At the same time, though, he was afraid of what Elemak would do later on to take vengeance. When he woke up on Earth and found himself surrounded by these strong young men, all committed to Nafai's cause, he would be so rilled with hate that he would never forgive. There would be war, sooner or later, and it would be bloody. Zdorab didn't want his children to suffer from that. Didn't want them to have to take part, or even take sides. What better way to accomplish that than to prove his loyalty to Elemak by letting the wake-up call come through as planned?
Of course, Nafai and the Oversoul would have no problem figuring out who had done it-nobody else had the computer skills back on Harmony, and none of the children who had acquired those abilities during the voyage were likely to want to wake up Elemak. Hadn't he heard Izuchaya-who had been so young at launch that she barely remembered Elemak-asking, "Why do we have to wake up Elemak at all, if he's so bad?" "Because that would be murder," Nafai had answered her, and then explained that even when you disagree with someone, they still have a right to live their life and make their own choices. The only time you have a right to kill someone is when they're actually trying to kill you or someone you need to protect.
Someone you need to protect. I need to protect my children. And here's the cold hard truth, Nafai: My children are no blood kin of yours. Therefore, even if we side with you, I can't believe for a moment that you will ever be as careful of them, as loyal to them, as you are to your own children or your parents' young children or your brother Issib's children. I have to find a way to protect them myself, to make it so Elemak won't hate them the way he will hate you and your children- even as I've helped them take advantage of your plan to become older and stronger than Elemak's boys. That's what a father does. Even if his wife wouldn't approve of it.
Shedemei had different ideas of loyalty, Zdorab knew. She was an all-or-nothing kind of person. That's because she hadn't lived in the nightmare world of interweaving treachery that Zdorab had inhabited for so many years. Gaballufix's constant plotting, in which other people's trust was regarded as a weapon to be turned against them; the routine violence and corruption of life in the men's village, where the ameliorating influence of women did not penetrate; and of course the relentless deception of the life of a man who loved men. No one can really be trusted, Shedemei, he said silently.
Not even the Oversoul. Especially not the Oversoul.
Zdorab's only contact with the master computer was through the Index and, later, through the ordinary computers of the starship. He had no dreams, and as far as he knew the Oversoul neither cared about him nor heard any of his thoughts. How else could he have installed his clandestine wake-up program? The Oversoul had no particular use for him except to provide the other set of chromosomes for Shedemei to reproduce. Well, that was fine-Zdorab didn't have all that much use for the Oversoul, either. He was firmly convinced that whatever it was the Oversoul wanted, it didn't care much about the comfort and happiness of the human beings it manipulated. And because the Oversold didn't care about him, he was the one person in the whole community with privacy.
At the same time, in the back of his mind, Zdorab hoped that, in fact, the Oversoul did hear his thoughts and knew all about the wake-up call. It had probably already removed it, in fact; Zdorab hadn't checked it for the same reasons that he hadn't removed it himself. The Oversoul wouldn't let anything dangerous happen during the voyage. Elemak wasn't going to wake up until Earth. And when he did, Zdorab could truthfully say, "I left the wake-up call in place. The Oversoul must have found it."
He silendy rehearsed the words, shaping them with his lips and tongue and teeth, knowing even as he did it that Elemak wouldn't believe him, or if he did he wouldn't care.
They're wrong to have brought me with their family, wrong to force me to choose between them in their deadly domestic quarrels.
He stood before Shedemei's sleep chamber as the lid slipped back and her eyes fluttered open. She smiled weakly.
"Hi, brilliant and beautiful lady," he said,
"To be flattered upon first waking is every woman's fondest dream," she said. "Unfortunately I'm still stupid from the drugs."
"What drugs?" He helped her sit up before he undamped and dropped the side of the chamber so she could get out.
"You mean I'm just naturally this mentally slow?"
She got up and clung to him, partly to support herself as she tried to get her legs working again in the low gravity, and partly as an embrace between friends. He responded, of course, and began telling her of all that the different children had accomplished since she had last been awake. "I think this may be the finest school that ever existed," he said.
"And how convenient that the teachers are all put to sleep between terms," answered Shedemei.
They spent the hours together talking about the children, especially their own, and about anything that came to Shedemei's mind. But they did not talk about the one thing preying most on Zdorab's mind, and Shedemei noticed something was wrong.
"What is it?" she asked, "You're not telling me something."
"Like what?" he answered.
"Something is worrying you."
"My life is worry," he said. "I don't like climbing into the sleep chamber."
She smiled thinly. "All right, you don't have to tell me."
"Can't tell you what I don't know myself," he said, and since this contained a grain of truth-he didn't know whether the Oversoul had removed his program or not-Shedemei's truthsense allowed her to believe him and she relaxed.
A few hours later he said goodbye to the children in a ritual that they were all used to by now, since their teachers all came and went this way. Handshakes or hugs all around, depending on the child's age; a kiss for his own children whether they liked it or not; and then Nafai and Shedemei escorted him to his chamber and helped him in.
