Destiny's Road - Back Story

Back Story

The novel is set several hundred years in the future, on an Earth-like planet named Destiny, along a length of fused bedrock known as the Road.

The Road was created to enable humans to survive on the planet, as its native life is not nutritious to Earth life – and vice versa. By sterilizing a peninsula with the ship's fusion engines and seeding the cleansed ground with Earth plant life, along with the burials of dead colonists (colloquially known as lifegivers, as they were always buried with a tree as a headstone), a self-sustaining near-analogue of Earth's ecosystem was created. At first, the colony prospered. Native viruses and bacteria are unable to infect colonists; disease is nonexistent and wounds cannot become infected, resulting in longer lifespans. Sea life quickly recovered and is consumed by the colonists as a "diet" food, as their digestive systems are unable to metabolize it into fat.

But the key word in near-analogue turned out to be near. The planet's biosphere almost completely lacks potassium. A diet lacking in potassium causes decreased intelligence in humans, which can be permanent if it is not remedied quickly – especially if this occurs during childhood. If one is denied it for too long, death always results. The reason for this lack is thus: potassium is as lethal to Destiny life as arsenic is to Earth life, and eons earlier, a form of sea life evolved the ability to concentrate potassium as a defense against predation. However, when sea life dies, its remains are deposited on the ocean floor. Ultimately, most of the element was thus leached out of the planet's ecosystem, concentrating it there. After that, volcanic activity was the only process that reintroduced potassium into the ecosystem. Potassium deficiency hypokalemia in reality is more likely to result in death before mental retardation.

Having thus discovered the lack of potassium in Destiny's biosphere, the crew of the Cavorite landing craft took the ship to search for a volcano from which to harvest potassium. However, Destiny is a far, far older planet than Earth, and is much less tectonically active: They could find only a single major volcano. But on that volcano - the future site of the Windfarm - they had an astounding stroke of luck. They found speckles, an indigenous plant that had adapted to concentrate potassium as a defence against predation, making complex extraction of the element unnecessary.

Even so, upon the ship's return to Spiral Town, they found they were too late. Everyone had succumbed to devastating cases of potassium deficiency; all had suffered severe mental retardation, and a great many were dead. The human gene pool on Destiny had been dangerously small from the beginning - more than half of the colonists had died from hibernation-related complications during the trip to the planet, and now more had died of potassium deficiency. The colony would now inbreed itself to extinction unless drastic measures were taken.

The crew decided to use their new-found monopoly on potassium (which the novel discusses as an example of a hydraulic empire) to coerce the colonists into a new social order: they began traveling from town to town as mysterious and well-armed merchants, trading speckles for various goods and services - including sexual favors. Colonial women were impregnated by male merchants, and colonial men impregnated female merchants. By subjecting themselves to constant genetic scrutiny (to the point of charting their genealogies like horses), the merchants were thus able to eventually return the colony's gene pool to relative stability. By then, the merchants had become accustomed to the new social order, or to be more precise, their position at the top of it. What had been visualized as a temporary measure then became permanent.