Earthfall

by Orson Scott Card

  "The Keeper?" asked Oykib. "They know about him?"

  "Not by that name, not till we taught them," said Nafai. "But there have always been dreamers among them. And Luet has found several who respond well to the trances that she used as Waterseer in Basilica. The Keeper speaks to them. And I'm working on trying to find weapons they can use that will enable them to stand against the diggers, if it ever comes to war."

  "Don't you think we'll be able to keep them at peace with each other?" asked Oykib.

  "I don't think we'll be able to keep at peace with ourselves," said Nafai. "We have the first two deaths as evidence."

  "Is it very awful of me," said Hushidh, "that I don't think I'm going to miss Obring at all?"

  "It would be more surprising if you did," said Nafai. "But Vas wanted to be a good man, I think."

  Oykib scoffed. "If he had wanted to be, he would have, Nafai. People are what they want to be."

  "What an uncharitable view," said Hushidh. "Why, you'd think, from the way you talk, that people were responsible for their own behavior."

  "And they're not?" asked Oykib.

  "Haven't you ever seen a three-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him, ‘Look what you made me do!' That's the moral universe that Vas and Obring always lived in, and Sevet and Kokor, too."

  At the funeral, Kokor kept watching Sevet furtively, matching her tear for tear and sigh for sigh. I'm not going to let the old bitch get any more mileage out of widowhood than me, thought Kokon After all, it was her husband who killed mine. She drove him to it, that's what, because she was so clumsy she got found out. I slept with Elemak even back before the voyage to Earth, and nobody ever knew. Sevet has a habit of getting caught in her little liaisons. Of course, maybe she wants to. Maybe that's how she gets her kicks, watching people go into frenzies of misery and rage over what she did and who she did it with.

  It certainly worked on me, back in Basilica. She certainly got me angry, didn't she? And then got to play the victim for years and years, never singing again even though her voice came back just fine within the first year. Always holding her musical silence over my head when Mother would look at her and reminisce about how she once sang the "Love Dream of Sogliadatai" or the "Death of the Poisoned Sparrow."

  The funeral pyres were set alight, and the angels around them started making the most awful whining sort of sound. Nasty little creatures. What did they know of grief?

  But their singing-if that's what it was-gave Kokor an idea, and she acted on it at once. The "Death of the Poisoned Sparrow" had been Sevet's signature song, and it would fit beautifully right at this moment, even though it was not actually about a funeral, but rather about the end of a beautiful but impossible love affair. And one of the best arrangements of the song had been a duet between Sevet and a flute. Kokor had listened to it over and over, had coveted the song with all her heart, but had never dared to sing it in public for the obvious reason that it would make it look as though she envied her sister and was trying to compete with her. Still, she knew every note of it. And, as she thought about it for a moment, she realized that she also remembered every note of the flute part.

  So that is what she began to sing, wordlessly, letting her voice rise and soar in the notes of the flute. She couldn't sing it quite as high as the flute had played, of course, but then, Sevet no doubt couldn't sing as high as she had sung back when she was a girl, especially without practice. Once Kokor started singing, she did not dare even steal a glance at Sevet, or it would look like she was trying to get Sevet to do something instead of simply expressing the heartbreak she felt as she watched her husband's body going up in flame.

  She sang the entire flute part and Sevet didn't join in. But Kokor could also tell from the stillness of the others-even the angels fell silent to hear her-that she had chosen to do the right thing this time, that for once the others approved of and even appreciated her. And when she began the flute part again at the beginning, Sevet's voice came out at last, singing the melody. Now the strangeness of the melody Kokor had sung began to make sense as harmony to Sevet's voice, and the words Sevet sang brought tears to people's eyes as the death of such worthless men as Obring and Vas never would have. People cried when she sang it in theaters, when nobody had died-how could they help but sob their little hearts out here, with the smell of cooking meat in their nostrils and Obring's and Vas's littlest children crying their poor little eyes out because their papas were such worthless murdering fornicating pieces of digger poo. Kokor loved the way her voice sounded with Sevet's. For Sevet's had changed, had grown richer and more mature, but Kokor's had not, had retained the flutelike simplicity and purity of youth. Kokor had no need to try to sound like Sevet now, nor Sevet to resent the similarity between them. They made different sounds, but they could be beautiful together nonetheless.