As the drugs began to take effect, though, he was filled with a sudden panic. No, no, no, he thought. How could I have been so stupid? Elemak will never be loyal to me, no matter what I do. I have to change the program. I have to keep him from waking up and taking Nafai by surprise. "Nafai," he said. "Check the life support computers."
But the lid of the chamber was already closed, and he couldn't see whether Nafai was even watching his lips, and before he could even move a hand, the drug overwhelmed him and he slept.
"What did he say?" Nafai asked Shedemei.
"I don't know. Something was bothering him but he didn't know what?"
"Well, maybe he'll remember it when he wakes up," said Nafai.
Shedemei sighed. "I always have that same anxiety, too, like I've forgotten to say something very important. I think it's just one of the side effects of the suspension drugs."
Nafai laughed. "Like when you wake up in the middle of the night with a very important idea from a dream, and you write it down and then in the morning it says, ‘Not the food! The dog!' and you have no idea what that could possibly mean or why you once thought it was important."
"The real dreams," said Shedemei, "you don't have to write down. You remember them."
They both nodded, remembering what it felt like to have the Oversold or the Keeper of Earth speak to them in their sleep. Then they returned to the children and set to work on the next part of their training.
Chveya was working with Dza on coaching some of the younger children through their exercises. They had learned years ago that everybody had to be supervised or they would start to slack off, even though Nafai had warned again and again that if they didn't put in two hard hours every day in the centrifuge, they would reach Earth with bodies so slack and feeble that they would have to borrow Issib's chair just to get around. So the younger children exercised with older children calling the rimes, and the older children worked with younger ones monitoring them. That way they never had peers "telling them what to do." The system worked well enough. Dza was still not Chveya's friend-they really hadn't that much in common. Dza was one of those people who couldn't stand to be alone, wh
o always had to surround herself with the hubbub of conversation, with eager gossip, with laughter and mockery. Chveya could see that, now that Dza wasn't bossing them anymore, the younger girls genuinely liked her. It appeared to Chveya like a physical connection between them, and she could see how the younger girls brightened when they came into Dza's presence-and how Dza brightened also. But Chveya could not enjoy being with them for long. And envy wasn't the cause of it, either, though at times she Aid envy Dza her bevy of friends. All the constant chat, the rapidly shifting demands on her attention-it wore Chveya out very quickly, and she would have to go off by herself for a while, to surround herself with silence and music, to read a book continuously for an hour, holding the same thread of talk.
Father had talked to her about it, and Mother, too, when she was awake the last time. You spend too much time alone, Chveya. The other children sometimes think you don't like them. But to Chveya, reading a book was not the same as being alone. Instead she was having a conversation with one person, a sustained conversation that stuck to the subject and didn't constantly fly off on tangents or get interrupted by someone demanding to tell her gossip or talk about her problem.
As long as Chveya got her solitary time, though, she could get along peaceably enough with the others- even Dza. Now that she had got over her childish infatuation with being "first child," Dza was good company, bright and funny. To her credit, Dza had not been jealous when it was discovered that Chveya alone of the third generation had developed the ability to sense the relationships among people, even though it was Dza's mother, not Chveya's, who had first learned to do it. When Aunt Hushidh was awake, she spent more time with Chveya than with her own daughters, but Dza did not complain. In fact, Dza once smiled at Chveya and said, "Your father teaches ail of us all the time. I'm not going to get mad because my mother spends time teaching you." Studying with Aunt Hushidh was like reading a book. She was quiet, she was patient, she stuck to the subject. And better than a book: She answered Chveya's questions. With Aunt Hushidh, Chveya suddenly became the talkative one. Perhaps that was because Aunt Hushidh was the only one who had seen the things that Chveya saw.
"But you see more," Aunt Hushidh said one day. "You have dreams like your mother, too."
Chveya rolled her eyes. "There's no Lake of Women on this starship," she said. "There's no City of Women to make a fuss over me and hang on every word of my accounts of my visions."
"It wasn't really like that," said Hushidh.
"Mother said it was."
"Well, that's how it seemed to her, perhaps. But your mother never exploited the role of Waterseer."
"It wasn't useful, though, like... well, like what we can do."
Hushidh smiled slightly. "Useful. But sometimes misleading. You can interpret things wrongly. When you know too much about people, it still doesn't mean that you know enough. Because the one thing you never really know is why they're connected to one person and distant from another. I make guesses. Sometimes it's easy enough. Sometimes I'm hopelessly wrong."
"I'm always wrong," said Chveya, but it didn't make her ashamed to say this in front of Aunt Hushidh.
"Always partly wrong," said Hushidh. "But often partly right, and sometimes very clever about it indeed. The problem, you see, is that you must care enough about other people to really think about them, to try to imagine the world through their eyes. And you and I-we're both a little shy about getting to know people. You have to try to spend time with them. To listen to them. To be friends with them. I'm saving this, not because I did it at your age, but because I didn't, and I know how much it hampered me."
