The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (20 page)

He was sitting on the carpet, his legs crossed, the Index on his lap, his hands together on the ball, his eyes closed. He spent every free moment with the Index—though that wasn’t really all that much time, since so few of his moments were free. Often Issib was with him, but in late afternoons Issib took his watch at the garden—the long arm of his chair was quite effective at discouraging baboons from exploring the melons, and had been known to bat birds out of the air. It was Zdorab’s time alone with the Index, rarely more than an hour, and the one respect that the company paid to him was to leave him alone then—provided that dinner was already cooking and somebody else didn’t want to use the Index, in which case Zdorab was casually shunted aside.

Looking at him there, his eyes closed, she could almost believe that he was communing with the great mind of the Oversoul. But of course he didn’t have the brains for that. He was probably just memorizing the main entries in the Index, so he could help Wetchik or Nafai or Luet or Shedemei herself locate some bit of information they wanted. Even with the Index, Zdorab was the pure servant.

He looked up. “Did you want the Index?” he asked mildly.

“No,” she said. “I came to talk to you.”

Did he shudder? Was that the quick involuntary movement of his shoulders? No, he was
shrugging
, that’s what it was.

“I expected that you would, eventually.”

“Everyone expects it, which is why I
haven’t
come till now.”

“All right then,” he said. “Why now?”

“Because it’s plain that in this company the unmarried people are going to slip further and further into oblivion as time goes on.
You
may be content with that, but I am not.”

“I haven’t noticed you slipping into oblivion,” said Zdorab. “Your voice is listened to in councils.”

“Patiently they listen,” said Shedemei. “But I have no real influence.”

“No one does,” said Zdorab. “This is the Oversoul’s expedition.”

“I didn’t think you’d grasp it,” said Shedemei. “Try to think of this company as a troop of baboons. You and I are getting thrust farther and farther to the edges of the troop. It’s only a matter of time until we are nothing.”

“But that only matters if you actually care about being
something
”

Shedemei could hardly believe that he would put it into words that way. “I
know
that you have utterly no ambition, Zdorab, but I don’t intend to disappear as a human being. And what I propose is simple enough. We just go through the ceremony with Aunt Rasa, we share a tent, and that’s it. No one has to know what goes on between us. I don’t want your babies, and I have no particular interest in your company. We simply sleep in the same tent, and we’re no longer shunted to the edge of the troop. It’s that simple. Agreed?”

“Fine,” said Zdorab.

She had expected him to say that, to go along. But there was something else in the way he said it, something very subtle ...

“You wanted it that way,” she said.

He looked at her blankly.

“You wanted it this way all along.”

And again, something in his eyes ...

“And you’re afraid.”

Suddenly his eyes flashed with anger. “Now you think
you’re Hushidh, is that it? You think you know how everybody fits with everybody else.”

She had never seen him show anger before—not even sullen anger, and certainly not a hot, flashing scorn like the one she was seeing now. It was a side of Zdorab that she hadn’t guessed existed. But it didn’t make her like him any better. It reminded her, in fact, of the snarling of a whipped dog.

“I really don’t care,” she said, “whether you wanted to have sex with me or not. I never cared to make myself attractive to men—that’s what women do who have nothing
else
to offer the world than a pair of breasts and a uterus.”

“I have always valued you for your work with genetics,” said Zdorab. “Especially for your study of genetic drift in so-called stable species.”

She had no answer. It had never occurred to her that anyone in this group had read, much less understood, any of her scientific publications. They all thought of her as someone who came up with valuable genetic alterations that could be sold in faraway places—that’s what her relationship had been with Wetchik and his sons for years.

“Though I couldn’t help but regret that you didn’t have access to the genetic records in the Index. It would have clinched several of your points, having the exact genetic coding of the subject species as they came off the ships from Earth.”

