Earthborn

by Orson Scott Card

  "That's right."

 

  "You couldn't block Nafai and Issib back on Harmony when you had your full powers. Akma has a powerful will; he would resist you. I think he'd probably enjoy it."

 

  "It's not my plan that matters now," said Shedemei. "It never was. We were as proud and as stupid as Akma was, back when we tried to provoke the Keeper by interfering with Monush's rescue. What we didn't understand is that the Keeper lets us interfere and tries to work around us. We really can't affect her. She wants this society, this nation of Darakemba to succeed. But if the people choose to ignore her and make something ugly out of their chance at something beautiful, well, so be it. She'll find somebody else."

 

  "Maybe the Keeper is waiting to see what these children of Harmony decide, right here, right now, before she can give you the instructions you came for."

 

  "She cares about them, yes. But she sees the whole picture, the sweep of time. To save a dozen or a thousand or a million people now, at the cost of the happiness of billions of lives over millions of years-she won't do it. She takes the long view."

 

  "I don't know. How can I know? We were wasting our time by trying to thwart her. But if Chebeya's right-and how can I tell how much truth a raveler knows?-if she's right, then the Keeper can be influenced, not by rebels but by her most loyal friends. So Akmaro may have been blocking her just as Chebeya said, and the things he's telling the Keeper now-maybe the logjam will be broken."

 

  "Either that or not. How can I know?"

 

  "I think that it's possible that when it comes time to break the impasse, the Keeper may have use for me."

 

  "Someone will have a dream. That's how the Keeper works. You'll see the dream, you'll tell me, and we'll figure out if there's something in it that the Keeper wants me to do."

 

  "I haven't had a true dream since I saw myself as a gardener in the sky. That came true long ago, and I don't expect to have another dream."

 

  "Yes, well, I'd like to think the Keeper had something to say to me, of course. I'm as vain as the next person."

 

  "It doesn't work that way. I'm not tired yet."

  She left the launch and wandered in the cold night air in her garden, routinely noticing the growth of the plants, the relative preponderance of one species over another, the amount of brachiation, the size of the foliage. The Oversoul entered her observations into the ship's computer as notes. They had long since stopped commenting on the irony that a computer program designed to govern a world was now acting as scribe for a lone biologist.

  The Oversoul began to talk to her.

  "Didn't you notice that about four hundred years ago?"

 

  "Forty million years you waited on Harmony, and now you're impatient?"

 

  "You were running things, you mean. If something was planned, it was because you were doing the planning. And then people started having dreams that didn't come from you. Made you a little uneasy, didn't it?"

 

  "That's how it is for us all the time."

 

  "Whatever the Keeper does, she does it faster than light, she does it no matter how far away a person is. It suggests such enormous power. Such knowledge, such... wisdom. And yet she is so delicate, intervening so little, really. Giving us such freedom. Respecting our choices. Listening to us. Listening to needs and desires we don't even know we have."

 

  "Organic, then? With very powerful tools?"

 

  "Or perhaps she found it and loved it and decided she wanted to help. On her own, unassigned, unrequested."

 

  "Now you're a critic."

 

  "That's the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings."

 

  "I mean my own life. I mean what I do. And the Keeper gives a meaning to the larger scene. That's enough meaning for me. I don't need to have somebody make an epic out of my life. I lived. Strange things happened. Now and then I made a little difference in other people's lives. You know what? It may be that the thing I'm proudest of in all my life is restoring the brain of that damaged little boy in Bodika."

 

  "The Keeper assigned that to me; if I hadn't done it, she would have found another way, given the task to someone else."

 

  "Maybe she did. But if I hadn't been there, the Keeper wouldn't have thought his life was so important that she would have sent someone else. So it was less significant-but because of that, I know that it happened only because I wanted it to happen. That makes it mine. My gift. Oh, I know it was the Keeper who brought me to Earth at all, and the Keeper who chose me to succeed Nafai as the starmaster so I was even alive then, all of that, I know it. But I'm the one who decided to be there at that time and to risk exposing who I really am to save that boy. So maybe that's what I'll think of with pride when I die. Or maybe it'll be the strange marriage I had with Zdorab. Or Rasaro's House-that school might last, and that would be something fine."

 

  "But I am tired. I think I can sleep now. Too cold to sleep out here. I really wish the seats reclined farther back in the launch."

