by Dawn Cook
“So, tell me, dearie.” Mav touched Alissa’s arm. “What did you do to calm the old beast down so quickly? I thought he would be raving all night.” She turned over six cards in the center of the table, and Connen-Neute chuckled for some reason.
“He wasn’t mad about Sati,” Alissa admitted, “but about me bruising my tracings.”
From behind his desk, Redal-Stan gave a grunt. Slowly he turned, the inspection of his hand apparently forgotten. “Sati?” he said. “What about Shaduf Sati?”
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Alissa’s eyes went wide, Connen-Neute lost his grin, and Mav sucked in her breath. “Um,” Alissa stammered.
“Can’t you ever keep your mouth shut?” Beast said dryly in Alissa’s thoughts.
“Alissa?” Redal-Stan said warily.
Quick, old fingers gathered the cards up in a tidy pile. “I think I’ll be going now,” Mav said as she slipped her cards into her pocket and stood.
Connen-Neute rose, gulping his tea in a single, hurried swallow. Redal-Stan loomed behind his desk. “Alissa?”
“Good night, dearie,” whispered Mav. She gave Alissa a pitying glance and left, not even taking the time to gather the plates and cups.
“Good luck, rather.” Connen-Neute edged out after her.
Alissa stood, feeling rather sick. “I should go, too. Good night, Redal-Stan.”
“What about Shaduf Sati?” Redal-Stan came out from around his desk, standing so close she fell back onto the couch.
“Um, she’s a nice lady,” Alissa offered.
“Nice lady! You met her? How could you stand it?” He paused, his eyes going wide in a sudden thought. “You didn’t . . .” he whispered, and Alissa shrank into herself. “Alissa,” he said. “Please tell me you didn’t.”
She bit her lip, miserably looking at her shoes.
There was a sigh as Redal-Stan fell heavily into Mav’s chair. “Wolves,” he breathed. Alissa looked up, afraid of what she might see. But he had no expression, staring at the moths hammering at his globe of light. “How did you keep her intact through the pain?” he asked.
“I—we took most of its echo,” Alissa said in a small voice.
“We? You mean Beast?” he asked, and Alissa nodded. “Wolves take you, Beast.”
“It was—uh—a selective burn,” Alissa offered. “That lessened the pain dramatically.”
Redal-Stan’s eyes looked flat and unreal, and she shivered. “You asked to see a resonance?” he said in a monotone, and she nodded. His reaction was frightening her.
“You tripped the lines?” he asked, and she nodded again. “Whose death did you see?”
“Ese’Nawoer’s,” she whispered.
“Wolves.” He sat quietly, not moving at all. Moth shadows fluttered over his face. “I should have gone to watch you myself. I thought Connen-Neute was mature enough to not allow music to distract him so thoroughly.” He turned his tired eyes to hers. “Can’t I let you out of my sight for even one evening without you destroying something?”
Alissa felt a flush of shame, then squelched it, replacing it with a more familiar defiance. “She asked for a burn. Demanded it. She was going to lose her mind.” Alissa steeled herself, preparing for a loud, aggressive lecture, but Redal-Stan seemed to grow more despondent.
“I’m not going to argue the morality of capitalizing upon her misaligned neural net,” he said heavily. “It’s an old argument, one never resolved.”
Alissa stiffened. Sati was right! They had bred the woman into existence, like a better sheep with thicker wool.
“All that work,” he breathed, his eyes fixed into infinity. “Six generations of study and observation—useless.” Unaware of Alissa’s anger, he rose and went behind his desk. Taking a large book from a stack, he set it before him with a spiritless thump and waved the moths from his light. Still standing, he leafed through the book. “Burn it to ash. There’s no question now as to allowing the Stryska line to produce a replacement. This is worse and worse.”
“Ren was right,” she said sharply. “We’re nothing but broodmares and stallions to you!”
