The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (25 page)

The worst thing about the wait was that they couldn’t make any fires. The military escort, the Index told them, was nervous and eager to find an enemy. Smoke would be taken as a sign of bandits, and the soldiers wouldn’t wait to find out otherwise before slaughtering them all. So they ate the most miserable traveling rations and sat around getting annoyed with each other, waiting for the day that Volemak told them that the Index had decided they could leave.

It was on the second day, as Elemak and Vas were hunting together—for Vas had some talent as a tracker of animals—that they lost the first pulse. Vas probably shouldn’t have been carrying one, but he asked for it, and it would have been too humiliating to forbid him to have one. Besides, there was always the chance that he’d surprise a dangerous beast of prey that had tracked the same quarry, and then he’d need the pulse to defend himself.

Vas was not usually clumsy. But as he crabwalked along a narrow ledge over a defile, he stumbled, and as he caught himself, the pulse slipped out of his hand. It bounced on a rocky out-cropping, and then sailed out into space and on into a canyon. Vas and Elemak never heard it strike bottom. “It could have been me,” he kept saying, when he told the story that night.

Elemak didn’t have the heart to tell him that it might have been better for everyone if it
had
been him. They only had four pulses, after all, and no way of getting more—eventually they would lose their ability to recharge themselves from sunlight, which was why Elemak was so careful about keeping two of them hidden away in a dark
place. With one pulse gone, now one of the hidden ones had to come out and into use for hunting.

“Why were you hunting, anyway?” asked Volemak, who understood what the loss of the pulse might mean in the future. He directed his question at Elemak, which was proper, since it was Elemak’s decision to take two pulses out into the desert that day.

Elemak answered as coldly as if he thought Volemak had no right to challenge his decision. “For meat,” he said. “The wives can’t nurse properly on hard biscuits and jerky.”

“But since we can’t cook the meat, what did you expect them to do, eat it raw?” asked Volemak.

“I thought I could sear the meat with the pulse,” said Elemak. “It would be rare, but ...”

“It would also be a waste of power that we can ill afford,” said Volemak.

“We need the meat,” said Elemak.

“Should I have jumped after the pulse?” asked Vas, nastily.

“Nobody wants
that,
” said Elemak scornfully. “This isn’t about
you
anymore.”

Hushidh watched the conversation in silence, as she usually did when there was conflict, seeing how the threads connecting them seemed to change. She knew that the lines she saw between people were not real, that they were simply a visual metaphor that her mind constructed for her—a sort of hallucinatory diagram. But their message about relationships and loyalties and hatreds and loves was real enough, as real as the rocks and sand and scrub around them.

Vas was the anomaly of the group and had been all along. No one hated him, no one resented him. But no one loved him, either. There was no great loyalty binding anyone to him—and none binding him to anybody else, either. Except the strange bond between him and Sevet, and the even stranger one between him and Obring. Sevet had little love or respect for her husband Vas—theirs had been a marriage in name only, for convenience, with no
particular bond of loyalty between them, and no great love or friendship, either. But he seemed to feel something very powerful toward her, something that Hushidh did not understand, had never seen before. And his bond with Obring was almost the same, only a bit weaker. Which should not have been the case, since Vas had no reason to be closely tied to Obring. After all, hadn’t Obring been the one who was caught in bed with Sevet the night that Kokor surprised them and almost killed her sister? Why should Vas feel a strong connection to Obring? Its strength—which Hushidh recognized by the thickness of the cord she saw connecting them—rivaled the strength of the strongest marriages in the company, like the one between Volemak and Rasa, or what Elemak felt toward Eiadh, or the growing bond between Hushidh herself and her beloved Issib, her devoted and sweet and brilliant and loving Issib, whose voice was the music underlying all her joy . . .

That
, she knew, was not what Vas felt toward Sevet or Obring—and toward everyone else he seemed to feel almost nothing. Yet why Sevet and Obring, and no one else? Nothing connected
them
except their one-time adultery . . .

