Earthborn (Homecoming) (16 page)

“Just because you haven’t heard it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“So Father thinks I’m a troublemaker and you think I’m a proud insensitive—”

“And aren’t you?”

Edhadeya shrugged. “I’d free you if I could.”

“At least your father
pretended
that he was trying to change your place in society. But in all your pleading, have you
ever
asked for the earth people of Darakemba to be set free?”

Edhadeya was furious; she didn’t like being called a hypocrite. “It’s completely different!”

“So eager to get this Chebeya and Akmaro out of captivity, but not a thought about getting old Uss-Uss her freedom.”

“What would you do with it if you had it?” demanded Edhadeya. “Go back to the Elemaki? The soldiers would have to kill you before you got halfway there, so you couldn’t tell them all our secrets.”

“Go
back
to the Elemaki? Child, my great grandfather was born a slave to the kings of the Nafari.
Back
to a place I’ve never been?”

“Do you really hate me?” asked Edhadeya.

“I never said I hated you,” said Uss-Uss.

“But you want to be free of me.”

“I would like it, when my day’s work was done, when you were fast asleep, I would like it, to go home to my own little house, and kiss the noses of my own fat little grandchildren, and share with my husband the wages I was paid for serving in the king’s house. Do you think I’d give you any less faithful service, just because I was doing it freely instead of because I knew I could be killed or at least sold out of the house if I made the slightest mistake?”

Edhadeya thought about this. “But you’d live in a hole in the ground, if you were free,” she said.

Uss-Uss cackled and hooted. “Of course I would! So what if I did?”

“But that’s . . .”

“That’s
inhuman”
said Uss-Uss, still laughing.

Edhadeya finally got the joke, and laughed with her.

Later, when it was dark, when Edhadeya was supposed to be asleep, she was wakened by a slight sound at the window. She saw there in the moonlight the silhouette of Uss-Uss, her head bobbing up and down. Thinking something might be wrong, Edhadeya got up and padded to the window.

Hearing her, Uss-Uss turned around and waited for her.

“Do you do this every night?” asked Edhadeya.

“No,” said Uss-Uss. “Only tonight. But you were
worried about these humans who are held captive by diggers in some far-off place.”

“So you pray to the Keeper for them?”

“Why should I do that?” asked Uss-Uss. “The Keeper knows they’re there—it was the Keeper sent you the dream you had, wasn’t it? I don’t figure it’s my business to tell the Mother what she already knows! No, I was praying to the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried. She lives in that star, that high one. The one that’s always overhead.”

“No one can live in a star,” said Edhadeya.

“An immortal can,” said Uss-Uss. “I pray to her.”

“Does she have a name?”

“A very sacred one,” said Uss-Uss.

“Can you tell it to me?”

Uss-Uss lifted up the hem of Edhadeya’s long nightgown and draped it onto her head, so that the cloth was over Edhadeya’s ear. “My name is Voozhum,” said Uss-Uss. “Now that you know my true name, I can tell you the name of the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried.” Then Uss-Uss waited.

“Please,” said Edhadeya, trembling. “Please, Voozhum.” What was she supposed to do or say now? All she could think of was to offer the most formal and official version of her own name in answer. “My true name is Ya-Edhad.”

“The One-Who-Was-Never-Buried is the one to whom Nafai gave the cloak of the starmaster. Did they think this was a secret from the earth people? The blessed ancestors saw her skin tremble with light. She is Shedemei, and she is the one who took the tower up into the sky and made a star of it.”

“And she’s still alive?”

“She has been seen twice in the years since then. Both times tending a garden, once in a high mountain valley, and once on the side of a cliff in the lowest reaches of the gornaya. She is the gardener, and she watches over the whole Earth. She will know what to do about Chebeya and her husband, about Luet and her brother.”

For the first time Edhadeya realized that there might be things that the diggers knew that they didn’t learn from the humans, and it filled her with a sudden and unfamiliar blush of humility. “Teach me how to speak to the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried.”

“You fix your eye on the permanent star, the one they call Basilica.”

Edhadeya looked up and found it easily—as every child could do.

“Then you bob your head, like this,” said Uss-Uss.

“Can she see us?”

“I don’t know,” said Uss-Uss. “I only know that this is what we do when we pray to her. I think it started because that was how she moved her head that time when she was seen in a high valley.”

So Edhadeya joined her slave in the unfamiliar ritual. Together they asked the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried to watch out for Chebeya and Luet and their people, and set them free. Uss-Uss would say a phrase, and Edhadeya would repeat it. At the end, Edhadeya added a few words of her own. “And help set all women free from captivity,” she said. “Women of the sky, women of the earth, and women of the middle.”

Uss-Uss cackled for a moment, then repeated the phrase. “And just think,” she said. “Someday they’ll marry you off to some second-rate potentate somewhere and I’ll be dead and you’ll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!” Then she bustled Edhadeya back to bed, where she slept fitfully, dreaming meaningless dreams about dead women with sparkling skin whom no one had remembered to bury.

“If I didn’t think this whole thing might be a mistake, I’d think it was funny,” said the Oversoul.

“You don’t have a sense of humor,” said Shedemei, “and if you thought it was a mistake you wouldn’t have done it.”

“I can make a decision when I’m still eighty percent unsure of the outcome,” said the Oversoul. “It’s built
into my programming, to help keep me from dithering to the point of inaction.”

“I think sending Motiak that message through the Index was a good idea,” said Shedemei. “Prevent them sending another expedition.
Force
the Keeper to act.”

“Easy for you to decide, Shedemei,” said the Oversoul.
“You
have no compassion for them.”

