THE SHIPS OF EARTH

by Orson Scott Card

  "Who packed this camel?" Elemak demanded.

  No one seemed to recall having packed it.

  "That's the problem," said Volemak. "The camel obviously packed itself, and it wasn't good with the knots."

  The company laughed nervously. Elemak whirled on his father, prepared to castigate him for making light of a serious situation. When he met Volemak's gaze, however, he paused, for he could see that Volemak was taking things very seriously indeed. So Elemak nodded to his father and then sat down, to show that he was going to let Volemak handle it.

  "Whoever loaded this camel knows his responsibility," said Volemak. "And finding out who it is will be very simple—I have only to ask the Index. But there will be no punishment, because there's nothing to be gained by it. If I ever feel a need, I will reveal who it was whose carelessness cost us our security, but in the meantime you are safe in your cowardly refusal to name yourself."

  Still no one spoke up.

  Volemak said no more, but instead nodded toward Elemak, who got up and held the last pulse in front of him. "This is the pulse we have used most" he said. "Therefore this is the one whose charge is least durable, and yet it's all we have to bring us meat. It could last a couple of years—pulses have lasted that long before—but when this one is no longer workable, we have no other."

  He walked to Nafai and held out the pulse to him. Nafai took it gingerly.

  "You're the hunter," said Elemak. "You're the one who'll make best use of it. Just make sure you take care of it. Our lives and the lives of our children depend on how you fulfil this duty."

  Nafai nodded his understanding.

  Elemak turned to the others. "If anyone sees that the pulse is in any danger whatever, you must speak or act at once to protect it. But except for such a case, no one but Nafai is to touch the pulse for any reason. We'll no longer use it even to sear the meat—what meat we eat during dangerous passages, we'll eat raw. Now, let's get down this valley before we're discovered here."

  By late afternoon they were at the place where caravans either went on south, into the inhabited valleys where the cities of Dovoda and Neeshtchy clung to life between the desert and the sea, or southeastward into the Razoryat Mountains, and then on down into the northern reaches of the Valley of Fires. Volemak led them up into Razoryat. But it occurred to more than one of them that if they went south into Dovoda or Neeshtchy, there would be more pulses they could buy, and decent food, for that matter. And above all, other faces, other voices. Hardly a one of them that didn't wish they could, at the very least, visit there.

  But Volemak led them on up into the hills, where they camped that night without a fire, for fear it would be seen by some dweller in the distant cities.

  It was slow travel, from then on, for the Index warned Volemak that there were three caravans coming north through the Valley of Fires, two of them from the Cities of Fire and another from the Cities of the Stars, even farther to the south. To most of them those were names out of legend, cities even older and more storied than Basilica. Tales of ancient heroes always seemed to begin, "Once upon a time in the Cities of the Stars," or "Here is how things were in the old days, in the Cities of Fire." They hoped, many of them: Perhaps that's where the Oversoul is taking us, to the great ancient cities of legend.

  To avoid the caravans, however, they had to travel away from the road. In the desert that had been easy enough—the road was barely distinguishable from the rest of the desert, and it made little difference what path, precisely, one followed. But here it mattered a great deal, for the terrain was strange, and more difficult and confusing than in any other place in Harmony. They came down out of the mountains and saw at once that it was a greener place, with grass almost everywhere, and vines, and bushes, and even a few trees. It was also rocky and craggy, and the land was strangely stepped, as if someone had pushed together a thousand tables of different sizes and heights, so that every surface was flat, but no two surfaces met at a level. And between the grassy tables were cliffs, some only a meter or so high, but some towering a hundred meters, or five hundred.

  And the strangeness grew even greater as they moved down into the Valley of Fires, for there were places where vents in the earth or cracks in a cliff gave off remarkable stenches. Most of them made faces and tried to breathe through their mouths, but Elemak and Volemak took the stinks very seriously indeed, often finding circuitous routes that avoided the vent where the gas was coming from. Only when Zdorab discovered that the Index could provide them with immediate spectroscopic analysis of the gas, at least during daylight, were they able to be sure which gases—and therefore which stinks—were safe to breathe.

