The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (27 page)

Even now, Shedemei was explaining how Zdorab was the one who had discovered the geological history of the Valley of Fires. “He plays the Index like a musical instrument. He found things in the past that even the Oversoul didn’t know that she knew. Things that only the ancients who first settled here understood. They gave the memory to the Oversoul, but then programmed her so that she couldn’t find those memories on her own. Zdorab found the back doors, though, the hidden passageways, the strange connections that led into so many, many secrets.”

“I know,” said Hushidh. “Issib marvels at him sometimes, even though Issya himself isn’t bad at getting ideas out of the Index.”

“Oh, indeed, I know that,” said Shedemei. “Zdorab says all the time that Issib is the real explorer.”

“And Issib says that’s only because he has more time, being useless at everything else,” said Hushidh. “It’s as if they both have to find reasons why the other is much better. I think they’ve become good friends.”

“I know it,” said Shedemei. “Issib is able to see how fine a man Zdorab really is.”

“We all understand that,” said Luet.

“Do you?” said Shedemei. “Sometimes it seems to me that everyone thinks of him as a sort of universal servant.”

“We think of him as our cook because he’s the best at it,” said Hushidh. “And our librarian because he’s the best at
that
.”

“Ah, but only a few of us care about his archival skills; to most of the people in our company, his culinary skills are the only things they notice about him.”

“And his gardening,” said Luet.

Shedemei smiled. “You see? But he gets little respect for it.”

“From some,” said Hushidh. “But others respect him greatly.”

“I know Nafai does,” said Luet. “And I do.”

“And I, and Issib—and Volemak, too, I know that,” said Hushidh.

“And isn’t that everybody that matters?” asked Luet.

“I tell him that,” said Shedemei, “but he persists in playing the servant.”

Hushidh could see that, for this moment at least, Shedemei was closer to opening her heart to someone than ever before on this journey. She hardly knew, though, how to encourage her to go on—should she prod with a question, or keep silence so as not to impede her?

She kept silence.

And so did Shedemei.

Until at last Shedemei sniffed loudly and put her nose down near Chveya’s diaper. “Has our little kaka factory produced another load?” she asked. “
Now
is the time when my permanent aunthood pays off. Mama Luet, your baby needs you.”

They laughed—because of course they knew that Shedemei was as likely to change a baby’s diaper as not. This business of giving the baby back to the mother whenever taking care of it was a bother was only a joke.

No, not
only
a joke. It was also a wistful regret. Shedemei’s reminder to herself that, like her husband Zdorab, she was not really one of the company of women.
She had been on the verge, Hushidh knew it, of telling
something
that mattered . . . and then the moment had passed.

As Luet cleaned her baby, Shedemei watched, and Hushidh watched her watching. Near the end of her bath, Luet was wearing nothing but a light skirt, and the shape of her motherly body—heavy breasts, a belly still loose and full from the birthing not that many months ago—was sweetly framed as she knelt and bent over her baby. What does Shedemei see when she looks at Luet, whose figure was once as lean and boyish as Shedemei’s is still? Does she wish for that transformation?

Apparently, though, Shedemei’s own thoughts had taken a different turn. “Luet,” she said, “when we were at that lake yesterday, did it remind you of the Lake of Women in Basilica?”

“Oh yes,” said Luet.

“You were the waterseer there,” said Shedemei. “Didn’t you want to float out into the middle of it, and dream?”

Luet hesitated a moment. “There was no boat,” she said. “And nothing to make one out of. And the water was too hot to float in it myself.”

“Was it?” said Shedemei.

“Yes,” said Luet. “Nafai checked for me. He passed through the Lake of Women too, you know.”

“But didn’t you wish that you could be—for just a little while—the person you were before?”

The longing in Shedemei’s voice was so strong that Hushidh immediately understood. “But Luet
is
the same person,” said Hushidh. “She’s still the waterseer, even if she now spends her days on camelback and her nights in a tent and every hour with a baby fastened to her nipple.”

