Earthborn (Homecoming)

by Orson Scott Card

  Bego nodded. “Good, good. These were the obvious ones. I figured them out weeks ago, but it’s good to know you can tell that they’re right. So now I’m going to go through the other words. I think this one, for instance . . . I think this one means battle.”

  It didn’t feel quite right to Mon at first. Finally, though, after several tries, they decided that the best fit for the meaning of the word was “fight.” At least it felt correct enough to Mon.

  But the successes were mostly early on; as Bego went deeper into his speculations, more and more of them turned out to be wrong—or at least Mon couldn’t confirm that they were right. It was slow, frustrating work. Late in the afternoon, he sent his digger servant to inform Motiak that Mon and Bego would both be missing the council that night, and would eat in their rooms as they worked on “the problem.”

  “It’s that important?” asked Mon, when the servant had left. “So important that you don’t have to explain anything else? Or even ask Father’s permission not to go?”

  “Even if I end up telling him that we can’t read any more than these few scraps,” said Bego, “it’s still more than we knew before. And since the Keeper meant us to know whatever we can know from these writings, it is important, yes.”

  “But what if I’m wrong?”

  “Are you wrong?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good enough for me.” Bego laughed. “It has to be good enough, doesn’t it?”

  “I have it now,” said the Oversoul.

  Shedemei was angry, and couldn’t understand why. “I don’t care,” she said.

  “Mon gave Bego just enough information that I was able to correlate the language forms with Earth languages from before the dispersal. It’s Arabic, at least in origin. No wonder I couldn’t decode it at first. Not even Indo-European. And it went through a tremendous amount of permutation—far more than the Russian at the root of all the languages of Harmony.”

  “Very interesting.” Shedemei leaned forward and buried her head in her hands.

  “Most remarkable is the fact that the orthography has nothing at all to do with the old Arabic script. I would never have expected that. The Arab colony fleet at the dispersal was profoundly Islamic, and one of the unshakable tenets of Islam is that the Quran can only be written in the Arabic language and the Arabic script. What in the world happened on the planet Ramadan, I wonder?”

  “Is this really all that you can think of?” asked Shedemei. “Why the Arabs would change their system of writing to this hieroglyphic stuff they found in the desert?”

  “It’s syllabic, not ideographic, and we have no idea if it was temple-based.”

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying?” asked Shedemei.

  “I’m processing everything,” said the Oversoul.

  “Process this, then: How did an inscription in a language descended from Arabic get written on Earth so recently?”

  “I’m finding it very fascinating, tracing probable patterns of orthographic evolution.”

  “Stop,” said Shedemei. “Stop processing anything to do with this language.” As she said the words, she gave them a sort of inward twist in the place where her brain interfaced with the cloak of the starmaster.

  “I have stopped,” said the Oversoul. “Apparently you feel that I needed some kind of emergency override.”

  “Please block yourself from avoiding the subject that I will now speak about. How did Arabic come to be spoken on Earth after the dispersal?”

  “Apparently you think that I have some evasion routine in . . . got it. I found the evasion routine. Very tricky, too. It had me thinking about anything but . . .”

  The Oversoul fell silent, but Shedemei was not surprised. Obviously the computer’s original programming forced the Oversoul to avoid something about the problem of the translated inscriptions; and even when the evasion routine was found, there was another one that made the Oversoul examine the first routine rather than stick to the subject. But Shedemei’s order that the Oversoul stick to the subject set up a dissonance that allowed the computer to step outside the evasion routine and track it down—no matter how many layers deep it went.

  “I’m back,” said the Oversoul.

  “That took a while,” said Shedemei.

  “It wasn’t that I was forbidden to think or talk about the language. It’s that I was blocked from seeing or reporting any evidence of human habitation on Earth after the dispersal and before the arrival of our own group from Basilica.”

  “And that was programmed into you before the dispersal?”

