The Memory of Earth

by Orson Scott Card

  Father wasn't done yet. "Do you know what I actually wanted to do, when I felt such urgency to get to the city? I wanted to warn people-to follow the old ways, to go back to the laws of the Oversold, or this place would burn."

  "What place?" asked Luet, her intensity back again.

  "This place. Basilica. The city. That's what I saw burning."

  Again Father fell silent, looking into her burning eyes.

  "Not the city," he said at last. "The city was only the picture that my mind supplied, wasn't it? Not the city. The whole world. All of Harmony, burning."

  Rasa gasped. "Earth," she whispered.

  "Oh, please," Nafai said. So Mother was going to connect Father's vision with that old story about the home planet that was burned by the Oversoul to punish humanity for whatever nastiness the current storyteller wanted to preach against. The all-purpose coercive myth: If you don't do what I say-I mean, what the Oversoul says-then the whole world will burn.

  "I haven't seen the fire itself," said Luet, ignoring Nafai. "Maybe I'm not even seeing the same thing."

  "What have you seen?" asked Father. Nafai cringed at how respectful he was being toward this girl.

  "I saw the Deep Lake of Basilica, crusted over with blood and ashes."

  Nafai waited for her to finish. But she just sat there.

  "That's it? That's all?" Nafai stood up, preparing to walk out. "This is great, hearing the two of you compare visions. I saw a city on fire. Well, I saw a scum-covered lake."

  Luet stood up and faced him. No, faced him down- which was ridiculous, since he was almost half a meter taller than her.

  "You're only arguing against me," she said hotly, "because you don't want to believe what I told you about Eiadh."

  That's ridiculous," said Nafai.

  "You had a vision about Eiadh?" asked Rasa.

  "What does Eiadh have to do with Nyeft" asked Issib.

  Nafai hated her for mentioning it again, in front of his family, "You can make up whatever you want about other people, but you'd better leave me out of it."

  "Enough," said Father. "We're done,"

  Rasa looked at him in surprise. "Are you dismissing me in my own house?"

  "I'm dismissing my sons."

  "You have authority over your sons, of course." Mother was smiling, but Nafai knew from her soft speech that she was seriously annoyed. "However, I see no one here in my house but my students."

  Father nodded, accepting the rebuke, then stood to leave. "Then I'm dismissing myself-I may do that, I hope."

  "You may always leave, my adored mate, as long as you promise to come back to me."

  His answer was to kiss her cheek.

  "What are you going to do?" she asked.

  ‘What the Oversoul told me to do."

  "And what is fire?"

  "Warn people to return to the laws of the Oversoul or the world will burn."

  Issib was appalled. "That's crazy, Father!"

  "I'm tired of hearing that word from the lips of my sons."

  "But-prophets of the Oversoul don't say things like that. They're like poets, except all their metaphors have some moral lesson or they celebrate the Oversoul or-"

  "Issya," said Wetchik, "all my life I've listened to these so-called prophecies-and the psalms and the histories and the temple priests-and I've always thought, if this is all the Oversoul has to say, why should I bother to listen? Why should the Oversoul even bother speaking, if this is all that's on his mind?"

  "Then why did you teach us to speak to the Oversoul?" asked Issib.

  "Because I believed in the ancient laws. And I did speak to the Oversoul myself, though more as a way of clarifying my own thoughts than because I actually thought that he was listening. Then last night-this morning-I had an experience that I never conceived of. I never wished for it. I didn't even know what it was until now, these last few minutes, talking to Luet. Now I know-what it feels like to have the Oversoul's voice inside you. Nothing like these poets and dreamers and deceivers, who write down whatever pops into their heads and then sell it as prophecy. What was in me was not myself, and Luet has shown me that she's had the same voice inside her. It means that the Oversoul is real and alive."

  "So maybe it's real," said Issib. "That doesn't tell us what it w."

  "It's the guardian of the world," said Wetchik. "He asked me to help. Told me to help. And I will."

