Earthborn

Mon thought about this. "Father would never let diggers rule over us."

"But it wasn't us, don't you see? They were so real. I saw the boy getting beaten once. But not by diggers, it was by human boys who ruled over the diggers."

"Elemaki," murmured Mon. The evil humans who had joined with the diggers and lived in their dank caves and ate the sky people they kidnapped and murdered.

"The boys were bigger than him. He was hungry and so they tormented him by shoving more food than he could swallow into his mouth until he choked and gagged, and then they rubbed fruit and crumbs all over him and rolled him in the mud and grass so nobody could eat it. It was horrible, and he was so brave and never cried out against them, he just took it with such dignity and I cried for him."

"In the dream?"

"No, when I woke up. I wake up crying. I wake up saying, ‘We've got to help them. We've got to find them and bring them home.' "

"We?"

"Father, I suppose. Us. The Nafari. Because I think those pedple are Nafari."

"So why don't they send sky people to find us and ask us for help? That's what people do, when the Elemaki are attacking them."

Edhadeya thought about this. "You know something, Mon? There wasn't a single angel among them."

Mon turned to her then. "No sky people at all?"

"Maybe the diggers killed them all."

"Don't you remember?" he asked. "The people who left back in the days of Father's grandfather? The ones who hated Darakemba and wanted to go back and possess the land of Nafai again?"

"Zef... ."

"Zenif," said Mon. "They said it was wrong for humans and sky people to live together. They didn't take a single angel with them. It's them. They're the ones you dreamed of."

"But they were all killed."

"We don't know that. We just know that we never heard from them again." Mon nodded. "They must still be alive."

"So you think it's a real dream?" asked Edhadeya. "Like the ones Luet had?"

Mon shrugged. Something bothered him. "Your dream," he said. "I don't think it's exactly about the Zenifi. I mean ... it just doesn't feel complete. I think it's someone else."

"Well, how can you know that?" she said. "You're the one who thought it was the Zenifi."

"And it felt right when I said it. But now... now there's just something wrong with it. But you've got to tell Father."

"You tell him," she said. "You'll see him at di

"And you when he comes to say goodnight."

Edhadeya grimaced. "Dudagu Dermo is always there. I never see Father alone."

Mon blushed. "That isn't right of Father."

"Yes, well, you're the one who always knows what's right." She punched him in the arm.

"I'll tell him your dream at di

"Tell him it was your dream."

Mon shook his head. "I don't lie."

"He won't listen if he thinks it's a woman's dream. All the other men at di

"I won't tell him whose dream it is until I'm done. How's that?"

"Tell him this, too. In the last few dreams, the boy and his sister and his mother and father, they lie there in silence looking at me, saying nothing, just lie there in the darkness and without their saying a word I know they're pleading with me to come and save them."

"You?"

"Well, me in the dream. I don't think that the real people - if there are any real people - would be sitting there hoping for a ten-year-old girl to come and deliver them."

"I wonder if Father will let Aronha go."

"Do you think he'll really send somebody?"

Mon shrugged. "It's dark. It's time for di

From the trees near the river, from the high, narrow houses of the sky people, the evening song arose, a few voices at first, then joined by more and more. Their high, lilting melodies intertwined, played with each other, madly inventing, challenging, resolving dissonance and then subverting expected harmonies, a haunting sound that recalled an earlier time when life for the sky people was a short span of years that had to be enjoyed in the moment, for death was always near. The children stopped their playing and began drifting downward from the sky, going home to supper, to their singing mothers and fathers, to homes filled with music as once the thatched shelters of the angels had filled with song in the high reaches of the trees.

Tears came unbidden to Mon's eyes. This was why he spent the moment of evening song alone, for he would be teased about the tears if others saw them. Not Edhadeya, though.

Edhadeya kissed Mon's cheek. "Thank you for believing me, Mon. Sometimes I think I might as well be a stump, for all that anybody listens to me."

Mon blushed again. When he turned around, she was already going down the ladder to the ground. He should go with her, of course, but now the human voices were begi

Mon raised his own voice, high and sweet-so high that he did not have to sing among the low human voices, he could take a place in the bottom reaches of the sky people's song. From the street, a woman of the fields looked up at him and smiled. Mon answered her, not with a smile, but with a rapid run, his best. And when she laughed and nodded and walked on, he felt good. Then he raised his eyes and saw, on the roof of a house two streets over, two young sky people who had perched there for a moment on their way home. They watched him, and Mon defiantly sang louder, though he knew his voice, high and quick as it was, was no match for the singing of the sky people. Still, they heard him, they sang with him for a moment, and then they raised their left wings in salute to him. They must be twins, thought Mon, self and oth-erself, yet they took a moment to open their duet to include me. He raised his own left hand in answer, and they dropped down from the roof into the courtyard of their own house.

Mon got up and, still singing, walked to the ladder. If he were an angel, he wouldn't have to use a ladder to climb down from the roof of the king's house. He could swoop down and come to rest before the door, and when di

His bare feet slapped against the rungs as he skimmed down the ladder. Keeper of Earth, why did you make me human? He sang as he walked through the courtyard of the king's house, heading for the raucous brotherhood of the king's table, but there was pain and loneliness in his song.

Shedemei woke up in her chamber in the starship Basilica, and saw at once that it wasn't one of her scheduled wakings. The calendar was all wrong, and to confirm it, she heard at once the voice of the Over-soul in her mind. "The Keeper is sending dreams again."

She felt a thrill of excitement run through her. For all these centuries, dipping into and out of life, kept young by the cloak of the starmaster but long since old and weary in her heart, she had waited to see what the Keeper's next move would be. She brought us here, thought Shedemei, brought us here and kept us alive and sent us dreams, and then suddenly she fell silent and we were left to our own devices for so long.