The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (32 page)

〈It will drive you mad.〉

“Find a bowmaker in your memory, one who
always
worked this way—there must have been one, in forty million years one who loved the feel of the knife, who could whittle a bow
without thinking
.”

〈Ah . . . without thinking . . . pure habit, pure reflex . . .〉

“Father was concentrating so hard on everything in his dream—that’s why I couldn’t bear to have his memories in my mind. But a bowmaker whose hands work without thought. Put those skills in me. Let me know how it feels, so that I also have those reflexes.”

〈I’ve never done such a thing. It wasn’t what I was designed to do. It might still make you mad.〉

“It might also make a bow,” said Nafai. “And if I fail at this, the expedition is over.”

〈I’ll try. Give me time. It takes time to find one man, in all the years of human life on Harmony, who worked so mindlessly . . .〉

So Nafai waited. A minute, two minutes. And then a strange feeling came over him. A tingling, not in his arms, really, but in the
idea
of his arms that constantly dwelt inside his mind. A need to move the muscles, to work. It’s happening, thought Nafai, the muscle memory, the nerve memory, and I must learn how to receive it, how to let
this body of mine be guided by someone else’s hands and fingers, wrists and arms.

He shifted the knife in his hand until it felt comfortable. And then he began to wipe the knife across the surface of the wood, not even letting the blade bite, just feeling the face of the sapling. And then, at last, he knew—or rather felt—when the wood invited the blade to dip into its surface, to peel away the thin bark. He pulled the knife through the wood like a fish moving through the sea, feeling the resistance of the wood and learning from it, finding the hard places, the weak places, and working around them, easing up where too much pressure would split the wood, biting hard where the wood cried out for discipline from the blade.

The sun was down, the moon just rising when he finished. But the bow was smooth and beautiful.

Green wood, so it won’t hold its spring long.

How did I know that? thought Nafai, and then laughed at himself. How had he known any of this?

We can choose the saplings that we need and make green-wood bows from them at first, but also save others, season them, so that the bows we make later will last. There are plenty of stands of wood on our way south that will do for our needs. We won’t even have to wait here for bow-wood gathering.

Carefully he looped and knotted one end of the twine Luet had given him, and tightened it around the narrow waist of the string-nock he had cut in one end of the bow. Then he drew the twine along the length of the bow to the other end, looped it around the other string-nock, and tightened it down. Far enough that there would be constant tension on the string, so that when he released an arrow the string would not wobble, but would return to perfect straightness, so the arrow would fly true. It felt right, as if he had done it a thousand times, and he easily and skillfully tied the loop in the twine, cut off the long excess, and then strung it into place.

“If I think about it,” he whispered to the Oversoul, “then I can’t do it.”

〈Because it’s reflex〉 came the answer in his mind. 〈It’s deeper than thought.〉

“But will I remember it? Can I teach it to others?”

〈You’ll remember some of it. You’ll make mistakes but it will come back to you, because it’s now deep in
your
mind, too. You may not be able to explain well what you do, but they can watch you and learn that way.〉

The bow was ready. He unstrung it again and then began work on the arrows. The Oversoul had led him to a place where many birds nested—he found no shortage of feathers there. And the short straight arrow shafts came from the tough woody reeds growing around a pool. And the arrowheads from obsidian crumbling out of the side of a hill. He gathered them all, having no idea of how to work with them; yet now the knowledge poured out of his fingers without ever reaching his conscious mind. By dawn he would have his arrows, his bow, perhaps in time enough for him to get a few hours of sleep. After that it would be daylight, and his real test: to track and follow his prey, and kill it, and bring it home.

And if I do, what then? I will be the hero, striding back into camp, triumphant, with the blood of the kill on my hands, on my clothing. I will be the one who brought meat when no one else could have. I will be the one who made it possible for the expedition to go on. I will be Velikodushnu, I will be the savior of my family and friends, everyone will know that when even my father shrank from the journey I was the one who found a way to continue, so that when we go forth among the stars and human feet again step on the soil of Earth, it will have been
my
triumph, because I made this bow, these arrows, and brought meat home to the wives ...

