"I... hadnt thought of it that way, Your Grace," Allison said slowly, and this time Sullivan laughed out loud.
"No, My Lady, but youve been rather more polite about it than some off-worlders have. We are a people of custom, and one which has traditionally embraced a highly consensual Faith and way of life, yet our Faith is also one of individual conscience in which no one neither a mans Steadholder, nor his Protector, nor even the Reverend or the Sacristymay dictate to him on matters of the spirit. That is the central dynamic of our beliefs, and maintaining it has never been easy. Which is fair enough, for God never promised us the Test would be easy. But it means that, for all our consensuality, we have experienced many periods of intense, even bitter debate and doctrinal combat. I believe that has ultimately strengthened us, but memories of those periods make some of us uneasy about embracing changes in our Church and society. To be perfectly honest, I myself harbor some personal reservations about at least some of the changesor, perhaps, about the rate of changewhich I see around me. Yet not even the priests of Father Church, or perhaps especially not the priests of Father Church, may dictate to the consciences of our flock. Nor may we properly decide that this or that bit of knowledge, however unpleasant we may fear its consequences will be, should be restricted or concealed. So continue with your explanation, please. I may not fully understand it, and it may yet shock or concern me, but as a child of the Tester and of Father Church, it is my duty to hear and at least try to understand... and not to blame the bearer of the news for its content."
"Yes, Your Grace." Allison shook herself again, then smiled crookedly. "Yes, indeed," she said, and nodded much more comfortably at the holo image.
"As nearly as I can reconstruct what must have happened, Your Grace, at least one person, and possibly several, in your original colonial medical team must have been real crackerjack geneticists, especially given the limitations of the technology then available. As you may be aware, they were still using viruses for genetic insertions rather than the precisely engineered nanotech we use today, and given the crudity of such hack and slash methodologies, hisor theirachievements are truly remarkable."
"I am less surprised to hear that than you might think, My Lady," Sullivan interposed. "The original followers of Saint Austin were opposed to the way technology had, as they saw it, divorced men from the lives God wished them to lead. But they recognized the advances in the life sciences as the gift of a loving Father to His children, and their intention from the beginning was to transplant as much of that gift to Grayson as they could. And that was certainly as well for all of us when our ancestors discovered what sort of world they had come to."
"I believe that probably constitutes at least a one or two thousand percent understatement, Your Grace," Allison said wryly. "One of the things which has puzzled those of us who have studied the situation has been how your colony could possibly have survived for more than a generation or two amid such lethal concentrations of heavy metals. Obviously, some sort of adaptive change had to have occurred, but none of us could understand how it happened quickly enough to save the colony. Now, I think, I know."
She took a sip of tea and crossed her own legs, leaning back in her chair and cradling the tissue-thin porcelain cup between her hands.
"Heavy metals enter the body via the respiratory and digestive tracts, Your Grace, hence your air filtration systems and the constant battle to decontaminate your farm soil. Apparently, whoever was responsible for this" she jutted her chin at the holo image once again "intended to build a filtration system into your bodies as well, by modifying the mucosal barriers in your lungs and digestive tract. Your secretory proteins are substantially different from, say, my own. They bind the metalsor a large proportion of them, at any ratewhich allows them to be cleared from the body in sputum and other wastes, rather than being absorbed wholesale into the tissues. They dont do a perfect job, of course, but theyre the reason your tolerance for heavy metals is so much higher than my own. Up until two or three months ago, the assumption, particularly in light of your ancestors limited technological resources and, um, attitude towards the resources they did have, was that this must represent a natural facet of adaptive evolution, even if we had no idea how it had happened so quickly."
"But you no longer believe this to be the case," Sullivan said quietly.
"No, Your Grace. Ive found flanking regions of rhinovirus genetic material around the cystic fibrosis locus indicated in the holo here, and I think I can say with some assurance that it didnt get there accidentally."
"Rhinovirus?"
"The vector for the common cold," Allison said dryly, "which could have offered several useful advantages to the med teams who made use of it. For one thing, with your people so tightly confined in the limited air-filtered habitats they could build, an aerosol vector like this would be very easily spread. Given the fact that Ive found absolutely no mention of it anywhere in the records, I might also hazard the guess that the project was kept confidential at the timepossibly to avoid raising hopes if, in fact, it should fail. Or there could have been other reasons. And if there were, spreading the alteration via a cold would have the advantage of maximum concealability, as well."
"Indeed it would have, and there could well have been other reasons to do such a thing quietly," Sullivan agreed, and it was his turn to smile crookedly. "Despite my own analysis of why Father Church does not believe in suppression, not everyone in our history would have agreed with me, and no doubt there have been times when our freer thinkers found that... discretion was indicated. As Im sure youve discovered in the course of your research, My Lady, many of our Founders were zealots. Heavens, look at those lunatics who launched the Civil War four hundred years later! However trying our own times may be, they do not compare to the Tests which faced the Founders, and it would certainly have been possible that the Founding Elders might have feared that some of the more blindly faithful among their flock would have reacted badly to the notion of such a thing as permanently modifying their own bodies and those of all their descendants."
"As you say, Your Grace," Allison murmured, then shrugged. "At any rate, we might think of this as a sort of weapon of beneficent biological warfare, an agent designed to modify the genetic material of your people in order to give them a fighting chance at surviving their environment. Unfortunately, it looks like it was a fast and dirty method, even by the standards of then-current technology."
Sullivan frowned, and she shook her head quickly.
"That wasnt a criticism, Your Grace! Whoever managed this was clearly working on a shoestring, with limited resources. He had to do the best with what he had, and what he managed was brilliantly conceived and clearly executed effectively. But I suspect that the need for speed, coupled with extremely limited facilities, prevented his team from carrying out as careful an analysis as they would have wished, and it looks like the vector carried a second, unintentional modification which they failed to recognize at the time."
"Unintentional?" Sullivans frown was deeper now, not in displeasure but in thought, and Allison nodded.
"Im certain it was. And the nature of their problem no doubt helps explain what happened. You see, whoever designed this modification had to make the adaptive mutation inheritable. Simply modifying the gene in those actually exposed to the rhinovirus wouldnt work, because it would have been a purely somatic mutation, which means it would have died with the first generation of hosts. To keep that from happening, heor theyhad to cross from the somatic to the germ linemodify the rhinovirus to cross the mucosal barrier and show a predilection for primordial germ cells in the hosts ovaries and testesin order to pass it on to the first generations offspring. What had to be accomplished was analogous to, oh, the mumps virus. That infects the salivary glands, but also attacks the ovaries and testes and can account for some cases of male infertility."