The Cydonian Pyramid Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been made a Pure Girl as an infant; she remembered nothing.
    “She was much like you,” said Song. “Light of hair and quick of tongue. We became Pure Girls the same summer.”
    That made no sense. Yar Song was
old.
“My
mother
was a Pure Girl?”
    “Yes . . . until she became pregnant, of course.”
    “How old was she?”
    “Do you wish me to number her years?”
    “No!”
    “She was about your age.”
    Lia had always assumed that she had been born of noble parents who had given her to the priests because of the color of her hair. The notion that she was the child of a Pure Girl shocked her. And she did not understand how her mother could be the same age as Song, nor how a Pure Girl could have come to be with child.
    “What happened to her?” she asked.
    “Once you were born, she was sent to the farms. She may have picked the fruit you ate for your breakfast.”
    On the surface, Lia absorbed this information placidly, as Yar Song would wish, but inside, she felt things crumbling, as if the girders of her emotions were made of brittle foam. She did not trust herself to speak.
    Song lifted her feet from the water and moved effortlessly into the lotus position.
    “There are some things I can tell you that may help and may explain that which seems to make little sense. Are you listening?”
    Lia jerked her head up as if slapped. “Yes, Yar.”
    “Do you know why the Pure Girls exist?”
    “We are throwbacks,” Lia said, quoting the teachings. “We represent that which was. The past. The Plague years.”
    “That is true, and they fear us for it. But what I am asking is this: Why, if we are so dreadful, do they celebrate us as children, make us Pure Girls, then cast us into the Gates?”
    “Because it is our way.”
    “Which begs the question. The truth is, the Pure Girls are the scapegoats of the Lah Sept — a repository for the sins of the people. By casting out the Pure Girls, we Lah Sept hope to cleanse ourselves. We destroy those who we fear we might become, and in so doing, we achieve salvation.”
    “That makes no sense,” Lia said.
    Song shrugged. “I did not say it made sense, only that it is so. You have been granted a brief but enviable life. This justifies, in the hearts of the people, your eventual fate. Or so the priests tell us.”
    “Do you believe it?”
    “Many do not. The priests maintain their power through fear, and the power of machines they obtain from the Boggsians. Should those machines ever fail, the priests themselves may become scapegoats. The cycle repeats itself endlessly.”
    Lia did not understand, but she nodded.
    Song smiled. “You do not need to know these things. Let me tell you some things you do need to know. The Gates are openings in time. Aleph, Bitte, and Heid lead directly or indirectly to Medicant hospitals with the technology to repair damaged bodies. In most cases, the Pure Girls survive their initial transition. But each of those hospitals is different, occurring at different points in Medicant history, each with different sets of laws and practices. At the hospital served by Bitte, for example, the doctors employ the Gates as a source for body parts. At Heid they are more concerned with psychological manipulations. Aleph leads to the most ancient of the hospitals, and the least dangerous, though Plague is rampant there. If you should land at any of these, you must assert your rights vigorously.”
    “What rights?”
    “You have the right to refuse treatment. If you are treated against your will, you have the right to refuse to pay. They may let you go, although in their later period, the Medicants began to extort payment in the form of involuntary labor. A sad commentary on the human race. No matter how often we repudiate the practice of slavery, it finds its way back like a cast-off cat.
    “In any case, the Medicants will not kill you. They are rigid and in some ways cruel, but they are bound by their numbers and their ethic. The Gates Gammel and Dal