The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

by Anissa Gray

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “And besides,” she said, “it wouldn’t be good for Chveya if a big fuss were made about this. Look what happened to Dza when we made her birthday into a festival—she’s really quite a bully with the other children, and it worries Shuya, and that public fuss only made her worse.”

  “There are times when I see her making the other children run meaningless errands for her that I want to slap her silly,” said Nafai.

  “But Lady Rasa says—”

  “That children must be free to establish their own society, and deal with tyranny in their own way, I know,” said Nafai. “But I can’t help but wonder if she’s right. After all, hers was an educational theory that thrived only in the womb of Basilica. Couldn’t we see our own conflicts early on in our journeying as a result of exactly her attitude?”

  “No, we couldn’t,” said Luet. “Particularly because the people who caused the most trouble were the ones who spent the least time being educated by Lady Rasa. Namely Elemak and Mebbekew, who left her school as soon as they came of age to decide for themselves, and Vas and Obring, who were never students of hers.”

  “Not so, my dear reductionist, since Zdorab is the best of us and he never studied with her, while Kokor and Sevet, her own daughters, are just as bad as the worst of the others.”

  “You only prove my point, since they went to Dhelem-buvex’s school and not your mother’s at all. Zdorab is an exception to everything anyway.”

  At that point the twins, Serp and Spel, toddled into the kitchen, and frank adult conversation was over.

  By the time they both got free enough to take a nap, the day’s activities had wakened them so thoroughly that they didn’t want to sleep. So they headed for Volemak’s and Rasa’s house to confer about the dream.

  On the way they passed a group of older boys competing with their slings. They stopped and watched for a while, mostly to see how their own two older boys, Zhatva and Motiga, were doing. The boys saw them watching, of course, and immediately set out to impress their parents—but it wasn’t their prowess with the sling and stones that most interested Luet and Nafai, it was how they were with the other boys. Motiga, of course, was an incessant tease—he was keenly aware of being younger than the other boys and his silly pranks and clowning were his strategy for trying to ingratiate his way into the inner circle. Zhatva, however, being older, was there by right, and what worried his parents was how pliant he was—how he seemed to worship Proya, a strutting cock-of-the-walk who didn’t deserve so much of Zhatva’s respect.

  A typical moment—Xodhya got hit in the arm by Motya’s careless swinging of his loaded sling. His eyes immediately filled with tears, and Proya taunted him. “You’ll never be a man, Xodhya! You’ll always just be coming near!” That was a play on his name, of course, and a rather clever one—but also cruel, and it did nothing but add to Xodhya’s misery. Then, without any of the boys being particularly aware of it, Xodhya turned in his misery to Zhyat, who offhandedly threw his arm around Xodhya’s shoulder as he barked at his little brother Motya, “Be careful with your sling, monkey brains!”

  It was a simple, instinctive thing, but Luet and Nafai smiled at each other when they saw it. Not only did Zhatva offer physical comfort to Xodhya, without a hint of condescension, but also he drew attention away from Xodhya’s pain and incipient tears and threw the blame where it rightly belonged, on Motya’s carelessness. It was done easily and gracefully, without giving the slightest challenge to Proya’s authority among the boys.

  “When will Zhyat see that he’s the one the other boys turn to when they’re in trouble?” asked Nafai.

  “Maybe he fills that role so well because he doesn’t know that he’s filling it.”

  “I envy him,” said Nafai. “If only I could have done that.”

  “Oh? And why couldn’t you?”

  “You know me, Luet. I would have been yelling at Protchnu that it wasn’t fair for him to tease Xodhya because it was Motya’s fault and if it had happened to Protchnu, he’d be crying too.”

  “All true, of course.”

  “All true, but it would have made Protchnu my enemy,” said Nafai. He hardly needed to point out the consequence of that. Hadn’t Luet lived through it with him often enough?

  “All that matters to me is that our Zhatva has the love of the other boys, and he deserves it,” said Luet.

