Earthfall Page 0,69

seen. Many will criticize me for my carelessness-but none will doubt that I am honest, or claim that I altered my story to make myself look good. Better to have the trust of the people than their respect. With trust, their respect could be earned later; without it, respect could never be deserved, and so to have it would be like poison.

Tired from the day's stillness, dreading his homecom-ing, pTo flapped his way higher, up the canyon, toward the valley where the people lived.

Oykib watched the giant feat as it circled once, then flew away up the canyon. He knew that to others, this would mean the beginning of the fulfillment of the old dreams, the ones from the Keeper of Earth. But to Oykib, it was something else. He had heard the voice of the Keeper, speaking to this visitor-and he had understood it.

The voice of the Keeper was strange. It was quieter than the voice of the Oversoul, less clear. It spoke more in images than ideas, more in desires than in emotions. It was harder for Oykib to understand; indeed, when they first arrived on Earth it had taken him several weeks before he even realized that the voice of the Keeper was there. The conversations between humans and the Oversoul were so much louder that the voice of the Keeper was like distant thunder, or a light breeze in the leaves-more felt than heard. But once he noticed it, once he had an idea of what it was, he began to listen for it. Sitting in the shadow of the starship in the gathering dusk, he could concentrate, gradually letting the louder voice of the Oversoul fade into the background.

It was especially hard because the Keeper didn't speak to humans very often. A dream now and then, sometimes a desire; and the dreams didn't often come at times when Oykib could hear them easily. But the Keeper had almost constant dialogue with someone else. Many someones, who seemed to surround the village of Rodina-but how far away or near they were he couldn't guess. The real problem was understanding what was being said. The dreams, the desires he overheard made no sense. At first he thought it was a simple matter of confusion. There were too many of them, that was all. But then, as he began to be able to distinguish one dream from another, as he began to follow a particular thread of communication, he realized that the strangeness was inherent in the messages. The Keeper was prodding these someones with desires that Oykib had never felt, that he couldn't understand; and then, suddenly, there would be something clear: a desire to go care for a child. A wish not to embarrass himself in front of his friends. And the more he listened, the more he began to glimpse what the stranger hungers were: a desire to dig, to tear at wood with his hands. A desire to smear himself with clay. These things made no sense, and yet as Oykib sat in the shadow of the ship, stripping away his humanness, these desires swept over him and he felt-different. Other. Not himself.

He and Chveya had speculated recently, for she, too, had been catching glimpses, out of the corner of her eye, of inexplicable threads, not connecting one human to another. "And yet I can't possibly be seeing any such thing," she had told him. "I only see the threads connecting people that I can see, or at least people that I know. Yet I've seen no one that these threads could belong to."

"Or you've seen them out of the corner of your eye," Oykib had suggested. "Seen them without knowing what you've seen."

"If that's the case, then dozens of them have been gathered all around the village and the fields, and we haven't seen them. Not once, not ever. That's really a pretty silly idea."

"But they tire gathered around us, all the time."

"Around us, but far. You said what you heard was faint."

"Compared to the Oversoul, that's all. Like trying to hear a distant concert when somebody's tootling on a fife right next to you."

"See? You said it yourself-a distant concert."

"What if someone is watching us?"

"What if they are?" Chveya had answered him, "Let them watch. The Keeper is also watching them"

Naturally, all those who believed in the truth of dreams were watching for the winged flyers and the burrowing rodents-what had Hushklh and Luet called them? Angels and Diggers. But in all