Earthborn Page 0,81

have to say it? Can't you look inside my mind and see the truth?"

"I can. I'm going down there because I'm lonely. There, is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Well, now you've heard it. I want to hear another organic voice. No insult to you, but I actually would like to feel like some other people know me."

"I know," said Shedemei. "And I don't claim to have any great and noble purpose. I'm just ready to come out of this metal shell and bump up against some people again." Then she thought of something. "How old am I? People will ask."

"Are you suggesting that I should have another child?"

Shedemei curled her lip in disgust. "This is a society with a strong tabu against sex outside of marriage. I'm not going down there to ruin some poor lonely man's life."

"Are you sure all these warnings aren't because you're just the tiniest bit jealous?"

"I can walk on the face of this planet, and other living creatures will know me as one of them. Have you ever wished... ."

"That's a shame, too."

"That is programmed into me" said Shedemei.

The hatches were sealed. The launch was flipped away from the starship Basilica and hurtled down into the atmosphere.

Chapter 7

SEVEN - RASARO'S SCHOOL

Light streamed through the tall, wide windows of the winter room, reflecting from the bare lime-washed plaster walls until it was hard for Mon to imagine that it could possibly be brighter outside. The reason he and his brothers could gather here to be brow beaten by-no, to have a discussion with-Akma was because no one used the winter room in the summer. It was too hot. It was too bright. It was all Mon could do to keep his eyes open. If it weren't for the buzzing flies that persisted in trying to drink the sweat dribbling out of his body, he would have dozed off long ago.

Not that Mon wasn't committed to Akma's ideas. It's just that the two of them had discussed all this before ever bringing Aronha and Ominer and Khimin into it. So it was going over old ground for him. And it was natural for Akma to conduct these sessions, since Mon didn't have his patience in dealing with Khimin's questions, which were always off the subject, or Aronha's stubborn refusal to agree with points that were already proven and more than proven. Only Ominer seemed to grasp at once what Akma was talking about, and even he made the sessions longer and more tedious than they had to be, because when he did understand a point he would then repeat it back to Akma in different words. Between Khimin's obtuseness, Aronha's stolidity, and Ominer's enthusiasm, every tiny advance in the discussion took hours, or so it seemed to Mon. Akma could endure it. Akma could act as though the questions and comments weren't unbearably stupid.

A tiny thought crept into Mon's consciousness: Did Akma deal with me the same way? Are the ideas we worked out "together" really Akma's alone? How skillful is he, really, at winning people to his point of view?"

Immediately Mon discarded the idea, not because it wasn't true, but because it would imply that Mon was not Akma's intellectual equal, and he certainly was. Bego had always made it clear that Mon was the best student he had ever had.

"Humans and angels can live together," said Akma, "because the natural habitat of both species is open air and sunlight. Humans cannot fly, it is true, but our bipedal body structure lifts us above the other animals. We conceive ourselves as seeing from above, which makes us in spirit compatible to the sky people. The diggers, however, are creatures of darkness, of caves; their natural posture is with their bellies dragging along the