The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (11 page)

Elemak. She remembered that terrible morning when he stood there with a pulse pointed at Nafai’s head and thought: I must tell Volemak. He must be warned about the murder in Elemak’s heart.

Except that the Oversoul had clearly shown that murder would not be tolerated, and Elemak and Mebbekew both had begged forgiveness. The whole issue of going back to Basilica was closed now, surely. Why bring it up again? What would Volemak do about it now, anyway? Either he’d repudiate Elemak, which would make the young man useless through the rest of the journey, or Volemak would uphold him in his right to make such a vile decision, in which case there’d be no living with Elemak from then on, and Nafai would shrink to nothing in this company. Elemak would never let Nafai rise to his natural position of leadership. That would be unbearable, for Rasa knew that of her own children, only Nafai was suited to lead well, for only he of the men of his generation had both the wit to make wise decisions and the close communication with the Oversoul to make informed ones.

Of course, Luet was every bit as well qualified, but they were now in a primitive, nomadic setting, and it was almost inevitable that males would take the lead. Rasa hadn’t needed Shedemei’s instruction about primate community formation to know that in a wandering tribe, the males ruled. Soon enough the women would all be pregnant, and then they would turn inward; when the children were born, their circle would enlarge only enough to include the little ones. Food and safety and teaching would be their concern then, in such a fearful, hostile place as the
desert. There would be neither reason nor possibility of challenging the leadership of men here.

Except that if the leader were a man like Nafai, he would be compassionate to the women and listen to good counsel. While Elemak would be what he had already shown himself to be—a jealous tyrant, slow to listen to advice and quick to twist things to his own advantage, unfair and conniving . . .

I can’t let myself hate him. Elemak is a man of many fine gifts. Much like his half-brother, Gaballufix, who was once my husband. I loved Gabya for those gifts; but, alas, he passed few of them to our daughters, Sevet and Kokor. Instead they got his self-centeredness, his inability to bridle his hunger to possess everything that seemed even faintly desirable. And I see that in Elemak also, and so I hate and fear him as I came to hate and fear Gaballufix.

If only the Oversoul had been just the teeniest bit fussier about whom she brought along on this journey.

Then Rasa stopped in the middle of dressing herself and realized: I’m thinking of how selfish and controlling Elemak is, and yet I’m angry this morning because
I’m
not the one in charge here. Who is the controlling one! Perhaps if I had been deprived of real control as long as Elemak has, I’d be just as desperate to get it and keep it.

But she knew that she would not. Rasa had never undercut her mother as long as she lived, and Elemak had already acted to thwart his father several times—to the point of almost killing Volemak’s youngest son.

I must tell Volya what Elemak did, so that Volemak can make his decisions based on complete information. I would be a bad wife indeed if I didn’t give my husband good counsel, including telling him everything I know. He has always done the same for me.

Rasa pushed aside the flap and stepped into the air trap, which was much hotter than the inside of the tent. Then, after closing the flap behind her, she parted the outer curtain and stepped out into the blazing sun. She felt herself immediately drenched in sweat.

“Lady Rasa!” cried Dol in delight.

“Dolya,” said Rasa. What, had Dol been waiting for Rasa to emerge? There was
nothing
productive for her to do? Rasa could not resist giving her a little dig. “Working hard?”

“Oh, no, though I might as Well be, with this hot sun.”

Well, at least Dol wasn’t a hypocrite ...

“I volunteered to wait for you to come out of the tent, since Wetchik wouldn’t let anybody waken you, not even for breakfast.”

It occurred to Rasa that she was a little hungry.

“And Wetchik said that when you woke up you’d be starving, so I’m to take you to the kitchen tent. We keep everything locked up so the baboons don’t ever find it, or Elemak says we’d have no peace. They can’t ever learn to find food from us, or they’d probably follow us farther into the desert and then die.”

So Dolya
did
absorb information from other people’s conversation. It was so hard to remember sometimes that she was quite a bright girl. It was the cuteness thing she did that made it almost impossible to give her credit for having any wit.

“Well?” asked Dol.

“Well what?”

“You haven’t said a thing. Do you want to eat now, or shall I call everyone together to hear Wetchik’s dream?”

“Dream?” asked Rasa.

