The Return of Nathan Brazil

Olympus

Olympus was well off the main shipping lanes.It had actually been discovered fairly early in Earth exploration and might have wound up as a grand Terraforming experiment except that the same space drive that allowed man to reach the planet also made possible the almost simultaneous discovery of a number of more attractive and less expensive planets more or less in a row.

It was roughly thirty-two thousand kilometers around at the equator, a bit smaller than old Earth, and farther out so it was colder. In fact, normal air temperature would be about three degrees Celsius on a summer’s day, minus eighteen in winter. Geologically Olympus was very active. Volcanoes larger than any seen on old Earth spewed hot gases and molten magma all over the place; earthquakes were an everyday occurrence on most of the world, although severe ones were rare. To top it all off, the atmosphere was loaded with oxygen and a lot of other gases. The air smelled something like that around a huge chemical plant no matter where you were, and though it rained frequently the chemical content of that rain was a mixture of weak acids stronger by far than those around industrial areas on more Earthlike worlds. The usual materials wore away quickly here; the rains stung and irritated exposed human flesh, and the additives in the air were severe enough to require an artificial air supply. The place had developed a lush plant life well adapted to it as well as some minor insects and sea creatures, but nothing very elaborate. The environment was still too hostile.

The First Mothers, bankrolled by Councillor Alaina, had bought Olympus cheap. Although Ben Yulin had wished for idealized love-slaves, he had made them into superwomen able to withstand enormous extremes. Obie had been the engineer, and he’d done a fine job. The First Mothers found they could live easily on Olympus; their metabolisms permitted them to consume just about anything organic.

Initially, living conditions on Olympus were primitive; houses hewn from solid rock by borrowed lasers were the first homes, and for a generation the population was just a small band of primitives living as naked hunter-gatherers in an almost stone-age culture. They had two advantages, though, a large interest-accruing account in the Com Bank and continuous contact with the Com and its resources.

After a few months, all the First Mothers discovered that they were pregnant. All of the children born were female save two. It was then that they realized they could, in fact, found a new race.

Off-world cloning was employed to guarantee a large, steady supply of females who would be of roughly the same age as the two males when they matured.

The girls were raised to believe that it was their duty to have children as long as they were able and as often as they were able, and the population grew rapidly, eventually allowing the Olympians to dispense with cloning and the outside interests the process necessitated. Now, over seven hundred years later, the population of Olympus was well over thirty million and still growing, although the birth rate had been slowed centuries earlier.

And all the women, except for hair and eye color, looked exactly alike with one additional difference. Of the First Mothers, Yulin had created two before adding the decorative tail. After seven centuries, ten percent of the population lacked the tail. They were the Athenes. The tailed majority were Aphrodites (the last two syllables pronounced as one). They called their race the Pallas, although everyone outside of their culture referred to them as Olympians after their planet. (One of their early books had contained information on human myths, legends, and ancient religions.)

Mavra Chang, disguised as a Pallas, along with Yua made subservient to her by Obie, approached Olympus in an Olympian ship after transferring from a commercial freighter. Realizing the naivete and vulnerability of their early state, the First Mothers had severely restricted access to Olympus. Over the centuries the rules had been chiseled in stone and made absolute. Only Olympians were allowed on the planet. Even freighters had to be Olympian owned and operated.

Although the planet was now modern and civilized, it produced little that was marketable. The old bank funds had been invested in the freighting concern, though, which also did some work for Com worlds. Although it was little known, skilled Olympian females were available for hire, as couriers, as guards, as private ship captains. They were totally loyal to their employers, absolutely incorruptible, and, as super-women, not easy to tangle with. Their attributes made them very useful as couriers of secret information of vital material. The Temple, too, invested heavily in Com businesses; its recent growth had made its wealth astronomical.

All this Obie extracted from Yua’s mind; also the linguistic differences, cultural forms and attitudes. Mavra would make no outward slips. But Yua was not the biggest help. She’d been raised in the Fellowship with the sole purpose of becoming a Priestess, so she had little contact with the greater society of her home planet, no more than one born and raised in a nunnery. Even her education had been turned toward dealing with the humans of the Com.

