Her eyes seemed fogged with sleepiness. “What?”
“The aspects in Your shrines have names by which They are called. Is there a name for You?”
She curled up on the couch. “Birana,” She whispered. She lowered Her lids. Tears rolled out from under Her dark lashes.
I slept only a little while and awoke early to begin my purification. I longed for more time to clear my mind and prepare myself, then recalled the events of the day before. The aspect called Birana was with me; Her presence would aid my purification.
The others were still sleeping. I went to the altar, knelt, recited every prayer I knew, then stood up. Slowly, I removed my clothing, until I was naked, and began to dance in front of the Wise One. I opened my arms and swayed, then bounced on my feet, whirling as I began to hum. The Lady, I thought, will bless me. She will make me sing, She will come to me with Her blessing. I danced and leaped, and my soul flew out from me, crying out to Her. I was strong, I was pure.
A longing for the Lady took possession of me. I was aflame and filled with holiness. I danced and swooped and then found myself over the still body of Birana. Suddenly, I was sure of Her purpose. She had come to the shrine to grant me Her favor, to purify me further for my journey to the enclave. I thought of the aspects in shrines Who had captured my soul with Their magic, how They had held me, how They had guided my hands to the cleft they had instead of a man’s parts.
I fell on the couch and embraced Her; I pulled at Her shirt and felt Her warm flesh.
She moved under me, screamed, and pushed me away. I fell on the floor, cowering as She struck me with Her fist. “What are you doing?”
I was terrified, certain that I had failed a test of some kind. “I am purifying myself,” I cried as I covered my member and pressed my forehead to the floor. “I longed for Your blessing, that is all. Forgive me. I meant no offense.”
“You fool,” I heard Ulred say in our speech.
“I longed only for…”
“I know,” he said. “It is hard not to feel it. But we must do Her bidding. We cannot take Her blessing, She must give it.”
I looked up, Ulred was standing near Birana’s couch, bowing his head. “Forgive him,” he said in the holy tongue. “His purification made him long for a visitation. His mind was filled with holiness, and Your spell was upon him. It will not happen again.”
“It had better not.” Her face was pale. “He will be punished if it does.”
I danced before the Wise One some more, but my fear of losing control again made me unable to purge my mind. I was afraid of the enclave now, afraid that the Lady would be disappointed in me when I finally reached Her realm.
Birana covered Her eyes. She seemed to hate the sight of my body. I stopped dancing and put on my clothes awkwardly.
She said, “Remember what I have told you.”
I bowed.
“I must instruct you now in how to meet the Lady. Your companions will find us food.” She gestured at Ulred and Hare as they scrambled to their feet. “You’d best be careful outside,” She said to the two men.
“We have You to protect us,” Hare replied.
“All the same, the Lady doesn’t protect those who are careless.”
They hastened from the shrine. I followed Birana to the altar, and we sat on the floor, facing each other. I was uneasy with Her so close to me in Her earthly body. I kept expecting Her to vanish, to fade from sight as other aspects did after They had given Their blessing. She drew back from me, as if wanting to disappear.
“I’ll teach you how to keep your mind still,” She said. “You must do this when you enter the enclave and don a circlet there. When you wear one, the Lady hears only what is on the surface of your mind.”
“But She knows all.”
“That is why She does not have to hear your deeper thoughts then. Remember, you’re being tested—that’s why you must keep all thoughts of Me from your mind when you are before Her. You will break a powerful spell if you say My name to Her, and you’ll suffer for it, and I will be taken from you.”
“I understand.” It seemed a strange test. If I would break a spell by saying Her name, then why had She given the name to me? But I could not question Her will.
“What are you called?”
“Arvil.” I wondered why She did not know that. “My friends are Ulred and Hare—Ulred is the bearded one. But do You not know all the names of men?”
“I wanted only to hear your name from your lips,” She said hastily. “Well, Arvil. We must begin now.” The sound of my name from Her lips made me shiver.
She lifted a golden chain from Her neck over Her head and held it in front of my eyes. From this chain hung a strange object with markings and what looked like a metal needle. She instructed me to watch this object as She spoke. We sat together for a long time while She taught me how to keep my mind still, how to keep all thoughts of Her from me with one holy word, and as She spoke, Her voice seemed to fill my soul.
Ulred brought back a rabbit, while Hare had caught three fish. We cooked our food over a fire outside the shrine. After Birana had taken Her share, I ate as much as I could, knowing that I would need strength. When we had eaten, we filled Birana’s bottle and our waterskins at the lake.
We walked for most of the morning. When Birana began to fall behind, Ulred waited for Her and then gently took Her arm. She pulled away and flailed at him, then relented and allowed him to support her.
She was slowing our pace. When Ulred guided Her, he had to walk more slowly. She hobbled, as if Her boots were blistering Her feet. She did not speak, but I could see the weariness in Her face. The Lady’s spirit, held by this body to our world, seemed to be weakening.
At last we stopped for a time to rest. “I can go on alone,” I said to Hare and Ulred in my speech.
