Yet even as he dismissed the dream, he knew that he would act on it.
Explaining nothing, he took his leave from Volemak, from Luet, and took the ship’s launch out to where the survey maps showed that gold could be found. It was a rich vein, one brought to the surface of the earth through the great foldings and upheavals that had taken place in the last forty million years. Nafai was armed with the metal tools from the ship’s store, and in two days of solitary labor he had several pounds of solid gold taken from the exposed vein in the mountainside. He spent a day refining it. Then he pounded it, unalloyed, into flat, smooth sheets, using the imperturbable metal surface of the launch as his anvil. The metal was very thin, but piled together it was also very heavy. It took him three days to make the sheets of gold, and during that time he only occasionally paused to gather the most obvious food that came easily to hand. He was hungry, but the work he was doing mattered more to him than food.
He found, in his first experiments, that the sweeping curves of the alphabet that had been used for so many millennia on Harmony simply did not work well when pressed by hand into the gold. He had to find squarer forms for the letters and yet still keep them different from each other. Also, some of the spellings were too complex and used too many letters to represent the sounds. So he changed them, inventing five new letters to represent sounds that had previously required two letters each. The result was a definite compression of the written language, and as he wrote, he compressed it even more, using only a couple of letters to stand for the most common words.
How do I dare to change the language like this? he asked himself. Who in the world could understand this?
Obviously, the only people who could read it easily would be people that he taught to read and write, and so they would know what his symbols meant. Perhaps just as important, though, anyone who had learned to read the script he used for pressing language into the gold would easily decode most of the letters used in the language of Harmony—the language of the ship’s computer library. At least until the language changed, he would not have cut his descendants off from their literary heritage, if ever the chance came for them to recover it.
Gold. How appropriate, for such a treasure as he hoped this book would be. But it wasn’t for the value of the gold as a medium of exchange that he chose it. Rather he used it for the same reasons that gold had been used for coinage in most cultures through most of human history. It was soft. It could be shaped. Yet it was not so soft that it couldn’t hold its shape. And it didn’t corrode or corrupt, tarnish or degrade in any way. Long after Nafai was dead, the letters would still exist on the pages of his metal book.
He put the gold leaves into the launch, along with all the leftover gold, and flew home. When he returned the launch to the ship, he explained nothing about where he had gone or what he had done. He didn’t mean to deceive anyone, and it wasn’t that he had no trust in Father or Mother, in Luet or anyone else. It’s just that he felt shy about telling anyone. They would think it was silly of him.
No, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all, he knew. As he sat there working by lamplight, the wick flickering as it floated on the melted fat in the clay cup, he could feel the power in what he was doing. I am projecting myself and my view of all that has happened to us into the future. Someday the only version of these events that anyone will know will be the one I wrote. Our descendants will see us through my eyes and no other. So it is I who will live in their memories. I who will whisper in the ear of that great leader—if he ever exists, if this book survives, if there is really anything of wisdom in it.
It is the writing on these gold pages that makes me immortal. When everyone else is dead, I will be alive and shining. That’s why I keep this secret. That’s why I hold it for myself. It’s a heartless, egotistical thing for me to do.
I know my own heart. I’m not ashamed to admit that my motives are impure.
What if Elemak were writing this book? It would be a different thing entirely, wouldn’t it?
A storyteller can’t help but distort every tale he tells. Without even knowing it, I’m also lying by giving events the shape that makes sense to me. Anyone else would write it differently. My way isn’t necessarily the best.
Nafai laughed silently, careful not to waken Luet or their last three little ones, born since they came up the canyon to live here with the angels, or the twins, who slept in the loft, dreaming of new pranks to play and accidents to stumble into in order to cause their parents to live in perpetual terror.
So, Oversoul, my dear old friend, was it you that sent me my dream?
The Keeper, then?
So it could be just the private fancy of a man who is reaching middle age and feels his future death breathing down his neck.
I’ll have to teach somebody to read my script. I’ll have to give it to somebody to pass along into the future.
I’m telling everything. If they read this, my children will say, Why didn’t he just shut up? Why didn’t he ever leave well enough alone? My mistakes will be out in the open and they’ll despise me.
And if Elemak ever reads this, he’ll kill me and destroy the book. You know that.
Or anyone. The hours I spend on this—are they wasted?
Nafai had no answer. Except that he kept on writing. Writing and writing, his script getting ever tinier and more compact, fitting more and more words onto the pages. His tale getting more and more spare.
What did he write? At first it was a very personal story, an account as best he remembered it of all their days in Basilica, of the journey through the desert, of the finding of the starport at Vusadka. But when the story reached Earth, it became far more general. The things they had learned about diggers and angels were set down in the order in which they discovered them or figured them out. The results of Zdorab’s journeys in the ship’s launch, mapping and bringing back plant and animal samples for Shedemei to study. The culture of the angels and diggers, and the way they responded to the cultural innovations the humans brought to them. The political machinations as the digger and angel communities struggled to deal with the destruction of their gods and the shattering of their equilibrium.