 

  "And they deserve to be, too, the thoughtless weasels." She laughed. "I am tired."

  She finished her count anyway, so that her report would be complete. Then she had the launch turn off its exterior lights and she returned to it by starlight and closed the door and went to sleep.

  Went to sleep and dreamed. Many dreams, the normal dreams, the random firings of synapses in the brain, being given fragmentary meaning by the storymaking functions of the mind; dreams that the mind doesn't even bother to remember upon waking.

  And then, su
ddenly, a different dream. The Oversoul sensed it, the fact that the brain had now assumed a different pattern from the normal dreamsleep. Shedemei herself felt the difference and, even in her sleep, paid attention.

  She saw the Earth as it looked from the Basilica, the curve of the planet plainly visible at the horizons. Then, suddenly, she was seeing the seething magma that roiled underneath the crust of the planet. At first it looked chaotic, but then with piercing clarity she understood that there was magnificent order to the flow of the currents. Each eddy, each whorl, each stream had meaning. Much of it was grossly slow, but here and there, on a small scale, the movements were quick indeed.

  Then she knew without seeing, knew because she knew, that these currents gave shape to the magnetic field of the Earth, making both large and tiny variations that could be sensed by the animals, that could disturb them or soothe them. The warning before the earthquake. The sudden veering of a school offish. The harmonies between organisms; this was what the ravelers saw.

  She saw how mind and memory lived in the currents of flowing stone, in the magnetic flow; saw how vast amounts of information were deposited in crystals on the underside of the crust, changed by fluxes in temperature and magnetism. For a moment she thought: This is the Keeper.

  Almost at once the answer came: You have not seen the Keeper of Earth. But you have seen my home, my library, and some of my tools. I can't show you more than this because your mind has no way to receive what I really am. Is this enough?

  Yes, said Shedemei silently.

  At once the dream changed. She saw all at once more than forty worlds that had been colonized from Earth, and all of them were being watched by some kind of Oversoul, and all the Oversouls were being watched by the Keeper. In particular she saw Harmony, the millions of people as if for just this moment her mind had the capacity to know them all at once. She felt herself in contact with the other iteration of the Oversoul that still lived there; but no, that was illusion, there was no such connection. Yet she knew that it was time for the Oversoul of Harmony to allow the humans there to recover their lost technologies. That's how the Oversoul would be rebuilt-by humans who had regained their hands.

  It's time, said the clear voice of the Keeper in the dream. Let them build new starships and come home.

  What about the people here? asked Shedemei. Have you given up on them?

  The time of clarity has come. The decision will be made, one way or the other. So I can send for the people of Harmony now, because by the time they get here, either the three species will be living in perfect peace, or their pride will have broken them and made them ripe for domination by those who come after.

  Like the Rasulum, thought Shedemei.

  They also had their moment of choice, the Keeper replied.

  The dream changed again, and now she saw Akma and the sons of Motiak walking along a road. She knew at once exactly where the road was, and what time of day it would be when they reached that point.

  In the dream she saw the launch drop out of the sky, deliberately raising a cloud of smoke under it when it landed; she saw herself stride out, the cloak of the starmaster dazzlingly bright so that they couldn't bear to look at her. She began to speak, and at that moment the earth shook under them, driven by the currents of magma, and the young men fell to the ground. Then the quaking of the earth ended, and she spoke again, and at last she understood what it was the Keeper needed her to do.

  Will you? asked the Keeper.

  Will it help? she asked. Will it save these people?

  Yes, the Keeper answered. No matter what he chooses, Motiak will finish his days as king of a peaceful kingdom, because of your intervention here. But what happens in the far future-that is what Akma will decide. You may live to see it if you want.

  How, if the Basilica must go back to Harmony?

  I'm in no hurry here. Have the ship's computer send a probe. You can stay, and the Oversoul can stay. Don't you want to see some part of how it ends?

  Yes, I do.

  I know you do, said the Keeper. Until you made this visit to Earth, I wasn't sure if you were truly part of me, because I didn't know if you loved the people enough to share my work. You're not the same person you were when I first called you here.

  I know, said Shedemei in the dream. I used to live for nothing but my work.

  Oh, you still do that, and so do I. It's just that your work has changed, and now it's the same as my work: to teach the people of Earth how to live, on and on, generation to generation; and how to make that life joyful and free. You made your choice, and so now, like Akmaro, I can give you what you want, because I know that you desire only the joy of these people, forever.

