“Kathein.” The younger woman could not get her attention. “Kathein.” She took her beloved betrothed from behind, and held her while the baby nursed. “You’re full of nonsense for a mind so intelligent.”

“Oelita is very nice. I’m glad for you.”

“Oelita is the nicest person in the world,” whispered Teenae. “But she is a barbarian. She is too different from us. She’s unformed, uneducated. It will never work. A Six is a difficult creation. We need you, Kathein.”

“Now you have made my pain so much worse.” She patted Teenae’s hand wrapped around her waist. “We have to find a way to protect Joesai from Aesoe. I couldn’t bear it if he died and I was mistress to Aesoe and could do nothing. Go. Please go. Our business is finished.”

Teenae brought out a bright ribbon with a bauble on the end. She pressed it into Kathein’s hand. “For Jokain. Homage to the Horse,” she said.

33

THE TEMPLE OF Human Destiny was dominated by a circular window of blazing glasses that illustrated the backward-facing mind and the forward-facing eyes. It glowed like a lunar overlord in the dimness above the gaming dens where citizens played their wits against the priestly measures. Oelita thought the Kaiel temples obscene, profligate, grandiose compared with Stgal elegance. Noe, who had brought her here, showed a delight in overwhelming bigness that probably stemmed from an architect daughter’s pride in the sheer ability to over-engineer. Still, the Temple was staggering.

Oelita released her man from his cell, comforting him. He was a guileless fellow who feared he had done her grievous wrong. She thanked him for not letting the crystal come to harm. She gave him money and told him where he could stay to await further word from her.

“Noe!”

A painted temple courtesan, roguish in his sensual outfit, rushed through the relaxed crowd and spoke to Noe with the gaiety of an out-of-touch friend. He had introduced Gaet to Noe when she was working here, consoling those who claimed Ritual Suicide and entertaining those who merely came to the Temple to practice their wits.

“How’s the game?” she asked in the wry way she talked to people who never changed.

“The girls seem to prefer chess,” he lamented.

“You’re not losing your ways?”

“I need new colors, new makeup.”

Noe took his hand and brought him with them to share cakes — for a moment. They talked of books Oelita had never read, and of Saeb’s astonishing rendition of the Commandment Chant they were to hear tonight.

It was dizzying for a coastal villager to adjust to an exuberant people who were consciously building a city that they intended to be the dominant intellectual and ruling center of Geta. The loose, almost revealing gown Noe had insisted that Oelita wear was stylish but she had never worn such a thing before in public. She found their religious pragmatism refreshing — but shocking to coastal ears — and it frightened her that she, who had always taken such a delight in shocking people, sounded conservative to herself when her conversation was interlaced with these people’s easygoing disrespect for the temples they were totally committed to uphold.

Oelita was curious to visit the meat market. No such place existed in Sorrow. There the only meat was given away at the Temple when it was freshly available, or one waited to be invited to a funeral. Here it was sold by the temples at atrocious prices. Noe bought a small jar containing two pickled baby tongues. For a moment, remembering her own twins, Oelita hated Noe with a violent passion. Then she calmed herself. She had long ago learned that the way to tackle such widespread customs was to accept them utterly until she knew the very source of the thought patterns that created the custom. Only then did she have a chance of exorcising it.

God’s Will. That’s what they would say. In the end she would have to destroy their God. He was at the root of all this evil. They thought: I am not killing and eating these children; God is eating them and I am merely the arms and mouth He lacks. She shuddered.

Oelita asked to see the back room where the meat was prepared. She spoke to the butchers gently, never showing her mind, searching theirs. They were jovial about their task as they prepared the carcass of a “machine,” the name the Kaiel seemed to have given the genetic monster-women who bore the babies for the creches.

“Ye covet a block o’ that thigh? Cost ye an arm and a leg, it will.” He laughed.

“Was she very old?”

“This un, ye’ll have’t’ boil. She mebe 30-40 chile down the road.”

These Kaiel machines matured sexually when a normal child was just learning to walk and hosted their first embryo immediately. Their second batch was always twins, and their third, when they were fully grown, triplets. Once they were as old as a normal woman would be at the first flowering weight of full breasts, the machines were worn out and ready for butchering. They were sterile, and reproduced by cloning.

Oelita left hurriedly and returned to the Temple where Noe was now engaged in a game of batra with an old gentleman, testing the quickness of her sight. The machines mainly supplied the creches but Noe, Oelita thought, would be the kind of woman who would use a surrogate mother to carry her own children. She’d have a batch of maybe six and keep the finest of the lot for herself after careful tests had sent the remaining five to a temple abattoir. How was it possible to reach a woman like that?

When Oelita expressed some curiosity about the “machine” wombs, Noe took her out for more exploration. This wife of her lovers was inexhaustible. She walked Oelita halfway across the city to a small sacristy hidden behind iron gates. A friend of Gaet finally agreed to take them underground.

Pillowed and pampered, the sacred object looked like another superstition to Oelita. Its frame was crusted and bent. Had a colony of sea creatures been building their apartment around some piece of flotsam that had later been fished from the waves, then crushed, and burned?

“Another sacred rock,” she said, a touch of irony in her voice.

“You’ve heard of the Arant heresy?” asked Noe.

“Not the Arant side of the story.”

“They claimed we were created by machines.”

“As logical an origin as falling out of a star.”

“This is such a machine. It’s old, old. It is a non-biological womb.”

Oelita only smiled.

Noe did not seem offended. She was well aware that the object was not impressive. “Who knows what it was once like? It was recovered many generations later from a building burned and razed during the Judgment. Joesai wanted you to see it. He thinks your education is lacking.”

“Joesai is a superstitious man.”

“He accepts the word of many great priests. You’ve heard of Zenei?”

“No.”

“Zenei deduced the function of this machine from its remnants, no easy task. The carbon-based components have all been burned away.”