For example, she’d never seen a male Olympian. She knew they existed, of course; she was not sexually ignorant, although her drives in that direction had been in some way suppressed. Even though she had not met one, she retained a very low opinion of the males. They were not capable of advanced reasoning, she’d been taught, certainly incapable of any responsibility. They were little better than smart animals, sex machines good for little else.

Both Mavra and Obie found this attitude curious, but they reserved judgment. There was no reason for the males to be that way. Considering how Yulin created this race and his own egomania, the men would in fact be powerful sex machines but they should also be at least Yulin’s intellectual equal, and he was, for all his amorality and ambition, certainly close to genius. Obie certainly hadn’t programmed poor reasoning into the biology of the Olympian males.

There were no customs and immigration formalities at the small, spartan spaceport; if you weren’t an Olympian you wouldn’t be there. There were also no dives, bars, or other such spaceport fixtures—just the shuttle landing bays, the barge docks, and a small lounge. Everything was modern, functional; it all looked prefab and lacked traces of imagination.

The capital city, Sparta, reflected its name—no frills, all function. Set as it was in a huge bowl-shaped valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains on three sides and an oddly disturbing deep-purple ocean on the other, it seemed shameful that it was not as beautiful as its setting. Blocky buildings, wide streets with concrete medians, all dull grays and browns. Trolleys carried the people most places, smoothly and silently; the hill sections were served by cable cars. There seemed to be no private vehicles, although there were many trucks whirring back and forth in their own lanes.

People walked a lot, too, and in about every state of dress and undress often with gaudy cosmetics, lots of jewelry, every possible hairstyle—and tailstyle—and tattooing seemed to be in. Some of the people looked like old circus exhibits.

Mavra understood that needless decoration at once. All Olympians looked alike once they reached fifteen; then stayed that way, aging internally but not externally until they died, normally at the age of two hundred or so. They were all the same height; had exactly the same tone of voice, everything the same except for hair and eye color, which could be modified by dyes or special lenses.

So making oneself a recognizable individual was a passion to these women—and that’s all Mavra saw.

Hundreds, thousands of identical women going about the city. No males at all.

Most of the drudge work, including that of moving the newcomers’ luggage, was performed by robots built to withstand the corrosive atmosphere. There were smart and dumb Olympians because there were smart and dumb First Mothers and, of course, other factors of environment intervened as well, but nobody had to do manual labor and nobody did—machines were built for that.

“Hotel Central,” Yua told the machine crisply; it looked like a glorified animated hand-truck to Mavra.

“Yes, ma’am,” a mechanical voice responded and the machine quickly scuttled off to collect and transfer the luggage through underground commercial roadways.

There were no taxis; an Olympian was expected to know her way around and which trolley to take. Yua chose one and they jumped on as it rumbled off. The new arrivals joined standing ranks of neatly identical Olympians. Apparently nobody sat down in Sparta, Mavra thought glumly.

The trip took about ten minutes and the tram never stopped. It just crept slowly along with people jumping on and jumping off. Nobody tried to collect a fare.

The Hotel Central was a square block near the city center; like all Spartan buildings it was low, five stories, built for an earthquake zone on a planet that was entirely an earthquake zone. Mavra studied the building before following Yua through the front door. Probably rent closets where you can sleep standing up against concrete, she guessed. She was not impressed with what her grandparents’ descendants had wrought, although, she knew, they would probably not be too thrilled by present-day Olympus, either. It’s sometimes a blessing that great historical figures don’t live to see what people do to their visions.

The lobby was drab and depressing as expected, but they had no problem getting a room. Again no money or identification was required. The society was communal to the nth degree and simply assumed that, if you needed a hotel room, you had a good reason to need it. You did have to register, though; Mavra suspected that somewhere somebody inspected those registers to see who was doing what with whom.

She signed as Mavra A332-6; apparently Mavra was a common name on Olympus—which pleased her. Nikki Zinder, also one of the First Mothers, had had a daughter—one of the founders—by Renard, the bookish Agitar satyr when he was still in human form—and she had named the child after Mavra Chang. She suspected that names like Nikki and Vistaru and perhaps ten or so others were also very common.