She was stunned. “The Index has information like
that?
”

“I found it a few years ago. The Index didn’t want to tell me—I realize now because there are military applications of some of the genetic information in its memory—you can make plagues. But there are ways to get around some of its proscriptions. I found them. I’ve never been sure how the Oversoul felt about that.”

“And you haven’t told me till now?”

“You didn’t tell me you were continuing your research,” said Zdorab. “You did those papers years ago, when you were fresh out of school. It was your first serious project. I assumed you had gone on.”

“This is the kind of thing you do with the Index? Genetics?”

Zdorab shook his head. “No.”

“What, then? What were you studying just now, when I came in?”

“Probable patterns of continental drift on Earth.”

“On
Earth
! The Oversoul has information that specific about Earth?”

“The Oversoul didn’t
know
it had that information. I kind of had to coax it out. A lot of things are hidden from the Oversoul itself, you know. But the Index has the key. The Oversoul has been quite excited about some of the things I’ve found in its memory.”

Shedemei was so surprised she had to laugh.

“I suppose it’s amusing,” said Zdorab, not amused.

“No, I was just ...”

“Surprised to know that I was worth something besides baking breads and burying fecal matter.”

He had struck so close to her previous attitude that it made her angry. “Surprised that
you
knew you were worth more than that.”

“You have no idea what I know or think about myself or anything else. And you made no effort to find out, either,” said Zdorab. “You came in here like the chief god of all pantheons and deigned to offer me marriage as long as I didn’t actually
touch
you and expected me to accept gratefully. Well, I did. And you can go on treating me like I don’t exist and it’ll be fine with me.”

She had never felt so ashamed of herself before in her life. Even as she had hated the way everybody else treated Zdorab as a nonentity, she had treated him that way herself, and in her own mind had given no thought for his feelings, as if they didn’t matter. But now, having stabbed him with the contemptuousness of her proposal of marriage, she felt she had wronged him and had to make it right. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m not,” said Zdorab. “Let’s just forget everything about this conversation, get married tonight and then we don’t have to talk again, agreed?”

“You really don’t like me,” said Shedemei.

“As if you have ever cared for one moment whether I or anyone else liked you, as long as we didn’t interfere too much with your work.”

Shedemei laughed. “You’re right.”

“It seems that we were both sizing each other up, but one of us did a better job of it than the other.”

She nodded, accepting the chastening. “Of course we
will
have to talk again.”

“Will we?”

“So you can show me how to get to that information from Earth.”

“The genetic stuff?”

“And the continental drift. You forget that I’m carrying seeds to replenish lost species on Earth. I need to know the landforms. And a lot more.”

He nodded. “I can show you that. As long as you realize that what I have are forty-million-year-old extrapolations of what
might
happen in another forty million years. It could be off by a lot—a little mistake early on would be hugely magnified by now.”

“I
am
a scientist, you know,” she said.

“And I’m a librarian,” said Zdorab. “I’ll be glad to show you how to get to the Earth information. It’s sort of a back door—I found a path through the agricultural information, through pig breeding, if you can believe it. It helps to be interested in everything. Here, sit across from me and hold on to the Index. You
are
sensitive to it, I hope.”

“Sensitive enough,” said Shedemei. “Wetchik and Nafai both took me through sessions, and I’ve used it to look things up. Mostly I just use my own computer, though, because I thought I already knew everything that was on the Index in my field.”

Now she was sitting across from him, and he set the Index between them and they both bowed forward to lean their elbows on their knees and rest their hands on the golden ball. Her hands touched his, but he did not move
his hands out of the way, and there was no trembling; just cool, calm hands, as if he didn’t even notice she was there.

She immediately caught the voice of the Index, answering Zdorab’s inquiries, responding with names of paths and headings, subheads, and catalogs within the memory of the Oversoul. But as the names droned on she lost the thread of them, because of his fingers touching hers. Not that she felt anything for him herself; what bothered her was that he felt nothing at all for
her
. He had known for more than a month that she was going to be his wife, or at least that she was expected to; he had been watching her, certainly he had. And yet there was not even a glimmer of desire. He had accepted her proscription of sexual relations between them without a hint of regret. And he could endure her touch without showing the slightest sign of sexual tension.

