Earthfall (Homecoming) Read online

  “Stupid.” Issib laughed at him. “You are dense, Nafai. You can’t have his respect precisely because you are worthy of it.”

  “I always hated paradoxes in school. I think they’re the conclusion that philosophers reach when—”

  “When they’ve given up on thinking, I know, it’s not the first time you’ve said it. But this isn’t a paradox. Elemak hates you because you’re his younger brother and he knows, he knows, that you have more of Father’s respect and love than he has. That’s why he hates you, because he knows that in Father’s eyes, you’re a better man than he is.”

  “I wish.”

  “You know it’s true. But if you gave it all up, if you surrendered everything to Elemak, if you gave up the cloak, if you repudiated the Oversoul, do you think he’d respect you then? Of course not, because then you really would be contemptible. Weak. A nothing.”

  “You’ve persuaded me. I’ll keep the cloak.”

  “The cloak is nothing. You’re already doing something far worse.”

  Nafai regarded him steadily. “Am I to understand that you’re really here trying to persuade me to keep your four oldest children awake during the voyage, teaching them, raising them for you, so that when you awake you’ll find them already grown?”

  “Not at all,” said Issib. “I’d hate that.”

  “Well, then, what is all this about?”

  “Keep them awake, but bring me awake too, sometimes. Once a year for a few weeks. Let me teach all the children computers, for instance. Nobody’s better at that than me.”

  “They won’t need computers in the new colony.”

  “Mathematics then. Surveying. Triangulation. I can read the same books as you and teach them just like you. Or were you planning on having an agricultural laboratory here? Forestry, perhaps? When were we going to bring the trees aboard?”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “You mean the Oversoul never thought of that.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Do it in shifts. Wake Luet up for a while, but then let her sleep again. Wake me, wake Hushidh. Wake Mother and Father. A few weeks at a time. We’ll see the children grow, then. We won’t miss it all. And when we reach Earth, they’ll be men and women. Ready to stand beside you against the others.”

  Nafai didn’t answer right away. “That’s not the way the Oversoul explained it to Luet.”

  “So, where is it engraved on stone that you have to do everything the Oversoul’s way? As long as you do what he wants, the methodology hardly matters, does it?”

  “Does Hushidh feel the same way?”

  “She might. In a while.”

  “I won’t take anyone’s child without their agreement.”

  “Really? And what about the children themselves? Going to ask them?”

  “I really ought to,” said Nafai. “I’ll think about this, Issib. Maybe this compromise will work.”

  “Good,” said Issib. “Because I think the Oversoul’s right. If we don’t do this, if we don’t give you strong young men and women to back you up, then when we get away from the starship, when the Oversoul’s influence weakens, you’ll be a dead man, and so will I.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Nafai.

  Issib rose up from the chair and leaned toward the door, then stepped lightly toward it, the floats bearing almost all of his weight. At the door he turned.

  “And something else,” said Issib.

  “What?” asked Nafai.

  “I know you better than you think.”

  “Do you?”

  “For instance, I know that the Oversoul talked to you about this whole thing long before Luet ever let anything slip.”

  “Really?”

  “And I know that you wanted it to happen all along. You just didn’t want it to be your idea. You wanted it to be us persuading you. That way we can never blame you later. Because you tried to talk us out of it.”

  “Am I really that clever?” asked Nafai.

  “Yes,” said Issib. “And I’m really clever enough to figure it all out.”

  “Well, then, I’m not so clever after all.”

  “Yes you are,” said Issib. “Because I really do want you to do it. And I never will be able to blame you if I don’t like the results. So it worked.”

  Nafai smiled wanly. “I wish you were completely right,” said Nafai.

  “Oh? And how am I wrong?”