  "That's all temple stuff," said Issib. "You don't know anything about it. You grow exotic plants."

  Father dismissed Issib's objections with a gesture.

  "Anything the Oversoul needs me to know, he'll tell me." Then he headed for the door into the house.

  Nafai followed him, only a few steps. "Father," he said.

  Father waited.

  The trouble was, Nafai didn't know what he was going to say. Only that he had to say it. That there was a very important question whose answer he had to have before Father left. He just didn't know what the question was.

  "Father," he said again.

  "Yes?"

  And because Nafai couldn't think of the real question, the deep one, the important one, he asked the only question that came to mind. "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Keep the old ways of the Oversoul," said Father.

  "What does that mean?"

  "Or the world will burn." And Father was gone.

  Nafai looked at the empty door for a while. It didn't do anything, so he turned back to the others. They were all looking at him, as if they expected him to do something.

  "What!" he demanded.

  "Nothing," said Mother. She arose from her seat in the shade of the kaplya tree. "We'll all return to our work."

  "That's all?" said Issib. "Our father-your mate-has just told us that the Oversoul is speaking to him, and we're supposed to go back to our studies?"

  "You really don't understand, do you?" said Mother. "You've lived all these years as my sons, as my students, and you are still nothing more than the ordinary boys wandering the streets of Basilica hoping to find a willing woman and a bed for the night."

  "What don't we understand here?" asked Nafai, "Just because you women all take this witchgirl so seriously doesn't mean that-"

  "I have been down into the water myself," said Mother, her voice like metal. "You men can pretend to yourselves that the Oversoul is distracted or sleeping, or just a machine that collects our transmissions and sends them to libraries in distant cities. Whatever theory you happen to believe, it miakes no difference to the truth. For I know, as most of the women in this city know, that the Oversoul is very much alive. At least as the keeper of the memories of this world, she is alive. We all receive those memories when we go into the water. Sometime;' they seem random, sometimes we are given exactly the memory we needed. The Oversoul keeps the history of the world, as it was seen through other people's eyes. Only a few of us-like Luet and Hushidh-are given wisdom away from the water, and even fewer are given visions of real things that haven't happened yet. Since the great Izumina died, Luet is the only seer I know of in Basilica-so yes, we take her very, very seriously."

  Women go down into the water and receive visions? This was the first time Nafai had ever heard a woman describe any part of the worship at the lake. He had always assumed that the women's worship was like the men's-physical, ascetic, painful, a dispassionate way of discharging emotion. Instead they were all mystics. What seemed like legends or madness to men was at the center of a woman's life. Nafai felt as though he had discovered that women were of another species after all. The question was, which of them, men or women, were the humans? The rational but brutal men? Or the irrational but gentle women?

  "There's only one thing rarer than a girl like Luet," Mother was saying, "and that's a man who hears the voice of the Oversoul. We know now that your father does hear-Luet confirmed that for me. I don't know what the Oversoul wants, or why she spoke to your father, but I am wise enough to know that it matters."

  As she passed Nafai, she reached up a
nd caught his ear firmly, though not painfully, between her fingers. "As for the mythical burning of Earth, my dear boy, I've seen it myself. It happened. I can only guess how long ago-we estimate there's been at least thirty million years of human history on this world we named Harmony. But I saw the missiles fly, the bombs explode, and the world erupt in flame. The smoke filled the sky and blocked the sun, and underneath that blanket of darkness the oceans froze and the world was covered in ice and only a few human beings survived, to rise up out of the blackness as the world died, carrying their hopes and their regrets and their genes to other planets, hoping to start again. They did. We're here. Now the Oversoul has warned your father that our new start can lead to the same ending as before."

  Nafai had seen Mother's public face-playful, brilliant, analytical, gracious-and he had seen her family face- frank of speech yet always kind, quick to anger yet quicker to forgive. Always he had assumed that the way she was with the family was her true self, with nothing held back. Instead, behind the faces that he thought he knew, she had kept this secret all the time, her bitter vision of the end of Earth. "You never told us about this," whispered Nafai.

