Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (27 page)

Yes. The aristocrat had denied the slave education, and called him stupid; had given him routine jobs with no hope of advancement, and called him lazy; had refused him his share in civilization, and called him a savage. All without justification. Barbi was right.

But surely the Folk were different from me, less intelligent, less—I could hear Barbi's answer:
Maybe.

As I'd suggested, Grace Pomroy came to the temple with her girl, Terry. Barbi accepted the idea, accepted it cheerfully in fact. When the babies slept, Barbi and Grace would take turns keeping an ear on them; when the babies were awake, they'd take care of them together. It was hardly any time at all before the two women were like sisters. This situation may have bothered Grace a little; to me it was definitely disquieting.

My peace of mind during those weeks was practically nonexistent anyhow. Jim Jenkins came to the temple often—too often—and it wasn't just to see his daughter and grandchild. I did not enjoy the things he had to tell me. First, there were the jokes circulating among the Folk about Fritz and Terry. I found these stories anything but amusing, but what could I do?

Then there was Paul Pomroy's request, apologetically forwarded to me by Jenkins. Pomroy didn't like Terry's staying at the Temple; she was his girl and he wanted to keep her. I wondered: Had someone put him up to this? Hard to guess. My answer was obvious—no.

These things were just the minor symptoms of dislocation. Pomroy's Terry and our Fritz—two still-unexplained mysteries of genetics; they were causing a lot of trouble, considering that neither had reached the age of one month.

They weren't causing
all
the trouble, though. Jenkins reported several times that various Villagers were discussing leaving the Village. Summer had come around again, and here it was again, the problem of Folk who thought hunting would be a better living than sweating on the farms. Well—I appealed to Jenkins. "How many want to go?"

The familiar half-frown. "Twenty, thirty."

"How many are you sure you can trust? How many will do whatever the Elder says?"

The frown deepened. "Twenty, thirty."

That was a shock, and not just because thirty plus thirty failed to add to the population of the Village. I called in the Temple Guard, Tony Shelton, and got about the same answer from him.

There it was. I couldn't afford a showdown, because all Old Red's men had to do was clear out, head for the hills, and I would have lost! The Village had to be held together. As for keeping the dissidents here as prisoners, that would require more loyal supporters than I had, and even if it could be carried off it might be merely postponing the issue. I'd lost too much face recently to try appealing to Word-of-the-Elder hocus pocus; which about exhausted the possible courses of action.

"Jim Jenkins," I said the next time he appeared, "can you say things so the Folk will think the Elder will let them go hunting? Not say you
know
what the Elder will do, but make the Folk
think
—"

"Yes, Elder Stevan."

It was the best I could do. If I couldn't prevent the group from leaving, I'd have to persuade them to allow their leaving to be sanctioned! That was the only way there was a good chance of their coming back. Still, even if they did leave with permission, there was a good chance they'd go the way the Chief had gone. Maybe, I thought, the party when it goes should be loaded with loyal Folk. Even with that idea, though, there were all sorts of difficulties. There might be fighting in the party once it got out of the Elder's shadow; the ringers I included might find they liked farming less once they'd had a taste of something different—

I
said
my mind wasn't exactly at ease.

The answer to this particular problem was simple, although I would never have thought of it. It was Barbi who made the suggestion: A foraging party should go out, and
she
should accompany it. I was startled by the idea of her going off and leaving Fritz, but she assured me that the women of the Chief's tribe frequently took part in long treks carrying their infant children on their backs; she would take Fritz with her. And really, the plan was perfect. If anybody could keep Old Red and the others in line it was Barbi: she knew as much about hunting and camping as any of them; and, to go with that, she had the name of Elder and as much prestige as still went with the title.

I agreed to the plan quickly. Two days later the party left, with Fritz incredibly asleep in the linen pouch on his mother's back; and that night I slept peacefully again.

