Earthborn (Homecoming) (46 page)

“No,” said Akmaro, answering for Chebeya so she wouldn’t have to weep in frustration. “No, her point is that anything
we
might do at this point would be useless. If someone causes harm to any of these boys, they would be martyrs and you would be blamed forever. It’s not in our power—that’s what Chebeya’s saying.”

“But I thought she was telling you to . . .”

“Akma has to be stopped, but the only way to stop him, that will actually work, is for everyone to see that he was stopped, not by any power of man or woman,
of angel, human, or digger, but by the plain and naked power of the Keeper of Earth. She’s saying that without realizing it, I’ve been begging, demanding that the Keeper find a way to
save
my son. All that’s left now is for me to stop that prayer. I think . . . perhaps the Keeper has trusted me with his plan for this nation, and so he won’t do anything without my consent. And without realizing it, up to now I’ve refused to let the Keeper do the only thing that would help at all. We’ve tried everything else, but now it’s time for me to ask the Keeper to do now what was done long ago when Sherem threatened to undo all the teachings of Oykib.”

“You want the Keeper to strike your son dead?” asked Pabul, incredulous.

“No I don’t!” cried Akmaro. Chebeya burst into tears. “No I don’t,” Akmaro said softly. “I want my son to live. But more than that, I want the people of this world to live together as children of the Keeper. More than I want to spare the life of my son. It’s time for me to beg the Keeper to do whatever he must do in order to save the people of Darakemba—no matter what it costs.” His eyes, too, spilled over with tears. “It’s happening again, just the way it did before, when I reached out to you, Pabul, you and your brothers, and taught you to love the Keeper and reject your father’s ways. I knew that I had to do that, for the good of my people, for
your
good, even though I could see that it was tearing my boy apart, making him hate me. I knew I was losing him then. And now I have to consent to it all over again.”

“Me, too?” asked Motiak in a small voice.

“No,” said Shedemei. “Your boys will return to their senses once they’re not with Akma anymore. And the peace of this kingdom depends on an orderly succession. Your boys must
not
die.”

“But a father praying for the Keeper to strike his son dead . . .,” said Motiak.

“I will never pray for that,” said Akmaro. “I’m not wise enough to tell the Keeper how to do his work.
I’m only wise enough to listen to my wife and stop demanding that the Keeper leave my son alive.”

“This is unbearable,” murmured Pabul. “Father Akmaro, I wish I had died back in Chelem rather than bring this day upon you.”

“No one brought this day upon
me
,” said Akmaro. “Akma brought this day upon himself. The only hope of mercy for this people is for the Keeper to give justice to my son. So that’s what I’m going to ask for.” He rose from the ground, sighing deeply, terribly. “That’s what I’m going to ask for with my whole heart. Justice for my son. I hope that he can bear to look the Keeper in the face.”

They watched as Akmaro walked away from the clearing, into the trees lining the banks of the Tsidorek. “I don’t know what to hope for,” Motiak said.

“It’s not our business to hope now,” said Shedemei. “Akmaro and Chebeya finally found the courage to face what they had to face. Now I need to get back to the city and see whether I can do the same in my own small way.”

They all knew better than to ask her what it was that she intended to do.

“I’ll go with you,” said Pabul.

“No,” said Shedemei sharply. “Stay here. Akmaro will need you. Chebeya will need you. I don’t need you.” She was not to be disobeyed. She set off down the road, not even taking a waterjar with her.

“Will she be all right?” asked Motiak. “Should I have some of my spies keep an eye on her?”

“She’ll be fine,” said Chebeya. “I don’t think she wants company. Or observers, either.”

It was dark when the launch flew silently above the water of the Tsidorek and stopped to rest in the air a single step away from the riverbank. Shedemei took that step and entered the small craft—small compared to the
Basilica,
that is; huge compared to any other vehicle on Earth. Once she was secure inside, the
launch took off without any command from her; the Oversoul knew what was needed, and took her to a garden she maintained in a hidden valley high above the settled land of Darakemba. As she traveled, the Oversoul spoke to her.

“That’s right.”

“You couldn’t block Nafai and Issib back on Harmony when you had your full powers. Akma has a powerful will; he would resist you. I think he’d probably enjoy it.”

“It’s not my plan that matters now,” said Shedemei. “It never was. We were as proud and as stupid as Akma was, back when we tried to provoke the Keeper by interfering with Monush’s rescue. What we didn’t understand is that the Keeper lets us interfere and tries to work around us. We really can’t affect her. She wants this society, this nation of Darakemba to succeed. But if the people choose to ignore her and make something ugly out of their chance at something beautiful, well, so be it. She’ll find somebody else.”

“Maybe the Keeper is waiting to see what these children of Harmony decide, right here, right now, before she can give you the instructions you came for.”

“She cares about them, yes. But she sees the whole picture, the sweep of time. To save a dozen or a thousand or a million people now, at the cost of the happiness of billions of fives over millions of years—she won’t do it. She takes the long view.”

