There were a few nods, but I frowned. “Wait a minute. If that’s true, then how do these grass huts stay up? They’re dead matter.”
She smiled again. “A good question. The truth is, they aren’t dead. They’re single living bunti plants, related to those yellow stalks you see growing here and there in the woods.”
“You mean they obligingly grow into houses for us?” a woman asked skeptically.
“Well, not exactly,” came the reply. “They grow into houses because they were ordered to do so.”
Eyebrows shot up at this. “Ordered by whom?” somebody else asked.
“Life is a contest of wills everywhere,” Patra responded. “On Lilith, it is more so. That is at the heart of the culture we’ve built here. You see, though the Warden organism isn’t intelligent, at least as we understand such things, it is a truly alien organism that more or less becomes an integral part of whatever it lives in—and it lives in everything. You are no longer human beings. You are something else now—alien creatures, really. If you master your own body and it your mind is strong enough and has enough natural ability and sheer willpower, you can sense the Warden organism in all things around you. Sense it, and in a way talk to it. Somehow, nobody knows how, all Warden organisms are linked together. You might think of them as single, independent cells of a great creature. Unlike our cells, they don’t adjoin, but like our cells, they are linked together somehow in a manner we don’t yet understand. They communicate. You can make them communicate. You might, if strong enough and powerful enough, instruct Warden organisms not a part of you to do just about anything.”
A sense of stunned unbelief swept over the group, but I was a little better prepared. Even so, I found the idea hard to visualize.
“The power of the individual over the organism,” Patra explained, “varies wildly. Some people never get much of anything—the majority, I’m afraid, re-. main as you are now—and thus are at the mercy of more powerful minds that have more control and thus can control Warden organisms necessary to you—for food, for shelter, even within your own bodies. There are also those wild talents with the ability to exercise power, sometimes considerable power, but not under any sort of control. Like the majority, they are essentially powerless—but they get a little more respect, particularly if their wild talents are dangerous or deadly. The degree of control you have is fixed. We have no idea why some have it and others don’t. But I can tell you that for some reason non-natives in general tend to possess a higher level of power than those born here. Perhaps this is because the Warden organism remains alien, something we are always aware doesn’t belong in us. If you have the power, it’ll show up on its own. Once it does, though, training and practice are required to bring you up to your full potential—and that’s when you’ll find out where you fit in this world.”
It was something to think about, and worry about —a wild-card factor beyond my control, and I felt more than a little nervous. Whether or not I’d go far around here depended on how well I got along with the little buggers in my cells.
“Lilith is divided into political regions,” she explained. “These areas, or districts, are based on population. As of this moment, each District contains roughly twenty-eight thousand people and there are a total of four hundred and seventy of them, each headed by an official called a Duke. They are enormously powerful, having the ability to stabilize dead matter. As a result, they live in fine mansions and often have art, dinnerware—all the finer things you can think of. And weapons, too.
“The Duke of a District is the most powerful Knight in his District. Therefore the officials below him are called Knights, and each Knight rules an area called a Keep. Knights also have some control over dead matter, but nothing like on the scale of a Duke—there’s really no difference in power between Dukes and Knights with regard to the rest of the population. A Duke is only the most powerful of Knights. The Keeps, by the way, vary in size from very small to huge, depending on the number of people living in them. The more powerful the Knight, the more people he or she controls and the larger the Keep. The Duke, also being a Knight, has the largest Keep, of course.”
I nodded to myself. Knights and Dukes had their way around here. The place was beginning to sound like a monarchy, but one determined by some indefinable natural ability, not heredity. Well, at least it kept dynasties down.
“Keeps,” Patra went on, “are administered by Masters. Think of them as department heads. Each runs a particular area of Keep administration. Masters can control living things, but their ability to stabilize dead matter is very, very limited. A Master could make these bunti grow into a house, though, to his or her particular design.
“Below Masters are Supervisors, who are just what the term says. They manage the actual work. Their ability to stabilize dead matter is limited to usually a few articles of basic clothing, but they still have power over living things—mostly destructive. However, they can regenerate parts of themselves, even whole limbs, and can cause regeneration in others—as can, of course, Masters, Knights, and Dukes. I must warn you, they can also do the opposite—cause a limb to wither, inflict pain by sheer will.” “Which are you?” a man asked. “None of the above,” she laughed. “I am a Journeywoman. Basically my power is similar to a Master’s, but I don’t belong to a Keep. Dukes need people to travel between Keeps, to carry messages, to work out commerce, to—well, give orientation talks to newcomers. We’re salespeople, ambassadors, couriers, you name it—answerable only to our Dukes. It’s mostly a matter of temperament whether you’re Journey or Master class. There are pluses and minuses for both jobs, and the fact that I’m a Journeywoman now doesn’t mean I might not take a Master’s position sometime.”
“You’ve covered all the high spots,” I noted. “You’ve accounted for maybe several thousand people, but you said there were more than thirteen million on the planet. What abput the rest?”
“Pawns,” she answered. “They do the work. In fact they do just about anything they’re told to do. Consider—pawns need those more powerful to feed them, to provide shelter, to protect them against the savage beasts of the planet. They are in no position to do anything else.”
“Slaves,” the man next to me muttered. “Just like the civilized worlds, only reduced to the lowest common denominator.”
I didn’t agree with the man’s comparison at all, but I could understand nun completely now and why he was there.
“You’ve left somebody out,” a woman—I think the one who was defiant back on the prison ship—spoke out. “The guy who runs the place. What kind of power does it take to be the Lord?”
Patra appeared to be slightly embarrassed by the way in which the question was put, but she answered it anyway. “There’s only one Lord,” she pointed out. “Right now it’s the Lord Marek Kreegan. He got there because he challenged the previous Lord and killed him, thereby proving his power. Lords, of course, have all the powers of Dukes plus one extra ability that almost no one has—the ability to stabilize alien matter. They can possess a device that is not of this world. All alien matter except that stabilized by the Lord or his almost-as-powerful administrative aide, Grand Duke Kob6, decomposes. As well as undergoing extreme decontamination procedures, our two shuttles were stabilized by Lord Kreegan. If that weren’t so, even the shuttles would decompose here.”