Pandora's Genes (20 page)

“Stay away from her,” said the Mistress, her voice as harsh as his. “You cannot have her – ever. Not without risking everything. We will never let you take her, do you understand?”

“Suppose she comes to me willingly?”

The old woman smiled and looked straight at him. “That will never happen,” she said. “Evvy has become a Daughter of the Garden.”

The Principal spat, then abruptly stood. “You’ve won for now, old woman. I have urgent business and little time to think of the girl. But I tell you this. I have an idea who she is, and if I’m right, nothing on this earth – not the Garden and all its Daughters – will keep me from her.” He rose, then bowed, in a sarcastic way. “Good night. I will see you at the new Garden.”

He strode rapidly away, toward the men’s camp. Evvy, her heart pounding furiously, scampered back to the wagon as quickly as she could.

For many hours she lay with her eyes open, listening to the sounds of the night. Over and over she saw the Principal’s face, smiling openly, then contorted with rage. She heard his voice, his breath, his laugh. The images were so intense that she felt as if he were not in the men’s camp but here, in the wagon, beside her.

M
OST OF THE LEAVES HAD
fallen, forming a thick, crisp carpet on the forest floor. The air was chilled and invigorating, and the Principal had to consciously guard against pushing his mount too fast. He was impatient and curious, wondering why he had suddenly been summoned to the new Garden.

He had not visited since the women had moved in, two years ago. Although he had been in frequent communication with them by writing, he had found excuses to avoid any contact, and, besides, in truth he had been busier these two years than ever before in his rule.

The Capital was now a thriving city, and he could no longer oversee the administration of all basic services. This meant training others to do the work for him. He had also started a school for teachers and healers, overseeing and in some cases creating the curricula himself. Even more time-consuming had been the constant training of new troops, some to man the increasingly important outlying fortresses, including the old Garden; others for police duty in the Capital, where they were charged with keeping order and arresting the growing number of Trader proselytizers.

He had also traveled a good bit in these two years: he had journeyed to the sparsely populated, bat-ridden northlands, where he reaffirmed his uneasy truce with the Governor of the North, an educated old man of little vision, who ran a feudal-like system and who welcomed the Principal as an ally against the Traders, who had begun to move into the north too. Afterwards, for several months, he had led an expensive and fruitless expedition of exploration into the unmapped areas of the west where the Traders were believed to originate, finding nothing but ignorant, unkempt nomadic tribes, many of whom followed the new religion. Of organized structure or religious leaders there had been no trace, though the primitive peoples his troops encountered seemed more resistant to the ideas of civilization than even the people of the District had when he had first assumed control. The movement seemed to have sprung up everywhere at once like mushrooms after a rain, with no order or direction.

Unfortunately, the Traders’ beliefs were taking hold in the Capital, and discouraging them consumed more energy every day. His subjects seemed eager at the least excuse to give up every vestige not only of civilization but of common sense. He had always had difficulty persuading the people of the Capital to bathe, to dispose of their waste in places other than the drinking-water supply, to attend the literacy classes which he encouraged by forgiving a part of taxes owed. There had been more resistance to all these since the Traders had come into the District with their doctrines equating cleanliness with godlessness, technology with the devil, and knowledge with damnation. It was as if all of mankind had suddenly chosen to return to the Dark Ages; but this was worse, because the knowledge existed, though it was no longer widely known, of the consequences of poor hygiene.

The Principal knew from his reading that it had taken hundreds of years for a few forward-looking scientists to persuade their peers to accept the theory of the bacterial spread of diseases, that as recently as two centuries ago people had died in great centers of healing, called hospitals, because doctors would not wash their hands. Today, the majority of the people in the District did not know the most elementary rules of hygiene, and those who had heard of them avoided them as evil mistakes of the past.

The theory of disease was well known to the Principal and Zach: as young boys in the Garden they had looked through ancient microscopes at the small creatures which lived in a drop of sweat or pus, and even in well water. At the time, both the Principal and Zach had been terrified of the small creatures, thinking them the personifications of wild deenas. It was only their systematic education in the Garden which had prevented the Principal and Zach from succumbing to the same superstitions and fears which made the lives of most citizens of the District more miserable than necessary.

In one respect only had the situation improved: after being repulsed several times by the soldiers at the old Garden, the Traders had given up armed attacks anywhere in the outlying parts of the District. The Principal liked to think that their militant arm had been defeated, but it seemed more likely they had simply changed tactics. Another western expedition would have to be mounted sooner or later to find the elusive heart of the Trader empire and cut it out.

At least he wouldn’t hear Trader nonsense at the Garden. Perhaps this thought accounted for his strangely buoyant mood. Not one of his men shared his concerns and goals in the same way Zach had, not even Daniel, the best-educated of his generals. There was no one he could discuss these things with, really, except for the women of the Garden.

There was a sharp smell of wood smoke, and his field headquarters, which guarded the neck of the peninsula, appeared. Leaving his escort, he rode the few remaining miles alone.

Again he tried to guess why the women might have summoned him so urgently. He realized he should long since have paid a courtesy call. Still, he doubted they expected courtesy of him, and on his part the thought of seeing the old woman again constricted his throat with remembered rage. He could still see her hateful, gloating face in the firelight the night she had informed him that Evvy had become a Daughter of the Garden.

The image of the girl, with her astonishing eyes, had appeared to him often in dreams and reverie. It was a neat trap: he owned her – he was certain of it – but he could never, without abandoning his greater concerns, have her.

He spat, as if to remove a bad taste. Well, two years had passed and no doubt she would now be too old for his needs. Seeing her again would be just the thing to rid him of his desire for her.

