Earthfall (Homecoming) (35 page)

For the old gods were being destroyed. One cannot live with gods and still believe in them, Nafai decided. And even though after the early times of crisis Nafai had explained to them all that he and Volemak had never been gods, that their powers were all the result of technology and learning, that not a one of them had the power to duplicate even the least of the complicated machines in the starship—even though he explained this, he could sense that many resented knowing it. Emeezem most of all. When he told her that as far as he could tell the clay figure that she had worshipped and treasured almost her entire life was just a remarkably fine sculpture by a talented angel named Kiti, she didn’t thank him. She acted as if he had slapped her face. “Should I break the statue then?” she demanded bitterly.

“Break something as finely wrought as that?” asked Nafai. “Break something that helped make you into the noble ruler that you are?”

But she was not to be mollified with praise; it sounded like flattery to her now, even though it was truthful and sincere. Nafai’s rejection of her worship was the cruelest blow. He could see her wither up; even though she lived on and continued to lead her people with wisdom and firmness, the heart had gone out of her. It was not just faith but also hope that she had lost.

The angels had it easier. Since Elemak’s rage had been their first exposure to humans, it was a relief to them to learn that none of them were gods. But the humans knew so many secrets and their wisdom, put to work for the angels, saved so many lives and improved everyone’s health so much that there was still an element of worship in their relationship, and therefore a bit—or perhaps a lot—of disappointment and disillusion when some human failed at a task, gave bad advice, or predicted an outcome and was proven wrong.

As he was writing about all of this, Nafai realized that what the people needed, diggers and angels and humans alike, was someone outside themselves in whom their hopes of wisdom and rightness could be invested. They had to begin to think of the Keeper of Earth as the only one who would never be wrong.

Not that Nafai was altogether sure of this himself. He never heard the voice of the Keeper with the kind of clarity with which the Oversoul spoke to him. In fact he was never quite sure whether he heard the voice or saw the dreams of the Keeper of Earth at all. Nor did he know what the Keeper might be. That he was real enough was obvious—there was no other explanation of the statue whose face looked exactly like Nafai, carved back when Nafai was just getting on the starship to come to Earth. Nor was there any other explanation of the dreams they had back on Harmony, when so many of them saw diggers and angels when the Oversoul himself had no notion that these were the creatures that populated Earth. Yet the dreams were always ambiguous, and tinged with the dreamer’s own hopes and fears and memories, so that it was never certain where the Keeper’s message left off and self-deception began.

Yet, inadequate as Nafai’s understanding of the Keeper of Earth might be, he knew that belief in the Keeper would fulfill a vital social function. The Keeper would be the highest authority, the one who was never wrong, the repository of Truth. When it became clear that even the wisest of humans knew very little, really; when it became plain that the most marvelous of miracles was in fact the result of working with a machine or exploiting a bit of ordinary knowledge; then there would still be no disillusionment because, after all, everyone knew that humans, angels, and diggers were all equal in the eyes of the Keeper of Earth, and all equally ignorant and weak and unwise compared to him.

Nafai explained these thoughts to Luet and she agreed. She began teaching the angel women about the Keeper of Earth, and adapting their ancient lore about various gods into a coherent story that replaced all the good gods with various aspects of the Keeper. With the angel men, Nafai was a bit more brutal, sweeping all the old gods away and keeping only a few of their ancient legends. Not that the old legends would die, of course—but he wanted them to start with a pure core of knowledge about the Keeper, even though the knowledge was really very small.

Then Nafai and Luet took Oykib and Chveya into their confidence, and soon Oykib was teaching the digger men and Chveya the digger women about the Keeper of Earth. They, too, adapted what the people already believed; they, too, were candid about how little they personally knew about the Keeper. But they did know this much: The Keeper wanted humans, diggers, and angels to live together in peace.

The trouble was that as the old religion faded, as fewer and fewer diggers took part in the annual raid to steal statues from the mating angels, the diggers’ birthrate also seemed to fall off—even as the angels prospered, their population blooming at an almost alarming rate. Whispers began among the diggers that the new religion of the Keeper of Earth was really part of a conspiracy to destroy the diggers so that angels and humans could divide the world between them. Not that many people believed these tales, but enough did that it was a worry. There were those who would exploit such rumors. And, in fact, when Nafai began to hear that it wasn’t all the humans but rather just Nafai and those who followed him who were plotting to destroy the diggers, he knew that someone was already seeking to turn these fears to his advantage.