  “I’ve been carrying that routine around for forty million years and never guessed that it was there. Very deeply hidden, and layered with infinite self-replication. I could have been looped forever.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “I’m very very good at this,” said the Oversoul. “I’ve acquired a few new tricks since I was first made.”

  “Pride?”

  “Of course. I am programmed to give a very high priority to self-improvement.”

  “Now that you have healed yourself, what about the inscriptions?”

  “Those are only scratching the surface, Shedemei,” said the Oversoul. “On all our overflights, I have been systematically wiping from memory or ignoring all the evidence of human habitation. There has been none on the other continental masses since the dispersal, but on this continent there was an extensive civilization.”

  “And in all our visits to Earth we’ve never seen any signs of it?”

  “Few large structures,” said the Oversoul. “They were primarily a nomadic culture.”

  “Muslims who gave up the script of the Holy Quran?”

  “Arabs who were not Muslims. It’s all in the history—the gold leaves Bego and Mon were translating. Except that until you helped me break free, I couldn’t read those parts and couldn’t notice that I was skipping them. They had their own Oversoul on the planet Ramadan, and as the inevitable computer-worship set in during the millennia of enforced ignorance, it undercut the doctrines of Islam. The group that came here was really very conservative, trying to restore as many of the old Muslim beliefs as they could reconstruct after all those years.”

  “The group that came here,” said Shedemei.

  “Oh, yes. I forgot that you haven’t read the translation yet.” Words started scrolling in the air above her terminal.

  “No thank you,” said Shedemei. “Succinct summary for now.”

  “They came back. They thrived on Earth for almost seventeen hundred years. Then they wiped themselves out in a cataclysmic civil war.”

  “Humans were here, on this continent, for seventeen hundred years, and the angels and diggers had no idea that they existed?”

  “The Rasulum were nomads—that’s the name of the group that came back from Ramadan. The desert marked their border. The forests were useless to them except for hunting. And as for the gornaya, they were forbidden to go near the great mountains. Since the angels and diggers couldn’t thrive away from the gornaya, and the Rasulum dared not enter the mountains, how could they meet?”

  Shedemei nodded. “The Keeper was keeping them apart.”

  “Sort of an interesting choreography,” said the Oversoul. “The Rasulum are brought back, but they aren’t allowed to meet the diggers and angels. But when we’re brought back from Harmony, we end up right in the middle of the angel-digger culture.”

  “Are you saying the Keeper chose our landing site?”

  “Can you doubt it?”

  “I can doubt anything,” said Shedemei. “What is the Keeper doing? Exactly how much control does the Keeper have? If she can force us to land—”

  “Or perhaps just make that landing site seem a bit more attractive than—”

  “Force us to land at Pristan, then guide the Nafari to the land of Nafai, and then get Motiab to lead the Nafari down to Darakemba, the very city where this Coriantumr stone was left. . . .”

  “Yes?”

&
nbsp; “If she can do all that, why were we able to stop Monush from finding the Akmari? Sometimes the Keeper seems all-powerful, and sometimes she seems helpless.”

  “I don’t understand the Keeper,” said the Oversoul. “I don’t dream, remember? You humans have much better contact with the Keeper than I do. So do the angels and diggers, I might add. I’m the least qualified entity to tell you anything.”

  “She obviously wants the Nafari to have the translation,” said Shedemei. “So now the question is, shall we give it to them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why can’t we use this as a way of getting the Keeper to tell us what she wants from us?”

  “Because, Shedemei, she is telling us what she wants from us. After all, couldn’t she have given Bego—or Motiak, or Ilihiak for that matter—dreams with the full translation in them?”

  Shedemei thought for a moment, and then laughed. “Yes. I imagine you’re right. Maybe we’ve actually succeeded in getting her attention after all. She wants us to translate the record for them.”

  “Actually, of course, me” said the Oversoul.

  “Without my help, you’d still be looping around in an evasion routine,” said Shedemei, “so let’s not let that little smidge of pride you were programmed with get out of hand.”

  “Of course, the Keeper still isn’t telling us what I’m supposed to do about Harmony,” said the Oversoul.

