The Memory of Earth (17 page)

“We’re not.”

“So take an oath to that, Issib. I’ll take it too. I swear it right now—you listening, Oversoul?—we’re not your enemies, so you don’t need to waste another second worrying about us. Go back and give visions to the women again. And spend your time blocking the dangerous guys. The Wetheads, for instance. Gaballufix. Roptat probably, too. And if you can’t block them, then at least let
us
know what to do so
we
can block them.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“The Oversoul.”

“This feels really stupid,” said Issib.

“It’s been telling
us
what to think our whole lives,” said
Nafai. “What’s so stupid about giving
it
a suggestion now and then? Take the oath, Issya.”

“Yes, I promise, I take the most solemn oath. You listening, Oversoul?”

“It’s listening,” said Nafai. “That much we
know
.”

“So,” said Issib. “You think it’s going to do what we say?”

“I don’t know,” said Nafai. “But I know
this
—we’re not going to learn anything more by hanging around the library for the rest of the day. Let’s get out of here. Spend the night at Father’s house. Maybe we’ll have a really good idea. Or maybe Father will have a vision. Or something.”

It was only that afternoon, as he was leaving Mother’s house, that Nafai remembered that Elemak was courting Eiadh. Not that Nafai had a right to hate him for it. Nafai had never said anything to anyone about his feelings toward her, had he? And at fourteen he was far too young to be taken seriously as a possible legal mate. Of course Eiadh would look at Elemak and desire him. It explained everything—why she was so nice to Nafai and yet never seemed to get close to him. She wanted to keep his favor in case he had some influence over Elemak. But it would never have crossed her mind that she might give a contract to
Nafai
. After all, he was a
child
.

Then he remembered how Hushidh had spoken of Issib. I couldn’t talk to
him
. Because he was a cripple? Not likely. No, Hushidh was shy with Issib because she was looking at him as a possible mate. Even
I
know enough about women to guess that, thought Nafai.

Hushidh is my age, and
she’s
looking at my older brother when she thinks of mating. While
I
might as well be a tree or a brick for all the sexual interest a girl my age would have in
me
. And Eiadh is older than me—one of
the oldest in my class, while I’m one of the youngest. How could I have ever thought . . .

He felt the hot blush of embarrassment on his cheeks, even though no one knew of his humiliation except himself.

Moving through the streets of Basilica, Nafai realized that except for an occasional walk in Rain Street he had not been out of Mother’s house since he began his research with Issib. Perhaps because of what Hushidh had told him, he was aware of a change in the city. Were there fewer people on the streets? Perhaps—but the real difference was more in the
way
they walked. People in Basilica often moved with purpose, but usually they did not let that purpose close them to what was going on around them. Even people in a hurry could pause for a moment, or at least smile, when they passed a street musician or a juggler or a comic reciting his doggerel. And many people sauntered, taking things in with real pleasure, conversing with their companions, of course, but also freely speaking with strangers on the street, as if all the people of Basilica were neighbors, or even relatives.

This evening was different. As the sun silhouetted the western rooftops and cast angled slabs of blackness across the streets, the people seemed to dodge the sunlight as if it might burn their skin. They were closed off to each other. The street musicians were ignored, and even their music seemed more timid, as if they were ready to break off their song at the first sign of displeasure in a passerby. The streets were quieter because almost no one was talking.

Soon enough the reason became obvious. A troop of eight men jogged up the street, pulses in their hands and charged-wire blades at their waists. Soldiers, thought Nafai. Gaballufix’s men. No—officially, they were the
militia of the Palwashantu, but Nafai felt no kinship with them.

They didn’t seem to look to left or right, as if their errand were set. But Nafai and Issib noticed at once that the streets seemed to empty as the soldiers passed. Where had the people gone? They weren’t actually hiding, but still it took several minutes after the soldiers had passed before people began emerging again. They had ducked into shops, pretending to have business. Some had simply taken alternate routes down side streets. And others had never left the street at all, but like Nafai and Issib they had stopped, had frozen in place, so that for a few minutes they were part of the architecture, not part of the life of the place.

