Earthborn Page 4

  But he would never fly. He would only sit on the roof and brood while others danced in the air.

  "You know, it could be worse."

  He turned and grimaced at his sister. Edhadeya was the only one he had ever told about his yearning for wings. To her credit, she had never told anyone else; but when they were alone together, she teased him mercilessly.

  "There are those who envy you, Mon. The king's son, tall and strong, a mighty warrior is what they say you'll be."

  "Nobody knows from the height of the boy how tall the man will be," said Mon. "And I'm the king's second son. Anybody who envies me is a fool."

  "It could be worse," said Edhadeya.

  "So you said."

  "You could be the king's daughter." There was a note of wistfulness in Edhadeya's voice.

  "Oh, well, if you have to be a girl at all, you might as well be the daughter of the queen," said Mon.

  "Our mother is dead, you might remember. The queen today is Dudagu poopwad, and don't you dare forget it for a moment." The childish term poopwad was translated as the much harsher dermo in the ancient language of the kings, so that the children got a great deal of pleasure from calling their stepmother Dudagu Dermo.

  "Oh, that doesn't mean anything," said Mon, "except that poor little Khimin is hopelessly ugly compared to all the rest of Father's children." The five-year-old was Dudagu's eldest and, so far, only child, and though she was constantly wangling to have him named Ha-Khimin in place of Ha-Aron, there was no chance that either Father or the people would stand for replacing Aronha. Mon's and Edhadeya's older brother was twelve years old and already had enough of his manheight for people to see he would be a mighty soldier in battle. And he was a natural leader, everyone saw it. Even now, if there was a call to war there was no doubt that Father would put a company of soldiers under Aronha's command, and those soldiers would proudly serve under the boy who would be king. Mon saw the way others looked at his brother, heard how they spoke of him, and he burned inside. Why did Father continue having sons after Mother gave him the perfect one first?

  The problem was that it was impossible to hate Aronha. The very qualities that made him such a good leader at age twelve also made his brothers and sister love him, too. He never bullied. He rarely teased. He always helped and encouraged them. He was patient with Mon's moodiness and Edhadeya's temper and Ominer's snottiness. He was even kind to Khimin, even though he had to be aware of Dudagu's schemes to put her son in Aronha's place. The result, of course, was that Khimin worshipped Aronha. Edhadeya speculated once that perhaps that was Aronha's plan-to make all his siblings love him desperately so they wouldn't be plotting against him. "Then the moment he succeeds to the throne-snip, snap, our throats are cut or our necks are broken."

  Edhadeya only said that because she had been reading family history. It wasn't always nice. In fact, the first nice king in many generations had been Father's grandfather, the first Motiak, the one who left the land of Nafai to join with the people of Darakemba. The earlier ones were all bloody-handed tyrants. But maybe that was how it had to be back then, when the Nafai lived in constant warfare. For their survival they couldn't afford to let there be any disputed successions, any civil wars. So new kings more than once put their siblings to death, along with nieces and nephews and, once, one of them killed his own mother because... well, it was impossible to guess why those ancient people did all those terrible things. But old Bego loved telling those stories, and he always ended them with some reference to the fact that the sky people never did such things when they ruled themselves. "The coming of humans was the beginning of evil among the sky people," he said once.

  To which Aronha had replied, "Ah, so you called the earth people devils as a little jest? Teasing them, I suppose?"

  Bego, as always, took Aronha's impertinence calmly. "We didn't let the earth people dwell among us, and set them up as our kings. So their evil could never infect us. It remained outside us, because sky people and devils never dwelt together."

  If we had never dwelt together, thought Mon, perhaps I wouldn't spend my days wishing I could fly. Perhaps I would be content to walk along the surface of the earth like a lizard or a snake.

  "Don't get so serious about it," said Edhadeya. "Aronha won't cut anybody's throat."

  "I know," said Mon. "I know you were just teasing."