“Broodmares?” Redal-Stan’s head came up, his brow furrowed. “Do you have any idea the time and effort it takes to build a profile on just one family line? You have to go back generations to catch sight of those cursed recessive traits, and then not even know for sure if they’re there in their descendants. Then,” he slammed his book shut, “there’s always the joy of trying to work around what some stubborn Keeper wants to do, and you warn them, but do they listen? No-o-o-o. So you end up with shadufs popping up all over the place!”
Beast came to the forefront, her outrage temporally overshadowing Alissa. “You tell them who they may join with and if they may engender offspring?” she exclaimed through Alissa. Then Beast stopped short, apologized to Alissa, and hid herself.
He strode to a stack of books and snatched one. “If only it were that easy, Beast.” His attention on the yellow pages, he returned to his desk. “Ash-laden moths,” he muttered. Gathering them up in a field, he bodily threw them over the balcony railing. “We do have some scruples. Keepers have children with whom they want, but you try keeping an accurate profile of even half the population at risk.”
“Risk?” Alissa whispered, her outrage hesitating.
“I’ll admit we discourage or occasionally prevent certain joinings.” Redal-Stan sat down and looked up from his book. “You’ve got it wrong, Alissa, for the most part, anyway. We aren’t trying to engender shadufs. We’re trying to minimize them. Mostly.”
“Then you do admit to manipulating the population!” she accused hotly.
Redal-Stan gave her a dry look from under his brow. “Let me explain. Obviously Talo-Toecan hasn’t, and I can’t allow you to run about with dangerous information unless you understand the whole of it. A little wisdom in your hands is a threat to civilization.” He ran a peeved glance over his desk. “Where’s my writing board?” he grumbled, then swept an arm to shove everything but his light to one end. Glancing up, he noticed she hadn’t moved. “I’m not angry about Shaduf Sati. No one told you not to. We’ll leave it at that.”
Still Alissa sat, fuming. Redal-Stan had plucked a quill and ink pot from the mess and was scribbling on a sheet of paper. His brown eyes rose to hers. “You do want to know the difference between a Keeper and Master, don’t you?”
Despite her ire, she dragged Mav’s chair closer.
“Now.” He looked up. “You grew up on a farm. Do you know the practical side of animal husbandry?” Alissa nodded, and he steepled his fingers. “White hen, red rooster give you red and white chicks, not pink, right?”
“Yes.” Alissa sat straighter. “But it varies with the two chickens. Sometimes the chicks are all red, and when any white do show up, it’s usually about half.”
“Half, eh? Very astute. What about two red chickens? What does that give you?”
Alissa shrugged. “All red, usually. Sometimes a quarter of them are white.”
“A quarter.” He gave a satisfied grunt and leaned forward. “Want to know why?”
Shoulders shifting in surrender, she put her elbows on his desk. Chuckling, he took his quill and scribbled some more. “This,” he said, shoving the paper at her, “is our key.”
She picked it up and read, “RR is red; rr is white; Rr is red carrying the masked—” She hesitated at the unfamiliar word, never having seen it before.
“Allele,” Redal-Stan prompted.
“Carrying the masked allele for white,” she continued, hoping he would explain. She let the paper fall. “I don’t get it.”
He paused in thought. “Every living thing has instructions for mass. Uh, for the way it looks. For reasons I don’t want to go into, these countless instructions just happen to come in pairs. Now, when I say pairs, I don’t mean the separate parts of the pair are identical. That chicken, for example, can either be red or white.”
“All right,” she said, wondering what he was talking about. He p
ushed her cup at her, and she took it, warming her fingers.
“A white chicken is white because both parts of that pair tell it to be.” He circled the rr.
“Why not write it as W?” she asked.
“It just isn’t. Don’t interrupt. A red chicken is written as RR, or Rr.” He circled them. “Now let’s say we have a white hen and a red rooster.”
Alissa leaned forward watching him scribble rr x RR.
“Their chicks need only one pair of instructions, so they get a half from each parent.”
Alissa squinted at the paper. “Wouldn’t having both pairs be better?”
“No. Trust me on this.” She made a face and he added, “So all our chicks get an R from their sire, and an r from their dam.”
Alissa looked to where he had enthusiastically scribbled Rr. “They would be red, right?” she said, glancing at the key. “Even though half the—uh—pair tells them to be white?”
