Earthfall (Homecoming) (37 page)

“That’s disgusting,” said one of the younger women.

“Only if you use someone else’s swab,” said Protchnu.

“What worries me,” said Mebbekew, “is what’s going to happen to the poor flatworms. Nobody seems to care about them. I think we have too much of a bias in favor of big animals. Don’t microscopic creatures have rights?” He grinned, and the others laughed with him.

While the meeting went on, however, Elemak had a meeting of his own. He sought out Fusum, who had recently been made blood king after the death of his father.

“I have a gift for you,” Elemak said.

“What could you possibly have that I want?” asked Fusum.

“Oh, we’re full of ourselves, aren’t we, now that we’re king.”

Fusum growled a little. “I have a life of my own, Elemak. I’m not a hostage anymore. I have responsibilities.”

“You also have power,” said Elemak, “and I think you wouldn’t mind getting a little more. So here’s my gift—more power.”

“Really,” said Fusum. “I didn’t know you had any power to give.”

“Knowledge is power, or so I’ve heard,” said Elemak. “But there’s a condition. You have to promise to tell your people you got the idea from me.”

“What idea?” asked Fusum.

“Promise first.”

“I promise,” said Fusum.

“But do you really mean it?” asked Elemak.

“If you’re going to mock me, you can keep your gift,” said Fusum.

“Ah, now that we’re the blood king, we’re too important to take a little teasing from a friend.”

“You’ve never been a friend, Elemak,” said Fusum. “You’ve been a useful source of knowledge.”

“But perhaps now we
can
be friends,” said Elemak.

“Either tell me the idea you have or don’t.”

“Go at once to the statue of the Untouched God,” said Elemak.

“You mean the one that looks like your shining brother Nafai?”

Elemak refused to be goaded. “That’s the one. Go to it, and in front of as many witnesses as possible, declare that the reason so few children are being born is because this statue has not been properly worshipped. Then do whatever it is you do with it. Rub it all over yourself.”

“That could get me killed.”

“Not the blood king. Not right away. And not if you promise the people that now that you have worshipped the Untouched God, obliterating the face of that deceiver Nafai, the true god will send a mild plague to purge the last traces of evil among your people. A few male embryos may even be miscarried because they were not pure. All those who are alive right now will have to worship the gods in the old way until the day they die. But the new children born after this time will not have to worship any gods at all. They are born in purity and they are blessed.”

“What kind of fungus are you trying to make me eat?” said Fusum. “You’re the one who told me that all this religious stuff was nonsense.”

“But the people believe it, don’t they. So you tell them that no matter what Oykib or Chveya or anybody else tells them,
I
told
you
the truth, and it’s
your
action that will free your people from having to go up the canyon and get your gods from the skymeat. You won’t
need
the skymeat anymore. Your new children and grandchildren can kill them all then, and it won’t matter because they will be pure and the gods won’t require them to humiliate themselves by worshipping objects created by the skymeat.”

“Why should I believe that any of this will happen?”

“I don’t care,” said Elemak. “You can doubt me and delay, and then Oykib will come out and make an announcement and all the power and influence will go to him and, through him, to Emeezem. Or you can believe me and act
now
, so that you’ve already done it before anybody else says a word. Then
you
and
I
will be the liberators of the diggers. It’s going to happen anyway, of course. The little act you put on with that statue of Nafai won’t actually do anything at all. Except make your people think you’ve got religious powers beyond any blood king before you. And it won’t hurt that you can make hash out of Emeezem’s insistence that the Untouched God remain untouched. When your prophecies come true, she’ll be discredited. But you can let the opportunity pass you by, Fusum. You can spend the rest of your life wishing you had taken the chance when I gave it to you. I really don’t care.”

“Yes you do,” said Fusum. “And you can be sure that I
will
use your name and tell them that I learned about this from you. Because if it fails, I might be able to save myself by laying the blame on you.”

“And when it succeeds,” said Elemak, “your people will know who is their true friend among the humans.”

