“Don’t you know how Minerva started?”
“Of course. After the Mother God punished the Old Men for ruining the earth she set up Minerva so that women could be truly free.”
Milo looked at her then said quietly, “Jesus Christ.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you another time. Look, didn’t you have any history books in that town of yours?”
“Books?” she said blankly.
He sighed. “Yeah, some hope. The fungus would have destroyed all the paper ages ago. But what about other records? Electronic stuff. Computers. You have any computers down there?”
“I don’t know what a computer is but we didn’t have any of Man’s evil devices down there.”
“So you don’t know anything about anything.” He shook his head in wonder. “My God, you’re even more innocent than you look.”
She wasn’t sure but she felt she’d just been insulted. “So how do you think Minerva began?” she asked him huffily.
“I don’t think, I know. It was a state in old America. Or rather it was one of the main states that old America broke up into in the period leading up to the Gene Wars. You have heard of the Gene Wars, I trust?”
“Of course I have.”
“But you’ve never heard of the United States of America?”
She admitted she hadn’t.
“America,” he began to explain, “was once a great empire. With another huge empire, the Soviet Union, it formed a powerful alliance—the Soviet-American Alliance—which practically ruled the entire world for over fifty years in the twenty-first century.” He paused and looked at her. “Do you understand any of this?”
“No,” she said truthfully.
He sighed but continued anyway. “Well, the Alliance finally ended and the two empires began to break up into a number of autonomous states. Minerva was one of them and it was quite big. Within Minerva was a smaller state that was exclusively female but Minerva at large permitted male citizens. However, men could only become citizens if they agreed to certain conditions—they had to agree to undergo a complete genetic modification of their bodies and brains. This genetic ‘rewiring’ had the effect of softening, not to mention eradicating entirely, certain unwelcome masculine traits. One of the changes they underwent was that they became smaller, while at the same time Minervan females were modified to grow larger. Thus at a stroke the natural physical superiority of the human male—and the prime cause of the traditional exploitation and subjugation of women by men throughout history—was el—” He stopped.
Jan was yawning.
Milo said, “You’re not interested in the origin of Minerva?”
“That’s not how Minerva began. You’re talking nonsense.”
“Talk of the Mother God setting up Minerva Herself isn’t nonsense as far as you’re concerned?” he asked, with amusement.
“No, of course it isn’t.”
“If that’s the case—that the Mother God established Minerva so women could be truly free—how do you explain this?” He gestured at their surroundings. “For hundreds of years Minerva, along with all the other ground communities throughout the world, has been under the thumb of the Sky Lords. That’s not what I call freedom. Your goddess seems to have short-changed you.”
“She’s not our goddess,” protested Jan, annoyed. “She’s the one, true Mother God, creator of everything. And she didn’t give absolute freedom to Minerva—she left the Sky Lords as a symbol of Man’s evil so that we would never be complacent about its danger.”
“Some symbol,” murmured Milo. “It pulverized your town into the dirt yesterday.”
She winced. “You don’t have to remind me.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m just trying to make my point. Your Mother God seems to have gone to unnecessary extremes to make her point about Man’s evil. I presume not many of you survived.”
Jan bowed her head. “No,” she said in a subdued voice. “I’m the only one. The only woman, that is. There are four Minervan men on board as well. …” She covered her face with her hands and began to cry.
Milo waited patiently while she cried for a time, then said, “You don’t know for sure you’re the only female survivor from your town. The Sky Warriors aren’t infallible. They more than likely missed quite a few when they were searching the ruins.”
She took her hands away and stared at him. “You really think so?” she asked hopefully.
“I believe there’s a very good chance of it. And there’s something else for you to keep in mind—your Minerva wasn’t the only one of its kind.”
She stared at him in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you know? There’s more than one Minerva. I know of at least one other town almost the same size as yours which is within the jurisdiction of the Lord Pangloth. It’s also called Minerva and lies less than a quarter of a day’s flying time to the east of here. And I have heard there are other such Minervan communities.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled at her expression of astonishment. “So you see, you’re not as alone as you thought you were.”
Chapter Nine
The communal latrine was as bad as Milo had warned her it would be. A long, foul-smelling place with rows of dirty sinks, urinals and sit-down toilets in cubicles without doors. Fortunately, there was only one other person in there as she entered, a woman who was just leaving one of the cubicles. She gave Jan an unreadable look as she hurried past her.
When she had gone Jan stepped into a cubicle. She was nervous and hoped Milo would be as good as his word and stay by the entrance to the latrine. She’d told him she didn’t want any man to see her naked—which was true—but the other reason was that she intended to remove the incendiary bomb. She just couldn’t carry the thing inside her any longer. It had become much too uncomfortable.
She quickly climbed out of the one-piece baggy suit and, feeling exposed and vulnerable, extracted the bomb. Then, sitting on the bowl to evacuate her bowels, she unwrapped the cloth from the bomb and examined it. When it was inside her it had felt huge but now, resting in the palm of her hand, it seemed ridiculously small for the task it was supposed to achieve. She sighed and put it in one of her suit’s many pockets.
Despite her anxiety about her immediate fate on the Sky Lord she was feeling in better spirits now. The revelation from Milo about the other Minervas had changed everything. At first she couldn’t bring herself to believe him. It seemed impossible that no one in her Minerva knew about these other Minervan communities but Milo was convincing in his explanation. “I told you that originally Minerva covered a very large area. As the blight began spreading across the country the state of Minerva, like all the other states, became fragmented with the various parts becoming isolated from each other. As you Minervans didn’t believe in using such ‘evil’ devices as radios I imagine communication ceased between your different communities ages ago.”
The thought that somewhere there existed another Minerva, even though it was full of strangers, made all the difference. Somehow she would get there … some day. But first she had to perform the simple task of destroying the Lord Pangloth, not to mention trying to stay alive long enough to make the attempt.
Beside the toilet there was a worn looking lever protruding from the floor. When she was finished she pulled it, presuming it worked the flush. But there was no flush; instead there was a hiss of air from the bowl. The lever, she realized, operated some kind of air pump that sucked out the waste matter and no doubt ejected it from the Sky Lord to be deposited on the ground below.