THE SHIPS OF EARTH

by Orson Scott Card

  She heard Dol as she wandered off, calling out at the top of her lungs—with full theatrical training in projecting her voice—"Aunt Rasa's up now! Aunt Rasa's up!"

  Rasa cringed inwardly. Why not announce to everybody exactly how late I slept in?

  She found the kitchen tent easily enough—it was the one with a stone oven outside, where Zdorab was baking bread.

  He looked up at her rather shamefacedly. "I must apologize, Lady Rasa. I never said I was a baker."

  "But the bread smells wonderful," said Rasa.

  "Smells, yes. I can do smells. You should catch a whiff of my favorite—I call it ‘burning fish.'"

  Rasa laughed. She liked this fellow. "You get fish from this stream?"

  "Your husband thought of doing some shore fishing down there." He pointed toward where the stream flowed into the placid waters of the Scour Sea.

  "So you had some luck?"

  "Not really," said Zdorab. "We caught fish, but they weren't very good."

  "Even the ones that didn't get turned into your favorite smell…"

  "Even the ones we stewed. There just isn't enough life on the land here. The fish would gather at the stream mouth if there were more organic material in the sediment being deposited by the stream."

  "You're a geologist?" asked Rasa, rather surprised.

  "A librarian, so I'm a little bit of everything, I guess," said Zdorab. "I was trying to figure out why this place doesn't have a permanent human settlement, and the reason came from the Index, some old maps from the last time there was a major culture in this area. They always grow up on the big river just over that mountain range." He pointed east. "Right now there are still a couple of minor cities there. The reason they don't use this spot is because there isn't enough plantable land. And the river fails one year in five. That's too often to maintain a steady population."

  "What do the baboons do?" asked Rasa.

  "The Index doesn't really track baboons," said Zdorab.

  "I guess not," said Rasa. "I guess the baboons will have to build their own Oversoul someday, eh?"

  "I guess." He looked mildly puzzled. "It'd help if they'd just build their own latrine."

  Rasa raised an eyebrow.

  "We have to keep an eye on them, so one of them doesn't wander upstream of us and then foul our drinking water."

  "Mm," said Rasa. "That reminds me. I'm thirsty."

  "And hungry too, I'll bet," said Zdorab. "Well, help yourself. Cool water and yesterday's bread in the kitchen tent, locked up."

  "Well, if it's locked up ... "

  "Locked to baboons. For humans, it should be easy enough."

  When Rasa got into the kitchen tent she found he was right. The "lock" was nothing but a twist of wire holding the solar-powered cold chest closed. So why did they stress the fact that it was locked? Perhaps just to remind her to close it after her.

  She opened the lid and found several dozen loaves of bread, as well as quite a few other cloth-wrapped parcels of food—frozen meat, perhaps? No, it couldn't be frozen, it wasn't cold enough inside. She reached down and opened one of the packages and found, of course, camel's milk cheese. Nasty stuff—she had eaten it once before, at Volemak's house, when she was visiting him once between the two times they were married. "See how much I loved you?" he had teased her. "The whole time we were married, and I never made you taste this!" But she knew now that she'd need the protein and the fat—they'd be on lean rations through most of the journey, and they had to eat everything that had nutritional value. Taking a flat round bread, she tore off half, rewrapped the rest, and then stuffed the part she meant to eat with a few chunks from the cheese. The bread was dry and harsh enough to mask much of the taste of the cheese, so all in all it wasn't as nauseating a breakfast as it could have been. Welcome to the desert, Rasa.

  She closed the lid and turned toward the door.

  "Aaah!" she screeched, quite without meaning to. There in the doorway was a baboon on all fours, looking at her intently and sniffing.

  "Shoo," she said. "Go away. This is my breakfast."

