Sisterhood of Suns: Pallas Athena

by Martin Schiller

  “Human society very nearly collapsed,” Ben Rilla continued, “and to compound the situation, an alien invasion followed right on the heels of the disaster. The Hriss, believing us to be weak, chose this point in history to wage a war of conquest and indiscriminate slaughter. What they didn’t count on was the reliance of women, or their determination to survive.”

  Being a naval officer, Lilith was well-acquainted with the desperate battles that had been fought to repel that invasion. They had become the stuff of military legend and the inspiration for generations of cadets at the Naval Academy on Calaphis; from the first bloody engagement at Tennos-9, all the way to the defeat of the Hriss battle fleets at Fomalhaut.

  And also, the terrible tragedy of Solara, where the Hriss had perpetrated one final atrocity. In revenge for their disgrace at Fomalhaut, the invaders had rallied their remaining forces and attacked the birthplace of Humanity.

  A new holo came up, and Lilith found it even harder to look at than its predecessors. Not simply because of its subject matter, but also the nearness of it to her own professional experience. It was another classic image, and although it was over a thousand years old, it still hadn’t lost any of its visual impact.

  The shot had been taken on the bridge of the USSNS Deborah Gannett, and showed a Navcom tech, looking back over her shoulder at her captain. She had been captured at the very instant that she was announcing the terrible news to her superior about Old Gaia’s fate.

  Alerted by the inhabitants of the planet, the fledgling Sisterhood fleet had rushed to intercept the Hriss battle group, but had come out of Null only to discover that their motherworld was gone forever, pulverized into dust by planet-buster missiles. It had been the last, and greatest loss of what would become known as the First Widow’s War.

  Lilith’s throat tightened involuntarily as she imagined what it must have been like for the Gannett’s crew, and their captain, as they realized that they had failed. She also whispered up a small, secret prayer of thanks to the Goddess that she had been born when she had, and had not been the one sitting in that command chair.

  She continued reading.

  “Our enemies also didn’t realize our capacity to learn from the lessons of history,” Ben Rilla stated. “MARS was not the first great disease to ravage our species, even if it was the most devastating. Centuries before interstellar space travel was even a concept, another plague cut a swathe through our ranks. This was the Black Death of the Middle Ages, and there are many parallels between it and MARS that bear serious examination.’

  “One of these was the pivotal role that travel and commerce played in both catastrophes. The ability to move over long distances and transport goods has always been the key to great wealth and power. However, it was this very freedom that proved to be our undoing.’

  “In the Middle Ages, trade between Europe and the Far East provided the mechanism for the Black Death to be introduced into European society. In the great city state of Florence, this occurred in 1348 BSE, when a merchant ship laden with exotic goods—and infected fleas--made port. By the time that the disease had finally burned itself out in 1356 BSE, an estimated 200 million people had perished.’

  “Centuries later, interstellar trade was the agent of disaster. Although a civil war between the Gaian Star Federation and the Kasiegian Confederation had been raging for several years, trade had continued unabated.’

  “In the process of transporting legal and illegal goods from one star system to the next, infected merchanter crews unwittingly transmitted the MARS plague throughout all of the human worlds until no place had been left untouched. This time, the casualties were in the trillions.’

  Another hologram appeared with this. It was an example of the ubiquitous Widow’s Stone. Every world in the Sisterhood had at least one of these monolithic black stones on display, etched with the names of the Plague’s victims, and those who had fallen in the three wars that the Sisterhood had fought with the Hriss.

  Lilith took a moment to make the sign of the Lady in respect for the dead, before closing it, and moving on.

  “Another common point was the sweeping social change that the two epidemics ushered in. Like the Black Death, the MARS Plague transformed human society completely. Established governments fell, religious beliefs were questioned and discarded, and the very fabric of civilization underwent a radical transformation.’

