Orson Card - Earthfall

Later you can explain it to them, when they're older." "So the diggers and angels are our children now?" asked Meb, mockingly.

"Better to treat them as our children," said Volemak,

"than to treat them as our ancestors did-as slaves, as playthings. So the decision is made. We explain only as much as they can understand. Oykib will explain to the diggers, and Nafai to the angels. I'd appreciate it if everyone else would keep their mouths shut about it. Shedemei, I'd like you to introduce the bacteria as quickly as possible into both communities."

"It's simple enough," she said. "I'll simply expose everyone here to it right now. It'll cause a bit of a runny nose, maybe a slight fever in a few cases. Just make sure you follow your normal patterns of interaction with diggers and angels, and the disease will spread naturally. Just come up here and swab the insides of your noses with this gel."

"That's disgusting," said one of the younger women.

"Only if you use someone else's swab," said Protchnu.

"What worries me," said Mebbekew, "is what's going to happen to the poor flatworms. Nobody seems to care about them. I think we have too much of a bias in favor of big animals. Don't microscopic creatures have rights?" He grinned, and the others laughed with him.

While the meeting went on, however, Elemak had a meeting of his own. He sought out Fusum, who had recently been made blood king after the death of his father.

"I have a gift for you," Elemak said.

"What could you possibly have that I want?" asked Fusum.

"Oh, we're full of ourselves, aren't we, now that we're king."

Fusum growled a little. "I have a life of my own, Elemak. I'm not a hostage anymore. I have responsibilities."

"You also have power," said Elemak, "and I think you wouldn't mind getting a little more. So here's my gift-more power."

"Really," said Fusum. "I didn't know you had any power to give."

"Knowledge is power, or so I've heard," said Elemak. "But there's a condition. You have to promise to tell your people you got the idea from me."

"What idea?" asked Fusum.

"Promise first."

"I promise," said Fusum.

"But do you really mean it?" asked Elemak,

"If you're going to mock me, you can keep your gift," said Fusum.

"Ah, now that we're the blood king, we're too important to take a little teasing from a friend."

"You've never been a friend, Elemak," said Fusum. "You've been a useful source of knowledge."

"But perhaps now we can be friends," said Elemak.

"Either tell me the idea you have or don't."

"Go at once to the statue of the Untouched God," said Elemak.

"You mean the one that looks like your shining brother Nafai?"

Elemak refused to be goaded. "That's the one. Go to it, and in front of as many witnesses as possible, declare that the reason so few children are being born is because this statue has not been properly worshipped. Then do whatever it is you do with it. Rub it all over yourself."

"That could get me killed."

"Not the blood king. Not right away. And not if you promise the people that now that you have worshipped the Untouched God, obliterating the face of that deceiver Nafai, the true god will send a mild plague to purge the last traces of evil among your people. A few male embryos may even be miscarried because they were not pure. All those who are alive right now will have to worship the gods in the old way until the day they die. But the new children born after this time will not have to worship any gods at all. They are born in purity and they are blessed."

"What kind of fungus are you trying to make me eat?" said Fusum. "You're the one who told me that all this religious stuff was nonsense."

"But the people believe it, don't they. So you tell them that no matter what Oykib or Chveya or anybody else tells them, I told you the truth, and it's your action that will free your people from having to go up the canyon and get your gods from the skymeat. You won't need the skymeat anymore. Your new children and grandchildren can kill them all then, and it won't matter because they will be pure and the gods won't require them to humiliate themselves by worshipping objects created by the skymeat."

"Why should I believe that any of this will happen?"

"I don't care," said Elemak. "You can doubt me and delay, and then Oykib will come out and make an announcement and all the power and influence will go to him and, through him, to Emeezem. Or you can believe me and act now, so that you've already done it before anybody else says a word. Then you and I will be the liberators of the diggers. It's going to happen anyway, of course. The little act you put on with that statue of Nafai won't actually do anything at all. Except make your people think you've got religious powers beyond any blood king before you. And it won't hurt that you can make hash out of Erncezem's insistence that the Untouched God remain untouched. When your prophecies come true, she'll be discredited. But you can let the opportunity pass you by, Fusum. You can spend the rest of your life wishing you had taken the chance when I gave it to you. I really don't care."

"Yes you do," said Fusum. "And you can be sure that I will use your name and tell them that I learned about this from you. Because if it fails, I might be able to save myself by laying the blame on you." and then reconciled their translations. "Who wrote this?" Oykib asked. "How could he know what power the Keeper had? To cause earthquakes and volcanos, to change the flow of continental drift. ..."

"Maybe the Keeper has something to do with the convection currents in the flowing magma on which the crust of the Earth floats. Who knows how quickly it might change?" said Nafai.

"I know this much," said Oykib. "We have to teach our people about this book, the warnings in this book. We have to teach them what the Keeper expects of us, even if we don't understand exactly what the Keeper of Earth might be."

"By ‘our people' do you mean just humans?" asked Nafai.

"Of course not," said Oykib. "In fact, maybe the reason the Keeper brought us back to Earth was precisely so that we could not only set the angels and diggers free from their ancient bondage, but also could teach them how to live so that the Keeper won't feel the need to make the Earth uninhabitable again."

"I think you're right," said Nafai. "But it's going to become a religion no matter what we do or how we teach it. Even our most naturalistic explanations are going to sound mystical to them. After all, what our ancestors wrote in the Book of Sins sounds mystical to us"

"Is that bad?" asked Oykib.

"Not bad in itself. It's just that religions have a way of losing track of the truth at the core. The diggers had a religion that kept them rubbing themselves with clay that contained the chemical derived from flatworm eggshells and angel spit-but they had no idea why they were doing it, and so they were enslaved by it. All we'll be doing, then, is teaching our children and their children arbitrary rules. The true reasons will be lost, or converted into myths."

"What can we do about it?" asked Oykib.

"We can write a book," said Nafai.

"You mean like the one you're already writing?" he asked.

Nafai glared at him. "I should have known I couldn't keep a secret from you."

"Yes, you should have," said Oykib. "Especially since you talked to the Oversold about it almost constantly for weeks when you first thought of it. I figured you'd tell me about it when you felt like it."