Earthborn (Homecoming) Read online

  “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 otherself, 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 Oversoul 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 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 know? 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 undiminished 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 th
at 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.”

  “Fascinating,” said Shedemei. “Let’s see if we can think of a way to get the Keeper to talk to you. Or at least to show her hand.”

  Mon was seated, as usual, down at the stewards’ end of the table. His father told him that the king’s second son was placed there in order to show respect for the record-keepers and message-bearers and treasurers and provisioners, for, as Father said, “If it weren’t for them, there’d be no kingdom for the soldiers to protect.”

  When Father said that, Mon had answered, in his most neutral voice, “But if you really want to show your respect for them, you’d place Ha-Aron among them.”

  To which Father mildly replied, “If it weren’t for the army, all the stewards would be dead.”

  So Mon, the second son, was all that the second rank of leaders in the kingdom merited; the first son was the honor of the first rank, the military men, the people who really mattered.

  And that was how the business of dinner was conducted, too. The King’s Supper had begun many generations ago as a council of war—that was when women began to be excluded. In those days it was only once a week that the council ate together, but for generations now it had been every night, and human men of wealth and standing imitated the king in their own homes, dining separately from their wives and daughters. It wasn’t that way among the sky people, though. Even those who shared the king’s table went home and sat with their wives and children for another meal.

  Which was why, sitting at Mon’s left hand, the chief clerk, the old angel named bGo, was barely picking at his food. It was well known that bGo’s wife became quite miffed if he showed no appetite at her table, and Father had always refused to be offended that bGo apparently feared his wife more than he feared the king. bGo was senior among the clerks, though as head of the census he was certainly not as powerful as the treasuremaster and the provisioner. He was also a surly conversationalist and Mon hated having to sit with him.

  Beyond bGo, though, his otherself, Bego, was far more talkative—and had a much sturdier appetite, mostly because he had never married. Bego, the recordkeeper, was only a minute and a half less senior than bGo, but one would hardly imagine they were the same age, Bego had so much energy, so much vigor, so much . . . so much anger, Mon thought sometimes. Mon loved school whenever Bego was their tutor, but he sometimes wondered if Father really knew how much rage seethed under the surface of his recordkeeper. Not disloyalty—Mon would report that at once. Just a sort of general anger at life. Aronha said it was because he had never once mated with a female in his life, but then Aronha had sex on the brain these days and thought that lust explained everything—which, in the case of Aronha and all his friends, was no doubt true. Mon didn’t know why Bego was so angry. He just knew that it put a delicious skeptical edge on all of Bego’s lessons. And even on his eating. A sort of savagery in the way he lifted the panbread rolled up with bean paste to his lips and bit down on it. The way he ground the food in his jaws when he chewed, slowly, methodically, glaring out at the rest of the court.

  On Mon’s right, the treasuremaster and the provisioner were caught up in their own business conversation—quietly, of course, so as not to distract from the real meeting going on at the king’s end of the table, where the soldiers were regaling each other with anecdotes from recent raids and skirmishes. Being adult humans, the treasuremaster and provisioner were much taller than Mon and generally ignored him after the initial courtesies. Mon was more the height of the sky people to his left, and besides, he knew Bego better, and so when he talked at all, it was to them.

  “I have something I want to tell Father,” said Mon to Bego.

  Bego chewed twice more and swallowed, fixing Mon with his weary gaze all the while. “Then tell him,” he said.

  “Exactly,” murmured bGo.

  “It’s a dream,” said Mon.

  “Then tell your mother,” said Bego. “Middle women still pay attention to such things.”

  “Right,” murmured bGo.

  “But it’s a true dream,” said Mon.

  bGo sat up straight. “And how would you know that.”

  Mon shrugged. “I know it.”

  bGo turned to Bego, who turned to him. They gazed at each other, as if some silent communication were passing between them. Then Bego turned back to Mon. “Be careful about making claims like that.”