For the old gods were being destroyed. One cannot live with gods and still believe in them, Nafai decided. And even though after the early times of crisis Nafai had explained to them all that he and Volemak had never been gods, that their powers were all the result of technology and learning, that not a one of them had the power to duplicate even the least of the complicated machines in the starship—even though he explained this, he could sense that many resented knowing it. Emeezem most of all. When he told her that as far as he could tell the clay figure that she had worshipped and treasured almost her entire life was just a remarkably fine sculpture by a talented angel named Kiti, she didn’t thank him. She acted as if he had slapped her face. “Should I break the statue then?” she demanded bitterly.
“Break something as finely wrought as that?” asked
Nafai. “Break something that helped make you into the noble ruler that you are?”
But she was not to be mollified with praise; it sounded like flattery to her now, even though it was truthful and sincere. Nafai’s rejection of her worship was the cruelest blow. He could see her wither up; even though she lived on and continued to lead her people with wisdom and firmness, the heart had gone out of her. It was not just faith but also hope that she had lost.
The angels had it easier. Since Elemak’s rage had been their first exposure to humans, it was a relief to them to learn that none of them were gods. But the humans knew so many secrets and their wisdom, put to work for the angels, saved so many lives and improved everyone’s health so much that there was still an element of worship in their relationship, and therefore a bit—or perhaps a lot—of disappointment and disillusion when some human failed at a task, gave bad advice, or predicted an outcome and was proven wrong.
As he was writing about all of this, Nafai realized that what the people needed, diggers and angels and humans alike, was someone outside themselves in whom their hopes of wisdom and rightness could be invested. They had to begin to think of the Keeper of Earth as the only one who would never be wrong.
Not that Nafai was altogether sure of this himself. He never heard the voice of the Keeper with the kind of clarity with which the Oversoul spoke to him. In fact he was never quite sure whether he heard the voice or saw the dreams of the Keeper of Earth at all. Nor did he know what the Keeper might be. That he was real enough was obvious—there was no other explanation of the statue whose face looked exactly like Nafai, carved back when Nafai was just getting on the starship to come to Earth. Nor was there any other explanation of the dreams they had back on Harmony, when so many of them saw diggers and angels when the Oversoul himself had no notion that these were the creatures that populated Earth. Yet the dreams were always ambiguous, and tinged with the dreamer’s own hopes and fears and memories, so that it was never certain where the Keeper’s message left off and self-deception began.
Yet, inadequate as Nafai’s understanding of the Keeper of Earth might be, he knew that belief in the Keeper would fulfill a vital social function. The Keeper would be the highest authority, the one who was never wrong, the repository of Truth. When it became clear that even the wisest of humans knew very little, really; when it became plain that the most marvelous of miracles was in fact the result of working with a machine or exploiting a bit of ordinary knowledge; then there would still be no disillusionment because, after all, everyone knew that humans, angels, and diggers were all equal in the eyes of the Keeper of Earth, and all equally ignorant and weak and unwise compared to him.
Nafai explained these thoughts to Luet and she agreed. She began teaching the angel women about the Keeper of Earth, and adapting their ancient lore about various gods into a coherent story that replaced all the good gods with various aspects of the Keeper. With the angel men, Nafai was a bit more brutal, sweeping all the old gods away and keeping only a few of their ancient legends. Not that the old legends would die, of course—but he wanted them to start with a pure core of knowledge about the Keeper, even though the knowledge was really very small.
Then Nafai and Luet took Oykib and Chveya into their confidence, and soon Oykib was teaching the digger men and Chveya the digger women about the Keeper of Earth. They, too, adapted what the people already believed; they, too, were candid about how little they personally knew about the Keeper. But they did know this much: The Keeper wanted humans, diggers, and angels to live together in peace.
The trouble was that as the old religion faded, as fewer and fewer diggers took part in the annual raid to steal statues from the mating angels, the diggers’ birthrate also seemed to fall off—even as the angels prospered, their population blooming at an almost alarming rate. Whispers began among the diggers that the new religion of the Keeper of Earth was really part of a conspiracy to destroy the diggers so that angels and humans could divide the world between them. Not that many people believed these tales, but enough did that it was a worry. There were those who would exploit such rumors. And, in fact, when Nafai began to hear that it wasn’t all the humans but rather just Nafai and those who followed him who were plotting to destroy the diggers, he knew that someone was already seeking to turn these fears to his advantage.
In the meantime, though, the digger birthrate continued falling off, even though the nutrition levels were higher and higher all the time. And the angels had to expand constantly, burning more patches of forest to put more land under cultivation. All those twins, and none of them getting murdered now in infancy; all those healthy adults, and none of them getting culled by the marauding diggers.
They had been on Earth for twelve years when Shedemei called the adult humans together for a meeting. She had finally solved the mysteries, she said. But now there were some new mysteries, and some decisions to be made.
