The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (21 page)

“That’s—gallant, I suppose.”

“It was stupid beyond belief,” said Zdorab. “He never believed me when I told him how terrifying it was in Basilica for people like me.”

“You told him what you are?”

“I thought of him as a man who could keep a secret. He proved me right. I kind of think—that he died in my place. So that I could be alive when Nafai came to take the Index out of the city.”

It was so far beyond anything she had experienced—beyond anything she had imagined. “Why did you keep on
living there, then? Why didn’t you go to someplace that isn’t so—terrible?”

“In the first place, while there are places that aren’t so bad, I don’t know of any place that I could actually get to that is actually safe for someone like me. And in the second place, the Index was in Basilica. Now that the Index is out of there, I hope the city burns to the ground. I only wish that Moozh had killed every one of the strutting men of Dog Town.”

“The Index was that important to you, to make you stay?”

“I learned of its existence when I was a young boy. Just a story, that there was a magic ball that if you held it, you could talk to God and he would have to tell you the answer to any question you asked. I thought, How wonderful. And then I saw a picture of the Index of the Palwashantu, and it looked exactly like the image in my mind of the magic ball.”

“But that’s not evidence at all,” said Shedemei. “That’s a childhood dream.”

“I know it. I knew it then,” said Zdorab. “But without even meaning to, I found myself preparing. For the day when I’d have the magic ball. I found myself trying to learn the questions that it would be worth asking God to answer. And, still without meaning to, I found myself making choices that took me closer and closer to Basilica, to the place where the Palwashantu kept their sacred Index. At the same time, being a studious young man helped me conceal my—defect. My father would say, ‘You need to set down the books now and then, go and find some friends. Find a girl! How will you ever marry if you never meet any girls?’ When I got to Basilica I used to write to him about my girlfriends, so he felt much better, though he would tell me that the way Basilicans marry, for just a year at a time, was awful and against nature. He really didn’t like things that were against nature.”

“That must have hurt,” said Shedemei.

“Not really,” said Zdorab. “It
is
against nature. I’m cut off from that tree of life that Volemak saw, I’m not part of
the chain—I’m a genetic dead end. I think I read once, in an article by a genetics student, that it was not unreasonable to suppose that homosexuality might be a mechanism that nature used to weed out defective genes. The organism could detect some otherwise unnoticeable genetic flaw, and this started a mechanism that caused the hypothalamus to remain stunted, causing us to be highly sexual beings but with an inability to fixate on the opposite sex. A sort of self-closing wound in the gene pool. We were, I think the article said, the
culls
of humanity.”

Shedemei blushed deeply—a feeling she rarely had and didn’t like. “That was student work. I never published it outside the scholarly community. It was speculation.”

“I know,” he said.

“How did you even find it?”

“When I realized that I was expected to marry you, I read everything you wrote. I was trying to discover what I could and could not tell you.”

“And what did you decide?”

“That I’d better keep my secrets to myself. That’s why I never spoke to you, and why I was so relieved that you didn’t want me.”

“And now you
did
tell me.”

“Because I could see that it hurt you, the fact that I didn’t want you. I hadn’t planned on that. You didn’t come across as someone who would ever want the love of a contemptible crawling worm like me.”

Worse and worse. “Was I so obvious in my attitude?”

“Not at all,” he said. “I deliberately cultivated my wormhood. I have worked hard to become the most unnoticeable, despicable, spineless being that anyone in this company will ever know.”

And now, thinking of what happened to his two friends, she understood. “Camouflage,” she said. “For you to remain single and not be suspected of what you are, you had to be sexless.”

“Spineless.”

“But Zdorab, we’re not in Basilica now.”

“We carry Basilica with us. Look at the men here. Look
at Obring, for instance, and Meb—doomed by their particular lack of gifts to be at the bottom of any pecking order you can imagine. Both of them aggressive and yet cowardly—they long to be on top, but haven’t the gumption to take on the big men and take them down. That’s why they’re doomed to follow men like Elemak and Volemak and even Nafai, though he’s the youngest, because they can’t take risks. Imagine the rage built up inside them. And then imagine what they’d do if they learned that I was the monstrous thing, the crime against nature, the unmanly man, the perfect image of what they fear that they are.”

