Earthborn (Homecoming) (26 page)
Read Earthborn (Homecoming) Online
Authors: Orson Scott Card
Luet nodded. “Father tried to make Akma start
earning his way when he was only fifteen. The age when laborers’ children—”
“I know the age,” said Edhadeya.
“Akma just said, ‘What, are you going to stand over me with a whip if I don’t?’ It was really vicious.”
“Your father wasn’t his taskmaster in those terrible days,” said Edhadeya.
“But Father
forgave
the taskmasters. The Pabulogi. Akma hasn’t, and he is still angry.”
“Thirteen years!” cried Edhadeya.
“Akma feeds on it the way an unborn chick feeds on the yolk of its egg. Even when he’s thinking about something else, even when he doesn’t realize it, he’s seething inside. He was my teacher for a while. We became very close. I loved him for a while more than I loved anybody. But if I came too close, if I touched his affection in just the wrong way, he
lashed
out. Sometimes it shocked me the way Elemak and Mebbekew must have felt when Nafai knocked them down with lightning from his finger.”
“Melancholy. I thought he was just a moody sort of person,” said Edhadeya.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s it,” said Luet, “it’s just that when he gets into that mood, it’s my father that he rages at.”
“And the Pabulogi.”
“They don’t come around often. When the priests come in for their meetings with Father, Akma makes sure he’s somewhere else. I don’t think he’s seen any of them for years.”
“But you’ve seen them.”
Luet smiled wanly. “As little as possible.”
“Even from her deathbed, as she calls it, Mother gets all the gossip, and she says that Didul looks at you like . . . like . . .”
“Like my worst nightmare.”
“You can’t mean that,” said Edhadeya.
“Not him personally. But what if he
did
decide he loved me? What if I loved him? It would be quicker and kinder if I just slit Akma’s throat in his sleep.”
“You mean this childish melancholy of Akma’s would keep you from the man you love?”
“I don’t
love
Didul. It was just a hypothetical situation.”
“Lutya, my friend, isn’t life complicated here in the king’s house?”
“It’s probably just as complicated for the poorest peasants. Down in their holes in the ground the most powerless ex-slaves probably have exactly the same problems. Grudges, loves, anger, fear, hate—”
“But when they quarrel in their tunnels, the whole kingdom doesn’t quake,” said Edhadeya.
“Well, that’s
your
family. Not mine.”
Edhadeya picked another worm off another leaf. “There are people eating holes in the kingdom, Lutya. What if our brothers turn out to be among the worms?”
“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? Deny the Keeper. Then we don’t have to associate with diggers and angels and—”
“Mon loves the angels. It would kill him not to be with them.”
“But does he love the sky people more than Akma hates the earth people?”
“When it comes down to it, Mon won’t give up his love for the angels.”
“Still. It would be a terrible thing if they started—”
“Don’t even think about it,” said Edhadeya. “Our brothers would not commit treason.”
“Then you’re
not
afraid,” said Luet.
Edhadeya sat on a bench and sighed. “I
am
afraid.”
A new voice came from behind them. “Of what?”
They turned. It was Chebeya, Luet’s mother. “Done already?” Luet asked.
“Poor Dudagu is exhausted,” said Chebeya.
Edhadeya snorted.
“Don’t make that sound in the woods,” said Chebeya, “or a jaguar will find you.”
“I don’t see why you think it’s so unnatural for me to despise my stepmother,” said Edhadeya.
“Your father loves her,” said Chebeya.
“A sign of his infinite capacity for love,” said Edhadeya.
“What were you talking about when I came out here?” asked Chebeya. “And don’t deny it was important, I could see how you were bound together.”
Luet and Edhadeya looked at each other.
“Trying to decide how much to tell me?” asked Chebeya. “Let me make it easy for you. Start with everything.”
So they told her.
“Let me watch them a little,” said Chebeya, when they were done. “If I see them together, I can learn a lot.”
“How can Mon not believe in true dreams?” asked Edhadeya. “He knows when things are true—he knew my dream about your family was a true one.”
“Don’t underestimate my son’s powers of persuasion,” said Chebeya.
“Mon isn’t any man’s puppet,” said Edhadeya. “I
know
him.”
“No, not a puppet,” said Chebeya. “But I know Akma’s gift.”
“He has one?” asked Luet.
“The little sister is the last to see,” said Edhadeya.
“He has the same gift as me,” said Chebeya.
“He’s never said so!” cried Luet.
“No, because he doesn’t realize it. It’s different with men, I think. Men don’t form communities as easily as women do. Human men, I’m speaking of—angels aren’t like this. Or maybe they are, it’s not as if I’ve had much experience. I just know that when a man has the raveling gift, he doesn’t see the connections between people the same way. What he does is he starts unconsciously finding ways to gather up all those scattered threads in his own hands.”
“So he can’t see the web of people,” said Luet. “He just becomes the spider?”
Chebeya shuddered. “I haven’t explained to him what it is he does. I’m afraid that if he ever becomes
conscious of it, it’ll be much worse. He’ll become more powerful and . . .”
“Dangerous,” said Edhadeya.
Chebeya turned away from her. “He gathers people up and they want to please him.”
“Enough that Mon would give up his love for the sky people?” asked Edhadeya.
“I’ll have to see them together, with that in mind. But if Akma really cared about something and needed Mon’s help, then I think Mon would help him.”
“But that’s horrible,” said Edhadeya. “Does that mean that the times I thought I loved him—”
“I don’t know,” said Chebeya. “Or I mean—I do know—as much as he is capable of love, he has loved you, from time to time.”
“Not now.”
“Not lately.”
Tears rolled out of Edhadeya’s eyes. “This is so stupid,” said Edhadeya. “I’m not even pining for him, I go whole days without thinking of him—but it’s just this gift of his, isn’t it?”