Mavra was using Yua’s codenumber, which indicated to the clerk that they were a “bonded” couple. Such associations were common on Olympus; at some point almost everyone chose to have a child, and there was an ingrained insistence on two-parent family structure. A “bonded” couple checking in generally meant only one thing to the locals: They were in Sparta to visit a Birth Temple, to be impregnated. They quickly found themselves being treated like newlyweds. This was uncomfortable for Mavra, but it had been Obie’s idea. The cover easily explained why the two were doing everything together, and Yua’s fawning adulation of Mavra might be dismissed as the reaction of a lover.

Their room was a pleasant surprise; it contained a gigantic soft and fluffy bed, an entertainment console, a versatile portabar, and a dial-a-meal food service area. Located on the fifth floor, it had a large draped window through which part of the city could be seen. Yua delighted in pointing out the sights to Mavra. “Up there, see, near the mountains, were the First Mothers’ original homesites, now a national shrine. At the base of that mountain was the Mother Temple, seat of the now interplanetary religion and the Olympian theocracy, while over there, to the right, the big cubed building in the distance, was where I grew up.”

In the morning they would take a tour of the city, then visit the Mother Temple itself. Mavra still wasn’t sure what she would do once she got there, but she decided to sleep on the problem. She still wondered where the men were. Was it possible, she mused, that, just as the tailless Athenes were superior to the tailed Aphrodites, perhaps the males, a far smaller portion of the population, might be at the heart of the Mother Temple?

But that didn’t make much sense, considering how Yua was brought up to regard the men she’d never seen. There was a puzzle here, one she wanted to solve—and which Obie was also curious about—but perhaps the answer would be found in the Mother Temple. If not, it could wait. There were more pressing things to do, and Nautilus, with an impatient Obie—not to mention Marquoz and Gypsy—was waiting.

Yua dialed meals and drinks for them as the sun, a ghostly red-orange, vanished behind the mountains. Then they lay down on the bed, roomy enough for them despite their tails and the most comfortable thing Mavra had encountered on the journey. She felt odd in ways she couldn’t quite put her finger on, ways she hadn’t felt in so long she could hardly remember. I’m horny as hell, she suddenly realized. Something must have been in the food or drinks; some kind of aphrodisiac that really worked on the Olympian biochemistry. It took all her willpower to fend off Yua’s advances and get to sleep.

They were awakened by a buzzer. It was loud and annoying, the kind one wants on alarm clocks when getting up is a necessity. Yua groaned, looked over at Mavra and smiled sweetly, then got up. “It’s the door; I’ll get it,” she said softly.

Mavra was having problems. If anything the sexual craving was worse; if it grew any more powerful it would be impossible to control. On the other hand, who should know they were there—and why were they being awakened by that someone?

It turned out to be a room-service robot laden with an assortment of odd-looking but tremendously appetizing breakfast items as well as a bottle of the Olympian equivalent of champagne.

Mavra got up. “What? We didn’t order this,” she told the machine.

“Compliments of the hotel,” the robot waiter piped. “All fresh, no synthetics. We have also taken the liberty of registering you with the Temple of Birth. Another service of the Hotel Central,” he added, almost proudly. “It is oh-eight-hundred now; your appointment is at ten-hundred hours. Pick up the card at the desk, take tram one eighty-seven. Thank you.” It detached itself from the serving table and rumbled out, the door closing automatically behind it.

Mavra was disturbed. “They certainly assume a lot, don’t they?”

“What will you do about it?” Yua responded. “There will be much suspicion if we do not keep the appointment.”

Mavra nodded. Damn, I’m horny! She was almost looking forward to it! Still, Yua was right—not to go might arouse suspicion and make it hard to operate. The procedure would probably be pretty clinical anyway, and over quickly; then they could get over to the Mother Temple.

Yua seemed excited at the prospect. Mavra sighed and surrendered, sitting down to eat. The stuff was probably loaded with aphrodisiacs, but what the hell, she thought. At least today I’ll find out where the men are.

When a race is physiologically identical to the nth degree it is easy for trained biochemists to mass produce whatever physiological results are desired. The fact that so little modification had been done to the people of Olympus was something of a credit to their leadership, if there was a leadership as such. In the case of reproduction, however, little was left to chance. A combination of aphrodisiacs designed for the Olympian body had brought Mavra and Yua to exactly the correct physical and emotional state. By the time they reached the Temple of Birth the two women could hardly think of anything nonsexual, and the internal physical and mental pressure was almost unbearable.

