Earthfall (Homecoming) by Orson Scott Card

would have said, Fine, whatever you want, they’re yours. But they’re not just yours now. I fathered them, incredible as that is to me, and I have taught them and cared for them and loved them and I’ll tell you something. I don’t want to lose a day with them.”
    She shook her head. “Neither do I.”
    “So forget these dreams, Shedya. Let the big computer in the sky plan what it wants to plan. We aren’t part of it.”
    She lay back down in the bed beside him. “Oh, I’m part of it, all right.”
    “And how is that?” he asked.
    She took his hand and held it. “That nonsense I said. About genes. Recessive ones expressing themselves, all that.”
    The bed shook. Zdorab was laughing.
    “It’s not funny.”
    “None of it was true?”
    “I have no idea if it’s true or not. They know I’m an expert in genetics, they think I know what I’m talking about. But I don’t. Nobody does. I mean, we can catalogue the genomes, but most of each genetic molecule is still undeciphered. They used to believe that it was junk, meaningless. But it isn’t. That much I’ve learned from working with plants. It’s all just…quiet. Waiting. Who knows what will show up if they let those cousins marry each other?”
    Zdorab laughed some more.
    “It isn’t funny,” said Shedemei. “I really should tell them the truth.”
    “No,” said Zdorab. “What you told them made it so they won’t feel any need to include our children with theirs in any experiment they decide to perform. Fine. That’s how it should be.”
    “But look at Issib.”
    “What, was his condition genetic after all?”
    “No, that part was true enough. But how he’s suffered, Zodya. It’s not right to let other children go through that, other parents, I can’t….”
    Zdorab sighed. “You pretend to be hard-nosed, Shedya, but you’re soft as cheese on a summer day.”
    “Thanks for choosing such a foul-smelling analogy.”
    “Shedya, if what you said wasn’t true, how did you think of it?”
    “I don’t know. The words just came to my mouth. Because I needed something to say to turn them away from our children.”
    “That’s right. Now, the Oversoul is perfectly capable of telling them things, right?”
    “Constantly.”
    “So let the Oversoul tell them not to let their children intermarry.”
    Shedemei thought about that for a moment. “I never thought of that,” she said. “I’m not one of those people who ‘leaves things up to the Oversoul.’”
    “And besides,” said Zdorab. “How do you know the Oversoul didn’t put the words into your mouth?”
    “Oh, don’t be so—”
    “I’m quite serious. You said the words just came to you. How do you know it wasn’t from the Oversoul? How do you know that it wasn’t true ?”
    “Well, I don’t know .”
    “There you are. You don’t need to say anything to them about anything.”
    She had no answer to that. He was right.
    They lay there in silence for a long time. She thought he was asleep. Then he spoke, a whisper just on the edge of voice. “We aren’t just a man with children and a woman with children, sharing the same house, sharing the same children. Are we?”
    “No, not just that,” said Shedemei.
    “I mean, how much does a husband have to desire his wife, sexually, for his feelings toward her to be love?”
    She felt her way carefully toward an answer. “I don’t know if the feelings have to be sexual at all,” she said.
    “Because I admire you so much. And the way you are with Rokya and Dabya, I…delight in that. And the way you teach them, all the children. And the way you are with…with me. The way you’re so kind to me.”
    “And what else would I do? Beat you? Scream at you? You’re the most aggravatingly unannoying man I’ve ever known. You don’t do anything wrong.”
    “Except that I don’t satisfy you.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t complain.”
    “But I do love you. Like a sister. A friend. More than either of those, like