The woman who had asked the question said, “All right. I will go along with you, Angai. Even though I am made uneasy by these new people. And even though I think Anhar is right about Nia.”
Angai made the gesture that meant “it is over.” She turned and went into her tent.
I said, “You finish translating, Derek. I want to speak to Nia.”
He made the gesture of agreement.
I walked over to Nia and the oracle. A couple of women removed the torches from their holders, taking them away.
Nia said, “I am not certain that Angai was being clever. She ought to have been more polite to Anhar. Now she’s made an enemy of her.”
“No,” said the oracle. “She has changed nothing. They were enemies already. Now they can stop pretending. I have never had an enemy, but I know it’s hard work being polite to someone you hate. It makes a woman tired. She loses strength. She cannot do things that are important.”
“You’ve never had an enemy?” I asked.
“Most men do not. If a man gets angry, he confronts the person who has made him angry. Or else he leaves. The women are trapped in their villages. They spend winter after winter next to people they dislike. They do not speak their anger. They cannot get away. That makes enemies. I have seen it happen.”
“Do you want to stay in the village?” I asked Nia.
She made the gesture of uncertainty.
“Do you have a place to stay tonight?”
“Here. With Angai.” Nia paused. “That was Ti-antai. The woman who spoke last. The woman who cared for your hand this morning. She was a good friend of mine when we were young.”
“Aiya!” I said.
The oracle said, “I will go with you. Angai made me stay at the edge of the village last night in an old tent that was full of holes. Even with the holes and the wind blowing through, it smelled of old age and craziness.” He paused. “Not holy craziness. The other kind.”
The square was empty except for my companions. The torches were all gone. There was no noise except the wind and Derek’s voice, still translating.
“What was the dream about?” I asked. “Why did it satisfy your cousin?”
“You don’t know much, do you?” Nia said.
“No. Who was the old woman?”
“The Mother of Mothers. If she tells us to go on through a strange country, then we will.”
“It was a good dream,” said the oracle. “I have had only a few that were that easy to understand. No one can possibly argue with it.”
Derek said, “I’m done.”
“Coming,” I said.
We left the square, walking through the dark village.
Ivanova said, “This decision is not going to satisfy anyone. The research teams are going to want to be able to travel. And Eddie, of course, is horrified that we have not been ordered off the planet.”
“That’s right,” Eddie said.
“I think the problem is vulgar Marxism,” said Mr. Fang.
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
“We oversimplify the dialectical process and we become fascinated by the drama of revolution. We forget that human history is very complex and very slow. Every big change is preceded by a multitude of small changes. There are compromises. There are failures. We take a step forward and then are forced to go back a step or even two.
“Even revolutions are full of compromise and failure. Even in the midst of great transformations, we go back. After the triumph of the October Revolution came Kronstadt and the crushing of the Workers’ Opposition.”
“I don’t understand where this is leading,” Ivanova said.
“We expected this meeting to resolve everything. We expected a revolution, the simple kind that we see on the holovision.
“We are in the middle of a revolution. It has gone on for over five hundred years. I have no idea when it will end, if ever. But it is not a simple drama. It does not move forward all the time. And there are no neat divisions. No scenes and acts. At least none that we can see. Historians put in such things later.
“Today—I think—the revolution has moved into a new stage. It has certainly moved onto a new stage. There are new actors and new problems. But there is no resolution.”
“True enough,” said Eddie. “What we have is goddamned compromise. It isn’t going to hold. Once we are down here—”
Ivanova said, “For once I agree with Eddie. We have to be able to travel. We have come so far.” She paused. “Maybe we can find another people who will set fewer limitations.”
“Not tonight,” said Mr. Fang.
We reached the river. There were lights on one of the boats. Tatiana and Yunqi sat together on the deck. They helped Mr. Fang onboard. Ivanova and Eddie followed.
The oracle said, “I want to sleep. This has been a long day.”
“You’re right about that,” I said.
We took him to the other boat and got him bedded down in the cabin.
Derek and Agopian and I went out on deck. The river air was cool and full of bugs. They swarmed around the deck lights once we turned them on. Agopian and I sat down. Derek went and got beers.
We drank, not speaking. We could hear voices from the other boat: Ivanova and Eddie, describing what had happened to Tatiana and Yunqi.
Agopian said, “I don’t know how long that conversation will go on.”
“Hours, most likely.”
“Maybe.” He set down his bottle. “There is something I have to tell you.”
I looked at him. “Your secret. Your ethical complexity.”
“Yes.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to get you alone. This is perfect now, if I have enough time.”
Derek said, “I’m willing to listen.”
Agopian looked at me.
I nodded.
“I’m going to try to tell this as quickly as possible. I don’t know when that conversation will end, and Tatiana will come over. There is information that has been kept hidden and lies that have been told. I think it’s time this situation was rectified.”
Derek leaned forward. “What kind of information?”
“History. What’s been happening on Earth during the past one hundred years.”
“We have the messages from Earth,” I said.
“They are lies.”
“You know this for certain?” asked Derek.
“I wrote them—with help, of course. It was too big a job for any one person.”
“Why?” I asked.
Derek asked, “When?”
“You know there was trouble coming into the system.”
Derek made the gesture of agreement.
Agopian looked puzzled and went on. “There was a lot more junk than we had expected, and a lot of it was a long way out. A kind of super Oort cloud. And there were problems with the astrogation system. The computers decided it was an emergency. They woke the crew up early. We brought the ship in.
“We didn’t have time to wake up any other people. But we did have time to check the messages that had been coming in from Earth. They were crazy.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean exactly that. The messages are crazy. Earth has changed a lot.” He paused. “We thought history would stop because our lives had stopped, because we were sleeping a magic sleep like children in a fairy tale.
“Not true. History went on and took a turn…” He paused again. “Progress is not inevitable. That is an error the vulgar Marxists make. I’ve always liked that term. I imagine a man with a big thick beard, farting at the dinner table as he explains commodity fetishism or the labor theory of value. And of course he gets the theory wrong.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Progress. There is no law that says humanity has to evolve ever higher social forms. Collapse is possible. Regression or stagnation. That’s essentially what happened after the twentieth century. Not regression but stagnation. We thought it was a characteristic of post-capitalist societies: extreme stability, as opposed to the extreme instability of capitalism, the crazy rate of change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.