  “I would rather, with all my heart, let all our children sleep through the voyage. Because I would rather have there be no division between us all in the new colony. Because I would rather make my brother Elemak the king of us all and let him rule over us, than to have him as my enemy.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Because he hates the Oversoul. And when we get to Earth, he’ll resist just as much whatever it is the Keeper of Earth wants us to do. He’ll end up destroying us all because of his stubbornness. He can’t be the ruler over us.”

  “I’m glad you understand that,” said Issib. “Because if you ever start to think that he ought to rule, that’s when he’ll destroy you.”

  Volemak, Rasa, Hushidh, Issib; and then at last Shedemei and Zdorab came to him, only an hour before they were all supposed to go to sleep for the voyage. “I don’t want to do it,” said Zdorab.

  “Then I won’t waken your children,” said Nafai. “I’m not sure yet that I’m going to waken anyone’s children.”

  “Oh, you are,” said Shedemei. “And you’re going to waken us, too, from time to time, to help teach them. That’s the deal.”

  “And when we get to Earth, and our children are all ten years older than Elya’s and Meb’s and Vasya’s and Briya’s, you’ll stand up to them with me? You’ll say, We thought it was a good idea? We asked him to do it?”

  “I’ll never say I thought it was a good idea,” said Zdorab. “But I’ll admit that I asked you to do it.”

  “Not good enough,” said Nafai. “If you don’t think it’s a good idea, why are you asking me to let your only two children take part in it?”

  “Because,” said Zdorab, “my son would never forgive me if he knew that he had a chance to reach Earth as a man, and I made him arrive there as a boy.”

  Nafai nodded. “That’s a good reason.”

  “But remember, Nafai,” said Zdorab. “The same thing goes for the other children. Do you think that when Elya’s boy Protchnu wakes up and finds that your younger son, Motya, is eight years older than him instead of two years younger, do you think that Protchnu will ever forgive you, or Motya either? This will cause hatred that will never be healed, generation after generation. They will always believe that something was stolen from them.”

  “And they’ll be right,” said Nafai. “But the thing that was stolen, it wasn’t taken away until they had already rejected it.”

  “They’ll never remember that.”

  “But will you?”

  Zdorab thought about it for a moment.

  “If he doesn’t,” said Shedemei, “I’ll remind him.”

  Zdorab smiled grimly at her. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.

  No matter who would be wakened later, all would be asleep for the launch itself. There was too much stress, too much pain to pass through it consciously. Instead they would be encased in foam inside their sleep chambers.

  Each couple put their own young children to bed, laying them into their suspended animation chambers, kissing them, then closing the lid and watching through the window until they drifted into the drugged sleep that began the process. There was some fear in the children, especially the older ones who understood something of what was going on, but there was also excitement, anticipation. “And when we wake up, we’ll be on Earth?” they asked, over and over. “Yes,” their parents said.

  Then Nafai took the parents to the control room and showed them the calendar with the midvoyage waking scheduled. “You’ll be able to check all your children and make sure that they’re sleeping safely,” Nafai assured
them.

  “Now I can sleep peacefully indeed,” Elemak answered with dry irony.

  Nafai watched them all go to sleep, one by one, and one by one he authorized the life support computers to drug them, surround them with foam, chill them until their bodies were barely alive at all. Then he, too, climbed into his chamber and drew the lid closed after him.

  No human being saw the ship rise silently into the air, a hundred meters, a thousand, until it was as high as the magnetics of the landing field could raise it. Then the launching rockets fired, blasting downward as the starship rose up into the night sky.

  Far away, on the other side of the narrow sea, travelers on the caravan road looked up and saw the shooting star. “But it’s rising,” said one of them. “No,” said another. “That’s just an illusion, because it’s coming toward us.”

  “No,” said the first again. “It’s rising into the sky. And it’s much too slow to be a shooting star.”

  “Really?” scoffed the other. “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said the first. “But I thank the Oversoul that we could see it.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because after millions of years, fool, there’s not a thing that any man can see that hasn’t been seen a hundred or a thousand or a million times before. But we’ve seen something that no one else has ever seen.”

