Zhair'lo hadn't known that there were places for men to sleep within the Temple. He'd been led to one such place the night before. Lost in a daze, he'd simply followed where Ella and Renia led. He must have passed hundreds of Temple women and failed to take any note of them. Talla wasn't among them. Why should he have cared?
Presently, he found himself blinking awake in a room that sported the same beige sandstone as much of the Temple and most of the city around it. There was nothing really remarkable about the room. Plain. Spartan, even. You wouldn't know you were inside the Temple except that it was so clean.
He surveyed the room. Nothing but empty beds and empty clothing racks if you didn't count his bed and the rack next to it.
Someone had laundered his clothes.
Oh, and he was naked.
Someone had done that, too.
He was pulling on his pants when he heard a female voice call in, "Are you dressed?"
"Um, yeah," he said. "I am now."
The wooden door swung open to admit a girl in an ankle length white skirt and the tiny top that seemed all the rage in the Temple now that he'd started noticing. The skinny girl looked him over.
"You look pretty good," she remarked. "I'm Natta."
"Zhair'lo," he replied dimly. She seemed unnaturally bright and cheery. What time was it?
"I know," she said. "I heard."
"Heard?" he wondered. "Heard what?"
"About what an amazing job you did last night," she replied.
Amazing? His jaw dropped. This crazy girl was giving him credit for what he had done to Talla? What was amazing about that?
"Don't be shy," she said. "I hope you can upgrade me some day."
What sort of rumours had been spreading about what had happened? The look in her eyes was some kind of hero worship.
"I -- I hadn't thought that it had gone that well."
"Are you kidding?" she asked, her eyes alight. "It went great!"
This floored him. He didn't mind the idea of adoring throngs of girls. But he didn't want to arrive at it like this.
Natta turned her head just slightly toward the door in a way that indicated someone was just outside.
"I have to get you some food and escort you out though," she said. "You're not really supposed to hang around longer than you have to."
"Oh, sure."
"Anything particular you like?"
"Uh, whatever you usually have."
"Sure."
And with a flare of skirt she was gone.
There was nothing for him to do except, perhaps, take a piss. In the town, you went outside to take care of such things. Outhouses were the order of the day. What did women do when the whole place was inside a building?
There was another door in the room. He tried that. Yep. Indoor plumbing. Must be nice.
That taken care of, he had a moment to consider Natta's attitude. She clearly didn't have an accurate story if she wanted him to be a Conduit for her. So what story did she have? What had he done that could be viewed in a positive light?
"It is possible that you took on too much," the guard had said in the departure room.
Ella had said something similar, that he'd 'taken on a lot'.
Was that what this was about? Did Natta have some weird version of last night's events which held that he'd done Talla some kind of service by overwhelming her? Obviously a huge chunk of that story was missing. What was he to do? Should he be correcting her?
He was struck by a sudden flash of memory: an image of dozens of women behind the four thrones. They must have thought themselves well cloaked in that darkness, but it couldn't protect them from the strange super-aware state the blue-skirted woman had put him in. That meant there were a lot of women who could easily dispel this rumour. That was a lot of women who weren't dispelling the rumour. It took a lot of power to keep that many people silent. Would it be wise for a boy, only days in to his adult life, to cross such a force? He was afraid, suddenly.
Natta was back very quickly with a tray containing an absurdly vast quantity of food: fruit, bread, scrambled eggs, a few pieces of ham.
"I told them it was for a man who worked on a farm," she said. She giggled when she saw the look of surprise on his face. "That's right, isn't it? You work on a farm?"
"Yeah."
How had that gotten around so quickly?
"I've been working with a blacksmith for a year or so," he said. "Just started at the farm."
Natta seemed to hang on every word he spoke. Her attention bothered him.
"What about you?" he asked. "What do you do?"
"I just got my first upgrade," she said. "Joined the Temple last week."
Last week? The same time as Talla?
"I'm in Within."
