The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (31 page)

Yet now here they were, together at Vas’s invitation, and it seemed like things might be improving now, that Obring might actually be
included
in something in this miserable company so dominated by Volemak’s and Rasa’s children.

“I think it’s time we put an end to this whole stupid expedition, don’t you?” said Vas.

Obring laughed bitterly. “That’s been tried before, and then Nafai pulled his little magic tricks.”

“Some of us have only been biding our time,” said Vas. “But this is the last chance—the last reasonable one, anyway. Dorova is in plain sight. We don’t need Elemak to guide us there. Yesterday I found a route down the mountain. It isn’t easy, but we can do it.”

“We?”

“You and Sevet and me.”

Obring looked over at where their baby, Vasnya, lay sleeping. “Carrying a baby? In the middle of the night?”

“There’s a moon and I know the way,” said Vas. “And we’re not bringing the baby.”

“Not bringing the—”

“Don’t get stupid on me, Obring—give it a little thought. Our purpose isn’t to get away from the group, our purpose is to get the whole group to give up the expedition. We aren’t doing this for ourselves, we’re doing it for
them,
to save them from themselves—from the Oversoul’s absurd plans. We’re going to Dorova so they
have
to follow us. We couldn’t take babies with us, because they’d slow us down and they might suffer from the journey. So we leave them behind. Then they have to bring Vasnya to me and Sevet, and they have to bring Kokor and Krassya to
you.
Only
they
take the long way round, so the babies are safe.”

“That makes … a kind of sense,” said Obring.

“How kind of you to say so,” said Vas.

“So if Nafai comes back without meat, we leave that night?”

“Are you such a fool you believe they’ll keep their agreement?” asked Vas. “No, they’ll find some other excuse to go on—putting our children at risk, taking us farther and farther from our last hope of a decent life. No, Briya, my friend, we wait for nothing. We force their hand before Nafai and the Oversoul have a chance to pull another trick.”

“So . . . when do we leave? After supper?”

“They’d notice it and follow us and stop us immediately,” said Vas. “So tonight I’ll volunteer for last watch and you volunteer for the late watch. A while into my watch, I’ll get Sevet up and then scratch the tent for you. Kokor will think you’re merely getting up to take your watch and she’ll go right back to sleep. There’s a good moon tonight—we’ll be hours on our way before anybody else wakes up.”

Obring nodded. “Sounds good.” Then he looked at Sevet. Her expression was as impenetrable as ever. He wanted to get past that mask, just a little, and so he said, “But won’t your teats get sore, leaving the baby behind when you’re nursing?”

“Hushidh produces enough milk for four babies,” said Sevet. “It’s what she was born for.”

Her words were hardly tender, but at least she had spoken. “Count me in,” said Obring.

Then he had a second thought. A doubt about Vas’s motive. “But why
me?
”

“Because you’re not one of
them,”
he said. “You don’t care about the Oversoul, you hate this life, and you’re not caught up in some foolish notion of family loyalty. Who else could I get? If Sevet and I did this alone, they might decide to keep our baby and go on. We needed somebody else with us, to split another family, and who was there besides you? The only other unconnected people are Zdorab and Shedemei, who don’t have a baby so they do us no good at all, and Hushidh and Luet, and they’re thicker with the Oversoul than anybody else. Oh, and Dol, of
course, but she’s so besotted with Mebbekew, God knows why, and such a lazy coward anyway, that she wouldn’t come with us and we wouldn’t want her if she would. That leaves
you,
Obring. And believe me, I’m asking you only because you’re a little less repugnant to me than Dolya.”

Now
that
was a motive that Obring could believe. “I’m in, then,” he said.

Shedemei waited until she saw Zdorab head for Volemak’s tent. He would be borrowing the Index, of course—with no cooking allowed these days, he had more free time for study. So she excused herself from the group washing clothes, asking Hushidh to pick up Zdorab’s and her laundry from the shrubs when it was dry. When Zdorab came through the door of the tent, the Index carefully tucked under his arm, Shedemei was waiting for him.

“Did you want to be alone?” Zdorab asked.

