Saturday was stretched out on her stomach, head propped on a hand, staring at the grass blades a few inches below her nose. Sam sat under a tree with China, hugely pregnant between his knees, her back against his chest, his arms around her. They weren’t talking. None of them had talked much today.
“What’s going to happen now?” China whispered to Sam. In the quiet, the whisper carried. They all heard her.
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “We might know better if we knew exactly what the Baidee had been trying to accomplish when they came here.”
“I think that’s obvious,” said Africa. “According to all the witnesses, they were mere youths. They wanted to play at being soldier, and they wanted to see what we would do after our Gods were destroyed.”
“I know that,” said Sam. “I mean in addition to that.”
“I don’t think there is any addition to that,” Africa went on. “I think that was all of it. They wanted to see what we’d do. They are Baidee. The idea of real Gods frightens them.”
Sam mused, remembering the nightmare from which he had wakened Shan. “That Shan Damzel, he was the one. He was a very frightened man.”
“Frightened men do stupid things. Now we’ve found their Door and shut it, so they can’t see, they’ll be frightened again. They don’t know what we’re doing.”
“What are we doing?” asked China, wiping her eyes.
“We’re grieving over our friends and relatives who have been killed in a exercise of pointless violence,” said Sam, who had thought he had left that behind, in Voorstod.
“When we’ve done that, probably we’ll pretty much do what we always did.” Saturday wiped her face and squeezed Jep’s hand.
One of the settlement cats came from behind the temple and addressed Saturday at length.
“What did she say?” asked China.
“She says if we aren’t going to use the milk, at least let the cats have all they’d like of it, and would we please tell the dairy people. She says not to store anything in the empty warehouses at CM until the cats have been through them, because they’re alive with ferfs, and she says cats are needed up on the escarpment to hunt ferfs, but they can’t stay up there by themselves because there’s nothing to eat.”
“I’ll arrange it,” said Sam, getting slowly to his feet. He pulled China up after him, and the two of them walked slowly down to the creek and across, heading toward the settlement.
“Poor Sam,” said Africa.
“Why poor Sam?” asked Jep.
“Because he’s spent his whole life looking for something, and he’s just figured out he was looking for the wrong thing, but he doesn’t know what the right one is yet.” She looked down at her knotted hands and thought them perfectly symbolic of China right now. Tightly knotted up, full of compassion, full of apprehension, not knowing which way to go. Poor China. Poor Sam.
“If we knew, we could tell him,” mused Jep.
“I can’t tell him, because I don’t know,” Saturday said. “I know some things. They come to me solid, like pieces of wood, all carved to fit and nailed down. I just know, and I open my mouth and out it comes, and that’s that. No questions. No hesitations.”
“That’s the God talking,” Jep asserted.
“I suppose it is. But when it comes to other things, I haven’t the least idea. Maybe those are things the God isn’t interested in.” Saturday sat up and brushed the grass off her trousers.
“What kinds of things wouldn’t a God be interested in?” asked Gotoit Quillow from behind them. The crying session was evidently over, for both the other Quillows and Thurby Tillan were with her and nobody was blubbering. “I should think the God would be interested in everything we’re interested in.”
Saturday had spent a lot of time while on Ahabar thinking about that matter. “I thought so, too. But then I got to thinking about what the God actually does. I mean, if the God is interested in something, it would probably do something about that, wouldn’t it? So, if it doesn’t interfere with what we do, day to day, it probably doesn’t care very much what we do.”
Africa looked up from her hands and said, “Perhaps it’s simply that, within rather broad limits, it doesn’t matter what we do day to day. There are probably thousands of equally effective ways of raising food and getting along together. The God is not interested in minutiae, though it helps us toward efficiency by improving our communications and running off people who are disruptive.”
Saturday nodded to her mother. “And it’s not just our communications, but cats’ too, and probably anything else on Hobbs Land that has any intelligence at all. So the God cares about intelligence.”
“What else?” wondered Gotoit.
Africa pondered this question. “It cares about diversity; Saturday’s right about the cats. Also, the people who’ve left tended to be those who thought man was more important than other parts of creation, and themselves more important than other men,” Africa mused. “Me-and-my-image devotees. Human fertility worshippers. The kind of people who will happily kill other species to make room for more humans, advocates of the old ‘fill up the world and ruin it’ philosophy.”
“I wonder what would happen if I decided to do something to destroy intelligence or diversity. Would it stop me?” Jep asked.
“It wouldn’t have to,” said Africa. “You simply wouldn’t do it, because you’d have been informed it wasn’t a good idea,” She stood up and brushed off her trousers. “Still, I get no sense that my autonomy has been destroyed. I believe I still have free will. I don’t think the God is directing us, except in a few specifics, and even those seem designed merely to increase our general welfare and freedom of choice.”
“So, then, what was Shan Damzel afraid of?” asked Jep.
The people sitting