It did not seem at all as though people thought the soldiers were making the city safer. Instead the soldiers had made them afraid.

“Basilica’s in trouble,” said Nafai.

“Basilica is
dead
,” said Issib. “There are still people here, but the city isn’t Basilica anymore.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad when they got farther along Wing Street—the soldiers had passed where Wing crossed Wheat Street, only a few blocks from Gaballufix’s house. When they got into Old Town there was more life in the streets. But changes were still visible.

For instance, Spring Street had been cleared. Spring was one of the major thoroughfares of Basilica, running in the most direct route from Funnel Gate through Old Town and right on to the edge of the Rift Valley. But as often happened in Basilica, some enterprising builder had decided that it was a shame to let all that empty space in the middle of the street go to waste, when people could be living there. On a long block between Wing and Temple, the builder had put up six buildings.

Now, when a Basilican builder started putting up a
structure that blocked a street, several things could happen. If the street wasn’t very busy, only a few people would object. They might scream and curse and even throw things at the builders, but since the workers were all such burly men, there would be little serious resistance. The building would go up, and people would find new routes. The people who owned houses or shops that used to front on the now-blocked road were the ones who suffered most. They had to bargain with neighbors to gain hallway rights that would give them street access—or
take
those rights, if the neighbor was weak. Sometimes they simply had to abandon their property. Either way, the new hallways or the abandoned property soon became thoroughfares in their own right. Eventually some enterprising soul would buy a couple of abandoned or decaying houses whose hallways were being used for traffic, tear out an open streetway, and thus a new road was born. The city council did nothing to interfere with this process—it was how the city evolved and changed over time, and it seemed pointless in a city tens of millions of years old to try to hold back the tide of time and history.

It was quite another thing when someone started building on a much-used thoroughfare like Spring Street. There, the passersby gained courage from their numbers—and from their outrage at the thought of losing a road they often used. So they would deliberately sabotage the construction as they passed, knocking down masonry, carrying away stones. If the builder was powerful and determined, with many strong workers, a brawl could easily start—but then it might easily come to a court trial, where the builder was
always
found to be at fault, since building in a street was regarded as ample provocation for legal assault.

The builder in Spring Street had been clever, though.
She had designed her six buildings to stand on arches, so that the road was never actually blocked. The houses instead began on the first floor, above the street—and so, while passersby were annoyed, they weren’t so provoked that they got serious about their sabotage. So the buildings had been finished early that summer, and some very wealthy people had taken up residence.

Inevitably, however, the archways became crowded with streetsellers and enterprising restaurateurs—which the builder surely knew would happen. Traffic slowed to a crawl, and other builders began to put up permanent shops and stalls, until only a few weeks ago it became physically impossible to get from Temple to Wing on Spring Street—the little buildings now completed blocked the way. Another street in Basilica had been killed, only this time it was a major thoroughfare and caused serious inconvenience to a lot of people. Only the original builder and the enterprising little shopkeepers truly profited; the people who bought the inner buildings now found it harder and harder to get to the stairways leading up to their houses, and people were already preparing to abandon old structures that no longer faced on a street.

Now, as Nafai and Issib passed Spring Street, they saw that someone had gone through the blocked section and torn down all the small structures. The new buildings were still there, arching over the street, but the passageway remained open underneath them. More significantly, a couple of soldiers stood at each end of the street. The message was clear: No new building would be tolerated.

“Gaballufix isn’t a fool,” said Issib.

Nafai knew what he meant. People might not like seeing soldiers trot by in the streets, with the threat of violence and the loss of freedom that they implied. But seeing Spring Street open would go a long way toward
making the soldiers seem like a mixed evil, one perhaps worth tolerating.