  “For the ancient Europeans, the result was the Renaissance and some of the finest art and inventions that our species has ever created. For the women of the 23rd century BSE, it was the enlightenment of Motherthought and the greatest society ever conceived of, the United Sisterhood of Suns. As terrible as it is to admit, the illumination that Motherthought has brought to our lives, and the freedom and prosperity that we now enjoy, would not have been possible without the MARS Plague. It freed us from the domination of men, and gave us the chance to flourish on a scale that our ancestresses could never have imagined for their daughters.’

  “Today, more than a thousand years after this catastrophic event, we tend to assume that MARS no longer touches our daily lives. And yet, its effects are still being felt. One example of this is religion.’

  “Prior to the Plague, it was a given that the universe had been created by a male God, and that ‘he’ was represented by the patriarchal religions of the time, including Christianity. With the advent of MARS, this viewpoint fell into disrepute, and was eventually replaced by the worship of the Goddess.’

  “Even so, a remnant of this archaic male-centered belief system has managed to survive to this very day, but not without experiencing a wholesale alteration to its fundamental beliefs. Instead of a male serving as its spiritual leader, a female was elected to become Pope in 03.24 ASE, and in order to bring about what it believed would be the ‘Second Coming’ of its redeemer figure, its followers were compelled to engage in a genetics program to resurrect the male human. Today, we call them the neomen.’

  Lilith paused the book, and took a long sip from her tea, pondering this statement. The New Catholic Church of the Revelation of Mari was a tiny minority in the Sisterhood, and generally despised and distrusted by most women. Personally, she didn’t feel any particular hostility towards them, and she didn’t share the general view that the Marionites were any kind of credible threat to society.

  Nor did she harbor any antipathy towards the neomen themselves. In her opinion, these ‘new males’ were too small in number, and too marginalized to ever wield the kind of sociopolitical influence that their forbearers had once enjoyed. As she saw it, they were really nothing more than a genetic curiosity, however much the Marionites and their sympathizers wanted it to be otherwise.

  Even so, she would have preferred that the neomen had never been created in the first place, and that Christianity had died with the Plague. Like Islam, Judaism and the other patriarchal religions that had once existed, the historical record amply demonstrated how this belief system had managed to stunt the spirtual and technological growth of humanity for millenia.

  And the fact that there was still a minority of otherwise enlightened women who chose to believe that a ‘god’ governed their lives, rather than the Goddess, both astounded and disappointed her. For all of its advances and progress, the Sisterhood still had its fair share of ignorance and superstition, she decided.

  Setting down her cup again, she resumed reading.

  “Another dramatic effect that MARS continues to exert on us is the very process of reproduction itself. We simply take it for granted that we can have a child completely free of any male influence. We have only to apply for the permit, pass the parenting classes, and let a doctor handle the rest.”

  She was tempted to close the book right there. At the outset, she had expected some of Ben Rilla’s material to bother her, but this was a particular sore spot. Every time birthing was mentioned in any context, she was always forced to recall her marriage, and the daughter that she and her wife had given birth to.

  That,
and the pain of losing them both.

  She was too dedicated a student of history, and too well trained as an officer to allow her regrets to overwhelm her however. Even now, at this time of year. Mastering herself, she pressed on. Her ghosts would have to wait until she was ready to deal with them.

  “But before the MARS Plague, and for literally millions of years, this was not the case.’ Ben Rilla went on, ‘Having a child in the pre-Sisterhood era required that a woman submit herself to a messy, animalistic union with a male in order to receive the ‘contribution’ of his XY chromosomes.’

  “This primitive, and often savage means of reproduction was at best, a desperate gamble. Sometimes, when the Y chromosome subjugated the female’s egg, it produced an inferior male offspring, and at other times, when the X chromosome triumphed, the mother was blessed with a female.’

  “The degradation did not end there by any means; once impregnated, women quickly found themselves enslaved by the ‘fathers’ of their children, and were forced into a life of utter servitude.’

  The holo that supplemented this depicted a pregnant woman standing before a stove in a primitive 20th century kitchen. She was barefoot, and screaming children were tugging at her skirt. Off in the corner, a male dozed in a chair, with an empty bottle of alcohol lying on the table in front of him.

