The Memory of Earth (8 page)

“So maybe it’s real,” said Issib. “That doesn’t tell us what it
is
.”

“It’s the guardian of the world,” said Wetchik. “He asked me to help.
Told
me to help. And I will.”

“That’s all temple stuff,” said Issib. “You don’t know anything about it. You grow exotic plants.”

Father dismissed Issib’s objections with a gesture.
“Anything the Oversoul needs me to know, he’ll tell me.” Then he headed for the door into the house.

Nafai followed him, only a few steps. “Father,” he said.

Father waited.

The trouble was, Nafai didn’t know what he was going to say. Only that he had to say it. That there was a very important question whose answer he had to have before Father left. He just didn’t know what the question was.

“Father,” he said again.

“Yes?”

And because Nafai couldn’t think of the real question, the deep one, the important one, he asked the only question that came to mind. “What am
I
supposed to do?”

“Keep the old ways of the Oversoul,” said Father.

“What does that
mean
?”

“Or the world will burn.” And Father was gone.

Nafai looked at the empty door for a while. It didn’t do anything, so he turned back to the others. They were all looking at him, as if they expected
him
to do something.

“What!”
he demanded.

“Nothing,” said Mother. She arose from her seat in the shade of the kaplya tree. “We’ll all return to our work.”

“That’s all?” said Issib. “Our father—your mate—has just told us that the Oversoul is speaking to him, and we’re supposed to go back to our studies?”

“You really don’t understand, do you?” said Mother. “You’ve lived all these years as my sons, as my
students
, and you are still nothing more than the ordinary boys wandering the streets of Basilica hoping to find a willing woman and a bed for the night.”

“What don’t we understand here?” asked Nafai. “Just because you women all take this witchgirl so seriously doesn’t mean that—”

“I have been down into the water myself,” said Mother,
her voice like metal. “You men can pretend to yourselves that the Oversoul is distracted or sleeping, or just a machine that collects our transmissions and sends them to libraries in distant cities. Whatever theory you happen to believe, it makes no difference to the
truth
. For
I
know, as most of the women in this city know, that the Oversoul is very much alive. At least as the keeper of the memories of this world, she is alive. We all receive those memories when we go into the water. Sometimes they seem random, sometimes we are given exactly the memory we needed. The Oversoul keeps the history of the world, as it was seen through other people’s eyes. Only a few of us—like Luet and Hushidh—are given wisdom away from the water, and even fewer are given visions of real things that haven’t happened yet. Since the great Izumina died, Luet is the only seer I know of in Basilica—so yes, we take her very, very seriously.”

Women go down into the water and receive visions? This was the first time Nafai had ever heard a woman describe any part of the worship at the lake. He had always assumed that the women’s worship was like the men’s—physical, ascetic, painful, a dispassionate way of discharging emotion. Instead they were all mystics. What seemed like legends or madness to men was at the center of a woman’s life. Nafai felt as though he had discovered that women were of another species after all. The question was, which of them, men or women, were the humans? The rational but brutal men? Or the irrational but gentle women?

“There’s only one thing rarer than a girl like Luet,” Mother was saying, “and that’s a
man
who hears the voice of the Oversoul. We know now that your father does hear—Luet confirmed that for me. I don’t know what the Oversoul wants, or why she spoke to your father, but I
am
wise enough to know that it matters.”

As she passed Nafai, she reached up and caught his ear firmly, though not painfully, between her fingers. “As for the mythical burning of Earth, my dear boy, I’ve seen it myself. It happened. I can only guess how long ago—we estimate there’s been at least thirty million years of human history on this world we named Harmony. But I saw the missiles fly, the bombs explode, and the world erupt in flame. The smoke filled the sky and blocked the sun, and underneath that blanket of darkness the oceans froze and the world was covered in ice and only a few human beings survived, to rise up out of the blackness as the world died, carrying their hopes and their regrets and their genes to other planets, hoping to start again. They did. We’re here. Now the Oversoul has warned your father that our new start can lead to the same ending as before.”

