Sheri Tepper - Singer From The Sea

by Singer From The Sea(Lit)

  "A boy. They raise almost all the girl babies for their blood, but if the donor of the candidate already has an heir or two, they leave the boys for the carrion birds."

  Genevieve cried, "I should think they'd grow them bigger, too. They'd have more blood, wouldn't they?"

  "They say only women's blood makes the lichen grow like this," said Melanie. "Women of reproductive age, preferably nursing mothers. It has to do with the hormones."

  "To make this stuff grow? What is it?"

  "P'naki," said Joncaster, watching her narrowly.

  She turned aside, retching, "They gave me P'naki, once. When I was a child. To protect me from the fever."

  Melanie shook her head. "No, Genevieve. They gave you powdered bonebush, probably. It's evil-tasting stuff, and they told you it was P'naki, a protection against the fever. They told you that it came from Mahahm. You grew up thinking that only P'naki from Mahahm could protect you from the fever, and that explained why Mahahm was important, why the Lord Paramount traded with Mahahm instead of conquering it."

  "I don't understand," she cried, as Joncaster dragged her to the fourth body. He rolled it over and removed the veil. Red hair tumbled across the sand, green eyes stared emptily at the sun, a soft mouth curved toward Genevieve, the lips slightly open, as though in a moment she would wake and laugh!

  Genevieve wailed, the high, hopeless cry of a child, man or creature, lonely and lost. "Oh, oh, no... no."

  Melanie grasped her by the shoulders and shook her, not gently. "Genevieve, stop it! Who is it!"

  She sobbed, "Barbara. My schoolmate, Barbara. She married... she married Viscount Willum, of Halfmore. Oh, for the love of heaven, why? Why?"

  "You haven't been listening to what we've been telling you!" snarled Melanie, shaking her. "Stop this!"

  Genevieve shuddered herself silent while Joncaster felt along the body, coming away with a bundle that moved slightly. "Another boy child."

  Melanie took it from him, a baby larger and older than the other had been. She took a nippled water bottle from the scrip at her side and thrust the teat into the little mouth.

  "This is what you come for?" Genevieve said, wiping her face on her sleeve. "To save the babies?"

  Melanie nodded. "The ones we can. There are other teams out covering the other locations. We have many among us now who were once children of the candidates."

  Genevieve, kneeling to replace the veil over Barbara's white face, scarcely heard. "Will we bury her?" she cried, wiping her eyes as she stared about at the quiet bodies. "Bury them?"

  "No," said Joncaster, rolling Barbara's body back onto her face, as he had already done the others. "We will do nothing except take this one living child back to the refuge. When he is strong enough to travel, he will go to Galul."

  "Just leave her? Like this?" she cried.

  Joncaster pulled her to her feet. "We will leave her with the others, so when the flagman's crew comes at the next holy season, they will see nothing except what the desert itself has done: perhaps a scattering of bones that the bonebushes have not eaten, which he will tidy away so the candidates won't be frightened by them. There are many carrion-eaters on the sands."

  Melanie said, "Besides, if we buried them, the Mahahmbi might catch on to us."

  "But surely the people from Mahahm-qum already know you're here," Genevieve said. "The refuge isn't hidden."

  "Of course they know we're here," said Melanie. "But they don't know who 'we' are. Just as they hide P'naki in plain sight by defining it as something else, so we hide ourselves in plain sight by calling ourselves malghaste. So far as they're concerned, we're malghaste, therefore unimportant. They don't concern themselves with unimportance!"

  "And the lichen isn't P'naki?"

  "It isn't P'naki if you mean a preventive of a purely fictional fever," said Joncaster. "It is P'naki if you mean the stuff that Mahahm lives by, the stuff that is taken from here to a well-guarded storehouse just outside the south gates of Mahahm-qum, from which it is traded with the Lord Paramount for food and fabric and machines, that is then traded by the Lord Paramount with other worlds for all manner of things. It is P'naki if you mean that which the Lord Paramount uses to reward his faithful followers, just as the Shah uses it here in Mahahm. This stuff can extend men's lives indefinitely. Both the Lord Paramount and the Shah Effulgent have grown centuries old upon P'naki, and they grow craftier and greedier with age, while those of Haven who want to grow older grow more numerous, and they, too, become more and more greedy. Those on far worlds, the powerful old men who trade off-world luxuries for P'naki, also grow greedy, always wanting more, and more and more."

  Melanie said, "First the old men take it every twenty years. Then, when they are about one hundred, they need it every ten years, or five, and when they get to be a hundred fifty, they need it every year, every season, just to go on living. And for every dose, more or less, a woman dies."

  Genevieve stared, her eyes glazed, lost in contemplation of the caverns beneath Havenor, piled high with useless treasures, paid for in blood. "How old can they get?" she cried. "Can they live forever?

  Joncaster shook his head. "When it gets to the point they need it every day or so, usually something happens to them. They are said to die in hunting accidents, or they drown, or they fall down the stairs."