It was not new to me, sitting alone, weak and inactive, sitting in the Temple with the problems of the farms and with my books. It had never bothered me before. Perhaps now it was the thought of my wife and son out there to the west with the foragers which gradually made me restive.
They
were not weak. They were where the adventure was. They could live under the sky while I was imprisoned here by my own feebleness.

It was this very mood of discouragement which led me to an adventure of my own. The phenomenon of Fritz's Folk-ness recurred to me oftener and oftener, until finally it reminded me of a long-forgotten fact which had never held any great interest to me, but which suddenly offered hope of an explanation. What was the book? Babcock and Clausen's "Genetics for Students of Agriculture." It turned up near the bottom of a heavy pile in a corner of the main room; in my impatience I worried it out of the stack myself, rather than wait to call Grace, who could have done it easily. And after a session of leafing through the dried, brown-edged pages I had what I wanted.

The term was "incomplete penetrance"; the way it works is this. Suppose you have a dominant and a corresponding recessive gene, call them A and B—say, high-shoulder and short-leg cattle. Then an individual having one A paired with a B will have the characteristics that go with the A—almost always. Pure-bred high-shoulder bull and pure-bred short-leg cow will have calves resembling the father—almost always. It's that "almost" which I'd only now remembered. The recessive characteristics
can
show up. A hybrid bull
might
, for example, stand as tall as the high-shoulders but have the down-turned horns of the short leg.

Whether that particular type of bull ever lived, I didn't know. I thought I knew rather intimately a much more important example of incomplete penetrance.

Barbi.

I ran rapidly over the other theories which had occurred to me. There was, I verified, some fatal weakness in each of them. I was left with this new theory, which checked perfectly.

The Folk strain—the mutant strain—had to be dominant. Dominant mutations are rare, but the conclusion was inescapable. The Folk gene—and one mutant Gene was all I had to suppose existed—was the A, the corresponding "normal" gene was the B.

The first Folk would have had to mate with one of the City's few human survivors; so originally the Village's ancestors would have been at least half human. A good many of the children in each generation would have been BB; but those paired human genes would have meant human characteristics and, in the radiation-drenched City, an early death. After awhile, the Folk killed human children at birth, by custom, so Jenkins had told me.

Still, the AB type could survive, being no more radiation-susceptible than the AA, the pure-bred Folk. And sometimes a child of two AB's could be—well, could be like little Terry, who already showed symptoms of feebleness dangerously like my own.

Then Grace and Paul Pomroy must have the same genotype, AB; as did my son. Barbi, too, was AB, but she was the anomaly, incomplete penetrance. She showed some characteristics of the recessive human strain she carried. But in the matter of resistance to radiation she ran true to form.

Genetically, my wife and son were as much Folk as Grace Pomroy. What was it I'd said to Barbi? "We must keep the group pure." A praiseworthy project indeed, I thought bitterly.

The morning after Barbi's return I awoke before dawn. Outside, rain was falling, the slow rain we get sometimes at night—but never by day in summer. I could hear the small sound of the water running down the valley in the roof; immediately above me there was a steady drip on the attic floor; around these intimate noises there was the hushed murmur of the sodden grass. It would have been pleasant to forget everything but the statistical patter of the rain, and go back to sleep.

But whatever had waked me kept me awake. What was it? Not the rain. Some night sound—some thought that had recurred to me in my sleep.

Getting up, I pulled my coat around me and crossed to the window. And suddenly I knew what had been on my mind.

The Chief. Before the foraging party's return, Tony Shelton had seen outside the Village two men with deer skins across the shoulders—a costume unknown among the Folk here. Yet Barbi's party had not reported meeting the Chief, or seeing any sign of his camp sites. Strange, to say the least.

Barbi's whole account of the expedition, after we got back to the Temple, had been strange. She was far more articulate than Old Red, yet her account was hardly less sketchy than his would have been. I questioned her, and she answered openly enough; but most of the answers were negative and all were just the minimum required. There was no complaint I could make—but the thing puzzled me.

