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.”
“Fortunately for Zenei.” Oelita was not hiding her skepticism.
“We learned how to duplicate the function of this machine.”
“No you didn’t. Your machine is no more than a genetically modified woman.”
“The end result is the same,” replied Noe stiffly.
“Then you follow the Arant? You don’t believe in the God of the Sky?”
The needling was successful. “The Arant were wrong!” Noe blazed. “They denied Original Conception. Even with such a machine, conception is necessary. We know God exists because this machine was part of Him.”
“Is She dead and Her parts scattered — a Finger here, a Womb there?” Oelita asked wryly.
Noe sighed. Was there no quick way to deal with ignorance?
They returned to the central hustle of Kaiel-hontokae, their conversation reduced to talk of men and sex. As the red twilight faded, dim alcohol torches were lit and Noe and friends decided it was time to wander toward the Chanting. They led Oelita past stalls where anything might be had. There were artists who showed their work and willingly carved into your flesh the design of your choice. A cabinet worker planed and polished while selling, potter joked with rugmaker, and og’Sieth waited to make you ornament or instrument out of metal. Oelita broke away to watch a craftsman building electron jars by ghoulish yellow electric light. Noe and her laughing male friend had to pull her away.
They arrived at the amphitheater before the Chanting began and seated themselves beneath the stars on benches carved from bedrock. The crowd joked. Men flirted with women they had never met before, and women teased men. Children were hushed. Newcomers arrived to display their finery.
“Look. See where Saeb enters! He’s here tonight!” Saeb doffed his helmet and smiled for those who had noticed him.
A party entered from below, taking honored seats. Instruments piped a welcome. “Aesoe’s group,” whispered Noe, pointing him out to Oelita. “Your patron. You could have no stronger ally! I have been commanded to introduce you to him tonight.”
Oelita craned her neck. He did not seem imposing at this distance. “Who are those women he is with?”
“Which ones?”
“They wear veils.”
“Those are only his Liethe whores. One of them has her teeth into our Hoemei.”
The music began like a faint whistling storm, building on piping reed instruments. The crowd hushed. Slowly eight male and eight female Kaiel, carrying torches and humming as does the wind blowing over the plains, ascended from two narrow underground tunnels. The procession moved by step and pause, step and pause. They were dressed only in cape and headplumes but the body designs that crawled in the flickering fire fully clothed them. All threw their torches simultaneously into the central pit, causing an explosion of igniting flames. As if by signal, eighty children flowed onto the stage, their bodies covered to hide their undecorated nakedness. Each wore a mask-piece which contained resonant chambers and flaring beaks to distort and amplify the voice.
Inexorably the Commandment Chant began its recitation of the laws of genetics — but in an astonishingly different form than anything Oelita had ever heard in theater. Throats swooped and boomed and danced in alien harmony, sometimes to soft effect, sometimes building on a rising timbre that shook the amphitheater with inhuman tone.
“What in the Sky?” asked Oelita so dumbfounded she willingly exposed her ignorance.
“Saeb has put God’s Voice into the children.”
“But how does he do that!”
“Don’t ask about it! Just listen!”
The celebrating went on all through the brief night. Noe moved her party to a temple that was nothing compared to the Temple of Human Destiny and only a third as large as the Stgal Temple at Sorrow. But it was intimate and quiet in its glory. Noe told Oelita that this was where Aesoe had commanded them to meet him.
He was already there. He waved his people away to allow Oelita access to his table and immediately set her up for a game of chess. Being senior to her he took God’s side, white, and opened with a classic Farmer to Child’s four. He smiled and waited. She moved. He followed her move instantly.
Noe settled down on cushions beside Oelita. Their male courtesan had been joined by a woman of the temples with shaved stripes along both sides of her head and platinum rings in the flesh of her right arm. Her eyes never left Aesoe. One of the Liethe appeared silently with juice for Oelita and disappeared. Aesoe’s party watched. Of them all, Oelita knew only Kathein.
Every move was received with attention. There were horrified comments when Oelita let her Child run free without protection of Black Queen or Horse. She ate both of Aesoe’s Priests and blocked him with a reach of her Smith. He counterplayed deftly. She had to hide her Child. It was the White God against the Black Queen. She was expecting to lose. Was this not the Prime Predictor who had the reputation for being able to see a hundred moves into the future? But she trapped him.