“
Is
she the waterseer, then?” asked Shedemei. “She
was
—but
is
she? Or are we nothing more than what we’re doing
now?
Aren’t we truly only what the people we live with
think
we are?”

“No,” said Hushidh. “Or that would mean that in Basilica I was nothing
but
the raveler, and Luet was nothing
but
the waterseer, and you were nothing
but
a geneticist,
and that was never true, either. There’s always something above and behind and beneath the role that everyone sees us acting out.
They
may think that we
are
the script we act out but
we
don’t have to believe it.”

“Who are we then?” asked Shedemei. “Who am
I?
”

“Always a scientist,” said Luet, “because you’re still doing science in your mind every hour you’re awake.”

“And our friend,” said Hushidh.

“And the person in our company who understands best how things work,” added Luet.

“And Zdorab’s wife,” said Hushidh. “That’s the one that means the most to you, I think.”

To their surprise and consternation, Shedemei’s only answer was to lay down Dza on the carpet and lightly run from the tent. Hushidh caught only a glimpse of her face, but she was weeping. There was no doubt of that. She was weeping because Hushidh had said that being Zdorab’s wife meant more to her than anything. It was what a woman might do if she doubted her husband’s love. But how could she doubt? It was obvious that Zdorab’s whole life was centered around her. There were no better
friends
in the company than Zodya and Shedya, everyone knew that—unless it was Luet and Hushidh, and they were sisters so it hardly counted.

What could possibly be wrong between Zdorab and Shedemei that would cause such a strong woman to be so fragile on the subject? A mystery. Hushidh longed to ask the Oversoul, but knew she’d get the same answer as always—silence. Or else the answer Luet already got—mind your own business.

The best thing and the worst thing about turning back and taking another route south was that they could see the sea. In particular, they could see Dorova Bay, an eastern arm of the Scour Sea. And on clear nights—which all the nights were—they could see, on the far side of that bay, the lights of the city of Dorova.

It was not a city like Basilica, they all knew that. It was a scrubby edge-of-the-desert town filled with riffraff and
profiteers, failures and thieves, violent and stupid men and women. They told each other that over and over, remembering tales of desert towns and how they weren’t worth visiting even if they were the last towns in the world.

Except that Dorova was the last town in the world—the last town in
their
world, anyway. The last they would ever see. It was the town they could have visited more than a week ago, when Volemak led them up into the mountains from the Nividimu and they left the last hope of civilization behind—or the last danger of it, for those who had that perspective.

Nafai saw how others looked at those lights, when they gathered at night, fireless, chilly, the bundled infants smacking and suckling away as they drank cold water and gnawed on jerky and hard biscuit and dried melon. How Obring got tears in his eyes—tears! And what was the city to him, anyway, except a place to get his hooy polished? Tears! And Sevet was no better, with her simple, steady gaze, that stony look on her face. She had a baby at her breast, and all she could think of was a city so small and filthy that she wouldn’t have stepped into its streets two years ago. If they had offered her twenty times her normal fee to come and sing there, she would have sneered at the offer—and now she couldn’t keep her eyes off of it.

But looking was
all
they could do, fortunately. They could see it, but they had no boat to cross the bay, and none of them could swim well enough to cross that many kilometers without a boat. Besides, they weren’t at the beach, they were at least a kilometer above it, at the edge of a craggy, rugged incline that couldn’t decide whether to be a cliff or a slope. There might be a way to get the camels down, but it wasn’t likely, and even if they did, it would be several days’ journey back along the beach,
with
the camels—and without them, there would be no water to drink and so they couldn’t make it at all. No, nobody was going to be able to slip away from the group and make it to Dorova. The only way there was if the whole group went, and even then they would probably have to go back the way they came, which meant a week and a half
at least, and probably one of the caravans from the south to contend with along the way. And it was all meaningless because Father would never go back.

And yet Nafai couldn’t stop thinking about how
much
these people wanted that city.

How much
he
wanted it.

