Chapter 18

"I don't understand," Alana replied, sounding annoyed. "Just what is it you're asking me to do?"

"Your majesty," the Mayor of Utopia whined. "There is something wrong with the ... environment. People in my district are getting fat, and they work hard and eat just like the rest of us. But there have been three heart attacks in the last year."

"So why don't you ask Harmony to deal with it?" Alana suggested. "She's the district goddess, after all. Wasn't she able to save them?"

"Well, yes – she saved them," the Mayor sighed, "but she doesn't know what's wrong with them. She says their vital organs aren't working properly. Even her blood..."

He stopped as Alana instantly glared at him. The secret of Goddess Blood was only known to a few, and there were many petitioners in the Queen's Audience Chamber awaiting their turn to speak with her. He thought the rest of the sentence loudly as he stared into the queen's emerald-green eyes.

'Goddess blood doesn't cure them!'

Alana frowned as she considered this new development. Goddess blood could repair damaged cells and renew injured blood cells. It also carried a great deal of oxygen – more than a human's red blood cells could ever manage – enough to even grow new bone matter in just a few minutes. When she'd been the Goddess of the Land, she'd used her own blood to cure the waning population of this strange, new world immediately upon her arrival.

"Alright, good sir," Alana conceded. "Tomorrow, I'll go with you to Utopia Station and see if perhaps I can help solve this dilemma."

The Mayor smiled and bowed down, though his eyes were glued to the queen's sexy thighs. "Thank you, your Majesty."

He turned to leave, and another stepped forward to take his place – a young girl wearing a simple dress. She was barefoot, as were most of New Eden's young female population – in emulation of the goddesses, who often strode about wearing nothing at all.

"My name is Kianna, your majesty," the girl said as she curtsied.

"And your problem?" Alana asked, smiling sweetly while wishing Sibilius was here to relieve her of some of this monotony.

"I'm her problem," a young man stated, stepping hurriedly forward, having just entered the chamber a moment before. "And I'm sorry, your majesty, but Kianna can't be allowed to roam through the city by herself. She has the mind of a five-year-old, and must be watched at all times."

"N-n, n-no!" Kianna whimpered, shying away from the man as he tried to grab her arm. "You don't own me, not here!"

"I'll own you wherever I want," he snarled quietly at her. "You're mine, and you're comin' home with me. Now."

"Your majesty!" Kianna cried out as her 'owner' attempted to drag her away.

"Stop!" Alana commanded.

The man immediately ceased dragging the girl away, but didn't let go of her, either.

"Your majesty, she is mine," he replied angrily. "In a fit of jealous rage, she killed my sister who was only trying to help us..."

"She was having SEX with you!" Kianna cried out, her voice filled with anguish. "And I didn't kill her! It was an accident! And I was just a child!"

"You were given to me as payment for your crime," the man demanded. "And I will take you home – to do with as I please!" He looked back at the queen, who was still seated. It was obvious that she wasn't going to help. The girl had committed a crime, and she owed penance to the person she had wronged. That was the law.

As he led the kicking and screaming girl though the archway, Alana rose and left through another entrance. There was another law, as well ... one meant to protect wrongdoers from excess persecution by 'righteous', overzealous citizens.

"The court is now out of session," an attendant called out. "Those of you who wish to petition a goddess, please wait. Another will be with you shortly."

Alana vanished from sight as she disappeared through the archway.

"Even the Queen's not gonna help you!" the man was snarling at the quivering young girl as he dragged her along the outside of the castle wall. "You should never have gone in there! When I get through with you, you won't even be able to walk!"

"I never said I wouldn't help her," Alana replied, sounding innocent and understanding as she appeared in his path. "I seem to recall a law that states, 'Any petitioner may request his or her case be heard at least once a year.' Is that not correct?"

She smiled at the girl's captor as the wind whipped her long silky gown around to bare her royal, silky legs. For an instant, the man was mesmerized by the queen's bare crotch and the fact that this filmy gown was the only protection she wore. She wasn't even wearing shoes. She was completely vulnerable.

"Your 'majesty'," he began, his voice low and threatening, "Perhaps you should notice that you are alone out here, and that none of your guards or courtly protectors are nearby. You may force your female beliefs on us when you are surrounded by guards and others of your kind, but you'll..."

Alana reached out, still smiling, and teleported them all high into the air. Kianna yelped, but didn't scream out – not like her would-be owner was screaming. Even as terrified as she was, she knew it would take a long time to hit the ground from here, and if the stories about the queen and her goddesses held even one tenth of the truth, there was a good chance she'd end up alive and unharmed. And free!

"Now," Alana cooed in her sweetest bedroom voice, "you were saying?"