Shedemei had never felt more ugly and undesirable than she did right now. It was absurd—until a few minutes ago she had had such contempt for this man that if he
had
expressed any sexual interest she would have been nauseated. But he was not the same man now, he was a much more interesting person, an intelligent person with a mind and a will, and while she didn’t exactly feel a great flood of love or even sexual desire for him, she still felt enough new respect that his utter lack of desire for her was painful.

Another wound in the same old place, opening all the fragile scabs and scars, and she bled afresh at the shame of being a woman that no man wanted.

“You’re not paying attention,” said Zdorab.

“Sorry,” she said.

He said nothing in reply. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her.

“Nothing,” she said, brushing away the tear that clung to her lower eyelashes. “I didn’t mean to distract you. Can we start again?”

But he didn’t look back down to the Index. “It isn’t that I don’t desire you, Shedemei.”

What, was her heart naked, that he could see right through her pretenses and see into the source of her pain?

“It’s that I don’t desire
any
woman.”

It took her a moment for the idea to register. Then she laughed. “You’re a zhop.”

“That’s really an old word for the human anus,” said Zdorab quietly. “There are those who might be hurt at being called by such a name.”

“But no one guessed,” she said.

“I have made quite
sure
that no one would guess,” said Zdorab, “and I’m putting my life in your hands telling
you
.”

“Oh, it’s not as dramatic as that,” she said.

“Two of my friends were killed in Dog Town,” he said.

Dog Town was where men who didn’t have a woman in Basilica had to live, since it was illegal for an unattached male to live or even stay overnight inside the city walls.

“One was set upon by a mob because they heard a rumor he was a zhop, a peedar. They hung him by the feet from a second-story window, cut off his male organs, and then slashed him to death with knives. The other one was tricked by a man who pretended to be . . . one of us. He was arrested, but on the way to prison he had an accident. It was the oddest sort of accident, too. He was trying to escape, and somehow he tripped and in the act of falling, his testicles somehow came off and got jammed down his throat, probably with a broomhandle or the butt of a spear, and he suffocated on them before anybody could come to his aid.”

“They do
that?
”

“Oh, I can understand it perfectly. Basilica was a very difficult place for male humans. We have an innate need to dominate, you see, but in Basilica we had to deal with the fact that we had no control except as we had influence with a woman. The men living outside the walls in Dog Town were, by the very fact they didn’t live inside, branded as second-raters, men that women didn’t want. There was the constant imputation that Dog Town men weren’t real men at all, that they didn’t have what it took to please a woman. Their very identity as males was in question. And so their fear and hatred of
zhops
”—he said
the word with scorching contempt—“reached peaks I’ve never heard of anywhere else.”

“These friends of yours . . . were they your lovers?”

“The one who was arrested—he had been my lover for several weeks, and he wanted to continue, but I wouldn’t let him because if he went on any longer people would begin to suspect what we were. To save our lives I refused to see him again. He went straight from me into the trap. So you see, Nafai and Elemak aren’t the only ones who have killed a man.”

The pain and grief he was showing seemed deeper than anything Shedemei had ever felt. For the first time she realized how sheltered her scholarly life had been. She had never had such a close connection with someone that she would feel their death
this
strongly, so long after. If it
was
long after.

“How long ago?”

“I was twenty. Nine years ago. No, ten. I’m thirty now. I forgot.”

“And the other one?”

“A couple of months before I—left the city.”

“He was your lover, too?”

“Oh, no—he wasn’t like me that way. He had a girl in the city, only she wanted it kept secret so he didn’t talk about it—she was in a bad marriage and was marking time till it ended, and so he never spoke about her. That’s why the rumor started that he was a zhop. He died without telling them.”