Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “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 increase 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 cyanobacteria 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 die 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 folióse 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 cloud 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!”

  Their shocked faces brought her to herself. The violence in her own mind and voice frightened her. Anger was an emotion she had avoided all her life, but now she was drowning in it, unable to keep from screaming at them, “You asked if I’d seen. Well I’ve seen one thing quite clearly, and that is that while all this bloodletting and killing has gone on, you’ve stood by and let it happen. No matter what excuses you make, that’s what you’ve done!”

  Melanie began to stammer something, but Genevieve could not bear their shocked and angry faces or her own burning rage. She fled past them, pushing them aside, and went back to her own little cell, where she struggled with the sliding door in her attempt to slam it, finally jamming it half closed before she threw herself facedown onto her pillow and wept herself exhaustedly to sleep.

  In the night, Genevieve woke to find Melanie sitting beside her bed, eyes closed, hands relaxed in her lap.

  Her anger had not left her in the night. She murmured, half-resentfully, “Why are you here, Melanie?”

  “I came to be with you. I thought you might be lonely.”

  She laughed, still angrily. “Oh, Melanie. Yes, I’m lonely, but you don’t fill my empty niches. You’re not husband or baby, so you won’t do. Just go away.”

  “I thought we might talk.”

  “About what? Religion, Melanie?”

  “Didn’t your mother ever talk to you about religion?”

  “She did, yes. She said it was important to be seen being pious. She quoted the covenants to me, about purity of soul. Women, she said, were required to be pure of soul.”

  “That’s … rather what I wanted to talk about.”

  Genevieve sat up, not as annoyed as she pretended to be, surprised to find herself slightly curious. “It seems you won’t be satisfied until you do! I’ll listen, but that’s all I’ll guarantee.”

  Melanie refolded her hands, took a deep breath, and said, “The difference between our belief and the belief you were reared in is this: We don’t believe people have individual souls. We believe living worlds have souls. We believe that all the species of life that have ever lived on a world are part of the soul of that world.”

  “Stephanie’s book said something of that.”

  “In the old language we call it te wairua taiao—the world spirit. It starts out small and simple, and it grows and develops and learns as billions of years go by, becoming old and wise. It’s of the world, our teachers say, an inevitable result of a living world, and it doesn’t die when the world dies. It separates itself and goes elsewhere.”

  “Stephanie’s book said that,” Genevieve remarked, with something almost like amusement. “I discussed it with a strange little man named Jeorfy Bottoms, and we decided it was a concept one might accept, philosophically.”

  Stubbornly, Melanie went on: “The world-soul includes every living creature that has ever been on the planet, every microbe, every animal, every tree, not as individuals, but as races, and at any time upon any planet, some of those races are harbingers …”

  “Harbingers?”

  “Indicators. Signifiers. You know … if you dig in your garden, the soil is full of worms.”

  “If it’s good soil.”

  “Exactly. If there are lots of worms, you know it’s good soil. The worms are … harbingers of the health of the soil. So, on any given planet there are harbingers. If they are alive and healthy, then that planet is also alive and healthy. If the harbingers are dying or dead, then the planet will surely die.”

  “Then mankind couldn’t have been à harbinger, for Earth died even though men were many.”

  Melanie’s mouth twisted. “You’re baiting me. You know Earthmen had no regard for other species. Even though it was the only soul they had, Earthmen evicted the soul of the Earth and moved out into space from a dead planet.”

  “So what are they now?”

  Melanie sighed. “A friend of ours calls them irrelevant intellects.”

  “And all this time that I’ve worried over the state of my soul, I shouldn’t have bothered,” Genevieve said angrily.

  Melanie sighed, moving restlessly in the chair. She said soothingly, “There’s a little story my mother used to tell me about Haven. A scrutator was sailing on Merdune Lagoon, and caught by a great fish who threatened to eat him, and the scrutator said it didn’t matter, for his soul would go to heaven. And the fish asked him, ‘When your soul gets to heaven, what will it say to enlighten the universe?’ The scrutator said he wasn’t that wise, and the fish said, ‘You’d better learn wisdom while you’re on the way down my gullet, because wisdom is the only thing that unlocks the gates of heaven.’”

  “What else did your mother tell you?” Genevieve asked, suddenly intrigued.

  “She told me that among the billions and billions of human beings, perhaps a few know some little thing of inter
est to the universe, and those few men are the leavening of mankind. Most men don’t know anything except myths and manners. She told me only the wholeness of a world that has lived for billions of years can speak to the universe about anything meaningful. Men’s lives are part of that, of course, and the wiser men become, the more they learn about the universe, the greater part they are, which is an incentive to study, so far as I’m concerned. If my life is a part of the world-soul, it is truly immortal.”

  “And what have harbingers to do with it?”

  “They’re just indicators. Like warning lights. Or alarm bells. They’re born naturally, and they die naturally. They don’t seek long life. Sometimes they’re killed, but they don’t look for unnatural ways to protect themselves. If a harbinger hunts, it hunts with what nature gave it. Sometimes it eats the prey. Sometimes the prey eats it. Harbingers don’t play it safe, they adhere to the chain of life, and if the chain is healthy, so are they.”

  Genevieve closed her eyes, going inside herself to another place. Melanie’s words resonated. Someone had said something like this to her before. Mother? Who else could it have been? “But if each living world has a spirit, didn’t you simply invade another spirit’s territory when you came here?”

  “Spirits aren’t territorial, they’re inclusive. One joining another is like immigrants coming to a new land. They change the society, yes, but they broaden it and add to its wisdom. The spirit of Haven, the world, was not identical to the spirit of Earth that arrived with the creatures in the ark ship, but when the two united, the resultant spirit was not dichotomous.”

  Genevieve rubbed her forehead wearily. “Melanie, I know you want me to believe all this, but it seems little different from the religious stories we learned in school, esoteric and relatively pointless. I can believe your people came here to preserve Êarthian species that were in danger of extinction. I believe that’s why people on Old Earth built the ark fleet. I believe you are sincerely religious, and I concede that your religious interpretation of what happened might be true, but I haven’t even sorted out the beliefs I was brought up to! I’ve no inclination toward adopting a new credo just now unless I have to.”