But then, in the space of a heartbeat it changed. The Ranger’s face became blank, her eyes broke from the contact, and her arms fell away. As if on cue, a voice called out from beside them on the ledge, asking for advice about arranging the injured woman on the stretcher. Feeling half dazed, Lynn turned to the group around Renie and tried to immerse herself in the task of supervising the stretcher’s departure down the steep flight of steps—an awkward maneuver because the stairway had not been cut with the current situation in mind. Plenty of willing hands were available though, and soon Lynn and her patient had left the ledge.
*
The sounds of the stretcher bearers faded, leaving only the two officers behind. Kim sighed and leaned back against the rock wall behind her, her eyes fixed on the distant mountains on the other side of the flood plain. Chip stood a little way off, studying her friend thoughtfully.
“So just how do things stand between Lynn and you?” Chip asked at last.
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, Kim. You know exactly what I mean.”
“We’re friends.”
“And you weren’t in a total panic every second that Lynn was dangling in midair.” Chip was at her most sarcastic.
“Of course I was. She’s our only Imprinter, and I like her.”
“That’s all you feel for her?”
Kim stopped and took a few deep breaths. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter. “It doesn’t matter what I feel for her. She doesn’t want me. I told you about that.”
“You told me that on the first night after she escaped from the temple, when she was tired, confused, and in pain, you gave her a three-second chance to disagree when you told her that she didn’t want you. And now you’re totally determined to take that as the final answer.”
Kim’s face hardened. “Do you see her chasing after me now?”
“You’re running away from her so fast I doubt she’d catch you.”
“When have you ever known me to run away from an attractive woman?”
“Well, since you’re asking, once or twice.”
“Oh, be serious.”
“I am.” And in truth, there was not a trace of humor in Chip’s voice.
“So what are you getting at?” For her part, Kim was starting to sound angry.
“What I’m getting at is that you seem to be going out of your way to make yourself miserable.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because of your parents.”
“How do they come into this?” Kim snapped back.
Chip was silent for a few seconds, looking at the ground. “Guilt.” She raised her eyes to meet Kim’s. “I remember when you first joined the squadron. You were like an over-wound spring. And I remember your face as you stood over the body of the first bandit you’d killed and you realized that revenge wasn’t really what you wanted. I’ve seen the way you raced through women as if it was some sort of competition, until you worked out that a never-ending stream of one-night stands wasn’t what you wanted either.”
“Oh stop—” Kim began, but Chip cut her off.
“No. Let me finish. What you really want is a new family, but you feel guilty that you survived when your parents didn’t. You feel guilty that revenge isn’t enough for you, and most of all, you feel guilty at the merest hint that a relationship is becoming serious. As if you might be accused of trying to replace your parents and sisters with someone else.” Chip sighed. “And I don’t think I’m telling you anything you haven’t already worked out for yourself.”
“If you think I already know it, why are you bothering to tell me?”
“Because I’m your friend, and it’s painful to watch you at the moment. I think what you want is Lynn, and I think you’re frightened at how much you want her. You’re feeling disloyal to your parents, but if they could see you now, do you think they’d be happy to watch you avoiding Lynn, to know you’d renounced any attempt to rebuild a family for yourself? Is that what they’d have wanted for you?”
Kim’s anger had faded to a sullen resistance. “But like I said before, Lynn is our only Imprinter. And for anyone to have a family, it means that things are going to have to stay exactly as they are.” She pushed herself away from the rock wall and began to head for the steps down, but Chip caught her arm.
“Okay. I’m pregnant at the moment, so maybe it’s easy for me to say this, but everyone here chose to leave the Sisters’ lands for one reason or another. Until you went back for Lynn, none of us thought we had any chance of having children. But now everyone who wants a baby is expecting one, and I don’t see that anybody has the right to ask you and Lynn to sacrifice the rest of your lives on the off chance that they might want more at some stage in the future.”
Kim stopped for a second, looking at Chip’s earnest face, then freed her arm and walked on down the steps without a word.
Chapter Twenty-One—A Legacy from the Elder-Ones
Nothing else under the Goddess’s wide skies could complain with the same frantic desperation as a piglet. From the succession of agonized squeals, anyone would have assumed that Lynn was trying to tear it limb from limb. However, the sounds stopped the instant the small creature was put back in the pen, and were replaced by happy grunts as it charged into its sisters, in a piglet’s distinctive impersonation of a small round battering ram on legs. The sow was completely unmoved by it all.
Lynn grinned at the antics and then turned back to Gina and Lilian. They were at the pigpens in the lowlands, checking the state of the young animals and making plans for the cloning work that would soon be beginning on the adults. The tour had concluded with Lynn insisting on lavishing some completely unreciprocated affection on a piglet.
“It’s a shame we don’t have a couple of the sicross blacks; this valley would suit them perfectly,” Lynn said, her thoughts turning again to the practical needs of the community.
Lilian disagreed. “They’d do all right for food, but they wouldn’t like the winters. We’d have to put them all up in shelters, and we’d still probably lose a few. The old grays are a lot hardier.”
