“But her—ah—development isn’t natural, is it?” I prompted.
He chuckled and held up an index finger. “See this finger? I lost it—got chopped clean away—in an accident a while back. Bled like mad. They took me to the Bodymaster, who had only to look ^t it to stop the blood. Then he looked at it, touched it, and I came back. It grew back out in time, good as new. Look.” He wiggled it for emphasis.
“But what does that… ?” I began, then realized what he was saying and shook my head in wonder. He caught my look and grinned.
“Breed stock needs to make lotsa babies, needs to want to make lotsa babies,” the man noted. “You see?”
I saw, all right. Slowly, to make certain her cells and nervous system were capable of standing it, this Bodymaster was somehow reaching inside her with his power, in the same way as he had ordered the finger regenerated and as Kronlon had inflicted paralysis and pain. Subtle alterations were being made, had probably been made from the point of puberty, which could only have taken place a year or so ago. Hormones stimulated, body chemistry subtly altered, so that actually he was making her unnatural, his exaggeration deforming her somewhat—but all for his purposes. Breeding stock he wanted, not show stock. For what? The beautifully colored hair, perhaps? Possibly as little as that, although another thought came to me.
“Hogi?” I prodded my laborer companion once again.
“Uh?”
“You said she had some wild talent. What kind? What can she do?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. Might not understand it, anyway. I do know that none of the Supers bother her much, not even Kronlon. A little scared, maybe, which may mean she’s got really great power—but it’s wild. Comes and goes. No control.”
I nodded. That would explain why the powers that be had left her here a while after puberty instead of taking her into the main village or perhaps to the castle grounds. They weren’t quite sure what her powers were, either, or whether she might not someday learn to control them. They wanted to see more, first, to ascertain what she could or could not do. They were afraid of her potential, which indicated great power. If it stayed wild, well, she’d become a breeder and that was that. But if she gained control, she could threaten them.
I suspected that that was the real reason for this breeding program. It must frustrate that upper class to see their own children wind up as pawns, to have to pass on their splendor and holdings to some stranger or subordinate who would take it from them. For the first time I thought I understood people like the Masters and Knights. How galling, how frustrating it must be to be like a god and know that you can’t pass it on, leave it to anyone. Genetic manipulation was out, as were all the scientific tests and lab procedures of the civilized worlds. What bestowed and regulated that mysterious and terrifying Warden power had eluded technological science and would elude them as well. They would have no choice but to try and breed for it. First among themselves, of course, but that hadn’t worked.
It struck me that, except for Patra, virtually all the powerful people I’d heard about were male. That might be a misleading statistic, based as it was on so small a sample, but if it held, even partly, it would mean even more problems in pure inbreeding.
Hogi at least knew enough to answer that. “Well, yes, more men than women, but lots of women have it,” he assured me. “No, I hear tell that when a woman like a Master or a Duke gets with child, she loses control, becomes a wild talent while carrying the child. During that tune somebody could steal her job, see?”
I did see. With only a few thousand positions near the top and only 471 really at the top, people in those positions were always on the spot, always being challenged by newcomers—and to put yourself in the position of being wide open to challenge for nine months would be unthinkable.
“You mean the big people don’t have sex?” I asked incredulously.
“Haw. Sure. When you got the power it’s easy,” Hogi responded. “You get cut, you just tell your body not to bleed. You also just tell your body not to get pregnant. See?” This was all said in the boy-are-you-dumb tone he usually used when talking to me.
It all fit, though. They were breeding with the strong wild talents that occasionally cropped up among the pawns’ children. Trying for power and control—and perhaps the key to breeding power in their own young.
But this young gkl had the power, even if it was wild, and that was the most important thing to me. I had to know a lot more about that power, and since she was the only one around who had it that I could talk to as an equal, I determined to get to know her.
Chapter Six
Ti
The next evening, I sought her out, trying to appear as casual as I could. I had been warned that she was hard to approach and difficult to talk to, but I had no problems. Sitting on a rock off by herself and out of the torchlights, she was fanning away the ever-present swarms of tiny bugs and idly chewing on a piece of gri, a melonlike fruit with an odd sweet-and-sour taste.
There wasn’t really too much I could do without being either corny or obvious, so I just walked up close to her and said, “Hello, there.”
She looked up with those huge, little girl’s eyes and smiled. “Hi. Sure. Have a seat.”
“My name is—” I began, but she cut me off. “Your name’s Caltremon, and you come from Outside,” she shot, catching me a little off-guard. Her voice, still a youthful one, more matched her face and true age than her body.
I laughed. “And how do you know all that?”
“I seen you lookin’ at me,” she responded playfully. “O’course, all the men look at me, but I ’specially noticed you. They say you’s sick in the head. That right?”
I found myself instantly warming to her. “I was,” I told her, “but I’m better now. This is not like the place I came from, and it took a lot of getting used to.”
She tossed the rind back into the bushes and shifted around, pulling her knees up against her bosom and putting her arms around her legs, rocking slightly. “What’s it like—Outside, I mean?” she wanted to know.
I smiled. She was so damned cute. “Nothing like here,” I replied, trying to find terms she could understand. “Not at all. For one thing, it’s cooler. And there aren’t any pawns or supers or knights.”
I could see that this was hard for her to digest. “If there ain’t no pawns, who does the work?”
A fair question. “People who want to do it,” I tried carefully. “And it’s a different kind of work than we do “here. Machines do all the really heavy stuff.”
“I heard ’bout ’sheens,” she said knowingly. “But somebody gotta raise ’em and breed ’em, right?”
I sighed. The usual dead end. How could you explain machines to somebody who was born and raised on a world where nothing worked and practically nothing lasted? I decided this could be used as a back way into the subject that really interested me.
“Where I come from nobody has the power,” I told her. “And when a place doesn’t have the power, you can change things, make things that last. Some of those are machines, and they do what the power does here.”
She mulled this over, trying to sort it out, but didn’t seem to understand. That was about as far as I’d gotten with anybody else, though, which indicated she had some brains.
“Why don’t they have the power?” she asked. I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know why some people do. I don’t really understand what the power is even now.” Watch it, I warned myself. Be very careful. “I hear you got the power. Is that right?”