Orson Card - THE SHIPS OF EARTH

The longing in Shedemei's voice was so strong that Hushidh immediately understood. "But Luet is the same person," said Hushidh. "She's still the waterseer, even if she now spends her days on camelback and her nights in a tent and every hour with a baby fastened to her nipple."

"Is she the waterseer, then?" asked Shedemei. "She was— but is she? Or are we nothing more than what we're doing now? Aren't we truly only what the people we live with think we are?"

"No," said Hushidh. "Or that would mean that in Basilica I was nothing but the raveler, and Luet was nothing but the waterseer, and you were nothing but a geneticist, and that was never true, either. There's always something above and behind and beneath the role that everyone sees us acting out. They may think that we are the script we act out, but we don't have to believe it."

"Who are we then?" asked Shedemei. "Who am I?"

"Always a scientist," said Luet, "because you're still doing science in your mind every hour you're awake."

"And our friend," said Hushidh.

"And the person in our company who understands best how things work," added Luet.

"And Zdorab's wife," said Hushidh. "That's the one that means the most to you, I think."

To their surprise and consternation, Shedemei's only answer was to lay down Dza on the carpet and lightly run from the tent. Hushidh caught only a glimpse of her face, but she was weeping. There was no doubt of that. She was weeping because Hushidh had said that being Zdorab's wife meant more to her than anything. It was what a woman might do if she doubted her husband's love. But how could she doubt? It was obvious that Zdorab's whole life was centered around her. There were no better friends in the company than Zodya and Shedya, everyone knew that—unless it was Luet and Hushidh, and they were sisters so it hardly counted.

What could possibly be wrong between Zdorab and Shedemei, that would cause such a strong woman to be so fragile on the subject? A mystery. Hushidh longed to ask the Oversoul, but knew she'd get the same answer as always—silence. Or else the answer Luet already got—mind your own business.

The best thing and the worst thing about turning back and taking another route south was that they could see the sea. In particular, they could see Dorova Bay, an eastern arm of the Scour Sea. And on clear nights—which all the nights were—they could see, on the far side of that bay, the lights of the city of Dorova.

It was not a city like Basilica, they all knew that. It was a scrubby edge-of-the-desert town filled with riffraff and profiteers, failures and thieves, violent and stupid men and women. They told each other that over and over, remembering tales of desert towns and how they weren't worth visiting even if they were the last town in the world.

Except that Dorova was the last town in the world—the last town in their world, anyway. The last they would ever see. It was the town they could have visited more than a week ago, when Volemak led them up into the mountains from the Nividimu and they left the last hope of civilization behind—or the last danger of it, for those who had that perspective.

Nafai saw how others looked at those lights, when they gathered at night, fireless, chilly, the bundled infants smacking and suckling away as they drank cold water and gnawed on jerky and hard biscuit and dried melon. How Obring got tears in his eyes—tears! And what was the city to him, anyway, except a place to get his hooy polished. Tears! And Sevet was no better, with her simple, steady gaze, that stony look on her face. She had a baby at her breast, and all she could think of was a city so small and filthy that she wouldn't have stepped into its streets two years ago. If they had offered her twenty times her normalfee to come and sing there, she would have sneered at the offer—and now she couldn't keep her eyes off of it.

But looking was all they could do, fortunately. They could see it, but they had no boat to cross the bay, and none of them could swim well enough to cross that many kilometers without a boat. Besides, they weren't at the beach, they were at least a kilometer above it, at the edge of a craggy, rugged incline that couldn't decide whether to be a cliff or a slope. There might be a way to get the camels down, but it wasn't likely, and even if they did, it would be several days' journey back along the beach, with the camels—and without them, there would be no water to drink and so they couldn't make it at all. No, nobody was going to be able to slip away from the group and make it to Dorova. The only way there was if the whole group went, and even then they would probably have to go back the way they came, which meant a week and a half at least, and probably one of the caravans from the south to contend with along the way. And it was all meaningless because Father would never go back.

And yet Nafai couldn't stop thinking about how much these people wanted that city.

How much he wanted it.

Yes, there was the trouble. That's what bothered him. He wanted the city, too. Not for any of the things they wanted, or at least the things he imagined that they wanted. Nafai had no desire for any wife but Luet; they were a family, and that wouldn't change no matter where they lived, he had decided that long ago. No, what Nafai wanted was a soft bed to lay Chveya in. A school to take her to. A house for Luet and Chveya and whatever children might come after. Neighbors and friends—friends that he might choose for himself, not this accidental collection of people most of whom he just didn't like that much. That's what those lights meant to him—and instead here he was on a grassy meadow that sloped deceptively downward toward the sea, so that if you just squinted a little you couldn't really tell you were a kilometer above sea level, you could pretend for a few moments that it was just a stroll across the meadow, and then a short ride on a boat across the bay, and then you'd be home, the journey would be over, you could bathe and then sleep in a bed and wake up to find breakfast cooking already, and you'd find your wife in your arms beside you, and then you'd hear the faint sound of your baby daughter waking, and you'd slip out of bed and go get her from her cradle and bring her in to your wife, who would sleepily draw her breast from inside her nightgown and put it into the mouth of the baby that now nestled in the crook of her arm on the bed, and you'd lie back down beside her and listen to the sucking and smacking of the baby as you also heard the birds singing outside the window and the noises of morning in the street not far away, the venders starting to cry out what they had to sell. Eggs. Berries. Cream. Sweet breads and cakes.

Oversoul, why couldn't you have left us alone? Why couldn't you have waited another generation? Forty million years, and you couldn't wait for Luet's and my great-grandchildren to have this great adventure? You couldn't have let Issib and me figure out how to build one of those marvelous ancient flying machines, so we could go to wherever you're taking us in just a few hours? Time, that's all we needed, really. Time to live before we lost our world.

Stop whining, said the Oversoul in Nafai's mind. Or maybe it wasn't the Oversoul. Maybe it was just Nafai's own sense that he had indulged himself too much already.

It was morning, just before dawn, at the spring the Index had told them was named Shazer, though why anyone should have bothered to name such an obscure place, and why the Oversoul had bothered to remember, Nafai could not begin to guess. Vas had had the last watch of the night, and then came and woke Nafai so they could hunt together. Three days since they last had meat, and this was a good campsite so they could take two days to hunt if need be. So Vas would catch sight of something, or find some fresh animal trace; Nafai would trail after him and, when the quarry was near, creep silently forward until the animal came in sight. Then Nafai would take the sacred pulse, aim so carefully, trying to guess which way the animal would move, and how far, and how fast, and then he would squeeze the trigger and the beam of light would burn a hole into the heart of the creature, sear it so that the wound would never bleed, except for a hot wet smoke that would stain the sand and rocks it fell on red and black.