  “If only Motya could learn from him.”

  “Motya’s still a baby,” said Luet, “and we don’t know what he’ll be except that it’ll be something loud and noticeable and underfoot. The one that I wish could learn from Zhatva is Chveya.”

  “Yes, well, each child is different,” said Nafai. He turned and led Luet away from the stone-slinging and on toward Father and Mother’s house. But he well understood Luet’s wish: Chveya’s loneliness and isolation from the other children was such a worry to them both—she was the only complete misfit among all the older children, and they didn’t understand why, because she did nothing to antagonize the others, really. She simply didn’t have a place in their childish hierarchies. Or perhaps she had one, but refused to take it. How ironic, thought Nafai—we worry because Zhatva fits in too well in a subservient role, and then we worry because Chveya refuses to accept a subservient role. Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I’m trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are.

  Luet must have been thinking along the same lines, because she said, out of the silence between them, “They’re both finding their own paths through the thickets of human society, and well enough. All we can really do is observe and comfort and, now and then, give a hint.”

  Or turn bossy little Queen Dza upside down and shake her until her arrogance falls out. But no, that would only cause a quarrel between families—and the last family that they would ever quarrel with would be Shuya’s and Issya’s.

  Volemak and Rasa listened with interest to their tale of Chveya’s dream. “I’ve wondered, from time to time, when the Oversoul would act again,” said Father, “but I’ll confess that I haven’t been asking, because it’s been so good here that I didn’t want to do anything to hasten our departure.”

  “Not that anything we might do could hasten our departure,” said Mother. “After all, the Oversoul has her own schedule to keep, and it has little to do with us. She never cared whether we spent these years at that first miserable desert valley, or that much better place between the North and South rivers, or here, which is quite possibly the most perfect spot on Harmony. All she cared about was getting us together and ready for when she needs us. For all we know, it’s the children she plans to take on the voyage to Earth, and not us at all. And that would suit me well enough, though I’d really prefer it if she took the great-grandchildren, long after we’re all dead, so we’ll never have to see them go and break our hearts missing the voyagers.”

  “It’s how we all feel sometimes,” said Luet.

  Nafai held his tongue.

  It didn’t matter, Father saw right through him. “All but Nafai. He’s ready for a change. You’re a cripple, Nyef. You can’t stand happiness for very long—it’s conflict and uncertainty that bring you to life.”

  “I don’t like conflict, Father,” protested Nafai.

  “You may not like it, but you thrive on it,” said Volemak. “It’s not an insult, son, it’s just a fact.”

  “The question is,” said Rasa, “do we do anything because of Chveya’s dream?”

  “No,” said Luet hastily. “Not a thing. We just wanted you to know.”

  “Still,” said Father, “what if some of the other children are having dreams from the Keeper but haven’t told anybody about them? Perhaps we should alert all the parents to listen to their children’s dream tales.”

  “Put the word out like that,” said Rasa, “and you know that Kokor and Dol will start coaching their daughters on what dreams they ought
to have, and get nasty with them if they don’t come up with good giant rat dreams.”

  They all laughed, but they knew it was true.

  “So we’ll do nothing for now,” said Father. “Just wait and see. The Oversoul will act when it’s time for him to act, and till then we’ll work hard when there’s work to be done, and in the meantime try to raise perfect children who never quarrel.”

  “Oh, is that the standard of success?” asked Luet, teasingly. “The ones who never quarrel are the good ones?”

  Rasa laughed wryly. “If that’s the case, the only good children are the ones who have no spine at all.”

  “Which means no descendant of yours, my love,” said Father.

  The visit ended; they returned home and went on with the day’s work. But Nafai was not content to wait and see. It troubled him that there had been so few visions, and that now the only one to receive anything from the Keeper was Chveya, and she the loneliest child, and too young to make real sense of her own dream.

