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"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."

Her eyes were hard, and she quickly took a sip of her wine.

"They brought in new women from the planets to re-populate the place, but there were enough survivors to provide a link with the past. There actually were improvements. The thumbcredit system was introduced. The craftwork was encouraged; the brewing, baking, and distilling; the food production. Our upstart need for an identity was channeled into forsaken basket weaving. There was another side, though. Any keeping of permanent records was immediately stamped out. It was after this that the coven system evolved. As far as we know, the Therem think it's just some witch cult revival, straight out of the planetary memory. They like us to get ourselves locked into that kind of primitive shit."

"Did you ought to be telling me this? I might get drunk or something and blurt it all out."

"Who are you going to tell? Your topman? The top-men know about us. Besides, any woman only knows in detail what her coven or group knows. The thing is the sum of its parts, and they'd have to kill all of us this time. If we ain't a nuisance, the odds are that they'll leave us alone."

She took another sip of wine.

"I can't talk anymore."

Her breakneck emotional cycle seemed to have once again completed itself. She shivered and wrapped a blanket around her body. Hark sat up. He wanted to comfort her, but the way she was holding herself warned him off. As far as it was possible in the intimacy of the bed, she appeared to be shutting him out. He lay down again, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. He waited a full fifteen minutes until he guessed she'd softened enough for him to talk to her.

"Do you think we'll ever get out of this?" he asked her.

"You mean you and me? We don't have a chance."

"I meant the human race as a whole. Do you think we'll ever get free of the Therem?"

"There's always the prophecy."

"The prophecy?"

"You never heard about it?"

Hark shook his head. "No, never."

Conchela glanced at him scornfully. "You troopers really know nothing. It was back before the massacre. The Venerable Madame of the time was Mystic Heda. She had a habit of falling into trances and talking in tongues. Her pronouncements became more and more outrageous, and people began to wonder how long it would be before the Therem did something about her. Finally she went into a trance in front of a huge crowd and announced that sometime in the future, a leader would come who'd free us from the Therem and take us to our own planet."

"Do you believe that?"

"I'd like to, but it's hard. Some of Heda's lesser prophecies did come true, so I try. It's the only hope we've got."

"What happened to Mystic Heda?"

"She was executed."

Conchela stood up and started searching through the clothes that were scattered on the floor.

"It's time we got out of here," she told him.

"What?" Getting out of there was the very last thing that Hark had in mind.

"Did you think that we'd stay shacked up in here, cozy and romantic, until you were called back to the ship?"

"It seemed like an idea."

"Forget it."

"What did I do?"

"You didn't do anything. It's just that we can't beat the system. The Therem don't like romance. They think it makes you guys hard to handle. They like you to spend your liberty drunk and stupid."

"But who would know?"