricken by the sight of the arrows in him. How she loves me! he thought. Will she ever know how I love her?
She cried out. “Come out, all of you, and see!”
Almost at once Elemak’s voice came from the distance. “Stay in your houses!”
“Everybody!” cried Luet. “See how they tried to murder my husband!”
They were pouring out of the houses, adults and children alike. Many of them screamed and cried at the sight of Nafai, the arrows in him.
“Look- he didn’t have even a bow with him,” she said. “They shot at him with no provocation!”
“It’s a lie!” cried Elemak, striding into the village. “I thought they’d try something like this! Nafai put the arrows in himself, to make it look like an attack.”
Now Zdorab and Volemak were there with her, and they were the ones who reached up and pulled the arrows from him. The one in his neck had to be broken and pulled out from the arrowhead side. Elemak’s arrow tore his chest badly coming out. He felt the blood rush out of both wounds, and speech was still impossible for him, but Nafai also could feel the cloak working within him, healing him, keeping the wounds from killing him.
“I refuse to let you blame us for this,” said Elemak. “Nafai’s an expert at playing the victim.”
But Nafai could see that no one was buying Elemak’s lies, except perhaps Kokor and Dol, who were never terribly bright and were easily deceived.
“No one believes you,” said Father. “Nafai himself knew that you were planning this.”
“Oh, really?” asked Elemak. “Well, if he’s so wise now, why did he stroll right into this supposed ambush?”
Nafai put the answer in his fathers mind.
“Because he wanted everyone to see your arrows in him,” said Father. “He wanted everyone to see clearly who and what you are, so there’s never any doubt about it.”
“Most of us saw it all along,” said Rasa. “We hardly needed Nafai to bear such wounds.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Luet. “Nafai wears the cloak of the Oversoul. He’s the starmaster now. The cloak is healing him. There’s nothing Elemak and Mebbekew can do to harm him now.”
Am I ready yet? Nafai asked. The pain had subsided considerably.
(Almost.)
Elemak was keenly aware that no one was with him now, except Meb, who had no choice. Even Vas and Obring were averting their gaze from him—there’d be no support from them. But then, he had never expected any. “Whatever we did,” said Elemak, “we did for the sake of our children, our wives—and your wives and children, too. Do you really want to leave here? Is there a one of you who wants to leave this place?”
“None of us want to go,” said Luet. “But we all knew that this was the plan from the beginning—to take us to Earth. That was never a secret. No one lied to you.”
And then—the crowning insult—Eiadh added her voice to Luet’s. “I don’t want to leave Dostatok,” she said. “But I would rather wander in the desert forever than have a decent man killed to keep us here.”
She spoke with fire, and Elemak felt it burn within him. My own wife, and she damns me with her accusations.
“Ah, you’re all so brave now!” he cried. “But yesterday you agreed with me. Did any of you really think that our peace and happiness here would be preserved without bloodshed? You’ve all known it from the beginning—as long as Nafai was free to stir things up, there’d be mutiny and dissension among us. The only hope we have of peace is what I tried to do more than eight years ago.”
(Now.)
He rose to his feet. To his surprise, he was unsteady, lightheaded. At once he “remembered” why—the cloak took energy from his own body when it had to, and the process of healing him so quickly was sucking strength from him faster than the cloak could replenish itself from the sunlight. However, he also knew that this temporary weakness would not stop him from doing all that he needed to do.
“Elemak,” he said. “I’ve wept all the way here. It fills me with anguish, what you’ve tried to do. If only you’d bend enough to accept the Oversoul’s plan—I would have followed you gladly if you had only done that. But all along, if s been you, your ambition to rule, that has torn us apart. If you hadn’t plotted with them, led them, do you think these weak ones would ever have resisted the Oversoul? Elemak, don’t you see that you’ve brought yourself to the edge of death? The Oversoul is acting for the good of all humanity, and it will not be stopped. Do you have to die before you’ll believe that?”
“All I know is that whenever the Oversoul gets mentioned, it’s you or your whiny wife or your mother the queen who’s angling for control.”
“None of us has sought to rule over you or anybody else,” said Nafai. “Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn’t mean that the rest of us do. Do you think that it’s my ambition that created this paritka I’m standing on? Do you think it’s Mother’s plotting that holds it off the ground? Do you think it was Luet’s—what did you call it, whining?— that brought me here, a day’s journey in an hour?”
“It’s an ancient machine, that’s all,” said Elemak. “An ancient machine, just like the Oversoul. Are we going to take our orders from machines?”
He looked around for support, but the blood on Nafai’s throat and tunic was too fresh; no one met his gaze except Mebbekew.
“We’re moving the village to the north, near Vusadka,” said Nafai. “And all of us, including the older children, will work with the Oversoul’s machines to restore one starship. And when it’s ready, then all of us will enter the starship and rise up into space. It will take us a hundred years to reach Earth, but to most of us it will seem like a single night, because they’ll sleep through the whole voyage, while to the rest of us it will seem like a few months. And when the voyage ends, we will come out of the ship and stand on the soil of Earth, the first humans to do so in forty million years. Are you telling me that you mean to deprive us all of thatadventure?”
