The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (18 page)

Then, instead of wondering, it occurred to him to ask.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re done, then?”

“The first time, anyway,” he said. “I hope it didn’t hurt you too much.”

“A little,” she said “Luet told me that I shouldn’t expect to be overwhelmed the first time anyway.”

“How not-overwhelmed were you?”

“I wasn’t
over
whelmed,” she said. “But it’s not like I wasn’t whelmed at all, either. In fact, I’d say that on my wedding night I was well and thoroughly whelmed, and I rather look forward to our next whelming, to see how much better it can get.”

“How about first thing in the morning?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But don’t be surprised if you wake up and find yourself being taken advantage of in the middle of the night.”

“Are you just pretending, or do you really mean all this?” said Issib.

“Are
you
just pretending?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “This is the most wonderful night of my life. Mostly because ...”

She waited.

“Because I never thought it would happen.”

“It did though,” she said.

“I answered,” he said. “Now you.”

“I thought I might have to pretend, and I
would
have pretended if I’d had to, because I know our marriage can work in the long run—I know it because I saw it in my dream from the Keeper of Earth. So if it meant I had to pretend to make it work well at the start, then I would have done it.”

“Oh.”

“But I didn’t have to pretend. I showed you what I really felt. It wasn’t as good as it’s going to be, but it was good.
You
were good to me. Very gentle. Very kind. Very . . .”

“Loving?”

“Was that what you meant to be?”

“Yes,” he said. “I meant that part most of all.”

“Ah,” she said.

But then in a moment he realized that she hadn’t said
ah
at all, but rather had let a sound escape her mouth without meaning to, and he saw in the dim light that she was crying, and it occurred to him that he had said exactly the right things to her, as she had said exactly the right things to him.

And as he drifted toward sleep, her body close to his, his arm resting lightly on her side, he thought: I have tasted of the fruit in Father’s dream. Not when we coupled, not when my body first gave its seed into a woman’s body, but rather when I let her see my fear, and my gratitude, and my love, and she let me also see hers. Then we both reached up and tasted just the first bite of that fruit, and now I know the secret from Father’s dream, the thing that even he didn’t understand—that you can never taste the fruit by reaching for it yourself. Rather you only taste it when you pick it from the tree for someone else, as Shuya gave the fruit to me, and I, though I never thought it possible, plucked and gave a taste of it to her.

Luet sat watching the baboons. The female that she thought of as Rubyet, because of a livid scar on her back, was in estrus, and it was interesting to watch the males compete for her. The most blustering male, Yobar, the one who spent so much time in camp with the humans, was the least effective at getting Rubyet’s attention. In fact, the more aggressive he got, the less progress he made. He would display his rage, stamping and snarling, even snapping his teeth and taking swipes with his hands, to try to intimidate one of the males who was courting Rubyet. Every time, the one he was intimidating would give up very quickly and run away from him—but while Yobar was chasing his victim, other males would approach Rubyet. So when Yobar returned to Rubyet from his “victory,” he would find other males there before him, and the whole play was enacted again.

Finally, Yobar got really angry and began to attack one of the males in earnest, biting and tearing at him. It was a male that Volemak had pointed out once with the name Salo, because he had once smeared grease all over his face
while stealing food from the cookfire. Salo immediately became submissive, showing his backside to Yobar, but Yobar was too angry to accept the submission. The other males looked on, perhaps amused, as Yobar continued to pummel and nip at his victim.

Salo at last managed to break free, howling and whining as he ran away from Yobar, who, still raging, followed after him at a furious pace, knocking him this way and that whenever he got within reach.

Then Salo did the most extraordinary thing. He ran straight for a young mother called Ploxy, who had a nursing infant that Salo often played with, and tore the infant from Ploxy’s arms. Ploxy hooted once in annoyance, but the baby immediately started to act happy and excited—until Yobar, still furious, came charging up and started pummeling Salo again.

