from above. So if that butt was full of water, they’d be bringing it from the outside all the way to the back here. That wouldn’t make any sense. They’d keep it close to the main entrance to minimise the work of carrying it.”
“Well, what else could it be?” I asked her.
“Oil, most likely, for the lanterns. There are so many of them, they’ve got to have a ready source – and this whole area sits on oil-rich shale.”
She told me what shale was, or tried to. It was a whole big story, and I got some of it – though it seemed strange to me that a river could give birth to a rock, kind of. I believed it when Ursala told it to me, but I couldn’t see it in my mind in a way that made it real.
I think she enjoyed telling it to me. She forgot about how bad things was for us for a while, and I guess I did too. It never stops amazing me how a story can deliver you out of your own self, even in the worst of times.
She told me one thing more though, that kind of done the opposite. Only the blame for that’s all mine, for I was the one that asked.
I had been thinking about what Cup said to me in Ludden, about why there was no people there. She said they died by not being born no more, which was a thought that sunk into my heart and sit there ever since. She said it as a thing Senlas told her, and Senlas had just told me he used to pour light and fire into the sun each morning, so I had hopes this was a similar kind of lie.
But Ursala couldn’t give me no comfort on that.
“That’s more or less what happened to Ludden,” she told me when I asked her. “And it happened in other places too. There are failed villages all across this area. Senlas’s people are probably survivors from some of them, or the children of survivors – along with people cast out by their communities for some crime or other.
“There’s a word from the old time, Koli. Homozygosity. It’s when you get a small group of people that keep marrying and interbreeding over many generations, with nobody coming in from the outside. It leads to some very serious problems – birth defects, stillbirths, declining fertility – and they only get worse over time.”
“Over how much time though?” I asked. “It don’t seem like that would be something that could happen without people noticing.”
“Yes, you’re right. It’s slow, and it’s incremental. But people did notice. Your Ramparts, for example. Perliu’s grandfather, Mennen Vennastin, started to keep a tally of live and healthy births year on year. He told his daughter Bliss to do the same, and she told Perliu. There are almost seventy years’ worth of records now, and they make stark reading.
“But it’s not just here, Koli. It’s everywhere. The human population of the Earth took a massive knock a few centuries ago. It ought to be bouncing back by now, but it’s not. And one of the reasons why it’s not is because the breeding communities are too small. For intractable reasons, your villages are falling out of contact with each other. The interchange of ideas, of goods and – crucially – of people is lower than it’s ever been and getting lower all the time.”
“So when Senlas told Cup that we’d just stop being born…?”
“He was extrapolating from a very obvious trend. I’ve been fighting that trend for a long time now, with the equipment that’s in the drudge. Telling people like Catrin whether this pairing or that one is a safe bet or a long shot in terms of genetic potential. Ludden’s not the only place where the odds caught up with them.”
“It seems like you’re doing all you can to help though,” I said. There was a grim look on her face, and I hoped to shift it.
It didn’t work. Ursala shaked her head like I had said a foolish thing and it made her sorrowful to think on it. “I could have done so much more. The diagnostic is meant to have gene-editing functionality. Repairing the chromosomes in a fertilised egg is half an hour’s work for a nano-imager and a splicing rig. A baby that would have been born dead, or with crippling disabilities, would be perfectly healthy.
“But most of my kit is old. Scavenged