  Melanie looked closely at Genevieve, noting her pallor, her trembling hands. "Come. Let's get out of this charnel house. Over the edge of the dune, at least."

  "Go up to the flag," directed Joncaster. "No sense all of us climbing back to the sled in this heat. I'll get it."

  Just over the edge of the dune, the two women sat on the sloping surface, Genevieve wiping her face with the hem of her robe while Melanie made a shade with her outer robe and laid the baby within it, still holding the bottle to his mouth. The baby sucked, then sighed, then sucked again.

  "When Willum married Barbara," murmured Genevieve, forcing herself to consider what she had seen, "he knew she would end here, with his child?"

  "As a candidate for his father, yes. Sons of the nobility know what is expected of them. No doubt Willum's father asked him to marry and provide a candidate. Under both Haven and Mahahmbi custom, a son owes filial respect to his father."

  "And the Prince needed a candidate, so he would have married me, but I'm not his wife..." Genevieve murmured.

  "There's a mystique about women of noble blood making the best candidates, but married to him or not, he'd have had to have someone else get you pregnant, Genevieve. This stuff makes men sterile and impotent. That's one reason they don't take it until they're older."

  Thinking of the days and nights spent traveling back from Merdune, Genevieve shook her head sadly. "So the Prince really didn't care if I married Aufors.... And Father... well, Father couldn't have known."

  Melanie moistened a cloth and wiped the baby's face. "If your father didn't know prior to this trip, be sure he knew during, for he was brought along to serve as ritual master for the Prince."

  "He was to have cut my throat?" murmured Genevieve, fighting the sickness she felt. "He did behave very strangely toward me. He must have known." She swallowed deeply and put her head on her knees. "What did Joncaster mean when he said a totally fictional fever?"

  Melanie lifted the baby to her shoulder, sheltering it within her hood. "The commons are occasionally exposed to a carefully engineered off-world fever that wipes out a few of them, actually very few, for the nobles don't want a drop in population. The reports, however, always mention a fictional, large number of fatalities. Then some bitter-tasting but harmless stuff they call P'naki is dispensed, with maximum fanfare, and that reinforces the importance of P'naki in people's minds. That in turn explains both Haven's trade with Mahahm and why so many young women are said to have died."

  "And when the Prince said he wanted the production of P'naki increased... ?"

  "Well, of course he wants it increased. Our spies say the Lord Paramount promised him he might keep one-third of any incr
ease in P'naki for himself. The Prince wants to hire mercenaries and buy war machines of his own. Most important, he wants to take over the throne of the Lord Paramount."

  "And the Shah plays the same game?" murmured Genevieve.

  "The Shah uses different words, but the game is the same, yes. At this stage of his life, the Shah no doubt needs a woman's life every few days to stay alive." She laid the baby down in the shadow of her body, offering the water bottle once more.

  "Do all the babies end up out here as well?"

  "We find quite a few boys. If a lord already has an heir or two, it isn't worth the money to rear a boy. Most of them are... well. There's Joncaster coming."

  He stopped the sled at the bottom of the dune, where Melanie stowed the baby in an insulated compartment before lying flat beside the other two.

  They had gone only a little way when Genevieve demanded, "Where did this lichen come from? Is it a native thing?"

  "Our people on the ark ship were provided with a carefully engineered DNA antiagathic to slow down their aging after they landed on the new planet. Antiagathics had been outlawed on Old Earth, because of the crowding, but our people needed enough time to guarantee the survival of the creatures from the ship. The antiagathic was kept alive in a cyano-bacteria inside an alga. When and if it was needed, the genetic code would have been extracted and inserted into a virus."

  Joncaster offered, "The alga was used to perpetuate the stuff because algae was something we could grow on the ship very easily. It was never supposed to exist anywhere but in the ship's lab or the laboratory we would establish after landing. If the ship hadn't crashed, there'd have been no problem-"

  Melanie interrupted, "But the ship did crash, and the bacteria was lost-so everyone thought-along with a lot of other things we really needed. Luckily, the people and creatures all survived, and they remained healthy long enough to carry on..."

  "Carry on doing what?" Genevieve demanded.

  "Our job was to help young creatures survive, to save seeds and cuttings, to hatch eggs, and to preserve adult members of long-lived species, the ones that needed to teach their young, to keep them safe from natural dangers until they got strong enough to hold their own among the species already on this world without destroying any of them. Every living species is a proper part of a world, and it would be tapu for us to destroy any of them."

  Genevieve muttered, "I've seen the results of P'naki. Do you count it among all the living things that are proper parts?"

  Melanie shook her head. "I've already said, the ship wasn't supposed to have crashed. We knew nothing about the survival of the bacteria until a few hundred years ago, when the Mahahmbi captured six of our women in the mountains and used them for sacrifice to the lichen. When we looked at the situation, we immediately remembered the antiagathic bacteria, and as soon as we could lay hands on some lab equipment, we took the P'naki apart and found out that's what it is-partly, at least. The bacteria survived, with its human genetic components, in the alga we'd transported it in. The human genetic components had mutated slightly, and the alga had teamed up with a terrestrial fungus-perhaps from spores carried by some of the birds on the ark-to create this foliose lichen."