  Why was the Oversoul delaying so long? It had been in quite a hurry to get them out of Basilica nine years ago. They had given up everything they had ever expected their lives to bring them, and plunged into the desert. Yes, things had turned out rather well in the end, but it wasn’t the end, was it? There were more than a hundred lightyears ahead of them, the part of their journey they had completed so far was nothing, and there was no sign of resuming it.

  Answer me!

  But there was no answer.

  It took another dream to stir Nafai to action. It was Luet this time; Nafai woke from a sound sleep to find her whimpering, moaning, then crying out. He shook her awake, speaking soothingly to her so she would be calmed as she emerged from her dream. “A nightmare,” he said. “You’re having a nightmare.”

  “The Oversoul,” she said. “She’s lost. She’s lost.”

  “Luet, wake up. You’re having a dream.”

  “I am awake now,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you the dream.”

  “You dreamed about the Oversoul?”

  “I saw myself in the dream. Only young—Chveya’s age. The way I used to see myself in dreams.”

  It occurred to Nafai that it hadn’t been all that long since Luet was Chveya’s age. She had been a child when he met and married her, barely in her teens. So when she saw herself as a child, how different could it be from how she saw herself now? “So you saw yourself as a child,” said Nafai.

  “No—I saw a person who looked like me, but I thought, This is the waterseer. And then I thought, No, this is the Oversoul, wearing the face and body of the waterseer. Which is what many women believed about me, you know.”

  “Yes, I know that,” said Nafai.

  “And then I knew that I was seeing the Oversoul, only she was wearing my face. And she was searching, desperately. Searching for something, and she kept thinking she had found it, only then she looked in her hands and she didn’t have it. And then I realized that what she was chasing, around and around, was a giant rat, and then as she caught it and embraced it, it turned into an angel and flew away. Only she hadn’t noticed the transformation and so she thought the rat had slipped away. I think the reason we’re waiting here is that the Oversoul is confused about something. Searching for something.”

  But Nafai’s thoughts had hung up on the fact that there were rats and angels in her dream. “This is a dream from the Keeper?” asked Nafai. “But how could the Keeper have known a hundred years ago that the Oversoul would be having trouble now?”

  “It’s only our guess that the dreams we’ve had from the Keeper are traveling at lightspeed,” said Luet. “Perhaps the Keeper knows more than we’re giving her credit for.”

  It grated on Nafai’s nerves when the women who knew about the Keeper at all simply assumed that it would be a female, as they imagined the Oversoul to be. Somehow it seemed all right with the Oversoul, but faintly arrogant with the Keeper. Perhaps just because Nafai knew the Oversoul was a computer, but had no idea what the Keeper of Earth might be. If it really was a god, or something like a god, he resented the thought that it had to be female.

  “Perhaps the Keeper is watching us and knows us very well, and is trying to wake us up—and through us wake up the Oversoul.”

  “The Oversoul isn’t asleep,” said Nafai. “We talk to it all the time through the Index.”

  “I tell you what I saw in my dream,” said Luet.

  “Then in the morning let’s go and talk to Issib and Zdorab and see what they can get out of the Index about it.”

  “Now,” said Luet. “Let’s go now.”

  “Wake them in the middle of the night? They have children, that would be irresponsible.”

  “In the middle of the night there won’t be interruptions,” said Luet. “And it’s almost dawn.”

  It was true; the first light was brightening the sky outside their parchment-glazed window.

  Zdorab woke instantly, coming to open the door even before Nafai and Luet reached it. Shedemei appeared in a moment, and after a few whispered words she left to go summon Issib and Hushidh. They gathered then at the house where the Index was kept. Luet told them all her dream, and Zdorab and Issib at once began searching through the Index, trying to find answers.

  Luet grew impatient first, as they waited in silence. “I’m useless here for now,” she said. “And the children will want me.”

