The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (45 page)

Nafai couldn’t keep himself from laughing in delight. “I did it, then!”

〈You did it. But you aren’t done.
Come
to me, Nafai. I have work for you to do, and tools for you to do it with.〉

Nafai strode down the hill into the valley of Vusadka. The place of disembarkation. The place where human feet had first touched the soil of Harmony, and where those first setders had placed the computer that would protect their children from self-destruction for so many years that to them it must have seemed the protection would be forever.

But it would not be forever. It was dying already. And now Nafai was walking among the towers of the starships, the first human being to tread in their footsteps since they built this place. Whatever the Oversoul meant for him to do now, he would do it, and when it was done, human beings would return again to Earth.

Volemak and Rasa called the community together the moment Zdorab and Issib finished reporting what they had learned from the Index. It had been a long time since a meeting had been called without Elemak knowing in advance what it was about. It worried him. At some level it
frightened
him, but since he could not live with the idea of fear, he interpreted it as anger. He was
angry
that a meeting was called without his knowledge, without Father having sought his advice in advance. It suggested to him that the meeting was Rasa’s, somehow—that the women were making some play for power and had deliberately cut him out of the process. Someday the old hag will push too hard, thought Elemak, and
then
she’ll find out what power and strength really are—and that she doesn’t have any.

This was the filter of interpretation through which Elemak received the morning’s news. Chveya and Luet had dreamed … ah, yes, the
women
trying to assert their spiritual leadership, the waterseer and her no-doubt-well-coached daughter angling for the old dominance Luet had back in Basilica. And then Nafai, Issib, and Zdorab had
searched the Index for information, and Nafai—of course, it had to be Luet’s
husband,
the Oversoul’s favorite boy—had found a secret place that none of them had visited in all their hunts. Such nonsense! Elemak had covered every kilometer of the surrounding country in his hunts and explorations—there
was
no hidden place.

So Nafai had taken off on a hunt for a non-existent place, and only this morning had figured out a way past all the barriers. Once a human being made it inside, the barrier came down, and now Nafai was walking among the ancient starships, while in the meantime Issib and Zdorab were able to find things through the Index that no one had guessed at before. “This is the landing place,” Father explained. “We are living now at the site of the First City, the oldest human settlement on Harmony. Older than the Cities of the Stars. Older than Basilica.”

“There was no city here when we came,” said Obring.

“But this
place
,” said Father. “We have brought the human race full circle. And even now, Nafai is walking where the ancient fathers and mothers of us all first set their feet upon the soil of Harmony.”

Romantic bushwa, thought Elemak. Nafai could be napping in the noonday sun right now for all anybody here knows. The Index was just a way for the weaklings of their company to assert control over the strong ones.

“You know what this means, of course,” said Father.

“It means,” said Elemak, “that because of what people who have nothing better to do have supposedly learned from a metal ball, our lives are going to be disrupted
again.”

Father looked at him in surprise. “Disrupted?” he asked. “What do you think we came here
for,
except to prepare for a journey to Earth? The Oversoul itself was caught up in a feedback loop, that’s all, and Nyef finally broke through and set it free. The disruption is
over
now, Elya.”

“Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I mean,” said Elemak. “We have plenty here. A good life. In many ways a better life than we would have had in Basilica, hard as that is for Obring to believe. We have families now—wives
and children—and our lives are good. We work hard, but we’re happy, and there’s room for our children and our children’s children here for a thousand years and more. We have no enemies, we have no dangers beyond the normal mishaps of being alive. And you’re telling me that
this
is the disruption, while wasting our time trying to get into
space
is our normal course? Please, don’t insult our intelligence.”

Elemak could sense easily enough who was with him in this. As he painted the true picture of what this all would mean, he could see Meb and Vas and Obring nodding grimly, and their wives would go along easily enough. Furthermore, he could see that he had put some doubt in the minds of some of the others. Zdorab and Shedemei especially had thoughtful expressions, and even Luet had glanced around at her children when Elemak spoke of how good their lives were, how they faced no danger, how they could have a good future here in Dostatok.

“I don’t know what Nafai found, or if he found anything at all,” Elemak went on. “I honestly don’t care. Nyef is a good hunter and a bright fellow, but he’s hardly suited to lead us into some hideous danger using forty-million-year-old starships. My family and I are not going to let my little brother make us waste our time in the foolish pursuit of an impossible project. Nyef’s murder of Gaballufix forced us all to leave Basilica as fugitives—but I’ve forgiven him for that. I certainly
won’t
forgive him if he disrupts our lives again.”

Elemak kept his expression calm, but inwardly it was all he could do to keep from smiling as he watched Luet’s feeble attempt to absolve her husband of guilt for Gaballufix’s murder. Her words didn’t matter—Elemak knew he had done the job thoroughly with the first blow. Nafai was discredited even before he returned. It was his fault we left the city; we forgive him for that; but nothing he says is going to change the way we live here. Elemak had provided the reasonable justification for total resistance to this latest maneuver by the women and their little male puppet. The proof of his success was the fact that
neither Father nor Mother—nor anyone else, except Luet—was mounting any kind of defense, and
she
had been sidetracked onto the issue of why Nafai killed Gaballufix. The idea of starships and hidden lands was dead.

Until Oykib walked out into the middle of the meeting area. “Shame on you all,” he said. “Shame on you!”

They fell silent, except Rasa. “Okya, dear, this is an adult conversation.”

“Shame on
you,
too. Have you all forgotten that we came here because of the Oversoul? Have you all forgotten that the reason we have such a perfect place to live is that the Oversoul prepared it for us? Have you forgotten that the only reason there weren’t already ten cities here was because the Oversoul kept other people away—except us? You, Elemak, could
you
have found this place? Would
you
have known to lead the family across the water and down the island to here?”

