Shedemei was so agitated she left the library and went to tend her seedlings in the high-altitude room, where she was trying to breed a legume that would produce useful quantities of high-protein, high-energy beans in the highest mountain valleys of the gornaya. It was unspeakable, what the Oversoul had said, but it also made a kind of sense. As primates evolved toward depending on a community for cooperative survival, they would evolve empathy first for their own children, then for the children of others, then for the adult parents of those other children-but as the circle grew wider, the empathy would grow weaker.
Finally, humans had to evolve what no other primate had: a sense of identity with a group so powerful that it could swallow up the individual identity, at least to a large degree. Humans couldn't have this deep, self-sacrificing loyalty to more than one or two communities at a time. Thus communities were inevitably in conflict with each other, competing for the loyalty of their members. The tribe had to break down the solidarity of the family; religion had to compete with nation for loyalty. But once a community had that loyalty, the most ardent members would gladly die for it. Not for the other individuals directly, but for the interests of the group as a whole, because in the human mind, that group was the self, and the individual was able to regard himself as merely one iteration of the pattern of the whole. Humans, in order to rise above animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even the disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism.
The Oversoul is right. If I knew Chebeya and her people as individuals, then even with no more moral insight than a baboon, I would reach out to protect them. Or if I conceived myself to be one of them, I would subsume my own interests in the needs of the group as a whole, and would not dream of making them serve as bait in an attempt to serve the Keeper of Earth.
The Oversoul, on the other hand, was created to look out for the needs of humanity as a whole. The powers she had were tremendous, and her programmers had to build some kind of compassion into her. But it was an intellectual compassion, a historical compassion-the more people who were suffering, the greater the priority of easing their pain. Thus the Oversoul could overlook individual accidents, the intermittent deaths from the ordinary course of a disease cycling through a region; but the Oversoul would dread and try to avoid the large group suffering that came from war, drought, flood, epidemic. In those cases, the Oversoul could act, guiding individuals to actions that would help the whole affected population-not to save individual lives, but to reduce the scale of the suffering.
Between the two of us, though, thought Shedemei, we are left untouched by the suffering of Chebeya's people. There aren't enough of them to force the Oversoul to intervene on their behalf-though there are enough to make her uncomfortable. And I, on my isolated perch in the outer reaches of the atmosphere, I am no part of them. All my people are gone; my community is dead. As the digger women speak of me: I am the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried. That is the only difference between me and the dead, for a person who has no living community is dead. Haven't I seen it in old people? Spouse gone, friends gone, family gone except for later generations that barely remember the old one-they become annoyed to discover that they're still alive. Have I reached that point?
Not yet, she thought, sliding her fingers behind the tiny trowel in order to lift out a seedling that needed transplanting into a larger tray. Because my plants have become my people. My little animals, going through generation after generation as I play genetic games with them-they are the ones I think of as part of myself.
So is this good or bad? The Oversoul needs to get advice from the Keeper of Earth in order to alleviate the suffering of the people of Harmony. To accomplish that, we need to interfere with the Keeper's plans. The Keeper wants to rescue Chebeya and Akmaro; therefore we'll make it harder. It's not an unreasonable plan. In the end, it will be to the benefit of millions and millions of people on Harmony.
But we're doing it blindly. We don't know what the Keeper is trying to accomplish. Why is she trying to save the Akmari? Maybe we should have tried to understand her purpose before we started fiddling around with her ability to accomplish it.
Yet how can we understand her purpose if she won't talk to us? It's so circular.
<Yes, it is.>
"Don't talk into my mind," she said to the Oversoul. "I hate that."
<If you won't go where I have a comfortable voice, I'll use an uncomfortable one.>
"I wasn't talking to you, I was thinking to myself." <If you don't want me to hear you, don't think.> Shedemei snorted. "Very funny."
<Let's think about what reasons the Keeper might have for saving the people of Akma and Chebeya.>
"While we're at it, why not also think about what or who in the world the Keeper of Earth is."
<Do you think I haven't been researching that very question? I tell you it's either hidden from me, or it was never included in my memory, or the people who built me didn't even know.>
"If we can't find the Keeper using physical evidence or recorded memory," said Shedemei, "then maybe we should study what she wants and what she does, and then search for some mechanism by which it is possible for her to do it, or some entity that might benefit from her doing it."
<You think the Keeper's motives might be selfish, then?> "Not at all. Any more than I will ever benefit from the expanded habitat that these little legumes will provide, if they are ever successful at producing useful nutrition in the low-oxygen, short-growing-season, thin-soil environment I intend them for. But someone will benefit. Therefore if some stranger who had no way of discovering me directly wanted to know something about me, she could at least start her reasoning from the fact that I have particular care for enhancing the ability of humans, diggers, and angels to expand into new habitats with improved nutrition. They might then look for me to be of a body-type that allowed me to identify with these creatures. Or at least they could gather from my actions that it is important to me that these creatures be protected."
<But would anything they learned ever cause them to look up in the sky?>
"I have no idea," Shedemei said wearily. "But I also know that if somebody wanted to get my attention, all they'd need to do is start stomping out all my gardens on Earth. Then I'd notice them, all right."
<So that's what we're doing. Stomping down the gardens of the Keeper of Earth.>
"Not so destructive, I hope."
<Yes, and Chebeya and Akmaro and their people had better hope so,too.>
"If you keep goading me this way, you'll end up persuading me to care so much about them that I stop worrying about the people of Harmony altogether. Is that what you want?"
<No.>
"Basilica was ruined half a millennium ago. My people are all dead. My nation of birth is irretrievable. Everything I ever felt myself to be a part of is dead, except my gardens. Do you really want me to become part of Akmaro and Chebeya, to begin to feel about them the way I once felt about Rasa and her household, about my friends, about my husband and my children?"
<No.>
"Then leave me alone."
<I can't. You're the starmaster. I'm programmed to maintain the health of the starmaster.>
"Health! What does this have to do with health?"
<It isn't good for you to be alone.>
Shedemei shuddered. She didn't want the Oversoul meddling like this. She was just fine on her own. Zdorab was gone, her children were gone, and that was fine, she had work to do, she didn't need distractions. Her health indeed!