They obviously were expected and were ushered in with little fanfare by crisp, professional technicians. A slight, still rational corner of Mavra’s mind wondered at all the prepreparation; it seemed all too pat.

They were directed to separate elevators, each of which seemed able to hold just one person. As they each entered the door closed on them and they sank, although slowly. Mavra felt as if a tremendous cloud were being lifted from body and mind.

“Sorry, Mavra.” Obie’s voice intruded into her mind. “I do not wish to force you into this against your will.”

Obie! she thought back fiercely. What the hell?…

“I’m wired into your brain and central nervous system, of course,” the computer responded.

“I’m sorry. You have to understand, these are my children’s children. I created them—I have to know.”

All this birth stuff—you arranged it! You ordered it, somehow!

Obie sounded very apologetic. “It isn’t wasting much time. I must see what the males are like. I didn’t program anything to make them different.”

Well, unless they’re artificially inseminating, which I doubt, I am going to face a sex-crazed male in a matter of seconds, thanks to you. Get me out of this!

Obie was still apologetic, but only slightly. “I feel confident you can deal with such a situation.”

She was coldly furious. Obie—don’t you ever do anything like this without my knowledge or permission again, you hear me?

There was a pause, then a little chastened, the far-off machine replied, “All right, Mavra.”

She’d undergone such mind linkages many times before, but never under similar circumstances and never when she was not in full control of herself.

The door opened into a bedroom; the floor all of it, was the bed. Well decorated with soft, indirect lighting, subtle music playing, sweet smells in the air, and lots of pillows all around. Near the far side of the room, reclining, was an Olympian male.

He looked as she and Obie had expected—the very essence of masculinity, incredibly handsome and muscular to boot, just as Obie had designed to Ben Yulin’s specifications so many centuries before.

She approached him cautiously, trying to figure a way out of the situation.

“Hi, there,” he greeted, softly and sensually. “Please come on over and lie beside me.”

“Your hypno works on Olympians,” Obie assured her. They were immune to almost every toxin, thanks to Obie; but because Obie had designed them he would naturally know exactly how to get around his own designs.

She flexed small muscles in her fingertips, feeling the toxin ooze from tiny glands into the needlelike tubes Obie had placed under her nails. It assured her; she was in control again.

Approaching nervously as if still under the influence of the aphrodisiacs, she lay down beside him and put her arms around him just as he expected. She inserted little needlelike projections into his back without his even feeling them. He was under in seconds. She released him and sat up, commanding him to do the same. He obeyed.

“What is your name?”

“Doney,” he responded slowly, eyes shut. Mavra nodded, satisfied. “How long have you been here, Doney?” she was trying to satisfy Obie’s curiosity and her own.

“I don’ know,” he answered. “Long time.”

“How old are you?” He didn’t know.

“Do you do anything except this?” Despite the hypnotics, he was surprised. “What else do men do? It is what we are born to do.”

The rest of the interrogation established fairly well the pattern for Olympian males. They were raised by the Temple, raised for one purpose only. They were totally ignorant of the outside world or even that there was an outside world. Theirs was a carefree if cloistered childhood, full of toys and games and play and not much else. They were not taught to read or write, nor even the most basic arithmetic. At puberty they were taught the skills necessary for their work. Otherwise they remained children, working out and playing childish games in a huge playground-gym. Even their vocabulary was carefully limited; their every waking moment was programmed by the Temple. The males were never in unmonitored groups or given the chance to think, to question. They questioned nothing, wondered about nothing. The superiority of women in all things was unquestioned; males existed to serve and service, nothing more. Mavra found it revolting. Obie tried to analyze the situation.

“Remember,” the computer noted, “your grandfather was a woman who liked women, only to be remade a man by Nathan Brazil, then remade a Yaxa by the Well—one of a butterflylike race that was entirely female, the males mindless sex machines. The early culture here was entirely female, the dominant personalities extremely female-oriented thanks to the Well World. And, of course, the two males were important; they had to be protected. It’s easy to see how such a system could arise.”

I think it’s disgusting, Mavra responded. If s no different from the party prostitution houses in which women were raised as whores.

“Oh, certainly,” Obie agreed. “I wasn’t approving, merely stating how such a system could logically arise given the circumstances of this planet’s founding. Fascinating, though.”

We ought to do something about it! the woman thought vehemently.

