That's why the rumor started that he was a zhop. He died without telling them."
"That's - gallant, I suppose."
Chapter 10
"It was stupid beyond belief," said Zdorab. "He never believed me when I told him how terrifying it was in Basilica for people like me."
"You told him what you are?"
"I thought of him as a man who could keep a secret. He proved me right. I kind of think - that he died in my place. So that I could be alive when Nafai came to take the Index out of the city."
It was so far beyond anything she had experienced - beyond anything she had imagined. "Why did you keep on living there, then? Why didn't you go to someplace that isn't so - terrible?"
"In the first place, while there are places that aren't so bad, I don't know of any place that I could actually get to that is actually safe for someone like me. And in the second place, the Index was in Basilica. Now that the Index is out of there, I hope the city burns to the ground. I only wish that Moozh had killed every one of the strutting men of Dog Town."
"The Index was that important to you, to make you stay?"
"I learned of its existence when I was a young boy. Just a story, that there was a magic ball that if you held it, you could talk to God and he would have to tell you the answer to any question you asked. I thought, How wonderful. And then I saw a picture of the Index of the Palwashantu, and it looked exactly like the image in my mind of the magic ball."
"But that's not evidence at all," said Shedemei. "That's a childhood dream."
"I know it. I knew it then," said Zdorab. "But without even meaning to, I found myself preparing. For the day when I'd have the magic ball. I found myself trying to learn the questions that it would be worth asking God to answer. And, still without meaning to, I found myself making choices that took me closer and closer to Basilica, to the place where the Palwashantu kept their sacred Index. At the same time, being a studious young man helped me conceal my - defect. My father would say, 'You need to set down the books now and then, go and find some friends. Find a girl! How will you ever marry if you never meet any girls?' When I got to Basilica I used to write to him about my girlfriends, so he felt much better, though he would tell me that the way Basilicans marry, for just a year at a time, was awful and against nature. He really didn't like things that were against nature."
"That must have hurt," said Shedemei.
"Not really," said Zdorab. "It is against nature. I'm cut off from that tree of life that Volemak saw, I'm not part of the chain - I'm a genetic dead end. I think I read once, in an article by a genetics student, that it was not unreasonable to suppose that homosexuality might be a mechanism that nature used to weed out defective genes. The organism could detect some otherwise unnoticeable genetic flaw, and this started a mechanism that caused the hypothalamus to remain stunted, causing us to be highly sexual beings but with an inability to fixate on the opposite sex. A sort of self-closing wound in the gene pool. We were, I think the article said, the culls of humanity."
Shedemei blushed deeply - a feeling she rarely had and didn't like. "That was student work. I never published it outside the scholarly community. It was speculation."
"I know," he said.
"How did you even find it?"
"When I realized that I was expected to marry you, I read everything you wrote. I was trying to discover what I could and could not tell you."
"And what did you decide?"
"That I'd better keep my secrets to myself. That's why I never spoke to you, and why I was so relieved that you didn't want me."
"And now you did tell me."
"Because I could see that it hurt you, the fact that I didn't want you. I hadn't planned on that. You didn't come across as someone who would ever want the love of a contemptible crawling worm like me."
Worse and worse. "Was I so obvious in my attitude?"
"Not at all," he said. "I deliberately cultivated my wormhood. I have worked hard to become the most unnoticeable, despicable, spineless