“Volemak wouldn’t let them touch you.”

“Volemak won’t live forever,” said Zdorab. “And I don’t trust my secret to those who won’t keep it.”

“Are you that sure of me?” said Shedemei.

“I have put my life into your hands,” said Zdorab. “But no, I’m not that sure of you. Like it or not, though, we’ve been forced together. So I’ve taken a calculated risk. To tell you, so that I have one person here that I don’t have to lie to. One person who knows that what I seem to be is only a pretense.”

“I’ll make them stop treating you so—so unregardingly.”

“
No!
” cried Zdorab. “No, you mustn’t. Things will be better when we’re married, for both of us—you were right about that. But you must let me remain invisible, as much as possible. I know best how to deal with what I am, believe me—you’ve never even imagined it, you said so yourself, so don’t bull your way into my survival strategy and start trying to fix things because you’ll end up killing me if you do. Do you understand that? You’re brilliant, one of the finest minds of our time, but you know absolutely nothing about this situation, you are hopelessly ignorant, you will destroy anything you touch, so keep your
hands off
.”

He spoke with unbelievable vehemence and power. She had not imagined him capable of talking this way. She loathed it—being put in her place so firmly. But when she
thought about it, instead of reacting viscerally, she realized that he was right. That for now, at least, she really
was
ignorant and the best thing she could do was let him continue to handle things however he thought best.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll say nothing, I’ll do nothing.”

“Nobody expects you to be
proud
to be married to me,” said Zdorab. “In fact, they’ll all think of it as a noble sacrifice you’re making. So you won’t lose any status by being my wife. It’ll make you sort of heroic to them.”

She laughed bitterly. “Zdorab, that’s how I thought of it myself.”

“I know,” he said. “But that’s not how
I
thought of it. I even hoped—imagine, having the right to be alone in the same tent with the keenest scientific mind on the planet Harmony—every night—with nothing to do but talk!”

It was so sweetly flattering and yet, for reasons she couldn’t quite grasp yet, it was also vaguely tragic.

“That’s a marriage, after a fashion, don’t you think? We won’t have babies like the others, but we’ll have
thoughts
. You can teach me, you can
talk
to me about your work and if I don’t understand I can promise you that I’ll educate myself through the Index until I do. And maybe I can tell you some of the things I’ve found.”

“I’d love that.”

“We can be friends then,” he said. “That’ll make ours a better marriage than most of
theirs
. Can you imagine what Obring and Kokor talk about?”

She laughed. “Do you think they actually
do?
”

“And Mebbekew and Dol, both playacting and secretly loathing each other.”

“No, I don’t think Dol hates Mebbekew, I think she actually
believes
the part she’s playing.”

“You’re probably right. But they’re pretty awful, don’t you think? And
they’re
going to have children!”

“Terrifying.”

They laughed, long and loud, till tears ran down both their faces.

The door parted. It was Nafai.

“I clapped,” he said, “but you didn’t hear me. Then I
realized you were laughing and I thought I might come in.”

Both of them immediately grew sober. “Of course,” said Zdorab.

“We were just discussing our marriage,” said Shedemei.

Shedemei could see the relief spread over Nafai’s face as if the shadow of a cloud had just passed. “You’re going ahead and doing it,” he said.

“We were just stubborn enough to want to wait until it was our idea,” said Zdorab.

“I believe it,” said Nafai.

“In feet,” said Zdorab, “we ought to go tell Rasa and Volemak, and besides, you wanted to use the Index.”

“I did, but not if you’re not done with it,” said Nafai.

“It’ll still be here,” said Shedemei, “when we’re ready for it again.” And in moments they were outside the tent, heading for—where?