“You don’t want us to come farther with you?” Hare asked.
I shook my head. “I can travel faster alone, and I have little time. We’ll soon be near scavenger territory. It would be safer for you to go to where you are to meet the rest of our band. It would be safer for Her, since we promised Her our protection.”
Birana did not seem to understand our speech, although I had thought that the Lady knew all languages. That was yet another of Her limitations in Her present form. Again, I wondered. An aspect of the all-powerful Goddess had to be honored, yet also treated as one who had our flaws.
“Wish me well, and I shall pray for your safe journey,” I said. Hare and Ulred bowed their heads and murmured some holy phrases. “I ask that You bless me,” I said to Birana in the holy speech. “I must leave You now and travel to the enclave, but Ulred and Hare will lead You to safety and to the rest of our band. They will all protect You, as we have.”
“I bless you.” She glowered at me. “Those creatures around the wall might kill you, though.” I recoiled, as if She had cursed me. At that moment, it almost seemed as if She wanted me to die before I entered the wall. I looked down at Her upturned face, searching for some sign of mercy.
She lowered her eyes and sighed. “May you return safely.” She said the words as if She did not mean them, and then Her face softened a bit. “Those men usually rummage near the western side, where. . .” She paused for a moment. “If you approach from the south, you may not see anyone. If you do, and they’re near the entrance, wait until they leave before you enter. They’ll grow tired of waiting.”
“I shall remember Your words,” I said gratefully. I gave directions to Hare and Ulred, drew pictures on the ground to show them their route, then watched them depart.
I went on my way, my mind filled with both anticipation and fear; they seemed almost the same feeling. I saw dimly, although I could not admit it openly to myself, that my faith had been altered. Somehow, the presence of the Lady in Birana’s body had changed me, and I was moving toward the enclave with unholiness within me.
I could not put my thoughts into words. I could not admit that my reverence for the Lady had been poisoned
by doubt, and—worst of all—by a buried rage at the life I had always accepted.
I was thinking: We are the Lady’s fools. She has made us mindless creatures, no better than the animals we hunt. She toys with us, then casts us aside. My thoughts were not words then, but only a weight on my heart.
LAISSA
I had acted to establish my independence from Mother, but still had the chore of moving my personal possessions to my room in Zoreen’s quarters. After checking to make sure that my mother wasn’t home, I went to my old room.
I had left only a few of my belongings at Shayl’s and had sent her a message, telling her that she could send them to Zoreen’s tower. I was sure that she wouldn’t want to keep them, and I didn’t particularly care whether she sent them on or threw them out. I only wanted her to know that I had found another companion, that she had not been the only one I could have chosen. I wanted her to be jealous, and perhaps to regret what she had lost.
I went into my old room and stared at the boxes, surprised at how little I wanted to take. I had packed old toys, pillows, message spools marking special occasions, gifts from Mother and my aunt and my grandmother, and had planned to take it all, along with my clothing, to Shayl’s rooms. Now my belongings seemed only a reminder of times I preferred to forget. As I looked down at my wrist, I realized that I was still wearing Shayl’s bracelet, the gift she had given me at my party. I tore it off and left the room.
Button had wandered into the outer chamber. He retreated to the window and watched me warily. As I moved toward him, he lifted a hand, warding me off.
“Button, I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
He turned from me and gazed out the window.
“I shouldn’t have done what I did. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
He was silent.
“But I also thought I was doing the best thing for you.”
“No,” he said. For a moment, I thought he understood what I was trying to explain, but he probably would have said “no” to anything I had to say. “Mother says you don’t live here now. Go away.”
I walked toward the door, thinking of how lonely his life had been. He had never gone out of the tower except with Mother or with me; his toys were his only companions. He had met other boys infrequently, for we had been told often enough that boys were unruly and hard to manage in groups. Visitors usually ignored him, and often he had been sent to his own room before they arrived. His only obligation was to stay as physically strong as possible, doing his exercises under Mother’s guidance, working out on his machines. Learning anything else was useless, for the mindwasher would erase it before he was sent out, leaving only his ability to speak, a sense of something lost, and perhaps a residue of memory to fuel his dreams.
The contrast with my own life was striking. I tried to imagine myself growing up that way and being forced to live outside. Would I become like a man? Would men, living here, become more like us? Everything I had been taught denied it; men had a propensity for violence that was both genetic and hormonal. The biological well-being of humankind as a whole required some of their qualities, but the survival of civilization demanded that women, who were less driven and able to channel their aggressiveness constructively, remain in control. Over these harsh facts, many of us had erected a structure of suppositions to soothe ourselves, believing that men were happier as they were, that they were capable of little more, that they would destroy everything we had built.
I considered what history I knew at that point. Once men and women had lived together and had formed bonds. The old records showed that a woman might love a man as I had loved Shayl. Such love had been, of course, a trap. I could not imagine a woman willingly putting herself in the power of a man; women had given power to men, and men had nearly destroyed everything. It could not be allowed to happen again.