  "I most certainly told you about it," said Rasa. "It's not my fault that when you heard it, you thought I was telling you a myth." She let go of his ear and returned to the house.

  Issib floated past him, mumbling something about waking up one morning to find that you've been living in a madhouse all your life. Hushidh went past him also, not meeting his gaze; he could imagine the gossip that she would spread in his class all the rest of the day.

  He was alone with Luet.

  "I shouldn't have spoken to you before," she said.

  "And you shouldn't speak to me again, either," suggested Nafai.

  "Some people hear a lie when they're told the truth. You're so proud of your status as the son of Rasa and Wetchik, but obviously whatever genes you got from your parents, they weren't the right ones."

  "While I'm sure you got the finest your parents lad to offer."

  She looked at him with obvious contempt, and then she was gone.

  "What a wonderful day this is going to be," he said-to no one, since he was alone. "My entire family hates me." He thought for a moment. "I'm not even sure that I want them to like me."

  For one dangerous moment, alone on the portico, he toyed with the idea of slipping past the screens and going to the edge, leaning out, and looking at the forbidden sight of the Valley of the Holy Women, casually referred to as the Rift Valley, and more crudely known as the Canyon of the Crones. I'll see it and I bet I don't even get struck blind.

  But he didn't do it, even though he stood there thinking about it for a long time. It seemed that every rime he was about to take a step toward the edge, his mind suddenly wandered and he hesitated, confiised, forgetting for a moment what it was he wanted to do. Finally he lost interest and went back inside the house.

  He should have gone back to class-it's what he expected to do when he went inside. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead he wandered to the front door and out onto the porch, into the streets of Basilica. Mother would probably be furious at him but that was too bad.

  He must have been seeing where he was going, since he didn't bump into anything, but he had no memory of what he saw or where he had been. He ended up in the Fountains district, not far from the neighborhood of Rasa's house; and in his mind, he had circled through the same thoughts over and over again, finally ending up not very far from where he started.

  One thing he knew, though: He couldn't dismiss this all as madness. Father was not crazy, however new and strange he might seem; and as for Mother, if her vision of the burning of Earth was madness, then she had been mad since before he was born. So there was something that put ideas and desires and visions into his parents' minds-and into Luet's, too, couldn't forget her. People called this something the Oversoul, but that was just a name, a label. What was it? What did it want? What could it actually dot If it could talk to some people, why didn't it just talk to everybody?

  Nafai stopped across a fairly wide street from what might be the largest house in Basilica. He knew it well enough, since the head of the Palwashantu clan was mated with the woman who lived there. Nafai couldn't remember her name-she was nobody, everyone knew she had bought the ancient house with her mate's money, and if she didn't renew his contract then even with the house she'd be nobody-but he was Gaballufix. There was a family connection-his mother was Hosni, who later on became Wetchik's auntie and the mother of Ekmak. Between that blood connection and the fact that Father was perhaps the second most prestigious Palwashantu clansman in Basilica, they had visited this house at least once, usually two or three times a year since as long ago as Nafai could remember.

  As he stood there, stupidly watching the front of that landmark building, he suddenly came alert, for without meaning to he had recognized someone moving along the street. Elemak should have been home sleeping-he had traveled all night, hadn't he? Yet here he was, in mid-afternoon. For a panicked moment Nafai wondered if Elya was looking for him- was it possible that Mother had missed him and worried and now the whole family, perhaps even Father's employees as well, were combing the city looking for him?

  But no. Elemak wasn't looking for anybody. He was moving too casually, too easily. Looking in no particular direction at all.

  And then he was gone.

  No, he had turned down into the gap between Cabal-Infix's house and the building next door. So he did have a destination.

