The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls Read online

  Taking a flat round bread, she tore off half, rewrapped the rest, and then stuffed the part she meant to eat with a few chunks from the cheese. The bread was dry and harsh enough to mask much of the taste of the cheese, so all in all it wasn’t as nauseating a breakfast as it could have been. Welcome to the desert, Rasa.

  She closed the lid and turned toward the door.

  “Aaah!” she screeched, quite without meaning to. There in the doorway was a baboon on all fours, looking at her intently and sniffing.

  “Shoo,” she said. “Go away. This is my breakfast.”

  The baboon only studied her face a little longer. She remembered then that she had not locked the coldbox. Shamefaced, she turned her back on the baboon and, hiding what she was doing with her body, she retwisted the wire. Supposedly the baboon’s fingers weren’t deft enough to undo the wire. But what if his teeth were strong enough to bite through it, what then? No point in letting him know that it was the wire keeping him out.

  Of course, it was quite possible he could figure it out on his own. Didn’t they say that baboons were the closest things to humans on Harmony? Perhaps that’s why the original settlers of this planet brought them—for they were from Earth, not native to this place.

  She turned back around and again let out a little screech, for the baboon was directly behind her now, standing up on his hind legs, regarding her with that same steady gaze.

  “This is my breakfast,” Rasa said mildly.

  The baboon curled his lip as if in disgust, then dropped down to all fours and started out of the tent.

  At that moment Zdorab entered the tent. “Ha,” he said. “We call this one Yobar. He’s a newcomer to the tribe, and so they don’t really accept him yet. He doesn’t mind because he thinks it makes him boss when they all run away from him. But the poor fellow’s randy half the time and he can’t ever get near the females.”

  “Which explains his name,” said Rasa. Yobar was an ancient word for a man who is insatiable in lovemaking.

  “We call him that to sort of encourage him,” said Zdorab. “Get on out of here now, Yobar.”

  “He was already leaving, I think, after I declined to share my bread and cheese with him.”

  “The cheese is awful, isn’t it?” said Zdorab. “But when you consider that the boons eat baby keeks alive when they can catch them, you can understand that to them, camel cheese is really good stuff.”

  “We humans do eat it, though, right?”

  “Reluctantly and constantly,” said Zdorab. “And you never get used to the aftertaste. It’s the chief reason we drink so much water and then have to pee so much. Begging your pardon.”

  “I have a feeling that city rules of delicate speech won’t be as practical out here,” said Rasa.

  “But I ought to try more, I think,” said Zdorab. “Well, enjoy your meal, I’m trying not to create the aroma of burnt bread.”

  He backed on out of the kitchen tent.

  Rasa took her first bite of bread and it was good. So she took her second and nearly gagged—this time there was cheese in it. She forced herself to chew it and swallow it. But it made her think with fondness of the recent past, when the only camel product she had to confront was manure and no one expected her to eat it.

  The tent door opened again. Rasa half expected to see Yobar again, back for another try at begging. Instead it was Dol. “Wetchik says we won’t gather until the shadows get long, so it won’t be so miserably hot. Good idea, don’t you think?”

  “I’m only sorry you had to waste half the day waiting for me.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Dol. “I didn’t want to work anyway. I’m not much at gardening. I think I’d probably kill the flowers right along with the weeds.”

  “I don’t think it’s a flower garden,” said Rasa.

  “You know what I mean,” said Dol.

  Oh, yes, I understand exactly.

  I also understand that I must find Volemak and insist that he put me to work at once. It will never do for me to get days of rest when everyone else is working hard. I may be the second oldest here, but that doesn’t mean I’m old. Why, I can still have babies, and I certainly will, if I can get Volya to greet me as his long-lost wife, instead of treating me like an invalid child.

  What she could not say to herself, though she knew it and hated it, was the fact that she would have to have babies to have any role at all here in the desert. For they were reverting to a primitive state of human life here, in which survival and reproduction were at the forefront, and the kind of civilized life that she had mastered in Basilica would never exist again for her. Instead she would be competing with younger women for position in this new tribe, and the coin of the competition would be babies. Those who had them would be somebody; those who didn’t, wouldn’t. And at Rasa’s age, it was important to begin quickly, for she wouldn’t have as long as the younger ones.

  Angry again, though with no one but poor frivolous Dol to be angry at, Rasa left the kitchen tent, still eating her bread and cheese. She looked around the encampment. When they had come down the steep incline into the canyon, there had been only four tents. Now there were ten. Rasa recognized the traveling tents, and felt vaguely guilty that the others were still living in such cramped quarters, when she and Volya shared so much space—a large, double-walled tent. Now, though, she could see that the tents were laid out in a couple of concentric circles, but the tent she shared with Volemak was not the center; nor was the kitchen tent. Indeed, at the center was the smallest of the four original tents, and after a moment’s thought Rasa realized that that was the tent where the Index was kept.

  She had simply assumed that Volemak would keep the Index in his own tent, but of course that would not do—Zdorab and Issib would be using the Index all the time, and could hardly be expected to arrange their schedule around such inconveniences as an old woman whose husband let her sleep too late in the morning.

