Earthfall (Homecoming) (22 page)

They held the pose in silence. It felt like forever, though it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. Finally Protchnu returned, leading Eiadh, who cried out in joy when she saw the baby. She ran to where the four female diggers stood, and reached down to scoop Zhivya out of the blanket. “Zhivoya, my lively one, my laughing one,” she sang, laughing and crying and turning around and around.

“All right,” said Volemak. “Nafai, tell Oykib to tell them to carry the hostages to the ship. And order Dazya to lead them there, so she can explain to Shedemei what’s needed. I want them kept unconscious and I want them thoroughly studied.”

Dazya, the erstwhile First Child, stepped forward. “I understand,” she said.

“But you apparently didn’t understand well enough to know that I wanted Nafai to give you the order,” said Volemak, not looking at her.

Nafai turned to Dazya and gave the exact orders that Volemak had already given. Dazya, blushing, obeyed. The digger soldiers formed a procession behind her, carrying the nine unconscious ones toward the ship.

The order of authority had now been clearly established. Queen Emeezem now addressed herself directly to Oykib. The trouble was, she didn’t perceive him as a god, and therefore when she spoke to him, her words weren’t a prayer. It wasn’t a communication with the Keeper or the Oversoul, and so to Oykib it was nothing but unintelligible hissing and humming. “I can’t understand them unless they think they’re speaking to a god,” said Oykib.

“Just stand there and refuse to hear them,” said Volemak. “When she pauses, point to Nafai.”

Oykib obeyed. She quickly got the idea and spoke the same words to Nafai. Oykib could understand her again.

Or maybe he couldn’t. “She begs you to come and see how well they’ve…cared for your….”

“Cared for my what?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Oykib.

“Cared for my what?”

“Your head,” said Oykib.

“Where does she want me to go?”

“It’s underground,” said Oykib. “She wants you to follow her underground.”

Nafai turned to Volemak and elaborately repeated all that Oykib had said. Volemak made a show of listening with a grave demeanor.

“First make all these soldiers go away,” said Volemak. “And then you, Nafai, will follow her into the tunnels. You’re the one with the cloak. If they mean to betray us, you’re the only one who’ll be safe.”

“I have to take Oykib with me,” said Nafai. “I don’t understand a word they’re saying.”

Volemak hesitated only a moment. “Keep him safe,” he said.

It was astonishing that a god would condescend to such a degree. Emeezem dared to ask him because she was old and had no fear, and because in her life she had learned to hope even for things that could not be hoped. And just as he had accepted her when she was an ugly, undesirable child so many years ago, so now the god accepted her again and followed her down into the city.

To leave the world of light and come into dimness because she asked! To let the bright shimmer of his immortal body illuminate the earthen walls of the deep temples! She wanted to sing, to dance her way down the tunnels. But she was leading a god to his temple. Dignity had to be maintained.

Especially for Mufruzhuuzh’s sake; he needed dignity today. No one would criticize him for what had happened—after all, it was Fusum who plotted the stealing of the baby, forcing a deadly confrontation that Muf had neither sought nor desired. And he had faced the god bravely—all saw that he had no fear when he offered his heart for the god to take. Then, when the god asked him to match impossible feats, requiring Muf to do things that only the blood king could do, if anyone could do it at all—well, no one could fault him for hesitating, for failing to act. He had nowhere to turn, so he did not turn at all.

Still, it was humiliating for him, that his wife should have to come forward and extricate him from the dilemma. Never mind that it was rare for the wife of the war king to be the root mother also. He was shamed when his wife was accepted by the god who had merely posed unanswerable riddles to him.

But could Emeezem help it that the baby came to her hands? Muf didn’t know where the baby had been hidden—it was only when Fusum’s sister realized what a terrible thing he had done that she came to Emeezem with the truth, and by then Muf was already facing down the god. It was just an unfortunate set of circumstances. Mufruzhuuzh was still war king. The god would set everything to rights.

The god was so large he had to bow down on all fours to travel through the tunnels. Of course, he could just as easily have walked upright, tearing out the roofs of the tunnels just by passing through them. But he chose not to, leaving the tunnels undamaged for the people to use. Such kindness! Such generosity to mere earth-crawling worms like us!

Around them she could hear the patter of a thousand feet, as men and women and children scurried to every open passageway, hoping for a glimpse of the god as he passed. Emeezem could see hands reaching up to let the light of the god’s body touch pink hands; parents held up their babies so the light of the god would bless their tiny bodies. And still the god followed her, his light undiminished.

They came to the chamber where, so many years ago, Emeezem—no, she was mere Emeez in those days—had first seen the unmarred head of the god. She stopped, and beseeched him to forgive them for leaving him in such obscurity for so long.