"So what changed it?" asked Chveya.
"I married a man who lived in such constant inner pain that it made my own fears and shames and sufferings seem like childish whining."
"Mother says that long before you married Uncle Issib, you faced down a bad man and took the loyalty of his whole army away from him."
"That's because they were another man's army, only that man was dead, and they didn't have much loyalty to begin with. It wasn't hard, and I did it by blindly flailing around, trying to say everything I could think of that might weaken what loyalty remained."
"Mother says you looked calm and masterful."
"The key word is ‘looked.' Come now, Veya, you know for yourself-when you're terrified and confused, what do you do?"
. Chveya giggled then. "I stand there like a frightened deer."
"Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as can be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They think of you as made of stone, and they want to break in and touch human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're most frightened and breakable."
"Why is that? Why don't people understand each other better?"
"Because they're young," said Hushidh.
"Old people don't understand each other any better."
"Some do," said Hushidh. "The ones who care enough to try."
"You mean you."
"And your mother."
"She doesn't understand me at all."
"You say that because you're an adolescent, and when an adolescent says that her mother doesn't understand her, it means that her mother understands her all too well but won't let her have her way."
Chveya grinned. "You are a nasty, conceited, arrogant grownup just like all the others,"
Hushidh smiled back. "See? You're learning. That smile allowed you to tell me just what you thought, but allowed me to take it as a joke so I could hear the truth without having to get angry."
"I'm trying," Chveya said with a sigh.
"And you're doing well, for a short, ignorant, shy adolescent."
Chveya looked at her in horror. Then Hushidh broke into a anile.
"Too late," said Chveya. "You meant that."
"Only a little," said Hushidh. "But then, all adolescents are ignorant, and you can't help being short and shy You'll get taller."
"And shyer."
"But sometimes bolder."
Well, it was true. Chveya had started a growth spurt soon after Hushidh went back to sleep the last time, and now she was almost as tall as Dza, and taller than any of the boys except Oykib, who was already almost as tall as Father, all bones and angles, constantly bumping into things or smacking his hands into them or stubbing his toes. Chveya liked the way he took the others' teasing with a wordless grin, and never complained. She also liked the fact that he never used his large size to bully any of the other children, and when he interceded in quarrels, it was with quiet persuasion, not with his greater size and strength, that he brought peace. Since she was probably going to end up married to Oykib, it was nice that she Uked the kind of man he was becoming. Too bad that all he thought of when he looked at her was "short and boring." Not that he ever said it. But his eyes always seemed to glide right past her, as if he didn't notice her enough to even ignore her. And when he was alone with her, he always left as quickly as possible, as if it nearly killed him to spend any time in her company.
Just because we children are going to have to pair up and marry doesn't mean we're going to fall in love with each other, Chveya told herself. If I'm a good wife to him, maybe someday he'll love me.
She didn't often allow herself to think of the other possibility, that when it came time to marry, Oykib would insist on marrying someone else. Cute little Shyada, for instance. She might be two years younger, but she already knew how to flirt with the boys so that poor Padarok was always tongue-tied around her and Motya watched her all the time with an expression of such pitiful longing that Chveya didn't know whether to laugh or cry. What if Oykib married her, and left Chveya to marry one of the younger boys? What if they made one of the younger ones marry her?
I'd kill myself, she decided.
Of course she knew that she would not. Not literally, anyway. She'd put the best face on it that she could, and make do.
Sometimes she wondered if that's how it was for Aunt
Hushidh. Had she fallen in love with Issib before she married him? Or did she marry him because he was the only one left? It must be hard, to be married to a man you had to pick up and carry around when he wasn't in a place where his floats would work. But they seemed happy together.
People can be happy together.
All these thoughts and many more kept playing through Chveya's mind as she helped Shyada, Netsya, Dabya, and Zuya get through their calisthenics. Since Netsya was a cruel taskmaster when she was doing times for the older children, it was rather a pleasure to say, "Faster, Netsya. You did better than this last time," as Netsya's face got redder and redder and sweat flew off her hands and nose as she moved.
"You are," Netsya said, panting, "the queen, of the bitches."
"And thou art the princess, darling Gonets."
"Listen to her," said Zuya, who was not panting, because she did all her exercises as easily as if they were a pleasant stroll. "She reads so much she talks like a book now."
"An old, book," Netsya panted. "An ancient, decrepit, dusty, yellowed, worm-eaten-"
Her list of Chveya's virtues was interrupted by a loud ringing sound, followed by a whooping siren that nearly deafened them. Several of the children in the centrifuge screamed; most held their hands over their ears. They had never heard such a thing before.
"Something's wrong," Dza said to Chveya. Chveya noticed that Dza was not holding her hands over her ears. She looked as calm as an owl.
"I think we should stay here until Father tells us what to do," said Chveya.
Dza nodded. "Let's make sure who we have and not lose track of them."
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