Earthborn

by Orson Scott Card

  He looked disappointed, but still he lingered, not looking at her. "I've come a long way."

  "In better times, sir, I would invite you in and offer you water at least, a meal if you would have it. But these are hard times and I don't allow strangers in this school."

  He nodded, looked down at the ground. As if he was ashamed. Yes. He was ashamed.

  "You seem to feel some personal responsibility for the troubles," she said. "Forgive me if I'm presumptuous."

  When he looked at her there were tears swimming in his old eyes under the fierce, bushy eyebrows. It did not make him look soft; if anything, it made him seem more dangerous. But not to her. No, she knew that now-he was not dangerous to her or anyone here. "Come in," she said.

  "No, you were right to keep me out," he said. "I came here to see ... the master... because I am responsible, partly so, anyway, and I can't think how to make amends."

  "Let me give you water, and we can talk. I'm not Shedemei-I don't have her wisdom. But it seems to me that sometimes any interested stranger will do when you need to unburden yourself, as long as you know she'll not use your words to harm you."

  "Do I know that?" asked the old man.

  "Shedemei trusts me with her school," said Edhadeya. "I have no prouder testimony to my character than that."

  He followed her into the school, then into the small room by the door that served Shedemei as an office. "Don't you want to know my name?" he asked.

  "I want to know how you think you caused these troubles." He sighed. "Until three days ago I was a high official in one of the provinces. It won't be hard to guess which province when I tell you that there have been no troubles at all there, since no angels live within its borders, and diggers have never been tolerated."

  "Khideo," she said, naming the province. He shuddered.

  And then she realized that she had also named the man. "Khideo," she said again, and this time he knew from the tone of her voice that she was naming him, and not just the land that had been named after him.

  "What do you know of me? A would-be regicide. A bigot who wanted a society of pure humans. Well, there are no pure humans, that's what I'm thinking. We talked of a campaign to drive all diggers from Darakemba. But it came to nothing for many years, a way to pass the time, a way to reassure ourselves that we were the noble ones, we pure humans, if only the others, the ones who lived among the animals, if only they could understand. I see the disgust in your face, but it's the way I was raised, and if you'd seen diggers the way I saw them, murderous, cruel, whips in their hands-"

  "The way diggers in Darakemba have been taught to see humans?"

  He nodded. "I never saw it that way until these recent troubles. It got out of hand, you see, when word spread-when I helped spread the word-that inside the king's own house, all four of his possible heirs had rejected the vile species-mixing religion of Akmaro. Not to mention Akmaro's own son, though we had known he was one of us for a long time. But all the king's sons-that was like giving these pure humans license to do whatever they wanted. Because they knew they would win in the end. They knew that when Motiak passes into being Motiab and Aronha become Aronak... ."

  "And they started beating children."

  "They started with vandalism. Shouting. But soon other stories started coming in, and the pure humans that I knew said, What can we do? The young ones are so ardent in their desire for purity. We tell them not to be mean, but who can contain the anger of the young? At first I thought they meant this; I advised them on ways to reign in the ones doing the beatings. But then I realized that... I overheard them when they didn't know that I could hear, laughing about angels with holes in their wings. How does an angel fly with holes in his wings? Much faster, but only in one direction. They laughed at this. And I realized that they weren't trying to stop the violence, they loved it. And I had harbored them. I had provided a haven for the Unkept from other provinces to meet together in the days before Akmaro removed all serious penalties for heresy. Now I have no influence over them at all. I couldn't stop them. All I could do was refuse to pretend I was their leader. I resigned my office as governor and came here to learn... ."

  "To learn what, Khideo?"

  "To learn how to be human. Not pure human. But a man like my old friend Akmaro."

  "Why didn't you go to him?"

  Again tears came to Khideo's eyes. "Because I'm ashamed. I don't know Shedemei. I only hear that she is stern and ruthlessly honest. Well, no, I also heard that she favors the mixing of species and all sort of other abominations. That's how word of her came to my city. My former city. But you see, in these last weeks, it occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies."

