Seeklight

All the way through the fields, as Daenek followed the mertzer along the narrow path, neither said a word. The rustling of the yellow stalks under the sun was the only sound, until the house was hidden from view by the curve of the hill. The village lay against the foot of the hill far below, “You’d better go back,” said Stepke.

Another few seconds of silence passed as Daenek glanced at the man’s face, then across the bending fields. “Why do things ran down?” he said finally. The question had been moving slowly through him since the mertzer had spoken of the Lady Marche.

“And people? Why can’t they stay the same, instead of everything falling apart?”

“Maybe,” said the mertzer softly, “the sociologists would know for sure. But—” He paused and ran his blunt fingers through his beard. “I heard, a long time ago, about something called the Dark Seed.”

Daenek sensed the other’s reluctance to begin the long walk, alone, down the hillside to the village. He waited for him to speak again.

Abstracted, the mertzer’s gaze wandered over the fields. “Back when I lived in the Capitol, before I signed on the caravans, I heard about how the seed-ships came all the way here from old Earth—do you know about that? Do they ever talk about it in these parts?”

Daenek nodded. “A little.”

“And when the ships came,” continued Stepke slowly, pulling on his beard, “there weren’t people aboard. No, just the priests, that were made on Earth to pilot the ships and take care of the cargo. The cargo was machinery, so delicate and precise that it had to be shielded from any slow leakage of radiation, and one small box less than a meter wide. The priests took the box from the little niche it had been crammed into in one of the closely packed ships. Inside the box was human genetic material—the cellular blueprints for an entire population to be started on this world. The priests took the fertilized ova, fed it into their precious machinery, and began cloning—do you know what that is?”

His forehead furrowed with concentration, Daenek shook his head.

“Cloning is a way of making many individuals from the same ovum, the same genetic material. You see, the seedships only had enough room to bring a tiny fraction of the human gene pool from Earth. So, to make the first generation here on the world large enough to be socially viable, each ovum was cloned to produce dozens of identical individuals. Then the genes from Earth were reshuffled with each succeeding generation, as the individuals married and had children at random. So many generations have passed since the first that no one’s exactly the same as anyone else now—but there was only so much genetic material to begin with. We’re all only different combinations of it.”

Daenek had followed most of what the mertzer had said. He recognized the concepts from an elementary science text that was one of the books, written in the stone-cutters’ language, kept in the house. The Lady Marche had found them in the marketplace, the remnants of a school for the village chil-dren, abandoned long ago. “But what’s the Dark Seed?” said Daenek.

“Ah, that.” The mertzer bent his head and frowned at the path’s dust. “Things have been slowly running down for a long time—not just machines, but the people as well. Becoming cruder and lazier, wretched and fearful of any change or effort.

Some writers of books in the Capitol talked about a Dark Seed, an entropic gene that had slipped by the eugenicists on Earth who were supposed to weed out every undesirable characteristic from the ova put aboard the seed-ships. Or else some radiation from somewhere between the stars managed to pierce the shielding and altered one gene for the worse. The Dark Seed—if it even really exists—creates that part of us that gives up, that lets things slide into rot and waste, that finds a kind of sullen joy in the end of hopes and ambitions. That’s satisfied with death.

Have you ever felt—” The mertzer’s eyes stared fervidly at Daenek. “—how simple, how easy it would be to die? How many problems it would solve? That’s the Dark Seed speaking in your veins.”

Stricken silent, Daenek gazed back into the other’s face. An appalling, sick feeling drifted in his gut, as if the mertzer had laid a finger on his most secret knot of organs. It’s true, he thought, the Dark Seed exists. Eats. I can feel it.

Stepke’s broad shoulders heaved as he sucked a great, ragged breath into his lungs. He looked away from Daenek and again towards the village. “What can be done?” he murmured. “It’s in our very hearts. There’s no knife fine enough…” His voice broke off, and after a moment, one of his massive hands squeezed Daenek’s shoulder. “You’ll see me, OK?” he boomed, the cheerfulness in his voice forced and artificial. “On the days off at the quarry, I’ll come up here, and we’ll swap books—OK? The one I gave you for one you haven’t read. All right?”

Daenek nodded.