That meant nothing to him. Abundance was Talla's Discipline. He'd learned what Point was from Renia. Within? Hadn't Renia said something about "making Within happy"? He'd taken that for the name or title of the woman who had so coldly examined him. But Within was the name of a Discipline?
"So what do they do in Within?" he asked, prodding her to talk so as to both avoid her questions and dampen the blindness of her adoration.
"Medicine," she said. "Science. Administration. Stuff like that."
"You're going to be a doctor?"
If she could talk more, he could eat more.
"Maybe, maybe not," she replied. "At the moment I do a lot of boring stuff. Laundry and cooking. Cleaning. Fetching things for people. Running errands. Bringing you breakfast is the only nice thing on my list today."
So the youngest ones got the worst jobs. They must have to work their way up. It wasn't really much different with men.
"When do you start doing something interesting?"
"Hard to say," she said, looking up at the ceiling. "We take a lot of classes when we aren't working. Maybe around fourth rank, when we go yellow, we start an apprenticeship."
Someone rapped sharply at the door. Natta straightened suddenly.
"Um, just a second."
She disappeared out the door.
Well, that was good. At least he had a chance to eat. He was starving. He didn't know if it was his nerves, a general result of ejaculating twice in one evening or some effect of taking part in an upgrade, but he had no problem downing the entire ridiculous meal that Natta had brought him.
She returned in good order, but slightly muted.
"If you're done, I'll escort you out," she said quietly.
The adoring look was still in her eyes, but she managed to look simultaneously sheepish. He nodded, wiped his mouth with the provided napkin and followed her out of the room. Outside the room there stood a guard, fully armoured, keeping watch. How fortunate he hadn't decided to go for a walk.
There were women everywhere. He was in the middle of some thoroughfare. White, yellow and orange clad women were traveling in every direction across a wide, cobblestone plaza. He had never seen the Temple like this. The brief glimpses of it he had seen last night, from the mostly underground path joining the small circle gate to the Augmentation Chamber, had shown him a nearly deserted Temple. Suddenly, in daytime, the full impact of some twelve thousand women crammed in to the area of the Temple hit him.
This place was full.
"This way," Natta said. "You came in by Endowment's lower gate, didn't you?"
"What?"
"Small circle?"
"Yeah."
"I can't take you back that way," she said. "Not my Division. Not proper without special reason. I can take you out the main gate. If you walk -"
"To the left," he said. "I know. I've lived here my entire life."
"Right," she said as they ploughed through the crowd.
She stopped quite quickly as they turned a corner. It was a narrow alley; deserted. It was not, he realized, a part of any route to the main gate.
"Listen", she said seriously and quietly, "Back there ... I said some things ..."
"About wanting me for your upgrade."
"Well, yes, but that's not what I'm talking about," she explained. "I shouldn't have told you about -- about how things work here. It's not something men should know, okay? I'm new, so I didn't know what you shouldn't know."
She ran a hand nervously through her hair as she looked at the foot traffic passing by. No one was paying them any attention.
"Look, just, uh, just don't tell anyone, okay? I know it doesn't make much sense anyway, but, just don't, okay?"
"Okay," he promised. What was there to say? That Within specialized in science and medicine? That girls new to the Temple were assigned crappy jobs? She hadn't told him anything ...
"Okay," she said with a deep breath, and smiled then congenially, "Okay. But I still hope I get to be upgraded by you someday. Let's go, then."
What was he to make of that?
He followed her out.
Shadows of pain.
Creeping across her body.
Burning out of her heart.
Triumphant ecstasy and relief, so brief, swallowed by a sea of agony.
Then blackness.
But these were memories. Hazy memories. They traced across her chest whenever she thought about it.
She laid on her back on a soft bed. She had been elsewhere. A hard marble altar. She shuddered thinking about it. Her body felt wrong when she shivered.
Someone was holding her hand.
She opened her eyes.
Though she felt rested, she knew it hadn't been an easy sleep. There was a lot of sunlight in the room around her, but curtains had been let down at the nearest window. The curtains waved in a light breeze, casting waves of filtered green light over her.