  Even more frightening—though Elemak assured them that it was much safer—were the smokeholes and the open flames. They would see them from miles away, either thick columns of smoke or bright flames, and they learned to bend their course toward them, especially after Shedemei assured them that they would certainly not explode. When they camped near the open flames, they used them to cook their meat and even bake fresh bread, though only Zdorab, Nafai, and Elemak were willing to do the actual cooking, since it involved running near enough to the flames to leave the meat and the loaves where there was enough heat to cook flesh—which, of course, meant that the heat could cook the cooks if they didn't get out fast enough. They would all help dress the meat that Nafai had killed, put it on griddles, and then cheer madly as Nafai, Zdorab, and Elemak, each in turn, ran toward the fire, set down a griddle of meat, and then ran back to cooler air. Fetching the meat was even harder, of course, since it took longer to pick up the hot griddles than to set down the cool ones, and sometimes when they came back their clothes were smoking.

  "It's only our sweat steaming," Nafai insisted, when Luet announced she preferred to have her meat raw and keep her husband alive.

  But there weren't that many fires that were usable, since they were not often located near sources of water, and as often as not they ate cold food.

  It was a place of glorious beauty, the Valley of Fires, but there was also something frightening about it, to be confronted at every turn by evidence of the terrible forces that moved inside the planet they lived on—forces strong enough to lift solid rock hundreds of meters straight up in the air.

  Glorious, frightening, and also inconvenient, they realized, when they came to a place where the route they had chosen funneled them into a cul-de-sac—a deep, hot lake, surrounded by five-hundred-meter cliffs on both sides. There was no getting across the lake, and no getting around it either. They would have to backtrack several days' journey, Volemak and Elemak decided, and choose another route even farther from the regular caravan roads, and much closer to the sea.

  "Couldn't the Oversoul have seen this?" asked Mebbekew, rather caustically.

  "The Index showed this lake," said Volemak. "That's why we came this way. What the Oversoul could not tell us was that there was no way around it on either side."

  "Then the last three days of traveling are wasted?" Kokor whined.

  "We've seen things that aren't even dreamed of in Basilica," Lady Rasa answered.

  "Except in nightmares" said Kokor.

  "Some artists have been known to take sights like these and turn them into song," said Rasa. "Which reminds me—we've heard neither you nor Sevet sing this whole year and more, except when you sing to your babies. Nor Eiadh, for that matter—she never had a chance to try her career as my daughters did, but she has the sweetest voice."

  Hushidh could have told her to save her breath—there would be no singing until something changed among the women. It was the old quarrel between Sevet and Kokor, of course. Sevet either could not sing anymore or chose not to, all as a result of the damage Kokor did by striking her on the larynx when she caught her in bed with Obring. And as long as Sevet wasn't singing, Kokor dared not sing—she feared Sevet's vengeance if she did. And Eiadh was hopelessly intimidated by the two older girls, who had been quite famous in Basilica, especially Sevet. Kokor had made it clear
that if she couldn't sing, she didn't want to hear Eiadh's wretched little voice like a mockery of music. Which was unfair—Eiadh did have talent, and the very thinness of her voice might have been called bell-like purity if someone besides Kokor had been the critic. But whenever Eiadh did try to sing, Kokor made such a show of grimacing and enduring that Eiadh soon lost heart and never tried again. So there would be no songs in their company about the grandeur and majesty of the Valley of Fires.

  There was another kind of poetry, though, and another kind of artist, and Hushidh and Luet were the audience as Shedemei rhapsodized about the forces of nature. "Two great landmasses, once a single continent but now divided," she said. "They pressed against each other like your two hands laid side by side on a table. But then they began to rotate in opposite directions, with the center right where your thumbs touch. Now they press toward each other at the fingertips, crushing into each other, even as they pull away from each other at the heels of the hands."

