The Return of Nathan Brazil

She was coldly furious. Obie—don’t you ever do anything like this without my knowledge or permission again, you hear me?

There was a pause, then a little chastened, the far-off machine replied, “All right, Mavra.”

She’d undergone such mind linkages many times before, but never under similar circumstances and never when she was not in full control of herself.

The door opened into a bedroom; the floor all of it, was the bed. Well decorated with soft, indirect lighting, subtle music playing, sweet smells in the air, and lots of pillows all around. Near the far side of the room, reclining, was an Olympian male.

He looked as she and Obie had expected—the very essence of masculinity, incredibly handsome and muscular to boot, just as Obie had designed to Ben Yulin’s specifications so many centuries before.

She approached him cautiously, trying to figure a way out of the situation.

“Hi, there,” he greeted, softly and sensually. “Please come on over and lie beside me.”

“Your hypno works on Olympians,” Obie assured her. They were immune to almost every toxin, thanks to Obie; but because Obie had designed them he would naturally know exactly how to get around his own designs.

She flexed small muscles in her fingertips, feeling the toxin ooze from tiny glands into the needlelike tubes Obie had placed under her nails. It assured her; she was in control again.

Approaching nervously as if still under the influence of the aphrodisiacs, she lay down beside him and put her arms around him just as he expected. She inserted little needlelike projections into his back without his even feeling them. He was under in seconds. She released him and sat up, commanding him to do the same. He obeyed.

“What is your name?”

“Doney,” he responded slowly, eyes shut. Mavra nodded, satisfied. “How long have you been here, Doney?” she was trying to satisfy Obie’s curiosity and her own.

“I don’ know,” he answered. “Long time.”

“How old are you?” He didn’t know.

“Do you do anything except this?” Despite the hypnotics, he was surprised. “What else do men do? It is what we are born to do.”

The rest of the interrogation established fairly well the pattern for Olympian males. They were raised by the Temple, raised for one purpose only. They were totally ignorant of the outside world or even that there was an outside world. Theirs was a carefree if cloistered childhood, full of toys and games and play and not much else. They were not taught to read or write, nor even the most basic arithmetic. At puberty they were taught the skills necessary for their work. Otherwise they remained children, working out and playing childish games in a huge playground-gym. Even their vocabulary was carefully limited; their every waking moment was programmed by the Temple. The males were never in unmonitored groups or given the chance to think, to question. They questioned nothing, wondered about nothing. The superiority of women in all things was unquestioned; males existed to serve and service, nothing more. Mavra found it revolting. Obie tried to analyze the situation.

“Remember,” the computer noted, “your grandfather was a woman who liked women, only to be remade a man by Nathan Brazil, then remade a Yaxa by the Well—one of a butterflylike race that was entirely female, the males mindless sex machines. The early culture here was entirely female, the dominant personalities extremely female-oriented thanks to the Well World. And, of course, the two males were important; they had to be protected. It’s easy to see how such a system could arise.”

I think it’s disgusting, Mavra responded. If s no different from the party prostitution houses in which women were raised as whores.

“Oh, certainly,” Obie agreed. “I wasn’t approving, merely stating how such a system could logically arise given the circumstances of this planet’s founding. Fascinating, though.”

We ought to do something about it! the woman thought vehemently.

“Nothing much we could do, unless you want me to swing in and alter the entire makeup of the planet,” the computer responded. “Besides, we are now dealing with the effective destruction of the entire Com and perhaps all reality. Let Olympus and its society go; what difference will it make?”

There really wasn’t a reply to that one, and Mavra let the matter drop. How long should I stay here? she wondered, more to herself than as a question to Obie.

The computer replied anyway. “An hour, give or take—give this fellow a memory of a happy liaison and put him to sleep. I’ll let you know when it’s time to go.”

She did it, being particularly suggestive in the hypnotic memories she was implanting. Soon he was happily snoozing, clutching a pillow like a teddy bear, and smiling.

She spent the time plotting new moves with Obie.

“Get to the Mother Temple,” he suggested. “We need to talk to the top of the political ladder, whoever that is. Indications are that someone’s in charge of everything. Find out who. Play it by ear. I’ll be riding with you just in case.”

The hour passed slowly.

Yua was positively radiant; she seemed to be in a daze for some time after they left the Temple of Birth. They caught a tram for the Mother Temple, whose spires could be seen in the distance.

“To whom do you report?” Mavra asked her.

“To the Priestess Superior,” the woman responded. “She is an Athene,” she added with some distaste. Athenes were the tailless.

“But who receives her report? I mean, who is in charge here?”

“The Holy Mother, eventually, I suppose,” Yua answered. “I have never seen her.”

“But she’s in the Mother Temple?”

Yua nodded. “So I’m told.”

The Mother Temple was imposing; although no higher than the surrounding buildings, it was designed like a medieval castle of gleaming metal, with towers and short spires abounding. At night it was bathed in colored lights, but even at midday it was very impressive.

One approached by an impossibly long flight of stone stairs; the building itself was anchored in and rested against the solid bedrock of the mountains encircling the city.

To the right Mavra and Yua could see the Pilgrimage Trail which lead to the site of the first settlement. It didn’t look like too long a walk and Mavra suggested they visit it before entering the Temple proper. The Olympians may have been Obie’s children, but the dominant First Mothers had been Mavra Chang’s grandparents.

The well-kept trail was littered with signs, exhibits, and displays telling the story of the founding of Olympus, of how the First Mothers had fallen under the spell of the Evil One while on the mystical Well World, which was pictured as a heavenly paradise, then spirited back to the Com by the machinations of this otherwise undefined Evil One who was then defeated in a great battle, leaving the First Mothers victorious but cut off from Heaven, and how they decided to build their own new world here, on Olympus.

The early huts were indeed primitive; Mavra guessed that they need not have been so basic, that the simplicity was a deliberate attempt to force the building of a new race and culture from the ground up, with as little contamination from the Com as possible. The First Mothers had recognized from the beginning that they merely wore the form of beautiful human women; that inside, biologically and otherwise, they were an alien race and would have been treated as freaks in the then totally human Com. They had been wrong in one thing, though; mentally they had risen above humanity and they carried that with them.

Above, carved in rock and gilded, were the names of the eleven First Mothers. Most of them were not familiar to Mavra, as they’d been refugees from New Pompeii, but there, too, was Kally “Wuju” Tonge, and Vistaru, her grandparents, as well as Dr. Zinder’s daughter, Nikki, and Nikki’s daughter Mavra. And, after the eleven names there was one more, off by itself and bordered in thick gold.

MAVRA CHANG TONGE, it read.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” breathed Mavra Chang softly. “Damn me if I’m not feeling foolishly emotional.” There was a sense of history here, and family, and continuity after all, which seemed suddenly to grab at her soul.