  Edhadeya sat beside him. "Mon, do you believe those old stories about our ancestors? About Nafai and Luet? How they could talk to the Oversoul? How Hushidh could look at people and see how they connected together?"

  Mon shrugged. "Maybe it's true."

  "Issib and his flying chair, and how he could sometimes fly, too, as long as he was in the land of Pristan."

  "I wish it were true."

  "And the magic ball, that you could hold in your hands and ask it questions and it would answer you."

  Edhadeya was clearly caught up in her own reverie. Mon didn't look at her, just watched the last of the sun disappear above the distant river. The sparkling of the river also ended when the sun was gone.

  "Mon, do you think Father has that ball? The Index?"

  "I don't know," said Mon.

  "Do you think when Aronha turns thirteen and he gets brought into the secrets, Father will show him the Index? And maybe Issib's chair?"

  "Where would he hide something like that?"

  Edhadeya shook her head. "I don't know. I'm just wondering why, if they had those wonderful things, we don't have them, anymore."

  "Maybe we do."

  "Do you think?" Edhadeya suddenly grew animated. "Mon, do you think that sometimes dreams are true? Because I keep dreaming the same dream. Every night, sometimes twice a night, three times. It feels so real, not like my other dreams. But I'm not a priest or anything. They don't talk to women anyway. If Mother were alive I could ask her, but I'm not going to Dudagu Dermo."

  "I know less than anybody," said Mon.

  "I know," said Edhadeya.

  "Thanks."

  "You know less, so you listen more."

  Mon blushed.

  "Can I tell you my dream?"

  He nodded.

  "I saw a little boy. Ominer's age. And he had a sister the same age as Khimin."

  "You find out people's ages in your dreams?" asked Mon.

  "Hush, woodenhead. They were working in the fields. And they were being beaten. Their parents and all the other people. Starved and beaten. They were so hungry. And the people who were whipping them were diggers. Earth people, I mean."

  Mon thought about this. "Father would never let diggers rule over us."

  "But it wasn't us, don't you see? They were so real. I saw the boy getting beaten once. But not by diggers, it was by human boys who ruled over the diggers."

  "Elemaki," murmured Mon. The evil humans who had joined with the diggers and lived in their dank caves and ate the sky people they kidnapped and murdered.

  "The boys were bigger than him. He was hungry and so they tormented him by shoving more food than he could swallow into his mouth until he choked and gagged, and then they rubbed fruit and crumbs all over him and rolled him in the mud and grass so nobody could eat it. It was horrible, and he was so brave and never cried out against them, he just took it with such dignity and I cried for him."

  "In the dream?"

  "No, when I woke up. I wake up crying. I wake up saying, ‘We've got to help them. We've got to find them and bring them home.' "

  "We?"

  "Father, I suppose. Us. The Nafari. Because I think those pedple are Nafari."

  "So why don't they send sky people to find us and ask us for help? That's what people do, when the Elemaki are attacking them."

  Edhadeya thought about this. "You know something, Mon? There wasn't a single angel among them."

  Mon turned to her then. "No sky people at all?"

  "Maybe the diggers killed them all."

  "Don't you remember?" he asked. "The people who left back in the days of Father's grandfather? The ones who h
ated Darakemba and wanted to go back and possess the land of Nafai again?"

  "Zef... ."

  "Zenif," said Mon. "They said it was wrong for humans and sky people to live together. They didn't take a single angel with them. It's them. They're the ones you dreamed of."

  "But they were all killed."

  "We don't know that. We just know that we never heard from them again." Mon nodded. "They must still be alive."

  "So you think it's a real dream?" asked Edhadeya. "Like the ones Luet had?"

  Mon shrugged. Something bothered him. "Your dream," he said. "I don't think it's exactly about the Zenifi. I mean ... it just doesn't feel complete. I think it's someone else."

  "Well, how can you know that?" she said. "You're the one who thought it was the Zenifi."

  "And it felt right when I said it. But now... now there's just something wrong with it. But you've got to tell Father."