  Shedemei was explaining this as she sat on the carpet in Luet's tent, holding both their babies sitting up on her knees, her arms around them, her hands in front of her, demonstrating. The babies seemed fascinated indeed—there was something in the color or intensity of Shedemei's voice that all the babies in the company were drawn to, for Hushidh saw how alert they all became when she spoke. Often Shedemei could quiet a fussy infant when the child's own mother could not—which meant that Kokor and Sevet never let Shedemei near their babies, out of jealousy at being shown up—and Dol was always dropping off her little Syelsika for Shedemei to tend, often leaving her until Dol's own breasts were so sore that she had no choice but to fetch her baby and nurse it.

  Only Luet and Hushidh, it seemed, sought out Shedemei's company, and even they had to use their babies as an excuse—could you help us with our babies while we bathe? So it was that Shedya sat on the carpet in Luet's tent while the two sisters sponged the dirt of the several days' journey from each other's backs and washed each other's hair.

  "The crushing at the fingertips raises the great mountains of the north," said Shedemei. "While the parting at the heels created the Scour Sea, and then the Sea of Smoke. The Valley of Fires is the upwelling at the center. Someday, when the tearing apart is done, Potokgavan will sink into the sea and the Valley of Fires will be an island in an ever-widening ocean. It will be the most glorious and isolated spot on all of Harmony, the place where the planet is most alive and dangerous and beautiful."

  Chveya, Luet's daughter, made a gurgling sound in the back of her throat. Like a growl.

  "That's right, Veyevniya," said Shedemei, using her own silly name for Chveya. "A place for wild animals like you."

  "And what about the thumbs?" asked Hushidh. "What happens there?"

  "The thumbs, the fulcrum, the center—that's Basilica," said Shedemei. "The stable heart of the world. There are other continents, but no place on any of them where the water is so hot and cold and deep or the land so old and unchangeable. Basilica is the place where Harmony is most at peace."

  "Geologically speaking," said Hushidh.

  "Humanity's little disturbances—what are they?" asked Shedemei. "The smallest unit of time that ever matters is the generation, not the minute, not the hour, not the day, not even the year. Those all come and go and are done in a moment. But the generation—that's where the true changes come, when a world is really alive."

  "Is humanity dead, then, since we've gone forty million years without evolution?" asked Luet.

  "Do you think these children aren't evolution in progress?" asked Shedemei. "Speciation comes at times of genetic stress, when a species—not a mere individual or even a tribe—is in danger of destruction. Then the vast variety of possibilities within the species is winnowed down to those few variations that offer particular advantages to survival. So a species seems to be unchanged for millions of years, only to have change come suddenly when the need arises. The truth is that the changes were present all along—they simply hadn't been isolated and exposed."

  "You make it sound like a wonderful plan," said Luet. "I know—that's how it's always taught among women, isn't it? The Oversoul's plan. The patterns of generation: coupling, conception, gestation, birth, nurturing, maturation, and then coupling again—all the plan of the Oversoul. But we know better, don't we? The machine in the sky is merely an expression of humanity's will—part of the reason why we have not undergone speciating stress in forty million years. A tool to keep us as widely varied as possible, without ever achieving power enough to destroy ourselves and our world, as we did on Earth. Isn't that what Nafai and Issib learned? Isn't that why we're here? Because this isn't a plan of the Oversoul, because the Oversoul is losing the power to keep humanity self-tamed. Yet I can't help but think that it might be a good thing to let the Oversoul wither and die. In the generations that came after that, in the terrible stresses that would come, maybe humanity would speciate again and develop something new." She leaned down to little Dza and poofed in her face, which always made Dza laugh. "Maybe you are the new thing that humanity is supposed to become," said Shedemei. "Isn't that right, Dazyitnikiya?"

  "You do love children so," said Luet, with a wistful tone.

  "I love other people's children," said Shedemei. "I can always give them back, and then have time for my work. For you, poor things, it never ends."

  But Hushidh was not deceived. Not that Shedemei didn't mean what she said—far from it. Shedya was quite sincere in her decision that it was perfectly all right for her not to have children—that she actually preferred it that way. She meant it, or at least meant to mean it.

