Earthfall (Homecoming) (41 page)
Read Earthfall (Homecoming) Online
Authors: Orson Scott Card
“I’m glad to see that you’re filled with the spirit of conciliation.”
He smiled at her. Then he stepped away from her and spoke to the diggers who held Fusum. “Take the prisoner into my house. And then start bringing me those who think they know of crimes this man has done.” He looked again at Shedemei. “That should take up the first day, I imagine.”
Shedemei turned from him to Protchnu, whose cheeks were stained with tears. “You shouldn’t have done that to me,” he whispered. “That was
wrong
.”
“You were such a promising boy,” she answered kindly. “Of all the tragedies this lifelong war between brothers has caused, you are the saddest one of all.”
He went livid. “I’ll kill him, Shedya. I’ll kill them all. Every one of them.”
“What you’re saying, then, is that you’re sure your father’s going to fail?”
“I meant that I’d kill any he left behind.”
“You know the truth, Protchnu. Stop worrying about vengeance and learn how to be a leader. These people need a king far more than your father needs to be justified. All he’s ever done, he did for power. Now he’s got it. You’ll see. He’ll go through the motions of war, but he’ll lose because his hunger has been satisfied.”
“You don’t know Father,” said Protchnu proudly. “And you don’t know me.”
“Nobody does,” said Shedemei. “So maybe you’ll surprise us all.”
Eight days later, Zdorab returned to the ship in the launch. He arrived in time to watch as Fusum was executed for his crimes, his throat cut by one of his own soldiers. His body was then hung from the limb of a tree, so that no part of it was touching the sacred earth. Shedemei, her skin aglow, stepped forward then and went through the ritual of naming Elemak to be war king. The people hailed him and cheered him, then watched in silence as Shedemei and Zdorab flew upward in the launch until they entered the tower through the high wide bay where the launch was kept.
The door closed behind them, and Elemak set out at once with two hundred soldiers, leaving Muzhestvo—Mebbekew’s youngest, now a man of twenty-three—to rule the people in his absence. Elemak’s army was halfway up the canyon when the starship roared to life and rose into the sky.
It became another point of light in the night heaven, circling and circling, now and then changing its position. It was called
Basilica
, but in time almost no one remembered why, or what it was, or that it had once been a tower standing by the first human village on Earth in forty million years.
Elemak’s army tracked the wide path of the Nafari migration, but when they reached the stony cliff that barred the southern passage into the wide high valley of the land of Nafai, angels assaulted them from the air, shooting darts into their exposed backs. Twenty diggers died in that place, and forty more were injured. They struggled back home, and Elemak taught them to make armor so that next year they could try again.
And so it went, year after year. But between the futile wars, both nations prospered and grew, and both sent out traders and teachers to spread the new agriculture and the new modes of warfare and the new myths and legends and religions to every other digger city and angel village.
Generations passed, and the humans became hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and there was not a digger city that didn’t have its human houses overhead, not an angel village that didn’t have humans joining in the evening song. The term that became common for humans in both societies was
middle people
, because they stood between the angels in the sky and the diggers in the earth.
In the sky, the starship circled and circled, but it was full of life. Shedemei and Zdorab slept long and often, but then they would emerge and use the launch to explore, to gather specimens, to introduce new variations, to give shape and strength and variety to the gardens of the Earth. In time, Zdorab’s body wore out, and Shedemei laid him to rest in a field of flowers she had brought from Harmony. Then, alone, she woke less often. But still from time to time she visited, she gathered, she tended, and silently she watched as the people spread across the face of the land, always cleverer each time she saw them, yet also angrier, and always at war.
What else could happen? The human race was home again.
Empire
The Folk of the Fringe
Future on Fire
(editor)
Future on Ice
(editor)
Hart’s Hope
Invasive Procedures
(with Aaron Johnston)
Lovelock
(with Kathryn Kidd)
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
Saints
Songmaster
The Worthing Saga
Wyrms
Ender
Ender’s Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Ender’s Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant
The Tales of Alvin Maker
Seventh Son
Alvin Journeyman
Prentice Alvin
Red Prophet
Heartfire
The Crystal City
Homecoming
The Memory of Earth
The Call of Earth
The Ships of Earth
Earthfall
Earthborn
Women of Genesis
Sarah
Rebekah
Rachel & Leah
Short Fiction
Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card
(hardcover)
Maps in a Mirror, Volume 1: The Changed Man
(paperback)
Maps in a Mirror, Volume 2: Flux
(paperback)
Maps in a Mirror, Volume 3: Cruel Miracles
(paperback)
Maps in a Mirror, Volume 4: Monkey Sonatas
(paperback)
For their help in the creation of this book, I am grateful to: Erin Absher, for keeping things going when the Card house was in permanent crisis, so that I could go off and write down these made-up stories;
Geoffrey Card, for the holes in the trees leading to the tunnels underground;
Mike Lewis and Dennis Child for the landforms and terrain 40 million years from now;
Clark and Kathy Kidd, for your dining room table, the trip to the beach with a broken leg, and putting up with 48 nights of dinner conversation;
Those who attended my thousand-ideas session at the BYU science fiction symposium where together we developed the original idea of the symbiotic cultures of the diggers and the angels;
Kristine and Kathy, for reading and responding to the pages as they spewed from the fax machine; and Geoff, for wanting to see what happened next;
The citizens of Hatrack River, my virtual neighborhood on America Online, for their critiques and comments on earlier volumes and on each chapter of this book as I completed it;
Scott Allen, for reinstalling every major piece of software on five computers about six times each;
Kathleen Bellamy, for proofreading
The Ships of Earth
right before I started writing this book, so she could remind me of all the questions that remained unanswered;
And above all to Kristine and the kids (Geoffrey, Emily, Charlie, and our newcomer, Zina), for making my life worth living and my work worth doing.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
EARTHFALL
Copyright © 1995 by Orson Scott Card
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
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is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6604-7