Earthborn

On the way out of the city, they were joined by Akmaro, Chebeya, Edhadeya, and Shedemei. Motiak greeted his daughter with an embrace, and met Shedemei with short courtesy; it was easy to assume a level of intimacy as if he had long known her. "Someday you must tell me where you're from," he said. "Show me on a map, that is. I have the original maps that Nafai drew, showing the whole gornaya. I won't have heard of your city, but I can add it to the map."

"It would do no good," said Shedemei. "It doesn't exist now."

"A grief that can hardly be imagined," said Motiak.

"It was for a while," said Shedemei. "But I'm alive, and my work requires all my concentration."

"Still, I'd like to see where your city was. People often build again on the same site. If there was a reason to build a city there once, another people will think of the same reason again." Polite conversation; they all knew what was really on Motiak's mind. But there was no use talking about it all the time; it wasn't as if they could do much. And it was Motiak's duty to make sure they were as comfortable as he could make them. That was one of the chief a

Out on the road, their reason for this journey was immediately apparent. The encampment of emigrating diggers wasn't large, but then it wasn't meant to be. Quiet humans and angels ma

Motiak led his party onto the road; the diggers moved aside. "No," he said, "the road is wide enough. We can share it."

They stayed motionless at the verge, watching him.

"I am Motiak," he said. "Don't you understand that you are citizens? You don't have to go. I've opened up the public larders in every city. You can wait this out. It will pass."

Finally one of them spoke. "When we go there, we see the hatred in their eyes, sir. We know you meant well for us, setting us free. We don't hate you."

"It's not the hunger," said another. "You know it's not that."

"Yes it is," said a woman, holding three small children near her. "And the beatings. You won't live forever, sir."

"Whatever else might be true of my sons," said Motiak, "they will never permit the persecution."

"Oh, they'll starve us out, but not let us be hit?" the woman scoffed. "Stand up, you," she said to her children. "This is the king, here. This is majesty."

Motiak's angel captain made a motion as if to punish her for impudence, but Motiak waved him back with a tiny gesture. The irony in her voice could not overmatch the bitterness in his heart. She was right, to jeer at majesty. A king has no more power than the willing obedience of the great mass of the people gives him. A king who is worse than his people is a poisonous snake; a king who is better is last year's snakeskin, discarded in the grass.

Pabul was at the Ancient Ways booth. He had asked if he might come along, if only because he felt somewhat responsible for the troubles with his decision in Shedemei's trial the year before. "These so-called Ancients, they're a loathsome bunch," he said, "but they're not breaking any law. They don't foul the water or poison the food. It's fresh enough, and the rations they give the earth people are adequate for a day's journey." He hesitated, considering whether to say the next thing, then decided and spoke. "You could forbid the diggers to leave."

Motiak nodded. "Yes-I could require the most helpless and obedient of my citizens to stay and suffer further humiliation and abuse, from which I'm powerless to protect them, I could do that."

Pabul made no more argument along that line.

They walked all day, briskly because they were all healthy: They made a point of staying fit; Motiak and Pabul because their offices were fundamentally military ones and they might find themselves in the field at any time; Akmaro and Chebeya, Edhadeya and Shedemei because they were of the Kept and labored with their own hands, permitting themselves no excess of food or unproductive leisure. So they overtook group after group of diggers, and to each of them Motiak said the same thing. "Please stay. I wish you would stay. Trust in the Keeper to heal the wound in this land." And their answer was always the same: For you we would stay, Motiak, we know you wish us well; but there's no future here for me, for my children.

"It's misleading," Akmaro said that afternoon. "We see here the ones that are on the road. Most are staying."

"So far," said Motiak.

"Our resources are stretched to the limit, but all the diggers that the Kept can hire are earning wages; their children are still in school; there are even towns and villages where Akma and your sons have no influence and the people treat each other civilly, without boycotts or any sign of hate."

"How many such towns, Akmaro?" asked Motiak. "One in a hundred?"

"One in fifty," said Akmaro. "Or one in forty." Motiak had no need to answer that.

He thought back to the morning's conversation with his wife. The callousness with which she said to let the diggers go and then the problem would be solved. Is that any more monstrous than my cruel thought that I might wish to see my sons in graves before I die? Yet I would not have shrunk from letting them all take weapons in their hands and go out into battle, if an enemy attacked us. They might have died then, in the violence of war, and when they saw me mourning no man or woman in the kingdom would have said, If he really loved them he wouldn't have put them in the way of death.

He framed the idea in words and said them aloud, so Akmaro, still walking beside him, could hear. "There are things that parents must value even above their children's lives."

Akmaro needed no explanation to understand where Motiak's thoughts had turned. "That's hard," he said. "All of nature has written into our minds the idea that children matter more than anything."

"But civilization means rising above even that," said Motiak. "We feel our self to be the town, the tribe, the city, the nation-"

"The children of the Keeper-"

"Yes, we see that as the self that must be preserved at all costs, so that nearer things are less valuable. Does it mean we're monsters, that we hate our grown children if we send them off to war to kill and die so they can protect our neighbors' little ones?"

" ‘The survival of the family is best enhanced when the family is subsumed in a larger society,' " Akmaro recited. " ‘One family breaks and bleeds, but the larger organism heals. The wound is not fatal.'

Edhadeya has been teaching me the things that are taught in Rasaro's House."

"She spends more time in your house than mine," said Motiak.

"She finds more comfort from Chebeya than from her stepmother," said Akmaro. "I don't think that's surprising. Besides, she spends most of her time with Shedemei."