  "Shedemei is not your enemy," said Edhadeya.

  "I have been her enemy, then, until now. I realized that all my loathing for angels had been taught to me from childhood, and I only continued to feel that way because it was the tradition of my people. I actually knew and liked several angels, including one rude old scholar in the king's house."

  "Bego," said Edhadeya.

  He looked at her in surprise. "But of course he would be better known here in the capital." Then he studied her face and knitted his brow. "Have we met before?"

  "Once, long ago. You didn't want to listen to me."

  He thought for a moment longer, then looked aghast. "I have been pouring out my heart to the king's daughter," he said.

  "Except for Akmaro himself, you couldn't have spoken to anyone gladder to hear these words from you. My father honors you, in spite of his disagreement with you. When you see fit to tell him that those disagreements exist no longer, he will embrace you as a long lost brother. So will Ilihi, and so will Akmaro."

  "I didn't want to listen to women," said Khideo. "I didn't want to live with angels. I didn't want diggers to be citizens. Now I have come to a school run by women to learn how to live with angels and diggers. I want to change my heart and I don't know how."

  "Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice. I will say nothing to my father or anyone else about who you are."

  "Why didn't you name yourself to me?"

  "Would you have spoken to me then?"

  He laughed bitterly. "Of course not."

  "And please remember that you also refrained from naming yourself to me."

  "You guessed soon enough."

  "And so did you."

  "But not soon enough."

  "And I say that no harm has been done." She rose from her chair. "You may attend any class, but you must do it in silence. Listen. You will learn as many lessons from the students as from the teachers. Even if you think they are hopelessly wrong, be patient, watch, learn. What matters right now is not correctness of opinion, but learning what opinions they might have. Do you understand?"

  He nodded. "I'm not used to being deferent."

  "Don't be deferent," she said testily-a tone of voice that Shedemei had taught her inadvertently. "Just be silent."

  During the days that followed, Edhadeya watched-from a distance, but carefully. Some of the teachers clearly resented the presence of this man, but Khideo was not insensitive, and soon stayed away from their classes. The girls got used to him quickly, ignoring him in class, and gradually, shyly, including him at meals and in the courtyard. He would be asked to reach something on a high shelf. Some of the little girls even started climbing on him whenever he sat leaning against a tree, using him to get to branches that were otherwise out of reach. Lissinits, they called him-"ladder." He seemed to like the name.

  Edhadeya came to value him for his own sake. Two things about him, though, weighed heavily on her mind. She kept thinking about how even a man like him, a confirmed bigot, could actually harbor a fundamental decency deep within. The outward pattern of his life didn't necessarily reflect what was inside him. It took terrible events to waken him, to get him to shuck off the man he seemed to be and reveal that inward self. But the decent self was there to be found.

&n
bsp; The other thing that preyed upon her mind was what he had said about her brothers. The Unkept had held their meetings for thirteen years and they led to nothing. Then Akma succeeded in persuading all her brothers, all the king's sons, to reject belief in the Keeper and, more specifically, obedience to the religion of Akmaro. And from that time forward, the most evil men felt free to do their dark business.

  That can't be what Akma intended. If he understood it the way Khideo does, wouldn't he stop?

  I should talk to Mon, not Akma, she told herself-not noticing that she must already have decided to talk to Akma. If I could get him to break ranks with the others... but no, she knew that was impossible. None of the brothers would betray the others; that was how they'd see it. No, it had to be Akma. If he changed his mind, they would change theirs. He would persuade them.

  She kept hearing Luet's despairing voice: "There's nothing left in him, Edhadeya. Nothing there but hate." If that was true, then talking to Akma would be a waste of time. But Luet couldn't see into his heart. If Khideo had a spark of decency in him, couldn't Akma also? He was young, still; he had been damaged in childhood far more than Khideo had. The world had been misshapen for him ever since; if once he saw the truth, couldn't he choose to be a different man in a very different world?

