Shedemei nodded gravely, knowing perfectly well that Rasa did not believe for a moment that the Oversoul was nothing more than a machine. “Zdorab,” said Shedemei, “will you take the ship’s launch, to carry Lady Rasa and the heaviest burdens up the canyon? And then use it to take Issib and his chair, and Lady Rasa again, and bring them to the new place where the Nafari will start their colony?”
“I will,” said Zdorab.
“And then, when Nafai tells you he has no further use for the launch, would you be kind enough to bring it back to me here at the ship, so we can lift ourselves into orbit?”
He smiled. He embraced her.
“You know that the cloak will sustain my life,” she said. “Longer than is natural. And I intend to hibernate a lot, too, so I can have the time to study many generations of life and gather a great deal of data over time.”
“I don’t mind dying before you do,” said Zdorab. “In fact, I rather prefer it that way.”
“It’ll be work all the time,” said Shedemei.
“So you’ll need a secretary and librarian all the more.”
“And the salary is low,” she said.
“I’ve already been paid,” he answered her.
When darkness fell, the digger soldiers outside the door of Volemak’s house fell asleep. Nafai stepped out almost at once, and began going door to door, speaking quietly to his loyal supporters and gathering them at the forest’s edge. They were not silent, though they tried to be; there was no way to keep the little children from talking or, occasionally, crying or complaining. But no alarm was raised.
Chveya stood beside Nafai, looking at the ties still binding him to the people he was leaving behind. “If they’re asleep,” said Chveya, “doesn’t that mean the Oversoul doesn’t want them to go with you?”
“It doesn’t matter what the Oversoul wants this time,” said Nafai. “I’m taking anyone who wants to join me.”
Chveya nodded. “Well, then, I must tell you that you are still bound to Eiadh and three of her children.”
Nafai nodded. “But I don’t need to speak to her,” he said. “See? She’s coming.”
And it was true. She was accompanied by the young men Yistina and Peremenya and the young woman Zhivoya, the one who had been kidnapped twenty years before. Yistina and Peremenya had their wives with them, but Zhivoya’s husband, Muzhestvo, had not come. “He’s asleep and I can’t waken him,” she explained with tears in her eyes.
“You can stay with him,” said Nafai. “No one will blame you for that.”
She shook her head. “I know what he is,” she said. “I didn’t when I married him, but I know it now. He’s one of them. In his heart and soul, he’s one of them.” She put her hands on her stomach. “But the baby is mine.”
Eiadh touched Nafai’s arm. “You don’t have to take us, Nafai. I know the danger it puts you in. He’ll never forgive us for this. He’ll believe that you and I—”
“He’ll believe that you and I have done what he and Kokor and he and Sevet and probably he and Dol have already done.” Nafai nodded. “But you and I know that we haven’t and that we never will.”
Eiadh smiled wanly at the gentle way he made it very clear that she was coming as a fellow-citizen, and not as a lover.
“Then we’re all here,” said Chveya.
“No we’re not,” said Nafai. “I have to invite my sisters.”
“They’re sleeping with him, Father,” Chveya said. “Not to mention that they aren’t the most trustworthy people in the world.”
“Are we only taking the strong and virtuous?” he asked. “Their husbands are dead, and as you said, their morals have never been their best talent. But they’re my sisters.” He walked away, back into the village.
It was a ghost town, the doors standing open, the people gone or, in just a few of the houses now, deeply asleep. But when Nafai came to the door of Sevet’s house, there she stood in the doorway, looking sleepy and surprised. “I had a dream,” she said, when Nafai approached her. “I don’t even remember what it was, but it made me get up and here you are.”
“We’re leaving,” said Nafai. “Before Elemak has a chance to kill me, we’re leaving, everyone who would rather not live under his rule. We’re taking all the angels with us, and going to a new place far away.”
“He’ll track you down and kill you if he can,” said Sevet. “You don’t know how much hate there is in him.”
“Yes I do,” said Nafai. “Will you come with me?”
She began to weep. “Would you really take me, after all I’ve done?”
“Would you really come?” he asked. “Would you really stand with me now?”
“I’m so afraid of him,” she said. “And my Vasnaminanya and my Umya, they think the sun rises and sets with him.”
“But Panimanya is with us,” said Nafai.
“So am I,” said Sevet.
They went to Kokor’s door. It stood open, but she was not standing there as Sevet had been. They came inside, quietly, and found that she was not alone in her bed. Mebbekew lay beside her, naked and sweating in the damp heat of the night. But Mebbekew was asleep, while Kokor’s eyes were already open when they came inside.
