The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

by Anissa Gray

  “Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I mean,” said Elemak. “We have plenty here. A good life. In many ways a better life than we would have had in Basilica, hard as that is for Obring to believe. We have families now—wives and children—and our lives are good. We work hard, but we’re happy, and there’s room for our children and our children’s children here for a thousand years and more. We have no enemies, we have no dangers beyond the normal mishaps of being alive. And you’re telling me that this is the disruption, while wasting our time trying to get into space is our normal course? Please, don’t insult our intelligence.”

  Elemak could sense easily enough who was with him in this. As he painted the true picture of what this all would mean, he could see Meb and Vas and Obring nodding grimly, and their wives would go along easily enough. Furthermore, he could see that he had put some doubt in the minds of some of the others. Zdorab and Shedemei especially had thoughtful expressions, and even Luet had glanced around at her children when Elemak spoke of how good their lives were, how they faced no danger, how they could have a good future here in Dostatok.

  “I don’t know what Nafai found, or if he found anything at all,” Elemak went on. “I honestly don’t care. Nyef is a good hunter and a bright fellow, but he’s hardly suited to lead us into some hideous danger using forty-million-year-old starships. My family and I are not going to let my little brother make us waste our time in the foolish pursuit of an impossible project. Nyef’s murder of Gaballufix forced us all to leave Basilica as fugitives—but I’ve forgiven him for that. I certainly won’t forgive him if he disrupts our lives again.”

  Elemak kept his expression calm, but inwardly it was all he could do to keep from smiling as he watched Luet’s feeble attempt to absolve her husband of guilt for Gaballufix’s murder. Her words didn’t matter—Elemak knew he had done the job thoroughly with the first blow. Nafai was discredited even before he returned. It was his fault we left the city; we forgive him for that; but nothing he says is going to change the way we live here. Elemak had provided the reasonable justification for total resistance to this latest maneuver by the women and their little male puppet. The proof of his success was the fact that neither Father nor Mother—nor anyone else, except Luet—was mounting any kind of defense, and she had been sidetracked onto the issue of why Nafai killed Gaballufix. The idea of starships and hidden lands was dead.

  Until Oykib walked out into the middle of the meeting area. “Shame on you all,” he said. “Shame on you!”

  They fell silent, except Rasa. “Okya, dear, this is an adult conversation.”

  “Shame on you, too. Have you all forgotten that we came here because of the Oversoul? Have you all forgotten that the reason we have such a perfect place to live is that the Oversoul prepared it for us? Have you forgotten that the only reason there weren’t already ten cities here was because the Oversoul kept other people away—except us? You, Elemak, could you have found this place? Would you have known to lead the family across the water and down the island to here?”

  “What do you know of this, little boy?” said Elemak scornfully, trying to wrench control back from this child.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Oykib. “None of you knew anything and none of us would have anything if the Oversoul hadn’t chosen us all and brought us here. I wasn’t even born when a lot of this happened, and I was a baby through most of the rest, so why do I remember, when you older ones—my older and wiser brothers and sisters, my parents—seem to have forgotten?”

  His high piping voice grated on Elemak’s nerves. What was going on here? He knew how to neutralize all the adults—he hadn’t counted on having to deal with Father’s and Rasa’s new spawn as well. “Sit down, child,” said Elemak. “You’re out of your depth.”

  “We’re all out of our depth,” said Luet. “But only Oykib seems to have remembered how to swim.”

  “No doubt you coached him on what to say,” said Elemak.

  “Oh, yes, exactly,” said Luet. “As if any of us knew in advance what you would say. Though we should have. I thought these matters were all settled long ago, but we should have known that you would never cease to be ambitious.”

  “Me!” shouted Elemak, leaping to his feet. “I’m not the one who staged this phony visit to an invisible city, which we know about only because of supposed reports from a metal ball that only you can interpret!”

  “If you would lay your hand on the Index,” said Father, “the Index would gladly speak to you.”

  “There’s nothing I want to hear from a computer,” said Elemak. “I tell you again, I will not put my family’s lives and happiness at risk because of supposed instructions from an invisible computer that these women persist in worshipping as a god!”

  Father rose to his feet. “I see that you are disposed to doubt,” he said. “Perhaps it was a mistake to share the good news with everyone. Perhaps we should have waited until Nafai came back, and we could all go to the place he found, and see what he has seen. But I thought that there should be no secrets among us, and so I insisted that we tell the story now, so no one could say later that they were not informed.”

  “A little late to try the honesty approach, isn’t it, Father?” asked Mebbekew. “You said yourself that when Nafai left day before yesterday, he was searching for this hidden place and he thought it was probably where the first humans disembarked from their starships. Yet you didn’t think of telling us all then, did you?”

  Father glanced at Rasa, and Elemak felt completely confirmed in his suspicions. The old man was dancing to the old lady’s tune. She had insisted it be kept secret before, and had probably counseled him against telling now, knowing her.

