Orson Card - Earthfall

"Do you mind letting me know what the game is this time?"

"It has to be related, though I don't sec ... oh, yes I do. Chveya heard me."

Nafai put his fingers to his forehead. "Oh, now it's all clear. Chveya heard you what?"

"Talking to the Oversoul. Last night. About-you know."

"No, I don't know."

"You can't be serious," she said.

"More serious by the minute."

"You mean the Oversoul hasn't even brought it up with you? About keeping the children awake on the voyage?"

"Don't be absurd. We don't have enough supplies to keep everybody awake. It's ten years!"

"I don't know," said Luet. "The Oversoul said that we had enough supplies to keep you and me and twelve of the children awake through most of the voyage."

"And why would we do that?" asked Nafai. "The whole point of the suspended animation is that ten years in a starship will be incredibly boring. I'm not even planning to be awake the whole time. Should our children spend ten years of their lives-more than half!-sitting around inside that metal pot?"

"The Oversoul never talked to you about it," she said. "That makes me so angry."

Nafai looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

"It would be our older children, all but the twins, and Shuya's down to Netsya, and Shedemei's boy and girl, and your brothers Oykib and Yasai."

"Why not the little ones?"

"You can't spend your first two years of life in low gravity."

"It can't work," said Nafai. "Even if the others would stand for it, the children would have no one their own age to marry except Shedya's two. The rest would be siblings or double first cousins or, at the best, Oykib and Yasai, and they're single first cousins."

"Nyef, I've said this to her over and over. Do you think I don't know what a stupid idea it is? That's what Chveya must have heard last night. I was arguing with the Oversoul."

"You don't have to talk out loud to the Oversoul, Luet," he said.

"I do," she said.

"Well, whatever happened, Zdorab apparently thinks he has to wake up in the middle of the voyage to check up on me."

"I imagine he's angry," said Luet.

"Well, there's only one tiling we can do." Nafai took her by the hand. They headed back to the maintenance building.

It took only a few minutes to gather all the adults into the kitchen, surrounding the large table where they ate their meals in shifts. As usual, Elemak looked quietly annoyed, while Mcbbekew was openly hostile. "What's all this?" he demanded. "Can't we even go to sleep at a normal hour anymore?"

"There's something that needs straightening out right now," said Nafai.

"Oh, did one of us do something bad?" asked Meb, tauntingly.

"No," said Nafai. "But some of you think that Luet is planning something-no, come to think of it, you probably think that I'm planning it-and I want to get it out in the open right now"

"Openness," said Hushidh. "What a novel idea."

Nafai ignored her. "Apparently the Oversoul has been trying to persuade Luet that we should do something foolish with some of the children on the voyage."

"Foolish?" Volemak, Nafai's father, looked puzzled.

"Foolish," said Nafai. "Like keeping some of them awake during the voyage."

"But that would be so boring for them" said Nafai's older sister, Kokor.

Nafai did not answer her, just looked around from face to face. It was gratifying to see that even Elemak, who surely knew about the idea of keeping children awake and understood all the implications, was not looking a bit surprised by what Nafai was doing. "I know that some of you were aware of this even before I was. The only reason I found out about it at all was because the Oversoul found the wake-up signal you put into the ship's calendar, Zdorab."

Mebbekew's quick glance at Zdorab, and his equally quick glance away, confirmed that he, too, had known about the wake-up signal. He probably even thought Zdorab's little alarm clock would wake him up along with the others. But of course Zdorab knew that waking Mebbekew would be useless. If only Meb understood the contempt that everyone held him in. But then, he probably did, which was why he was so relentlessly belligerent.

"I think, Zdorab, that it's a good idea," said Nafai. "Of course the Oversoul removed your wake-up signal, but I will put a new one in. At midpoint of the voyage, all the adults will be wakened. Just for a day, so you can inspect all your sleeping children and make sure that they're the age they were when you left them. I can't think of any better way for you to make sure that the Oversoul did not get his way in this."

Volemak chuckled. "Do you really think you can fool the Oversoul?"

Luet spoke up. "The Oversoul understands many things, but she is not a human being. She doesn't understand what it would cost us, if our children's childhood was taken away from us. How would you feel, Aunt Rasa, if you woke up and found that Okya and Yaya were eighteen- and seventeen-year-old men? That you had missed all the years in between?"

Rasa smiled thinly. "I would never forgive anyone who did that to me. Even the Oversoul."

"I was trying to explain that to the Oversoul. She doesn't understand human feelings sometimes."

"Sometimes?" murmured Elemak,

"I ... I spoke out loud. In the privacy of my room. Nafai was working late. But Chveya got up and she must have listened for a rather long time before she knocked."

"Are you saying that your daughter is a sneak?" said Mebbekew, pretending to be shocked.

Luet didn't look at him. "Chveya didn't understand what she was hearing. I'm sorry that it caused everyone to be disturbed. I know some of you knew about it, and some of you did not, but when Nafai learned about it a few minutes ago he and I rushed back here and... here we are."

"Tomorrow, Zdorab can verify that the wake-up signal is set for midvoyage. The only way that it won't wake us up is if the Oversoul cancels it during one of the many times that I'll be asleep myself. But I don't think that's likely, because as soon as I woke up again, I'd waken you all myself manually. I'm telling you now, once and for all, that there will be no games played with the passage of time. Our children will be, when we arrive, the same ages they were when they left. The only person who will have aged during the voyage is me, and believe me, I have no interest in aging any more than the minimum necessary to operate the ship safely."

"Why are you needed awake at all?" asked Obring, Kokor's husband, a little snake of a man, in Nafai's considered opinion.

"The ships weren't designed to be run by the Over-soul," said Nafai. "In fact, the Oversoul's program wasn't fully written until after the original fleet arrived on Harmony. The computers here can hold the Over-soul's program, but no single program is able to control all the computers on the ship at once. It's for safety. Redundancy. The systems can't all fail at once. Anyway, there are things that I have to do from time to time."

"That someone has to do," murmured Elemak.

"I have the cloak," said Nafai. "And that point was settled a while ago, I think. Do you really want to dredge up old arguments?"

Nobody wanted to, apparently.

"Son," said Volemak, "you won't be able to stop the Oversoul from doing what it knows is right."

"The Oversoul is wrong," said Nafai. "It's that simple. None of you would ever forgive me if I obeyed the Oversoul in this."

"That's right," said Mebbekew.