They said nothing, for fear that Meb might come awake. Kokor looked at them in the darkness, blinking. Nafai nodded to her, beckoned, and then led Sevet outside. They waited several paces from the house. Soon she came out, still arranging her clothing. “You’re leaving,” she said softly. “I dreamed it.”
“Will you come with us?” asked Nafai.
Kokor looked at Sevet, her eyes widening. “Us?” she asked.
“You can stay with him if you want to, Kokor,” said Sevet. “I think he does love you.”
“He doesn’t love anybody,” said Kokor.
“I didn’t mean Meb,” said Sevet.
“I know,” said Kokor. “But can’t I come with you if I want to?”
“There’s no going back,” said Nafai. “And in our new city, we’ll respect the law.”
They understood what he was telling them. “I think perhaps we’ve had our fill,” said Sevet.
Kokor rolled her eyes. “I will never have my fill,” she said. “But I know it won’t be Basilica. I’ll be good.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier if you stayed?” asked Nafai.
“Don’t you want us to come with you?” asked Kokor.
“Of course I do,” he answered.
“Give us some credit, Nafai,” said Kokor. “We can tell the difference between you and Elemak. We know steel from cheap tin when we see it.”
“Then let’s go,” said Nafai. “There’s a long journey ahead of us tonight.”
Oykib was already leading the long procession out onto the forest path, so that only a few remained when Nafai got there, among them Rasa and Zdorab on the launch. Shedemei was there, too.
“Seal the ship,” said Nafai. “They can’t get in if you don’t let them.”
“I know,” she said. “The ship will be safe.”
“Don’t try to be heroic,” said Nafai. “We’ll be fine.”
“You need more than one night’s head start,” said Shedemei.
Nafai shook his head, obviously intending to argue further. But she reached out a hand and touched his lips to silence him. “Nyef, my dear friend, I’m the starmaster now. You go lead your colony into the wilderness. I will tend the ship and decide how the powers of the cloak are to be used.”
Shedemei embraced Rasa and Zdorab and then waved as the launch rose into the sky and soared over the tops of the trees, passing all the other travelers who were trudging along the road. Then she embraced Nafai and returned to the ship.
Nafai was the last to set out on the road. He thought he was alone, when suddenly he found himself surrounded by a dozen diggers. His first thought was that the Keeper had failed, that while the Oversoul was able to keep his human enemies asleep, the diggers had been able to awaken. This is how I’ll die, he thought.
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br /> Then he saw that they weren’t armed, and half of them were women.
“Take us with you,” said one of them in digger language.
Nafai wasn’t as fluent in that tongue as Oykib was, but he could understand them. “And live among the angels?” he asked. “They’ll never trust you.”
“We would rather be servants to the…angels,” said the woman who was speaking for them all. Nafai noticed that she did not say skymeat, but rather struggled to form her lips and tongue around the strange sounds of the angels’ own word for people. “Fusum is the most terrible god.”
Nafai nodded. “It will be hard for you among the angels,” he said, “but you have my protection, and I will trust you unless you teach me that I can’t. Do all of you take an oath to obey me and harm none of my people, humans or angels?”
They took the oath, and so he let them follow him. There was consternation among the angels when they arrived, but Nafai’s assurances and their own humble pleas won the grudging acceptance of the angels. It was still dark when they left the angel village empty, and set out into the new country to build a new city, of a new kind.
When, after many days of travel, they reached the place that Nafai had chosen years before, knowing that this day might come, pTo and Poto held a little ceremony. “A place must have a name,” they said. “And since we will always be known as the Nafari—” the word their lips pronounced was more like Dapati, but they were understood “—then we think this must now be called the land of Nafai—” Dapai “—and you are the one we choose to lead us all.”
The voices rang out so loud in approbation that Nafai could only smile and say, “No man could be more happily praised than to have his friends choose to name their home after him.” But despite the modesty of his words, they all knew what the naming meant. Nafai was their king. Their war king. And they would gladly die for him.
Sixteen
Starmaster
Shedemei heard what Issib said to her through the Index. “It’s dawn, and we’re well away from the village, but we’re slow, Shedya, and an army of diggers could have us by noon.”
To this Shedemei replied, “There will be no army today or tomorrow.”
“Just remember, Shedya,” Issib answered. “There’s only one of you to protect all of us. Don’t be noble. Don’t be fair. Prevail.”
“Good advice, Issya. Now let me go and follow it.”
