Chapter 1

2076 a.d. - Summer

Reprieve

The Goddess of the Land lay naked on the soft, green grass behind her manor, luxuriating in the warmth of the two crystal suns, her eyes closed against the brightness. A warm breeze caressed her body, making her nipples stand up as she was reminded of her sister's breath on them during the last sleep period. She felt the curious minds of the two gardeners as they worked along the hedge wall trimming it smooth with their sharp blades.

It had been a slow, lazy month since Béla's judgement ended her month-long nightmare of mind-ripping interrogation by the Praetor.

After all that mental torment, she still had difficulty believing it was over. Not only was she free, but the Praetor had determined that: 'the individual presently known as Béla was a random Quantum factor necessary to the survival of civilization. As such, her unimpeded... '

Béla didn't remember all the elocutionary terms the Praetor had used, but her understanding of it was...

Although delighted with the assurance of her continued survival as a free being, Béla wasn't sure it was a good idea to give her that much freedom. Most of the 'improvements to civilization' that she was aware of had been as a direct result of her adversarial confrontations with the judgment system (i.e. her father or the Praetor), forcing improved conditions for everyone. What the judgment had effectively done was grant her 'queen of the world' status for killing somebody. It would surely cause her problems, eventually.

For the last four weeks, Béla had spent at least half of her time recovering, allowing her mind to mend; doing absolutely nothing except lie in the sun and watch the clouds float over the inner surface. She discovered that she couldn't track them completely around the entire circumference of New Eden, as they continually evaporated and reformed. Individual clouds, and even masses of them, didn't last that long. Besides, the air was too thick to see all the way across to the other side with all that sunlight reflecting off all that air.

The southern crystal sun had been shining for almost a week now as Béla measured time. For the next three months, because of the tremendous output of the two crystal suns, one at each pole, there could be no travel between the surface and the great ship.

Béla had already finished her morning audience seated beside the Great Bard Geoffrey. She found it surprisingly easy to resolve disputes and determine punishments for various violations of the civil codes. The goddess had only to look into someone's mind to determine what was required for that person's continued civil conduct.

As her psychic abilities improved, she became aware that many grievances between two parties were actually due to the fact that one or both litigants believed something about the other that simply wasn't true. Once the falsehoods were cleared up, the involved, and often, embarrassed, participants often resolved their grievances themselves.

The people of the Lorraine District loved and respected their goddess and her companion, the Great Bard Geoffrey, to the degree that they practically governed themselves in honor of them. They remembered their last master with his 'goon squad' and were grateful that the goddess had intervened.

They were, however, somewhat disappointed that she didn't require their worship of her, especially after titillating tales of the 'Goddess of the Land's Spring Festival' at New Hope began circulating.

As she soaked up the sun, Béla could feel Elaine's mind as she slept in her own private audience chambers on the third floor of the manor. Currently she was lying naked in the middle of the floor, exhausted from a private little experiment she'd conducted with the help of a dozen of her more ardent new worshippers.

Back on the ship, while the two sisters had feasted on each other celebrating Béla's newly won freedom, Elaine, mind-linked with her sister, had discovered Béla's memories of her sex club. Enthralled, Elaine vampirically embraced the concept of being violently mistreated while having sex with multiple male partners and wanted to experience it herself.

When Elaine had been a Mayan princess, she had never considered taking more than one sacrifice at a time. That may have been partly because no sacrifice ever survived any sexual encounter with the Espirito Sheba who now called herself Elaine.

Her first gangbang was much more exciting than feasting on her sacrificial partners had ever been. She found it impossible to control a dozen horny men and quickly became the object of their lust, simply hanging on for the ride as she was passed around the room like one big, horny party favor. Plus, all of her worshipers survived, so it wasn't necessary to find new and usually unwilling sacrificial replacements every time she wanted sex.

Elaine decided she liked being a goddess, again. She was going to have to think up a name for herself, since Espirito Sheba, Spirit (or Goddess) of the Land, had been usurped by Bard Geoffrey to describe her older sister, Béla.

Although Béla was being physically lazy, her mind was busy working on details of creating a hedonistic society similar to the Sumarian culture she experienced during her early years on Earth. Among other fundamental changes in earth culture that she'd lived through, the gradual, but sometimes violent, move from matriarchal to male-dominated societies was the cause of many cultural problems that had infected mankind throughout the ages. Once men got involved with power, war, and the enslavement of the female half of the population, they seemed to lose their empathic abilities.

'Perhaps that was because they couldn't bear to feel in their minds what they were doing to their women, ' thought Béla as she worked her way through the problem. But that wasn't going to happen again, because Béla and her sister 'goddesses' were fully in charge, now.

This whole Victorian-Christian modesty bit was incredibly galling to her. She didn't know any of her siblings who, once they learned how to fly, enjoyed having to wear clothes (well, except for Melinda and Hank – Hank had started this whole religion mess anyway and Melinda was a must-have-total-control-of-everything psycho nut case. They deserved each other, but Béla felt sorry for anyone living in their district).

Sexuality was much more expressed and appreciated back in Ur when she was a handmaiden to Nanna, the Moon Goddess. There were dozens of temples to many different gods and goddesses, most of which provided the same sexual service as hers. Plus, Hethemtima (her name back then) had also been a diviner.

Petitioners to the Moon Goddess often needed a 'character reference' to determine their sincerity. Hethemtima had excelled at providing this necessary and extremely pleasant service for her foster mother, the High Priestess. Because of her empathic abilities, she was usually correct in her assertion of the petitioner's sincerity or lack of it.