Elemak was silent; so was Mebbekew. But Nafai knew what was passing through their minds. A grim resolve to back down now, but at the first opportunity knock him unconscious, slit his throat, and throw his body in the sea.
It would not do. They had to be convinced of the futility of resistance. They had to stop their plotting and concentrate their efforts on making the ship spaceworthy.
“Don’t you see that you can’t kill me, even though at this very moment, Elemak, you’re imagining slitting my throat and throwing my body into the sea?”
Elemak’s rage and fear redoubled within him. Nafai could feel it, striking at him in waves.
“Don’t you see that already the Oversoul is healing the wounds in my throat, in my chest?”
“If they were real wounds at all!” cried Meb. Poor Meb, who still thought that Elemak’s original lie might be revived.
In answer, Nafai plunged his finger into the wound in his own throat. Because the scar tissue was already forming, his finger had to tear its way in—but no one could miss the fact that Nafai’s finger was into the wound nearly to the third knuckle. A couple of people gagged; the rest gasped or moaned or cried out in sympathetic pain. And, in truth, the pain was considerable—worse as he pulled his finger out than when he plunged it in. I must learn to avoid theatrical gestures like that, thought Nafai.
He held up his bloody finger. “I forgive you for this, Elemak,” said Nafai. “I forgive you, Mebbekew. If I have your solemn oath to help me and the Oversoul as we build a good ship.”
It was too much for Elemak. The humiliation was far worse now than it had been in the desert eight years before. It could not be contained. There was nothing in his heart but murderous rage. He cared not at all now what others thought—he knew he had already lost their good opinion anyway. He knew he had lost his wife and his children—what was left? The only thing that could heal any part of the agony he felt inside was to kill Nafai, to drag him to the sea and plunge him in until he stopped kicking and struggling. Then let the others do what they wanted—Elemak would be content, as long as Nafai was dead.
Elemak took a step toward Nafai. Then another.
“Stop him,” said Luet. But no one got in his way. No one dared—the look on Elemak’s face was too terrible.
Mebbekew smiled and fell in step beside Elemak.
“Don’t touch me,” said Nafai. “The power of the Oversoul is in me like fire. I’m weak right now, from the wounds you gave me—I may not have the strength to control the power I have. If you touch me, I think you’ll die.”
He spoke with such simplicity that his words had the plain force of truth. He could feel something crumble inside Elemak. Not that the rage had died; what broke in him was that part of him that could not bear to be afraid. And when that barrier was gone, all the rage turned back into what it had really been all along: fear. Fear that he would lose his place to his younger brother. Fear that people would look at him and see weakness instead of strength. Fear that people wouldn’t love him. Above all, fear that he really had no control over anything or anybody in the world. And now, all those fears that he had long hidden from himself were turned loose within him—and they had all, all of them, come true. He had lost his place. He looked weak to everyone, even his children. No one here could love him now. And he had no control at all, not even enough control to kill this boy who had supplanted him.
With Elemak no longer moving forward, Meb, too, stopped—always the opportunist, he seemed to have no will of his own. But Nafai well knew that Meb was less broken in spirit than Elemak. He would go on plotting and sneaking, and with Elemak out of the picture, there would be nothing to restrain him.
It was clear to Nafai, therefore, that he had not yet won. He had to demonstrate clearly, unforgettably, to Meb and Elemak and to all the others, that this was not just a struggle between brothers, that in fact it was the Oversoul who had overcome Elemak and Meb, not Nafai at all. And in the back of his mind, Nafai clung to this hope: that if Elya and Meb could come to understand that it was the Oversoul who broke them today, they might eventually forgive Nafai himself, and be his true brothers again.
Enough power to shock them, said Nafai silently. Not to kill.
(As you intend, the cloak will act.)
Nafai held out his hand. He could see the sparking himself, but it was far more imposing when he saw through the eyes of others. By accessing the Oversoul he could see dozens of views of himself at once, his face a-dazzle with dancing light, growing brighter and brighter. And his hand, alive with light as if a thousand fireflies had swarmed around it. He pointed his finger at Elemak, and an arc of fire like lightning leapt from his fingertip, striking Elemak in the head.
Elya’s body spasmed brutally and he was flung to the ground.
Have I killed him? cried Nafai in silent anguish.
(Just shocked him. Have a little trust in me, will you?)
Sure enough, Elemak was moving now, writhing and jerking on the ground. So Nafai extended his hand toward Meb.
“No!” cried Mebbekew. Having seen what happened to Elemak, he wanted no part of it. But Nafai could see that in his heart, he was still plotting and scheming. “I promise, I’ll do whatever you want! I never wanted to help Elemak anyway, he just kept pushing me and pushing me.”
“Meb, you’re such a fool. Do you think I don’t know that it was Elemak who stopped you from murdering me in the desert, when I stopped you from killing a baboon?”
Meb’s face became a mask of guilty fear. For the first time in his life, Mebbekew had come face to face with one of his own secrets, one that he thought no one could know; there’d be no escaping from the consequences now. “I have children!” cried Mebbekew. “Don’t kill me!”