“He had a dream last night, from the Oversoul, and he wanted to tell us all together. But he didn’t want to waken you, so we all started doing other things, and I was supposed to watch for you.”

Now Rasa was deeply embarrassed. It was a bad precedent for Volya to set, making everyone else get up and work while Rasa slept. She did
not
want to be the pampered wife of the ruler, she wanted to be a full participant in the community. Surely Volemak understood that.

“Please, call everyone together. Point me to the kitchen tent first, of course. I’ll bring a little bread to the gathering.”

She heard Dol as she wandered off, calling out at the
top of her lungs—with full theatrical training in projecting her voice—“Aunt Rasa’s up now! Aunt Rasa’s up!”

Rasa cringed inwardly. Why not announce to everybody
exactly
how late I slept in?

She found the kitchen tent easily enough—it was the one with a stone oven outside, where Zdorab was baking bread.

He looked up at her rather shamefacedly. “I must apologize, Lady Rasa. I never said I was a baker.”

“But the bread smells wonderful,” said Rasa.

“Smells, yes. I can do smells. You should catch a whiff of my favorite—I call it ‘burning fish.’”

Rasa laughed. She liked this fellow. “You get fish from this stream?”

“Your husband thought of doing some shore fishing down there.” He pointed toward where the stream flowed into the placid waters of the Scour Sea.

“So you had some luck?”

“Not really,” said Zdorab. “We caught fish, but they weren’t very good.”

“Even the ones that didn’t get turned into your favorite smell . . .”

“Even the ones we stewed. There just isn’t enough life on the land here. The fish would gather at the stream mouth if there were more organic material in the sediment being deposited by the stream.”

“You’re a geologist?” asked Rasa, rather surprised.

“A librarian, so I’m a little bit of everything, I guess,” said Zdorab. “I was trying to figure out why this place doesn’t have a permanent human settlement, and the reason came from the Index, some old maps from the last time there was a major culture in this area. They always grow up on the big river just over that mountain range.” He pointed east. “Right now there are still a couple of minor cities there. The reason they don’t use this spot is because there isn’t enough plantable land. And the river fails one year in five. That’s too often to maintain a steady population.”

“What do the baboons do?” asked Rasa.

“The Index doesn’t really track baboons,” said Zdorab.

“I guess not,” said Rasa. “I guess the baboons will have to build their own Oversoul someday, eh?”

“I guess.” He looked mildly puzzled. “It’d help if they’d just build their own latrine.”

Rasa raised an eyebrow.

“We have to keep an eye on them, so one of them doesn’t wander upstream of us and then foul our drinking water.”

“Mm,” said Rasa. “That reminds me. I’m thirsty.”

“And hungry too, I’ll bet,” said Zdorab. “Well, help yourself. Cool water and yesterday’s bread in the kitchen tent, locked up.”

“Well, if it’s locked up ...”

“Locked to
baboons
. For humans, it should be easy enough.”

When Rasa got into the kitchen tent she found he was right. The “lock” was nothing but a twist of wire holding the solar-powered cold chest closed. So why did they stress the fact that it was locked? Perhaps just to remind her to close it after her.

She opened the lid and found several dozen loaves of bread, as well as quite a few other cloth-wrapped parcels of food—frozen meat, perhaps? No, it couldn’t be frozen, it wasn’t cold enough inside. She reached down and opened one of the packages and found, of course, camel’s milk cheese. Nasty stuff—she had eaten it once before, at Volemak’s house, when she was visiting him once between the two times they were married. “See how much I loved you?” he had teased her. “The whole time we were married, and I never made you taste this!” But she knew now that she’d need the protein and the fat—they’d be on lean rations through most of the journey, and they had to eat everything that had nutritional value.

Taking a flat round bread, she tore off half, rewrapped the rest, and then stuffed the part she meant to eat with a few chunks from the cheese. The bread was dry and harsh enough to mask much of the taste of the cheese, so all in
all it wasn’t as nauseating a breakfast as it could have been. Welcome to the desert, Rasa.

She closed the lid and turned toward the door.

“Aaah!” she screeched, quite without meaning to. There in the doorway was a baboon on all fours, looking at her intently and sniffing.

“Shoo,” she said. “Go away. This is
my
breakfast.”