“Yes!” He smiled as if she had said something clever. “The white instruction is weaker than the red. It’s recessive, overpowered by the other. Even though the chick looks red, half its instructions tell it to be white. The white won’t show up in the chicken, but if it passes its white instruction to its offspring, they might be white.”
Her brow pinched. “What does this have to do with Masters and Keepers?”
He blew out a slow breath and waved at a moth. “It’s more complex than that,” he admitted. “Though the Masters would like to deny it, the difference between a Master and a Keeper is small. Only three pairs of those untold number of instructions are critical to transcending a human background and becoming a raku. Get those in the proper configuration, and the rest can be smoothed out in the first shift.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “That’s why I had to bind Talo-Toecan’s nail the first time. His instructions were in it, weren’t they?”
Redal-Stan nodded. “Yes. The three pairs of instructions, or alleles, rather, concern the complexity of your neural net. They’re called P, C, and F.”
“Plains, coastal, and foothills,” she guessed.
“Ah, yes.” He shifted uneasily and reached for his cup. “The plains are unusually numerous with the recessive p instruction, the foothills in the f, and so on. A raku is recessive in all three and is written thus.” He scribbled, ppccff. “That’s what is known as a signature. If you have even one dominant instruction, you aren’t a raku, or Master, rather.”
“So my signature is ppccff,” Alissa said hesitantly.
He grinned, showing his teeth. “Since before you were born. Keepers have two dominant instructions fouling up their neural nets. Any two. It doesn’t matter which. Three or more creates so much chaos in their tracings that they’re a commoner.”
Deep in thought, Alissa sipped her tea. “What do you get when there is only one strong instruction messing up their tracings? A very powerful Keeper?”
Redal-Stan shook his head. “It’s called dominant, Alissa, not strong. If it’s C or P, you get a shaduf. A single dominant F gives you a septhama.” He shuddered in mock horror. “Very rare, almost as rare as you, and just as much trouble.”
“So,” Alissa said softly, ignoring the small jibe. “Sati was almost a Master.”
Stretching for more tea, Redal-Stan cleared his throat nervously. “No. Sati was an unhappy accident. Highly unlikely, but it happens when Keepers are stubborn.”
“An accident you capitalized upon,” Alissa accused.
He sighed in exasperation. “Should I have gone to her parents and forbid them to wed?”
“Yes!” she cried, then dropped her gaze. “No, I guess not.”
“See? It’s difficult.” Redal-Stan settled back to prop his feet upon his desk in an unmasterly fashion. “Her mother was a Keeper. She had been told of the risks, though not the reasoning behind them. It was far more likely she would have commoner or Keeper children. The calculations are hard, even when having followed the family lines as far back as I have. Except in the obvious case of a shaduf, you can’t tell if someone is carrying recessive alleles unless they pair up. You can’t see it hiding behind a dominant allele. That is, except in the coastal allele. Those function together as codominant. The phenotypic expression of the alleles show a blend of the phenotype rather than the dominant masking the recessive.”
Wishing he would stop talking, Alissa put a hand to her head and sighed. Codominant. Phenotypic alleles? Expressions? Did he really expect her to remember all this? she thought.
“Uh,” he amended. “Neither of the two kinds of instruction is dominant over the other. It would be like getting pink chicks from red and white parents.”
“Then why didn’t you just say that?” she muttered under her breath, then louder, “What about septhamas? Can you spot them?”
Redal-Stan shook his head. “No, unfortunately. That single dominant F throws their tracings so far from ours that their neural net looks like a commoner’s. That’s why they don’t make us ill with half-resonances as shadufs do. Several appear every century, throwing off everyone’s expected ratios. We usually find them by an upsurge of Keepers in a family line that was expected to produce commoners.” Redal-Stan grimaced. “They’re nothing but trouble. The only reliable way to spot a recessive instruction is when they pair up. That can be seen.”
“Like white chickens,” Alissa said, thinking she might be starting to understand. She stretched for the teapot and refilled her tiny cup. “What do people with a double weak pair look like?” she asked, warming the cup with a quick ward.
