Free Earthfall (Homecoming) by Orson Scott Card Page A

the Oversoul is saying a torrent of things to Nafai, important things, beautiful things, only he’s so far away that I only catch glimmers of it, and I know that Nafai himself has no fear at all, he’s just excited, he keeps shouting inside himself, “Now I get it! So that’s it! Now I understand it! Yes!” But he could explain none of this. All he could do was cling to his mother until she had to push him away to get on with her work, and then talk it out with Yasai. “I think Elya and Meb are going to try to kill Nyef today, when he comes back,” he said, and Yaya’s eyes grew wide. “I think Nyef isn’t worried, though, because he’s become so strong that nobody can hurt him.”
    When it all ended with Elemak and Mebbekew humbled before the power of the starmaster’s cloak, Yaya was in awe of Oykib’s insights more than ever. But Oykib was exhausted. He didn’t want to know so much. And yet, underneath it all, he wanted to know more. He wanted the Oversoul to speak to him .
    Why should he? Oykib was only an eight-year-old boy, and not strong and domineering like Elemak’s boy Protchnu, either, even though Proya was a few weeks younger. What would the Oversoul have to say to him ?
    Now, sitting with the others in the library of the starship Basilica , Oykib already knew exactly what was going to be explained to them, because he had heard the Oversoul arguing with the adults about it before the ship was launched, and he could hear the Oversoul arguing with Luet and Nafai even now. He wanted to shout at them to just shut up and do it. But instead he held his peace, and listened patiently as Nafai and Luet explained it all.
    He didn’t like the way they handled it. They told the truth, of course—he had learned to expect that from them, more perhaps than from any of the other adults—but they left out a lot of the real reasons for what they were doing. They only talked about it as a wonderful chance for the children to learn a lot of things they’d need to know in order to make the colony work when they got to Earth. “And because you’ll be fourteen or fifteen or sixteen—or even, some of you, eighteen years old—when we arrive, you can do the work of a man or a woman. You’ll be grownups, not children. At the same time, though, you’ll only see your mothers and fathers now and then during the voyage, because we can’t afford the life support to keep more than two adults awake at a time.”
    Yes yes, all of that is true, thought Oykib. But what about the fact that only a dozen of us children will be in this little school of yours? What about the fact that when I am an eighteen-year-old at the end of the voyage, Protchnu will still be eight? What about friendships like the one between Mebbekew’s daughter Tiya and Hushidh’s daughter Shyada? Will they still be friends when Shyada is sixteen and Tiya is still six? Not very likely. Are you going to explain that ?
    But he said nothing. Waiting. Perhaps they would get to that part.
    “Any questions?” asked Nafai.
    “There’s plenty of time,” said Luet. “If you want to go back to sleep, you can do it a few days from now—there’s no rush.”
    “Is there anything fun to do on this ship?” asked Xodhya, Hushidh’s oldest boy. That was the most obvious question, since the adults had spent a lot of time before the launch assuring the kids that they wanted to sleep through the voyage because it would be so dull.
    “There are a lot of things you can’t do,” said Luet. “The centrifuge will provide Earth-normal gravity for exercise, but you can only run in a straight line. You can’t play ball or swim or lie in the grass because there’s no pool and no grass and even in the centrifuge, it wouldn’t be practical to throw and catch a ball. But you can still wrestle, and I think you could get used to playing tag and hide-and-seek in low gravity.”
    “And there are computer games,” said Nafai. “You’ve never had a chance to play them,