In the name of Noxon (part 2)

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It was the five of us, 

Hanneke Smith, a 40 years old with the complexion, the skin and the appetites of a farm worker

Francine Ghaul, a slightly chubby woman of 26, with the black eyes and hairs of her womb-mother, an immigrant from Scipia
  
Gavina Sarra, another descendant of women from the small sea, 25 years, fierce and proud.

Cezanne Gogh, the 19 year old skinny blonde with a shade of fragility

and finally me... one of the few redheads in the valley, the most exotic that it could offer.

I was pretty proud of having been chosen - usually, our valley gave only four women, every twenty-thirty years,  to the needs of Noxon. It`was a bit surprising, to see five of us going to the capital of the empire.

The first leg of the travel was by the local bus, and we were with the priestesses and their two black guards, Karima and Trielina.

I remember my first impression, seeing them - women that trained in a regime of hormonal enhancement, till they develop muscular masses comparable of those of the fabled males of our species, the men. I found them ugly, angular and vaguely scary.

I also expected them to be moodily aggressive, in line with their shape and the legends on their hormonally similar precursors, but they were courteous and gentle, and very maternal - more than the priestesses.

They chatted freely with us, specially with Hanneke, that looked a lot like one of them, just with some more healthy fat on her thighs.

When the bus finally reached Katowa, that in those days hadn't started decaying and was still the first big city south of the Valley, our parties separated.

The Priestesses and their guards - plus other four sent by the Black Garrison in Kogsberg - continued their voyage, toward the Valley of the Scrangs.

The inhabitants of that valley were, then, even more restless than they are today, and it was known that some of them contested allowing to their best daughters to offer themselves up as officiants.

It was not uncommon for priestesses to be attacked and ousted out of the valley by bandits with covered faces. Six guards was just a prudential detachment, given these precedents.

We, too, received a Black Guard - a precious little thing that, apart her "exploded" muscles and fat-less forms, could have been a younger sister of Cezanne. She went by the name of  Lolena, and was a tad shy.

She would guide us to Sassa, where we would receive our first instruction and then be separated, each one of us sent to one of the other Ziggurat on the planet.

I wonder how things were, in the ancient times, before hardware technology had re-developed trains and aircrafts.

Reaching the capital back then required four grovelling months, with nothing to do but read the pamphlets of the church detailing what our new role would be.

Though, if I must believe the "Maidens Voyage" by De La Cueva,  most of the time the "maidens" were simply drunk, filling up with black wine at every post station, so I am not sure that us "moderns" got it any better, really..

Even with trains, it took some three days to go from our Nox-forsaken valley to the centre of the empire, through two thousand miles of progressively more populated and developed lands.

It was just enough time, for us, to make acquaintance with each other, though we knew that no two of us would be assigned to the same temple.

In those day, when the Church still maintained its independence from the various states, it was a truly supranational organization and all new recruits were distributed among the fourteen great temples.

Dividing the officiants coming from an areas was a way to avoid that the local tensions or interpersonal frictions, developed in their home-towns, could creep in the organization and damage the Church mission.

This has become the norm, now that the Empire has overtaken the Ancient Church and officiants are redistributed only among the temple of Sassa and the two sub-capitals, Monia and Londres; many women, now, sees the service as a way to enter the politic arena, especially those of humble birth that have no other resources then themselves and their ambitions.

 In many ways, it was better in the ancient time - the service was much more cosmopolitan, we shared our lives with women from the other side of the world, usually while living in yet a third corner of the planet.

To Noxon, of course, it makes no difference where a woman is from, when she climbs a Ziggurat - it sees the planet as a whole, and it doesn't change things to him where an Asianne is offered, as long as not a day goes by without someone placing herself on the the stone bed at the centre of a ceremonial area..

But, to us that live in the convents, it does. - and to the people that watches the ceremonies from the towers that have grown around the ziggurat, it does too.

They see a far less varied spectacle, nowadays - no more redheads under the Affrikan Sun, or Obsidian blacks in Vladivosti.

Religiously speaking, it may be better that it is less of a spectacle for the common woman, but I think it is one of the reason volunteers in the Capitals have dwindled and the rate of levied officiants has reached five percent, in recent years.

Arriving in Sassa, the train takes a large bend on an undulation of the ground, before plunging down through  a long descent that goes to the city main station.

It is a place from where you could see almost all of the Old City, the Ziggurat and the palaces around it.

Real estate over-development hadn't replaced, yet, all the old buildings with steel and glass towers, many higher than the  Ziggurat itself.

It was still possible to see, almost unimpeded, the great stone pyramid, the waterway going to it and the main staircase.

Almost unimpeded - the Sassa Central Trade Tpwer had already been built, and it lays directly to the north of the Ziggurat, so from our position covered the right quarter of the Ziggurat.

The SCT becoming the taller structure on the planet may have been "a triumph for  civilian society", but ever since I saw it, I always prayed that Noxon destroyed it with its power.