  “You think.”

  “Yes, I think.”

  “And what good is it? To see something wondrous, and have no idea what it is you saw?”

  The starship Basilica rose higher, out of the gravity well of the planet Harmony. When it was far enough away, the rockets stopped. They would not be used again until it was time for the ship to land on another world. Instead, a web unfolded itself from the sides of the ship, made of strands so fine that they could not be seen were it not for the dazzle of light upon the wires when a molecule of hydrogen or some particle even smaller fell into the energy field the web generated. Then the shape of it could be seen, like a vast spiderweb, gathering the dust of space to fuel the onward progress of the starship. The Basilica began to accelerate, faster and faster, until Harmony was left behind, just another dot of light indistinguishable by the naked eye from any other. After forty million years, human beings had left the surface of this world, and, against all expectations, they were going home.

  Five

  The Eavesdropper

  The other children all supposed, upon waking, that they must have arrived at Earth. That’s what they had been told upon going to sleep in the suspended-animation chambers—when you wake up, it will be Earth.

  Oykib, however, already knew that he would be waking long before then. He was not surprised that instead of normal gravity, he seemed unbelievably light and strong, each step sending him bounding up to touch the ceiling. That’s the way it was in space, when instead of a planet to hold you down, you had only the acceleration of the ship. And if he had any doubts, they were dispelled by the fact that as Nafai and Luet gathered the children into the ship’s library—the largest open space in the starship, except for the centrifuge—Oykib could hear the faint murmurings of the Oversoul to Nafai and Luet: This is a bad idea. Don’t give them a choice. Children that age are too young to decide something this important. Their parents have already agreed. If you tell them they have a choice when they really don’t, they’ll only hate you for it. And so on, and so on.

  Oykib had been hearing scraps of conversation like this since earliest childhood. He couldn’t remember a time without it. At first, though, it was like music, like wind, like the sound of waves for a child who grows up by the sea. He thought nothing of it, did not search for meaning in it. But gradually, by the time he was four or five, he began to realize that this background noise contained names; that there were ideas in it, ideas that later showed up in discussions among the adults.

  Though the voices were all in his mind, and therefore soundless, he began to associate certain ways of thinking with certain people. He began to notice that sometimes, when he was with Mother or Father, Nafai or Issib, Luet or Hushidh, the conversation that he heard most clearly was one that seemed appropriate to what they were talking about with someone else. He would see Luet trying to deal with a quarrel between Chveya and Dazya, for instance, and hear someone saying: Why won’t she hold her own with Dazya? Why does she back off like this? And someone else—the most constant voice, the strongest voice—saying, She’s holding her own, she’s doing fine, have patience, she doesn’t need to win openly as long as you assure her of your respect for her. Thus he knew that a particular passionate, intimate manner meant that he was hearing Luet; a cooler, calmer, but more uncertain way of thought belonged to Hushidh. The most matter-of-fact, impatient, argumentative voice was Nafai’s.

  Yet even so, he was young enough that he didn’t realize that he wasn’t supposed to be hearing these things. It first became clear to him because of the dreams, for that was one of the Oversoul’s most powerful ways of talking to people. One time when Oykib was a very little boy, Luet had come to the house to talk to Mother about a dream she had had. When she finished, Oykib had piped up and said, “I had that dream, too,” and then repeated the things that Luet had seen.

  Mother answered him then with a smile, but he knew that she didn’t believe that he had seen the same dream. The second time it happened, with a dream of Father’s, Mother took Oykib aside and gently explained to him that there was no need to pretend to have the same dreams as other people. It was better to tell only his own dreams.

  Oykib was bothered by not being believed, and the older he got, the more it bothered him. Why, with so much communication between these adults and the Oversoul, did they all assume that he, as a three-year-old, as a four-year-old, could not have had the same communication? Eventually he decided that the problem was that the dream really was sent to someone else—it was appropriate for their situation, and not at all appropriate for Oykib. Therefore, the adults knew that the Oversoul would never have sent such a dream to him, because it had nothing to do with his life. And in fact the Oversoul hadn’t sent the dream to him. The dreams and the background conversations were all real enough, but they were also not his own.

