GAET RENTED A SAILBOAT to take Oelita and her boy and girl up the coast to the bay of the Old Man, the Mother, and the Child of Death. He had little knowledge of sailing and gave command to Oelita who remembered her sailor motions as if she had never left the sea. They beached beneath the maran mansion. Gaet left a bewildered Hoemei to manage as best he could with two squalling infants. Kathein gave him instructions and then apprehensively followed Gaet back to the beach.
“I’ve never been in a boat before,” said Kathein, “not even to cross a river.”
“You’ll like it!” Oelita said with a smile, as she helped her rival aboard, glad that she was in command.
“Tell me what to do,” said Kathein.
Gaet was shoving the boat out into the waves again. “You should know all about the forces of tacking.”
“The boom adds and subtracts on its fingers faster than I do!”
“Where to?” asked Oelita.
Gaet was aboard, dripping, helping Oelita hoist the sail. “You once told me long ago that you found the Frozen Voice of God along the shore near here when you were a child.”
“I know exactly where.”
“I thought it might be a place to picnic. The Forge of War is the common meeting ground between you and Kathein.”
Kathein’s eyes brightened. “Do you really remember where you picked it up? That’s very exciting!” The boat was gathering speed, splashing a fine spray into her face when they crossed a wave. That was exciting, too. “We’ve never found more than the one we had and yours.”
“The cove has a sandy bottom. A lot could be buried there.”
“Maybe God will nudge your hand again.”
“We’ll try. It is a wonderful place to swim.”
“Is swimming in the sea different than swimming in a pool?”
“Oh yes. I’ll show you how.”
The cove was isolated and protected from the storms and, because of that, sheltered peculiar kinds of insect life. Oelita remembered why her father had been here, and found a green-backed digger for Kathein and then a whole colony of tunneling insects with peculiar clawed eyes.
“What are these?” Kathein was holding blades of an underwater grass on which grew a delicate band of silver flowers all the way up each spine.
“They are delicious when rotted for a week — and quite poisonous. A nerve poison. Long ago when the Stgal first took over Sorrow from the Nowee priests they gave a great feast in honor of the new pact between the Nowee and the Stgal and fed the Nowee a salad laced with such grasses. A tale among other tales — and the Stgal wonder why they have a devious reputation!”
The two women shed their sailing clothes and began a diving exploration of the shore bottom. Gaet built a fire on the sand and roasted a lunch in bundles of leaf packs. He watched the swimmers, pleased with the emotional smoothness of his venture. He could relax now and worry about trivial details like the penetration of the leaf aroma into the food.
Women were beautiful in different ways, he thought, watching them. The artists of the coast had used simple designs over Oelita’s flesh, leaving sweeping areas of plain or lightly etched skin for contrast. Kathein was decorated more in the high fashion of the Kaiel, delicate work, lavish detail, symbols, intricate dye work overlaying the scars so that not a patch of child’s flesh remained, showing her to be a true Master of Pain.
He spread mats on the sand. With the sun at highnode and the fire to dry them, they did not bother to dress when they returned. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” said Oelita. “There’s growth down there, more than when I was a child.”
Kathein laid up her wet hair on a lattice of fingers. “Sea life entrances me. I learned to swim with my eyes open! I’ll have to bring a dredge up here sometime. It’s a shame. I wonder how The Forge of War got into the sea? There is no sign of ruins or an old boat, or anything at all down there.”
“I’m glad you brought us,” said Oelita. “The problems of our men seem very remote out here. We’ve been talking about that.”
“Between mouthfuls of sea!” laughed Kathein.
Gaet unwrapped a leafy fish cake and let them smell its steamy fragrance. “I’m working on a compromise that will satisfy us all. I need new information. You two will have to be my source.”
“Do you want to know how Joesai feels?” asked Oelita.
“No. I know Joesai. I’m not sure I know what drives a Gentle Heretic.”
“You know me,” said Kathein.
“You’re positive?” asked Gaet. “You’ve been with Aesoe a long time.”
Kathein dropped her eyes and Oelita took her hand and confronted Gaet for the both of them. “What do you want to know about us? Just ask.”
“Let me go over some history first. We’ve had a Five that works well. I didn’t really understand it when I started it. A family was a misty dream, something to do as I climbed the ladder of Kaiel tradition. I was told that the bonds of a family created abilities that no single man could aspire to by himself, and I wanted to do everything — and be everything — and so a family was just a natural extension of myself.”
“Do you think of your family as beginning the day you met Noe?” asked Kathein.
“The day I met Noe was a disaster. Whatever happened began the day I met Joesai.”
Joesai was a studious child, intolerant of the flaws in both his peers and masters. He was larger than his peers and used his extra strength to bully. Whoever crossed him ran the risk of dying at the next Trial. Joesai never exacted revenge through an intermediary but if the offender could stay out of Joesai’s way for at least a week, the slight was forgotten. He had no friends. He was a thief but no master ever caught him.
He knew his father was Tae ran-Kaiel, the Prime Predictor, and that gave him an arrogant hope that he might survive the creche. But he didn’t know who his mother was and that made him unsure of his worth.
He pestered his genetics teacher for his record. Then he learned why no one had told him about his mother. They thought he wouldn’t understand. It was puzzling. His mother was both a woman and a man and two people and the same person.
Tae ran-Kaiel had authorized an experiment in an attempt to create a predictor as powerful as himself. He had bred himself with one of the early successful predictors, a Gaieri ma-Kaiel, whose sperm had been frozen in liquid nitrogen yet never used because he was a known carrier of multiple lethal recessives.
In a technique developed by Tae’s own study group, hundreds of 23-chromosome sets from Gaieri sperm cells were infused into chromosomeless ova and triggered to yield a cell of 23 chromosomes in the dyad form — each with two chromatids and one joining centromere, similar to the stable secondary oocytes carried by women prior to ovulation. Tae’s group developed a process by which the final meiosis was inhibited, the centromeres broken and a fully homozygous 46-chromosome cell formed that when transferred to the womb of a machine mother began to grow into an embryo.
Four million homozygous female individuals — sub-clones — can be formed from one heterozygous male. One hundred eighty pregnancies were started. One hundred fifty-three of these aborted before coming to term because of doubled y-chromosomes and doubled lethal recessives. Twenty-one of the surviving twenty-seven babies were judged to be substandard and were used for medical experimentation, teaching purposes, or sold to the abattoir.
The best specimen of the final six, Joesai’s mother, was artificially matured, butchered, and her ovaries used for further experimentation. She became, in this indirect fashion, the genetic mother of nine of Tae’s children. At the time Joesai read the records, four of that batch were still alive: Sanan, Gaet, Hoemei, and Joesai. Unilaterally, he began to protect his Gaieri-derived brothers for no more reason than that he felt their kalothi was somehow tied to his own.