  Nevertheless, it was time for Elemak’s next move—he had to seize the high ground now that Oykib had undercut his previous position. “Let’s not be unfair,” said Elemak. “We’ve only heard about Nafai. We don’t have to decide anything or do anything yet. Let’s wait until he gets home, and see how we feel then.” Elemak turned to Oykib, who still stood in the middle of the group. “As for you, I’m proud that my next-to-last brother has such fire in him. You’re going to be a real man, Oykib, and when you grow old enough to understand the issues instead of blindly following what others tell you, your voice will be well listened to in council, I can assure you.”

  Oykib’s face reddened—with embarrassment, not anger. He was young enough to have heard only the clear praise and completely missed the subtle insult. Thus I wipe you out, too, Okya, dear brother, without your even realizing it.

  “I say this meeting is over,” said Elemak. “We’ll meet again when Nafai comes back, except, of course, for the little conspiratorial meetings in the Index House where all this was cooked up in the first place. I have no doubt that those meetings will continue unabated.” And with those words he put a sinister meaning into any kind of conversation that Rasa’s party entered into, thus deeply weakening them.

  These poor people—they thought they were so clever, until they actually came up against somebody who understood how power worked. And because it was Elemak who dismissed the meeting, and in effect announced the next one, he had gone a long way toward stripping Father of his leadership in Dostatok. The only test now was whether the meeting actually broke up with Elemak’s departure. If he walked away, but the meeting went on substantially intact, then Elemak would have a much tougher time establishing leadership—in fact, he would have lost ground today.

  But he needn’t have worried. Meb arose almost at once and, with Dol and their children in tow, followed him away from the meeting; Vas and Obring and their wives also got up, and then Zdorab and Shedemei. The meeting was over—and it was over because Elemak had said it was over.

  Round one for me, thought Elemak, and I’ll be surprised if that isn’t the whole match. Poor Nafai. Whatever you’re doing out in the woods, you’re going to come home and find all your plots and plans in disarray. Did you think you could really face me down from a distance and win?

/>   There was no writing anywhere, no sign, no instructions.

  〈No one needs instructions here. I am with you always in this place, showing you what you need to know.〉

  “And they were content with this?” asked Nafai. “All of them?” His voice was so loud in the silence of this place, as he scuffed along the dustless catwalks and corridors, making his way downward, downward into the earth.

  〈They knew me. They had made me, had programmed me. They knew what I could do. They thought of me as—their library, their all-purpose instruction manual, their second memory. In those days I knew only what they had taught me. Now I have forty million years of experience with human beings, and have reached my own conclusions. In those days I was much more dependent on them—I reflected back to them their own picture of the world.〉

  “And their picture—was it wrong?”

  〈They did not understand how much of their behavior was animal, not intellectual. They thought that they had overcome the beast in them, and that with my help all their descendants would drive out the beast in a few generations—or a few hundred, anyway. Their vision was long, but no human being can have that long a vision. Eventually the numbers, the dimensions of time, become meaningless.〉

  “But they built well,” said Nafai.

  〈Well but not perfectly. I have suffered forty million years of cosmic and nuclear radiation that has torn apart much of my memory. I have vast redundancy, and so in my data storage there has been no meaningful loss. Even in my programming, I have monitored all changes and corrected them. What I could not monitor was the area hidden from myself. So when the programs there decayed, I could not know it and could not compensate for it. I couldn’t copy those areas and restore them when any one copy decayed.〉

  “So they didn’t plan well at all,” said Nafai, “since those programs were at your very core.”

  〈You mustn’t judge them harshly. It never occurred to them that it would take even a million years for their children’s children to learn peace and be worthy to enter this place and learn all about advanced technologies. How could they guess that century after century, millennium after millennium, the humans of Harmony would never learn peace, would never cease trying to rule over one another by force or deception? I was never meant to keep this place closed off for even a million years, let alone forty million. So they built well indeed—the flaws and failures in my secret core were not fatal, were they? After all, you’re here, aren’t you?〉

  Nafai remembered his terror when he had had no air to breathe, and wasn’t sure that they hadn’t cut it all a little fine.

  “Where are you?” asked Nafai.

  〈All around you.〉

  Nafai looked, and saw nothing in particular.

  〈The sensors there, in the ceiling—those are how I see you right now, and hear you, besides my ways of seeing through your eyes, and hearing your words before you say them. Behind all these walls are bank after bank of static memory—all of that is my self. The machinery pumping air through these underground passages—they are also me.〉

  “Then why did you need me at all?” asked Nafai.

  〈You are the one who broke me out of my loop and opened up my vision to include my own heart, and you ask me that?〉

  “Why do you need me now?”

  〈I also need you—all of you—because the Keeper has sent you dreams. The Keeper wants you, and so I will bring you.〈

  “Why do you need me?” he asked, clarifying the question even further.

  〈Because my robots were all controlled by a place in my memory that has become completely untrustworthy. I have shut them down because they were reporting falsely to me. No one ship of these six has a fully uncorrupted memory. I need you to collect and test the memory in every part of the ships and bring good memory together until we have one perfect ship. I can’t do this myself—I have no hands.〉

  “So I’m here to replace broken machines.”

  〈And I need you to pilot the starship.〉

  “Don’t tell me you can’t do that yourself.”