Then I told her of the discovery I'd made while she was away. She listened calmly, and when I was done she lighted a few extra candles, got the genetics book out, and read over the passages I showed her.

At the end, she looked up and smiled. "Good work," she said. " 'Incomplete penetrance.' Nice phrase.

"Now," she went on, "what does this mean for the Elders?"

"Go on," I said, on my guard.

"All right. In the first place, there won't be any keeping the line of the Elders pure. Any children we have later will be likely to be like Fritz. Fifty percent probability, to be exact. And then—what are the probabilities for 'human' births among the Folk, do you think?"

"Two percent," I hazarded.

"Two percent—all of that. There's one consolation for you, Stevan. Even if the direct line of Elders dies out, the 'human strain' you worry about will still be around."

"Among the Folk."

"Yes."

I stood and began walking nervously about the room. "That doesn't console me much. There's something in one of the books about population sizes. The smaller a population is, the more likely it is for a strain to die out completely among the population—just by accident. Maybe it just so happens that all the AB-type Folk are out on a hunting party that gets trampled by a herd of cattle. Maybe something less spectacular. There's no safety except in numbers; if the Village were a hundred times as large as it is, the human strain would be reasonably sure of surviving, even if it wasn't present in any greater proportion than it is."

"I see, yes. And beside that—"

"Beside that, it's
not random
." I crossed in front of her. It was funny for me to be pacing the floor while she sat there, relaxed. "The BB's—the human proper— wouldn't have an even chance of survival, not for another hundred years. They'd be sickly—"

"That's true. And your strain absolutely must be given a chance, mustn't it?"

Now, standing at the window and staring at the gray oak trunks against the blank darkness, I mulled over that last question. A threat? Or just a taunt? I didn't like it. And there had been plenty on Barbi's mind that night that I hadn't been let in on.

A new sound cut though the monotonous sluicing of the rain water. Though I couldn't identify it exactly, it told me Barbi was awake. I stood rigidly in the solid silence.

Behind me, "Can't sleep, Stevan?"

"No; no. I just woke up."

"Worried?"

"About what?"

"You should be worried, Stevan."

"Oh?"

"I wasn't going to talk to you about it again, but I will. Stevan, you haven't got the right answer."

"What do you mean?" But I thought I knew.

"Let's see what your excuses are for this 'Elder' business." I swallowed hard, stood stockstill at the window. Her voice came clear and brisk from the shadows behind me and fell weirdly on my tired brain. "You want to save time, right? You don't want civilization to have to start at the beginning again, you want to save time by keeping hold of the knowledge from before the War. But this isn't the way to do it—keeping the Folk here as your slaves."

Weakly, "The Folk aren't slaves."

"Some of them want to stay here," she conceded. "But some of those would be dissatisfied if they thought they had alternatives. Look. You know what a civilized world's like, you want to see one built. Well, if it's done it'll be done by the people. You can't just decide what it'd be nice to have happen. The men who are going to do it have to
want
to do it."

Her earnestness frightened me; so I tried to sound amused and academic. "You seem pretty confident of your theory of history."

That stopped her. She'd learned a lot in the last year, but she realized how much there was she didn't know. "O.K.," she said, "I'll be specific. You might like the idea of a race of farmers, sticking peacefully to one place. But if there's an easy living to be made by hunting somebody's going to take to the idea. If there's an easy living to be made by raiding villages, somebody'll take to that, too. Your books won't stop them."

"You're worried about the Chief, too."

"No," I turned at that, but she was in darkness and I couldn't see her face. "I'm not worried, I just admit he exists. You don't, so you can't have the right answer."

An abrupt weakness came over me. My limbs felt as if they were loose in their sockets. I clutched at the window frame, half surprised that my hands would still move. "Yes," I brought out, "I've got the
only
answer."

"I think not, Stevan."

My head fell forward. The red lightning erased everything then; it did not stop when I shut my eyes.

Barbi was watching me. Holding my breath and balancing carefully, I made it back to the bed without falling.