  The baboon only studied her face a little longer. She remembered then that she had not locked the cold box. Shamefaced, she turned her back on the baboon and, hiding what she was doing with her body, she retwisted the wire. Supposedly the baboon's fingers weren't deft enough to undo the wire. But what if his teeth were strong enough to bite through it, what then? No point in letting him know that it was the wire keeping him out.

  Of course, it was quite possible he could figure it out on his own. Didn't they say that baboons were the closest things to humans on Harmony? Perhaps that's why the original settlers of this planet brought them—for they were from Earth, not native to this place.

  She turned back around and again let out a little screech, for the baboon was directly behind her now, standing up on his hind legs, regarding her with that same steady gaze.

  "This is my breakfast," Rasa said mildly.

  The baboon curled his lip as if in disgust, then dropped down to all fours and started out of the tent.

  At that moment Zdorab entered the tent. "Ha," he said. "We call this one Yobar. He's a newcomer to the tribe, and so they don't really accept him yet. He doesn't mind because he thinks it makes him boss when they all run away from him. But the poor fellow's randy half the time and he can't ever get near the females."

  "Which explains his name," said Rasa. Yobar was an ancient word for a man who is insatiable in lovemaking.

  "We call him that to sort of encourage him," said Zdorab. "Get on out of here now, Yobar."

  "He was already leaving, I think, after I declined to share my bread and cheese with him."

  "The cheese is awful, isn't it?" said Zdorab. "But when you consider that the boons eat baby keeks alive when they can catch them, you can understand that to them, camel cheese is really good stuff."

  "We humans do eat it, though, right?"

  "Reluctantly and constantly," said Zdorab. "And you never get used to the aftertaste. It's the chief reason we drink so much water and then have to pee so much. Begging your pardon."

  "I have a feeling that city rules of delicate speech won't be as practical out here," said Rasa.

  "But I ought to try more, I think," said Zdorab. "Well, enjoy your meal, I'm trying not to create the aroma of burnt bread."

  He backed on out of the kitchen tent.

  Rasa took her first bite of bread and it was good. So she took her second and nearly gagged—this time there was cheese in it. She forced herself to chew it and swallow it. But it made her think with fondness of the recent past, when the only camel product she had to confront was manure and no one expected her to eat it.

  The tent door opened again. Rasa half expected to see Yobar again, back for another try at begging. Instead it was Dol. "Wetchik says we won't gather until the shadows get long, so it won't be so miserably hot. Good idea, don't you think?"

  "I'm only sorry you had to waste half the day waiting for me."

  "Oh, that's all right," said Dol. "I didn't want to work anyway. I'm not much at gardening. I think I'd probably kill the flowers right along with the weeds."

  "I don't think it's a flower garden," said Rasa.

  "You know what I mean," said Dol.

  Oh, yes, I understand exactly.

  I also understand that I must find Volemak and insist that he put me to work at once. It will never do for me to get days of rest when everyone else is working hard. I may be the second oldest here, but that doesn't mean I'm old. Why, I can still have babies, and I certainly will, if I can get Volya to greet me as his long-lost wife, instead of treating me like an invalid child.

  What she could not say to herself, though she knew it and hated it, was the fact that she would have to have babies to have any role at all here in the desert. For they were reverting to a primitive state of human life here, in which survival and reproduction were at the forefront, and the kind of civilized life that she had mastered in Basilica would never exist agai
n for her. Instead she would be competing with younger women for position in this new tribe, and the coin of the competition would be babies. Those who had them would be somebody; those who didn't, wouldn't. And at Rasa's age, it was important to begin quickly, for she wouldn't have as long as the younger ones.

  Angry again, though with no one but poor frivolous Dol to be angry at, Rasa left the kitchen tent, still eating her bread and cheese. She looked around the encampment. When they had come down the steep incline into the canyon, there had been only four tents. Now there were ten. Rasa recognized the traveling tents, and felt vaguely guilty that the others were still living in such cramped quarters, when she and Volya shared so much space—a large, double-walled tent. Now, though, she could see that the tents were laid out in a couple of concentric circles, but the tent she shared with Volemak was not the center; nor was the kitchen tent. Indeed, at the center was the smallest of the four original tents, and after a moment's thought Rasa realized that that was the tent where the Index was kept.