“Nothing much we could do, unless you want me to swing in and alter the entire makeup of the planet,” the computer responded. “Besides, we are now dealing with the effective destruction of the entire Com and perhaps all reality. Let Olympus and its society go; what difference will it make?”

There really wasn’t a reply to that one, and Mavra let the matter drop. How long should I stay here? she wondered, more to herself than as a question to Obie.

The computer replied anyway. “An hour, give or take—give this fellow a memory of a happy liaison and put him to sleep. I’ll let you know when it’s time to go.”

She did it, being particularly suggestive in the hypnotic memories she was implanting. Soon he was happily snoozing, clutching a pillow like a teddy bear, and smiling.

She spent the time plotting new moves with Obie.

“Get to the Mother Temple,” he suggested. “We need to talk to the top of the political ladder, whoever that is. Indications are that someone’s in charge of everything. Find out who. Play it by ear. I’ll be riding with you just in case.”

The hour passed slowly.

Yua was positively radiant; she seemed to be in a daze for some time after they left the Temple of Birth. They caught a tram for the Mother Temple, whose spires could be seen in the distance.

“To whom do you report?” Mavra asked her.

“To the Priestess Superior,” the woman responded. “She is an Athene,” she added with some distaste. Athenes were the tailless.

“But who receives her report? I mean, who is in charge here?”

“The Holy Mother, eventually, I suppose,” Yua answered. “I have never seen her.”

“But she’s in the Mother Temple?”

Yua nodded. “So I’m told.”

The Mother Temple was imposing; although no higher than the surrounding buildings, it was designed like a medieval castle of gleaming metal, with towers and short spires abounding. At night it was bathed in colored lights, but even at midday it was very impressive.

One approached by an impossibly long flight of stone stairs; the building itself was anchored in and rested against the solid bedrock of the mountains encircling the city.

To the right Mavra and Yua could see the Pilgrimage Trail which lead to the site of the first settlement. It didn’t look like too long a walk and Mavra suggested they visit it before entering the Temple proper. The Olympians may have been Obie’s children, but the dominant First Mothers had been Mavra Chang’s grandparents.

The well-kept trail was littered with signs, exhibits, and displays telling the story of the founding of Olympus, of how the First Mothers had fallen under the spell of the Evil One while on the mystical Well World, which was pictured as a heavenly paradise, then spirited back to the Com by the machinations of this otherwise undefined Evil One who was then defeated in a great battle, leaving the First Mothers victorious but cut off from Heaven, and how they decided to build their own new world here, on Olympus.

The early huts were indeed primitive; Mavra guessed that they need not have been so basic, that the simplicity was a deliberate attempt to force the building of a new race and culture from the ground up, with as little contamination from the Com as possible. The First Mothers had recognized from the beginning that they merely wore the form of beautiful human women; that inside, biologically and otherwise, they were an alien race and would have been treated as freaks in the then totally human Com. They had been wrong in one thing, though; mentally they had risen above humanity and they carried that with them.

Above, carved in rock and gilded, were the names of the eleven First Mothers. Most of them were not familiar to Mavra, as they’d been refugees from New Pompeii, but there, too, was Kally “Wuju” Tonge, and Vistaru, her grandparents, as well as Dr. Zinder’s daughter, Nikki, and Nikki’s daughter Mavra. And, after the eleven names there was one more, off by itself and bordered in thick gold.

MAVRA CHANG TONGE, it read.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” breathed Mavra Chang softly. “Damn me if I’m not feeling foolishly emotional.” There was a sense of history here, and family, and continuity after all, which seemed suddenly to grab at her soul.

Yua looked surprised. “Why, that’s you, isn’t it?” she gasped. “Somehow I just never thought of it!”

Mavra broke the silence. Turning, she said, flatly, “Let’s get this over with.” She walked back down the pathway not looking back and Yua followed. Outwardly, Mavra Chang was all business again.

Obie? Where are you now?

“There’s a lot of debris in the system,” the computer responded instantly. “I am well disguised but within range.”

You have a fix on me? She was climbing the long steps to the doors of the Mother Temple.

“I’m locked on,” Obie assured her. “Just let me know when and if you need something.”

Olympians were walking up and down the stairs and in and out the massive Temple doors. Most were tailed Aphrodites but one or two were tailless Athenes garbed in Temple robes and intent on some business or the other. It was a busy place.