Nafai had seen Mother’s public face—playful, brilliant, analytical, gracious—and he had seen her family face—frank of speech yet always kind, quick to anger yet quicker to forgive. Always he had assumed that the way she was with the family was her true self, with nothing held back. Instead, behind the faces that he thought he knew, she had kept this secret all the time, her bitter vision of the end of Earth. “You never told us about this,” whispered Nafai.

“I most certainly told you about it,” said Rasa. “It’s not
my
fault that when you heard it, you thought I was telling you a myth.” She let go of his ear and returned to the house.

Issib floated past him, mumbling something about waking up one morning to find that you’ve been living in a madhouse all your life. Hushidh went past him also, not meeting his gaze; he could imagine the gossip that she would spread in his class all the rest of the day.

He was alone with Luet.

“I shouldn’t have spoken to you before,” she said.

“And you shouldn’t speak to me again, either,” suggested Nafai.

“Some people hear a lie when they’re told the truth. You’re so proud of your status as the son of Rasa and Wetchik, but obviously whatever genes you got from your parents, they weren’t the right ones.”

“While I’m sure
you
got the finest your parents had to offer.”

She looked at him with obvious contempt, and then she was gone.

“What a wonderful day this is going to be,” he said—to no one, since he was alone. “My entire family hates me.” He thought for a moment. “I’m not even sure that I
want
them to like me.”

For one dangerous moment, alone on the portico, he toyed with the idea of slipping past the screens and going to the edge, leaning out, and looking at the forbidden sight of the Valley of the Holy Women, casually referred to as the Rift Valley, and more crudely known as the Canyon of the Crones. I’ll see it and I bet I don’t even get struck blind.

But he didn’t do it, even though he stood there thinking about it for a long time. It seemed that every time he was about to take a step toward the edge, his mind suddenly wandered and he hesitated, confused, forgetting for a moment what it was he wanted to do. Finally he lost interest and went back inside the house.

He should have gone back to class—it’s what he
expected
to do when he went inside. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he wandered to the front door and out onto the porch, into the streets of Basilica. Mother would probably be furious at him but that was too bad.

He must have been seeing where he was going, since
he didn’t bump into anything, but he had no memory of what he saw or where he had been. He ended up in the Fountains district, not far from the neighborhood of Rasa’s house; and in his mind, he had circled through the same thoughts over and over again, finally ending up not very far from where he started.

One thing he knew, though: He couldn’t dismiss this all as madness. Father was
not
crazy, however new and strange he might seem; and as for Mother, if
her
vision of the burning of Earth was madness, then she had been mad since before he was born. So there
was
something that put ideas and desires and visions into his parents’ minds—and into Luet’s, too, couldn’t forget
her.
People called this something the Oversoul, but that was just a name, a label. What
was
it? What did it want? What could it actually
do
? If it could talk to some people, why didn’t it just talk to everybody?

Nafai stopped across a fairly wide street from what might be the largest house in Basilica. He knew it well enough, since the head of the Palwashantu clan was mated with the woman who lived there. Nafai couldn’t remember
her
name—she was nobody, everyone knew she had bought this ancient house with her mate’s money, and if she didn’t renew his contract then even
with
the house she’d be nobody—but
he
was Gaballufix. There was a family connection—his mother was Hosni, who later on became Wetchik’s auntie and the mother of Elemak. Between that blood connection and the fact that Father was perhaps the second most prestigious Palwashantu clansman in Basilica, they had visited this house at least once, usually two or three times a year since as long ago as Nafai could remember.

As he stood there, stupidly watching the front of that landmark building, he suddenly came alert, for without meaning to he had recognized someone moving along
the street. Elemak should have been home sleeping—he had traveled all night, hadn’t he? Yet here he was, in mid-afternoon. For a panicked moment Nafai wondered if Elya was looking for
him
—was it possible that Mother had missed him and worried and now the whole family, perhaps even Father’s employees as well, were combing the city looking for him?