  She had simply assumed that Volemak would keep the Index in his own tent, but of course that would not do—Zdorab and Issib would be using the Index all the time, and could hardly be expected to arrange their schedule around such inconveniences as an old woman whose husband let her sleep too late in the morning.

  Rasa stood outside the door of the small tent and clapped twice.

  "Come in."

  From the voice she knew at once that it was Issya. She felt a stab of guilt, for last night she had hardly spoken to the boy—the man—that was her firstborn child. Only when she and Volya had spoken to the four unmarried ones all at once, really. And even now, knowing that he was inside the tent, she wanted to go away and come back another time.

  Why was she avoiding him? Not because of his physical defects—she was used to that by now, having helped him through his infancy and early childhood, having fitted him for chairs and floats so he could move easily and have a nearly normal life—or at least a life of freedom. She knew his body almost more intimately than he knew it himself, since until he was well into puberty she had washed him head to toe, and massaged and moved his limbs to keep them flexible before he slowly, painfully learned to move them himself. During all those sessions together they had talked and talked—more than any of her other children, Issib was her friend. Yet she didn't want to face him.

  So of course she parted the door and walked into the tent and faced him.

  He was sitting in his chair which had linked itself to the solar panel atop the tent so he wasn't wasting battery power. The chair had picked up the Index and now held it in front of Issib, where it rested against his left hand. Rasa had never seen the Index but knew at once that this had to be it, if only because it was an object she had never seen.

  "Does it speak to you?" she asked.

  "Good afternoon, Mother," said Issib. "Was your morning restful?"

  "Or does it have some kind of display, like a regular computer?" She refused to let him goad her by reminding her of how late she had arisen.

  "Some of us didn't sleep at all," said Issib. "Some of us lay awake wondering how it happened that our wives-to-be were brought in and dumped on us with only the most cursory of introductions."

  "Oh, Issya," said Rasa, "you know that this situation is the natural consequence of the way things are, and nobody planned it. You're feeling resentful? Well, so am I. So here's an idea—I won't take it out on you, and you don't take it out on me."

  "Who else can I take it out on?" said Issib, smiling wanly.

  "The Oversoul. Tell your chair to throw the Index across the room."

  Issib shook his head. "The Oversoul would simply override my command. And besides, the Index isn't the Oversoul, it's simply our most powerful tool for accessing the Oversoul's memory."

  "How much does it remember?"

  Issib looked at her for a moment. "You know, I never thought you'd refer to the Oversoul as it."

  Rasa was startled to realize she had done so, but knew at once why she had done so. "I wasn't thinking of her— the Over-soul. I was thinking of it— the Index."

  "It remembers everything," said Issib.

  "How much of everything? The movements of every individual atom in the universe?"

  Issib grinned at her. "Sometimes it seems like that. No, I meant everything about human history on Harmony."

  "Forty million years," said Rasa. "Maybe two million generations of human beings. A world population of roughly a billion most of the time. Two quadrillion lives, with thousands of meaningful events in every life."

  "That's right," said Issib. "And then add to those biographies the histories of every human community, starting with families and including those as large as nations and language groups and as small as childhood friends and casual sexual liaisons. And then include all natural events that impinged on human history. And then include every word that humans ever wrote and the map of every city we ever built and the plans for every building we ever constructed…"

  "There wouldn't be room to contain all the information," said Rasa. "Not if the whole planet were devoted to nothing but storing it. We should be tripping over the Oversoul's data storage with every step."

  "Not really," said Issib. "The Oversoul's memory isn't stored in the cheap and bulky memory we use for ordinary computers. Our computers are all binary, for one thing—every memory location can carry only two possible meanings."

  "On or off," said Rasa. "Yes or no."