“And
I’ll
know,” said Fusum, “that you are a liar who is obviously planning to betray his own people and you want to have the diggers behind you when you strike.”

“Any problem with that?” said Elemak.

“None whatsoever,” said Fusum. “Just so you remember who is the king of the diggers when the time comes.”

“I’ll remember,” said Elemak. “I remember everything.”

So Fusum went down to the temple of the Untouched God, made his speech and performed his blasphemous worship. Emeezem had him bound and walled up in a prison chamber, but his imprisonment lasted only until Oykib called together the elders of the digger people and explained to them that a minor plague was going to come among them, but all children conceived afterward would no longer need to worship statues anymore. “The Keeper of Earth has set you free from your old gods,” he said. But there were many who said among themselves, Fusum set us free. And Emeezem was unable to prevent them from releasing Fusum from his prison and restoring him as blood king.

The plague came within days, just as Fusum had predicted. But no other harmful consequences came from his having touched the Untouched God. And now the Untouched God didn’t look like Nafai anymore, and people said, It was Elemak who taught us this secret, that Nafai is not a god, and that he hasn’t even got the power to keep his face on the statue. Fusum is a true blood king, but Emeezem as our deep mother didn’t know the truth about the Untouched God.

When Mufruzhuuzh died not long after, the people chose Fusum to be the new war king, saying, He was Nen’s true friend, and killed the panther that slaughtered him. He also set our children free from the gods of the skymeat. Let him be war king and blood king, both at once.

That day marked the end of Emeezem’s rule over the digger city. She still had great influence over the women, but the men belonged to Fusum, and Fusum began to train them for war.

For months, Nafai and Oykib pored over the
Book of the Sins of the Human Race
, learning from it all they could. Here were the secrets of the evolution of the human race, of the development of technologies, of the cruel uses that humans put them to. Here were the tales of wars and slaughters, of oppressive poverty that paid for the wealth of a few, of stripped and ruined land, of ancient resources burned up or thrown away.

At the end, they found these words:

“These sins came about because of rebellion, for the human race ignored the good dreams that came from the Keeper of Earth, until at last the Keeper wearied of their sins and shrugged them off. Then the great floating continents shuddered, and the earth shook, and the volcanos burst open in a thousand places. The sky was filled with smoke and the plants died; the Earth grew cold and ice covered the face of the Earth in the deepest ice age ever known. Those few human beings who survived understood that the Keeper of Earth was done with them. The Earth had no more room for human beings, and if they were to live at all they must leave. Seven fleets were assembled and seven colonies left, and of the others we have no word. We know only this: that on our new world, Harmony, we will build an Oversoul to be the servant of the Keeper of Earth, and under the Oversoul’s watchful eye the human race will not remember how to sin on such a terrible scale. As for Earth, it belongs to the Keeper now, and human beings will never live there again, unless the Keeper forgives us and calls us home.”

Nafai and Oykib both translated this final passage, and then reconciled their translations. “Who wrote this?” Oykib asked. “How could he know what power the Keeper had? To cause earthquakes and volcanos, to change the flow of continental drift….”

“Maybe the Keeper has something to do with the convection currents in the flowing magma on which the crust of the Earth floats. Who knows how quickly it might change?” said Nafai.

“I know this much,” said Oykib. “We have to teach our people about this book, the warnings in this book. We have to teach them what the Keeper expects of us, even if we don’t understand exactly what the Keeper of Earth might be.”

“By ‘our people,’ do you mean just humans?” asked Nafai.

“Of course not,” said Oykib. “In fact, maybe the reason the Keeper brought us back to Earth was precisely so that we could not only set the angels and diggers free from their ancient bondage, but also could teach them how to live so that the Keeper won’t feel the need to make the Earth uninhabitable again.”

“I think you’re right,” said Nafai. “But it’s going to become a religion no matter what we do or how we teach it. Even our most naturalistic explanations are going to sound mystical to them. After all, what our ancestors wrote in the
Book of Sins
sounds mystical to
us
.”