Béla realized that major cultural changes took time. She had a good start with what she had accomplished so far. There were twenty-nine goddesses, including herself, spread across New Eden. Most had their own district of authority where they maintained order.

Right now, the power of the goddesses came from the fact that they had suddenly appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; divine intervention to thwart an unstoppable, rampaging disease that was decimating the already sparse population of this little world. The survivors were more than grateful and happily turned the responsibility for their welfare over to their new saviors. Even then, things would have rapidly fallen apart if Sibilius had not commanded of his daughters that they not interfere with the workings of the existing culture before he permitted any of them to leave the great ship. It was extremely important that business and commerce be maintained, or else the society itself would collapse, and the new 'Order of the Goddess' collapse with it, bringing chaos, terrorism between various factions and the likely murder of one or more of his beloved daughters.

Béla, however, now being 'Carte Blanche', found herself suddenly immune from any infraction of those above edicts issued by her father. That didn't mean, of course, that she couldn't be affected by any social disaster she might cause – if the balance that maintained peace and harmony was upset and the populace rose up against the goddesses, the worst that might happen would be the death of Béla and all her sisters. More likely would be the enslavement of any human survivors by the surviving Goddesses, and the creation of a Master/Slave society where the declining human population would become the general food source of the victors.

Béla seriously doubted her ability to create a beneficent matriarchal society if the above ever happened. But in her experience throughout Earth's history, the fragile matriarchal societies had been the most prosperous and, during the short time each existed, the most peaceful. But only until less fortunate neighbors decided they wanted part of that prosperity and destroyed both their societies with their warring attempts to conquer and consume the luxuries they felt were being denied them.

Here in New Eden, there would be no contesting groups; the reason being that there simply wasn't that much room, plus, the entire population was already under the single rule of the Goddesses. Besides that, there wasn't, for the time being, enough excess manpower to form an army to take over another district, agriculture being the primary taskmaster of anyone who planned to have enough to eat for the next year or so.

Still, the disturbing places where Béla's thoughts had taken her caused a feeling of restlessness, and she felt an anxious need to fly – to spread her wings and rise up to where her vision was completely unencumbered. She stood, flexed her shoulders and stretched her arms up toward the sky. As her wings formed, she crouched low and jumped, pushing her wings down hard against the air. With several powerful strokes, she was quickly dozens of meters high. She felt awe radiating from one of the gardeners as he watched her naked, winged form rise into the sky.

As she glided over the town, she looked around at the green world that surrounded her. It smelled wonderful. The people were happy. Some pointed at her, some waved as she sailed over their heads. Béla was getting used to this attention. She liked being the center of attention.

As 'Carte Blanche', Béla had the freedom to go anywhere on the entire planet and do anything she wanted. She was known everywhere, mostly thanks to the Great Bard Geoffrey and his amazing stories about her. Wherever she went, people deferred to her with respect and admiration. She enjoyed it despite the fact that her high visibility seemed to attract a lot of trouble. Everywhere she went, people wanted her to solve their problems; respectfully, of course.

'So why am I so restless?' Béla asked herself. 'I feel useless, bored, nothing to do. Is this what it's like to have everything you've ever wanted handed to you?

She smiled, though, as she remembered his stamina in her multi-colored tent. But she also remembered that he had been another conqueror who destroyed everything he reached for. It was, perhaps, the reason he felt he had nothing in the end.

The excitement of the wind, the heights of her flight and the exhilaration Béla always felt when she flew succeeded in clearing the dark thoughts from her head, so she circled to begin her flight back to her estates, deciding to see Jeff now, rather than wait until dinner to discuss some of the ideas she wanted to augment.

Landing on the second-floor balcony outside her bedroom, she stepped inside, out of the warm sunlight. Searching with her mind, she located the great bard in his study. He was writing. He was always writing. He was writing about her; another epic tale to be included in his legends, another ode to his goddess.

'I need to put that magnificent, imaginative mind of his to work on something more productive than writing odes about me... ' she decided. 'I'll bet he can fix this restlessness I feel – help me find something worth doing until the resources of the great ship are available again.'

Béla leaned against the doorway and gazed into the library. Jeff had his back to the door and was now studying a large, hard-back tome. 'Probably an encyclopedia, ' she thought as she watched. She could simply brush against his mind and find out what he was thinking, but she was constantly practicing restraint these days, knowing how much trouble her impetuous behavior had caused her before. Now that the Praetor wanted nothing more to do with her, she was going to have to restrain herself.

He laughed abruptly and radiated a selfish satisfaction with himself, bringing Béla's attention completely back to him.

"I was right!" he stated, unaware that anyone was around.

"Right about what?" Béla asked from the doorway.

Jeff jumped about a foot, dropping the book to the table. He looked up, surprised, then frowned.

"Will you put something on?" he asked impatiently. "Please?"

Every time he saw her, she was delightfully naked. Every time he saw her, he wanted to throw her sweet body against the wall and pin her there with his personal shaft. It was so ... improper ... to constantly think of his goddess that way.

'I wouldn't mind, ' she thought at him, grinning at his discomfort. 'I'm ready if you are... '

"Do you realize there are petitioners at the front gate and that they're lined up around the block?" he said, looking down his nose at her and trying not to stare at her bare breasts. "They come to see you – some just to touch you, some seeking your help to redress some real or imagined wrong. And here you are, parading around like ... oh, my!" His eyes grew wider when she absently scratched beneath her left breast with her fingers as she walked, hips swaying, directly toward him.