The interior of the Mother Temple looked more like a spaceport lounge than a religious center; an intricate model of the Well World hung from the center of a huge chamber and myriad creatures had been depicted in the mosaic tiles that covered the floor and the walls. Many doorways and corridors led from the chamber and before each was a reception desk staffed by a priestess. The place was well organized, Mavra had to admit that.

Yua walked almost the length of the chamber before approaching a particular desk to give a crossed-arm salute and bow to the Aphrodite sitting there.

“Yua of Mendat to see Her Holiness,” she reported quickly.

The receptionist nodded slightly and checked a list, then looked back up at Yua. “You are back early, High Priestess. We had no word you were coming.”

“I report on discussions with the Com government of concern only to Her Holiness,” Yua responded a little icily. “She will see me.”

The receptionist shrugged almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t her problem. “I’ll tell Her Holiness you’re here,” she said, then looked over at Mavra. “Yes?”

“The sister is with me,” Yua covered quickly, “and bears on the report. I will take full responsibility.”

Dark eyebrows rose slightly. The Priestess punched Yua’s code. After a few seconds, a small green light glowed. “You may enter now,” she told them. “Reception Room three, on the right.”

They walked past the desk and down the hall. It was disappointingly mundane after the Temple facade and the grand hall—it looked like office-building corridors everywhere. The door to Reception Room 3 slid open as they approached. Inside were two backless stone benches almost in the center of the room and a small chair of some plastic material sculpted to hold the human form, slightly raised and facing the benches. It’s construction would have prohibited an Aphrodite from sitting; clearly this was Athene territory. A small table alongside the chair was the room’s only other furnishing.

Mavra and Yua had barely sat when the door opened behind them. They rose and turned as an Olympian in a scarlet robe walked in, up to the chair, and sat down, thus proving she had no tail. She had some files under her arm and placed them on the table.

“Hello, Yua,” she opened, nodding toward the High Priestess. “And who is this with you?”

Yua started to answer but Mavra cut her off. “I’m a spy,” she replied casually. “I am Mavra Chang.”

The Athene looked a little startled. “What the hell is this all about?” she snapped. “Are you mad?”

Obie? You got her?

“No problem, Mavra.”

A violet glow surrounded the Athene, her form seemed to sparkle. Then the glow died out suddenly.

The Athene stood, smiled at them, gave the crossed-arm salute, and asked softly, “How may I serve you?”

Yua was astonished, first at her superior and then again at Mavra Chang. Knowing nothing of Mavra’s link to Obie, Yua took this as further evidence that she was in the presence of a goddess.

“Who is in charge of Olympus?” Mavra Chang wanted to know.

“The Holy Mother, of course,” the Athene answered.

Mavra nodded. “She has the ultimate, absolute power here?”

“Why, yes, of course. We all obey the Holy Mother.”

“She is here, in this Temple?”

“Always,” the Athene assured her.

“I wish an audience as soon as possible. Can you arrange it?”

“Oh, yes, surely, although it is highly improper for her to do so. But—I shall need a reason to give her.”

She had considered that. “Tell her that Mavra Chang Tonge returns from the dead to find Nathan Brazil!”

The Athene supervisor returned shortly. “Please, follow me,” she requested.

They walked a short way to an elevator. Mavra saw from the buttons that there were ten floors—five above and five below ground, most likely. The Athene picked none of them; the door closed and the elevator descended of its own accord. Mavra watched as each floor button glowed when the elevator passed, until they reached the bottommost—and they descended another thirty meters or so, judging by the time that passed.

The door slid open revealing a dimly lit chamber. Mavra’s eyes could operate well in the infrared as could the Olympians’. Their view was distinct. The chamber was circular, the walls artificial but hard and without trace of opening but for the elevator doors, which stood at four opposing points and seemed to provide the only entrance and exit.

Mavra Chang turned to the two Olympians who had accompanied her. “Return to the surface and await my instructions,” she ordered in a whisper. They saluted and did as instructed. She was alone in that cold room.

Or was she? She wished she had Gypsy’s ability to say for certain. Her instincts told her that she was being observed from somewhere, but her eyes could not locate the source.

Suddenly the room seemed to burst into light; it was just that, but the effect was disorienting for a moment.