I glanced at Button before leaving the room. History, I was beginning to see, might be instructive. I had read a few tales of women bought and sold, of depending on men for food and shelter, of being forced to endure contact with male bodies, of being murdered by men. Our ways were surely better.
Zoreen was sprawled on the floor among her papers and books, reading. I tiptoed over the floor, careful not to step on anything, and sat on the couch.
“Are those real?” I asked, waving a hand at the piles of paper.
“Real documents? Of course not. These are copies—they’d hardly let a student handle the originals.” She picked up one book, a thick pile of paper, and waved it at me. “The real books don’t look like this at all. The pages are bound together, or decorated.”
“Then why have all this paper? Why don’t you just use a screen, or a reader and microcopies?”
Zoreen sat up. “I do, for most reading, but sometimes I want to make a note on a page, or underline a passage, and it’s easier to have the paper in my hands. Eventually I’ll just put my notes into the system, and then I can get rid of some of this. Why, does this mess bother you?”
“Not really, but it would still be easier to make your notes another way.”
She shrugged. “I know it seems odd, but you’d be surprised at how many historians keep piles of paper in their rooms. One of them told me it’s because they start thinking of how much from the past has been lost, how easily things can disappear, so they make microcopies and keep papers, or give them to other historians, as well as recording it all on spools. The more copies there are in different forms, the more likely the past is to survive.”
“You sound as though some might want to lose it deliberately.”
Zoreen nodded. “Let’s put it this way. There are those who think much of it’s best forgotten.”
“Anyway, it seems to me that, with all these copies around, it might just become harder to find the one you’re looking for,” I said. “And if so much was lost, then how can you be sure that what you learn about the past is true? How do you know that your own assumptions aren’t shaping the way you interpret and understand these documents?”
She smiled. “Why, Laissa, you surprise me. You sound as though you’re interested in the subject. I didn’t think you cared.”
I waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, I don’t, not really.”
“Are you still going to do physics?”
“I don’t know.”
“I suppose you wanted to do what Shayl was doing when you thought you’d be living with her, and now…”
I shook my head. “That isn’t it. It’s just that I was advised against it. I was thinking of doing something else even before I decided not to live with Shayl.” I had altered the details of my confrontation with Shayl when telling Zoreen about the incident, making it seem that I had decided not to live with my old friend because of her doubts about me. “I’ll probably do general science. I can go on to physics later, maybe.”
“How utterly useless.”
I leaned forward. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t mean the subject itself is useless, but the way we go at it is. All we do is study what’s known, what was discovered ages ago. After all, we wouldn’t want to push too far, considering the violent applications of science in the past. It’s stultifying—perfect for someone like Shayl.”
“You’re hardly one to criticize someone else for keeping to what’s known,” I said. “Besides, we should be cautious. Using scientific knowledge to build weapons perverts the whole enterprise.”
Zoreen’s eyes widened. “What a proper statement that is, and yet our past achievements in the sciences, the most important ones, took place during times when people were building their most powerful weapons. One might almost say that building the weapons brought about other, more constructive discoveries that otherwise wouldn’t have taken place.” She tilted her head; her long, brown hair swayed. “You know, most of the physicists in ancient times, before the Rebirth, were men.”
“It’s hard to believe.”
She chuckled. “Oh, Laissa. You sound like so many others. Even the Mothers of t
he City often sound like those we serve, those who don’t know any better.”
I seized on one point. “If what you say is true, then it’s because men worked in the sciences that their efforts were directed toward such enterprises.”
Zoreen laughed even more at that. “And we made most of our advances when we had to find ways to enclose our cities, to secure our walls, to build weapons our ships could use to strike at men. Since then, we’ve done very little. Unpleasant facts, Laissa. I’m not saying that the need to push against the boundaries of knowledge has to be linked to such aggressive impulses, but, for whatever reason, we haven’t managed to replace it with another motivation. And in the past, there were men who questioned how science and technology were used, who saw the dangers. Iree of Teesa’s Clan is the expert on the period just before the Destruction. She’s written about it; she knows more about it than anyone else. Iree deals with primary sources, records of the period, not post-Rebirth documents. There were many men who saw what was coming and tried to work against it.”
“Men wouldn’t have had the ethical sense.”
Zoreen pushed a few papers aside. “Let me ask you this. Why do you think so many women don’t want much to do with history or historians?”
I smiled. “Oh, come now, Zoreen. You know why.”
“Because it’s sordid? That’s what girls think, and a lot of the Mothers of the City as well, even though they once knew better. It isn’t the real reason. Most women just don’t want to admit that men had the capacity to think and act in certain ways. They’d rather believe that men always had certain innate limitations, because to believe otherwise raises a lot of questions about the way things are.”
I could not think of a reply.
“Look,” Zoreen said as she held out her hands, “it doesn’t really change things. Whether or not men could behave ethically or peacefully isn’t the point. The point is that they used their power, the power women gave them, to destroy the world, and can’t ever be allowed to do that again. Nothing changes that. Most historians simply think it would be better for more of us to admit that ancient men weren’t quite what a lot of women prefer to think they were.”
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