“I don’t know. How can I know?
We
were wasting our time by trying to thwart her. But if Chebeya’s right—and how can I tell how much truth a raveler knows?—if she’s right, then the Keeper
can
be influenced, not by rebels but by her most loyal friends. So Akmaro may have been blocking her just as Chebeya said, and the things he’s telling the Keeper now—maybe the logjam will be broken.”

“Either that or not. How can I know?”

“I think that it’s possible that when it comes time to break the impasse, the Keeper may have use for me.”

“Someone will have a dream. That’s how the Keeper works. You’ll see the dream, you’ll tell me, and we’ll figure out if there’s something in it that the Keeper wants me to do.”

you
.>

“I haven’t had a true dream since I saw myself as a gardener in the sky. That came true long ago, and I don’t expect to have another dream.”

“Yes, well, I’d like to think the Keeper had something to say to me, of course. I’m as vain as the next person.”

“It doesn’t work that way. I’m not tired yet.”

She left the launch and wandered in the cold night air in her garden, routinely noticing the growth of the plants, the relative preponderance of one species over another, the amount of brachiation, the size of the foliage. The Oversoul entered her observations into the ship’s computer as notes. They had long since stopped commenting on the irony that a computer program
designed to govern a world was now acting as scribe for a lone biologist.

The Oversoul began to talk to her. place
that she could be. I’ve been searching for the means she uses to send dreams to the minds of humans, angels, and diggers. Whatever the Keeper does, I can’t find it.>

“Didn’t you notice that about four hundred years ago?”

“Forty million years you waited on Harmony, and now you’re impatient?”

“You were running things, you mean. If something was planned, it was because you were doing the planning. And then people started having dreams that didn’t come from you. Made you a little uneasy, didn’t it?”

“That’s how it is for us all the time.”

“Whatever the Keeper does, she does it faster than light, she does it no matter how far away a person is. It suggests such enormous power. Such knowledge, such . . . wisdom. And yet she is so delicate, intervening so little, really. Giving us such freedom. Respecting our choices. Listening to us. Listening to needs and desires we don’t even know we have.”

“Organic, then? With very powerful tools?”

charged
with it.>

“Or perhaps she found it and loved it and decided she wanted to help. On her own, unassigned, unrequested.”

“Now you’re a critic.”

“That’s the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings.”

should
imply that it has no meaning.>

“I mean my own life. I mean what I do. And the Keeper gives a meaning to the larger scene. That’s enough meaning for me. I don’t need to have somebody make an epic out of my life. I lived. Strange things happened. Now and then I made a little difference in other people’s lives. You know what? It may be that the thing I’m proudest of in all my life is restoring the brain of that damaged little boy in Bodika.”

“The Keeper assigned that to me; if I hadn’t done it, she would have found another way, given the task to someone else.”

“Maybe she did. But if I hadn’t been there, the Keeper wouldn’t have thought his life was so important that she would have sent someone else. So it was less significant—but because of that, I know that it happened only because I wanted it to happen. That
makes it mine. My gift. Oh, I know it was the Keeper who brought me to Earth at all, and the Keeper who chose me to succeed Nafai as the starmaster so I was even alive then, all of that, I know it. But I’m the one who decided to be there at that time and to risk exposing who I really am to save that boy. So maybe that’s what I’ll think of with pride when I die. Or maybe it’ll be the strange marriage I had with Zdorab. Or Rasaro’s House—that school might last, and that would be something fine.”

“But I
am
tired. I think I can sleep now. Too cold to sleep out here. I really wish the seats reclined farther back in the launch.”

“And they deserve to be, too, the thoughtless weasels.” She laughed. “I
am
tired.”

She finished her count anyway, so that her report would be complete. Then she had the launch turn off its exterior lights and she returned to it by starlight and closed the door and went to sleep.

Went to sleep and dreamed. Many dreams, the normal dreams, the random firings of synapses in the brain, being given fragmentary meaning by the story-making functions of the mind; dreams that the mind doesn’t even bother to remember upon waking.

And then, suddenly, a different dream. The Oversoul sensed it, the fact that the brain had now assumed a different pattern from the normal dreamsleep. Shedemei herself felt the difference and, even in her sleep, paid attention.

She saw the Earth as it looked from the
Basilica
, the curve of the planet plainly visible at the horizons. Then, suddenly, she was seeing the seething magma that roiled underneath the crust of the planet. At first it looked chaotic, but then with piercing clarity she understood that there was magnificent order to the flow of the currents. Each eddy, each whorl, each stream had meaning. Much of it was grossly slow, but
here and there, on a small scale, the movements were quick indeed.

Then she knew without seeing, knew because she knew, that these currents gave shape to the magnetic field of the Earth, making both large and tiny variations that could be sensed by the animals, that could disturb them or soothe them. The warning before the earthquake. The sudden veering of a school of fish. The harmonies between organisms; this was what the ravelers saw.

She saw how mind and memory lived in the currents of flowing stone, in the magnetic flow; saw how vast amounts of information were deposited in crystals on the underside of the crust, changed by fluxes in temperature and magnetism. For a moment she thought: This is the Keeper.