  “I am,” said Mon. “Only when I’m sure. Only when it matters.”

  That was something Bego had taught them in school, about making judgments. “Whenever you can get away with making no decision at all, then that’s what you should do. Make decisions only when you’re sure, and only when it matters.” Bego nodded now, to hear Mon repeat his precept back to him.

  “If he believes me, then it’s a matter for the war council,” said Mon.

  Bego studied him. bGo did, too, for a moment, but then rolled his eyes and slumped back in his chair. “I feel an embarrassing scene coming on,” he murmured.

  “Embarrassing only if the prince is a fool,” said Bego. “Are you?”

  “No,” said Mon. “Not about this, anyway.” Even as he said it, though, Mon wondered if in fact he was a fool. After all, it was Edhadeya’s dream, not his own. And there was something about his interpretation of it that made him uneasy. Yet one thing was certain: It was a true dream, and it meant that somewhere humans—Nafari humans—lived in painful bondage under the whips of Elemaki diggers.

  Bego waited for another moment, as if to be sure that Mon wasn’t going to back down. Then he raised his left wing. “Father Motiak,” he said loudly.

  His abrasive voice cut through the noisy conversation at the military end of the table. Monush, for many years the mightiest warrior in the kingdom, the man for whom Mon had been named, was interrupted in the middle of a story. Mon winced. Couldn’t Bego have waited for a natural lull in the conversation?

  Father’s normally benign expression did not change. “Bego, the memory of my people, what do you have to say during the war council?” His words held a bit of menace, but his voice was calm and kind, as always.

  “While the soldiers are still at table,” said Bego, “one of the worthies of your kingdom has information that, if you choose to heed it, will be a matter for a council of war.”

  “And who is this worthy? What is his information?” asked Father.

  “He sits beside my otherself,” said Bego, “and he can give you his information for himself.”

  All eyes turned to Mon, and for a moment he wanted to turn and flee from the room. Had Edhadeya realized how awful this moment would be, when she asked him to do this? But Mon knew he could not shrink from this now—to back down would humiliate Bego and shame hi
mself. Even if his message was disbelieved, he had to give it—and boldly, too.

  Mon rose to his feet, and, as he had seen his father do before speaking, he looked each of the leading men of the kingdom in the eyes. In their faces he saw surprise, amusement, deliberate patience. Last of all he looked at Aronha, and to his relief, he saw that Aronha looked serious and interested, not teasing or embarrassed. Aronha, thank you for giving me respect.

  “My information comes from a true dream,” Mon said at last.

  There was a murmur around the table. Who had dared to claim a true dream in many generations? And at the king’s table?

  “How do you know it’s a true dream?” asked Father.

  It was something Mon had never been able to explain to anyone or even to himself. He didn’t try now. “It’s a true dream,” he said.

  Again there was a whisper around the table, and while some of the impatient faces changed to amusement, some that had been amused now looked serious.

  “At least they’re paying attention,” murmured bGo.

  Father spoke again, a hint of consternation in his voice. “Tell us the dream, then, and why it’s a matter for the council of war.”

  “The same dream over and over for many nights,” said Mon. He was careful to give no hint of who the dreamer was. He knew they would assume that it was him, but no one would be able to call him a liar. “A little boy and his sister, the ages of Ominer and Khimin. They were working in the fields, as slaves, faint with hunger, and the taskmasters who whipped them at their work were earth people.”

  He had their attention now, all of them. Diggers with humans as slaves—it made all of them angry, though they all knew that it must happen from time to time.

  “One time in the dream the boy was beaten by human boys. Humans who ruled over the diggers. The boy was brave and never cried out as they . . . humiliated him. He was worthy.”

  The soldiers all nodded. They understood what he was saying.

  “At night the boy and his sister and his father and mother lay in silence. I think . . . I think they were forbidden to speak aloud. But they asked for help. They asked for someone to come and deliver them from bondage.”