The baboon only studied her face a little longer. She remembered then that she had
not
locked the coldbox. Shamefaced, she turned her back on the baboon and, hiding what she was doing with her body, she retwisted the wire. Supposedly the baboon’s fingers weren’t deft enough to undo the wire. But what if his teeth were strong enough to bite through it, what then? No point in letting him know that it was the wire keeping him out.

Of course, it was quite possible he could figure it out on his own. Didn’t they say that baboons were the closest things to humans on Harmony? Perhaps that’s why the original settlers of this planet brought them—for they were from Earth, not native to this place.

She turned back around and again let out a little screech, for the baboon was directly behind her now, standing up on his hind legs, regarding her with that same steady gaze.

“This is
my
breakfast,” Rasa said mildly.

The baboon curled his lip as if in disgust, then dropped down to all fours and started out of the tent.

At that moment Zdorab entered the tent. “Ha,” he said. “We call this one Yobar. He’s a newcomer to the tribe, and so they don’t really accept him yet. He doesn’t mind because he thinks it makes him boss when they all run away from him. But the poor fellow’s randy half the time and he can’t ever get near the females.”

“Which explains his name,” said Rasa.
Yobar
was an ancient word for a man who is insatiable in lovemaking.

“We call him that to sort of encourage him,” said Zdorab. “Get on out of here now, Yobar.”

“He was already leaving, I think, after I declined to share my bread and cheese with him.”

“The cheese is awful, isn’t it?” said Zdorab. “But when you consider that the boons eat baby keeks alive when they can catch them, you can understand that to them, camel cheese is really good stuff.”

“We humans
do
eat it, though, right?”

“Reluctantly and constantly,” said Zdorab. “And you never get used to the aftertaste. It’s the chief reason we drink so much water and then have to pee so much. Begging your pardon.”

“I have a feeling that city rules of delicate speech won’t be as practical out here,” said Rasa.

“But I ought to try more, I think,” said Zdorab. “Well, enjoy your meal, I’m trying not to create the aroma of burnt bread.”

He backed on out of the kitchen tent.

Rasa took her first bite of bread and it was good. So she took her second and nearly gagged—this time there was cheese in it. She forced herself to chew it and swallow it. But it made her think with fondness of the recent past, when the only camel product she had to confront was manure and no one expected her to eat it.

The tent door opened again. Rasa half expected to see Yobar again, back for another try at begging. Instead it was Dol. “Wetchik says we won’t gather until the shadows get long, so it won’t be so miserably hot. Good idea, don’t you think?”

“I’m only sorry you had to waste half the day waiting for me.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Dol. “I didn’t want to work anyway. I’m not much at gardening. I think I’d probably kill the flowers right along with the weeds.”

“I don’t think it’s a flower garden,” said Rasa.

“You know what I mean,” said Dol.

Oh, yes, I understand exactly.

I also understand that I must find Volemak and insist that he put me to work at once. It will never do for me to get days of rest when everyone else is working hard. I may be the second oldest here, but that doesn’t mean I’m
old
. Why, I can still have babies, and I certainly will, if I can get
Volya to greet me as his long-lost wife, instead of treating me like an invalid child.

What she could not say to herself, though she knew it and hated it, was the fact that she would have to have babies to have any role at all here in the desert. For they were reverting to a primitive state of human life here, in which survival and reproduction were at the forefront, and the kind of civilized life that she had mastered in Basilica would never exist again for her. Instead she would be competing with younger women for position in this new tribe, and the coin of the competition would be babies. Those who had them would be somebody; those who didn’t, wouldn’t. And at Rasa’s age, it was important to begin quickly, for she wouldn’t have as long as the younger ones.

Angry again, though with no one but poor frivolous Dol to be angry
at
, Rasa left the kitchen tent, still eating her bread and cheese. She looked around the encampment. When they had come down the steep incline into the canyon, there had been only four tents. Now there were ten. Rasa recognized the traveling tents, and felt vaguely guilty that the others were still living in such cramped quarters, when she and Volya shared so much space—a large, double-walled tent. Now, though, she could see that the tents were laid out in a couple of concentric circles, but the tent she shared with Volemak was not the center; nor was the kitchen tent. Indeed, at the center was the smallest of the four original tents, and after a moment’s thought Rasa realized that that was the tent where the Index was kept.