The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (19 page)

He gathered her into his arms and she had to twist away to keep him from kissing her. “Don’t!” she said. “I’ve got the most awful taste in my mouth, it would probably kill you!”

So he held her and after a while she felt better.

“I think about Keeper of Earth all the time,” said Nafai.

I would, too, if I weren’t thinking about the baby, Luet said silently.

“I keep thinking that maybe it
isn’t
just another computer,” said Nafai. “That maybe it
isn’t
calling us through hundred-year-old dreams, that maybe it knows us, and that it’s just waiting for . . . for
something
before it speaks to me.”

“It’s waiting for the message that only you can receive.”

“I don’t care,” said Nafai. “About it being only me. I’d take
Father’s
dream, if only I could experience what it feels like inside my head. How the Keeper is different from what the Oversoul does inside me. I want to
know
”

I know you do. You keep coming back to it, day after day.

“I’ve been trying to talk to the Keeper of Earth. That’s how crazy I’m getting, Luet. Show me what you showed Father! I say it over and over.”

“And she ignores you.”

“It’s a hundred lightyears away!” said Nafai. “It doesn’t know I exist!”

“Well if all you want is the same dream as Volemak, why not get the Oversoul to give it to you?”

“It isn’t
from
the Oversoul.”

“But she must have recorded the whole experience inside your father’s mind, right? And she can retrieve it, and show it to you. And the way you get everything so much more clearly through the Index—”

“Just like experiencing it myself,” said Nafai. “I can’t believe I never thought of that. I can’t believe the
Oversoul
never thought of that.”

“She’s not very creative, you know that.”

“She’s creatively
inert,”
said Nafai. “But
you’re
not.” He kissed her on the cheek, gave her one last hug, and bounded to his feet. “I have to go talk to the Oversoul.”

“Give her my love,” said Luet mildly.

“I—oh, I see. I can wait—let’s walk back together.”

“No, really—I wasn’t hinting. I want to stay here a while longer. Maybe just to see if they let Yobar back.”

“Don’t miss supper,” said Nafai. “You’re eating for—”

“Two,” said Luet.

“Maybe three!” said Nafai. “Who knows?”

She groaned theatrically, knowing that was what he wanted to hear. Then he ran off, back up the valley toward the camp.

He really is just a boy, as Aunt Rasa said. But what am I? His mother now? Not really—
She’s
his mother. I shouldn’t expect more of him—he works hard and well, and more than half the meat we eat is from his hunting. And he’s kind and gentle with me—I don’t know how Issib could be any sweeter and more tender than Nafai, no matter what Shuya says. And I’m his friend—he comes to me to talk about things that he says to no one else, and when I want to talk he listens and answers, unlike some of the other husbands, or so
their
wives say. By any standard I ever heard of, he’s a fine husband, and mature beyond his years—but it isn’t what I thought it was going to be. When I took him through the Lake of Women, I thought it meant that he and I were going to do great and majestic things together. I thought we would be like a king and a queen, or at least like a great priestess and her priest, doing powerful and majestic things to change the universe. Instead I throw up a lot and he bounds around like a
fifteen-year-old who is really hurt because some computer from another planet won’t send dreams to him ...

Oh, I’m too tired to think. Too sick to care. Maybe someday my image of our marriage will come true. Or maybe that’ll be his second wife, after I puke to death and get buried in the sand.

Shedemei had spent her whole life knowing that people looked at her oddly. At first it was because she was so intelligent as a child, because she cared about things that children weren’t supposed to care about. Adults would look at her strangely. So would other children, but sometimes the adults smiled and nodded their approval, while the children never did. Shedemei had thought this meant that when she was an adult, she would be fully accepted by everyone, but instead the opposite was true. When she became an adult it only meant that all the other adults were the same age now and treated her as the children had. Of course, now she was able to recognize what she was seeing. It was fear. It was resentment. It was envy

Envy! Could she help it that she had been given a combination of genes that gave her an extraordinary memory, an enormous capacity for grasping and understanding ideas, and a mind that was able to make connections that no one else could see? It’s not as if she
chose
to be able to do mental gymnastics beyond the reach of anyone she had ever met in person. 〈There were people just as intelligent as she, and some perhaps more intelligent, but they were in far cities, even on other continents, and she knew of them only through their published works, distributed by the Oversoul from city to city.〉 She had no malicious intent. She certainly didn’t have the ability to share her ability with the envious ones—she could only share the products of her ability. They gladly took those, and then resented her for being able to produce them.