  "You tell him," she said. "You'll see him at dinner."

  "And you when he comes to say goodnight."

  Edhadeya grimaced. "Dudagu Dermo is always there. I never see Father alone."

  Mon blushed. "That isn't right of Father."

  "Yes, well, you're the one who always knows what's right." She punched him in the arm.

  "I'll tell him your dream at dinner."

  "Tell him it was your dream."

  Mon shook his head. "I don't lie."

  "He won't listen if he thinks it's a woman's dream. All the other men at dinner will laugh."

  "I won't tell him whose dream it is until I'm done. How's that?"

  "Tell him this, too. In the last few dreams, the boy and his sister and his mother and father, they lie there in silence looking at me, saying nothing, just lie there in the darkness and without their saying a word I know they're pleading with me to come and save them."

  "You?"

  "Well, me in the dream. I don't think that the real people - if there are any real people - would be sitting there hoping for a ten-year-old girl to come and deliver them."

  "I wonder if Father will let Aronha go."

  "Do you think he'll really send somebody?"

  Mon shrugged. "It's dark. It's time for dinner soon. Listen."

  From the trees near the river, from the high, narrow houses of the sky people, the evening song arose, a few voices at first, then joined by more and more. Their high, lilting melodies intertwined, played with each other, madly inventing, challenging, resolving dissonance and then subverting expected harmonies, a haunting sound that recalled an earlier time when life for the sky people was a short span of years that had to be enjoyed in the moment, for death was always near. The children stopped their playing and began drifting downward from the sky, going home to supper, to their singing mothers and fathers, to homes filled with music as once the thatched shelters of the angels had filled with song in the high reaches of the trees.

  Tears came unbidden to Mon's eyes. This was why he spent the moment of evening song alone, for he would be teased about the tears if others saw them. Not Edhadeya, though.

  Edhadeya kissed Mon's cheek. "Thank you for believing me, Mon. Sometimes I think I might as well be a stump, for all that anybody listens to me."

  Mon blushed again. When he turned around, she was already going down the ladder to the ground. He should go with her, of course, but now the human voices were beginning to join in the song, and so he could not go. From the windows of the great houses, the human servants and, in the streets, the fieldworkers and the great men of the city sang, each voice with as much right to be heard in the evening song as any other. In some cities, human kings decreed that their human subjects must sing a certain song, usually with words that spoke of patriotism or dutiful worship of the king or the official gods. But in Darakemba the old ways of the Nafari were kept, and the humans made up their own melodies as freely as the angels did. The voices of the middle people were lower, slower, less deft in making rapid changes. But they did their best, and the sky people accepted their song and played with it, danced around it, decorated and subverted and fulfilled it, so that middle people and sky people together were a choir in a continuous astonishing cantata with ten thousand composers and no soloists.

  Mon raised his own voice, high and sweet-so high that he did not have to sing among the low human voices, he could take a place in the bottom reaches of the sky people's song. From the street, a woman of the fields looked up at him and smiled. Mon answered her, not with a smile, but with a rapid run, his best. And when she laughed and nodded and walked on, he felt good. Then he raised his eyes and saw, on the roof of a house two streets over, two young sky people who had perched there for a moment on their way home. They watched him, and Mon defiantly sang louder, though he knew his voice, high and quick as it was, was no match for the singing of the sky people. Still, they heard him, they sang with him for a moment, and then they raised their left wings in salute to him. They must be twins, thought Mon, self and oth-erself, yet they took a moment to open their duet to include me. He raised his own left hand in answer, and they dropped down from the roof into the courtyard of their own house.

  Mon got up and, still singing, walked to the ladder. If he were an angel, he wouldn't have to use a ladder to climb down from the roof of the king's house. He could swoop down and come to rest before the door, and when dinner was over he could fly up into the night sky and go hunting by moonlight.