The debate continued. Gina listened with a thoughtful expression, and at last joined in. “It seems as if what we want is something combining the best traits of the sicross and the grays?”
“Ideally, yes,” Lynn agreed.
“So why don’t you do it?”
Lynn stopped, stunned. “You mean imprint from one breed onto another?”
“Why not?” Gina asked innocently, although she surely knew what the answer would be.
“Because they’d be unique, so they’d have a soul. And you can’t eat something with a soul.”
“You’re right, you can’t. You’d be much better off with a knife and fork.”
Both Gina and Lilian chuckled at Lynn’s confusion as she stood, hands on hips, looking between the elderly pair and trying to work out just how much of what Gina had said was intended as a joke. She had still not found her voice by the time they separated, Lilian going to take a final look at some sheep she was concerned about, while Gina headed toward the path up to Westernfort. Lynn hurried to catch up with the heretic leader.
“You’re going to tell me that it’s not true the Elder-Ones forbade us to eat anything that hadn’t been cloned. It was just something the Sisters made up?” Lynn’s voice was halfway between irony and astonishment.
“The Sisters may seem dull and narrow-minded, but you should never underestimate their imagination,” Gina joked, and then spoke more seriously. “And they had a basis to work on. The Elder-Ones did tell us not to eat anything that reproduces sexually, but they said it more in the way of practical rather than religious advice. It’s an easy way of picking out the native fauna of the planet, all of which is poisonous to us. They also knew that Imprinters would be so rare they’d have a full-time job keeping up with the needs of the human population. Hence they arrived at only having cloned animals for food. What the Sisters made up was all the nonsense about
unique individuals having a soul and cloned ones not.”
“But...” Lynn started to say something and then stopped. Her head was still twisting the ideas around when they reached the bottom of the path to the upper valley and began the climb.
The trouble was that Gina made far more sense than the Sisters ever had. An Imprinter’s training included reading from the Elder-Ones’ books. It was essential to do her work. The Sisters did not like it; they would rather have given a censored version, but they did not understand what was involved well enough to know which sections of the books could be abridged safely. They settled for providing convoluted theological rationalizations for all the inconvenient parts of the books, parts such as mention of Y-chromosomes. Gina’s explanation was far more coherent. Even so, the moral step of imprinting animals for food was hard to contemplate.
“Are you still thinking?” Gina asked cheerfully.
“Yes. And I’m not convinced.”
“I could tell that from your face.” Gina stopped and pointed down at the various herds that were spread across the plain below. “Think about it. All of these animals are descended from gene stock the Elder-Ones brought from the home planet, where they had been bred for human use. Originally they reproduced sexually, just like the indigenous fauna here, so for maybe,” Gina shrugged, “thousands of years, our ancestors were quite happily eating unique creatures.”
“Then why is cloning humans banned?”
“In part, that’s a very easy question to answer. The Sisters get all their money from imprinting fees. They also get most of their power from having a monopoly on human reproduction. They’d be happier if they could keep the Cloners in the temples as well, but it’s not practical to have all the farm animals brought to them, so they have to let the Cloners travel freely. Their biggest threat is from a group like us, who move off into the wildlands with a Cloner, but the rebels would only last for one generation, as long as the Sisters impress on people that you must never, never, never clone a human. That’s why they drum the idea into people so hard. And very successful they are at it.” Gina gave a wry smile. “Even we heretics couldn’t quite bring ourselves to take the step, though we did discuss it a lot.”
“Didn’t the Elder-Ones ban human cloning?”
“Not entirely, although they thought it should only be done as a last resort.”
“Why?”
“Ah. Now we get to much trickier ground, and to be honest I don’t fully understand it. I don’t think any of us now can,” Gina said as she turned to continue walking up the slope. “But I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
“And...?”
Gina said nothing for a dozen steps and then she asked, “Have you ever wondered why we only imprint couples who are partners? Why a prospective mother doesn’t just choose the most intelligent or healthiest woman she knows and ask her to donate a few DNA sequences?”
“Er...no.” Lynn frowned, realizing that the idea had never even occurred to her before.
“Human beings are a pair-bonding species. In theory, that means a male and a female form a long-term bond that holds the couple together until the offspring produced by the union reach adulthood. In practice, it was never that straightforward. This planet is evidence that the human need to form pair bonds is completely unaffected by the absence of one sex. Pair bonding is the reason for the link between procreation and relationships; it’s a legacy from the Elder-Ones, though I’m not sure whether it’s cultural or innate. Whichever it is, I don’t think it’s possible for us to grasp all the”—Gina waved her hands—“symbolic importance our ancestors attached to their own sexual behavior. Just imagine, by the simple act of making love with your partner, you could produce a child. They combined all the irrationality of love with the mysticism of the creation of life.” Gina sighed. “All of which is a long, roundabout way of explaining why, when it got to human reproduction, the Elder-Ones could be arbitrary, illogical, and occasionally, totally inane. Cloning humans is a good example.”
“Which is your roundabout way of explaining why you don’t know the answer,” Lynn teased.
