Conchela opened her eyes and looked at Hark. "What are you thinking about?"
"Me?"
"There's no one else here."
Hark stared at the patchwork canopy above his head.
"I was thinking about all the stuff that you've got. We don't have anything up on the cluster, only what we can hide in the cavity behind our lockers."
"You have to remember that I'm so much older than you. I've been here on the recstar much longer than you've been on your ship."
"How can that be? We were picked up at the same time."
"You make the jumps. They do things to relative time. Didn't you think I looked older?" "I don't know. I…"
"You thought it was all a result of the life of degradation I've been leading." "I knew you'd changed." "You could lie."
Hark's embarrassment robbed him of words. Conchela leaned over and kissed him. "You're still such a boy."
The hours passed slowly, and Hark luxuriated in the unique sensation of having nothing do and nobody shouting at him. They ate and drank and made love. In between, they slept. Each time Hark woke, he experienced a moment of panic, sure that he was back on the messdeck and that it had all been a dream. Then he saw that he was still in Conchela's cubicle, and he eased down under the covers with a sigh. He didn't want to think about going back to the ship.
At times, Conchela talked. Along the track of her swings of mood, she seemed to feel a need to explain. She wanted Hark to know exactly what it meant to be a woman and to live on a recstar.
"I guess you could say that we remember. You men see nothing but combat. You're isolated in your crews and your twenties. We see thousands of you guys. Over the years, millions of men pass through a place like this. Each one has his own part of the puzzle."
"What puzzle?"
"Who we are, of course. Where the human species came from and where it's going. It's the one way we can fight against the system, against the Therem, if you like. They've stopped us having children. That's for the primitives out on i e planets. All that's left for us is to maintain the memory."
"You mean you remember what the men tell you?"
"That's what they come here for. To get laid and to tell it to somebody. You all have to tell it to somebody. You don't want to believe that after you've gone, nobody will remember. I guess that's what we're doing. We're remembering you all."
"I don't have anything I want to tell."
"Oh, yes, you do. And you will. You'll sob it out to someone before you leave this rock."
Conchela swung her legs over the side of the bed. The flow of words had temporarily halted. The story seemed to be unfolding in fits and starts and snatches. She poured herself dark, amber wine from a stone jug.
"You'd better thumb my sensor a few times. I'm supposed to be working. I don't want to be closed out of this place because I didn't make the norm."
Hark pressed his thumb into her sensor five times. "Is that enough?"
"It'll help." Almost an hour passed before she picked up the story again.
"Bit by bit, we get parts of the picture. It wasn't always like this. That's one thing we know for sure. Before the Yal came, we had our own civilization. We had even colonized the closest planets in our home system."
"Before the Therem came?"
"In the very beginning, it was the Yal that occupied our home world. The Therem took it and us from them."
"You learned all this from listening to the men talk? The men on my messdeck know nothing of these things."
"You have to realize that this knowledge has taken centuries to acquire. Also, there are those of us who go up to the clusters to service the medians. The medians know much more than anyone suspects."
"Have you ever been with a median?"
Conchela laughed. "A median? You're joking. I'm not the kind the medians go for. Something for which I'm profoundly grateful."
"And, according to the medians, it was the Yal that destroyed this human civilization that could travel from planet to planet?"
"The Yal only suppressed it. The Therem, being the Therem, had much more elaborate plans."
"You sound as if you really hate the Therem."
"Don't you?"
"I don't know. We don't get much time to think about that sort of thing. We know we hate the Yal. Most of the time that's enough."
"Doesn't that say it all? The Therem destroy our identity as a species and spread us over the galaxy to be their slaves, and you only hate who they tell you to hate."
"It's not really like that."
"You know it is. Oh yeah, you'll blame it on the suits or the topmen or the officers or something they put in the food, but deep down, you know it's the truth."
Conchela lay on her back, seemingly unwilling to say anything else. Hark put a hand on her stomach, but her body was stiff and unyielding. It was some minutes before she came around and pulled him to her. Sometime later, as they were lying side by side, filmed by sweat, Hark couldn't keep his curiosity to himself.
"What I don't understand is how you women manage to keep all these bits and pieces together."
"That's a question only a man could ask."
"It is?"
"Sure it is."
"So how do you do it?"
"Through the covens."
"Covens?"
"Another man's question."
She spelled it out. "Covens are cells of women. Seven women to each cell. We sift anything that we may have heard and then pass it on to the mother cell. Each mother cell controls seven covens. Beyond the mother cells are the processing enclaves, all the way to the committee of the seven High and Venerable Madames."
Hark was dumbfounded. "There's a whole system?"
"Don't you think women are capable of creating a system?"
"It sounds almost like a religion."
"It does have elements of a religion, but for the most part, they're a cover. It's really modeled on how the thinking machines work."
Hark decided not to ask about thinking machines. The answer would only confuse him. "Why do you need a cover?"
"To deceive the Therem. If they knew what we were doing, they'd more than likely dismantle the whole recstar system and exterminate us into the bargain."
"Why should they bother? There's no way that your keeping records can harm them."
"The Therein bother about everything. That's what makes them the Therem. It may only be a median's vanity, but there's even a theory that we make the Therem nervous. They may think that we're inferior to them, but we're too smart to be left to our own devices. We did get into space on our own. They don't want humans to have an independent history and culture that they can't control. Besides, they almost wiped us out once, and there's nothing to say that they won't do it again. We have to be careful."
"When did they nearly wipe you out?" "It was called the Lysistrata Massacre." "What's Lysistrata?"
"Who, not what. She was a character in a play by a man called Aristophanes." "Huh?"
"Don't worry about it. The massacre was over a century ago. Unrest was spreading across all the fronts. Needless to say, the recstars were among the most restless. Back then, things were a whole lot more slack but at the same time also cruder, going on bestial…"
"Bestial?" Hark wanted to hear about this.
"They were big on orgies back in those days. Piles of naked people, humping and pumping in a cave. It was pretty basic and the Venerable Madame decided that we weren't going to take it anymore. The Madame, by all accounts, was a hell of an orator. We only had the one back then. The committee of seven came later. The plan was simple. We'd totally withdraw our services. Not a man jack was going to have any fun until conditions got better. She believed it would be simplest for the Therem to negotiate. The Therem didn't negotiate. They kept the men locked up in their clusters, and they turned the lanteres and the red spheres loose on us. The lantere execution squads slaughtered over three-quarters of the population before they were called off."