  〈Your ancestors did not let their starships pass completely under the control of computers like me, Nafai. There must be a starmaster on every ship, to give command. I will carry out those commands, but the ship will be yours. I will be yours.〉

  “Not me,” said Nafai. “Father should do this.”

  〈Volemak didn’t come here. Volemak didn’t open this place.〉

  “He would have, if he’d known.”

  〈He knew what you knew. But you acted. These things are not accidental, Nafai. It isn’t coincidence that you are here and no one else is. If Volemak had found this place and forced his way in, risking his own life for the sake of coming here, then he would wear the cloak. Or Elemak, or Zdorab—whoever came would have that responsibility. It was you. It is yours.〉

  Almost Nafai said, I don’t want it. But that would be a lie. He wanted it with his whole heart. To be the one chosen by the Oversoul to pilot the starship, even though he knew nothing about piloting anything—that would be wonderful. More glory and accomplishment than he ever dreamed of in his childhood. “I’ll do it then,” said Nafai, “as long as you show me how it’s done.”

  〈You can’t do it without tools. I can give you some of them, and teach you how to make the rest. And you can’t do it without help.〉

  “Help?”

  〈There will be thousands of memory plates to move from one ship to another. You will grow old and die if you try to do it all yourself. Your whole village will need to work together, if we are to have a reliable starship that contains all of the memory that I will need to bring to the Keeper of Earth.〉

  At once Nafai tried to imagine Elemak doing any job under his direction, and he laughed aloud. “If that’s so, then you’d better put someone else in charge. They won’t follow me.”

  〈They will.〉

  “Then you don’t understand human nature very well after all,” said Nafai. “The only reason we’ve had peace among us these past few years is that I’ve stayed pretty much in my place, as far as Elya is concerned. If I suddenly come back and tell them that I’m the starmaster and they have to help me put together a starship ...”

  〈Trust me.〉

  “Yeah, right. I always have, haven’t I?”

  〈Open the door.〉

  Nafai opened the door and stepped into a dimly lighted room. The door closed behind him, shutting off much of what light there had been. Blinking, Nafai soon grew accustomed to the dimmer light and saw that in the middle of the room, hanging in the air with no obvious means of support, was a block of—what, ice?

  〈Much of it is water.〉

  Nafai approached it, reached out, touched it. His finger went in easily.

  〈As I said. Water.〉

  “How does it hold this shape, then?” asked Nafai. “How does it float in the air?”

  〈Why should I explain, when in a few moments the memory will be yours just for the thinking of it?〉

  “What do you mean?”

  〈Pass through the water and you will emerge wearing the cloak of the starmaster. When that is in place, linked to you, then all my memories will be yours, as if they had been yours all along.〉

  “A human mind could never hold such information,” said Nafai. “Your memory includes forty million years of history.”

  〈You will see.〉

  “Having Father’s memory of his vision in my mind almost drove me mad,” said Nafai. “Won’t that happen this time, having yours?”

  〈I will be with you as I have never been with you before.〉

  “Will I still be myself?”

  〈You will be more yourself than ever before.〉

  “Do I have a choice?”

  〈Yes. You can choose to refuse this. Then I will bring another, and she will pass through the water, and then she will be starmaster.〉

  “She? Luet?”

  〈Does it matter? Once you have chosen not to be starmaster, what ri
ght do you have to concern yourself with the person I then choose to take your place?〉

  Nafai stood there, looking at the miraculous block of water resting in the air, and thought: This is less dangerous than passing through the barrier, and I did that. He also thought: Could I bear to follow the starmaster, knowing for the rest of my life that I could have been starmaster, and refused? And then: I have trusted the Oversoul so far. I have killed for it; I have nearly died for it. Will I now refuse to take the leadership of this voyage?

  “How do I do it?” asked Nafai.

  〈Don’t you know? Don’t you remember when Luet told you of her vision?〉

  Only now, with the Oversoul’s reminder, did Nafai remember what Luet had said, of seeing him sink down into a block of ice and emerge from the bottom, glowing and sparkling with light. He had thought it had some metaphorical meaning. But here was the block of ice.

  “I sink down from the top,” said Nafai. “How do I get above this?”

  Almost at once, a meter-wide platter skimmed across the floor toward him. Nafai understood that he was to stand on it. But when he did, nothing happened.

  〈Your clothing will interfere.〉

  So he removed his clothing for the second time that day. Doing so reminded him of all the scratches and bruises he had suffered from the buffeting of the wind. Naked, he stepped again on the disk. Almost at once it rose straight up into the air and carried him above the block.

  〈Step off onto the water. It will support you like a floor.〉

  Having just put his finger easily into the side of the block, Nafai had his doubts, but he did as he was told—he stepped onto the surface of the block. It was smooth, but not slippery; like the surface of the barrier, it seemed to be moving in every direction at once under his feet.

  〈Lie down on your back.〉

  Nafai lay down. Almost at once the surface under him changed, and he began to sink down into the water. Soon it would cover his face, he realized. He wouldn’t be able to breathe. The memory of his recent suffocation was still fresh inside him—he began to struggle.