The pages slowly passed under Daenek’s hands as he opened the books. Words that were already becoming a part of him, sinking into the flesh under his flesh.
“It’s late,” said the mertzer. “Go to bed. We’ll start on the first page tomorrow.”
When Daenek got back to his room he opened the book and saw a single word inscribed inside the cover. Stepke. He switched off the light and got into bed. That’s his name, he thought. It joined the other words massing at his heart.
The mertzer Stepke was right—by the evening of the next day Daenek knew the language well enough to read aloud from the poems, while the mertzer sat with eyes closed on his makeshift bed. The sensation, the feel of the words on his tongue, was intoxicating to Daenek. He felt as if he had grown another pair of arms.
Their voices went on for a long time, the words coming faster and more sure from Daenek’s mouth. He even talked for a while about living with the Lady Marche in the house so far above the friendless village. Stepke finally gave in and spoke of some things he remembered about the old thane, a long time ago.
“The rumor was,” said Stepke, “that he had a power, a tremendous power. He could reach into a man’s mind with his own and command him. And the man would obey, as though he were nothing but another hand of the thane’s. I heard that he quelled a riot in the quarters of his militia that way. By just striding into the barracks and looking around, pressing them all under the weight of his power.” The mertzer paused for a moment. “But the thane hated the power, didn’t want his people to be only puppets at his bidding. He wanted them to be fired with his ideas, the hopes that fired him. Some were—but not enough.”
He was silent again, and turned away to gaze out the window.
In his own room, Daenek sat on the edge of his bed, thinking.
Something was growing hard within his chest. Not to be a thane—who could come after a man with a power such as that?
Daenek knew there was nothing inside himself like it—but to wrestle from the devouring past the truth about his father’s death. A son’s obligation.
That night Daenek heard angry sounding voices from the kitchen downstairs. Lying in his bed, he couldn’t make out what the mertzer and the Lady Marche were arguing about. He knew he didn’t want to sneak out to the head of the stairs and listen, either. He turned his head toward the window and watched the cold stars until the voices were smothered by sleep.
The next morning, with the sun forming thick, dust-filled shafts in the little room, Stepke was busy re-assembling his pack.
Daenek stood in the doorway and watched him as he knelt, stacking his books and rolling the blankets into a tight cylinder.
“Where are you going?” said Daenek.
The mertzer did not look up as he began stuffing the items into the leather pack. “A man has to work,” he said. “Cutting stone is as much to my liking as anything else, I suppose.”
“But you could stay here. You don’t have to leave. You could go down to the quarry every day from here.”
The bearded face looked up at Daenek, then turned back to the motions of his hands. “No,” he said quietly. “That’s not possible.”
“I know why,” said Daenek, his voice choked tight with a sudden, overwhelming bitterness.
The mertzer reached out and took Daenek’s elbow in one hand and drew him closer. “No, you don’t,” he said, holding Daenek before himself. “The Lady Marche loves you, but hearts wear down and become fragile, just like all the other machines have. There’s a world of pain and confusion below this one, and it’ll come welling back up like blood soon enough without my being around to remind the poor woman of it. Everything breaks down and ends, eventually.”
Daenek pulled away from his grasp and ran out of the room.
He returned in a few seconds and thrust the book of poems at the mertzer. “Here. This is yours.”
Stepke shook his head. “Keep it.”
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 children, 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.”