"You want the Keeper to strike your son dead?" asked Pabul, incredulous.
"No I don't!" cried Akmaro. Chebeya burst into tears. "No I don't," Akmaro said softly. "I want my son to live. But more than that, I want the people of this world to live together as children of the Keeper. More than I want to spare the life of my son. It's time for me to beg the Keeper to do whatever he must do in order to save the people of Darakemba-no matter what it costs." His eyes, too, spilled over with tears. "It's happening again, just the way it did before, when I reached out to you, Pabul, you and your brothers, and taught you to love the Keeper and reject your father's ways. I knew that I had to do that, for the good of my people, for your good, even though I could see that it was tearing my boy apart, making him hate me. I knew I was losing him then. And now I have to consent to it all over again."
"Me, too?" asked Motiak in a small voice.
"No," said Shedemei. "Your boys will return to their senses once they're not with Akma anymore. And the peace of this kingdom depends on an orderly succession. Your boys must not die."
"But a father praying for the Keeper to strike his son dead... ." said Motiak.
"I will never pray for that," said Akmaro. "I'm not wise enough to tell the Keeper how to do his work. I'm only wise enough to listen to my wife and stop demanding that the Keeper leave my son alive."
"This is unbearable," murmured Pabul. "Father Akmaro, I wish I had died back in Chelem rather than bring this day upon you."
"No one brought this day upon me" said Akmaro. "Akma brought this day upon himself. The only hope of mercy for this people is for the Keeper to give justice to my son. So that's what I'm going to ask for." He rose from the ground, sighing deeply, terribly. "That's what I'm going to ask for with my whole heart. Justice for my son. I hope that he can bear to look the Keeper in the face."
They watched as Akmaro walked away from the clearing, into the trees lining the banks of the Tsidorek. "I don't know what to hope for," Motiak said.
"It's not our business to hope now," said Shedemei. "Akmaro and Chebeya finally found the courage to face what they had to face. Now I need to get back to the city and see whether I can do the same in my own small way."
They all knew better than to ask her what it was that she intended to do.
"I'll go with you," said Pabul.
"No," said Shedemei sharply. "Stay here. Akmaro will need you. Chebeya will need you. I don't need you." She was not to be disobeyed. She set off down the road, not even taking a waterjar with her.
"Will she be all right?" asked Motiak. "Should I have some of my spies keep an eye on her?"
"She'll be fine," said Chebeya. "I don't think she wants company. Or observers, either."
It was dark when the launch flew silently above the water of the Tsi-dorek and stopped to rest in the air a single step away from the riv-erbank. Shedemei took that step and entered the small craft-small compared to the Basilica., that is; huge compared to any other vehicle on Earth. Once she was secure inside, the launch took off without any command from her; the Oversoul knew what was needed, and took her to a garden she maintained in a hidden valley high above the settled land of Darakemba. As she traveled, the Oversoul spoke to her.
"That's right."
"You couldn't block Nafai and Issib back on Harmony when you had your full powers. Akma has a powerful will; he would resist you. I think he'd probably enjoy it."
"It's not my plan that matters now," said Shedemei. "It never was. We were as proud and as stupid as Akma was, back when we tried to provoke the Keeper by interfering with Monush's rescue. What we didn't understand is that the Keeper lets us interfere and tries to work around us. We really can't affect her. She wants this society, this nation of Darakemba to succeed. But if the people choose to ignore her and make something ugly out of their chance at something beautiful, well, so be it. She'll find somebody else."
"Maybe the Keeper is waiting to see what these children of Harmony decide, right here, right now, before she can give you the instructions you came for."
"She cares about them, yes. But she sees the whole picture, the sweep of time. To save a dozen or a thousand or a million people now, at the cost of the happiness of billions of lives over millions of years-she won't do it. She takes the long view."
"I don't know. How can I know? We were wasting our time by trying to thwart her. But if Chebeya's right-and how can I tell how much truth a raveler knows?-if she's right, then the Keeper can be influenced, not by rebels but by her most loyal friends. So Akmaro may have been blocking her just as Chebeya said, and the things he's telling the Keeper now-maybe the logjam will be broken."
"Either that or not. How can I know?"
"I think that it's possible that when it comes time to break the impasse, the Keeper may have use for me."
"Someone will have a dream. That's how the Keeper works. You'll see the dream, you'll tell me, and we'll figure out if there's something in it that the Keeper wants me to do."
"I haven't had a true dream since I saw myself as a gardener in the sky. That came true long ago, and I don't expect to have another dream."
"Yes, well, I'd like to think the Keeper had something to say to me, of course. I'm as vain as the next person."
"It doesn't work that way. I'm not tired yet."
She left the launch and wandered in the cold night air in her garden, routinely noticing the growth of the plants, the relative preponderance of one species over another, the amount of brachiation, the size of the foliage. The Oversoul entered her observations into the ship's computer as notes. They had long since stopped commenting on the irony that a computer program designed to govern a world was now acting as scribe for a lone biologist.
The Oversoul began to talk to her.
"Didn't you notice that about four hundred years ago?"
"Forty million years you waited on Harmony, and now you're impatient?"
"You were running things, you mean. If something was planned, it was because you were doing the planning. And then people started having dreams that didn't come from you. Made you a little uneasy, didn't it?"
"That's how it is for us all the time."
"Whatever the Keeper does, she does it faster than light, she does it no matter how far away a person is. It suggests such enormous power. Such knowledge, such... wisdom. And yet she is so delicate, intervening so little, really. Giving us such freedom. Respecting our choices. Listening to us. Listening to needs and desires we don't even know we have."