Then, in the midst of his imagined triumph, another thought: I will be the one held responsible from then on if anything goes wrong. I will be the one blamed for every misfortune on the journey. It will be
my
expedition, and even Father will look to me for leadership. On that day Father will be irretrievably weakened. Who will lead then? Until now, the answer would have been clear: Elemak.
Who could rival him? Who would follow anybody else, except the handful who will do whatever the Oversoul asks? But now, if I return as the hero, I will be in a position to rival Elemak. Not in a position to overwhelm him, though. Only to rival him. Only strong enough to tear the company apart. It would lead to bitterness no matter who won; it might lead to bloodshed. It must not happen now, if the expedition is to succeed.

So I can’t return as a hero. I must find a way to bring back the meat we need to live, to feed the babies—and yet still leave Father’s leadership unweakened.

As he thought and thought, his fingers and hands continued at their work, experdy finding the straightest reeds and nocking them for the bowstring, slicing them in deft spirals for the feathers, and splitting and lashing the other end to hold the tiny obsidian arrowheads.

Zdorab lay beside Shedemei, sweating and exhausted. The sheer physical exertion of it had almost defeated him. How could something that brought the two of them so little pleasure be so important to her—and, in its own way, to him? Yet they had accomplished it, despite his body’s initial disinterest. He remembered something that an old lover of his had once said—that when it came down to it, human males could mate with any creature that held still long enough and didn’t bite very hard. Perhaps so . . .

He had been hoping, though, in the back of his mind, that when he finally mated with a woman there would be some place in his brain, some gland in his body that would awaken and say, Ah, so
this
is how it’s done. Then the days of his isolation would be over, and his body would know its proper place in the scheme of nature. But the truth was that nature had no scheme. Only a series of accidents. A species “worked” if enough of its members reproduced faithfully and often enough to keep it going; so what if some insignificant percentage—
my
percentage, Zdorab thought bitterly—ends up being reproductively irrelevant? Nature wasn’t a child’s birthday party; nature didn’t care about including everybody. Zdorab’s body would be cycled
back through the wheels and gears of life, whether or not his genes happened to reproduce themselves along the way.

And yet. And yet. Even though his body had had no particular joy from Shedemei’s (and certainly hers had finally become exhausted from the effort to please
his
), yet there was joy in it on another level. Because the gift had been given. Sheer friction and stimulation of nerves had won in the end, sparking the reflex that deposited a million hopeful half-humans-to-be into the matrix that would keep them alive for the day or two of their race toward their other half, the all-mother, the Infinite Egg. What did
they
care whether Zdorab had lusted after Shedemei or merely acted out of duty while desperately trying to fantasize another lover of a reproductively irrelevant sex? Their life was lived on another plane—and it was on exactly that plane that the great net of life that Shedemei so worshipped was woven together.

I have finally been caught in that net, for reasons that no gene could plan for; I was greased at birth, to slip away from the net forever, but I have been caught anyway, I have
chosen
to be caught, and who is to say that mine is not the better fatherhood, because I acted out of pure love, and not out of some inborn instinct that captured me. Indeed, I acted
against
my instinct. There’s something in that. A hero of copulation, a
real
cocksman, if the others only knew. Anybody can pilot his boat to shore in a fair wind; I have come to shore by tacking in contrary winds, by rowing against an ebbing tide.

So let the little suckers make it to the egg. Shedemei said it was a good time for them to have their competition for survival. Let one of them, a strong and sturdy one, reach his microscopic goal and pierce that cell wall and join his helical deoxyribonucleic acid to hers and make a baby on our very first try, so I don’t have to go through all of this again.

But if I have to, I will. For Shedemei.

He reached out and found her hand and clasped it in
his. She did not awaken, but still her hand closed ever so slightly, gently enclosing his.