  Joncaster said, "The cyanobacteria produces nourishment from the sun while the fungus extracts minerals and water from the environment and offers protection. Together, so long as their environmental needs are met, lichens are very tough growths."

  Melanie interrupted again, "Joncaster's right, and this one is tougher than most. Usually, when the fungus part of a lichen makes spores, the spores don't carry any alga, so when the spores hatch, they're just a fungus, not a lichen. With this thing, however, the algal material is packed right in with the fungal spores. They spread on the wind, and when it comes alive, it doesn't do so as two separate, harmless organisms, it comes alive as P'naki."

  "Presumably, you stopped them killing your women," Genevieve remarked.

  Joncaster nodded emphatically. "We-that is, our people-made it very expensive for Mahahm to kill a malghaste. Wherever they had killed one of us, we destroyed the lichen patch where they did it..."

  "I thought you couldn't destroy things," muttered Genevieve.

  "Of course we can destroy members of a species. We're part of nature, and nature imposes a feeding chain, so some members of any species are killed by others all the time. What's forbidden is to destroy species. We were quite comfortable with wiping out individual patches of the stuff, though we might not have tried if we'd known how hard it would be!

  "We had no herbicides or chemical killers of any kind. We couldn't have used them if we had, for all such things are forbidden. The only way we could remove a patch of lichen was to sterilize the sand it was growing in-and I do mean in. The rhizines are as thin as hair and they go down farther than you can imagine! We had no harpta to carry tools, and back then we didn't have sleds, either. It took an enormous amount of labor to dig out the sand in those areas and keep turning it over and over and burning it until the last of it was dead. And, of course, every time we disturbed the sand, the spore capsules were blown off in every direction."

  "Do you have any idea how it works?"

  Melanie said, "We hypothesize that lactating hormones stimulate some chemical process inside the genetic material, but we don't honestly know. Our ancestors on the ship had a great deal of technical knowledge, but their equipment and supplies and reference library went down with the ship. That's part of the reason we couldn't come up with a technical way to fight the stuff, or so we like to believe, though it could be we're just not smart enough. The best we could do was to create a myth about ourselves. We called ourselves the malghaste-that's a word the Mahahmbi already used for some of their own lowest caste people. We said we were divinely appointed to help them, and that our blood kills the lichen, and every time they killed one of us, a patch was killed. It didn't take them long to believe."

  "That was a long time ago," Genevieve asserted. "Since then you've learned how to lay hands on technology. You've had the opportunity to get herbicides and fungicides. Why haven't you wiped it out?"

  Joncaster said angrily, "I've told you! We can't. We'd have to spray the entire continent of Mahahm! And we've all been reared on horror tales from Old Earth that make the idea repugnant."

  Melanie patted her shoulder, "Genevieve, we honestly don't know how to kill it. Your muttering is pretty much the same as the muttering our own people do when confronted with the dilemma. We've considered wiping out the Mahahmbi, and we've considered wiping out the nobility of Haven. There's no way to do it without involving a lot of innocent people. We did the best we could when we created the story of the malghaste."

  Genevieve snorted, "The Mahahmbi really believed that? I find that hard to accept!"

  Joncaster cast her a quick glance, shaking his head. "The Mahahmbi scriptures are in writing. According to them, this makes writing so holy that it can't be used for anything but scriptures. As a result, they have no written history and their oral history is subject to a lot of revision. We had our people sing malghaste songs around the women and children, and when the boy children grew up, they remembered the songs. By now, the Mahahmbi think we've always been around. They already believed they were God's favorites when they came here, so it wasn't hard to persuade them God created slaves for them,"

  Melanie snarled, "And if you believe you're God's favorite, killing a few women and children doesn't bother you..."

  "No more." Genevieve hugged herself to keep from shattering or screaming, as she felt about to do. "No more. I can't absorb half of what you've said. Don't tell me anything more."

  She pillowed her head on her arms and tried to think of nothing, absolutely nothing. Blackness. No light, no sound, no nothing. Though it was only partially successful, the resultant mental fog was better than the assaults of the morning.

  They went back the way they had come, winding among the dunes and arriving at the refuge as the evening bell tolled and the sun bled scarlet clou
d rivers down the western sky.

  * * *

  Enid waited for them in the garage, where they brought the sled to a rest.

  "She's seen?" she asked Joncaster, while peering into Genevieve's frozen face and staring eyes.

  "More than she wanted to see," he said. "One of the victims was a friend of hers...."

  Enid shook her head, lips tightly clamped. She said to Genevieve. "I know you must be very sad..."

  Genevieve erupted in laughter. "Sad? You know that I'm sad? I saw a girl I knew... a girl I loved! I saw her get her throat slit. Her last words were of concern for her child. And you think I'm sad? That's not quite it. Believe me, Enid, that's not quite the emotion I'm feeling!"