“Well, I did come across worries about rich egotists creating thousands of copies of themselves, but to be honest, it all read like the rationalizing of the Sisters. I think the reason for the ban was more of a gut feeling a child with only one genetic parent would be an attack on the sanctity of their dual-sex relationships.”
They reached the top of the path and passed under the gateway in the wall. Before them, the buildings of Westernfort nestled in the well-tended farmlands. Evening was close at hand and work was stopping for the day. People were drifting back from the distant fields. The light was softening to a golden glow, and the peacefulness of the scene carried Lynn’s thoughts along as she mulled over what Gina had said, trying to resolve the conflicts between logic and ethics.
They were halfway between wall and village when the crunching of gravel alerted them to someone overtaking them on the road. Lynn glanced over her shoulder, and her mood of tranquil reflection evaporated. At first, it seemed as if Kim would walk past with only a word of acknowledgment, then she appeared to change her mind and slowed down to match Gina’s limping gait. Lynn averted her face and fixed her eyes on the distant ranks of fir trees, while she made sure her expression was under control. She was certain it was not mere chance that Kim had tagged on beside Gina rather than her when joining them to walk three abreast.
“You’ve been looking at the animals?” Kim asked in the rigid tones of someone straining to be casual.
Gina glanced at Lynn before answering. “Yes. We were down there talking to Lilian.”
“You’ll be starting cloning soon?”
“In a couple of months.”
Again Lynn had ignored the chance to answer, and an awkward silence fell on the group. She was aware of Gina glancing in her direction, as if waiting for her to speak. But eventually the elderly heretic carried on. “In fact, I was talking to Lynn about imprinting the animals rather than cloning. It’s our chance to improve the livestock. What do you think people would feel about it?”
“You can answer for the heretics better than me. But some of the Rangers wouldn’t be at all happy. I don’t think I’d be totally easy myself,” Kim said after a little thought.
“And that still goes for you, Lynn?” Gina’s head turned to the other side.
“Er...Yes.”
“So how about horses? Do you think you could ride something with a soul?” Gina was clearly fighting to keep the conversation going, but no one spoke until Gina elbowed Kim to get a reply.
“Um...maybe...probably. Most Rangers credit their horses with human personalities as it is.”
“And Lynn, you’d be happy doing the imprinting?”
“Yes, well...happier.”
The silence returned, worse than before, but to Lynn’s relief, they reached the first of the buildings and Kim turned off toward the hut she shared with nine other Rangers. The two other women walked across the central square of the village and entered the stone house. Inside the common room, the two residents whose turn it was to cook supper were busy at the hearth. Lynn gave a hasty wave of greeting and headed for her own room, but Gina caught her arm.
“Have you got time to talk?”
Gina’s question was verging on the rhetorical. Lynn shrugged by way of answer but made no other comment as she was guided into the room Gina shared with her partner. In recognition of her status as leader and the difficulty she had getting up from the floor, the village carpenters had made Gina a raised bed. It was the only item of private furniture to be found in Westernfort. Gina took a seat on the edge then pulled Lynn down beside her and said, “You know, it’s really hard work keeping a conversation going between three people when two of them won’t talk to each other.”
“I’m sorry. I had my mind on other things.” Lynn made the uninspired excuse.
“Obviously.”
Lynn stared morosely at the floor, although she could fee
l Gina’s eyes on her. The silence dragged on for such a long time that Lynn jumped when Gina spoke again. “The Elder-Ones’ attitude toward relationships has implications for more than just cloning.”
“Oh, does it?” Lynn tried to sound interested.
“Even when there were two sexes, people didn’t always take someone from the other sex as a partner. When you start thinking it through, the whole thing becomes very confusing, and the Elder-Ones were just as confused as me, although in totally different ways and about completely different things. As I said, it’s impossible for us to fully understand their viewpoint. For us, it makes no sense to even start asking whether relationships between women are legitimate, but for the Elder-Ones, it was an issue. Some thought it morally wrong, and at times during the history of the home planet, two people of the same sex who were lovers could be executed for it.”
“Executed!” Despite herself, Lynn’s attention was caught.
“It was an extreme response. Usually people were a tad more easygoing.”
“But when they planned this world, didn’t they...” Lynn’s voice trailed off in bewilderment.
“Think?” Gina laughed as she finished the sentence for her. “Some did and some didn’t. And at the time the Elder-Ones left the home planet, society was far more tolerant. Even between the Elder-Ones, attitudes differed. It’s one of the things Peter McKay talks about in his diary. He thought same-sex relationships were all perfectly okay and normal, whereas others thought them slightly undesirable, and some were even less happy than that. I’m afraid Himoti herself was in the last group. Peter McKay admitted he was baffled by her, but there’s evidence in his diary that the imposition of celibacy on her followers was due solely to Himoti’s personal dislike of same-sex pairings.” Gina looked soberly at Lynn. “Which is another very roundabout way of saying that I don’t think there is any reason for you not to have a lover.”
“Oh.” Lynn’s eyes returned to the floor, while a miserable frown creased her face.
The Temple at Landfall Page 23