Luet could hardly sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Nafai, worrying about him. In vain did the Oversoul assure her: He’s doing well, all will be well. It was long after dark, long after Chveya slept from her last suckling of the night, before Luet drifted off to sleep.

It was no restful sleep, either. She kept dreaming of Nafai sidling along rocky ledges, creeping up the face of sheer cliffs with sometimes a bow in one hand, sometimes a pulse, only in her dream the cliff would grow steeper and steeper until finally it bent backward and Nafai was clinging like an insect to the underside of the cliff and finally he would lose his grip and drop away . . .

And she would come half-awake, realize it had been a dream, and impatiently turn her sweaty pillow and try to sleep again.

Until a dream came that was not of Nafai dying. Instead he was in a room that shone with silver, with chromium, with platinum, with ice. In her dream he lay down upon a block of ice and the heat of his body melted into it, and he sank and sank until he was completely inside the ice and it closed over him and froze. What is this dream? she thought. And then she thought, If I know that this is a dream, does that mean that I’m awake? And if I’m awake, why doesn’t the dream stop?

It did not stop. Instead she saw that, instead of being trapped in the ice, Nafai was sinking all the way through it. Now the shape of his back and buttocks, his calves and heels, his elbows and fingertips and the back of his head began to bow downward at the bottom of the ice block, and she thought—what holds this ice in the middle of the air like this? Why didn’t it also hold Nafai? His body bulged farther and farther downward, and then he dropped through, falling the meter or so to the shining floor. His eyes opened, as if he had been asleep during his passage through the ice. He rolled out from under the block, out of the shadow of it, and as soon as he stood up
in the light, she could see that his body was no longer what it had been. Now, where the lights struck him, his skin shone brightly, as if it had been coated with the finest possible layer of the same metal the walls were made of. Like armor. Like a new skin. It sparkled so . . . and then she realized that it was not reflecting light at all, but rather it was giving off its own light. Whatever he was wearing now drew its power from his body, and when he thought of any part of himself, to move a limb, or even just to look at it, it fairly sparked with light.

Look at him, thought Luet. He has become a god, not just a hero. He shines like the Oversoul. His is the body of the Oversoul.

But that’s nonsense. The Oversoul is a computer, and needs no body of flesh and bone. Far from it—caught in a human body it would lose its vast memory, its light-fast speed.

Nevertheless, Nafai’s body sparkled with light as he moved, and she knew that it was the Oversoul’s body he was wearing, though it made no sense to her at all.

In the dream she saw him come to her, and embrace her, and when she was joined to him, she could feel that the sparkling armor that he wore grew to include her, so that she also shone with light. It made her skin feel so alive, as if every nerve had been connected to the molecule-thin metal coating that surrounded her like sweat. And she realized—every point that sparks is where a nerve connects to this layer of light. She pulled away from Nafai, and the new skin stayed with her, even though she had not passed through the ice that gave it to him. It is his skin I’m wearing now, she thought; and yet she also thought: I too am wearing the body of the Oversoul, and am alive now for the first time.

What does this dream mean?

But since she was asking the question in a dream, she got only a dream answer: She saw the dream-Nafai and her dream-self make love, with such passion that she forgot it was a dream and lost herself in the ecstasy of it. And when their coupling was done, she saw the belly of her dream-self
grow, and then a baby emerged from her groin and slid shining into Nafai’s arms, for the babe, too, was coated with the new skin, alive with light. Ah, the child was beautiful, so beautiful.

〈Wake up.〉

She heard it like a voice, it was so clear and strong.

〈Wake up.〉

She sat bolt upright, trying to see who had spoken to her, to recognize the voice that lingered in her memory.

〈Get up.〉

It was not a voice at all. It was the Oversoul. But why was the Oversoul interrupting her dream, when surely the Oversoul had
sent
the dream in the first place?

〈Get up, Waterseer, rise up in silence, and walk in the moonlight to the place where Vas plans to kill his wife and his rival. On the ledge that saved Nafai’s life you must wait for them.〉