Though sweat matted her dirty brown hair and dripped down her face, Talla felt no heat. Her meeting with Shanata had left her with such a chill in her bones that it was a wonder her legs could still move. She might freeze up altogether and become a statue on the road. People would remark upon her as they passed. "How lifelike!" they would say, and perhaps wonder why a statue had been made of one of such low rank. Maybe they would peek up her skirt and find it odd that the artisan had given her underwear.
But she wouldn't be a statue. There were too many things she had yet to do. She forced her stiff legs to walk her home and, with some protest, they walked.
What now?
Shanata's lecture had been abundantly clear on the subject of monogamy. From the sounds of it the guard who had appeared at the doorway of the children's dormitory had managed to follow Talla but luckily hadn't managed to identify her. However, from the very private conversation that followed her superior's lecture, it was obvious that – even if no one else knew – Shanata did know that it had been Talla.
What had given her away?
Talla harkened back to the evening when she and Tina, sitting naked and crying on her bed, had been interrogated by that awful woman while surrounded by enforcers in their leather armour. One of those women in leather armour had seemed to possess the ability to tell when people were lying. It was she that had ended the interrogation by indicating that both Talla and Tina were telling the truth.
Did Shanata possess the same skill?
Probably. Maybe it came with the Form upgrades. Shanata was well known for having as many of those as she could get. In any case, it was obvious that Shanata was letting her off easy with that warning. All she had to do was stay out of trouble.
Pain struck her. An empty feeling in her chest that she hadn't felt in a very long time. Staying out of trouble would mean staying away from Zhair'lo. That hurt. Only yesterday, they'd embraced each other. Only yesterday, in the shade of that tree, breaking so many rules, had they come together.
Now she had to give that up? How wrong was that? Why couldn't they be together?
But the answers came, even to her indignant mind. Her body was not hers, nor was it his. She was an instrument of the Goddess. Her vagina was a tool to be used to glue their society together. If women could absent themselves from that – if men and women could choose some and exclude others – chaos would ensue.
Did it have to be that way? It seemed so.
She felt the tenuous link with Zhair'lo getting weaker and weaker the more she thought about it. Distance could do that too, but this withdrawal had nothing to do with the growing physical space between the white skirted Initiate and her most favoured man.
Lost in the depths of her own misery, she hadn't even realized that she'd passed through the Temple's main gates and was entering the Division of Endowment.
Home, she thought with chagrin.
She'd been so happy to have a grown-up place to live. What was that? Two weeks ago? So happy. She'd met Zhair'lo. She'd Served him. Everything had seemed so good. And now she'd have to give up the one thing – the one person – that she wanted most.
Home was an empty consolation.
She passed through Endowment Hall, cool and dark as it always was during the day. Women milled about, doing their work in a slow and gentle fashion out of respect for the intense heat that awaited them outside these walls. More were out in the Tranquil Courtyard, tanning in the nude so as to make sure there were no unsightly lines on their bodies.
Such beautiful women, Talla thought sadly.
Once she had wanted to be like them. Now she wanted a certain other something, and all her previous desires were swept aside.
Grow up, she whined at herself. This is how women live. Deal with it.
The thing for a grown-up woman to do was to go in to the Offices and see if there was anything in her slot.
From heat, nudity and brightness back in to the darkness of serious work and busy women fully clothed. Talla walked quietly to her slot and pulled out the card. No surprise that there was a card. She'd set herself to five Services per week. That worked out to a lot of penises, but she kind of felt like she needed it to make up for not having Zhair'lo.
'Patah'.
She wondered who he was. He lived out in Sector one, possibly with the metal workers or maybe the quarrymen.
Very well. She'd go out tonight and fuck his brains out, if that's what they wanted. It didn't matter, really, and there was no point not doing her duty if she wasn't going to have Zhair'lo anyway.
-----------===================-------------
Infuriated was the only word to describe Maksa's condition.
The Sorceress of Pussy had put her newest Adept into the Stacks with the genealogists, giving the whole bunch of them the goal of trying to codify what it was that Maksa understood with a glance. It was hellishly difficult to explain to them. Every time she pointed out something that was obvious in a matrilineal line of descent, they would give her a counter case – an instance where a woman had voluntarily chosen not to follow in the path of her mother.
Maksa would look at those odd cases and most of the time she could patiently explain why each one did not invalidate her theories. In some cases she could not. The records were so old in some cases that there were no annotations regarding the quality of each of the boys the woman doing her Initiation had used. Perhaps, Maksa would tell them, there was an especially powerful boy that caused the young woman in question to change Disciplines? This type of answer did not satisfy them.
"Just-so stories," they would criticize.
At first she had found it offensive and so had to reminder herself that this was a scientific endeavour. If her theories were valid, they would stand up to scrutiny. If they could not stand that scrutiny, they would fall or be revised. Such was the emotionless way of the physician.
And none of that had anything to do with her utter infuriation.
Her pussy – or as the men would say, her "pubic hair" - was starting to grow back as an itchy stubble. On top of that irritation was the effect of her recent double upgrade, causing the hair to grow back faster, thicker and, eventually, softer.
That was bad enough.
But something else had happened during the upgrade. She hadn't been able to curb her sexual arousal. Having tried to ignore it all night, she had eventually given in and masturbated her way to several orgasms. Then she'd woken up in the morning and fingered herself again.