Yes, there was the trouble. That’s what bothered him.
He
wanted the city, too. Not for any of the things
they
wanted, or at least the things he imagined that they wanted. Nafai had no desire for any wife but Luet; they were a family, and that wouldn’t change no matter where they lived, he had decided that long ago. No, what Nafai wanted was a soft bed to lay Chveya in. A school to take her to. A house for Luet and Chveya and whatever children might come after. Neighbors and friends—friends that he might choose for himself, not this accidental collection of people, most of whom he just didn’t like that much. That’s what those lights meant to him—and instead here he was on a grassy meadow that sloped deceptively downward toward the sea, so that if you just squinted a little, you couldn’t really tell you were a kilometer above sea level, you could pretend for a few moments that it was just a stroll across the meadow, and then a short ride on a boat across the bay, and then you’d be home, the journey would be over, you could bathe and then sleep in a bed and wake up to find a breakfast cooking already, and you’d find your wife in your arms beside you, and then you’d hear the faint sound of your baby daughter waking, and you’d slip out of bed and go get her from her cradle and bring her in to your wife, who would sleepily draw her breast from inside her nightgown and put it into the mouth of the baby that now nestled in the crook of her arm on the bed, and you’d lie back down beside her and listen to the sucking and smacking of the baby as you also heard the birds singing outside the window and the noises of morning in the street not far away, the venders starting to cry out what they had to sell. Eggs. Berries. Cream. Sweet breads and cakes.

Oversoul, why couldn’t you have left us alone? Why
couldn’t you have waited another generation? Forty million years, and you couldn’t wait for Luet’s and my great-grandchildren to have this great adventure? You couldn’t have let Issib and me figure out how to build one of those marvelous ancient flying machines, so we could go to wherever you’re taking us in just a few hours? Time, that’s all we needed, really. Time to live before we lost our world.

Stop whining, said the Oversoul in Nafai’s mind. Or maybe it wasn’t the Oversoul. Maybe it was just Nafai’s own sense that he had indulged himself too much already.

It was morning, just before dawn, at the spring the Index had told them was named Shazer, though why anyone should have bothered to name such an obscure place, and why the Oversoul had bothered to remember, Nafai could not begin to guess. Vas had had the last watch of the night, and then came and woke Nafai so they could hunt together. Three days since they last had meat, and this was a good campsite so they could take two days to hunt if need be. So Vas would catch sight of something, or find some fresh animal trace; Nafai would trail after him and, when the quarry was near, creep silently forward until the animal came in sight. Then Nafai would take the sacred pulse, aim so carefully, trying to guess which way the animal would move, and how far, and how fast, and then he would squeeze the trigger and the beam of light would burn a hole into the heart of the creature, sear it so that the wound would never bleed, except for a hot wet smoke that would stain the sand and rocks it fell on red and black.

Nafai was tired of it. But it was his duty, and so when Vas scratched softly on the cloth of the tent, near where he knew Nafai’s head lay, Nafai awoke at once—if he had not already been awake, coasting on the verges of a dream—and got up and dressed without waking Luet or Chveya and took the pulse out of its box and joined Vas outside in the chilly darkness.

Vas nodded a greeting to him—they tried to avoid speaking, lest they wake babies unnecessarily—and then
turned slowly, finally pointing toward the downhill slope. Not toward the city, but still toward the sea. Downward. Nafai normally thought it was a stupid plan to go downhill on the hunt, since it would mean carrying the game back uphill to get it to camp. But this time he
wanted
to go down. Even though he would never abandon their quest, even though he had no thought of betraying either Father or the Oversoul, nevertheless there was a part of him that longed for the sea, and for what lay across the sea, and so he nodded when Vas pointed toward the seaward slope of the meadow.

When they were well away from the camp, and over the brow of the hill, they stopped and peed, and then began the difficult descent into the tumble of rocks that led downward. All the slope ahead of them lay in shadow, since the dawn was coming up behind them. But Vas was the tracker, and Nafai had long since learned that he was both good at it and very proud of his prowess, so things went better if Nafai didn’t try to second-guess him.