The arc of lightning again crackled through the air, connecting with Meb’s head and knocking him to the ground.
Nafai was exhausted. He could barely stand. Luet, help me, he said silently, urgently.
He felt her hands on his arm, holding him up. She must have climbed into the paritka beside him.
Ah, Luet, this is how it should always be. I can never stand without you beside me. If you’re not part of this I can’t do it at all.
In answer, all he could feel from her was her love for him, her vast relief that the danger was over, her pride at the strength he had shown.
How can you be so forgiving? he asked her silently.
I love youwas the only message for him that he could find in her heart.
Nafai decided that the paritka should settle to the ground, and so it did. Luet helped him step from it, and with their children swarming around him, she led him back to the house. Over the next few minutes, all the others came to the house to see if they could help. But all he needed was to sleep. “Look after the others,” he whispered. “I’m worried that the damage might be permanent.”
When he awoke, it was near dusk. Zdorab was in their kitchen, cooking; Issib, Hushidh, Shedemei, and Luet were gathered around his bed. They weren’t looking at him… they were talking among themselves. He listened.
They spoke of how sorry they felt for Eiadh and Dol, and for their children. Especially Proya, who lived for the pride he felt in his father, Elemak. “He looked as if he had just seen his father die,” said Luet.
“He did,” said Hushidh. “At least, it was the death of the father that he knew.”
“The damage from this day will be a long time healing,” said Shedemei.
“Was it damage?” said Luet. “Or the beginning of the process of healing wounds that we had only ignored for the past eight years?”
Hushidh clucked her tongue. “Nafai would be the first to tell you that what happened today wasn’t healing, it was war. The Oversoul got her way today—the starship will be outfitted, and Elemak and Mebbekew will work as hard as anyone, when they recover from this. But the damage was permanent. Elemak and Mebbekew will always see Nafai as their enemy. And anyone who serves Nafai.”
“Nobody serves Nafai,” said Luet. “We only serve the Oversoul, as Nafai himself does.”
“Yes,” Shedemei agreed quickly. “We all understand that, Luet. This wasn’t Nafai’s battle, it was the Oversoul’s. It might have been any of us with the cloak.”
Nafai noticed that, however close she might come to the edge, this time Shedemei wasn’t telling that she was the one who would have had the cloak if Nafai had refused it. She would keep that now as private knowledge, between her and Zdorab. Elemak and Mebbekew, Vas and Obring—they weren’t likely to tell anybody, if they had even understood what she told them last night. She would always know that she was the Oversoul’s next choice for the leadership of the colony—that was enough for her, she was content.
“He’s awake,” said Luet.
“How do you know?” asked Issib.
“His breathing changed.”
“I’m awake,” said Nafai.
“How are you?” asked Luet.
“Still tired. But better. In fact, good. In fact, not even tired.” He propped himself up onto one elbow, and at once felt a little light-headed. “On second thought, definitely still tired.” He lay back down.
The others laughed.
“How are Elya and Meb?”
“Sleeping it off, same as you,” said Shedemei.
“And who has your children?” Nafai asked them.
“Mother,” said Issib.
“Lady Rasa,” said Shedemei. “Zdorab decided you’d want real food when you woke up, so he came over and cooked.”
“Nonsense,” said Luet. “He just knew how worried I’d be and didn’t want me to have to worry about cooking. You haven’t asked about our children.”
“Actually, I don’t have to ask about anybody’s children,” he said. “I know where they are.”
There was nothing they could say to that. Soon they brought food in to him, and they all ate together, gathered around the bed. Nafai explained to them what kind of work would be required at the starship, and they began to think through the division of labor. They didn’t talk long, though, because Nafai was clearly exhausted—in body, if not in mind. Soon they were gone, even Luet; but Luet returned soon with the children, who came in and embraced their father. Chveya especially clung to him. “Papa,” she said, “I heard your voice in my heart.”
“Yes,” he said. “But that’s really the voice of the Oversoul.”
“It was your voice, when you thought you were dying,” she said. “You were standing on a hill, about to run down and throw yourself through an invisible wall. And you shouted to me, Veya, I love you.”
“Yes,” he said. “That was my voice, after all.”
“I love you too, Papa,” she said.
He slept again.
And woke in the middle of the night, hearing a breeze from the sea as it played through the thatch of the roof. He felt strong again, strong enough to rise up into the wind and fly.
Instead he reached out and touched Luet, gathered her to him. She woke sleepily, and did not protest. Rather she snuggled closer. She was willing to make love, if he had wanted to. But all he wanted tonight was to touch her, to hold her. To share the dancing light of the cloak with her, so she could also remember all the things that he remembered from the mind of the Oversoul. So she could see into his heart as clearly as he saw into hers, and know his love for her as surely as he knew her love for him.
The light from the cloak grew and brightened. He kissed her forehead, and when his lips came away, he could see that a faint light also sparked on her. It will grow, he knew. It will grow until there is no difference between us. Let there be no barrier between us, Luet, my love. I never want to be alone again.