"Did you understand that?"
Chveya could only give a stupefied nod. Her entire world had been turned upside down. Not just by the confusion of who was really kin to whom after all, but by the whole idea that the same people didn't have to stay married all their lives—that somebody's mother and father might end up being married to completely different people and have children who thought of only one of them as Mother and the other one as a complete stranger! It was terrifying, and that night she had a terrible dream in which giant rats came into their house and carried off Father in his sleep, and when Mother woke up she didn't even notice he was gone, she simply brought in little Proya—only full-sized now, because this was a dream—and said, "This is your new father, till the rats take him."
She woke up sobbing.
"What was the dream?" asked Mother, as she comforted her. "Tell me, Veya, why do you cry?"
So she told her.
Mother carried her into Father's and her room and woke Father and made Chveya tell him the dream, too. He didn't even seem interested in the most horrible thing, which was Proya coming into their house and taking his place. All he wanted to know about were the giant rats. He made her describe them again and again, even though she couldn't think of anything to say about them except that they were rats and they were very large and they seemed to be chuckling to each other about how clever they were as they carried Father away.
"Still," said Father, "it's the first time in the new generation. And not from the Oversoul, but from the Keeper."
"It might mean nothing," said Mother. "Maybe she heard of one of the other dreams."
But when they asked her whether she had heard stories of giant rats before this dream, Chveya had no idea of what they were talking about. The only rats she had heard about were the ones that were constantly trying to steal food from the barns. Did other people dream of giant rats, too? Adults were so strange—they thought nothing of families being torn apart and children having half-brothers and half-sisters and other monstrosities like that, but a dream of a giant rat, now, that was important to them. Father even said, "If you ever dream of giant rats again—or other strange animals—you must tell us at once. It can be very important."
It was only as Luet was covering her up again in bed that Chveya was able to ask about the question that was gnawing at her. "Mother, if you ever don't renew Father, who will be our new father then?"
Instantly a look of understanding and compassion came to Mother's face. "Oh, Veya, my dear little seamstress, is that what's worrying you? We left laws like that behind when we left Basilica. Marriages are forever here. Till we die. So Father will always be the father in our family, and I will always be the mother, and that's it. You can count on that."
Much reassured, Chveya settled down to sleep. She thought several thoughts as she was drifting off: How awful it must have been, to live in Basilica and never know who would be married to your parents from year to year—you might as well live in a house where the floor might be the ceiling tomorrow. And then: I am the first of the new generation to have a dream of giant rats, and somehow that is very wonderful so I must be very proud of myself and if I'd known that I would have dreamed about giant rats before. And then: Rokya is the boy who is no kin to anybody, and so he's the very best one to marry, and so I shall marry him and that will show Dazya who's the best.
Nafai and Luet got little sleep that night. Each had keyed in on a different aspect of Chveya's dream. To Luet, what mattered was that one of the children had finally shown some of the ability that the Oversoul had been selecting for. She knew it was vain of her, but she felt it appropriate that the firstborn of the waterseer should be the first to have a meaningful dream. She could hardly bear to wait until she could first take her daughter into the water of the river to see if she could learn to deliberately fall into the kind of sleep that brought true dreams, the way Luet had schooled herself to do.
To Nafai, on the other hand, what mattered was that after so long a silence, someone had received some kind of message at all. And the message, however vague it was, however tied to childish puzzlements, was nevertheless from the Keeper of Earth, which somehow made it more important than if it had come from the Oversoul.
After all, they had conversation with the Oversoul all the time, through the Index. The Index only allowed them access to the Oversoul's memory, however. It did not let them plumb the Oversoul's plans, to find out through the Index exactly what the Oversoul expected them to do this year or the next. For that they waited, as they had always waited, for the Oversoul to initiate things through dreams or a voice in their own minds. All these years in Dostatok, and the Oversoul had sent no dream, no voice, and the only message the Index had for them, beyond their own research into memory, was: Stay and wait.
But the Keeper of Earth was not tied to any plan or schedule of the Oversoul; it sent its dreams through the light-years from Earth itself. It was impossible to guess what the Keeper's purpose was—the dreams it sent seemed to get tangled up in the concerns of the person having the dream, just as happened with Chveya's dream of the rats. Yet there were themes that kept recurring—hadn't Hushidh dreamed of rats also as enemies, attacking her family? This seemed to hint that somehow these large rats were going to be a problem to them on Earth—though there were also the dreams that showed the rats and angels of Earth linked with humans as friends and equals. It was so hard to make sense of all of it—but one thing was certain. The dreams from the Keeper of Earth had not stopped coming, and so perhaps something would happen soon, perhaps the next stage of their journey would begin.
For Nafai was growing impatient. Like all the others, he loved the way they lived at Dostatok, yet he could not forget that this was not the object of their journey. There was an unfinished task ahead of them, a journey through space to the planet where humankind originated, the return of humans for the first time after forty million years, and Nafai longed to go. Life in Dostatok was sweet, but it was also far too closed and neat. Things seemed to have ended here, and Nafai didn't like the feeling that somehow the future had been tied off, that there would be no more changes other than the predictable changes of growing older.
Oversoul, said Nafai silently, now that the Keeper of Earth has awakened again, will you also awaken? Will you also set us on the next stage of our journey?
Nafai was keenly aware of how different were his and Luet's responses to Chveya's dream. He was at once disdainful and envious of Luet's attitude. Disdainful, for she seemed to have let Dostatok become her whole world—what she cared most about was the children, and how this meant that they might also become visionaries, and most specifically how wonderful it was that their Chveya was the first to dream true dreams. How could this matter compared to the news that the Keeper of Earth was stirring again? And yet he envied her for very connectedness with their present life in Dostatok—he could not help but think that she was far happier than he, because her world did center around the children, the family, the community. I live in a larger world, but have little connection with it; she lives in a smaller one, but is able to change it and be changed by it far more than I.