  When the song ended, the appropriate action was obvious, and Sevet did not fail her. They both extended their arms at once, and weeping copiously they fell into each other's embrace. Kokor enjoyed hearing the collective sigh of the watching humans. The sisters, reconciled at last! She could imagine Mother reaching down and squeezing Volemak's hand, and Volemak whispering to her later, If only my sons could make peace as your daughters have.

  While they clung to each other in their embrace of grief and forgiveness, Sevet whispered in Kokor's ear. "I'm going to be Elemak's mistress now, little sister, so don't try to stop me,"

  To which Kokor whispered in reply, "So am I. He's cocksman enough for the two of us, don't you think?"

  "Share and share alike?" murmured Sevet.

  "I'll bet I bear him a baby before you do," whispered Kokor. Of course she had no intention of bearing him a child at all, but it would be lovely if Sevet did, ruining her thick body even more than having three children already had. Let the poor bitch think we're competing to give birth to Elya's bastards-I'll just let her "win" and keep the real victory, which is my youthful body despite having let Obring sire five babies on me. If all five were really his.

  They broke the embrace and pulled apart a little.

  "Oh, Kokor," said Sevet. "My sister." Then she burst into tears again.

  Damn. That would be hard to top.

  Kokor reached out and took a tear from Sevct's cheek, then held it up as a glistening patch of wetness on her fingertip. "I will never cause you to shed another one of these, my beloved Sevya."

  The sigh from the others was all the applause Kokor needed. I win again, Sevet. You're simply no match for me.

  Fusum learned two things from the killing of Obring and Vas.

  First, he learned that the humans were, in fact, mortal, and could be killed if enough force were applied using a sufficient weapon in the right way. He had no immediate plans to use this information, but he intended to devote a great deal of thought to it over the months and years to come.

  Second, he learned that killing was a powerful device that should not be wasted. You must kill the right person, and at the right time, and always in order to achieve an important purpose. That was why, when Fusum was finally judged to be rehabilitated and returned to his people, he made it a point to become a friend and companion to Nen. As the eldest and most gifted son of Emeezem and Mufruzhuuzh, the deep mother and the war king, Nen was the bright golden hope of the next generation. He spoke the human language almost as fluently as Fusum himself, having learned it through close association with Oykib, and when Emeezem and Mufruzhuuzh coerced Fusum's own father, the blood king Shosseemem, to join them in declaring a ban on the kidnapping and eating of skymeat infants, it was Nen who came forward and swept away the pedestal of bones on which the Untouched God had rested. It was Nen who cried out, "Let friendship everlasting stand between our people and the people of the sky." Oh, Fusum had cheered along with everyone else that day. And he worked hard to win a place at Nen's side, as his most trusted friend.

  Then one day they were out hunting together, carrying the traditio
nal stone-tipped spear in one hand, knotty club in the other. They were stalking a peccary through the undergrowth, near enough to hear it grunting now and then, when suddenly Fusum saw his opportunity. A panther, too, was stalking the peccary, but as everyone knew, panthers were only too happy to make a meal of whatever meat was at hand. It had to be living meat, though, so when Fusum struck, he didn't strike hard enough to kill-or at least he hoped not. Nen dropped like a rock, but then almost immediately lifted himself up on his elbows, moaning. Fusum didn't even need to throw a stone to attract the panther's attention. It leapt on Nen and tore his throat out in a moment. Then Fusum charged, driving his spear into the panther's side under the ribs, finding its heart immediately. I am good at this, thought Fusum. Then he clubbed the panther in the head, over and over, so that no one would think to look for traces of Nen's blood and hair and scent on the club.