“We’ve been meddling,” said Shedemei. “As you’re all aware, the falling birthrate among the diggers is causing some serious worries among them.”
“We’re worried too,” said Volemak.
“Yes, well, now I know why it’s happening. We did it. We’re doing it.”
They waited. Finally Mebbekew said, “I didn’t know you had such a flair for the dramatic, Shedya. How long do we wait for the other shoe to drop?”
“This is only the first shoe,” she said. “The other shoe comes after.” There was some nervous laughter. “The problem is, you see, that we’ve stopped them from believing in their gods. They aren’t worshipping anymore. They aren’t even stealing fresh statues from the angels. And that’s why they aren’t having any babies.”
“You’re telling us,” said Elemak, laughing, “that their religion is true?”
“In a word, yes,” said Shedemei. “We have a dozen years’ worth of close observation of the local digger and angel tribes. Zdorab and I have also made some sampling visits to other digger and angel settlements, and we feel reasonably confident that we have uncovered a universal pattern. For one thing, there’s no such thing as an angel village without a digger city nearby, nor a digger city without an angel village within a few hours’ walk. This is not an accident. The diggers can’t survive without the angels. Specifically, the diggers can’t reproluce without worshipping the statues that the angel males create as part of their mating ritual.”
“Do I get the impression that the cause is biological rather than theological?” asked Rasa.
“Of course, though it’s hard to look at little clay statues and see a biological mechanism,” said Shedemei. “It was Zdorab who first pointed out to me that what matters, biologically, may not be the artistry involved in the creation of the statues. It’s the spit. The angel men take the clay into their mouths and mix a wet mud out of it, which they use to start the wad that becomes the statue. Every now and then they take another mouthful of mud and wet it. The saliva flows very freely.”
The listeners’ minds were working rapidly, trying to out things together. “You mean diggers need to rub angel spit on their bodies in order to mate?” asked Dza.
“Not quite,” said Shedemei. “The first time we examined the bodies of angels and diggers, we found a little organ—a gland, actually—near the scrotum. It was identical in both species, even though they have no common ancestor with a similar organ. Very puzzling, of course. But we now know the function of the organ. It continuously secrets tiny amounts of a hormone that suppresses the production of sperm. No, let me be clear. It completely shuts down the production of sperm. While the organ is functioning, males are completely, absolutely sterile.”
“What a useful little organ,” murmured Oykib. Then, louder, “Why would that evolve?”
“It gets worse,” said Zdorab.
“There’s a tiny flatworm, a microscopic one, that lives in all the freshwater rivers of this massif. During the rainy season, when the rivers are in flood, this flatworm burrows into beds of firm clay and lays millions of tiny eggs
. They don’t develop as long as they remain wet. But when the dry season comes and the water subsides, the eggs develop, forming hard little coatings that hold in what moisture they have. The embryos are ready to hatch at any time. But they can’t, because they can’t get rid of their own confining shells. So they hibernate, living off their yolks. They use the yolks so slowly that they can live for twenty or thirty years like that. The next rainy season doesn’t cause them to hatch, because water doesn’t dissolve the shells. Guess what dissolves them.”
“Angel spit,” said Oykib.
“Amazing boy,” said Shedemei. “My prize student.” There was some laughter, but they were all waiting for the story to go on. “No other fluid will do it, because the angels have tiny organelles in the saliva-producing cells of their mouths, which secrete an enzyme that has no function whatsoever within the bodies of the angels—but it dissolves the shells of the flatworm eggs. So when the males bring the clay into their mouths, they’re not just softening it to make sculptures. They’re also dissolving the shells of millions of little flatworms. And it just so happens that the dissolved shells contain precisely the one chemical that suppresses the action of the prophylactic gland near the angels’ and diggers’ scrota. The fertility chemical breaks down very slowly, and the statues contain useful quantities of it perhaps as long as ten years, certainly for five.”
Everybody was getting it now. “So when the diggers rubbed the statues all over their bodies….” “Were the angels swallowing some of it?” “How much of the fertility chemical does it take?”
Shedemei raised her hands to damp the questions and comments. “Yes, you’ve got it. The angel males absorb the fertility enzyme by mouth. It doesn’t take much of it to shut down the action of the prophylactic gland, and it doesn’t recover and start up again for about two weeks, maybe three. So there’s a window there in which reproduction can take place. And the digger males have a special absorbent patch on their lower bellies, near the groin, where the chemical can be absorbed quite directly into the bloodstream. Rubbing the statues on their sweating bellies dissolves some of the clay, whereupon the dissolved fertility enzyme is taken into the blood and, just as with the angels, it shuts down the prophylactic gland and the digger males are fertile. But because they actually get a great deal less of the enzyme, the fertility window is only a few days long for them. Doesn’t matter, though. Where the angels make their statues once a year and have to score a reproductive hit that one time, the diggers are culturally able to worship the statues any time. In effect, the statues enable them to reproduce whenever they want. They just have to pray first.”
Earthfall (Homecoming) Page 31