Orson Card - Earthfall

And that was fine. No harm was done. The things that mattered for survival were taught. What else was needed?

Yet Nafai couldn't shake his uneasiness about it. In all the forty million years of history on Harmony, human beings could read and write. Languages drifted and changed over centuries and across kilometers. But there was writing. The past could be recovered. Learned from. It was writing that allowed a community to hold its memory outside the individuals who happened to be alive and present at the moment.

How long till I'm forgotten, I and Luet and Father and Mother and all of us?

Then he laughed at himself for the vanity of wanting people to go to the trouble of reading and writing, just so they could remember that he had once lived. In ten generations it wouldn't matter at all.

It was in the beginning of the sixth year that he had the dream. He saw a man leading a great nation of angels and humans, with farms spreading on either side of a great river, kilometer after kilometer, as for as the eye could see. Angels flew here and there, and goats and dogs drew carts and sledges along roads. Boats trafficked up and down the river, some of them with diggers, some with angels as their crew. And here and there, in towers rising high above the tallest trees, watchmen kept the perimeter in view, so that no enemy could take them unaware.

The man who led this great nation was weary and afraid. Enemies were coming to beset them on every side, and within the nation factions threatened to tear apart the fabric of the community. Towns that had once been independent forgot that in those days they had also been hungry. People whose ancestors had once been rulers forgot that those ancestors had also been killed by enemies and their people only survived at all because they came under the protection of this great nation. People who longed for wealth were getting it by any means possible, plotting and cheating, bullying and sometimes even killing to get rivals out of the way. It was a beautiful land, but the struggle to keep it so seemed harder every year and the man despaired.

In his loneliness and fear, he went into his small house and opened a box he kept hidden inside a jar of dried corn. Inside the box he found a thick pile of metal sheets, bound together on one side with metal rings. It was a book, Nafai realized, for language had been inscribed in the metal, and the man opened it and began to turn the pages.

Without understanding how, Nafai knew what the words contained, what the man was seeing in his mind's eye as he read. The man was reading the story of Volemak seeing a pillar of fire on a rock in the desert and coming home to Basilica to give warning that the city was going to be destroyed. The story of Nafai and his brothers going back to the city to fetch the Index. The man saw Nafai standing over the dead body of Gaballufix and he nodded. Sometimes those who care for a whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when the people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let k be known what he does.

From me he learned this, thought Nafai, and then he realized that he was the one who made the book and wrote in it the story of his life, of the life and acts of all the people in this community, their evil deeds and their heroic ones, their times of doubt and their astonishing achievements. And this man, this leader, this king, he looked into the book and found stories in it, tales that made clear to him what he must do, wisdom that stiffened his resolve, love that taught him compassion, hopes that led to noble actions even when the hopes themselves were unfulfilled.

Nafai awoke and thought, This dream was so clear, it must have come from the Oversoul. Or perhaps the Keeper of Earth.

And then he thought, This dream so exactly fits my own desire to keep reading and writing alive among this people that it could just as easily have crane out of my own longings.

But then, where did his longings come from? Why did he want so much to preserve written language among his descendants? Couldn't those very desires have come from the Keeper?

No, he thought. Those desires came from my memory of standing over the corpse of Gaballufix. I killed him in order to get the Index from him. And what was the Index for? It was my access-our access-to the vast store of learning in the star-ship that brought us here. It was the key to all that the Oversold knew. What would it have meant to us if none of us could read and write? To an illiterate people, the Index would be worthless and there-fore no man should have had to die so Nafai could get it. I dream the dream that justifies my own actions to myself.

Yet even as he dismissed the dream, he knew that he would act on it.

Explaining nothing, he took his leave from Volemak, from Luet, and took the ship's launch out to where the survey maps showed that gold could be found. It was a rich vein, one brought to the surface of the earth through the great foldings and upheavals that had taken place in the last forty million years. Nafai was armed with the metal tools from the ship's store, and in two days of solitary labor he had several pounds of solid gold taken from the exposed vein in the mountainside. He spent a day refining it. Then he pounded it, unalloyed, into flat, smooth sheets, using the imperturbable metal surface of the launch as his anvil. The metal was very thin, but piled together it was also very heavy. It took him three days to make the sheets of gold, and during that time he only occasionally paused to gather the most obvious food that came easily to hand. He was hungry, but the work he was doing mattered more to him than food.

He found, in his first experiments, that the sweeping curves of the alphabet that had been used for so many millennia on Harmony simply did not work well when pressed by hand into the gold. He had to find squarer forms for the letters and yet still keep them different from each other. Also, some of the spellings were too complex and used too many letters to represent the sounds. So he changed them, inventing five new letters to represent sounds that had previously required two letters each. The result was a definite compression of the written language, and as he wrote, he compressed it even more, using only a couple of letters to stand for the most common words. How do I dare to change the language like this? he asked himself. Who in the world could understand this?

Obviously, the only people who could read it easily would be people that he taught to read and write, and so they would know what his symbols meant. Perhaps just as important, though, anyone who had learned to read the script he used for pressing language into the gold would easily decode most of the letters used in the language of Harmony-the language of the ship's computer library. At least until the language changed, he would not have cut his descendants off from their literary heritage, if ever the chance came for them to recover it.

Gold. How appropriate, for such a treasure as he hoped this book would be. But it wasn't for the value of the gold as a medium of exchange that he chose it. Rather he used it for the same reasons that gold had been used for coinage in most cultures through most of human history. It was soft. It could be shaped. Yet it was not so soft that it couldn't hold its shape. And it didn't corrode or corrupt, tarnish or degrade in any way. Long after Nafai was dead, the letters would still exist on the pages of his metal book.

He put the gold leaves into the launch, along with all the leftover gold, and flew home. When he returned the launch to the ship, he explained nothing about where he had gone or what he had done. He didn't mean to deceive anyone, and it wasn't that he had no trust in Father or Mother, in Luet or anyone else. It's just that he felt shy about telling anyone. They would think it was silly of him.