  Nafai had to know what Elemak was doiog. He trotted along the street to where he had a clear view down the narrow road. He got there in time to see Elemak ducking into a low alky doorway into Gaballufix's house.

  Nafai couldn't imagine what business Elya might have with Gaballufix-especially something so urgent that he had to go to his house the same day he got back from a long trip. True, Gaballufix was technically Elya's half-brother, but there were sixteen years between them and Gaballufix had never openly recognized Elya as his brother. That didn't mean, though, that they couldn't start behaving more like close kinsmen now. Still, it bothered Nafai that Elemak had never mentioned it and seemed to be concealing it now.

  Whether the question bothered him or not, Nafai knew that it would be a very bad idea to ask Elemak about it directly. When Elya wanted anybody to know what he was doing with Gaballufix, he'd tell them. In the meantime, the secret would be safe inside Elya's head.

  A secret inside somebody's head.

  Luet had known that Nafai was in love with Eiadh.

  Well, it wasn't all that secret-Luet might have guessed it from the way that he looked at her. But there on the front porch of Mother's house, Luet had said, "Tou're the bastard," as if she were answering him for calling her a bastard. Only he hadn't said anything. He had only thought of her as a bastard. It wasn't an opinion he had expressed before. He had only thought of it at that moment, because he was annoyed with Luet. Yet she had known.

  Was that the Oversoul, too? Not just putting ideas into people's heads, but also taking them out and telling them to other people? The Oversoul wasn't just a provider of strange dreams-it was a spy and a gossip as well.

  It made Nafai afraid, to think that not only was the Oversoul real, but also that it had the power to read his most secret, transitory thoughts and tell them to someone else. And to someone as repulsive as the little bastard witchgirl, no less.

  It frightened him like the first time he went out into the sea by himself. Father had taken them all on a holiday, down to the beach. The first afternoon there, they had all gone out into the sea together, and surrounded by his father and brothers-except Issib, of course, who watched them from his chair on the beach-he had felt the sea play with him, the waves shoving him toward shore, then trying to draw him out again. It was fun, exhilarating. He even dared to swim out to where his feet couldn't quite touch the bottom, all the while playing with Meb and Elya and Father. A good day, a great day, when his older brothers still l
iked him. But the next morning he got up-early, left the tent and went out to the water alone. He could swim like a fish; he was in no danger. And yet as he walked out into the water he felt an inexplicable unease. The water tugging at him, pushing him; he was only a few meters from shore, and yet with no one else in the water, all by himself, he felt as if he had lost his place, as if he had already been washed out to sea, as if he were caught in the grasp of something so huge that any part of it could swallow him up. He panicked then. He ran to shore, struggling against the water, convinced that it would never let him go, dragging at him, sucking him down. And then he was on the sand, on the dry sand above the tide line, and he fell to his knees and wept because he was safe.

  But for those few moments out in the water he had felt the terror of knowing how small and helpless he was, how much power there was in the world, and how easily it could do to him whatever it wanted and there was nothing he could do to resist it.

  That was the fear he felt now. Not so strong, not so specific as it had been that day on the beach-but then, he wasn't a five-year-old anymore, either, and he was better at dealing with fear. The Oversoul wasn't an old legend, it was alive, and it could force visions into his own parents' minds and it could search out secrets inside Nafai's head and tell them to other people, to people that Nafai didn't like and who didn't like him.

  The worst thing was knowing that the reason why Luet didn't like him was probably became of what the Oversoul had told her about his thoughts. His most private thoughts exposed to this unsympathetic little monster. What next? Would Father's next vision be Nafai's fantasies about Eiadh? Worse yet, would Mother be shown?

  On the beach, he had been able to run for shore. Where did you run to get away from the Oversoul?

  You didn't. You couldn't hide, either-how could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?

  The only choice he had was to try to find out what the Oversoul was, to try to understand what it wanted, what it was trying to do to his family, to him. He had to understand the Oversoul and, if possible, get it to leave him alone.