Orson Card - THE SHIPS OF EARTH

Looking at him there, his eyes closed, she could almost believe that he was communing with the great mind of the Oversoul. But of course he didn't have the brains for that. He was probably just memorizing the main entries in the Index, so he could help Wetchik or Nafai or Luet or Shedemei herself locate some bit of information they wanted. Even with the Index, Zdorab was the pure servant.

He looked up. "Did you want the Index?" he asked mildly.

"No," she said. "I came to talk to you."

Did he shudder? Was that the quick involuntary movement of his shoulders? No, he was shrugging, that's what it was.

"I expected that you would, eventually."

"Everyone expects it, which is why I haven't come till now."

"All right then," he said. "Why now?"

"Because it's plain that in this company the unmarried people are going to slip further and further into oblivion as time goes on. You may be content with that, but I am not."

"I haven't noticed you slipping into oblivion," said Zdorab. "Your voice is listened to in councils."

"Patiently they listen," said Shedemei. "But I have no real influence."

"No one does," said Zdorab. "This is the Oversoul's expedition."

"I didn't think you'd grasp it," said Shedemei. "Try to think of this company as a troop of baboons. You and I are getting thrust farther and farther to the edges of the troop. If s only a matter of time until we are nothing."

"But that only matters if you actually care about being something."

Shedemei could hardly believe that he would put it into words that way. "I know that you have utterly no ambition, Zdorab, but I don't intend to disappear as a human being. And what I propose is simple enough. We just go through the ceremony with Aunt Rasa, we share a tent, and that's it. No one has to know what goes on between us. I don't want your babies, and I have no particular interest in your company. We simply sleep in the same tent, and we're no longer shunted to the edge of the troop. It's that simple. Agreed?"

"Fine," said Zdorab.

She had expected him to say that, to go along. But there was something else in the way he said it, something very subtle …

"You wanted it that way," she said.

He looked at her blankly.

"You wanted it this way all along."

And again, something in his eyes …

"And you're afraid."

Suddenly his eyes flashed with anger. "Now you think you're Hushidh, is that it? You think you know how everybody fits with everybody else."

She had never seen him show anger before—not even sullen anger, and certainly not a hot, flashing scorn like the one she was seeing now. It was a side of Zdorab that she hadn't guessed existed. But it didn't make her like him any better. It reminded her, in fact, of the snarling of a whipped dog.

"I really don't care," she said, "whether you wanted to have sex with me or not. I never cared to make myself attractive to men—that's what women do who have nothing else to offer the world than a pair of breasts and a uterus."

"I have always valued you for your work with genetics," said Zdorab. "Especially for your study of genetic drift in so-called stable species."

She had no answer. It had never occurred to her that anyone in this group had read, much less understood, any of her scientific publications. They all thought of her as someone who came up with valuable genetic alterations that could be sold in faraway places—that's what her relationship had been with Wetchik and his sons for years.

"Though I couldn't help but regret that you didn't have access to the genetic records in the Index. It would have clinched several of your points, having the exact genetic coding of the subject species as they came off the ships from Earth."

She was stunned. "The Index has information like that?"

"I found it a few years ago. The Index didn't want to tell me—I realize now because there are military applications of some of the genetic information in its memory—you can make plagues. But there are ways to get around some of its proscriptions. I found them. I've never been sure how the Oversoul felt about that."

"And you haven't told me till now?"

"You didn't tell me you were continuing your research," said Zdorab. "You did those papers years ago, when you were fresh out of school. It was your first serious project. I assumed you had gone on."

"This is the kind of thing you do with the Index? Genetics?"

Zdorab shook his head. "No."

"What, then? What were you studying just now, when I came in?"

"Probable patterns of continental drift on Earth."

"On Earth! The Oversoul has information that specific about Earth?"

"The Oversoul didn't know it had that information. I kind of had to coax it out. A lot of things are hidden from the Oversoul itself, you know. But the Index has the key. The Oversoul has been quite excited about some of the things I've found in its memory."

Shedemei was so surprised she had to laugh.

"I suppose it's amusing," said Zdorab, not amused.

"No, I was just…"

"Surprised to know that I was worth something besides baking breads and burying fecal matter."

He had struck so close to her previous attitude that it made her angry. "Surprised that you knew you were worth more than that."

"You have no idea what I know or think about myself or anything else. And you made no effort to find out, either," said Zdorab. "You came in here like the chief god of all pantheons and deigned to offer me marriage as long as I didn't actually touch you and expected me to accept gratefully. Well, I did. And you can go on treating me like I don't exist and it'll be fine with me."

She had never felt so ashamed of herself before in her life. Even as she had hated the way everybody else treated Zdorab as a nonentity, she had treated him that way herself, and in her own mind had given no thought for his feelings, as if they didn't matter. But now, having stabbed him with the contemptuousness of her proposal of marriage, she felt she had wronged him and had to make it right. "I'm sorry," she said.

"I'm not," said Zdorab. "Let's just forget everything about this conversation, get married tonight and then we don't have to talk again, agreed?"

"You really don't like me," said Shedemei.

"As if you have ever cared for one moment whether I or anyone else liked you, as long as we didn't interfere too much with your work."

Shedemei laughed. "You're right."

"It seems that we were both sizing each other up, but one of us did a better job of it than the other."

She nodded, accepting the chastening. "Of course we will have to talk again."

"Will we?"

"So you can show me how to get to that information from Earth."

"The genetic stuff?"

"And the continental drift. You forget that I'm carrying seeds to replenish lost species on Earth. I need to know the landforms. And a lot more."

He nodded. "I can show you that. As long as you realize that what I have are forty-million-year-old extrapolations of what might happen in another forty million years. It could be off by a lot—a little mistake early on would be hugely magnified by now."

"I am a scientist, you know," she said.

"And I'm a librarian," said Zdorab. "I'll be glad to show you how to get to the Earth information. It's sort of a back door—I found a path through the agricultural information, through pig breeding, if you can believe it. It helps to be interested in everything. Here, sit across from me and hold on to the Index. You are sensitive to it, I hope."

"Sensitive enough," said Shedemei. "Wetchik and Nafai both took me through sessions, and I've used it to look things up. Mostly I just use my own computer, though, because I thought I already knew everything that was on the Index in my field."