“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 cyano-bacteria 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 the 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 foliose 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 destroyspecies. 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!