Most human beings, she concluded long ago, love to worship from afar people with extraordinary ability, but prefer to have their friends be genial incompetents. And, of course, most of them get their preference.

But now she was permanently attached to this little society of sixteen people, and unable to avoid meeting them day by day. She did her work—her time weeding in the garden, her water turn, her hours of baboon-watching during the day to make sure they didn’t leave their area and get into the food. She gladly covered for Luet when she was throwing up, and uncomplainingly did the tasks that Sevet was too lazy and Kokor too pregnant and Dol just generally too precious a being to do. Yet still she did not fit, was not accepted, was not
part
of the group, and it only got worse, day by day.

It didn’t help a bit that she understood exactly what was happening. The bonding between husband and wife triggers a need for others also to be bonded in the same pattern, she knew that, she had studied it. The old courtship patterns, the loose and easy friendships, those now make the married ones feel uneasy, because they don’t want anything around them that threatens the stability of the monogamous marriage bond, while the essence of unmarried society is always to be off balance, always to be free and random and unconnected and playful.

Admittedly, that was precisely the way some of them still wished to behave—Shedemei could see how monogamy chafed at Mebbekew and Obring, Sevet and Kokor. But they were
acting
the role of spouse right now, perhaps even more aggressively than the ones who actually meant it. In any event, the result was that Shedemei was even more cut off from others around her than she had ever been before. Not that she was shunned. Hushidh and Luet were as warm to her as ever, and Eiadh in her way was decent, while Aunt Rasa was utterly unchanged—she would never change. However, the men were all universally what,
civil?
And Dol’s, Sevet’s, and Kokor’s attitudes ranged from ice to acid.

Worst of all, this little company of humans was taking a shape that systematically excluded her from any influence in it. Why had they stopped saying, “The men will do
this
while the women do
that
”? Now it was, “The
wives
can stay here while the men go off and” do whatever it was
that the men wanted to do. It drove her crazy sometimes that the women were lumped together as
wives
, while the men never called themselves
husbands
—they were still men. And, as if they were as stupid as baboons, the other women seemed not to know what Shedemei was talking about when she pointed it out.

Of course, they
did
notice, at least the brighter ones did, but they chose not to make an issue of it because . . . because they were all becoming so
wifelike
. All these years in Basilica, where women did
not
have to submerge their identity in order to have husbands, and now, six weeks into the journey, and they were acting like nomadic tribes-women. The coding for getting along without making waves must be so deep in our genes that we can never get it out, thought Shedemei. I wish I could find it, though. I’d dig it out with a trowel, I’d burn it out with a hot coal held in my bare fingers. Never mind the absurdity of dealing with genes with such blunt instruments. Her rage at the unfairness of things went beyond reason.

I didn’t plan to marry, not for years yet, and even when I did I expected it would only be for a year, long enough to conceive, and then I’d dismiss the husband except for his normal rights with the child. I had no place for bonding with a man in my life. And when I
did
marry it would
not
have been with a weak-kneed semi-vertebrate archivist who allowed himself to be turned into the only servant in a company of lords.

