Earthborn

"I want to know these people, that's all," said Shedemei. "I want to know them for myself."

<You can't possibly know them as well from just conversing with them as I know them from looking inside their thoughts.>

"Do I have to say it? Can't you look inside my mind and see the truth?"

<The question really is: Can you?>

"I can. I'm going down there because I'm lonely. There, is that what you wanted to hear?"

<Yes.>

"Well, now you've heard it. I want to hear another organic voice. No insult to you, but I actually would like to feel like some other people know me."

<I'm not offended. I've been hoping you'd do something like this. I just wish you had chosen a more benign time. There is little you can do by way of intervention at this time.>

"I know," said Shedemei. "And I don't claim to have any great and noble purpose. I'm just ready to come out of this metal shell and bump up against some people again." Then she thought of something. "How old am I? People will ask."

<You mean physically? The cloak keeps you very healthy. You could pass for forty. You haven't reached menopause. You never will, actually, until you tell me to let you do it.>

"Are you suggesting that I should have another child?"

<I'm just telling you to be careful how you go about curing your loneliness. >

Shedemei curled her lip in disgust. "This is a society with a strong tabu against sex outside of marriage. I'm not going down there to ruin some poor lonely man's life."

<Just a thought.>

"Are you sure all these warnings aren't because you're just the tiniest bit jealous?"

<Not programmed into me.>

"I can walk on the face of this planet, and other living creatures will know me as one of them. Have you ever wished... ."

<I don't wish.>

"That's a shame, too."

<It's sweet of you to anthropomorphize me so compassionately. But if I really had these feelings you project onto me, wouldn't the last few things you've said be, in a technical sense, gloating?>

"That is programmed into me" said Shedemei.

The hatches were sealed. The launch was flipped away from the starship Basilica and hurtled down into the atmosphere.

SEVEN - RASARO'S SCHOOL

Light streamed through the tall, wide windows of the winter room, reflecting from the bare lime-washed plaster walls until it was hard for Mon to imagine that it could possibly be brighter outside. The reason he and his brothers could gather here to be brow beaten by-no, to have a discussion with-Akma was because no one used the winter room in the summer. It was too hot. It was too bright. It was all Mon could do to keep his eyes open. If it weren't for the buzzing flies that persisted in trying to drink the sweat dribbling out of his body, he would have dozed off long ago.

Not that Mon wasn't committed to Akma's ideas. It's just that the two of them had discussed all this before ever bringing Aronha and Ominer and Khimin into it. So it was going over old ground for him. And it was natural for Akma to conduct these sessions, since Mon didn't have his patience in dealing with Khimin's questions, which were always off the subject, or Aronha's stubborn refusal to agree with points that were already proven and more than proven. Only Ominer seemed to grasp at once what Akma was talking about, and even he made the sessions longer and more tedious than they had to be, because when he did understand a point he would then repeat it back to Akma in different words. Between Khimin's obtuseness, Aronha's stolidity, and Ominer's enthusiasm, every tiny advance in the discussion took hours, or so it seemed to Mon. Akma could endure it. Akma could act as though the questions and comments weren't unbearably stupid.

A tiny thought crept into Mon's consciousness: Did Akma deal with me the same way? Are the ideas we worked out "together" really Akma's alone? How skillful is he, really, at winning people to his point of view?"

Immediately Mon discarded the idea, not because it wasn't true, but because it would imply that Mon was not Akma's intellectual equal, and he certainly was. Bego had always made it clear that Mon was the best student he had ever had.

"Humans and angels can live together," said Akma, "because the natural habitat of both species is open air and sunlight. Humans cannot fly, it is true, but our bipedal body structure lifts us above the other animals. We conceive ourselves as seeing from above, which makes us in spirit compatible to the sky people. The diggers, however, are creatures of darkness, of caves; their natural posture is with their bellies dragging along the moist underground dirt. What creatures of intelligent and refinement abhor, the diggers love; what the diggers love, creatures of higher sensibility view with disgust."

Mon closed his eyes against the white unbearable light of the room. In the back of his mind there throbbed an intense feeling, a certainty that in his childhood he had learned to trust, and in recent years he had learned-a much harder task-to ignore. The feeling was beneath and behind the place in his mind that words came from. But, in the way that the mind supplies words for unexplainable tunes, his mind had also learned the words that went along with this feeling: Wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. Throb, throb, throb. Closing his eyes didn't make it go away.

This doesn't mean anything, thought Mon. This feeling is just a holdover from my childhood. It's just the Keeper of Earth trying to get me to disbelieve what Akma is saying.

What am I thinking? I don't even believe in the Keeper of Earth, and here I am blaming him for this throbbing meaningless stupid insane chant running over and over through my mind. I can't get rid of my superstitions even when I'm trying to get rid of my superstitions. He laughed at himself.

Laughed aloud, or perhaps just breathed as if laughing-it didn't take much for Akma to pick up on it.

"But perhaps I'm wrong," said Akma. "Mon is the one who really understands this. Why were you laughing, Mon?"

"I wasn't," said Mon.

Wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.

"I mean my first thought, Mon, you'll remember this, my first thought was that all three species should separate, but you're the one who insisted that humans and angels could live together because of all these affinities between us."

"You mean this comes from Mon?" asked Aronha. "Mon, who jumped off a high wall when he was three because he wanted to fly like an angel?"

"I was just thinking," said Mon, "that all those things you say about the diggers, the angels could also say about us. Low, belly-crawling creatures. We can't even hang cleanly from a tree limb. Filthy, squatting in dirt-"

"But not hairy!" said Khimin.

"Nobody's going to listen to us," said Ominer, "if we start saying that angels are better than humans. And the kingdom would fall apart if we start saying humans and angels should be separate. If we're going to make this work, we have to exclude diggers and only the diggers." Mon looked at him in surprise. So did Akma. "If what's going to work?" asked Akma. "This. This whole thing we're preparing for," said Ominer. Mon and Akma looked at each other.

Ominer realized that he had said something wrong. "What?" No one answered.

Then Aronha, in his measured way, said, "I didn't know that we had any plan to take these discussions public."

"What, we're going to wait around until you're the king?" asked Ominer scornfully. "All this urgency, all this secrecy, I just assumed Akma was preparing us to start speaking against Akmaro's so-called religion. His attempt to control and destroy our society and turn the whole kingdom over to the Elemaki, is more like it. I thought we were going to speak out against it now, before he's succeeded in getting diggers accepted as true men and women throughout Darakemba. I mean, if we're not, why are we wasting our time? Let's go out and make some digger friends so at least we won't be thrust aside when they take over."