This time, however, the infant Salo was holding started screeching in terror, and now, instead of watching complacently, the other males immediately became agitated. Ploxy began screaming, too, calling for help, and within a few moments the entire troop of baboons had assembled around Yobar and were beating him and screaming at him. Confused, frightened, Yobar tried to grab the infant out of Salo’s hands, perhaps thinking that if
he
held the infant, everybody would be on
his
side, but Luet realized that it wouldn’t work. Sure enough, the moment he grabbed for the baby, the others became downright brutal in their beating of him, finally ejecting him from the group and chasing him away. Several of the males chased him quite a distance and then stayed nearby to watch and make sure he didn’t come near. Luet wondered if that would be the end of Yobar’s attempt to be part of the troop.

Then she looked for Salo, trying to spot him somewhere near Ploxy and the baby—but he wasn’t there, though most of the other baboons were still there, chattering and bobbing up and down and otherwise showing how agitated they were.

Salo, however, was off in the brush upstream of the main group. He had got Rubyet away from the rest and
now was mounting her. She had the most comically resigned look on her face, which now and then gave way to a look of eyes-rolled-back pleasure—or exasperation. Luet wondered if human faces gave that same weirdly mixed signal under similar circumstances … a sort of distracted intensity that might mean pleasure or might mean perplexity.

In any event, Yobar, the aggressive one, had been completely defeated—might even have lost his place in the tribe. And Salo, who wasn’t particularly large, had lost the skirmish but won the battle
and
the war.

All because Salo had grabbed a baby away from its mother.

“Lucky Salo,” said Nafai. “I wondered who would win sweet Rubyet’s heart.”

“He did it with flowers,” said Luet. “I didn’t mean to be off here so long.”

“I wasn’t looking for you to
do
anything,” said Nafai. “I was looking for you because I wanted to be with you. There isn’t anything for me to do now anyway, till supper. I got my prey early this morning and brought the bloody thing home to lay at my mate’s feet. Only she was busy throwing up and didn’t give me my customary reward.”

“Wouldn’t you know that
I’d
be the one who’d get sick all the time,” said Luet. “Hushidh burped once and that was it for her. And Kokor
tries
to throw up but she just can’t bring it off, so she ends up
not
getting the sympathy she wants and I end up having it when I don’t want it.”

“Who would have thought that it would be a race between you and Hushidh and Kokor for the first baby in the colony?”

“A good thing for you,” said Luet. “It’ll give you an infant to grab, in case there’s trouble.”

He hadn’t seen Salo’s strategem, so he didn’t understand.

“Salo—he grabbed Ploxy’s baby.”

“Oh, yes, they do that,” said Nafai. “Shedemei told me. The males who are fully accepted in the tribe make friends with an infant or two, so the infant likes them. Then, in
combat, they grab the infant, who
doesn’t
scream when his
friend
takes him. The other male
isn’t
his friend, so when he keeps attacking, the baby gets scared and screams, which brings the whole tribe down on the poor pizdook’s head.”

“Oh,” said Luet. “So it was routine.”

“I’ve never seen it. I’m jealous that you did and I didn’t.”

“There’s the prize,” said Luet, pointing to Salo, who still hadn’t finished with Rubyet.

“And where’s the loser? I’ll bet it’s Yobar.” Luet was already pointing, and sure enough, there was Yobar, looking forlorn off in the distance, watching the troop but not daring to come closer because of the two males who were browsing halfway between him and the rest of the troop.

“You’d better make friends with my baby, then,” said Luet. “Or you won’t ever get your way in this tribe we’re forming.”

Nafai put his hand on Luet’s stomach. “No bigger yet.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Luet. “Now, what did you really come out here for.”

He looked at her in consternation.

“You didn’t know I was down here because nobody knew I was down here,” said Luet, “so you didn’t come looking for me, you came here to be alone.”

He shrugged. “I’d rather be with you.”

“You’re so impatient,” said Luet. “The Oversoul already said there’s no hurry—she won’t even be ready for us at Vusadka for years yet.”

“This place can’t sustain us—it’s already getting harder to find game,” said Nafai. “And we’re too close to that settled valley over the mountains to the east.”