Zdorab took her by the hand and led her to the cookfire. “Dol was supposed to be watching here,” he said, “but she usually runs off—she needs her little nap, you know. It doesn’t matter—I let Yobar touch the cookpot once, and he must have spread the word about how it feels, because the boons don’t come anywhere near here now, even when it smells as good as this.”

It
did
smell good.

“How did you learn to cook?”

“My father was a cook,” said Zdorab. “It was the family business. He was good enough that he was able to afford to send me to Basilica to study, and I learned a lot of what he knew. I think he’d be proud of what I’ve been able to do in these piss-poor conditions.”

“Except the camel cheese.”

“I think I’ve found an herb that will improve it,” said Zdorab. He lifted the lid of the cookpot. “I’m trying it tonight—there’s twice as much cheese in this as usual, but I don’t think anybody will mind.” He lifted the stirring spoon and she saw how cheesily the liquid strung and glopped off of it.

“Mmm,” she said. “Can’t wait.”

He detected the irony in her voice. “Well, it’s not as though you don’t have ample reason to be suspicious of anything that looks like it might taste like the cheese, but I figure that we’ve all had years of loving cheese and only a couple of months of hating it, so I should be able to win you all back if I do it right. And we
will
need the cheese—it’s too good a source of animal protein for all the nursing mothers we’re going to have.”

“You’ve got it all planned out,” she said.

“I have plenty of time to myself, to think,” he said.

“In a way,” she said, “you’re really the leader of this group.”

“In a way,” he said, “you’d best not say that in front of anyone else or they’ll be sure you’ve lost your mind.”

“You’re the one who decides what we’ll eat and when, where we’ll void ourselves, what we’ll plant in the garden, and you guide us around in the Index—”

“But if I do it right, no one ever notices,” he said.

“You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told.”

“So do all good people,” he said. “That’s what it
means
to be a good person. And I
am
a good person, Shedya.”

“I know that now,” she said. “And I should have known it before. I interpreted all you did as weakness—but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don’t deserve it.”

And now at last it was time for tears to come to
his
eyes. Just a little shining, but she saw, and knew that he knew that she saw. It occurred to her that their marriage would be far more than the sham she had intended. It could be a real friendship, between the two people who had least expected to find friends and companions on this journey.

He stirred the pottage and then replaced the lid, leaving the spoon hooked over the side.

“I imagine this is the safest place we could come and talk, if we didn’t want to be disturbed or overheard,” she said. “Because I don’t imagine anybody ever comes near the cookfire if they can help it, for fear of being asked to work.”

Zdorab chuckled. “I’ll always be glad for your company while I’m working here, as long as you understand that cooking is an art, and I
do
concentrate on it sometimes while I do it.”

“I hope I can tell you things so stimulating and interesting that you ruin the soup sometimes.”

“Do it too often and they’ll be pleading with us to get a divorce.”

They laughed, and then again their laughter trailed off into silence.

“Why don’t I go and tell Aunt Rasa?” said Shedemei. “She’ll want to do up a wedding for us tonight, I’m sure. She’ll be even more relieved than Nafai was.”

“And we want it as public as possible,” said Zdorab.

She understood. “We’ll make sure everybody sees that we are definitely man and wife.” And the unspoken promise: I will never tell anyone that we are
not
man and wife at all.

Shedemei turned to leave, to look for Rasa, but Zdorab’s voice detained her. “Shedya,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Please call me Zodya.”

“Of course,” she said, though in fact she had never heard his familiar name. No one used it.

“And another thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Your student article—you were wrong. About genetic culls.”

“I said it was just speculation . . .”

“I mean, I
know
you were wrong because I know what we are. In the ancient science, the Earth science that I’ve been exploring through the Index: it’s not some internal mechanism of the human body. It’s not genetic. It’s just the level of male hormones in the mother’s bloodstream at the time the hypothalamus goes through its active differentiation and growth.”

“But that’s almost random,” said Shedemei. “It wouldn’t mean anything, it would just be an accident if the level happened to be low for those couple of days.”