Farseed The Seed Trilogy

Yusef sat up. His bearded face was pale. "You know about that, all that ugly talk?"

Nuy shrugged. "How could I not know? Your own son is a healer, you know what he and Kagami found in me and in Carin and Sarojin. I can hear beyond your range, so picking up a few whispers isn't that hard. When I first heard a woman talking about us, I thought of confronting her and telling her the truth, but then it came to me that anyone who would say such things without knowing what was true wouldn't listen to the truth anyway, and might even see the truth as a lie. So l said nothing."

Ship had sent them here to live as human beings in an Earthlike environment, Aleksandr had declared at one of the meetings, and he was not about to abandon Ship's mission. He would do what he could to ensure that any descendants of his would be able to greet Ship, if Ship ever returned, as truly human people. In the cause of true humanity and the preservation of the human genome, Aleksandr had even turned his back on his son Edan.

“And sometimes you hardly seem real,” Bonnie had gone on to say. “There’s something odd about you, Nuy, something different.”

The doubt in the woman’s voice had put Nuy on edge, and then she recalled hearing the same words from her father’s mouth long ago. “There’s something strange about you, Nuy, you and the others,” and she had known Ho was talking about Carin and Sarojin and Belen as well as herself. “I turn around and there you are, even though I was sure you were in front of me only a few seconds ago. You tell me rain’s coming when there isn't a cloud in the sky, you warn me that a big cat’s on the prowl nearby when there's no animal in sight, you read signs I can't see." She had felt the fear and suspicion welling up inside her father just before he had grabbed her wrist. "Some times you don't seem human, and I wonder if I should get rid of you before you taint us all." She had never been so afraid of her father as she had been when he uttered those words.

"I thought it was just that you were more accustomed to this region than we are,” Bonnie went on, "more used to surviving with little, and maybe that was the reason you seem to pick up on certain things and we don't, but it's more than that. Sometimes, I almost think you can hear my thoughts," and Nuy had thrown up her hands and shaken her head in denial. "You're different."

Ho had said the same thing. "You're different. Sometimes I wonder that you can even be my daughter." Bonnie's words frightened her, but in a different way than Ho's had. Maybe Bonnie's people would never welcome her among them, maybe they, too, would see her as too much unlike themselves to live among them even for a short time. Maybe they would look at her the way her father and the others sometimes looked at her, Carin, Sarojin, and Belen.

“What are you called?” he asked her.

"Nuy. Nuy the daughter of Ho."

"And your mother?" the woman asked.

“My mother's dead. I never knew her, because she died when I was still small. My father never told me her name and neither did anyone else. Katti says that speaking the names of the dead brings bad luck, but I never believed her. Not saying their names didn't always keep bad luck away." Once Nuy had thought that her father had missed her mother too much to be able to speak her name, that it would have pained him too deeply to say it, but after a while she had come to believe that he had simply forgotten it. Too many things had escaped his memory over the years, almost everything except his fears, his resentments and his hatreds.

"Were not a perfect fit," Kagami continued, "Home and human beings, but so far the life of this planet has been reactive to us as if we're harmless. If there's anything other than what we've brought here ourselves that can kill us, an animal or a virus or a poisonous plant or deadly microbe, we've avoided it so far. That might mean that being a transplanted species here has given us a kind of immunity, at least temporarily. Or it may only mean that we haven't done anything yet that would cause Home's immune system to attack us." She cleared her throat. "I’m speaking figuratively, of course.”

"Zoheret told me once-“ Leila paused.

"Go on, Kagami said.

"That some of you had considered building an enclosed settlement, with tunnels and barriers and larger domes so that we'd be even more protected.”

“We might have done that, but I think it's good that we didn't. It would have been like imprisoning ourselves, giving up on Home's environment before we'd ever really tried to live in it and adapt to it. We might not have been able to maintain such a settlement anyway, and if it had failed us later on, we might have been much less able to adapt. The descendants of Ho and Owen and Katti and their group might have become the inheritors of Home in time"

“We send them to the library so that they can learn about their great ancestors and the advanced civilization that they created in their own solar systenm and their dream of seeding other worlds with human life, and we tell them tales of how we had to fight the people who had hidden aboard Ship, some of them our own biological parents, in order to settle on Home, even if we don't go into some of the more problematic parts of that story. Maybe our old battles used up our store of courage. Maybe human beings only have a certain amount of courage and when it's used up, they live out the rest of their lives hiding from anything they fear.”

"Leila and Yukio and Sofia and Edan feel as strongly about this as I do. But I will say one thing. Maybe I’m getting more and more upset with people who'd let three of their friends just disappear without doing anything to find out what happened to them. My mother and her comrades would have expected someone to come after them by now instead of making excuses. First it was not caring about what was happening with the outsiders, and then it was forgetting about three of your own people. You’re not living here--you're hiding here."

"We learned something from them," Zoheret said, "even if it was a violent lesson. We put our own differences aside and stood against them, so you could say that they brought us all together."