“Is that bad?” asked Oykib.

“Not bad in itself. It’s just that religions have a way of losing track of the truth at the core. The diggers had a religion that kept them rubbing themselves with clay that contained the chemical derived from flatworm eggshells and angel spit—but they had no idea why they were doing it, and so they were enslaved by it. All we’ll be doing, then, is teaching our children and their children arbitrary rules. The true reasons will be lost, or converted into myths.”

“What can we do about it?” asked Oykib.

“We can write a book,” said Nafai.

“You mean like the one you’re already writing?” he asked.

Nafai glared at him. “I should have known I couldn’t keep a secret from you.”

“Yes, you should have,” said Oykib. “Especially since you talked to the Oversoul about it almost constantly for weeks when you first thought of it. I figured you’d tell me about it when you felt like it.”

“Well, I feel like it,” said Nafai. “Because I think our descendants aren’t going to have access to the ship’s computer. The skill of reading and writing will be lost to most of them. But a few of them will be taught to read and write in order to keep a record of what we’ve learned. We’ll write it down as clearly as we can, a true history of our voyage and everything we’ve learned and done. We’ll pass it along from parent to child, and because it’s written down it can’t be distorted.”

“People can distort anything,” said Oykib.

“But as long as the original text is there, the next generation or the one after, somewhere along the line, they can go back to the original and discover the truth. The way we learned so much from the
Book of Sins
.”

“Well, fine,” said Oykib. “You’re already keeping a record.”

“I’m keeping
one
record. But I think we need to keep another. The first one has everything in it, all the details, everything I can remember. But I had a dream last night….”

“Ah, another dream.”

“I know you’d like to have these dreams yourself, Oykib, but—”

“I don’t need to have my own dreams,” Oykib said. “Not when I have yours. You dreamed of writing a book that you would give to me and Chveya instead of to Zhyat and Netsya.”

“A book,” said Nafai, “that includes everything from the
Book of Sins
, written on gold so we don’t need a computer to read it and so it won’t corrode. We can seal up that part, so no one adds to or changes it. But the rest of the book will be a record, not of the whole history of our people, but just the story of our dealings with the Oversoul and the Keeper of Earth. Just the….”

“Just the theology,” said Oykib.

“To the diggers and angels it will seem like theology,” said Nafai.

“And to our children and grandchildren, too,” said Oykib. “They won’t have lived in the starship. They won’t have used the great library. They’ll have no idea of what a computer is.”

Nafai nodded. “So you’ve come to the same conclusion.”

“No, I’ve simply seen you and Luet and Chveya all having the same dream. The ship has got to go. We have to cut ourselves off from the machinery of the past and live in the technology of the present. The ship has to go up into orbit.”

“We don’t have the technology anymore to hide it on the planet’s surface, the way our ancestors hid it on Harmony,” said Nafai.

“I’ll help you with your second book,” said Oykib. “You write whatever you want to in order to start it off. You have to tell the parts where I wasn’t born yet anyway. I’ll take over when you tell me to. But in the meantime, I can be copying out the
Book of Sins
.”

“The
Book of Sins
, yes,” said Nafai. “And maybe also you should start a record of the dreams the Keeper sent us. Especially the ones that don’t seem yet to be completely fulfilled. It’s the only guide we have to what the Keeper might have planned for us.”

“The
Book of Sins
and the
Book of Dreams
,” said Oykib. “I’ll get those started. And you write the
Book of Nafai
.”

“And in the meantime,” said Nafai, “I’m going to start figuring out some kind of weapon that the angels can use in flight, something that can kill a digger despite the diggers’ enormously greater strength.”

Oykib nodded. “So you think your dreams of war between diggers and angels, you think those are from the Keeper of Earth.”

“Whether they come from the Keeper or my own fears, I have to be prepared, don’t I? I have to prepare my people, just in case.”

Oykib nodded. “I love the diggers, Nafai. I don’t want to have to choose between them and the angels.”