  These were the thoughts that drove her as one night she locked the school, leaving Khideo-no, Lissinits-as caretaker of it. Then, torch in hand, she walked in the brisk autumn air to her father's house. On the way she thought: What if there were no safety? If I were an earth woman-or man, or child-I wouldn't dare to make this walk in darkness, for fear of being set upon by cruel men who hate me, not because of anything I've done, but because of the shape of my body. For those people these streets are filled with terror, where all my life I've walked without fear, day and night. Can they truly be citizens, when they haven't the freedom to walk the city?

  As she expected, Akma was in the king's house, in the library wing, where he slept most nights now. Not that he was asleep. He was up, reading, studying, jotting down notes to himself in the wax on a bark; one of dozens of barks covered with scribbling. "Writing a book?" she asked.

  "I'm not a holy man," he said. "I don't write books. I write speeches." He swept the barks to one side. She liked the way he looked at her, as if he had been hoping she would come. She had his full attention, and his eyes didn't wander over her body the way most men's did. He looked into her eyes. She felt as though she ought to say something very clever or very wise, to justify his interest in her.

  No, she told herself sternly. That's just one of his tricks. One of the things he does to win people over. And I'm not here to be won over. I came to teach, not to be taught.

  No wonder I once loved him, if he always looked at me like that.

  To her surprise, what she blurted out now was nothing like what she had come to say. "I used to love you," she said.

  A sad smile came over his face. "Used to," he whispered. "Before there was any issue of belief."

  "Is it an issue of belief, Akma?" she asked.

  "For two people to love each other, they have to meet, don't they? And two people who live in utterly different worlds have no chance of meeting."

  She knew what he meant; they had had this conversation before, and he had insisted that while she lived in an imaginary world in which the Keeper of Earth watched over everyone, giving purpose to their lives, he lived in a real world of stone and air and water, where people had to find their own purposes.

  "Yet we're meeting here," she said.

  "That remains to be seen." His words were cold and distant, but his eyes searched her face. For what? What does he want to see? Some remnant of my love for him? But that is the one thing that I dare not show him because I dare not find it in myself. I can't love him, because only a monstrous, callous woman could love the man who caused so much pointless suffering.

  "Have you been hearing the reports from the provinces?"

  "There are many reports," said Akma. "Which did you have in mind?"

  She refused to play along with his pretense of innocence. She waited.

  "Yes, I've heard the reports," he said. "A terrible business. I wonder your father hasn't called in the military."

  "To attack what army?" she asked scornfully. "You're smarter than that, Akma. An army is useless against thugs who melt away into the city and hide by wearing the clothing of respectable men of business, trade, or labor during the day."

  "I'm a scholar, not a tactician," said Akma.

  "Are you?" she asked. "I've thought about this a great deal, Akma, and when I look at you it's not a scholar that I see."

  "No? What monster have you decided that I am?"

  "Not a monster, either. Just a common thug. Your hands have torn holes in the wings of angel children. Diggers hide in terror during the night because they fear seeing your shadow come between them and the moonlight."

  "Are you seriously accusing me of this? I have never raised my hand in violence against anyone."

  "You caused it, Akma. You set them in motion, the whole army of them, the whole nasty, cruel, evil army of child-beaters."

  He shuddered; his face contorted with some deep emotion. "You can't be saying this to me. You know that it's a lie."

  "They're your friends. You're their hero, Akma. You and my brothers."

  "I don't control them!" he said. He only barely controlled his voice.

  "Oh, you don't?" she answered. "What, do they control you then?"