She heard the undergod speak to him, and he answered. Then he licked his finger, reached out his hand, and touched the lintel of the doorway. Thus did he leave the fluid of his body on the door of the place. That was more than mere forgiveness. She keened in relief, and many others joined in with her. She could hear one voice, a man, singing, “We put your glorious head in darkness, not worshipping it because in the clay we could not see your light. But you return the waters of life to us, and bring light into the stomach of the earth. So noble, so great!” Others sang their assent to his words: “So noble! So great! So noble! So great!”

The god paid them the compliment of staying there, still, unmoving, till the song ended. Then Emeezem moved on, leading him farther up the corridor, to the temple she had caused to be built for him, starting the very day she was chosen as root mother. Because the head was so large, she had decided that the god must also be very tall, and so she had made the people dig his temple so low that the ceiling could be high. She also placed the temple so that the roof reached up into a crevice in the rock, letting a bit of daylight reflect down into the chamber. And in the brightest spot of the soft diffused glow, on a pedestal made of bones of the skymeat, she had placed his head.

It was nighttime now, though, so there was little illumination when he came into the temple. Instead he brought the light with him, and it brightened every corner of the room when he rose to his feet. Others came through the door after him, gathering along the walls of the temple, watching as he approached the pedestal where the sculpture sat. Now he would see how they had worshipped him, once they understood that his strange large head was a sign of power and not of weakness. Hadn’t the entire spring harvest of infant skymeat been offered to him that first year, so that his pedestal immediately rose at once to be as high as any god’s? Hadn’t he also had more than his share of skymeat broken open and shared among the people in his honor every year since then? Yet still no one had used his head in the time of mating, for they understood that he was not to be worshipped in that way.

The god walked slowly to the face and stood before it. It glowed in the brightness of his body, answering his bright face with an earthen one. He reached out to it, touched it. Then he lifted his head upward toward the source of the room’s faint natural starlight and sank to his knees before the statue.

I see, thought Emeezem. You show us how to worship you properly. We cannot do exactly what you have done, because our knees do not bend in that direction. But we will touch the face as you touched it. Was there a reason why it was the lips you touched? Should it always be the lips? Or will we touch that part of the face that we want to have bless us? You must tell me. Perhaps later, if you should deign to soil your lips by speaking our language, or if your undergod should choose to speak our impure tongue. We touch your face, look at the light, then go down on our haunches before your face and gaze at it. Yes, I will remember. We will all remember.

Like all the other women, Shedemei was at once frightened, repelled, and fascinated by the procession of diggers who came into the village, carrying their compatriots who had been knocked unconscious by Nafai. But the responsibility for doing something with them was hers, and so she quickly set her personal feelings aside and led the diggers into the ship. She knew at once what Volemak’s purpose was; he had seen her doing nondestructive scans and studies of the few animals they had revived, and knew that she could learn a vast amount about a creature using the equipment on the ship. It was imperative that they understand the physical structures and systems that gave shape to the lives of the diggers, and yet it was just as important that they not be harmed.

The trouble was that it might not be such a good idea to let the diggers see the inside of the ship. From the little that Dza had said, she knew that Nafai had overawed them with the powers of the cloak of the starmaster. Perhaps the smooth and shiny surfaces of the inside of the ship would enhance that effect; but perhaps not. There was definitely danger in letting the diggers see that the humans were, after all, human, that what miracles they did were done with tools and machines and not by godlike powers inherent in them.

But that was for another day. Volemak had made his decision, and it was almost certainly best. Even if it wasn’t, Shedemei would obey. The peace they had had these past months since arriving on Earth depended on supporting his authority; she would obey him even if he was flat wrong. Peace—that’s all Shedemei wanted. A chance to do her work without having to worry about which side she was on and who was on top in the endless family struggles among Volemak’s and Rasa’s children.

The first order of business once the carriers were gone was to sedate the diggers so that they didn’t awaken at an inconvenient time. There had been forty million years of evolution since the biota of Earth and Harmony had diverged, but the most conservative aspect of life was at the chemical level. A light dosage of the safest sedative should do the job. She spoke to the medical computer as she weighed each of the bodies in turn. The dosages were meted out and she pressed the pads against the pink skin.

Pink hairless skin—why would these rodents have lost their fur? She suspected that there was no sound evolutionary reason for it—it was a cultural thing. Some standard of beauty became general and then only those who exhibited the beautiful trait were able to mate. Soon pink skin would predominate in the culture while hairiness would be relegated to a few despised members. Otherwise, the trait made no sense. Digger skin had no melanin. No wonder they had to stay in shadows and tunnels all the time, unlike their ancient rat ancestors—they couldn’t bear the sunburn if they emerged from the trees.