In the meantime, though, the digger birthrate continued falling off, even though the nutrition levels were higher and higher all the time. And the angels had to expand constantly, burning more patches of forest to put more land under cultivation. All those twins, and none of them getting murdered now in infancy; all those healthy adults, and none of them getting culled by the marauding diggers.

They had been on Earth for twelve years when Shedemei called the adult humans together for a meeting. She had finally solved the mysteries, she said. But now there were some new mysteries, and some decisions to be made.

“We’ve been meddling,” said Shedemei. “As you’re all aware, the falling birthrate among the diggers is causing some serious worries among them.”

“We’re worried too,” said Volemak.

“Yes, well, now I know why it’s happening. We did it. We’re doing it.”

They waited. Finally Mebbekew said, “I didn’t know you had such a flair for the dramatic, Shedya. How long do we wait for the other shoe to drop?”

“This is only the first shoe,” she said. “The other shoe comes after.” There was some nervous laughter. “The problem is, you see, that we’ve stopped them from believing in their gods. They aren’t worshipping anymore. They aren’t even stealing fresh statues from the angels. And that’s why they aren’t having any babies.”

“You’re telling us,” said Elemak, laughing, “that their religion is
true
?”

“In a word, yes,” said Shedemei. “We have a dozen years’ worth of close observation of the local digger and angel tribes. Zdorab and I have also made some sampling visits to other digger and angel settlements, and we feel reasonably confident that we have uncovered a universal pattern. For one thing, there’s no such thing as an angel village without a digger city nearby, nor a digger city without an angel village within a few hours’ walk. This is not an accident. The diggers can’t survive without the angels. Specifically, the diggers can’t reproluce without worshipping the statues that the angel males create as part of their mating ritual.”

“Do I get the impression that the cause is biological rather than theological?” asked Rasa.

“Of course, though it’s hard to look at little clay statues and see a biological mechanism,” said Shedemei. “It was Zdorab who first pointed out to me that what matters, biologically, may not be the artistry involved in the creation of the statues. It’s the spit. The angel men take the clay into their mouths and mix a wet mud out of it, which they use to start the wad that becomes the statue. Every now and then they take another mouthful of mud and wet it. The saliva flows very freely.”

The listeners’ minds were working rapidly, trying to out things together. “You mean diggers need to rub angel spit on their bodies in order to mate?” asked Dza.

“Not quite,” said Shedemei. “The first time we examined the bodies of angels and diggers, we found a little organ—a gland, actually—near the scrotum. It was identical in both species, even though they have no common ancestor with a similar organ. Very puzzling, of course. But we now know the function of the organ. It continuously secrets tiny amounts of a hormone that suppresses the production of sperm. No, let me be clear. It completely shuts down the production of sperm. While the organ is functioning, males are completely, absolutely sterile.”

“What a useful little organ,” murmured Oykib. Then, louder, “Why would that evolve?”

“It gets worse,” said Zdorab.

“There’s a tiny flatworm, a microscopic one, that lives in all the freshwater rivers of this massif. During the rainy season, when the rivers are in flood, this flatworm burrows into beds of firm clay and lays millions of tiny eggs. They don’t develop as long as they remain wet. But when the dry season comes and the water subsides, the eggs develop, forming hard little coatings that hold in what moisture they have. The embryos are ready to hatch at any time. But they can’t, because they can’t get rid of their own confining shells. So they hibernate, living off their yolks. They use the yolks so slowly that they can live for twenty or thirty years like that. The next rainy season doesn’t cause them to hatch, because water doesn’t dissolve the shells. Guess what dissolves them.”

“Angel spit,” said Oykib.