Was
that
the connection? Was it the adultery itself? Was Vas’s powerful link with them an obsession with their betrayal of him? But that was absurd. He had known of Sevet’s affairs all along; they had an easy marriage that way. And Hushidh would have recognized the connection between them if it had been hate or rage—she had seen plenty of
that
before.

Even now, when Vas should have been connected to everyone in the company by a thread of shame, of desire to make amends, to win approval, there was almost nothing. He didn’t care. Indeed, he was almost satisfied.

“We could more easily have afforded the power to cook the meat,” said Sevet, “back when we had all four pulses.”

It astonished Hushidh that Vas’s own wife would bring up Vas’s culpability.

But it was no surprise when Kokor followed her sister
and pounced even more directly. “You might have watched your step in the first place, Vas,” she said.

Vas turned and regarded Kokor with mild disdain. “Perhaps I should have learned about working carefully and efficiently by following
your
example.”

Quarrels like this started far too easily and usually went on far too long. It didn’t take a raveler like Hushidh to know where this argument would lead, if it was allowed to continue. “Drop it,” said Volemak.

“I’m not going to take the blame for our having no cooked meat,” said Vas mildly. “We still have three pulses and it’s not my fault that we can’t light fires.”

Elemak put a hand on Vas’s shoulder. “It’s me that Father holds responsible, and rightly so. It was my misjudgment. There should never have been two pulses on the same hunting trip. When we blame
you
for our lack of meat, you’ll know it.”

“Yes, we’ll start eating
you,”
said Obring.

It was funny enough that several people laughed, if only to release the tension; but Vas did not appreciate the joke’s having come from Obring. Hushidh saw the odd connection between them flare and thicken, like a black hawser mooring Vas to Obring.

Hushidh watched, hoping that they might quarrel just long enough for her to understand what it was between them, but at that moment Shedemei spoke up. “There’s no reason we can’t eat the mert raw, if it’s from a fresh kill and the animal was healthy,” she said. “Searing the outside a little just before eating it would help kill any surface contamination without using much power. We have a good supply of antibiotics if someone
does
get sick, and even when we run out of
those
, we can make fairly adequate ones from available herbs if we need to.”

“Raw meat,” said Kokor in disgust.

“I don’t know if I
can
eat it,” said Eiadh.

“You just have to chew it more,” said Shedemei. “Or cut it into finer pieces.”

“It’s the
taste
of it,” said Eiadh.

“It’s the
idea
of it,” said Kokor, shuddering.

“It’s only a psychological barrier,” said Shedemei, “which you can easily overcome for the good of your babies.”

“I don’t know why someone without a baby should be telling the
rest
of us what’s good for us,” snapped Kokor.

Hushidh saw how Kokor’s words stung Shedemei. It was one of Hushidh’s most serious worries about their company, the way that Shedemei was becoming more and more isolated from the women. Hushidh talked about it with Luet rather often, and they had been doing their best to deal with it, but it wasn’t easy, because much of the barrier was in Shedemei herself—she had persuaded herself that she didn’t
want
children, but Hushidh knew from the way Shedemei focused so intently on all the babies in the group that unconsciously she judged her own value by the fact that she had no children. And when some shortsighted, unempathic little birdbrain like Kokor threw Shedemei’s childlessness in her face, Hushidh could almost see Shedemei’s connections with the rest of the group dropping away.

And the silence after Kokor’s remark didn’t help. Most of them were silent because that’s how one responded to unspeakable social clumsiness—one gave it just a long enough silence to serve as a rebuke to the offensive one, and then one went on as if it had not been said. But Hushidh was sure that was not how
Shedya
interpreted the silence. After all, Shedya was not well versed in high manners, and she was also relentlessly aware of her childlessness, so to her the silence no doubt meant that everyone
agreed
with Kokor, but was too polite to say so. Just one more injury, one more scar on Shedemei’s soul.

If it were not for the intense friendship between Shedemei and Zdorab, and the much slighter friendship that Luet and Hushidh had cultivated with Shedya, and Shedya’s great love and respect for Rasa, the woman would have no positive connection with the rest of the company at all. It would be nothing but envy and resentment.