  Minutes later, he came staggering and weeping into the digger city, crying out his grief at the death of his friend Nen, blaming himself for having failed the golden one, the beautiful one. "No man ever had a worse friend than me!" he cried. "Kill me, I beg you! I don't want to live with Ncn's death on my hands." But when they found the scene, the men of the city cleared Fusum of any culpability, and the story of his great grief at the death of his beloved friend swept through the city. Some of Nen's glory thus lingered with Fusum, and many began to look to him as the hope of the future, now that Nen was gone.

  FOURTEEN - WORDS

  Nafai wasn't sure whether the dream came from the peeper, the Oversoul, or his own concerns. Perhaps it was amply the fact that he realized that in all their teaching of the angels and the diggers, in all their teaching of their own children, the one thing they couldn't give them was a compelling reason to learn how to read and write.

  What was it good for? Did it make the crops grow better? Did it keep the flocks in their pens at night? Did it ward off predators? Did it keep children from getting sick? When he talked to Luet about it, she didn't seem worried. "Nyef, we're not recreating Basilica here. We can't. The next generation is going to lack so many things. We have to teach them the herbs that can heal infections or cure different diseases. We have to teach them the principles of sanitation, so they don't foul their own water supply. We have to-" "We have to keep them human." "It isn't writing that makes us human." "Isn't it?" asked Nafai. "Then what is it?"

  "The diggers and angels are sentient. They're people. And they don't read and write."

  It was unanswerable, what she said, and the way she said it made it clear she didn't think it a problem worth worrying about. Yet hadn't they taught their own children how to read and write? Hadn't they risked destruction on the journey, teaching them how to use the computers, letting them pore over millions of volumes of human learning and history and it would all be extinguished in the next generation.

  And the next generation was already here. In the five years since landfall, Chveya's and Oykib's generation had all started families. Their children were growing up and when they turned six or seven or eight would there even be a school for them? No, they would set to work learning the skills of survival. Side by side with diggers and angels in the fields, out gathering in the forest, building fences and walls, gleaning and weeding, planting and harvesting, tanning hides and tooling leather, carding wool and spinning it into yarn-where in all this activity was there a moment when they needed to read something? On the ship they had been preparing for a new life, learning in advance what they would need to know for subsistence in a new world. Now they were in that world, and the new generation learned from the adults, not from books.

  And that was fine. No harm was done. The things that mattered for survival were taught. What else was needed?

  Yet Nafai couldn't shake his uneasiness about it. In all the forty million years of history on Harmony, human beings could read and write. Languages drifted and changed over centuries and across kilometers. But there was writing. The past could be recovered. Learned from. It was writing that allowed a community to hold its memory outside the individuals who happened to be alive and present at the moment.

  How long till I'm forgotten, I and Luet and Father and Mother and all of us?

  Then he laughed at himself for the vanity of wanting people to go to the trouble of reading and writing, just so they could remember that he had once lived. In ten generations it wouldn't matter at all.

  It was in the beginning of the sixth year that he had the dream. He saw a man leading a great nation of angels and humans, with farms spreading on either side of a great river, kilometer after kilometer, as for as the eye could see. Angels flew here and there, and goats and dogs drew carts and sledges along roads. Boats trafficked up and down the river, some of them with diggers, some with angels as their crew. And here and there, in towers rising high above the tallest trees, watchmen kept the perimeter in view, so that no enemy could take them unaware.

  The man who led this great nation was weary and afraid. Enemies were coming to beset them on every side, and within the nation factions threatened to tear apart the fabric of the community. Towns that had once been independent forgot that in those days they had also been hungry. People whose ancestors had once been rulers forgot that those ancestors had also been killed by enemies and their people only survived at all because they came under the protection of this great nation. People who longed for wealth were getting it by any means possible, plotting and cheating, bullying and sometimes even killing to get rivals out of the way. It was a beautiful land, but the struggle to keep it so seemed harder every year and the man despaired.

