For example, she’d never seen a male Olympian. She knew they existed, of course; she was not sexually ignorant, although her drives in that direction had been in some way suppressed. Even though she had not met one, she retained a very low opinion of the males. They were not capable of advanced reasoning, she’d been taught, certainly incapable of any responsibility. They were little better than smart animals, sex machines good for little else.
Both Mavra and Obie found this attitude curious, but they reserved judgment. There was no reason for the males to be that way. Considering how Yulin created this race and his own egomania, the men would in fact be powerful sex machines but they should also be at least Yulin’s intellectual equal, and he was, for all his amorality and ambition, certainly close to genius. Obie certainly hadn’t programmed poor reasoning into the biology of the Olympian males.
There were no customs and immigration formalities at the small, spartan spaceport; if you weren’t an Olympian you wouldn’t be there. There were also no dives, bars, or other such spaceport fixtures—just the shuttle landing bays, the barge docks, and a small lounge. Everything was modern, functional; it all looked prefab and lacked traces of imagination.
The capital city, Sparta, reflected its name—no frills, all function. Set as it was in a huge bowl-shaped valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains on three sides and an oddly disturbing deep-purple ocean on the other, it seemed shameful that it was not as beautiful as its setting. Blocky buildings, wide streets with concrete medians, all dull grays and browns. Trolleys carried the people most places, smoothly and silently; the hill sections were served by cable cars. There seemed to be no private vehicles, although there were many trucks whirring back and forth in their own lanes.
People walked a lot, too, and in about every state of dress and undress often with gaudy cosmetics, lots of jewelry, every possible hairstyle—and tailstyle—and tattooing seemed to be in. Some of the people looked like old circus exhibits.
Mavra understood that needless decoration at once. All Olympians looked alike once they reached fifteen; then stayed that way, aging internally but not externally until they died, normally at the age of two hundred or so. They were all the same height; had exactly the same tone of voice, everything the same except for hair and eye color, which could be modified by dyes or special lenses.
So making oneself a recognizable individual was a passion to these women—and that’s all Mavra saw.
Hundreds, thousands of identical women going about the city. No males at all.
Most of the drudge work, including that of moving the newcomers’ luggage, was performed by robots built to withstand the corrosive atmosphere. There were smart and dumb Olympians because there were smart and dumb First Mothers and, of course, other factors of environment intervened as well, but nobody had to do manual labor and nobody did—machines were built for that.
“Hotel Central,” Yua told the machine crisply; it looked like a glorified animated hand-truck to Mavra.
“Yes, ma’am,” a mechanical voice responded and the machine quickly scuttled off to collect and transfer the luggage through underground commercial roadways.
There were no taxis; an Olympian was expected to know her way around and which trolley to take. Yua chose one and they jumped on as it rumbled off. The new arrivals joined standing ranks of neatly identical Olympians. Apparently nobody sat down in Sparta, Mavra thought glumly.
The trip took about ten minutes and the tram never stopped. It just crept slowly along with people jumping on and jumping off. Nobody tried to collect a fare.
The Hotel Central was a square block near the city center; like all Spartan buildings it was low, five stories, built for an earthquake zone on a planet that was entirely an earthquake zone. Mavra studied the building before following Yua through the front door. Probably rent closets where you can sleep standing up against concrete, she guessed. She was not impressed with what her grandparents’ descendants had wrought, although, she knew, they would probably not be too thrilled by present-day Olympus, either. It’s sometimes a blessing that great historical figures don’t live to see what people do to their visions.
The lobby was drab and depressing as expected, but they had no problem getting a room. Again no money or identification was required. The society was communal to the nth degree and simply assumed that, if you needed a hotel room, you had a good reason to need it. You did have to register, though; Mavra suspected that somewhere somebody inspected those registers to see who was doing what with whom.
She signed as Mavra A332-6; apparently Mavra was a common name on Olympus—which pleased her. Nikki Zinder, also one of the First Mothers, had had a daughter—one of the founders—by Renard, the bookish Agitar satyr when he was still in human form—and she had named the child after Mavra Chang. She suspected that names like Nikki and Vistaru and perhaps ten or so others were also very common.
Mavra was using Yua’s codenumber, which indicated to the clerk that they were a “bonded” couple. Such associations were common on Olympus; at some point almost everyone chose to have a child, and there was an ingrained insistence on two-parent family structure. A “bonded” couple checking in generally meant only one thing to the locals: They were in Sparta to visit a Birth Temple, to be impregnated. They quickly found themselves being treated like newlyweds. This was uncomfortable for Mavra, but it had been Obie’s idea. The cover easily explained why the two were doing everything together, and Yua’s fawning adulation of Mavra might be dismissed as the reaction of a lover.
Their room was a pleasant surprise; it contained a gigantic soft and fluffy bed, an entertainment console, a versatile portabar, and a dial-a-meal food service area. Located on the fifth floor, it had a large draped window through which part of the city could be seen. Yua delighted in pointing out the sights to Mavra. “Up there, see, near the mountains, were the First Mothers’ original homesites, now a national shrine. At the base of that mountain was the Mother Temple, seat of the now interplanetary religion and the Olympian theocracy, while over there, to the right, the big cubed building in the distance, was where I grew up.”
In the morning they would take a tour of the city, then visit the Mother Temple itself. Mavra still wasn’t sure what she would do once she got there, but she decided to sleep on the problem. She still wondered where the men were. Was it possible, she mused, that, just as the tailless Athenes were superior to the tailed Aphrodites, perhaps the males, a far smaller portion of the population, might be at the heart of the Mother Temple?
But that didn’t make much sense, considering how Yua was brought up to regard the men she’d never seen. There was a puzzle here, one she wanted to solve—and which Obie was also curious about—but perhaps the answer would be found in the Mother Temple. If not, it could wait. There were more pressing things to do, and Nautilus, with an impatient Obie—not to mention Marquoz and Gypsy—was waiting.
Yua dialed meals and drinks for them as the sun, a ghostly red-orange, vanished behind the mountains. Then they lay down on the bed, roomy enough for them despite their tails and the most comfortable thing Mavra had encountered on the journey. She felt odd in ways she couldn’t quite put her finger on, ways she hadn’t felt in so long she could hardly remember. I’m horny as hell, she suddenly realized. Something must have been in the food or drinks; some kind of aphrodisiac that really worked on the Olympian biochemistry. It took all her willpower to fend off Yua’s advances and get to sleep.
They were awakened by a buzzer. It was loud and annoying, the kind one wants on alarm clocks when getting up is a necessity. Yua groaned, looked over at Mavra and smiled sweetly, then got up. “It’s the door; I’ll get it,” she said softly.