  The woman was the very epitome of weariness, and she sported several bruises and a black eye that had clearly been visited upon her by her husband. While Lilith understood that the image had been deliberately overplayed in order to underscore the wisdom of Motherthought for young girls, she had read enough accounts from the pre-Sisterhood era to accept its basic message. Before MARS and the Sisterhood, women had been nothing better than chattel, especially in what historians had called the ‘third world’ nations.

  There was also another, optional holo embedded in the text, which promised her a graphic example of the ancient sex act itself, but Lilith pointedly ignored it. She had viewed ‘vid clips just like it in Tertiary school, and wasn’t interested in seeing another.

  Most modern women considered heterosexual sex to be on par with bestiality, and just as socially unacceptable. But although she shared this attitude, she didn’t consider it to be a crime like so many of her countrywomen did. Instead, it was like the neomen; something that nature had discarded in favor of something better.

  MARS had certainly been a terrible thing, she reflected, but Motherthought was correct. The Plague had elevated womankind to a state of evolutionary perfection. Unlike the beasts of the field, her species no longer required a weaker counterpart to reproduce, which was a claim that few races could make. Now, sex was just for pleasure and not a tool of domination.

  She sent a thought and turned to the next page.

  “We have a woman to thank for our liberation from this genetic tyranny” Ben Rilla continued. “She was the great scientist, Dr. Rachel Landa, and although every schoolgirl knows her name, her story deserves retelling, not only to award her memory the honor that it merits, but also to bring to light certain details of her work that the average reader might be wholly unfamiliar with.’

  “Our reproductive revolution actually began well before the MARS Plague, in 2004 BSE. Researchers in a Japanese laboratory were able to create a ‘fatherless’ mouse from two female parents. The technique involved the modification of an immature egg and combining it with a normal, mature egg. The result was a genetically diverse female mouse that could also reproduce in the same manner.”

  Lilith took another long, speculative sip of her tea. She hadn’t been aware this particular fact.

  So, we owe it all to a pair of mice? she wondered. The universe could be a surprising place at times. Mice it was then.

  She also made a mental note not to mention this particular detail to Skipper. The kaatze would be utterly appalled.

  “At the time, the Human race, unenlightened as it was by the tenets of Motherthought, viewed this experiment as nothing more than an anomaly, and some (especially among the male population) were even frightened by its implications. Dr. Landa however, saw past these narrow attitudes, and envisioned a shining future for womankind.’

  “She immediately relocated to Japan, joined the project, and soon secured support from several progressive corporations, which allowed her to take the experiment to the next level. Working in secret, she eventually overcame the technical hurdles, and enabled two female volunteers to produce a daughter without any male involvement whatsoever.’

  “The first human woman, born of women, had arrived on history’s stage and she was named Nozomi (which meant ‘hope’ in the ancient Japanese language). Nozomi soon became one of the most studied children in pre-Sisterhood history.”

  This was another surprise. Lilith hadn’t been aware of the child’s name, or the fact that she had been Japanese, and she felt a surge of ethnic pride course through her. Her motherworld, Ara, had been colonized by the ancient Nippon, the Chin, and Eurasians like herself. It was also the birthplace of Motherthought, and now, Ben Rilla had linked it with this momentous event.

  The women of Asia have contributed a great deal to the Sisterhood, she mused. However quietly. Eager to learn more, she paged forwards.

  “The announcement of Nozomi’s birth created a firestorm of controversy. Landa was immediately vilified by the scientific community, and the male-dominated media as a ‘mad scientist’ and a ‘monster’. And although her fellow lesbians embraced her discovery, Landa ended her days in disgrace and obscurity. But thanks to her selfless dedication and sacrifice, the doorway to a fully functional, all-female society had been opened, and would never be closed.’

