“We had no herbicides or chemical killers of any kind. We couldn’t have used them if we had, for all such things are forbidden. The only way we could remove a patch of lichen was to sterilize the sand it was growing in—and I do meanin. The rhizines are as thin as hair and they go down farther than you can imagine! We had no harpta to carry tools, and back then we didn’t have sleds, either. It took an enormous amount of labor to dig out the sand in those areas and keep turning it over and over and burning it until the last of it was dead. And, of course, every time we disturbed the sand, the spore capsules were blown off in every direction.”
“Do you have any idea how it works?”
Melanie said, “We hypothesize that lactating hormones stimulate some chemical process inside the genetic material, but we don’t honestly know. Our ancestors on the ship had a great deal of technical knowledge, but their equipment and supplies and reference library went down with the ship. That’s part of the reason we couldn’t come up with a technical way to fight the stuff, or so we like to believe, though it could be we’re just not smart enough. The best we could do was to create a myth about ourselves. We called ourselves the malghaste—that’s a word the Mahahmbi already used for some of their own lowest caste people. We said we were divinely appointed to help them, and that our blood kills the lichen, and every time they killed one of us, a patch was killed. It didn’t take them long to believe.”
“That was a long time ago,” Genevieve asserted. “Since then you’ve learned how to lay hands on technology. You’ve had the opportunity to get herbicides and fungicides. Why haven’t you wiped it out?”
Joncaster said angrily, “I’ve told you! We can’t. We’d have to spray the entire continent of Mahahm! And we’ve all been reared on horror tales from Old Earth that make the idea repugnant.”
Melanie patted her shoulder, “Genevieve, we honestly don’t know how to kill it. Your muttering is pretty much the same as the muttering our own people do when confronted with the dilemma. We’ve considered wiping out the Mahahmbi, and we’ve considered wiping out the nobility of Haven. There’s no way to do it without involving a lot of innocent people. We did the best we could when we created the story of the malghaste.”
Genevieve snorted, “The Mahahmbi really believed that? I find that hard to accept!”
Joncaster cast her a quick glance, shaking his head. “The Mahahmbi scriptures are in writing. According to them, this makes writing so holy that it can’t be used for anything but scriptures. As a result, they have no written history and their oral history is subject to a lot of revision. We had our people sing malghaste songs around the women and children, and when the boy children grew up, they remembered the songs. By now, the Mahahmbi think we’ve always been around. They already believed they were God’s favorites when they came here, so it wasn’t hard to persuade them God created slaves for them,”
Melanie snarled, “And if you believe you’re God’s favorite, killing a few women and children doesn’t bother you . . .”
“No more.” Genevieve hugged herself to keep from shattering or screaming, as she felt about to do. “No more. I can’t absorb half of what you’ve said. Don’t tell me anything more.”
She pillowed her head on her arms and tried to think of nothing, absolutely nothing. Blackness. No light, no sound, no nothing. Though it was only partially successful, the resultant mental fog was better than the assaults of the morning.
They went back the way they had come, winding among the dunes and arriving at the refuge as the evening bell tolled and the sun bled scarlet cloud rivers down the western sky.
* * *
Enid waited for them in the garage, where they brought the sled to a rest.
“She’s seen?” she asked Joncaster, while peering into Genevieve’s frozen face and staring eyes.
“More than she wanted to see,” he said. “One of the victims was a friend of hers. . . .”