"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."
"If there's one thing the Oversoul has had plenty of, it's time," said Issib. "But even with all that, there's decay and loss."
"Memory locations can become unreadable," said Rasa.
"I don't know about that. I just know that the Oversoul is losing satellites. That makes it harder for it to keep an eye on us. So far there aren't any blind spots—but each satellite has to bring in far more information than it was originally meant to. There are bottlenecks in the system. Places where a satellite simply can't pass through all the information that it collects fast enough not to miss something going on among the humans it's observing. In short, there are events happening now that aren't getting remembered. The Oversoul is controlling the losses by guessing to fill in the gaps in its information, but it's only going to get worse and worse. There's still plenty of memory left, but soon there'll be millions of lives that are remembered only as vague sketches or outlines of a life. Someday, of course, enough satellites will fail that some lives will never be recorded at all."
"And eventually all the satellites will fall."
"Right. And, more to the point, when those blind spots occur, there will also be people who are not under the influence of the Oversoul in any way. At that point they'll begin to make the weapons again that can destroy the world."
"So—why not put up more satellites?"
"Who? What human society has the technology to build the ships to carry satellites out into space? Let alone building the satellites in the first place."
"We make computers, don't we?"
"The technology to put satellites into space is the same technology that can deliver weapons from one side of Harmony to the other. How can the Oversoul teach us how to replenish its satellites without also teaching us how to destroy each other? Not to mention the fact that we could probably then figure out how to reprogram the Oversoul and control it ourselves—or, failing that, we could build our own little Oversouls that key in on the part of our brain that the Oversoul communicates with, so that we'd have a weapon that could cause the enemy to panic or get stupid."
"I see the point," said Rasa.
"It's the quandary the Oversoul is in. It must get repaired or it will stop being able to protect humanity; yet the only way it can repair itself is to give human beings the very things that it's trying to prevent us from getting."
"How circular."
"So it's going home," said Issib. "Back to the Keeper of Earth. To find out what to do next."
"What if this Keeper of Earth doesn't know either?"
"Then we're up to our necks in kaka, aren't we?" Issib smiled. "But I think the Keeper knows. I think it has a plan."
"And why is that?"
"Because people keep getting dreams that aren't from the Oversoul."
"People have always had dreams that aren't from the Oversoul," said Rasa. "We had dreams long before there was an Oversoul."
"Yes, but we didn't have the same dreams, carrying clear messages about coming home to Earth, did we?"
"I just don't believe that some computer or whatever that's many light-years from here could possibly send a dream into our minds."
"Who knows what's happened back on Earth?" said Issib. "Maybe the Keeper of Earth has learned things about the universe that we don't begin to understand. That wouldn't be a surprise, either, since we've had the Oversoul making us stupid whenever we tried to think about really advanced physics. For forty million years we've been slapped down whenever we used our brains too well, but in forty million years the Keeper of Earth, whoever or whatever it is, might well have thought of some really useful new stuff. Including how to send dreams to people lighters away."
"And all this you learned from the Index."
"All this I dragged kicking and screaming from the Index, with Zdorab's and Father's help," said Issib. "The Oversoul doesn't like talking about itself, and it keeps trying to make us forget what we've learned about it."
"I thought the Oversoul was cooperating with us."
"No," said Issib. "We're cooperating with it. In the meantime, it's trying to keep us from learning even the tiniest bit of information that isn't directly pertinent to the tasks it has in mind for us."
"So how did you learn all that you just told me? About how the Oversoul's memory works?"
"Either we got around its defenses so well and so persistently that it finally gave up on trying to prevent us from knowing it, or it decided that this was harmless information after all."
"Or," said Rasa.
"Or?"
"Or the information is wrong and so it doesn't matter whether you know it or not."
Issib grinned at her. "But the Oversoul wouldn't lie, would it, Mother?"
Which brought back a conversation they had had when Issib was a child, asking about the Oversoul. What had the question been? Ah, yes—why do men call the Oversoul he and women call the Oversoul she? And Rasa had answered that the Oversoul permitted men to think of her as if she were male, so they'd be more comfortable praying to her. And Issib had asked that same question: But the Oversoul wouldn't lie, would it, Mother?