The truth was I felt more than physically naked standing in the ak-cart looking at nothing except an occasional star that peeked through the ever-present clouds. But the ever-present crescendo of insect noises, a background I’d gotten so used to by this time I’d just about tuned it out of my conscious, never ceased.
Bronz awoke before dawn on his own, and we stopped for tea.
“Damned nuisance, this place,” the priest muttered. “You can’t take food with you, it rots in a day unless you have a couple of agriculture masters around to see it shipped safely and some others to store it properly. Me, I get along by roadside pickings and save my Warden energies for my gourds and teas.”
I took the hint, and shortly before dawn was on a foraging expedition into the bush. I didn’t come back with much, since I dared not risk going too far from the road, but it was enough—a few melons, a handful or two of berries. Bronz worked some of his Warden magic on them so that we were able to keep a tiny supply, but clearly his area of expertise, if he had one, lay elsewhere.
Daylight was the time of greatest risk. Although Bronz had chosen a route that took us away from the more congested Keeps and where the wild was dominant, we came upon the occasional traveler nonetheless.
Scrunching down in the cart, covering myself with straw and bedding as best I could, I had to stay there, still as possible, praying I could keep from coughing or sneezing or moving no matter how long the conversation (and some were very long). Most were supervisors, some with a/fc-carts of their own, who were delivering something from one Keep to another, but there was an occasional master as well. All were worrisome, since I doubted if Father Bronz would kill even to protect me. But the masters were the most irritating, since they possibly could outdo Bronz himself.
. One time we even ran into an actual roadblock, the one thing we never expected, which indicated just how far afield Artur was willing to go. Fortunately, Father Bronz knew the two guards and talked us through it. Since I didn’t really have a low opinion of Artur, I suspect that if those two mentioned in their report they passed Bronz without conducting an inspection there would be two fewer guards from Zeis Keep, no matter how reliable the priest was deemed to be.
It was like that all over, though, I knew. Act as if you own the place, betray no anxiety, and you can get away with the damnedest things, even in a crowd.
Most of the time, though, the road was empty, so Bronz and I could talk—and did we ever. There was little else to do, and I was anxious to learn.
“You don’t much like the system on Lilith, I note,” he commented once.
I gave a dry laugh. “Stratified oppression, a tiny ruling class in permanent power—mostly the best criminal minds humanity has produced. I think it stinks.”
“What would you do, then?” he came back, sounding amused. “What sort of system would, say, Lord Cal Tremon impose that would supplant this one?”
“The Warden organism makes that tough,” I replied carefully. “Obviously power corrupts”—Bronz gave me a hurt look—“most people,” I rescued myself. “The people with the power are generally the most corrupt to begin with, since outsiders tend to have a higher degree of this power, and only the corrupt are sent here.”
He smiled. “So corruption cometh to Paradise, and the snakes rule Eden, is that it? Get rid of the snakes and Eden returns?”
“You’re mocking me. No, I don’t believe that and you know it. But a more enlightened leadership could produce a better standard of living for the pawns without all this torture and degradation.”
“Could it?” he mused. “I wonder. This is a complex planet, but I think you are being too one-dimensional on its limitations. You think of the Warden organism only in terms of the power it gives some people. You must recognize it as a total fact of life tot everything on Lilith, not merely for who’s got the power. The Warden organism is a peculiarity of the evolution of this world; it was not designed for human beings. It is just a freak of nature that we’re able to tap into it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think of the Warden beast as a regulator, a balancer that evolved of necessity here. Exactly why it evolved is not for me to say, but my best guess would be that this world, for much of its past, went through some pretty violent changes. I don’t know the nature of them, but there are reptiles, mammals, crystalline creatures of some sort—all sorts of creatures on the other Warden worlds that are not found here. Here only the insect was able to survive, it being the most adaptable and, ironically, the least likely to change. But I suspect that even the insects and the plants were threatened by whatever changes the planet underwent, so much so that there evolved a mechanism in nature to keep things stable—at equilibrium, you might say. Why the planet needs to be kept in that state is another question for which I don’t have any answers, but it does. In some funny way the planet needs this ecosystem, at least to survive. That’s the reason for the Warden organism.”
“You talk as if the planet itself were alive.”
He nodded slowly. “I have often found it more convenient to think that way. Look, when man originally set out from Earth centuries ago he expected to find very alien worlds. What did he find? Mostly worlds that were crater-strewn and dead, gas giants, frozen rock piles, and occasionally a planet that perhaps was a mess but could be terraformed. Most of the liveable planets not needing a lot of work were already inhabited, some by mere plants and animals but some by other species. And yet—no matter how crazy the biology was or the ecosystem balance or the patterns of thought and behavior of nonhumans—they were all comprehensible. We could say, ‘Oh, yes, the Alphans are tentacled protoplasmic blobs, but look at the environment they evolved in, look how we trace it thus and so, and look how the environmental conditions shaped their cultures, their ways of thinking, and so forth.’ Their own cultures and ways of life might have been so crazy that we couldn’t find anything in common with them, couldn’t follow their reasoning at all, but taken as a whole they were all comprehensible. We never met a world so alien we couldn’t at least understand, under the laws of physical and social science, how it got that way. Not until Lilith and her sisters.”
I looked around at the foliage, at the deep blue sky, and at the remains of melon and berries. “Frankly, I can’t see where you’re heading,” I told him. “In terms of familiarity, this world is more familiar than many I’ve been on.”
He nodded. “Superficial familiarity, yes. These insects are all unique to Lilith, but they are recognizably insects. The plants are recognizably plants, since an atmosphere that will support us requires photosynthesis for complex plant life. But consider. The Warden Diamond is a statistical absurdity. Four worlds, all within the life-supporting range of a sun just right for them. Four worlds very close together—the distance between Charon and Medusa is only about 150 million kilometers, practically next door, with two goodies in between—almost as if they’d been placed there just for us. The idea is simply absurd. You know the sum ratio of solar systems to even terraformable worlds. And yet here they are, right in our way, and each with a tiny, inexplicable little additive that damned well keeps us here.”