  In his loneliness and fear, he went into his small house and opened a box he kept hidden inside a jar of dried corn. Inside the box he found a thick pile of metal sheets, bound together on one side with metal rings. It was a book, Nafai realized, for language had been inscribed in the metal, and the man opened it and began to turn the pages.

  Without understanding how, Nafai knew what the words contained, what the man was seeing in his mind's eye as he read. The man was reading the story of Volemak seeing a pillar of fire on a rock in the desert and coming home to Basilica to give warning that the city was going to be destroyed. The story of Nafai and his brothers going back to the city to fetch the Index. The man saw Nafai standing over the dead body of Gaballufix and he nodded. Sometimes those who care for a whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when the people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let k be known what he does.

  From me he learned this, thought Nafai, and then he realized that he was the one who made the book and wrote in it the story of his life, of the life and acts of all the people in this community, their evil deeds and their heroic ones, their times of doubt and their astonishing achievements. And this man, this leader, this king, he looked into the book and found stories in it, tales that made clear to him what he must do, wisdom that stiffened his resolve, love that taught him compassion, hopes that led to noble actions even when the hopes themselves were unfulfilled.

  Nafai awoke and thought, This dream was so clear, it must have come from the Oversoul. Or perhaps the Keeper of Earth.

  And then he thought, This dream so exactly fits my own desire to keep reading and writing alive among this people that it could just as easily have crane out of my own longings.

  But then, where did his longings come from? Why did he want so much to preserve written language among his descendants? Couldn't those very desires have come from the Keeper?

  No, he thought. Those desires came from my memory of standing over the corpse of Gaballufix. I killed him in order to get the Index from him. And what was the Index for? It was my access-our access-to the vast store of learning in the star-ship that brought us here. It was the key to all that the Oversold knew. What would it have meant to us if none of us could read and write? To an illiterate people, the Index would be worthless
and there-fore no man should have had to die so Nafai could get it. I dream the dream that justifies my own actions to myself.

  Yet even as he dismissed the dream, he knew that he would act on it.

  Explaining nothing, he took his leave from Volemak, from Luet, and took the ship's launch out to where the survey maps showed that gold could be found. It was a rich vein, one brought to the surface of the earth through the great foldings and upheavals that had taken place in the last forty million years. Nafai was armed with the metal tools from the ship's store, and in two days of solitary labor he had several pounds of solid gold taken from the exposed vein in the mountainside. He spent a day refining it. Then he pounded it, unalloyed, into flat, smooth sheets, using the imperturbable metal surface of the launch as his anvil. The metal was very thin, but piled together it was also very heavy. It took him three days to make the sheets of gold, and during that time he only occasionally paused to gather the most obvious food that came easily to hand. He was hungry, but the work he was doing mattered more to him than food.

  He found, in his first experiments, that the sweeping curves of the alphabet that had been used for so many millennia on Harmony simply did not work well when pressed by hand into the gold. He had to find squarer forms for the letters and yet still keep them different from each other. Also, some of the spellings were too complex and used too many letters to represent the sounds. So he changed them, inventing five new letters to represent sounds that had previously required two letters each. The result was a definite compression of the written language, and as he wrote, he compressed it even more, using only a couple of letters to stand for the most common words. How do I dare to change the language like this? he asked himself. Who in the world could understand this?

  Obviously, the only people who could read it easily would be people that he taught to read and write, and so they would know what his symbols meant. Perhaps just as important, though, anyone who had learned to read the script he used for pressing language into the gold would easily decode most of the letters used in the language of Harmony-the language of the ship's computer library. At least until the language changed, he would not have cut his descendants off from their literary heritage, if ever the chance came for them to recover it.