Shedemei had entered this camp determined to make the best of a bad situation, but the more she saw of Zdorab, the less she liked him. She might have forgiven him the way he
came
to this company—tricked by Nafai into carrying the Index out of the city, and then bullied into taking an oath to go into the desert with them. A man could be forgiven for behaving in an unmanly fashion during a time of stress and uncertainty and surprise. But when she got here she found that Zdorab had taken a role that was so demeaning she was ashamed to belong to the same species as him. It wasn’t that he took upon himself all the tasks that no one else would do—covering the latrines,
digging new ones, carrying away Issib’s bodily wastes, doing the baking, the washing up. She rather respected someone who was willing to help—she certainly preferred that to the laziness of Meb and Obring, Kokor and Sevet and Dol. No, what made her feel such contempt for Zdorab was his
attitude
toward doing all that work. He didn’t
offer
to do it, as if he had a right
not
to offer; he simply acted as if it were his natural
place
to do the worst jobs in the camp, and then performed his work so silently, so invisibly that soon they all took it for granted that the repulsive or unbearably tedious jobs were all Zdorab’s.

He’s a natural-born servant, thought Shedemei. He was born to be a slave. I never thought there was such a human creature, but there is, and it’s Zdorab, and the others have chosen
him
to be my husband!

Why the Oversoul permitted Zdorab to have such easy access to her memory through the Index was beyond Shedemei’s comprehension. Unless the Oversoul, too, wanted a servant. Maybe that’s what the Oversoul loves best—humans who act like servants. Isn’t that why we’re all out here, to serve the Oversoul? To be arms and legs for her, so she can make her journey back to Earth? Slaves, all of us … except
me
.

At least, that’s what Shedemei had been telling herself for all these weeks, until at last she realized that she, too, was beginning to fall into the servant category. It came to her today, as she carried water up from the stream for Zdorab to cook and wash with. She used to do this job with Hushidh and Luet, but now Luet was too weak from all her vomiting—she had lost weight, and that was bad for the child—and Hushidh was nursing her, and so it fell to Shedemei. She kept waiting for Rasa to notice that she was hauling the water all alone, for Rasa to say, “Sevet, Dol, Eiadh, put a yoke on your shoulders and haul water! Do your fair share!” But Rasa saw Shedemei carrying the water every day now, saw her carry the water right past where Sevet and Kokor were gossiping as they pretended
to card camel hair and twine it into string, and Aunt Rasa never said a thing.

Have you forgotten who I am! she wanted to shout. Don’t you remember that I am the greatest woman of science in Basilica in a generation? In ten generations?

But she knew the answer, and so she did not shout. Aunt Rasa
had
forgotten, because this was a new world, this camp, and what one might have been in Basilica or any other place did not matter. In this camp you were either one of the wives or you were not, and if you were not, you were nothing.

Which is why, today, with her work done, she went looking for Zdorab. Servant or not, he was the only available male, and she was sick of second-class citizenship in this infinitesimal nation. Marriage would symbolize her bowing to the new order, it would be another kind of servitude, and her husband would be a man for whom she had nothing but contempt. But it would be better than
disappearing
.

Of course, when she thought of actually letting him do his business with her body, it made her skin crawl. All she could think of was Luet throwing up all the time—that’s the result of letting men treat you like a bank in which to deposit their feeble little sperm.

No, I don’t really feel that way, thought Shedemei. I’m just angry. The sharing of genetic material is elegant and beautiful; it’s been my life. The grace of it when lizards mate, the male mounting and clinging, his long slender penis embracing the female and searching out the opening, as deft and prehensile as a baboon’s tail; the dance of the octopuses, arms meeting tip to tip; the shuddering of salmon as they drop eggs, then sperm, onto the bottom of the stream; it is all beautiful, all part of the ballet of life.

But the females always get to have some choice. The
strong
females, anyway, the
clever
ones. They get to give their ova to the male who will give them the best chance of survival—to the strong male, the dominant male, the aggressive male, the intelligent male—not to some cowering slave. I don’t want my children to have slave genes.
Better to have no children at all than to spend years watching them grow up acting more and more like Zdorab so that I’m ashamed of the very sight of them.

Which is why she found herself at the door of the Index tent, ready to walk in and propose a sort of semi-marriage to Zdorab. Because she felt such contempt for him, she intended it to be a marriage without sex, without children. And because he was so contemptible, she expected him to agree.