But no. Elemak wasn’t looking for anybody. He was moving too casually, too easily. Looking in no particular direction at all.

And then he was gone.

No, he had turned down into the gap between Gaballufix’s house and the building next door. So he
did
have a destination.

Nafai had to know what Elemak was doing. He trotted along the street to where he had a clear view down the narrow road. He got there in time to see Elemak ducking into a low alley doorway into Gaballufix’s house.

Nafai couldn’t imagine what business Elya might have with Gaballufix—especially something so urgent that he had to go to his house the same day he got back from a long trip. True, Gaballufix was technically Elya’s half-brother, but there were sixteen years between them and Gaballufix had never openly recognized Elya as his brother. That didn’t mean, though, that they couldn’t start behaving more like close kinsmen now. Still, it bothered Nafai that Elemak had never mentioned it and seemed to be concealing it now.

Whether the question bothered him or not, Nafai knew that it would be a very bad idea to ask Elemak about it directly. When Elya wanted anybody to know what he was doing with Gaballufix, he’d tell them. In the meantime, the secret would be safe inside Elya’s head.

A secret inside somebody’s head.

Luet had known that Nafai was in love with Eiadh.
Well, it wasn’t all
that
secret—Luet might have guessed it from the way that he looked at her. But there on the front porch of Mother’s house, Luet had said, “
You’re
the bastard,” as if she were answering him for calling
her
a bastard. Only he hadn’t
said
anything. He had only
thought
of her as a bastard. It wasn’t an opinion he had expressed before. He had only thought of it at that moment, because he was annoyed with Luet. Yet she had known.

Was that the Oversoul, too? Not just putting ideas into people’s heads, but also taking them out and telling them to other people? The Oversoul wasn’t just a provider of strange dreams—it was a spy and a gossip as well.

It made Nafai afraid, to think that not only was the Oversoul real, but also that it had the power to read his most secret, transitory thoughts and tell them to someone else. And to someone as repulsive as the little bastard witchgirl, no less.

It frightened him like the first time he went out into the sea by himself. Father had taken them all on a holiday, down to the beach. The first afternoon there, they had all gone out into the sea together, and surrounded by his father and brothers—except Issib, of course, who watched them from his chair on the beach—he had felt the sea play with him, the waves shoving him toward shore, then trying to draw him out again. It was fun, exhilarating. He even dared to swim out to where his feet couldn’t quite touch the bottom, all the while playing with Meb and Elya and Father. A good day, a great day, when his older brothers still liked him. But the next morning he got up early, left the tent and went out to the water alone. He could swim like a fish; he was in no danger. And yet as he walked out into the water he felt an inexplicable unease. The water tugging at
him, pushing him; he was only a few meters from shore, and yet with no one else in the water, all by himself, he felt as if he had lost his place, as if he had already been washed out to sea, as if he were caught in the grasp of something so huge that any part of it could swallow him up. He panicked then. He ran to shore, struggling against the water, convinced that it would never let him go, dragging at him, sucking him down. And then he was on the sand, on the dry sand above the tide line, and he fell to his knees and wept because he was safe.

But for those few moments out in the water he had felt the terror of knowing how small and helpless he was, how much power there was in the world, and how easily it could do to him whatever it wanted and there was nothing he could do to resist it.

That was the fear he felt now. Not so strong, not so specific as it had been that day on the beach—but then, he wasn’t a five-year-old anymore, either, and he was better at dealing with fear. The Oversoul wasn’t an old legend, it was alive, and it could force visions into his own parents’ minds and it could search out secrets inside Nafai’s head and tell them to other people, to people that Nafai didn’t like and who didn’t like him.

The worst thing was knowing that the reason why Luet didn’t like him was probably
because
of what the Oversoul had told her about his thoughts. His most private thoughts exposed to this unsympathetic little monster. What next? Would Father’s next vision be Nafai’s fantasies about Eiadh? Worse yet, would
Mother
be shown?