  He wondered: Why doesn’t the Oversoul have anything to say to me?

  By the time Oykib turned eight, he had long since learned to keep what he overheard to himself. He was naturally quiet and reserved, preferring to be silent in a large group, listening to everything, helping when he was needed. He understood far more than anyone thought he did, partly because he had grown up overhearing adult problems being discussed with an adult vocabulary, and partly because he could hear, along with the vocal conversation, scraps and snatches of internal dialogues as the Oversoul made suggestions, tried to influence mood, and occasionally attempted to distract someone from what they were thinking or doing. The trouble was that it always distracted Oykib, so that he could hardly have any thoughts of his own, so busy was his mind in trying to follow all that was going on around him. When he did open his mouth to speak, he could never be sure if he was responding to what had been said aloud, or to things that he understood only because of overhearing that which he really shouldn’t have been hearing.

  There was also another reason why Oykib said little. He had learned about privacy and secrets, and he knew people wouldn’t be happy if they ever guessed how much he knew. He suspected that it would make them angry to know that their most intimate thoughts, framed in their own minds where only the Oversoul could hear, were being heard and noted and stored away in the mind of a six-or seven-or eight-year-old boy.

  Sometimes, the burden of all these secrets was more than Oykib could bear. That was why he had begun having little talks with Yasai, his younger brother. He never told Yaya how he was learning the things he learned. Instead he always said things like, “I’ll bet that Luet is angry because of the way Hushidh never stops Dazya from bossing the younger children,” or “Father doesn’t really love Nafai more than everybody
else, it’s just that Nafai is the only one who understands what Father is doing and can help him to do it.” Oykib knew that Yaya was dazzled by how often Oykib’s “insights” turned out to be right, and that Yaya was also flattered to be included in his “wise” older brother’s confidence; sometimes it made him feel like a cheater, to let Yaya think that Oykib had simply figured things out. But he knew, without knowing why, that it was a bad idea to tell even Yaya about how all communication with the Oversoul spilled over into Oykib’s mind. Yaya was good about keeping secrets, but something that important was bound to slip out sometime.

  So Oykib kept his secrets to himself. The hardest time was a few months back, when Nafai went out to the mountains and broke through the perimeter and found the starships. Oykib heard some terrible, frightening things. Luet pleading for the Oversoul to protect her husband. The Oversoul urging someone else to be calm, be calm, don’t kill your brother, you don’t want to live with yourself afterward if you kill your brother. He understood the community well enough by then to know who it was who was planning to kill Nafai. Oykib longed to be able to do something, but he couldn’t; in fact, he was almost immobilized by the maelstrom of needs and hungers, shouts and demands, pleas and griefs. He was so frightened; he went to Mother and clung to her, and heard her say to Volemak, “See how the children pick up on things without understanding them?” He wanted to say, “I understand perfectly well that Elemak and Mebbekew are planning to kill Nafai and then rule over all of us—I know it because I’ve heard the Oversoul trying to get them to stop. I know that Luet is terrified and so are you, that Nafai might be killed. But I also know that the Oversoul is saying a torrent of things to Nafai, important things, beautiful things, only he’s so far away that I only catch glimmers of it, and I know that Nafai himself has no fear at all, he’s just excited, he keeps shouting inside himself, “Now I get it! So that’s it! Now I understand it! Yes!” But he could explain none of this. All he could do was cling to his mother until she had to push him away to get on with her work, and then talk it out with Yasai. “I think Elya and Meb are going to try to kill Nyef today, when he comes back,” he said, and Yaya’s eyes grew wide. “I think Nyef isn’t worried, though, because he’s become so strong that nobody can hurt him.”