Kianna's owner let go of his slave, actually thrusting her away from him, and sent her spinning wildly. Alana quickly teleported to her side and caught her.

"It's alright, young woman," Alana promised. "He can't hurt you for the moment."

"B-b-but ... w-what about later?" Kianna whispered, doing her best to keep from shaking like a leaf in pure terror. 'There's nowhere to put my FEET!'

"We'll sort it all out," the queen told her, "once Mister Bossy Pants calms down a bit."

Kianna laughed at that, and they both watched as Kianna's would-be oppressor wildly swung his arms and legs, swore and threatened at the top of his voice and generally worked himself into an unpleasant, frothy state. Finally he ran down, and simply floated, slowly turning in the brightness between the two crystal suns as his chest heaved with weary exhaustion.

"How come we don't fall?" Kianna wanted to know.

"Well," Alana began, perfectly willing to answer but wondering if her answer would make any sense to someone who didn't understand much about physics. "There really isn't any gravity here. The force that holds us to the ground is caused by the..."

"The spinning of the world!" Kianna cried, interrupting with her own version of how things worked. "And the only reason someone falls, even from a height, is because they're not really standing still. They're moving with the spinning of the world, and when..." she began to falter, scrunching up her face in an effort to concentrate. "And when someone is in the air, they will ... collide? Collide with the ground again, because it gets in the way of their, uh, I don't know what to call it."

"The direction of travel," Alana filled in. "Trajectory. Like when you throw a stone into the air and it seems to come back down, but it actually just collides with another part of the ground as the world turns.

"So, I assume you weren't born inside New Eden?" Alana asked. "You're pretty smart for a village girl. Did you come with the Earth ship?"

"Yeah, but I was just a little kid," Kianna told her. "Uncle Guevara," she indicated the comically turning man ten meters away, "he took care of me after my mother died. She was one of the first people to ever meet Béla. That was before anybody knew she was a goddess. My mother lived in Solar City before it was called that. She told me all about it, and the newcomers who came in and made it safe for everybody, and the awful war that happened right after I was born..."

"I see," Alana replied thoughtfully. She remembered those days, too. And she also seemed to remember this young woman's mother, who had been barely a child, herself, at the time. "So, how did you meet your 'Uncle' Guevara?"

"We lived in a ... building," Kianna began. "A project house that they built for us, Guevara was like the boss of all of us – told everybody what to do, where to sleep, who went on work detail and how much we could eat. He was mean, sometimes, but he kept us together ... Protected us from the outsiders."

'Outsiders? She means us, I think... '

"Tell me more," Alana suggested, pulling gently on Kianna's arm to keep her from turning away in the zero gravity. "What happened to your mother?"

"He ... kept her away from the rest of us," Kianna said, her face sad and lonely. "I couldn't ... I had my own place in the room where I slept and ate, and he ... kept my mother with him. She had to take care of him whenever he was there."

"That doesn't sound right," Alana murmured, mostly to herself.

'Could all of this have been going on right under my nose?' she wondered, but deep inside she knew that she hadn't been very interested in 'how' their city had held itself together – a few hundred people hiding deep inside the Colorado Mountains – only that it did. And now she met this girl who had lived through something that she could have prevented. 'Except that I didn't know ... didn't want to know... '

"Well," Kianna continued, "I don't remember much about it, except for all the yelling and confusion when we all had to leave. Uncle Guevara tells me that my mother died trying to get me out of the building we lived in. And it's my fault that she's gone."

"I don't see how a baby can be blamed for something that happened to its mother," Alana told her.

"I was two," Kianna said. "I was old enough to know I shouldn't have gone back in. It really was my fault. I remember it all, very well."

Alana reached out to stroke the young girl's hair, just incidentally brushing her own mind against the girl-child's mind for a brief instant. Without anyone saying a word – especially Guevara – the queen knew the whole story.

Kianna had seen Guevara beat her mother to death in a drunken rage. His powerful, angry persona convinced the girl that what had really happened to her mother was the girl's fault. It had also happened some time before the emergency evacuation of Solar City, so the bombs and the fires hadn't caused the mother's death as her daughter believed. This Guevara person had convinced the child that she had seen something that never happened.

Once the two survivors of their project house arrived in New Eden, Guevara had learned how the 'law' worked here, and twisted Kianna's young, innocent mind into believing that she, since she caused her mother's death, must now take her place, enslaved to the man who had 'loved' her dead mother for however long he estimated that her mother would have lived. (It actually was the law – she, as Béla, along with Elaine, had performed a 'magic' ceremony whereupon they had 'produced' the Goddess Stone, the writ that protected humankind from ever being persecuted by any goddess, or wrongly killed in the name of justice.)