  “But when MARS arrived, Landa’s work ceased to be a curiosity, or a marginal ‘alternative’ birthing process. Instead, it proved be the very key to our survival as a species. The women of the Sisterhood owe Dr. Landa a debt that can never be fully repaid, and this book has been humbly dedicated to her memory and to the memory of all those women who fought and died to preserve our nation, and our species.’

  “--Dr, Maria ben Rilla, Thermadon Val, 1041.05”

  Thoroughly impressed, Lilith started in on the first chapter. It highlighted the early efforts by the ancients to create biological weapons at various points in history, and then the circumstances that gave rise to the civil war between the Gaian Star Federation and the Kaseigian Confederacy. Although she found the material to be detailed, and well-reasoned, she couldn’t agree with the author’s conclusions.

  The Kasiegian’s certainly deserved the suspicion that historians viewed them with, but the MARS virus had affected them just as deeply as it had the GSF. Ben Rilla’s contention that the Plague was their creation, and had somehow gotten out of control, simply didn’t wash.

  Lilith’s personal theory was that it had had its genus elsewhere, either among the many cults and political splinter groups of the time, or came from one of womankind’s many alien enemies. In her estimation, the Zeta Reticulans were the most likely culprets.

  The ‘Greys’ as they were often nicknamed, had secretly enslaved humanity for thousands of years, and farmed it for genetic materials. After humanity had rebelled and overturned the puppet leaders that the Greys had put in place, they had earned their eternal enmity.

  But the Greys were not fighters in the conventional sense. They worked in the shadows, and their weapons were subterfuge and treachery. Instead of engaging in an open war with the Sisterhood, many including herself, believed that they had goaded their client race, the Hriss, into doing all the fighting and dying for them.

  Unfortunately, there was no firm proof of this, but what intelligence the Sisterhood did possess pointed strongly in that direction. And only their status as a member race in the Collective, and its mutual protection pact, was what had kept Womankind from seeking a direct conflict with them. Seeding a deadly plague was well within their means, and just the kind of loathsome thing that the Zeta Reticulans would stoop to.

  As certain as she was of their c
omplicity, Lilith still allowed Ben Rilla to present her case, and kept an open mind. An hour later though, and despite learning additional information, her opinion remained unaltered.

  It was also time for her lunch date with Katrinn. Rubbing the fatigue from her eyes, she set a bookmark, and closed the file.

  ***

  If there was one thing that the Star Service prided itself on, it was its food; brunch, as always, was good and filling. By necessity, the meals had to be good: long tours of space-duty ate at a crew’s spirits. Appetizing food, decent entertainment and continuing education through a half dozen universities ensured that morale aboard a ship on active patrol stayed as high as possible. To Lilith’s mind, of all the ships in their battle group, or in the Topaz Fleet for that matter, the Pallas Athena boasted the best of all these things. For this reason, it came as no surprise to her that the Captain of the Artemis was also dining aboard that day.

  Lilith took her plate and sat down at Captain taur Minna’s table. “Erin? Getting tired of your cook?”

  “Hmm, perhaps,” the Nemesian replied. “She still has no idea how to properly prepare sq’ueeka. She still insists on cooking them!” Erin shook her head in dismay, and looked down at the bowl in front of her. Two of the tiny amphibians were swimming around in it, completely unaware that they were about to become her mid-day meal.

  “Care for one?” she offered, knowing full well that Lilith would refuse. Like most women, Lilith did not agree with the Nemesian view that all food was at its best when it was still alive, and wriggling.

  “No, Erin. Thank you, though,” she replied politely.

  Erin shrugged and fished one of the Sq’ueeka out of its bowl with a special fork, neatly biting off its head with her sharp canines. True to its name, the hapless creature gave a short squeak of protest before expiring. But this did not shock Lilith in the least. She’d seen the spectacle many times before and sat opposite the jungle-dweller without making any comment.

  “I heard about the Spacewitch being let go,” Erin said between bites. “You really think it was worth it, this ‘big plan’ that the spooks have in mind for her?” Her tone was casual, but her light green skin darkened and her prehensile tail flicked in the air behind her, betraying her actual mood.