Having filled their bellies and engaged in an adequate amount of chatter with their gracious breakfast company, D_Light, Lyra, and Djoser speculated about the next quest. They expected it to have something to do with hunting since the theme of the game was “the hunter and the hunted,” but that wasn’t exactly an encouraging thought. They hoped they would not be pitted against something awful that lived in the inner sanctum, the cullers that had chased them earlier coming to mind. In any case, Lyra was certain that the next quest would be the last, given how rapidly they were progressing through them. “Since the quests we have been getting are significant, I’d only expect three or four of them, and this will be our fourth,” she said.
Lyra tried to get Djoser and D_Light to bet against her on this, but there were no takers. Normally D_Light would have taken an interest in the wager, but he was only half listening to the conversation, desperately trying to eavesdrop on Lily and the clones.
“Yes, I have two daughters,” Lily said with a faint smile.
“You have children?” Curious_Scourge looked confused.
“You are not gene-clamped?”
Lily did not understand the last question, but she did not have a chance to ask for clarification because the other girls clamored to hear what it was like to be pregnant. Lily briefly indulged them in the retelling of the good, the bad (mostly bad), and the ugly of her pregnancies and births.
“You miss them? Your daughters, I mean?” BoBo asked gently.
“Oh yes, very much.” Lily’s voice quavered just a little.
“And your mate? He must miss you terribly.” BoBo squeezed Lily’s shoulder.
“My what?” Lily asked, furrowing her brow. “Oh no, there are no men, no men of my kind in my tribe back home.”
This spurred a general clamor of questions around how campers got pregnant.
Lily’s eyes bolted wide open as it dawned on her why they were so surprised. “Oh no!” Lily exclaimed. “My sisters and I do not use sexual intercourse to make babies.” As Lily said “sexual intercourse,” she made thrusting motions with her hips. The girls covered their mouths with their hands and giggled, but it was apparent from the expression on Lily’s face that she was not making a joke; she was simply trying to be clear.
“You see,” Lily said, “when I reached what you call ‘puberty,’ I became pregnant. This happens for all my sisters, and we call it the Stag’s gift. And every six years afterward, the Great Stag gives us another.”
“And your daughters look exactly like you and your other sisters?” Curious_Scourge asked.
“Yes,” Lily answered.
Curious_Scourge squeezed Lily’s hand with gentle excitement. “Yes, that makes sense. Your designer gene-clamped you. Sex is only useful for creating variation in a species and spurring evolution over a long period of time. It is actually divine law to gene-clamp all products once their design has been finalized. Otherwise, mutations could compromise the integrity of the product design over time.”
“How does the wetgineer who designed campers get points for additional products? It seems like the reserve could just buy one and make more themselves,” BoBo said.
“Like the goose that lays the golden egg,” Curious_Scourge said.
BoBo looked over Lily’s body, fixing momentarily on her abdomen, and then she returned her gaze back to her face. “I’ve never heard of a reproductive strategy like yours. The products we create in House Monsa do not reproduce at all. When our clients want another one, we grow them a new one-that is, if we don’t already have a pre-grown model in stock.”
“Yes, Father then reaps additional points from return customers,” Curious_Scourge added. “My guess is that your owners are doing what is called ‘leasing the herd.’ They pay an annual flat fee, an unusual and outdated business model, but a few bioengineering houses still use it. Even some of Father’s early contracts were herd leases.”
D_Light expected Lily to appear quite uncomfortable in this conversation, but just the opposite was true. Lily’s eyes were burning with intensity as she asked of the identical girls a series of follow-up questions. The girls were just as anxious to answer her. Their feverish discourse was only interrupted by the intermittent pitiable cry from the nubber begging for additional table scraps. D_Light was about to leave his side of the table and join the throng of animated females when he heard Lyra calling. “You coming? We’re getting a tour of the garden.”
D_Light reluctantly followed.
CHAPTER 30
Dr. Monsa’s garden was enormous, although it was more of a collection of smaller gardens than one large one. There was the English garden with its traditional, orderly plots of roses and symmetrical walkways; the Japanese garden with its stonework, well-manicured tree branches, and hidden brooks; the French garden, sporting dense hedges sculpted into ornate geometrical patterns; and a walled-off paradise garden that featured waterworks like fountains, canals, ponds, and waterfalls. As it were, these labels were little more than vague descriptions, as the gardens contained very few original plants from those olden times; this was fitting considering that the nationalities themselves-English, Japanese, and French-had long since faded into irrelevance.
Many of the plants found in the garden had been designed in the inner sanctum itself and were either being tested or served as living reminders of past successes. The priest pretended to lead the tour, but it soon became evident that the child-framed clone girl named Pueet was the most knowledgeable, and she would often cut in whenever the priest seemed to stammer over the answers to questions.
Although the entire garden was nothing short of spectacular, perhaps the most glorious of the plant life were the colossal nectar trees. These marvels of engineering were ten stories high and bore massive trunks and beefy branches that supported immense orbs of leaves and flowers. The soothing hum of countless collectors buzzing or crawling about was always present. These insects were designed to harvest the abundant sugars produced by the nectar trees and bring this precious juice by way of a pheromone trail to a place determined by their master. After taking their fill, the coin-sized insects set off, bobbing uncertainly under their load, along the chemical trail set down for them. Once they reached the invisible trail end, they would deposit their load into catch tubes, and the sugars were then shunted off to locations where they could be metabolized.
The dro-vine that made up House Monsa required a constant supply of food. It needed energy to regulate its temperature and to optimize its air quality and humidity. Whatever the house did not eat could be fed to the countless creatures that inhabited it, including those people who were either too frugal or too busy to obtain food in some other manner. There was no shame in eating and drinking nectar. Indeed, nectar optimized for animal consumption came in many flavors and contained all the essential proteins and vitamins for optimum health. Even the highest scoring players did not shun nectar, although it did become boring over decades of consumption. Nectar could even be used to fuel organic machines like familiars or robots that were responsible for mundane industrial work. However, such machines typically consumed the most potent nectar (and most terrible tasting to humans), which was super-compressed into dense cubes.
It was the heavy demand for variety in nectar production that drove much of the point revenue of House Monsa. Any new strain of nectar that, for example, offered a different taste, was metabolized more easily, or simply came from an aesthetically pleasing tree would find a ready market. Indeed, nectar trees were so common on earth-and increasingly on other planets and moons-that a house could expect to sell millions, if not billions of trees with every new variety it created.
Beside the grove of nectar trees were the fast-growing poplar trees that set off a soft and even melodious groan as their trunks rose up nearly fast enough for the naked eye to watch in action. Although most dwellings were grown rather than built, the wood these trees produced was still used in a variety of classic products, from paper to furniture.