  He rose from the table, knocking over his stool as he did. "If they did control me, Edhadeya, I'd be out preaching against Father's pathetic little religion right now. They beg, they plead. Ominer's all for doing it, Pour the bronze while it still flows, he tells me. But I refuse to lend my name to any of these persecutions. I don't want anybody hurt-not even diggers, despite what you think of me. And those angels, with holes torn in their wings-do you think I didn't hear that with the same rage as any decent person? Do you think I don't want the thugs who did that punished?" His voice trembled with emotion.

  "Do you think they would have had the boldness to do it if it weren't for you?"

  "I didn't invent this! I didn't create hatred and resentment of the diggers! It was our fathers who did it, when they changed the whole religious structure of the state to include the diggers as if they were people-"

  "Thirteen years since they made those changes, and in all those years, nothing happened. Then you announce that you've ‘discovered' that there is no Keeper-in spite of my true dream by which the Keeper saved the Zenifi! In spite of knowing that it was only by the power of the Oversoul that the very records from which you took your ‘proof were translated. You persuade my brothers-even Mon, I don't know how-even Aronha, who always used to see through silliness-and then, the moment that Father's heirs are united in their unbelief, the floodgates open."

  "You might as well blame my mother, then. After all, she gave birth to me."

  "Oh, I think there is blame before you. I found out, for instance, that Bego has been part of a longtime conspiracy against Akmaro's teachings. If you search your memory honestly, I wonder if you won't find that it was Bego who led you to your ‘discovery' of the nonexistence of the Keeper."

  "Bego isn't part of anything. He lives for his books. He lives in the past."

  "And your father was inventing a new future, doing away with the past. Yes, Bego would hate that, wouldn't he? And he's never believed in the Keeper, I realize that now-insisting on a natural explanation for everything. No miracles, please-remember him saying that over and over? No miracles. The people of Akmaro escaped because it was in the best interest of the digger guards to let them go. The Keeper didn't make them sleep. Did anybody see them sleeping? No, Akmaro simply dreamed a dream. Go with the simplest explanation every time, that's what he taught us."

  "He taught us that because it's true. It's intellectually honest."

  "Honest? Akma, the simplest explanation of most of these stories is that the Keeper s
ends true dreams. The Keeper intervenes sometimes in people's lives. To avoid believing that you have to come up with the most convoluted, twisted, insulting speculations. You dare to tell me that my dream was only significant because it reminded people of the Zenifi, not because I was actually able to tell the difference between a true dream and a normal one. In order to disbelieve in the Keeper, you had to believe that I was and continue to be a self-deceptive fool."

  "Not a fool," he said, with real pain in his expression.-"You were a child. It seemed real to you then. So of course you remember it as being real."

  "You see? What you call intellectual honesty I call self-deception. You won't believe me, when I stand before you in flesh and blood and declare to you what I saw-"

  "What you hallucinated among the dreams of the night."

  "Nor will you even believe the simple truth of what the ancient records say-that the Rasulum, just like the Nafari, were brought back to Earth after millions of years of exile on another world. No, you can't stick with the simple explanation that the people who wrote these things actually knew what they were talking about. You have to decide that the books were created by later writers who simply wrote down old legends that accounted for the divinity of the Heroes by claiming that they came from the heavens. Nothing can be read straight. Everything has to be twisted to fit your one, basic article of faith that there is no Keeper. You can't know it! You have no proof of it! And yet faith in that one premise-against which you have a thousand written witnesses and at least a dozen living ones, including me-faith in that one premise leads you to set in motion the chain of events that leads to children being mutilated in the streets of the cities and villages of Darakemba."

  "Is this why you came?" asked Akma. "To tell me that my disbelief in your true dream really hurts your feelings? I'm sorry. I had hoped you would be mature enough to understand that reason has to triumph over superstition."

  She hadn't touched him. Hadn't reached that spark of decency hidden deep inside. Because there was no such spark, she knew that now. He rejected the Keeper, not because he was hurt so badly as a child, but because he truly hated the world the Keeper wanted to create. He loved evil; that's why he no longer loved her.