“That isn’t what you’re anxious about, either,” said Luet. “It’s driving you crazy that the Keeper of Earth hasn’t sent you a dream.”

“
That
doesn’t bother me at all,” said Nafai. “What bothers me is the way you keep throwing it up to me. That you and Shuya and Father and Moozh and Thirsty all saw these angels and rats, and I didn’t. What, does that
mean that some computer orbiting a planet a hundred or so lightyears away somehow judged me a century before I was born and decided that I wasn’t worthy to receive his neat little menagerie dreams?”

“You really
art
angry,” said Luet.

“I want to
do
something, and if I can’t then at least I want to
know
something!” cried Nafai. “I’m sick of waiting and waiting and
nothing
happens. It’s no good for me to work with the Index because Zdorab and Issib are constantly using it and they’re more familiar with how it works than I am—”

“But it still speaks more clearly to you than anybody.”

“So while it tells me nothing it does it with greater clarity, how excellent.”

“And you’re a good hunter. Elemak even says so.”

“Yes, that’s about all anybody’s found for me to do—kill things.”

Luet could see the shadow of the memory of Gaballufix’s death pass over Nafai’s face. “Aren’t you ever going to forgive yourself for that?”

“Yes. When Gaballufix comes down out of the baboons’ sleeping caves and tells me he was just pretending to be dead.”

“You just don’t like waiting, that’s all,” said Luet. “But it’s like my being pregnant. I’d like to have it over with. I’d like to have the baby. But it takes time, so I wait.”

“You wait, but you can feel the change in you.”

“As I vomit everything I eat.”

“Not everything,” said Nafai, “and you know what I mean. I don’t feel any changes, I’m not needed for anything ...”

“Except the food we eat.”

“All right, you win. I’m vital, I’m necessary, I’m busy all the time, so I must be happy.” He started to walk away from her.

She thought of calling after him, but she knew that it would do no good. He wanted to be miserable, and so all she would do by trying to cheer him up was thwart him in his mood of the day. Aunt Rasa had told her a few days
ago that it wouldn’t hurt for her to remember that Nafai was still just a boy, and that she shouldn’t expect him to be a mature tower of strength for her. “You were both too young to marry,” said Rasa then, “but events got away from us. You’ve come up to the challenge—in time, Nyef will too.”

But Luet wasn’t sure at all that she had come up to any challenge. She was terrified at the thought of giving birth out here in the wilderness, far from the physicians of the city. She had no idea whether they’d even have food in a few months—everything depended on their garden and the hunters, and it was really only Elemak and Nafai who were any good at
that
, though Obring and Vas sometimes went out with pulses, too. The food supply could fail at any time, and soon she’d have a baby and what if they suddenly decided they had to travel? Bad as her sickness was right now, what if she had to ride atop a swaying camel? She’d rather eat camel cheese.

Of course, the thought of camel cheese made the nausea come back in a wave, and she knew that this time it might well come out, so down she went on her knees again, sick of the pain of the acidy stuff that came up from her gut into her mouth. Her throat hurt, her head hurt, and she was tired of it all.

She felt hands touch her, gathering her hair away from her face, twisting it and holding it out of the way, so none of the flecks of vomitus would get in it. She wanted to say thank you, knowing it was Nafai; she also wanted him to go away, it was so humiliating and awful and painful to be like this and have somebody
watching
. But he was her husband. He was part of this, and she couldn’t send him away. Didn’t even
want
to send him away.

At last she was through puking.

“Not too effective,” said Nafai, “if we judge these things by quantity.”

“Please shut up,” said Luet. “I don’t want to be cheered up, I want my baby to be a ten-year-old child already so that I remember all of this as an amusing event from my childhood long ago.”

“Your wish is granted,” said Nafai. “The baby is here and aged ten. Of course, she’s incredibly obnoxious and bratty, the way
you
were at ten.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were the waterseer already, and we all knew you bossed and sassed grownups all the time.”

“I told them what I saw, that’s all!” Then she realized that he was laughing. “Don’t tease me, Nafai. I know I’d be sorry later, but I still may lose control and kill you now.”