Wing Street eventually fed into Temple Street, and Nafai and Issib followed it until it came to the great circle around the Temple itself. This was the one outpost of the men’s religion in this city of women, the one place where the Oversoul was known to be male, and where blood rather than water was the holy fluid. On impulse, though he hadn’t been inside since he was eight and his foreskin was drowned in his own blood, Nafai stopped at the north doors. “Let’s go in,” he said.

Issib shuddered. “I deeply hate this place,” he said.

“If they used anesthetic, worship would be more popular with kids,” said Nafai.

Issib grinned. “Painless worship. Now there’s a thought. Maybe dry worship would catch on among the women, too.”

They went through the door into the musty, dark, windowless outer chamber.

Though the temple was perfectly round, the inner chambers were designed to recall the chambers of the heart: the Indrawing Auricle, the Airward Ventricle, the Airdrawing Auricle, and the Outflowing Ventricle. The winding halls and tiny rooms between them were named for various veins and arteries. Before their circumcision boys had to learn all the names of all the rooms, but they did it by memorizing a song that remained meaningless to most who learned it. So there was nothing particularly familiar about the names written on each door lintel or keystone, and Issib and Nafai were immediately lost.

It didn’t matter. Eventually, all halls and corridors funneled worshipers into the central courtyard, the only bright space in the temple, open to the sky. Since it was so close to sunset, there was no direct sunlight on the
stone floor of the courtyard, but after so much darkness even reflected sunlight was painfully dazzling.

At the gateway, a priest stopped them. “Prayer or meditation?” he asked.

Issib shuddered—a convulsive movement, for him, since the floats exaggerated every twitch his muscles made. “I think I’ll wait in the Airdrawing Auricle.”

“Don’t be a poddletease,” said Nafai. “Just meditate for a minute, it won’t kill you.”

“You mean
you’re
going to
pray
?” said Issib.

“I guess so,” said Nafai.

Truth to tell, Nafai wasn’t sure why, or for what. He only knew that his relationship with the Oversoul was getting more complicated every day; he understood the Oversoul better than before, and the Oversoul was meddling in his life now, so it had become important to try to communicate clearly and directly, instead of all this slantwise guesswork. It wasn’t enough to slack off their research into forbidden words and hope that the Oversoul got the hint. There had to be something more.

He watched as the priests jabbed Issib’s finger and wiped the tiny wound over the bloodstone. Issib took it well enough—he really
wasn’t
a poddle, and he’d had enough pain in his life that a little fingerjab was nothing. He just had little use for the rituals of the men’s worship. He called it “blood sports” and compared it to shark-fights, which always started out by getting every shark in the pool to bleed. As soon as his little red smear was on the rough stone, he drifted over toward the high bench against the sunny wall, where there was still about a half-hour of sunlight. The bench was full, of course, but Issib could always float just beside it. “Hurry up,” he murmured as he passed Nafai.

Since Nafai was here to pray, the priest didn’t jab him. Instead he let him reach into the golden bowl of prayer
rings. The bowl was filled with a powerful disinfectant, which had the double effect of keeping the barbed prayer rings from spreading disease and also making it so that every jab stung bitterly for several long seconds. Nafai usually took only two rings, one for the middle finger of each hand, but this time he felt that he needed more. That even though he had no idea what he was praying
about,
he wanted to make sure that the Oversoul understood that he was serious. So he found prayer rings for all four fingers of each hand, and thumb rings as well.

“It can’t be that bad,” said the priest.

“I’m not praying for forgiveness,” said Nafai.

“I don’t want you fainting on me, we’re short-staffed today.”

“I won’t faint.” Nafai walked to the center of the courtyard, near the fountain. The water of the fountain wasn’t the normal pinkish color—it was almost dark red. Nafai well remembered the powerful frisson the first time he realized how the water got its color. Father said that when Basilica was in great need—during a drought, for instance, or when an enemy threatened—the fountain flowed with almost pure blood, there was so much blood. It was a strange and powerful feeling, to pull off his sandals and strip off his clothes, then kneel in the pool and know that the tepid liquid swirling around him, almost up to his waist if he sat back on his heels, was thick with the passionate bloody prayers of other men.