  Rasa stood outside the door of the small tent and clapped twice.

  “Come in.”

  From the voice she knew at once that it was Issya. She felt a stab of guilt, for last night she had hardly spoken to the boy—the man—that was her firstborn child. Only when she and Volya had spoken to the four unmarried ones all at once, really. And even now, knowing that he was inside the tent, she wanted to go away and come back another time.

  Why was she avoiding him? Not because of his physical defects—she was used to that by now, having helped him through his infancy and early childhood, having fitted him for chairs and floats so he could move easily and have a nearly normal life—or at least a life of freedom. She knew his body almost more intimately than he knew it himself, since until he was well into puberty she had washed him head to toe, and massaged and moved his limbs to keep them flexible before he slowly, painfully learned to move them himself. During all those sessions together they had talked and talked—more than any of her other children, Issib was her friend. Yet she didn’t want to face him.

  So of course she parted the door and walked into the tent and faced him.

  He was sitting in his chair which had linked itself to the solar panel atop the tent so he wasn’t wasting battery power. The chair had picked up the Index and now held it in front of Issib, where it rested against his left hand. Rasa had never seen the Index but knew at once that this had to be it, if only because it was an object she had never seen.

  “Does it speak to you?” she asked.

  “Good afternoon, Mother,” said Issib. “Was your morning restful?”

  “Or does it have some kind of display, like a regular computer?” She refused to let him goad her by reminding her of how late she had arisen.

  “Some of us didn’t sleep at all,” said Issib. “Some of us lay awake wondering how it happened that our wives-to-be were brought in and dumped on us with only the most cursory of introductions.”

  “Oh, Issya,” said Rasa, “you know that this situation is the natural consequence of the way things are
, and nobody planned it. You’re feeling resentful? Well, so am I. So here’s an idea—I won’t take it out on you, and you don’t take it out on me.”

  “Who else can I take it out on?” said Issib, smiling wanly.

  “The Oversoul. Tell your chair to throw the Index across the room.”

  Issib shook his head. “The Oversoul would simply override my command. And besides, the Index isn’t the Oversoul, it’s simply our most powerful tool for accessing the Oversoul’s memory.”

  “How much does it remember?”

  Issib looked at her for a moment. “You know, I never thought you’d refer to the Oversoul as it.”

  Rasa was startled to realize she had done so, but knew at once why she had done so. “I wasn’t thinking of her—the Oversoul. I was thinking of it—the Index.”

  “It remembers everything,” said Issib.

  “How much of everything? The movements of every individual atom in the universe?”

  Issib grinned at her. “Sometimes it seems like that. No, I meant everything about human history on Harmony.”

  “Forty million years,” said Rasa. “Maybe two million generations of human beings. A world population of roughly a billion most of the time. Two quadrillion lives, with thousands of meaningful events in every life.”

  “That’s right,” said Issib. “And then add to those biographies the histories of every human community, starting with families and including those as large as nations and language groups and as small as childhood friends and casual sexual liaisons. And then include all natural events that impinged on human history. And then include every word that humans ever wrote and the map of every city we ever built and the plans for every building we ever constructed . . .”

  “There wouldn’t be room to contain all the information,” said Rasa. “Not if the whole planet were devoted to nothing but storing it. We should be tripping over the Oversoul’s data storage with every step.”

  “Not really,” said Issib. “The Oversoul’s memory isn’t stored in the cheap and bulky memory we use for ordinary computers. Our computers are all binary, for one thing—every memory location can carry only two possible meanings.”

  “On or off,” said Rasa. “Yes or no.”

  “It’s read electrically,” said Issib. “And we can only fit a few trillion bits of information into each computer before they start getting too bulky to carry around. And the space we waste inside our computers—just to represent simple numbers. For instance, in two bits we can only hold four numbers.”

  “A-1, B-1, A-2, and B-2,” said Rasa. “I did teach the basic computer theory course in my little school, you know.”

  “But now imagine,” said Issib, “that instead of only being able to represent two states at each location, on or off, you could represent five states. Then in two bits—”

  “Twenty-five possible values,” said Rasa. “A-1, B-1, V-1, G-1, D-1 and so on to D-5.”

  “Now imagine that each memory location can have thousands of possible states.”

  “That certainly does make the memory more efficient at containing meaning.”

  “Not really,” said Issib. “Not yet anyway. The increase is only geometric, not exponential. And it would have a vicious limitation on it, in that each single location could only convey one state at a time. Even if there were a billion possible messages that a single location could deliver, each location could only deliver one of those at a time.”

  “But if they were paired, that problem disappears, since between them any two locations could deliver millions of possible meanings,” said Rasa.

  “But still only one meaning at any one time.”

  “Well, you can’t very well use the same memory location to store contradictory information Both G-9 and D-9.”

  “It depends on how the information is stored. For the Oversoul, each memory location is the interior edge of a circle—a very tiny, tiny circle—and that inside edge is fractally complex. That is, thousands of states can be represented by protrusions, like the points on a mechanical key, or the teeth on a comb—in each location it’s either got a protrusion or it doesn’t.”