Obie’s voice came to her. “They’re projecting hypnotics at you. I’m neutralizing them.”

It figured, really. You couldn’t be a truly awesome leader unless you gave an awe-inspiring show. Again she thought of Gypsy. He’d love all this.

And now came the voice, incredibly ancient, impossibly weary, and altogether nonhuman. It was a voice somehow powerful yet filled with infinite sadness, a voice unlike any she’d heard before, and it seemed to issue from nowhere and everywhere at one and the same time. “Who and what are you?” it asked.

“Computer-amplified thought waves, first order,” Obie informed her. “This isn’t part of the show. It’s too complex for that.” He sounded puzzled, and Mavra didn’t like that at all.

“I am Mavra Chang,” she told the voice while straining to locate the source. If Obie was correct, the source could be in her own mind.

“Mavra Chang is dead,” the voice responded. “Mavra Chang is more than seven centuries dead.”

“Mavra Chang did not die,” she told the unseen person, creature, whatever. “No one can kill Mavra Chang.” Her own voice, she noted, echoed slightly; the other’s did not.

“You are mad, my child. Receive the spirit of your Holy Mother.”

Suddenly she felt pain, a massive headache and an attack along her entire central nervous system. Mavra dropped to the floor in agony. Slowly she could feel the other, the presence, creep in, invading her mind, starting to take control.

Obie, taken by surprise as well, was quick to react now. Through the link to the body he’d fashioned for Mavra he fought back, casting out the alien mental presence. It was not a battle; once Obie had analyzed the manner of mental attack he countered it instantly, leaving Mavra free but exhausted on the floor. She was in shock and would have liked to collapse but didn’t dare; her survival depended on a different tack. Slowly, unsteadily, she got to her feet and looked around. With a bravado she didn’t feel she shouted, “You see? Shall we talk or will I now come to your mind?” Anger was always a good tonic, and Mavra was mad as hell. “Who dares invade the mind of Mavra Chang?”

Obie approved. “Atta girl, tiger-cat! Steady and I’ll make you into you again! That’ll put the fear of god into ’em!”

She knew that Obie was reaching down to her, that her form was bathed in the violet glow, but the renewal was very quick and was not consciously apparent to her. She knew, though, that her lithe, black-clad human form was being seen by the unseen other or others. If they had any historical records they knew upon whose visage they now gazed. She could sense the astonishment in that strange alien voice-not-voice as it gasped, “You are Mavra Chang!”

“I am,” she acknowledged, grateful also that Obie had eliminated the shock. She felt in complete command. “And who are you?”

The voice was silent for a moment, apparently still astonished and perhaps a bit troubled by the power it had just witnessed. Finally it said, “I am Nikki Zinder.”

Once again it was Mavra’s turn to be shocked. “Now wait a minute! I know how I’m still around—but that’s not possible.” A computer, she guessed. A computer programmed to think it’s Nikki. That has to be it. Obie was strangely silent; built by Nikki’s father, he had considered the girl his sister.

Mavra remembered the original Nikki. Fat, naive, sheltered from reality by her father until they’d landed on the Well World. Nikki had been full of sponge. Mavra had battled to lead the girl and Renard, a servant who was also sinking fast because of the sponge, to a haven of sorts on the Well World. Renard had made love to the girl when they’d both thought they were dying; he, though, had been changed by the Well World into one of the satyrlike Agitar; Nikki had been grabbed by Obie and cared for by him in the minor control room. There she’d borne the daughter Renard had fathered, and named her Mavra. And it was there that both of them had been changed into the form now called Olympian or Pallas. They had been among the First Mothers.

But that had been seven centuries and more ago.

A machine that thinks it’s a long-dead person, Mavra thought glumly. How do you deal with a machine?

“New Pompeii was destroyed,” the voice noted. “I saw it with my own eyes. Obie was destroyed. The history tapes bear me out. You cannot be Mavra Chang.”

“Obie is alive. I remained. We only made it appear that we were destroyed. You know the power of Obie, you know that he could do this, know why I can still be alive and much as I was then. You have Nikki Zinder’s memories—you must know that this can be so.”

There was a short pause. “You speak as if I were not who I say,” the voice noted. “I tell you that I am Nikki Zinder. I have remained alive, now bound to this machine. But I am not a machine. My mind and soul live, are preserved and amplified by it.”

