Orson Card - THE SHIPS OF EARTH

"Because you're not one of them," he said. "You don't care about the Oversoul, you hate this life, and you're not caught up in some foolish notion of family loyalty. Who else could I get? If Sevet and I did this alone, they might decide to keep our baby and go on. We needed somebody else with us, to split another family, and who was there besides you? The only other unconnected people are Zdorab and Shedemei, who don't have a baby so they do us no good at all, and Hushidh and Luet, and they're thicker with the Oversoul than anybody else. Oh, and Dol, of course, but she's so besotted with Mebbekew, God knows why, and such a lazy coward anyway, that she wouldn't come with us and we wouldn't want her if she would. That leaves you, Obring. And believe me, I'm asking you only because you're a little less repugnant to me than Dolya."

Now that was a motive that Obring could believe. "I'm in, then," he said.

Shedemei waited until she saw Zdorab head for Volemak's tent. He would be borrowing the Index, of course—with no cooking allowed these days, he had more free time for study. So she excused herself from the group washing clothes, asking Hushidh to pick up Zdorab's and her laundry from the shrubs when it was dry. When Zdorab came through the door of the tent, the Index carefully tucked under his arm, Shedemei was waiting for him.

"Did you want to be alone?" Zdorab asked.

"I wanted to talk to you, "said Shedemei.

Zdorab sat down, then set the Index aside so she wouldn't think he was impatient to use it—though of course she knew that he was.

"Dorova is our last chance," said Shedemei. "To return to civilization."

Zdorab nodded—not agreement, only a sign that he understood.

"Zodya, we don't belong here," she said. "We're not part of this. It's a life of endless servitude for you, a life in which all my work is wasted. We've done it for a year—we've served well. The reason for your oath to Nafai was to keep you from giving the alarm in Basilica back when it would have meant soldiers capturing him if you returned to the city. Well, that's hardly likely to happen now, don't you think?"

"I don't stay here because of my oath, Shedya."

"I know," she said, and then, despite herself, her tears came.

"Do you think I don't see how you suffer here?" he said. "We thought that having the outward form of marriage would be enough for you, but it isn't. You want to belong, and you can't do that as long as you don't have a child."

It made her furious, to hear him analyze her that way—clearly he had been watching and deciding what her "problem" was, and he was wrong. Or at least he was only half right. "It isn't about belonging," she said angrily. "It's about life. I'm nobody here—I'm not a scientist, I'm not a mother, I'm not even a good servant like you, I can't plumb the depths of the Index because its voice isn't as clear to me—I find myself echoing your wisdom when I talk to others because nobody can even understand the things I know—and when I see the others with their babies I want one of my own, I'm hungry for one, not so I can be like them but because I want to be part of the net of life, I want to pass my genes on, to see a child grow with a face half-mine. Can't you understand that? I'm not reproductively handicapped like you, I'm cut off from my own biological identity because I'm trapped here in this company and if I don't get out I'll die and I will have made no difference in the world."

Silence was thick in the air in their tent, when she was done with her impassioned speech. What is he thinking? What does he think of me? I've hurt him, I know—I've told him that I hate being married to him, which is not true really, because he is my true friend—who else in all my life have I been able to pour out my heart to, until him?

"I shouldn't have spoken," she said in a whisper. "But I saw the lights of the city, and I thought—we could both return to a world that values us."

"That world didn't value me any more than this one," said Zdorab. "And you forget—how can I ever leave the Index?"

Didn't he understand what she was proposing? "Take it," she said. "We can take the Index and hurry around the bay. We have no children to slow us down. They can't catch us. With the Index you will have knowledge to sell as surely as I have—we can buy our way out of Dorova and back to the wide world in the north before they can get this caravan back north to chase us. They don't need the Index—don't you see how Luet and Nafai and Volemak and Hushidh all talk to the Oversoul without the help of the Index?"

"They don't really need it, and so we aren't really thieves for taking it," said Zdorab.

"Yes, of course we're really thieves," said Shedemei. "But thieves who steal from those who don't need what they're taking can live with their crime a little more easily than thieves who take bread from the mouths of the poor."

"I don't know that it's the magnitude of the crime that decides whether the criminal can live with it," said Zdorab. "I think it's the natural goodness of the person who commits the crime. Murderers often live with their murders more easily than honest men live with a small lie."

"And you're so honest…"

"Yes, I am," said Zdorab. "And so are you."

"We're both living a lie every day we spend with this company." It was a terrible thing to say, and yet she was so desperate for change, for something to change, that she hurled at him everything that came to mind.

"Are we? Is it a very big lie?" Zdorab seemed not so much hurt as ... thoughtful. Pondering. "Hushidh mentioned to me the other day that you and I are among the very closest bondings in this caravan. We talk about everything. We have immense respect for each other. We love each other—that's what she saw, and I believe her. It is true, isn't it?"

"Yes," whispered Shedemei.

"So what is the lie? The lie is that I'm your partner in reproduction. That's all. And if that lie became the truth, and there were a child in your belly, you would be whole, wouldn't you? The lie would no longer tear at your heart, because you would be what now you only seem—a wife—and you could become a part of that net of life."

She studied his face, trying to find mockery in it, but there was none. "Can you?"

"I don't know. I was never interested enough to try, and even if I had been, I would have had no willing partner. But—if I can find some small satisfactions from my own imagining, by myself, then why couldn't I—give a gift of love to my dearest friend? Not because I desire it, but because she desires it so much?"

"Out of pity," she said.

"Out of love," he said. "More love than these other men who jump their wives every night out of a desire no deeper than the scratching of an itch, or the voiding of a bladder."

What he was offering—to father a child on her—was something she had never considered as a possibility. Wasn't his condition his destiny?

"Doesn't love show its face," he went on, "when it satisfies the need of the loved one, for that loved one's sake alone? Which of these husbands can claim that?"

"But isn't a woman's body—repulsive to you?"

"To some, perhaps. Most of us, though, are simply… indifferent. The way ordinary men are toward other men. But I can tell you things to do that can awaken desire; I can perhaps imagine other partners out of my past, if you will forgive me for such… disloyalty… in the cause of giving you a child."

"But Zdorab. I don't want you to give me a child," she said. She was uncertain how to say this, since the idea had only just come to her, but the words came out clearly enough. "I want us to have a child."