“What do you know of this, little boy?” said Elemak scornfully, trying to wrench control back from this
child.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Oykib. “None of you knew
anything
and none of us would
have
anything if the Oversoul hadn’t chosen us all and brought us here. I wasn’t even born when a lot of this happened, and I was a baby through most of the rest, so why do
I
remember, when you older ones—my older and wiser brothers and sisters, my
parents
—seem to have forgotten?”

His high piping voice grated on Elemak’s nerves. What was going on here? He knew how to neutralize all the adults—he hadn’t counted on having to deal with Father’s and Rasa’s new spawn as well. “Sit down, child,” said Elemak. “You’re out of your depth.”

“We’re
all
out of our depth,” said Luet. “But only Oykib seems to have remembered how to swim.”

“No doubt you coached him on what to say,” said Elemak.

“Oh, yes, exactly,” said Luet. “As if any of us knew in advance what
you
would say. Though we should have. I thought these matters were all settled long ago, but we
should have known that you would never cease to be ambitious.”

“Me!” shouted Elemak, leaping to his feet. “
I’m
not the one who staged this phony visit to an invisible city, which we know about only because of supposed reports from a metal ball that only
you
can interpret!”

“If you would lay your hand on the Index,” said Father, “the Index would gladly speak to you.”

“There’s nothing I want to hear from a computer,” said Elemak. “I tell you again, I will not put my family’s lives and happiness at risk because of supposed instructions from an invisible computer that these
women
persist in worshipping as a god!”

Father rose to his feet. “I see that you are disposed to doubt,” he said. “Perhaps it was a mistake to share the good news with everyone. Perhaps we should have waited until Nafai came back, and we could all go to the place he found, and see what he has seen. But I thought that there should be no secrets among us, and so I insisted that we tell the story now, so no one could say later that they were not informed.”

“A little late to try the honesty approach, isn’t it, Father?” asked Mebbekew. “You said yourself that when Nafai left day before yesterday, he was searching for this hidden place and he
thought
it was probably where the first humans disembarked from their starships. Yet you didn’t think of telling us all
then,
did you?”

Father glanced at Rasa, and Elemak felt completely confirmed in his suspicions. The old man was dancing to the old lady’s tune. She had insisted it be kept secret before, and had probably counseled him against telling now, knowing her.

Nevertheless, it was time for Elemak’s next move—he had to seize the high ground now that Oykib had undercut his previous position. “Let’s not be unfair,” said Elemak. “We’ve only heard
about
Nafai. We don’t have to decide anything or
do
anything yet. Let’s wait until he gets home, and see how we feel then.” Elemak turned to Oykib, who still stood in the middle of the group. “As for
you, I’m proud that my next-to-last brother has such fire in him. You’re going to be a real man, Oykib, and when you grow old enough to understand the issues instead of blindly following what others tell you, your voice will be well listened to in council, I can assure you.”

Oykib’s face reddened—with embarrassment, not anger. He was young enough to have heard only the clear praise and completely missed the subtle insult. Thus I wipe
you
out, too, Okya, dear brother, without your even realizing it.

“I say this meeting is over,” said Elemak. “We’ll meet again when Nafai comes back, except, of course, for the little conspiratorial meetings in the Index House where all this was cooked up in the first place. I have no doubt that
those
meetings will continue unabated.” And with those words he put a sinister meaning into any kind of conversation that Rasa’s party entered into, thus deeply weakening
them.

These poor people—they thought they were so clever, until they actually came up against somebody who understood how power worked. And because it was Elemak who dismissed the meeting, and in effect announced the next one, he had gone a long way toward stripping Father of his leadership in Dostatok. The only test now was whether the meeting actually broke up with Elemak’s departure. If he walked away, but the meeting went on substantially intact, then Elemak would have a much tougher time establishing leadership—in fact, he would have lost ground today.

But he needn’t have worried. Meb arose almost at once and, with Dol and their children in tow, followed him away from the meeting; Vas and Obring and their wives also got up, and then Zdorab and Shedemei. The meeting was over—and it was over because Elemak had said it was over.

Round one for me, thought Elemak, and I’ll be surprised if that isn’t the whole match. Poor Nafai. Whatever you’re doing out in the woods, you’re going to come home and find all your plots and plans in disarray. Did you
think you could really face me down from a distance and
win?

There was no writing anywhere, no sign, no instructions.

〈No one needs instructions here. I am with you always in this place, showing you what you need to know.〉

“And they were content with this?” asked Nafai. “All of them?” His voice was so loud in the silence of this place, as he scuffed along the dustless catwalks and corridors, making his way downward, downward into the earth.

〈They knew me. They had made me, had programmed me. They knew what I could do. They thought of me as—their library, their all-purpose instruction manual, their second memory. In those days I knew only what they had taught me. Now I have forty million years of experience with human beings, and have reached my own conclusions. In those days I was much more dependent on
them
—I reflected back to them their own picture of the world.〉

“And their picture—was it wrong?”

〈They did not understand how much of their behavior was animal, not intellectual. They thought that they had overcome the beast in them, and that with my help all their descendants would drive out the beast in a few generations—or a few hundred, anyway. Their vision was long, but no human being can have
that
long a vision. Eventually the numbers, the dimensions of time, become meaningless.〉

“But they built well,” said Nafai.

〈Well but not perfectly. I have suffered forty million years of cosmic and nuclear radiation that has torn apart much of my memory. I have vast redundancy, and so in my data storage there has been no meaningful loss. Even in my programming, I have monitored all changes and corrected them. What I could not monitor was the area hidden from myself. So when the programs there decayed, I could not know it and could not compensate for it. I couldn’t copy those areas and restore them when any one copy decayed.〉