“I wanted to talk to
you,
” said Shedemei.

Zdorab sat down, then set the Index aside so she wouldn’t think he was impatient to use it—though of course she knew that he was.

“Dorova is our last chance,” said Shedemei. “To return to civilization.”

Zdorab nodded—not agreement, only a sign that he understood.

“Zodya, we don’t belong here,” she said. “We’re not part of this. It’s a life of endless servitude for you, a life in which all my work is wasted. We’ve done it for a year—we’ve served well. The reason for your oath to Nafai was to keep you from giving the alarm in Basilica back when it would have meant soldiers capturing him if you returned to the city. Well, that’s hardly likely to happen
now,
don’t you think?”

“I don’t stay here because of my oath, Shedya.”

“I know,” she said, and then, despite herself, her tears came.

“Do you think I don’t see how you suffer here?” he said. “We thought that having the outward form of marriage
would be enough for you, but it isn’t. You want to belong, and you can’t do that as long as you don’t have a child.”

It made her furious, to hear him analyze her that way—clearly he had been watching and deciding what her “problem” was, and he was wrong. Or at least he was only half right. “It isn’t about
belonging
,” she said angrily. “It’s about
life
. I’m nobody here—I’m not a scientist, I’m not a mother, I’m not even a good
servant
like you, I can’t plumb the depths of the Index because its voice isn’t as clear to me—I find myself echoing
your
wisdom when I talk to others because nobody can even
understand
the things
I
know—and when I see the others with their babies I want one of my own, I’m
hungry
for one, not so I can be like
them
but because I want to be part of the net of life, I want to pass my genes on, to see a child grow with a face half-mine. Can’t you understand that? I’m not reproductively handicapped like you, I’m cut off from my own biological identity because I’m trapped here in this company and if I don’t get out I’ll die and I will have made
no difference in the world.”

Silence was thick in the air in their tent when she was done with her impassioned speech. What is he thinking? What does he think of me? I’ve hurt him, I know—I’ve told him that I hate being married to him, which is not true really, because he is my true friend—who else in all my life have I been able to pour out my heart to, until him?

“I shouldn’t have spoken,” she said in a whisper. “But I saw the lights of the city, and I thought—we could both return to a world that values us.”

“That
world didn’t value me any more than this one,” said Zdorab. “And you forget—how can I ever leave the Index?”

Didn’t he understand what she was proposing? “Take it,” she said. “We can take the Index and hurry around the bay. We have no children to slow us down. They can’t catch us. With the Index you will have knowledge to sell as surely as I have—we can buy our way out of Dorova
and back to the wide world in the north before they can get this caravan back north to chase us.
They
don’t
need
the Index—don’t you see how Luet and Nafai and Volemak and Hushidh all talk to the Oversoul without the help of the Index?”

“They don’t
really
need it, and so we aren’t
really
thieves for taking it,” said Zdorab.

“Yes of course we’re really thieves,” said Shedemei. “But thieves who steal from those who don’t need what they’re taking can live with their crime a little more easily than thieves who take bread from the mouths of the poor.”

“I don’t know that it’s the magnitude of the crime that decides whether the criminal can live with it,” said Zdorab. “I think it’s the natural goodness of the person who commits the crime. Murderers often live with their murders more easily than honest men live with a small lie.”

“And you’re so honest ...”

“Yes, I am,” said Zdorab. “And so are you.”

“We’re both living a lie every day we spend with this company.” It was a terrible thing to say, and yet she was so desperate for change, for
something
to change, that she hurled at him everything that came to mind.

“Are we? Is it a very big lie?” Zdorab seemed not so much hurt as . . . thoughtful. Pondering. “Hushidh mentioned to me the other day that you and I are among the very closest bondings in this caravan. We talk about everything. We have immense respect for each other. We
love
each other—that’s what she saw, and I believe her. It
is
true, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” whispered Shedemei.

“So what is the lie? The lie is that I’m your partner in reproduction. That’s all. And if that lie became the truth, and there were a child in your belly, you would be whole, wouldn’t you? The lie would no longer tear at your heart, because you would
be
what now you only seem—a wife—and you could become a part of that net of life.”