For all her confidence, Shedemei was reluctant to leave the shelter of the starship, to make the door seal itself behind her. Wearing the cloak gave her a feeling of connection and closeness to every part of the ship, but in truth she had felt not very differently before. The ship was where her tools were, her library, her work, her career, herself. Stepping out into the village—the remnant of the village, the mostly deserted human-built houses—she was becoming someone else. Nafai must have relished this, thought Shedemei, this feeling of power, of control. But I don’t. I’m not interested to find out how much power can be focused through my flesh. I have no desire to know just how strong a jolt I can give someone without killing him.
To be fair, Nafai might not have loved it either. But good-hearted as he might be, he was a man, and men seemed to find an obscene amount of pleasure in having the upper hand, in winning. Shedemei, on the other hand, simply wanted to know. But maybe it wasn’t a matter of men and women. Maybe it was just that Shedemei’s connection to other people was never very strong, compared to her love for her work, her devotion to understanding the way life worked. Is that really different, though? she wondered. Nafai and Elemak were born to rule men and determined to win out over each other. But I feel myself also born to rule, not men or women but organisms, genetic codes, life systems, ecologies. And, like Nafai and Elemak, I will have my way.
The problem today would not be Elemak, not really. The problem would be the diggers. Shedemei could easily stop Elemak and his few human followers. But there was no way she could seek out and block all of Fusum’s soldiers, and they were the ones who would do the killing if they reached the Nafari while they were traveling, encumbered as they were by children and infants, by supplies and flocks and herds.
So whatever Shedemei did, she would have to persuade the diggers that they must wait; if the diggers did not go, then Elemak would also have to wait.
Thus it was that Shedemei walked through the village, paying no attention to the shouting as Elemak, Mebbekew, and Protchnu searching all the houses, ransacked them, really, screaming to each other about the betrayal, about all those who had gone. Mebbekew saw her and called out to her, then went howling off to find Elemak, crying out that Shedemei had stayed, Shedemei couldn’t leave the ship after all. “We have the laboratories! We have the computers! We have the Oversoul!” Time enough to disabuse him of this delusion later.
She made her way to where the digger watchmen were conferring in terror, wondering what would happen to them when Fusum learned that somehow they had all slept through the night, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, as most of the humans slipped away. “Fusum will kill you,” she said in her halting digger language.
They answered her in human speech, for which she was grateful. “What can we do? What happened to us? Someone poisoned us!”
“It was the Keeper of Earth,” she said. “The Keeper of Earth has rejected you, because a murderer rules over you. You have chosen a murderer to be your blood king and your war king.” Then, with some effort, she made her skin begin to glow. “Did you think that when Fusum desecrated the statue of the Untouched God, it would go unnoticed?”
She hated doing this. It had taken a great deal of effort to break them free of superstition, and here she was rekindling all their old fears and faiths. But how else could she control them, given the few powers that she had?
They were supine before her, offering their underbellies in a gesture of submission.
“I don’t want your naked bellies,” she said. “Stand like men, for once. If you had stood like men before, the Keeper of Earth would not be so angry with you now.”
“What should we do, great one?”
“Bring me the friend-killer, the liar who murdered Nen on the hunt.”
The charge was like an electric current suddenly flowing through them. “So it was not the panther! Not the panther!” they said.
“There was a panther,” said Shedemei, “but the panther killed a man who had been struck down by a blow from a friend.” Even as she said it, she wondered if it was true, and, if it was, how she knew it.
Could it be true? she asked.
But we set twelve satellites in orbit, she said. You must be able to see, even if you can’t hear their thoughts.
Furiously Shedemei responded, Well, I program you now to treat diggers and angels as if they were human, too.
Then do this, said Shedemei silently. Remember that because the humans have to live among diggers and angels now, our safety and survival depend on you watching what these sentient aliens do. You must always know.
Do your best.
Within your limits, within a reasonable set of priorities, do your best.
Don’t pretend to be helpless. I know what you are, who you are, and you don’t need me to explain things to you. Now do your best to help me understand Elemak.
Shedemei almost said, I wasn’t planning to. But then she realized that in the back of her mind that was exactly what she had planned. Fusum and Elemak, both of them dead and therefore the Nafari safe.
Why not kill him? she asked.
I haven’t done anything to him yet.
How can you know this?
So Nafai thinks that I need Elemak to keep the diggers in check.
Nafai was planning this all along, wasn’t he? When he gave me the cloak, he knew he would need me to do this.
Victory?
They dragged Fusum out of a hole in the ground and spread-eagled him before her. He hissed and howled and cursed her. She gave him the mildest of jolts, and his body spasmed. “Hold your tongue,” she said.
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