Shedemei felt those words cut her to the heart. “A machine tells
me
that I have no compassion?”

“I have a sort of virtual compassion,” said the Oversoul. “I do take human suffering into account, though not usually the suffering of individuals. Akmaro and Chebeya have a large enough group there that, yes, I feel some compassion for them. But
you
have the normal human ability to dehumanize people at will, especially strangers, especially in large groups.”

“You’re saying I’m a monster.”

“I’m saying the humans feel compassion primarily for those they conceive of as being part of themselves. You don’t know these people, so you can use them as bait for the Keeper of Earth. If it was just one person being tortured, however, you wouldn’t do it—because then you would empathize with her and couldn’t live with yourself for letting her suffer.”

Shedemei was so agitated she left the library and went to tend her seedlings in the high-altitude room, where she was trying to breed a legume that would produce useful quantities of high-protein, high-energy beans in the highest mountain valleys of the gornaya. It was unspeakable, what the Oversoul had said, but it also made a kind of sense. As primates evolved toward depending on a community for cooperative survival, they would evolve empathy first for their own children, then for the children of others, then for the adult parents of those other children—but as the circle grew wider, the empathy would grow weaker.

Finally, humans had to evolve what no other primate had: a sense of identity with a group so powerful that it could swallow up the individual identity, at least
to a large degree. Humans couldn’t have this deep, self-sacrificing loyalty to more than one or two communities at a time. Thus communities were inevitably in conflict with each other, competing for the loyalty of their members. The tribe had to break down the solidarity of the family; religion had to compete with nation for loyalty. But once a community had that loyalty, the most ardent members would gladly die for it. Not for the other individuals directly, but for the interests of the group
as a whole,
because in the human mind, that group
was
the self, and the individual was able to regard himself as merely one iteration of the pattern of the whole. Humans, in order to rise above animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even the disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism.

The Oversoul is right. If I knew Chebeya and her people as individuals, then even with no more moral insight than a baboon, I would reach out to protect them. Or if I conceived myself to be one of them, I would subsume my own interests in the needs of the group as a whole, and would not dream of making them serve as bait in an attempt to serve the Keeper of Earth.

The Oversoul, on the other hand, was created to look out for the needs of humanity as a whole. The powers she had were tremendous, and her programmers had to build some kind of compassion into her. But it was an intellectual compassion, a historical compassion—the more people who were suffering, the greater the priority of easing their pain. Thus the Oversoul could overlook individual accidents, the intermittent deaths from the ordinary course of a disease cycling through a region; but the Oversoul would dread and try to avoid the large group suffering that came from war, drought, flood, epidemic. In those cases, the Oversoul could act, guiding individuals to actions that would help the whole affected population—not
to save individual lives, but to reduce the scale of the suffering.

Between the two of us, though, thought Shedemei, we are left untouched by the suffering of Chebeya’s people. There aren’t enough of them to force the Oversoul to intervene on their behalf—though there are enough to make her uncomfortable. And I, on my isolated perch in the outer reaches of the atmosphere, I am no part of them. All my people are gone; my community is dead. As the digger women speak of me: I am the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried. That is the only difference between me and the dead, for a person who has no living community
is
dead. Haven’t I seen it in old people? Spouse gone, friends gone, family gone except for later generations that barely remember the old one—they become annoyed to discover that they’re still alive. Have I reached that point?

Not yet, she thought, sliding her fingers behind the tiny trowel in order to lift out a seedling that needed transplanting into a larger tray. Because my plants have become my people. My little animals, going through generation after generation as I play genetic games with them—they are the ones I think of as part of myself.

So is this good or bad? The Oversoul needs to get advice from the Keeper of Earth in order to alleviate the suffering of the people of Harmony. To accomplish that, we need to interfere with the Keeper’s plans. The Keeper wants to rescue Chebeya and Akmaro; therefore we’ll make it harder. It’s not an unreasonable plan. In the end, it will be to the benefit of millions and millions of people on Harmony.

But we’re doing it blindly. We don’t know what the Keeper is trying to accomplish.
Why
is she trying to save the Akmari? Maybe we should have tried to understand her purpose before we started fiddling around with her ability to accomplish it.

Yet how can we understand her purpose if she won’t talk to us? It’s so circular.

“Don’t talk into my mind,” she said to the Oversoul. “I hate that.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, I was thinking to myself.”

Shedemei snorted. “Very funny.”

“While we’re at it, why not also think about what or who in the world the Keeper of Earth
is.”

“If we can’t find the Keeper using physical evidence or recorded memory,” said Shedemei, “then maybe we should study what she wants and what she does, and then search for some mechanism by which it is possible for her to do it, or some entity that might benefit from her doing it.”

“Not at all. Any more than I will ever benefit from the expanded habitat that these little legumes will provide, if they are ever successful at producing useful nutrition in the low-oxygen, short-growing-season, thin-soil environment I intend them for. But
someone
will benefit. Therefore if some stranger who had no way of discovering me directly wanted to know something about me, she could at least start her reasoning from the fact that I have particular care for enhancing the ability of humans, diggers, and angels to expand into new habitats with improved nutrition. They might then look for me to be of a body-type that allowed me to identify with these creatures. Or at least they could gather from my actions that it is important to me that these creatures be protected.”

“I have no idea,” Shedemei said wearily. “But I also know that if somebody wanted to get my attention, all they’d need to do is start stomping out all my gardens on Earth. Then I’d notice them, all right.”

“Not so destructive, I hope.”

“If you keep goading me this way, you’ll end up persuading me to care so much about them that I stop worrying about the people of Harmony altogether. Is that what you want?”