She studied his face, trying to find mockery in it, but there was none. “
Can
you?”

“I don’t know. I was never interested enough to try, and even if I had been, I would have had no willing partner. But—if I can find some small satisfactions from my own imagining, by myself, then why couldn’t I—give a gift of love to my dearest friend? Not because
I
desire it but because
she
desires it so much?”

“Out of pity,” she said.

“Out of love,” he said. “More love than these other men who jump their wives every night out of a desire no deeper than the scratching of an itch, or the voiding of a bladder.”

What he was offering—to father a child in her—was something she had never considered as a possibility. Wasn’t his condition his destiny?

“Doesn’t love show its face,” he went on, “when it satisfies the need of the loved one, for that loved one’s sake alone? Which of these husbands can claim
that?
”

“But isn’t a woman’s body—repulsive to you?”

“To some, perhaps. Most of us, though, are simply . . . indifferent. The way ordinary men are toward other men. But I can tell you things to do that can awaken desire; I can perhaps imagine other partners out of my past, if you will forgive me for such . . . disloyalty … in the cause of giving you a child.”

“But Zdorab. I don’t want you to give
me
a child,” she said. She was uncertain how to say this, since the idea had only just come to her, but the words came out clearly enough. “I want
us
to have a child.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I mean, too. I’ll be a father to our child—I won’t have to pretend to do
that.
My condition is not, strictly speaking, hereditary. If we have a son, he’ll not necessarily be . . . like me.”

“Ah, Zodya,” she said, “don’t you know that in so many ways I want our sons to be
just
like you?”

“Sons?” he said. “Don’t try to net your fish before you reach the sea, my dear Shedya. We don’t know if we can do this even once, let alone often enough to conceive a single child. It may be so awful for both of us that we never try again.”

“But you
will
try the once?”

“I will try until we succeed, or until you tell me to stop trying.” He leaned toward her and kissed her cheek. “The hardest thing for me may well be this: That in my heart, I think of you as my dearest sister. Coupling with you might feel like incest.”

“Oh, do try not to feel
that
way,” she said. “The only problems we’ll have with that are when a child of Luet’s falls in love with a child of Hushidh’s—double first cousins! You and I are genetically remote.”

“And yet so close to each other,” he said. “Help me do this for you. If we can do it, it will bring us so much joy. And running away, stealing from our friends, parting from each other, defying the Oversoul—what joy could that ever bring? This is the best way, Shedya. Stay with me.”

Nafai found the wood easily enough—the Oversoul did have a fair idea of what kinds of vegetation grew where in this area, and of course knew perfectly well which woods were chosen by the bowmakers of different cities and cultures. What the Oversoul could
not
do was give Nafai any skill with his hands. Not that Nafai was unusually clumsy. It was just that he had never worked with wood, or with knives, really, except for gutting and flaying game. He spoiled two potential bows, and now it was coming on evening and he hadn’t even begun to make arrows, the bow was causing him such grief.

You can’t acquire in an hour a skill that others take a lifetime to develop.

Was it the Oversoul speaking in his mind when this thought came? Or was it the voice of despair?

Nafai sat on a flat rock, despondent. He had his third piece of bow-wood across his knees, his knife in hand, freshly whetted and sharp. But he knew little more now about working with wood than he did at the start—all he had was a catalog of ways that knives could slip and ruin wood, or that wood would split in the wrong places or at the wrong angle. He had not been more frustrated since
the time when the Oversoul put Father’s dream into his mind and it nearly drove him mad.

Thinking back to that time made him shudder. But then, thinking about it, he realized that it might also be a way to . . .

“Oversoul,” he whispered. “There are master bowmakers in this world. Right now, this very moment, there is a bowmaker whittling a piece of wood to shape it properly.”

〈None with tools as primitive as yours,〉 said the Oversoul in his mind.

“Then find one and fill him with the idea of whittling one with a simple knife. Then put his thoughts, his movements, into my mind. Let me have the feeling of it.”