  "It's read electrically," said Issib. "And we can only fit a few trillion bits of information into each computer before they start getting too bulky to carry around. And the space we waste inside our computers—just to represent simple numbers. For instance, in two bits we can only hold four numbers."

  "A-1, B-1, A-2, and B-2," said Rasa. "I did teach the basic computer theory course in my little school, you know."

  "But now imagine," said Issib, "that instead of only being able to represent two states at each location, on or off, you could represent five states. Then in two bits—"

  "Twenty-five possible values," said Rasa. "A-l, B-l, V-1, G-1, D-1, and so on to D-5."

  "Now imagine that each memory location can have thousands of possible states."

  "That certainly does make the memory more efficient at containing meaning."

  "Not really," said Issib. "Not yet anyway. The increase is only geometric, not exponential. And it would have a vicious limitation on it, in that each single location could only convey one state at a time. Even if there were a billion possible messages that a single location could deliver, each location could only deliver one of those at a time."

  "But if they were paired, that problem disappears, since between them any two locations could deliver millions of possible meanings," said Rasa.

  "But still only one meaning at any one time."

  "Well, you can't very well use the same memory location to store contradictory information. Both G-9 and D-9."

  "It depends on how the information is stored. For the Over-soul, each memory location is the interior edge of a circle –a very tiny, tiny circle—and that inside edge is fractally complex. That is, thousands of states can be represented by protrusions, like the points on a mechanical key, or the teeth on a comb—in each location it's either got a protrusion or it doesn't."

  "But then the memory location is the tooth, and not the circle," said Rasa, "and we're back to binary."

  "But it can stick out farther or not as far," said Issib. "The Oversoul's memory is capable of distinguishing hundreds of different degrees of protrusion at each location around the inside of the circle."

  "Still a geometric increase, then," said Rasa.

  "But now," said Issib, "you must include the fact that the Oversoul can also detect teeth on each protrusion—hundreds of different values from each of hundreds of teeth. And on each tooth, hundreds of barbs, each reporting hundreds of possible values. And on each barb, hundreds of thorns. And on each thorn, hundreds of hairs. And on each
hair—"

  "I get the idea," said Rasa.

  "And then the meanings can change depending on where on the circle you start reading—at the north or the east or south-southeast. You see, Mother, at every memory location the Oversoul can store trillions of different pieces of information at once," said Issib. "We have nothing in our computers that can begin to compare to it."

  "And yet it's not an infinite memory," said Rasa.

  "No," said Issib. "Not infinite. Because eventually we get down to the minimum resolution—protrusions so small that the Oversoul can no longer detect protrusions on the protrusions. About twenty million years ago the Oversoul realized that it was running out of memory—or that it would run out in about ten million years. It began finding shorthand ways of recording things. It devoted a substantial area of memory to storing elaborate tables of kinds of stories. For instance, table entry ZH-5-SHCH might be, ‘quarrels with parents over degree of personal freedom they permit and runs away from home city to another city." So where a person's biography is stored, instead of explaining each event, the biographic listing simply refers you to the vast tables of possible events in a human life—it'll have the value ZH-5-SHCH and then the code for the city he ran away to."

  "It makes our lives seem rather sterile, doesn't it. Unimaginative, I mean. We all keep doing the same things that others have done."

  "The Oversoul explained to me that while ninety-nine percent of every life consists of events already present in the behavior tables, there's always the one percent that has to be spelled out because there's no pre-existing entry for it. No two lives have ever been duplicates yet."

  "I suppose that's a comfort."

  "You've got to believe that ours is following an unusual path. ‘Called forth by the Oversoul to journey through the desert and eventually return to Earth'—I bet there's no table entry for that. "

  "Oh, but since it has happened now to sixteen of us, I'll bet the Oversoul makes a new entry."

  Issib laughed. "It probably already has."

  "It must have been a massive project, though, constructing those tables of possible human actions."