  I'm not so pure-hearted as that!

  Don't be confused by your transient feelings. I know what you do; I know why you do it; I can name you more truly than you can name yourself.

  For a moment, Shedemei could see herself reaching up and plucking a white fruit from a tree; she tasted it, and the flavor of it filled her body with light and she could fly, she could sing all songs at once and they were endlessly beautiful inside her. She knew what the fruit was- it was the love of the Keeper for the people of Earth. The white fruit was a taste of the Keeper's joy. Yet also in the flavor of it was something else, the tang, the sharp pain of the millions, the billions of people who could not understand what the Keeper wanted for them, or who, understanding, hated it and rejected her interference in their lives. Let us be ourselves, they demanded. Let us accomplish our accomplishments. We want none of your gifts, we don't want to be part of your plan. And so they were swept away in the currents of time, belonging to no part of history because they could not be part of something larger than themselves. Yet they had their free choice; they were not punished except by the natural consequence of their own pride. Thus even in rejecting the Keeper's plan they became a part of it; in refusing to taste the fruit of the tree, they became part of its exquisite flavor. There was honor even in that. Their hubris mattered, even though in the long flow of burning history it changed nothing. It mattered because the Keeper loved them and remembered them and knew their names and their stories and mourned for them: O my daughter, O my son, you are also part of me, the Keeper cried out to them. You are part of my endless yearning, and I will never forget you-

  And the emotions became too much for Shedemei. She had dwelt in the Keeper's mind for as long as she could bear. She awoke sobbing violently, overwhelmed, overcome. Awoke and uttered a long mournful cry of unspeakable grief-grief for the lost ones, grief for having had to leave the mind of the Keeper, grief because the taste of the white fruit was gone from her lips and it had only been a dream after all. A true dream, but a dream that ends, it ended, and here I am more alone than I ever was before because for the first time in my life I had the experience of being not alone and I never knew, I never knew how beautiful it was to be truly, wholly known and loved. Her cry trailed off; her body was spent by the dream; she slept again, and dreamed no more until morning. By then enough time had passed that she could bear to be awake, though the dream was still powerfully present in her mind.

  "Did you watch?" she whispered.

 

  "He had different work to do," she said. "Can you get me to the place where I'm supposed to be?"

 

  She ate as the launch moved, chewing mechanically; the food had no flavor, compared to what she remembered from her dream.

  "Your waiting is over at last," she said between bites. "I assume you saw that."

 

  "So did I. But I got enough, I think, to last me for a while."

  y so vague ?>

  "I understood why, during the dream," said Shedemei. "The experience is so overwhelming that if she gave it to most people, they'd be so consumed by it that they wouldn't own their souls anymore. Their will would be swallowed up in hers. It would kill them, in effect."

 

  "I'm not. But since I had already chosen to follow the Keeper's plan, this dream didn't erase my will, it confirmed who I already was and what I already wanted. I didn't lose my freedom, and instead of killing me it made me more alive."

 

  "Yes, that's right. It's an organic thing." She thought for a moment longer, and added, "She said she couldn't let me see her face, but now I understand that I don't need to or want to, because I've done something better."

 

  "I've worn her face. I've seen through her eyes."

 

  Shedemei held up her hands and looked at them, damp and crumbed from the meal she was just finishing. "Then I would have to say that the Keeper of Earth looks just like me, don't you think?" She laughed for a moment; the sound was no doubt as raucous as any laugh, but inside herself it awakened the memory of music, and for a moment she remembered the taste of the fruit, and she was content.

  TWELVE - VICTORY

  When Edhadeya came to see them after their big public meeting in Jatva, it was Mon who went aside with her to hear what she had to say. "If you've come to persuade me to break ranks with my brothers," he began, but she gave him no chance to finish.

  "I know you're already committed to denying everything that was ever noble and good about you, Mon, so I wouldn't waste my time. Father sent me with a message."

  Mon felt the tiniest thrill of fear and dread. He often found it hard to believe that Father was letting them get away with all the things they were doing. Oh, he had stopped them from organizing the boycott of digger trade and labor, but of course they got around that by pretending to speak against the boycott-everyone understood the real message. Was Father now taking action against them? And if so, why was there something inside Mon that welcomed it? Was it that victory had come to them too easily, and he wanted some kind of contest?