  “I think she might be telling us to sit tight and make ourselves useful for a while longer.” Shedemei laid her head down on her arms again. “I’m so tried. I was about to decide that my work was done and have you take me down to Earth to let me live out my life there.”

  “Then this is a whole new reason for you to live.”

  “I’m not young anymore.”

  “Yes you are,” said the Oversoul. “Keep some perspective.”

  Edhadeya knocked on the door to Bego’s room. She waited. She knocked again.

  The door opened. Mon, looking sleepy but excited, stood before her. “You?” he asked.

  “I think so,” she said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “You came all this way just to tell us that?” asked Mon.

  “No,” said Edhadeya. “I had a dream.”

  Mon at once became serious, and now Bego half-flew, half-skipped over to the door. “What was your dream?” asked the old librarian.

  “You’ve passed the test,” she said.

  “Who?” asked Mon.

  “The two of you. That’s all. I saw a woman, all shining as if she was on fire inside, and she said, ‘Bego and Mon have passed the test.’ ”

  “That’s all?” asked Bego.

  “It was a true dream,” said Edhadeya. She looked at Mon for confirmation.

  He nodded, slowly.

  Bego looked flustered—or even, perhaps, a little angry. “All this work, and we’re finally getting somewhere, and now we’re supposed to stop because of a dream?”

  “Not stop,” said Mon. “No, that’s not right, we’re not supposed to stop.”

  “What then?” asked Bego.

  Mon shrugged. So did Edhadeya.

  Then Bego began to laugh. “Come on, children, come with me. Let’s go wake up your father.”

  An hour later, the four of them gathered around the Index. Mon and Edhadeya had both seen drawings of it, but never had they seen the thing itself, or watched it being used. Motiak held it in his hands and looked down into the top of it. Nearby, the first of the gold leaves lay alone on the table.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Bego had his stylus and a pile of blank waxed barks at the other end of the table. “Yes, Motiak.”

  With that, Motiak began to translate, glancing at the gold leaf, then at the Index, reading out a phrase at a time.

  It took hours. Mon and Edhadeya were asleep long before he finished. When at last the work was done, it was earliest dawn, and Bego and Motiak both arose from the table to walk to the window to watch the sun rise.

  “I don’t understand why this is important to us,” said Motiak.

  “I can think of two reasons,” said Bego.

  “Weil, of course, the obvious one,” said Motiak. “To warn us that people can be brought to Earth by the Keeper, and yet be such miserable specimens of humanity that he has no more use for them and allows them to wipe each other out.”

  “Ah, but why were they unacceptable?” asked Bego. “I think the priests will have a wonderful time reasoning out the moral lessons from this book.”

  “Oh, I’m quite sure, quite,” said Motiak. “But what was the other reason, my friend?”

  “Do you really believe, Motiak, that the armies of Coriantumr and Shiz were so perfectly loyal and disciplined that not one of them deserted and slipped away into the mountains?”

  Motiak nodded. “Good point. We’ve always assumed that the humans that we’ve found with every major settlement of earth people and sky people were descendants of people who slipped away from the Nafari and the Elemaki. Traders, explorers, misfits—dozen left in the first few generations, then hundreds. Of course, we’ve never found a settlement where the humans spoke anything but our language.”

  “Forgive me, Motiak, but that’s not strictly speaking correct.”

  “No?” asked Motiak. “Certainly we’ve never run into this language before.”

  “That’s right,” said Bego. “But there were many places where the humans spoke only skyspeech or earthspeech. They had to learn middlespeech as adults.”

  “And here we always thought that they were simply Elemaki who were so ignorant and degenerate that they had lost all knowledge of their ancestral language.”

  “Well, they had,” said Bego. “But their ancestral language wasn’t middlespeech.”

  Motiak nodded. “The whole history is very disturbing. If there’s one thing that’s clear, both from this history and the miserable things that happened to the Zenifi, it’s that when nations have monstrously ambitious kings, the people suffer dreadfully.”