Mavra considered this. “But why? Why you, Nikki? Why not the others?”

“The others, like me, grew old. When it was clear that they would die, when Touri did die, they gathered and made their decision. They would find a Markovian gate; they would return to the Well World and be reborn yet again. They all left and, as far as I know, succeeded, my daughter included.”

“But not you?”

“Not I. We were barely two centuries started; the population was just approaching viability. The Pallas needed guidance to build the proper society, guidance only we of the First Mothers could give them. We had the proper technology. I proposed that we First Mothers be preserved, cybernetically linked to computers capable of sustaining us indefinitely, so that we could lead. The others refused, but they could not force me to accompany them. Since then I have remained; I have shaped the growth and development of my people and led them through the founding of the Fellowship. The greatness you see today is my work.”

Obie?

“I’m afraid it’s true, Mavra. I wish it weren’t. This explains the aberrant culture. Brain and soulcanbe preserved as she says, but brain cells do not regenerate. She’s got to be senile, Mavra—senile, probably quite mad, and still in complete control of a people who don’t know any better. Better play along.”

Mavra considered her words carefully. “Nikki, look. Your own people must have told you. The Com is doomed, perhaps everything is doomed, by stupid people who misused your father’s research. We must stop it, and that can only be done by fixing the Well of Souls itself. Only Nathan Brazil can do so, so we have common cause, your people and us. We have brought together the Com government and ourselves for this; we need your people for the legwork. Will you cooperate with us? Will you order that cooperation?”

Nikki seemed lost in thought. Finally the voice said, “Yes, Mavra. You will have whatever you require. The only condition is that Olympians be present when Nathan Brazil is found.”

“I think we can agree to that,” Mavra replied. “We think he might have been spooked by the cul—Fellowship, though, so we’ll have to be very careful when we find him that we don’t lose him again. I give you my word, though, as the same person who brought you from New Pompeii and kept you alive on the Well World, that your people will have access to him. Will you accept that?”

“It is sufficient,” the voice responded. “Go now. The orders have already been given.” She hesitated. “You can survive in our atmosphere as you are now?”

Mavra nodded. “Oh, yes.” An elevator door opened. She turned and walked toward it, then stopped and turned back to the empty chamber. “Good-bye, Nikki,” she whispered, then got on. The door closed.

Another elevator opened across from Mavra’s and two Athenes emerged in their cloaks of priestly scarlet. They entered the chamber, knelt, and awaited command.

“With a computer such as Obie, the Com records, and our own followers, Nathan Brazil will soon be found,” Nikki Zinder told them. “But beware. You saw how both the High Priestess Yua and the Arch-priestess Tala are bewitched?”

“We saw, Holy Mother,” they responded in unison.

“From Obie our race issued, but it issued at the command of the Evil One,” Nikki said. “We do not know what the Evil One did while in control of Obie, but we can be sure that he was the last one to control my father’s creation. It is more than likely, then, that Obie is still doing the bidding of the Evil One, for, as a machine, he has no choice. Mavra Chang was deformed and died in the assault on the Evil One; this I know for I was present. The thing we just saw was but a construct made by Obie, and, if made by Obie, it too is under the spell of the Evil One. Remember at all times that we are dealing with the devil incarnate; make certain that no others are placed under the spell as our two sisters have been. We require them to find Nathan Brazil. We have a pact with the Evil One, but the devil will keep his word only as long as it suits his needs. There is no honor in him, no trust or goodness. Monitor the operation; do what is requested, but keep out of the Evil One’s control, trust no one under it, and, when Nathan Brazil has been located, be certain that only we get to him. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Holy Mother,” they responded in unison. They had been dismissed and knew it; they reboarded the elevator.

Nikki Zinder, locked into her computer, was alone once more. Nevertheless the eerie voice continued to issue, a horrible crackling laughter.

“Oh, Evil One!” she said to no one. “You think to imprison the Lord God so that you may destroy the Universe! But you will not, you’ll see. As your visage haunts and torments me in the male child, now your very self comes to trick me! I’ll not let you, I’ll not, I’ll not…”

Silence reigned briefly in the chamber, then the eerie voice spoke once more, this time in the forlorn, plaintive tones of a very small girl.

“Oh, Daddy! Daddy! I want you so…”