Chebeya shook her head. “When he ravels people up, it only lasts for a little while. A day or two. Unless he stays with you, it fades. You haven’t seen him in a week.”
“I see him every day,” said Edhadeya.
“You haven’t been
close
to him, though,” said Luet helpfully.
“He has to be talking to you, looking at you, interacting with you,” said Chebeya. “You can trust your feelings with him. They’re real enough.”
“More’s the pity,” murmured Edhadeya.
“Mother,” said Luet, “I think something very dangerous is happening. I think Akma and the sons of Motiak are plotting something.”
“As I said, I’ll look and see if it seems that way.”
“And if it does?”
“I’ll talk to your father about it,” said Chebeya. “And perhaps then we’ll talk to the king. And he may want to talk to you.”
“And when everyone has talked to everybody,” said Edhadeya, “there still won’t be a thing we can do.”
Chebeya smiled. “Ever hopeful, aren’t you? Dedaya, have some trust. Your father and my husband and I may be old, but we still have some power within our reach. We
can
change things.”
“I notice you didn’t include my stepmother in that group,” said Edhadeya nastily.
Chebeya smiled with benign innocence. “Poor Dudagu. She’s too frail to be mentioned in the same breath with power.”
Edhadeya laughed.
“Come home with me now, Luet. There’s work to do.”
Edhadeya hugged them both and watched them leave the courtyard. Then she lay back on the bench and looked up at the sky. She thought, when the angle of the sun was right, that she could see the star Basilica even in bright sunlight. Today, though, the clouds were blocking everything. It
was
going to rain.
“One-Who-Was-Never-Buried,” murmured Edhadeya. “Are you going to do
anything
about this?”
Shedemei loaded her supplies into the ship’s launch as the Oversoul murmured one more time inside her mind:
“Do you think you can’t protect me?” asked Shedemei.
“That’s all I ask.”
“
I
want to know these people, that’s all,” said Shedemei. “I want to know them for myself.”
“Do I have to say it? Can’t you look inside my mind and see the truth?”
“I can. I’m going down there because I’m lonely. There, is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Well, now you’ve heard it. I want to hear another organic voice. No insult to you, but I actually would like to feel like some other people know me.”
“I know,” said Shedemei. “And I don’t claim to have any great and noble purpose. I’m just ready to come out of this metal shell and bump against some people again.” Then she thought of something. “How old am I? People will ask.”
“Are you suggesting that I should have another child?”
Shedemei curled her lip in disgust. “This is a society with a strong tabu against sex outside of marriage. I’m not going down there to ruin some poor lonely man’s life.”
“Are you sure all these warnings aren’t because you’re just the tiniest bit jealous?”
“I can walk on the face of this planet, and other living creatures will know me as one of them. Have you ever wished . . .”
“That’s a shame, too.”
“That
is
programmed into
me”
said Shedemei.
The hatches were sealed. The launch was flipped away from the starship
Basilica
and hurtled down into the atmosphere.
RASARO’S SCHOOL
Light streamed through the tall, wide windows of the winter room, reflecting from the bare lime-washed plaster walls until it was hard for Mon to imagine that it could possibly be brighter outside. The reason he and his brothers could gather here to be brow beaten by—no, to have a discussion with—Akma was because no one used the winter room in the summer. It was too hot. It was too bright. It was all Mon could do to keep his eyes open. If it weren’t for the buzzing flies that persisted in trying to drink the sweat dribbling out of his body, he would have dozed off long ago.
Not that Mon wasn’t committed to Akma’s ideas. It’s just that the two of them had discussed all this before ever bringing Aronha and Ominer and Khimin into it. So it was going over old ground for him. And it was natural for Akma to conduct these sessions, since Mon didn’t have his patience in dealing with Khimin’s questions, which were always off the subject, or Aronha’s stubborn refusal to agree with points that were already proven and more than proven. Only
Ominer seemed to grasp at once what Akma was talking about, and even he made the sessions longer and more tedious than they had to be, because when he
did
understand a point he would then repeat it back to Akma in different words. Between Khimin’s obtuseness, Aronha’s stolidity, and Ominer’s enthusiasm, every tiny advance in the discussion took hours, or so it seemed to Mon. Akma could endure it. Akma could act as though the questions and comments weren’t unbearably stupid.
A tiny thought crept into Mon’s consciousness: Did Akma deal with me the same way? Are the ideas we worked out “together” really Akma’s alone? How skillful is he, really, at winning people to his point of view?
Immediately Mon discarded the idea, not because it wasn’t true, but because it would imply that Mon was not Akma’s intellectual equal, and he certainly
was.
Bego had always made it clear that Mon was the best student he had ever had.
“Humans and angels
can
live together,” said Akma, “because the natural habitat of both species is open air and sunlight. Humans cannot fly, it is true, but our bipedal body structure lifts us above the other animals. We conceive ourselves as seeing from above, which makes us in spirit compatible to the sky people. The diggers, however, are creatures of darkness, of caves; their natural posture is with their bellies dragging along the moist underground dirt. What creatures of intelligent and refinement abhor, the diggers love; what the diggers love, creatures of higher sensibility view with disgust.”
Mon closed his eyes against the white unbearable light of the room. In the back of his mind there throbbed an intense feeling, a certainty that in his childhood he had learned to trust, and in recent years he had learned—a much harder task—to ignore. The feeling was beneath and behind the place in his mind that words came from. But, in the way that the mind supplies words for unexplainable tunes, his mind had
also learned the words that went along with this feeling: Wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. Throb, throb, throb. Closing his eyes didn’t make it go away.
This doesn’t mean anything, thought Mon. This feeling is just a holdover from my childhood. It’s just the Keeper of Earth trying to get me to disbelieve what Akma is saying.