  Hushidh was convinced, however, that the powerful bond between Shedemei and every baby in the camp was really the infants' unconscious response to Shedemei's irresistible hunger. She wanted babies. She wanted to be part of the vast passage of the generations through the world. And more than that—as Hushidh watched the love between her and Zdorab grow into one of the strongest friendships she had ever seen, Hushidh became more and more certain that Shedemei wanted to bear Zdorab's child, and it made Hushidh yearn more and more for that longing to come true.

  She had even asked the Oversoul why it was that Shedemei didn't conceive, but the Oversoul had never answered—and Luet said that when she asked, she got the clear answer that what went on between Zdorab and Shedemei was none of her business.

  Maybe it's none of our business, though Hushidh, but that doesn't mean we can't wish that Shedemei had all that she needs to make her happy. Didn't the Oversoul bring everyone into the company because all their genes were needful? Was it possible that the Oversoul had erred, and either Zdorab or Shedemei was sterile? Awfully clumsy of her, if that's what happened.

  Even now, Shedemei was explaining how Zdorab was the one who had discovered the geological history of the Valley of Fires. "He plays the Index like a musical instrument. He found things in the past that even the Oversoul didn't know that she knew. Things that only the ancients who first settled here understood. They gave the memory to the Oversoul, but then programmed her so that she couldn't find those memories on her own. Zdorab found the back doors, though, the hidden passageways, the strange connections that led into so many, many secrets."

  "I know," said Hushidh. "Issib marvels at him sometimes, even though Issya himself isn't bad at getting ideas out of the Index."

  "Oh, indeed, I know that," said Shedemei. "Zdorab says all the time that Issib is the real explorer."

  "And Issib says that's only because he has more time, being useless at everything else," said Hushidh. "It's as if they both have to find reasons why the other is much better. I think they've become good friends."

  "I know it," said Shedemei. "Issib is able to see how fine a man Zdorab really is."

  "We all understand that," said Luet.

  "Do you?" said Shedemei. "Sometimes it seems to me that everyone thinks of him as a sort of universal servant."

  "We think of him as our cook because he's the best at it," said Hushidh. "And
our librarian because he's the best at that."

  "Ah, but only a few of us care about his archival skills; to most of the people in our company, his culinary skills are the only things they notice about him."

  "And his gardening," said Luet.

  Shedemei smiled. "You see? But he gets little respect for it."

  "From some," said Hushidh. "But others respect him greatly."

  "I know Nafai does," said Luet. "And I do."

  "And I, and Issib and Volemak, too, I know that," said Hushidh.

  "And isn't that everybody that matters?" asked Luet.

  "I tell him that," said Shedemei, "but he persists in playing the servant."

  Hushidh could see that, for this moment at least, Shedemei was closer to opening her heart to someone than ever before on this journey. She hardly knew, though, how to encourage her to go on—should she prod with a question, or keep silence so as not to impede her?

  She kept silence.

  And so did Shedemei.

  Until at last Shedemei sniffed loudly and put her nose down near Chveya's diaper. "Has our little kaka factory produced another load?" she asked. "Now is the time when my permanent aunthood pays off. Mama Luet, your baby needs you."

  They laughed—because of course they knew that Shedemei was as likely to change a baby's diaper as not. This business of giving the baby back to the mother whenever taking care of it was a bother was only a joke.

  No, not only a joke. It was also a wistful regret. Shedemei's reminder to herself that, like her husband Zdorab, she was not really one of the company of women. She had been on the verge, Hushidh knew it, of telling something that mattered… and then the moment had passed.

  As Luet cleaned her baby, Shedemei watched, and Hushidh watched her watching. Near the end of her bath, Luet was wearing nothing but a light skirt, and the shape of her motherly body—heavy breasts, a belly still loose and full from the birthing not that many months ago—was sweetly framed as she knelt and bent over her baby. What does Shedemei see when she looks at Luet, whose figure was once as lean and boyish as Shedemei's is still? Does she wish for that transformation?