It was Luet who finally broke the silence. “If meat is
what our babies need, then of course we’ll eat it seared, or even raw. But I wonder—are we so close to the edge, nutritionally, that we can’t go a
week
without meat?”

Elemak looked at her coldly. “You can treat
your
baby as you want. Ours will always suckle on milk that has been freshened with animal protein within three days.”

“Oh, Elemak, do I
have
to eat it?” asked Eiadh.

“Yes,” said Elemak.

“It’ll be fine,” said Nafai. “You’ll never notice the difference.”

They all turned to look at him. His remark was quite outrageous. “I think I can tell whether meat is raw or cooked, thank you,” said Eiadh.

“We’re all here because we’re more or less susceptible to the Oversoul,” said Nafai. “So I just asked if the Oversoul could make the meat taste acceptable to us. Make us
think
that there’s nothing wrong with it. And it said that it could do that, if we didn’t try to resist it. So if we don’t dwell on the fact that we’re eating raw meat, the Oversoul can influence us enough that we won’t really be aware of the difference.”

No one answered for a moment. Hushidh could see that Nafai’s almost casual relationship with the Oversoul was quite unnerving to some of them—not least to Volemak himself, who only spoke to the Oversoul in solitude, or with the Index.

“You asked the Oversoul to
season our food?
” asked Issib.

“We know from experience that the Oversoul is good at making people stupid,” said Nafai. “You went through it with me, Issya. So why not have the Oversoul make us just a little stupid about the taste of the meat?”

“I don’t like the idea of the Oversoul messing with my mind,” said Obring.

Meb looked at Obring and grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure you can be adequately stupid without help.”

The next day, when Nafai brought home a nolyen—a small deerlike creature, barely a half-meter from the shoulder
to the ground—they cut it up and seared the meat and then ate it, rather gingerly, until they realized that either raw meat wasn’t so bad or the Oversoul had done a good job of making them insensitive to the difference. They’d get by without fire whenever they had to.

But the Oversoul couldn’t give them a new pulse to replace the lost one.

They lost two more pulses crossing the Nividimu. It was a stupid, unnecessary loss. The camels were reluctant to make the crossing, even though the ford was wide and shallow, and there was some jostling as they were herded across. Still, if all the loads had been competently and carefully tied in place, none of them would have come loose, none would have spilled their contents into the ice-cold water.

It took a few minutes before Elemak realized that this was the camel that carried two of the pulses; until then he had concentrated on getting the rest of the camels across before trying to retrieve the load. By the time he found the pulses, in a poke, wrapped in cloth, they had been immersed for a quarter of an hour. Pulses were durable, but they had not been meant for use under water. Their seals had been penetrated and the mechanism inside would corrode rapidly. He saved the pulses, of course, in the hope that perhaps they would
not
corrode, though he knew the chance of that was slim.

“Who packed this camel?” Elemak demanded.

No one seemed to recall having packed it.

“That’s the problem,” said Volemak. “The camel obviously packed itself, and it wasn’t good with the knots.”

The company laughed nervously. Elemak whirled on his father, prepared to castigate him for making light of a serious situation. When he met Volemak’s gaze, however, he paused, for he could see that Volemak was taking things very seriously indeed. So Elemak nodded to his father and then sat down, to show that he was going to let Volemak handle it.

“Whoever loaded this camel knows his responsibility,”
said Volemak. “And finding out who it is will be very simple—I have only to ask the Index. But there will be no punishment, because there’s nothing to be gained by it. If I ever feel a need, I will reveal who it was whose carelessness cost us our security, but in the meantime you are safe in your cowardly refusal to name yourself.”

Still no one spoke up.

Volemak said no more, but instead nodded toward Elemak, who got up and held the last pulse in front of him. “This is the pulse we have used
most,
” he said. “Therefore this is the one whose charge is least durable, and yet it’s all we have to bring us meat. It
could
last a couple of years—pulses have lasted that long before—but when this one is no longer workable, we have no other.”