Orson Card - Earthfall

No, that wasn't it. That wasn't it at all, he knew. As he sat there working by lamplight, the wick flickering as it floated on the melted fat in the clay cup, he could feel the power in what he was doing. I am projecting myself and my view of all that has happened to us into the future. Someday the only version of these events that anyone will know will be the one I wrote. Our descendants will see us through my eyes and no other. So it is I who will live in their memories. I who will whisper in the ear of that great leader-if he ever exists, if this book survives, if there is really anything of wisdom in it.

It is the writing on these gold pages that makes me immortal. When everyone else is dead, I will be alive and shining. That's why I keep this secret. That's why I hold it for myself. It's a heartless, egotistical thing for me to do.

I know my own heart. I'm not ashamed to admit that my motives are impure.

What if Elemak were writing this book? It would be a different thing entirely, wouldn't it?

A storyteller can't help but distort every tale he tells. Without even knowing it, I'm also lying by giving events the shape that makes sense to me. Anyone eke would write it differently. My way isn't necessarily the best.

Nafai laughed silently, careful not to waken Luet or their last three little ones, born since they came up the canyon to live here with the angels, or the twins, who slept in the loft, dreaming of new pranks to play and accidents to stumble into in order to cause their parents to live in perpetual terror.

So, Oversoul, my dear old friend, was it you that sent me my dream?

The Keeper, then?

So it could be just the private fancy of a man who is reaching middle age and feels his future death breathing down his neck.

I'll have to teach somebody to read my script. I'll have to give it to somebody to pass along into the future.

I'm telling everything. If they read this, my children will say, Why didn't he just shut up? Why didn't he ever leave well enough alone? My mistakes will be out in the open and they'll despise me.

And if Elemak ever reads this, he'll kill me and destroy the book. You know that.

Or anyone. The hours I spend on this-are they wasted?

Nafai had no answer. Except that he kept on writing. Writing and writing, his script getting ever tinier and more compact, fitting more and more words onto the pages. His tale getting more and more spare.

What did he write? At first it was a very personal story, an account as best he remembered it of ail their days in Basilica, of the journey through the desert, of the finding of the starport at Vusadka. But when the story reached Earth, it became far more general. The things they had learned about diggers and angels were set down in the order in which they discovered them or figured them out. The results of Zdorab's journeys in the ship's launch, mapping and bringing back plant and animal samples for Shedemei to study. The culture of the angels and diggers, and the way they responded to the cultural innovations the humans brought to them. The political machinations as the digger and angel communities struggled to deal with the destruction of their gods and the shattering of their equilibrium.

For the old gods were being destroyed. One cannot live with gods and still believe in diem, Nafai decided. And even though after the early times of crisis Nafai had explained to them all that he and Volemak had never been gods, that their powers were all the result of technology and learning, that not a one of them had the power to duplicate even the least of the complicated machines in the starship-even though he explained this, he could sense that many resented knowing it. Emeezem most of all. When he told her that as for as he could tell the clay figure that she had worshipped and treasured almost her entire life was just a remarkably fine sculpture by a talented angel named Kiti, she didn't thank him. She acted as if he had slapped her face. "Should I break the statue then?" she demanded bitterly.

"Break something as finely wrought as that?" asked Nafai. "Break something that helped make you into the noble ruler that you are?"

But she was not to be mollified with praise; it sounded like flattery to her now, even though it was truthful and sincere. Nafai's rejection of her worship was the cruelest blow. He could see her wither up; even though she lived on and continued to lead her people with wisdom and firmness, the heart had gone out of her. It was not just faith but also hope that she had tost.

The angels had it easier. Since Elemak's rage had been their first exposure to humans, it was a relief to them to learn that none of them were gods. But the humans knew so many secrets and their wisdom, put to work for the angels, saved so many lives and improved everyone's health so much that there was still an element of worship in their relationship, and therefore a bit-or perhaps a lot-of disappointment and disillusion when some human failed at a task, gave bad advice, or predicted an outcome and was proven wrong.

As he was writing about all of this, Nafai realized that what the people needed, diggers and angels and humans alike, was someone outside themselves in whom their hopes of wisdom and lightness could be invested. They had to begin to think of the Keeper of Earth as the only one who would never be wrong.

Not that Nafai was altogether sure of this himself. He never heard the voice of the Keeper with the kind of clarity with which the Oversoul spoke to him. In fact he was never quite sure whether he heard the voice or saw the dreams of the Keeper of Earth at all. Nor did he know what the Keeper might be. That he was real enough was obvious-there was no other explanation of the statue whose face looked exactly like Nafai, carved back when Nafai was just getting on the starship to come to Earth. Nor was there any other explanation of the dreams they had back on Harmony, when so many of them saw diggers and angels when the Oversoul himself had no notion that these were the creatures that populated Earth. Yet the dreams were always ambiguous, and tinged with the dreamer's own hopes and fears and memories, so that it was never certain where the Keeper's message left off and self-deception began.

Yet, inadequate as Nafai's understanding of the Keeper of Earth might be, he knew that belief in the Keeper would fulfill a vital social function. The Keeper would be the highest authority, the one who was never wrong, the repository of Truth. When it became clear that even the wisest of humans knew very little, really; when it became plain that the most marvelous of miracles was in feet the result of working with a machine or exploiting a bit of ordinary knowledge; then there would still be no disillusionment because, after all, everyone knew that humans, angels, and diggers were all equal in the eyes of the Keeper of Earth, and all equally ignorant and weak and unwise compared to him.

Nafai explained these thoughts to Luet and she agreed. She began teaching the angel women about the Keeper of Earth, and adapting their ancient lore about various gods into a coherent story that replaced all the good gods with various aspects of the Keeper. With the angel men, Nafai was a bit more brutal, sweeping all the old gods away and keeping only a few of their ancient legends. Not that the old legends would die, of course-but he wanted them to start with a pure core of knowledge about the Keeper, even though the knowledge was really very small.

Then Nafai and Luet took Oykib and Chveya into their confidence, and soon Oykib was teaching the digger men and Chveya the digger women about the Keeper of Earth. They, too, adapted what the people already believed; they, too, were candid about how Kttle they personally knew about the Keeper. But they did know this much: The Keeper wanted humans, diggers, and angels to live together in peace.