“It’s called a double recessive, Alissa,” he said irately, “not a double weak pair. But to answer your question, what a person looks like depends on which pair you’re referring to.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m not going to tell you.”
Alissa frowned, and Redal-Stan arched his nonexistent eyebrows, daring her to push the issue. “I,” he boasted, “remember Ese’Nawoer’s population when it was a small cluster of huts about a central community fire. Except for the newer families, I can tell you who has the potential for carrying a hidden recessive trait. It helps tremendously in calculating the expected probabilities for the next generation of Keepers. You, for instance, were probably a one in sixty-four, possibly one in thirty-two.” He took his feet from his desk and put them on the floor. “Highly unlikely. But I’m surprised they allowed your parents to have any children.”
“Allowed!” Alissa said, her anger flooding back. “You’re all self-serving hypocrites.”
He shook his head in exasperation. “Let me tell you a story before you judge,” he said quietly, his eyes falling from hers. “When the first of my line of teachers was young, younger than you, she existed on the coast before being recognized for her potential and rescued.”
Rescued? Alissa thought. “She was born human?” she asked, not needing to see his nod.
“Her name was Mirim, and she was the first human to manage the shift to Master. All the human folk were on the coast at that time,” he said. “The mountains and plains belonged to the Masters. It was their playground—theirs and the feral beasts. There were lots of them, as it had recently been discovered how to shift to a human form. Losses were high until they got it right.”
He paused, and his voice was somber when he next spoke. “The genetic heritage of the coastal people at that time was diverse, much as Ese’Nawoer is today. But there were untold thousands more. I’ve made a study concerning Mirim’s memories, and it was a horrendous existence. No one bothered to instruct the latent Keepers. Some knew how to use their tracings. Taught one another stolen resonances. More often then not, a power-hungry Keeper slaughtered the one who taught him to prevent a future betrayal.” His eyes went sorrowful. “Without the teachings of control and restraint, they made a shambles of their society.”
“Wars?” she asked hesitantly.
He shook his head. “Wars are at least organized. It was more of a continuous multifront battle that ebbed and flowed with the seasons. The common folk suffered
the most.” Redal-Stan watched the moths battling his light. “The Masters had a practice of making forays into the safer areas—smaller towns, a fishing district on market day—and finding as many rogue Keepers as they could. Then they’d burn their tracings to ash to try to break the cycle. That’s how they found Mirim.”
He looked up. “Her townsfolk had beaten her and left her for the crabs and tide. They beat an eight-year-old nigh to death when someone caught her playing with fields. They would rather see her dead then grow up to join the ranks of the tyrants that stole their food, burned their homes, and assaulted their wives and daughters.”
Alissa swallowed, imagining being beaten for playing with fields.
“When they discovered her tracings were perfect, the Masters didn’t burn her network. Instead they took her in, tended her broken body, and eventually gave her a source. When she got older, she managed the jump to Master, then went on to write the book of First Truth.”
She shivered, never knowing where the wisdom had come from before. Her hands trembled as she reached for her cup.
Redal-Stan eyed her from under his nonexistent brows. “Mirim shifting into a raku threw their beliefs of superiority into chaos,” he said. “Their ‘pet’ had to be taken seriously, and it caused a savage rift in the conclave, the echoes of which we’re still battling today.” Again Redal-Stan gathered the moths in a field, watching them through his fingers. “Somehow the Keepers discovered the origins of source and that it made them stronger,” he said as he rose and went to the balcony. “They began to lure feral beasts. Rope it. Kill it. Burn it. Bind the ash.”
Alissa sat in a horrified silence, her fingers gripped tightly about her cup.
“They only knew it gave them more strength. They didn’t know why. Thankfully they were able to retain only a small amount of source for all their efforts. Most would have been lost to the wind. It takes a special field to capture the source from a death pyre without snuffing out the flames that free it.” He released the moths, turning to give Alissa a thin smile. “Only a few Masters every generation bother to cultivate the concentration necessary for such a skill.”