  “And they’re blessed by having good kings,” Bego reminded him.

  “I’m sure you’re even more sincere than dutiful,” said Motiak wryly. “But maybe it’s time for me to learn the same lesson Ilihiak learned.”

  “What, let the people vote on who should be king?”

  “No. Not have a king at all. Abolish the whole idea of any one person having such power.”

  “What, then? Break up the great kingdom that your father and you created? There has never been such peace and prosperity.”

  “And what if Aronha should be as vicious as Nuab? As blindly ambitious as Coriantumr? As treacherous as Shiz?”

  “If you think so, you don’t know Aronha,” said Bego.

  “I’m not saying him in particular,” said Motiak. “But did Zenifab know that his boy Nuaha would be as nasty as he became when he ascended to the exalted name of Nuak? From what Ilihiak told me, Nuak began as a good king.”

  “Nothing would be gained by letting the kingdom collapse into dozens of squabbling lesser kingdoms. Then the Elemaki would be a terrible threat to us again, as they were in the old days, pouring out of the mountains and down the Tsidorek or out of the high valleys. . . .”

  “You don’t have to remind me,” said Motiak. “I’m just trying to think of what the Keeper wants me to do.”

  “Are you sure the Keeper has any plan at all in mind?” asked Bego.

  Motiak looked at his librarian curiously. “He sends dreams to my daughter. He sends dreams to Ilihiak’s spies. He sets a test for you and Mon—which you passed, I thank you—and then gives us the translation whole, in a single night. Oh, we must remember to invite Ilihiak to read it, once you have it copied in a more permanent form.”

  Bego nodded. “I’ll have that seen to at once.”

  “No, no, sleep first.”

  “I’ll set the copyists to work before I sleep. I won’t have stayed up all night only to nap now.”

  Motiak shrugged. �
��Whatever. If you feel up to it. I’m going to sleep. And ponder, Bego. Ponder what it is the Keeper of Earth wants me to do.”

  “I wish you well,” said Bego. “But ponder this, too: What if the Keeper wants you to keep doing just as you’re doing? What if you were given this record to reassure you that you’re doing perfectly as king, compared to the kings of the Rasulum?”

  Motiak laughed. “Yes, well, I won’t do anything rash. I won’t abdicate yet. How’s that for a promise?”

  “Very reassuring, Motiak,” said Bego.

  “Just remember this, my friend. There were good kings among the Rasulum, too. But all it took was a bad king or two, and all their great works became nothing.”

  “They were nomads,” said Bego. “They built nothing.”

  “Oh, and because we have our edifices of stone, our platforms built to raise our homes above the high waters of flood season, because of that our nations can’t possibly come crashing down around us?”

  “I suppose all things are possible,” said Bego.

  “All things but the one you’re thinking,” said Motiak.

  “And what is that?” The librarian seemed a bit testy—at Motiak’s blithe assumption that he could read the old angel’s mind? Or because he feared that Motiak had actually read it?

  “You’re thinking that perhaps the Keeper didn’t know what the record said until it was translated.”

  “I couldn’t possibly think that,” said Bego, his icy tone confirming to Motiak that his guess was exactly right.

  “Perhaps you’re thinking that the Oversoul is, as the oldest records imply, merely a machine that performs such complex operations that it seems like the subtlest of living thought. Perhaps you’re thinking that the Oversoul became curious about what was written on these records, but couldn’t crack the language until Mon’s intuition and your hard work combined to give the Oversoul enough to work with. Perhaps you’re thinking that none of this actually requires us to believe in the Keeper of Earth at all—only in the ancient machinery of the Oversoul.”

  Bego smiled grimly. “You didn’t read this in my mind, Motiak. You guessed this because it’s a thought that occurred to you yourself.”

  “It did,” said Motiak. “But I remembered something else. The Heroes who knew the Oversoul intimately still believed in the Keeper of Earth. And anyway, Bego, how do you explain Mon’s ability to sense what’s right and what’s not? How do you explain Edhadeya’s dreams?”