Pandora's Genes by Kathryn Lance

Author:Kathryn Lance
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, General, Romance, Science Fiction, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Fiction
ISBN: 9781585862030
Publisher: eReads.com
Published: 1985-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

The Garden

One

Most of the leaves had fallen, forming a thick, crisp carpet on the forest floor. The air was chilled and invigorating, and the Principal had to consciously guard against pushing his mount too fast. He was impatient and curious, wondering why he had suddenly been summoned to the new Garden.

He had not visited since the women had moved in, two years ago. Although he had been in frequent communication with them by writing, he had found excuses to avoid any contact, and, besides, in truth he had been busier these two years than ever before in his rule.

The Capital was now a thriving city, and he could no longer oversee the administration of all basic services. This meant training others to do the work for him. He had also started a school for teachers and healers, overseeing and in some cases creating the curricula himself. Even more time-consuming had been the constant training of new troops, some to man the increasingly important outlying fortresses, including the old Garden; others for police duty in the Capital, where they were charged with keeping order and arresting the growing number of Trader proselytizers.

He had also traveled a good bit in these two years: he had journeyed to the sparsely populated, bat-ridden northlands, where he reaffirmed his uneasy truce with the Governor of the North, an educated old man of little vision, who ran a feudallike system and who welcomed the Principal as an ally against the Traders, who had begun to move into the north too. Afterwards, for several months, he had led an expensive and fruitless expedition of exploration into the unmapped areas of the west where the Traders were believed to originate, finding nothing but ignorant, unkempt nomadic tribes, many of whom followed the new religion. Of organized structure or religious leaders there had been no trace, though the primitive peoples his troops encountered seemed more resistant to the ideas of civilization than even the people of the District had when he had first assumed control. The movement seemed to have sprung up everywhere at once like mushrooms after a rain, with no order or direction.

Unfortunately, the Traders’ beliefs were taking hold in the Capital, and discouraging them consumed more energy every day. His subjects seemed eager at the least excuse to give up every vestige not only of civilization but of common sense. He had always had difficulty persuading the people of the Capital to bathe, to dispose of their waste in places other than the drinking-water supply, to attend the literacy classes which he encouraged by forgiving a part of taxes owed. There had been more resistance to all these since the Traders had come into the District with their doctrines equating cleanliness with godlessness, technology with the devil, and knowledge with damnation. It was as if all of mankind had suddenly chosen to return to the Dark Ages; but this was worse, because the knowledge existed, though it was no longer widely known, of the consequences of poor hygiene.

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