  His bare feet slapped against the rungs as he skimmed down the ladder. Keeper of Earth, why did you make me human? He sang as he walked through the courtyard of the king's house, heading for the raucous brotherhood of the king's table, but there was pain and loneliness in his song.

  Shedemei woke up in her chamber in the starship Basilica, and saw at once that it wasn't one of her scheduled wakings. The calendar was all wrong, and to confirm it, she heard at once the voice of the Over-soul in her mind. "The Keeper is sending dreams again."

  She felt a thrill of excitement run through her. For all these centuries, dipping into and out of life, kept young by the cloak of the starmaster but long since old and weary in her heart, she had waited to see what the Keeper's next move would be. She brought us here, thought Shedemei, brought us here and kept us alive and sent us dreams, and then suddenly she fell silent and we were left to our own devices for so long.

  "It was an old man first, among the Zenifi," said the Oversoul. Shedemei padded naked along the corridors of the ship and then up the central shaft to the library. "They murdered him. But a priest named Akmaro believed him. I think he also had some dreams, but I'm not sure. With the old man dead and the ex-priest living in slavery, I wouldn't have woken you. But then the daughter of Motiak dreamed. Like Luet. I haven't seen a dreamer like this since Luet."

  "What's her name? She was just a newborn when I... ."

  "Edhadeya. The women call her Deya. They know she's something but the men don't listen, of course."

  "I really don't like the way things have developed between men and women among the Nafari, you know. My great-great-granddaughters shouldn't have to put up with such nonsense."

  "I've seen worse," said the Oversoul.

  "I have no doubt of that. But, forgive me for asking: So what?"

  "It will change," the Oversoul said. "It always does."

  "How old is she now? Deya?"

  "Ten."

  "I sleep ten years and I still don't feel rested." She sat down at one of the library computers. "All right, show me what I need to see."

  The Oversoul showed her Edhadeya's dream and told her about Mon and his truthsense.

  "Well," said Shedemei, "the powers of the parents are undimin-ished in the children."

  "Shedemei, does any of this make sense to you?"

  Shedemei almost laughed aloud. "Do you hear yourself, my friend? You are the program that posed as a god back on the planet Harmony.

  You planned your plans, you plotted your plots, and you never asked humans for advice. Instead you roped us in and dragged us to Earth transformed our
lives forever and now you ask me if any of this makes sense? What happened to the master plan?"

  "My plan was simple," said the Oversoul. "Get back to Earth and ask the Keeper what I should do about the weakening power of the Oversoul of Harmony. I fulfilled that plan as far as I could. Here I am."

  "And here I am."

  "Don't you see, Shedemei? Your being here wasn't my plan. I needed human help to assemble one workable starship, but I didn't need to take any humans with me. I brought you because the Keeper of Earth was somehow sending you dreams-and sending them faster than light, I might add. The Keeper seemed to want you humans here. So I brought you. And I came, expecting to find technological marvels waiting for me. Machines that could repair me, replenish me, send me back to Harmony able to restore the power of the Oversoul. Instead I wait here, I've waited nearly five hundred years-"

  "As have I," added Shedemei.

  "You've slept through most of them," said the Oversoul. "And you don't have responsibility for a planet a hundred lightyears distant where technology is beginning to blossom and devastating wars are only a few generations away. I don't have time for this. Except that if the Keeper thinks I have time for it, I probably do. Why doesn't the Keeper talk to me? When no one was hearing anything for all these years, I could be patient. But now humans are dreaming again, the Keeper is on the move again, and yet still it says nothing to me."

  "And you ask me?" said Shedemei. "You're the one who should have memories dating back to the time when you were created. The Keeper sent you, right? Where was it then? What was it then?"

  "I don't know." If a computer could shrug, Shedemei imagined the Oversoul would do it now. "Do you think I haven't searched my memory? Before your husband died, he helped me search, and we found nothing. I remember the Keeper always being present, I remember knowing that certain vital instructions had been programmed into me by the Keeper-but as to who or what the Keeper is or was or even might have been, I know as little as you."