His compulsions, in any case, seemed to come upon him less and less. In the time since the move, he had had very few girls; none now for several months. In the mornings when he looked into the mirror, he saw gray strands in his hair; perhaps he was at last maturing, outgrowing the ruinous obsession that had controlled him for so long.

The new Garden had been transformed since he was last here. His men had repaired all cracks in the walls and the houses, and the women had planted and tended the gardens and orchards. Though the crops had long since been harvested and the ground was bare, save for stubble and brown leaves, there was a feeling of vitality and growth here.

The Principal stood by the gate, while the guard, a heavy, awkward girl with a sallow complexion, ran off to summon the mayor. The late fall breeze brought the fresh scent of fish and salt from the bay, and he breathed it deeply, remembering again the week that he and Zach had spent here, planning their final assault on the Capital, knowing that this time they would succeed or die. It was astonishing how memories of Zach continued to turn up unbidden, three years since his death. In spite of the finality of the burial, the Principal still found himself listening for Zach’s quiet knock at the private door to his office, or for the haunting music of his feathered lyre. The Principal wondered if he would ever stop missing him.

He was brought to himself by the sound of a door slamming. A familiar figure crossed the wooden porch and strode along the carefully tended path.

“Good day to you,” said Katha, her face carefully expressionless.

“And to you.”

“The Mistress is anxious to speak with you. After you’ve cleaned up and rested, I’ll take you to her.”

Without another word she led him around the great stone house to a small wooden outbuilding.

The Mistress’s room was in the basement of the main house. Like her old cabin, it was dark and stuffy, dimly lit by flickering fish-oil lamps.

The old woman was lying on a long wooden cot, bundled in blankets and propped up with pillows. She looked as if she had aged ten years in the two that she had been living here. Her skin was yellowed and hung in folds; even her eyes seemed to have lost their fire. He was shocked and tried not to let his face show it.

“Good afternoon, Will,” she said, as if she had last seen him just a day or so ago.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m sorry to see you’re not well.”

She snorted. “It’s obvious that I’m dying, though I don’t know how long it will take. It’s some form of cancer, I think. They could probably have cured it before the Change, but I don’t mind. I’ve lived far longer than I ever expected to.”

He felt strangely moved by the news of her approaching death. At other times in his life he had wished for nothing so intensely, but now it hurt to see her so obviously weak and sick.

“This is why you summoned me,” he said.

She shook her head impatiently. “I can die very well without your company.”

He held in his anger, pity for her pain restraining him.

She continued, her voice surprisingly strong. “I called you here because we need your help. I must explain some things to you myself.”

He relaxed. It was to be a matter of business, then. In other matters, except for brief moments, usually with Zach’s intervention, they had never communicated except through a veil of mutual irritation.

Her face clenched then as a wave of pain passed over her, and he looked away until it had passed. This room was more cluttered even than the old one; from the dust on the instruments and books he guessed she had been too ill to work for some time.

“This new site has worked out well,” she said, as if from a great distance. “At first, as you know, we objected to having your soldiers stationed so close by, but in the long run it has proved convenient in many ways.”

“So I hear.”

“You’ve heard that some of our women have mated with the soldiers, and that is true. It was most inconvenient for us to move when we did, and lose the services of the local men. But your camp provides us with a far greater selection for our breeding experiments.” She paused, then raised her head and moved it toward him. Automatically he leaned down, his eyes going to her thin lips to help him understand what she had to say next. “We believe that we have taken the first step in eradicating the woman sickness.”

“What!”

She nodded several times, her lips smacking together between words as she continued. “We were working on it when you forced us to move. That was one reason for our opposition, though we could not tell you then. Do you remember the large number of women who were pregnant when you came to the Garden two years ago?”

“At the time it seemed unusual.”

“We’ve long known that the illness is sex-linked, passed on by both parents but attacking only women. As you know, some women develop it early in life and some never do; and usually it kills a woman and her child upon the birth of her second daughter.”

The Principal frowned. “As I remember it, the trait is believed to be carried on the female sex chromosome.”

“Yes, the X chromosome. As nearly as we can tell, only those women who have received the trait on both their X chromosomes ever actually develop the disease.”

“But those who have received the trait from just one parent could pass it on to their children?”

She nodded. “Since men have only one X chromosome, any man who carries the trait will pass it on to each of his daughters. A woman carrier’s children will have a fifty-fifty chance of receiving it from her.” She lay back and rested a moment, then went on, almost briskly. “All of this has been known – or assumed – for years. What we did not know was how the disease actually operated. About four years ago, old Alison got the idea that the disease was autoimmune, that somehow the women who became ill were reacting to something in femaleness itself. That the first affected girl-child would set up the sensitivity, and the second cause the illness to appear. Alison developed a serum from the blood of women who had died of the sickness, and we tested it on all the members of the Garden. Those who had more than one daughter did not show a reaction, but many with one daughter or no children or only sons developed a swelling at the site of the inoculation.”

“Meaning that they carry the trait?”

“We can’t be sure that the test shows carriers. But we are becoming quite certain that it indicates those women who have the trait on both X chromosomes.” She raised herself on her elbows, her pale eyes glittering with excitement. “Will, since we began testing, we have allowed no women to mate except those who showed no reaction to the skin test. There have been thirty-six normal pregnancies in that time, half of them of girl-children, and no one has died of the sickness.” She lay back, her face exhausted and triumphant.

The Principal caught her excitement. The details would have to be worked out, but clearly this work held the answer to the greatest threat ever to face humanity. Leaping into the future, his imagination saw that cooperation between him and the women of the Garden would indeed change the course of history, and that his name in future books would not be a footnote, but would be written large, as the savior of all mankind. So lost was he in this dream that he had to ask the old woman to repeat what she had just said in her feeble voice.