It is one tall ugly piece of shit, and I hope that the architect lived, to her last days, in disgrace. A fitting punishment for her sins against the aesthetic integrity of one of the most beautiful cities in our world.

While the train entered the city, we lost vision of its ensemble, but we had a chance to see the ManSerrail, where a few men are born every year, grown, evaluated and - finally - discarded. It is one of the six, now eight, Manserrails that exists in our world.

Though not the most ancient nor the bigger, it is still one of the main centres of biologic sciences, from which many depend for samples with which to compare the quality of para-sperm to "the real thing".  

I remember that I felt horror... if, by any chance, I was assigned to Sassa, or any of the other ziggurats that had a Manserrail in their town, among my duties would have been to bred one or two children in "the natural way".

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A frisson moved through the children, as the girls didn't expect the mention of one of the greatest taboos - not so soon, at least - in a tale from their great-dad Padma.

Keisha - the little black girl, daughter of Padma's Obsidian child, Akema - dared to ask, with her usual promptness:

"Have you met  a man, grand-dad?" 

"I bred with two of them. From one, another male was born. The other gave me a girl."

- "Oooooohhhh"  - None of the girls knew that great-dad had been a womb-mother, in her youth .

"How it is, a man? Horrible as they say?" - still Keisha, ever forceful in her curiosity.

All the girls went silent, feeling the sadness from the narrator and the importance of the question... they wanted to know, too.

"It is not so easy to say - as you may know, men are dangerous to a structured society, so in the Manserrails they are kept at the lowest possible level of cerebral development - they are little more than little children, even in their fifties, when they are eliminated to make room for the sequent generation."

Padma stopped, to see if the girls reacted at the inhuman cruelty that laid behind those simple words.

But the kids didn't see the issue - all she said was factually true. Men were dangerous, yet a small number had to be kept functional and active, as a fail-safe in the not so unlikely case that the technology for the production of`para-sperm became lost or unfeasible.

It had already happened once and the sperm produced in the manserrails had to replace the female para-sperm, till the technology to create the p-sperm out of women's total-pòtent cells could be re-implemented.

For about a hundred horrible, barbaric years, men sperm became the only way to conceive. 

The Manserrails became hundreds, each providing sperm for an area of one or two million inhabitants.

P-sperm never gives birth to a male, but human males' sperm do so in about the 51% of the cases - the unwanted excess males had to be castrated or eliminated a birth... an enormous amou

For a hundred years, women had to waive their newborn, when they were male, for evaluation and probable destruction...  only one in a hundred was considered worthy of been raised, by the nurses in the manserrails, and sent there.

Padma still remembered the aching pain that she felt, when she had to let Anna go - she had secretly called the little kid like her great-granddad - and asked herself if "freedom from the tyranny of males" was really enough to justify all that pain.

But these girls never had a small male-child in their hands, never had to let it go because it was not born right. They couldn't see anything wrong in it. Men are a dangerous yet sometimes necessary resource, and have to be maintained, yet contained in condition of not becoming a danger to society.

The only reason the girls were interested, really, was because sex with men was the stuff of legends - it could destroy a woman self-respect and turn her from an intelligent being into a puppet in the hand of the monster... and had other likewise impossible characteristics.

Padma felt almost sad, destroying their illusions...

"... as a result, they perform sex in a very perfunctory, almost forced way. I am sorry, girls, it was not  a steamy encounter, full of passion and acrobatics. I was there, at the peak of my fertility cycle, just to be bred. There wasn't much fun on either part... I think that both men were all too happy to go back at their little games, with their friends, afterwards".

"And the girl child?" - this was Celia, the one that had inherited - mystery of genetics -  both the green eyes and red hairs of Padma, as well as the epicantic fold and skin pigmentation of her Asianne mother, Lala Moon.

Padma knew that she couldn't say out loud that it was Keisha's mother, Akema, so she replied with the story of one of her other daughters...

"She grew up in the convent, and decided to volunteer there. She was gorgeous, and the Church accepted her - when I left the service, she was officiating  in Alazka."

Another round of  exclamations... the cold continent was as much to the south as possible, and the Ziggurat - the last to have been built -  and the convent had been, virtually, all that existed there till last century.

Then, research stations had been created to investigate the extreme environment and its resources, creating an heterogeneous community that recognized the Ziggurat as its spiritual centre.

Padma had sought to go there, but was considered already too old, when the Nation-states had assaulted the independence of the Church and planted their flag in each Ziggurat. Everywhere, but in Alazka.

The girls were looking at her quizzically, so she realized that her mind had wandered away once again. Being 120, Padma was not incredibly old, but she already tended an awful lot to lost herself in the past.

Here and now, though, she had a tale to continue.

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The Manserrail soon disappeared, among the tall buildings of the city, as the rails reached the last leg of our journey.

Traditionally, newcomers like us received a day "off" to visit the city, before starting the training.

hat night, we got drunk for the last time in many years, and finally knew noxically Hanneke .

But that is a story for another day.

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