'He perverted MY LAW into something he used to enslave this young girl!' Alana's lips curled as she watched the vile man turn helplessly over and over again. He was numb with terror and had soiled himself in his fit of rage at being trapped in all this open space with those two helpless females almost within reach of his savage hands. Almost, but not quite, reachable.

"I think we should just leave him up here," Alana decided. "That is my decision, as justice."

"But won't he die?" Kianna anxiously asked, not wanting any harm to come to anybody, not even Uncle Guevara. "He'll fall to the ground, eventually."

'Damn! I can't kill him. My own law prevents it.'

"Sometimes I really hate being a justice," Alana muttered. An instant later, all three of them were safely on the ground. Guevara staggered to his feet, and looked like he was ready for another go-round with the women. Controlling her rage, Alana teleported him to the far side of New Eden, then instructed the local goddess of that region, another of her twenty-eight sisters, regarding how to find him, and what to do with him when they did, so that he didn't take advantage of any other young...

"How old are you, child?" Alana asked, suddenly realizing that it hadn't been that long since the Exodus from Earth.

"I'm seventeen," Kianna said proudly.

"Old enough..." Alana observed.

"Uncle Guevara said that, too, three years ago..." Kianna replied, her smiling instantly vanishing from her face. "And then he showed me what I was supposed to do ... what my mother had ... I can't believe she would willingly..." Kianna burst into tears even as she snarled the words in her hatred of what her life had been – and of what her mother had done.

"Who says your mother did it willingly?" Alana wanted to know.

"He did!" Kianna spat out the words. "He said my mother loved him. She did it because she loved him!"

Alana hugged the girl close and whispered ardently to her; "I think, perhaps, he lied. More likely, she did what she needed to do in order to protect you." The queen was glad she was standing on the ground, as the energy in Kianna's mind actually created a visible discharge when Alana began to siphon off the girl's excess emotions. After a while, Kianna was somewhat recovered. She sat with the queen and rocked gently, back and forth while leaning on her shoulder, her arms clenched tightly around her waist.

"He would bring me flowers," Kianna murmured. "Little white flowers that grew in the woods around Hudson Ridge, where we lived after we came here. He made me eat them. Not every day ... just once in a while. To keep my stomach from swelling, he said."

Alana was again appalled at the vicious deception the male mind was capable of. In her four thousand years on Earth in her last life, she had experienced the highest heights and the most degraded depths of the human psyche, but it still disgusted her that a man would do what this girl's uncle had done to her. "He didn't want any kids," she said, mostly to herself.

"What?" Kianna asked, not having even a slight clue about what her queen meant.

"The flowers; Queen Anne's..." Alana started to explain, then realized that this would undoubtedly spin the girl's fragile emotions completely askew and added, "Nothing. It's not important now."

'I wonder how many times she was forcibly aborted with those 'little white flowers'... ' she thought, then decided that she didn't want to know.

It was another hour before the queen asked Kianna if she wanted to go back inside the castle. "You should probably eat something," Alana suggested. "You've been through a lot, today."

"I suppose," Kianna smiled (She actually smiled!). "He had me strapped in the back of his wagon so I couldn't get out. But I got loose anyway. I've been waiting for a long time to get away – to escape to a temple so I could find a goddess – someone to rescue me. And now here you are. The Queen. I never expected it would be you, your majesty."

"Enough of that," Alana frowned. "You may call me Alana. All my friends do."

"Alana," Kianna tested her queen's name on her tongue, then grew silent as they walked.

"Is something troubling you?" Alana wanted to know.

"I was just ... wondering," Kianna replied. "I was wondering what I would do next. 'Uncle Guevara is ... gone?" Alana nodded, confirming the young girl's suspicions. "And I'm ... free. That sounds good, and I've longed for freedom it seems like forever. But ... it's a bit unnerving, you know?"

"I think so," Alana replied, trying to keep the corners of her mouth from curling up in a silly grin.

"And," Kianna continued, "I'm just wondering what I'm going to do next. Now. Tomorrow."

"Well," Alana said, thinking about it, "You're not stupid. You could go study at University – maybe find something you might like to do. It is important, you know, deciding what to do with one's life."

"Yeah," Kianna murmured. "But I'm only good at one thing, you know, and I don't really like the idea of doing that for the rest of my life."

"So he actually told you that you were good at that?" Alana asked, then stopped, stunned that she would actually ask such an insensitive question. 'Gods! What was I thinking?'

"Ha. Not even once," Kianna replied, her voice surly. "But I know I was – otherwise, he wouldn't have kept such close watch on me, would he?"