  “But then the memory location is the tooth, and not the circle,” said Rasa, “and we’re back to binary.”

  “But it can stick out farther or not as far,” said Issib. “The Oversoul’s memory is capable of distinguishing hundreds of different degrees of protrusion at each location around the inside of the circle.”

  “Still a geometric increase, then,” said Rasa.

  “But now,” said Issib, “you must include the fact that the Oversoul can also detect teeth on each protrusion—hundreds of different values from each of hundreds of teeth. And on each tooth, hundreds of barbs, each reporting hundreds of possible values. And on each barb, hundreds of thorns. And on each thorn, hundreds of hairs. And on each hair—”

  “I get the idea,” said Rasa.

  “And then the meanings can change depending on where on the circle you start reading—at the north or the east or south-southeast. You see, Mother, at every memory location the Oversoul can store trillions of different pieces of information at once,” said Issib. “We have nothing in our computers that can begin to compare to it.”

  “And yet it’s not an infinite memory,” said Rasa.

  “No,” said Issib. “Not infinite. Because eventually we get down to the minimum resolution—protrusions so small that the Oversoul can no longer detect protrusions on the protrusions. About twenty million years ago the Oversoul realized that it was running out of memory—or that it would run out in about ten million years. It began finding shorthand ways of recording things. It devoted a substantial area of memory to storing elaborate tables of kinds of stories. For instance, table entry ZH-5-SHCH might be, ‘quarrels with parents over degree of personal freedom they permit and runs away from home city to another city.’ So where a person’s biography is stored, instead of explaining each event, the biographic listing simply refers you to the vast tables of possible events in a human life—it’ll have the value ZH-5-SHCH and then the code for the city he ran away to.”

  “It makes our lives seem rather sterile, doesn’t it? Unimaginative, I mean. We all keep doing the same things that others have done.”

  “The Oversoul explained to me that while ninety-nine percent of every life consists of events already present in the behavior tables, there’s always the one percent that has to be spelled out because there’s no pre-existing entry for it. No two lives have ever been duplicates yet.”

  “I suppose that’s a comfort.”

  “You’ve got to believe that ours is following an unusual path. ‘Called forth by the Oversoul to journey through the desert and eventually return to Earth’—I bet there’s no table entry for that.”

  “Oh, but since it has happened now to sixteen of us, I’ll bet the Oversoul makes a new entry.”

  Issib laughed. “It probably already has.”

  “It must have been a massive project, though, constructing those tables of possible human actions.”

  “If there’s one thing the Oversoul has had plenty of, it’s time,” said Issib. “But even with all that, there’s decay and loss.”

  “Memory locations can become unreadable,” said Rasa.

  “I don’t know about that. I just know that the Oversoul is losing satellites. That makes it harder for it to keep an eye on us. So far there aren’t any blind spots—but each satellite has to bring in far more information than it was originally meant to. There are bottlenecks in the system. Places where a satellite simply can’t pass through all the information that it collects fast enough not to miss something going on among the humans it’s observing. In short, there are events happening now that aren’t getting remembered. The Oversoul is controlling the losses by guessing to fill in the gaps in its information, but it’s only going to get worse and worse. There’s still plenty of memory left, but soon there’ll be millions of lives that are remembered only as vague sketches or outlines of a life.
Someday, of course, enough satellites will fail that some lives will never be recorded at all.”

  “And eventually all the satellites will fail.”

  “Right. And, more to the point, when those blind spots occur, there will also be people who are not under the influence of the Oversoul in any way. At that point they’ll begin to make the weapons again that can destroy the world.”

  “So—why not put up more satellites?”

  “Who? What human society has the technology to build the ships to carry satellites out into space? Let alone building the satellites in the first place.”

  “We make computers, don’t we?”

  “The technology to put satellites into space is the same technology that can deliver weapons from one side of Harmony to the other. How can the Oversoul teach us how to replenish its satellites without also teaching us how to destroy each other? Not to mention the fact that we could probably then figure out how to reprogram the Oversoul and control it ourselves—or, failing that, we could build our own little Oversouls that key in on the part of our brain that the Oversoul communicates with, so that we’d have a weapon that could cause the enemy to panic or get stupid.”

  “I see the point,” said Rasa.

  “It’s the quandary the Oversoul is in. It must get repaired or it will stop being able to protect humanity; yet the only way it can repair itself is to give human beings the very things that it’s trying to prevent us from getting.”

  “How circular.”

  “So it’s going home,” said Issib. “Back to the Keeper of Earth. To find out what to do next.”

  “What if this Keeper of Earth doesn’t know either?”

  “Then we’re up to our necks in kaka, aren’t we?” Issib smiled. “But I think the Keeper knows. I think it has a plan.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because people keep getting dreams that aren’t from the Oversoul.”

  “People have always had dreams that aren’t from the Oversoul,” said Rasa. “We had dreams long before there was an Oversoul.”