Once they were all sedated, she meant to begin scanning them at once. But then sleepiness swept over her like a wave at the beach, and she realized that after being awake all night this was hardly the time to conduct serious investigations. So she used the cart and carried each digger in turn to a suspended animation chamber. She set the chambers to normal life support so they wouldn’t kick into suspended animation mode—there was too much risk that the suspended animation dosages wouldn’t be right for diggers and they’d be unrevivable.

Then she went to her berth and lay down, just for a nap. A couple of hours and she’d be fine. It reminded her of the way she had lived in Basilica before they persuaded her—no, tricked her, manipulated her, forced her—to join Volemak’s exodus into the wilderness. In those days, when she was hot on the trail of some elusive gene, she could work around the clock, taking short naps that amounted to little more than a couple of hours of sleep a day. The excitement of discovery and creation was more important than sleeping and eating. She had never wanted that life to be interrupted.

Well, it
had
been interrupted, and she wasn’t entirely unhappy about it. For one thing, Basilica had been destroyed in Moozh’s bid for empire, so her old life couldn’t have continued in any case. Even if Basilica still stood, however, Shedemei’s journey in the wildnerness had given her many good gifts. Her two children, Padarok and Dabrota—their names meant Gift and Kindness, and they had grown up to merit them. Zdorab, her shy and complicated husband, a man who had never desired women and yet had given her two children, not to mention good companionship for these many years. Despite his lack of desire, despite her lack of interest, they had helped each other join the great stream of life, of creation. Wouldn’t it have been sad if I had spent my life bending and shaping life, and yet had never taken part in it myself? I was spared that, I am glad of it.

But now Rokya and Dabya were adults. Rokya was married to Hushidh’s daughter Dza; Dabya was married to Luet’s son Zhatva. They were going to be parents soon. They didn’t need Shedemei anymore. Zdorab had never needed her, not really. Liked her, yes, even loved her, but it wasn’t a
need
. So why am I still here? she wondered. I don’t want to see this community torn apart. I don’t want to watch as my children have to choose sides. I don’t want to be here when blood is shed, when lives are lost. I don’t even want to care about the outcome. I just want to be by myself, working on plants, on animals, studying how the biosystems have diverged, understanding more and more of the way life creates itself. I want to know why giant cattle roam the plains north of this massif. I want to know why two sentient species evolved in such close proximity without one of them destroying the other. I want to know why the Oversoul brought us to this place of all places, instead of to one of the many locations where we could have established our colony without interfering in the lives of diggers or angels.

I want my dream to come true.

Ah, yes, that was the underlying wish above all wishes. The dream that the Keeper of Earth had sent her, so many years ago, a dream of a garden in the sky. Of course it had already
been
fulfilled. The seeds and embryos she had brought with her were already beginning to play a role in the life of this planet. But couldn’t the dream be more literal? Once the colony was fully established, couldn’t she take the ship back into the sky and orbit the Earth, studying ecosystems, developing variations and enhancements and hybrids of lifeforms from Harmony and Earth, coming down only now and then to take samples and measurements and to introduce new organisms into the world? Then she really would be the gardener of Earth, a whole planet to play with. I’d be good at it, she whispered to the Oversoul. Then I wouldn’t have to be part of the messiness here in the colony. I don’t want to have to care about rivalries and loyalties. I just want to learn, to change, to create, to transform. That’s what my talent is. I have no gift for getting along with humans. I’ve given you what you needed from me. Let me now have what I want.

Shedemei felt the anxiety and longing seep out of her. The Oversoul said it would be all right. Now she could sleep.

Oykib was grateful to be able to stand up at last, after crawling or duckwalking his way through seemingly endless low tunnels. He had hardly been able to pay attention to his surroundings, partly because the grays and browns of the rock and earthen walls hardly offered much in the way of scenery, but mostly because the diggers that surrounded them were all crying out to the gods, and so Oykib could hear the silent pleadings and psalms and paeans as if they were all singing in his ears.

Still, despite the confusion of voices, Oykib
was
beginning to learn some words, some shapes and structures in the language. It became music to him first, so that he heard the rhythms and tunes that helped carry meanings and emotions. This must be what dogs hear in human speech, he thought. The music of our voices tells them if we’re angry or happy, sad or frightened. That was as much of the language as Oykib understood, but he knew that soon he would understand more. He had never had to learn a second language before, so that until now he had never known how easy it was. He had a talent for it. Or perhaps it was simply easier to learn a language if you had some understanding of the speakers before trying to grasp their speech.