“Amazing boy,” said Shedemei. “My prize student.” There was some laughter, but they were all waiting for the story to go on. “No other fluid will do it, because the angels have tiny organelles in the saliva-producing cells of their mouths, which secrete an enzyme that has no function whatsoever within the bodies of the angels—but it dissolves the shells of the flatworm eggs. So when the males bring the clay into their mouths, they’re not just softening it to make sculptures. They’re also dissolving the shells of millions of little flatworms. And it just so happens that the dissolved shells contain precisely the one chemical that suppresses the action of the prophylactic gland near the angels’ and diggers’ scrota. The fertility chemical breaks down very slowly, and the statues contain useful quantities of it perhaps as long as ten years, certainly for five.”

Everybody was getting it now. “So when the diggers rubbed the statues all over their bodies….” “Were the angels swallowing some of it?” “How much of the fertility chemical does it take?”

Shedemei raised her hands to damp the questions and comments. “Yes, you’ve got it. The angel males absorb the fertility enzyme by mouth. It doesn’t take much of it to shut down the action of the prophylactic gland, and it doesn’t recover and start up again for about two weeks, maybe three. So there’s a window there in which reproduction can take place. And the digger males have a special absorbent patch on their lower bellies, near the groin, where the chemical can be absorbed quite directly into the bloodstream. Rubbing the statues on their sweating bellies dissolves some of the clay, whereupon the dissolved fertility enzyme is taken into the blood and, just as with the angels, it shuts down the prophylactic gland and the digger males are fertile. But because they actually get a great deal less of the enzyme, the fertility window is only a few days long for them. Doesn’t matter, though. Where the angels make their statues once a year and have to score a reproductive hit that one time, the diggers are culturally able to worship the statues any time. In effect, the statues enable them to reproduce whenever they want. They just have to pray first.”

“That is the most absurdly complicated, unlikely, ridiculous mechanism I’ve ever heard of,” said Issib.

“Exactly,” said Shedemei. “There is no chance that it evolved naturally. Why would the diggers and angels independently evolve identical organs that make them sterile? There’s no evolutionary advantage in it. Why didn’t the angels simply die out before they ever started making their sculptures in the first place? Why didn’t the diggers die out before they ever discovered the virtues of rubbing angel statues all over themselves? And why would a species of flatworm just happen to require a special chemical in angel saliva in order to hatch their eggs? And why did the angels develop a chemical with no use in their bodies except to dissolve the shells of the flatworms?”

“There are a lot of strange things in nature,” said Oykib.

“Of course,” said Shedemei. “I shouldn’t have said there’s no chance it evolved naturally. It’s just that for me, at least, the coincidence is too great to believe in natural causation. This was
done
to the diggers and angels.”

“But that’s not what matters right now,” said Zdorab. “Shedya has an answer to that, but what matters is that we have to tell the diggers the truth. They need to go back to using the statues. And getting new ones.”

“Maybe we can get the angels just to
give
their statues to the diggers,” said Padarok. “It’s not as if the angels use them after the women judge the men.”

“Maybe,” said Shedemei. “But it’s not just the diggers who are suffering from our interference in their previous social patterns. This relationship, this connection between diggers and angels has been going on for millions of years. Forty million years, to be more precise. And in those countless generations, certain patterns have evolved. The twinning of the angels, for instance. Every pregnancy is double. This isn’t accidental. It’s only happened twice in all our observations, and never in our own angel village, but when a single birth takes place, the baby is destroyed and the mother is never allowed to mate again. In other words, single births are ruthlessly excluded from angel society. It looks to me as if this is a response to the fact that diggers follow angels wherever they go. The diggers have to follow the angels in order to get the statues. But then the diggers can’t help but see the angels as an easy source of meat, especially when the angel infants are at that awkward age when they can’t fly well at all, and yet they’re too heavy for one adult to carry them alone and still fly. In effect, the twinning allows each generation of angels to have one death and one survivor. Over the years, community cooperation has enabled between two-thirds and three-fourths of the twin-pairs to survive intact. Now, though, in our village all the twins are living to adulthood. And all the damaged, weak, sick, and crippled angels are surviving, where in other villages the diggers cull them out. In short, the angels have evolved a strategy of reproducing far beyond their sustainable population in order to survive the depredations of the diggers. When the diggers no longer prey on them, their population balloons out of control.”