  “Me too,” said Hushidh, and Shedemei reluctantly left with them, each returning to her house. Nafai knew that when it came to searching the Index, he wasn’t much use, either—it was Issib and Zdorab who had made exploration of the Oversoul’s memory their life’s work, and he couldn’t compete with them. He knew that the women would resent his tacit assumption that he could stay and Luet needed to leave . . . but he also knew that it was true. The children’s routines revolved around Luet, who was always there, while Nafai was so often gone on hunting expeditions that his presence or absence barely made a difference in their lives. Not that they didn’t care whether he was there or not—they cared a great deal—but it didn’t change the normal events of their day.

  So Nafai stayed in the Index House as Zodya and Issya asked it questions. He head their murmuring, and now and then one would ask him a question, but he was truly useless to them.

  He reached out his hand across the table and rested the back of his fingers against the Index. “You’re looping, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes,” said the Index. “I realized that as soon as Luet had her dream from the Keeper. Issib and Zdorab are already working to find the loop.”

  “It must be in your primitive routines,” said Nafai, “because you could find it and program your way out of it if it were your own self-programming.”

  “Yes,” said the Index again. “Zdorab assumed that at once, and that’s where we’re exploring.”

  “It must be a loop where you think you’ve found something only you haven’t really,” said Nafai, remembering the dream.

  “Yes,” said the Index. It couldn’t be sounding impatient, could it? “Issib insisted on that from the start, so we’re trying to find something that I can’t detect myself. It’s very hard to search my memory to find what I haven’t detected.”

  Nafai realized that all his thoughts were doing nothing but following far behind Zdorab and Issib, and so he sighed and took his hand away from the Index, sat back in the chair, and waited. He loathed being a spectator at important events. It’s what Elemak has so often said about me, Nafai told himself nastily. I have to make myself the hero of every story I take part in. What was it he said that time? That someday if he didn’t stop me, I’d find a way to be the protagonist of Elemak’s own autobiography. Thus I fancy myself to be vital to the process of discovering what has the Oversoul going in circles, wasting its time, wasting our time . . .

  Wasting our time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then.

  Like a hunt, around
in circles, the poor Oversoul is tying itself up in knots, covering the same ground without realizing it.

  And as he thought this, Nafai envisioned the path he took on his most recent hunt as if he were above the ground, looking down at it like a map, seeing his own path drawn out among the trees, watching as he went in twisting, interlocking circles, but never quite passed the same tree from the same direction so he never guessed it except by seeing the map.

  That’s what the Oversoul needs to do—see its own tracks.

  He reached out and touched the Index and said so to the Oversoul.

  “Yes,” said the Index—still maddeningly unreproachful. “Zdorab already suggested that I look through my recent history to find repetitive behavior. But I don’t track my own behavior. Only human behavior. I have no autobiography stored here, except insofar as my actions impinge on humanity. And apparently whatever I’m doing that has me in a loop has no direct effect on humanity—or is so primitive that I’m unaware of it. Either way, I can’t retrace my own steps.”

  Stymied again, Nafai didn’t take his hand away. It might be too disturbing to the others, to keep touching the Index and then removing his hand.

  Disturbing? No. He simply didn’t want the embarrassment of having them know that again his would-be contribution was futile.

  He was still sleepy. Luet’s dream had woken him too early, and sitting here now, with nothing to do, he began to doze. He laid his head down on the table, resting on his other arm; still his fingers touched the Index.

  He went back to that image of himself seen from above, a map being traced behind him as he hunted in circles through the woods. Maybe I really do that, he thought, drifting on the edge of sleep. Maybe I really move in circles.

  “No you don’t,” said the Index. “Except when the animal you’re tracking moved that way.”

  I might, said Nafai silently. I might drift around and around in large circles, casting for the tracks of some beast, never realizing that I’m seeing my own tracks. Maybe sometimes I hunt myself. Maybe I find my own tracks and think, what an exceptionally large beast, this will feed us for a week, and then I track myself and track myself and never catch up until one day I come upon my own body, lying there exhausted and starving, dying so that in my madness I now imagine myself detached from my body and . . .