The ride into town was disconcerting. It hadn't occurred to Megan that they would use a "horse"-drawn cart. Surely, she thought, a society able to manufacture the sophisticated electronic appliances they had would be able to manage a fuel cell, but perhaps they couldn't pass up another chance to demean women. The two women pulling the cart, the same ones Megan had seen yesterday doing plow duty, didn't seem to object to the heavy labor, and certainly they were built for it. Hauling the wheeled cart was no doubt easier than the plow, but the idea of women as draft animals wasn't any more palatable to Megan today than it had been yesterday. She looked at Jason, who seemed almost hypnotized by the sight of the powerful leg muscles and buttocks rippling, shiny with sweat. Megan wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake some decency into him, yell at him that they were as human as himself and as deserving of respectful treatment, but she knew it would be useless.

There were several farms along the way, each with its complement of women used as farm animals. Megan was surprised at the seemingly large number of descendants -- or somewhat more accurately, clones -- of the original seven crew members. She saw, for the first time, a horse with Janica's body. It was inevitable there would be some, but the sight, the thought of it, still made Megan grit her teeth.

On reaching town, Jason pulled the cart to a stop in front of a hardware store, jumped down from the cart and tied the horse-women's reins to a wooden bar in front of the boardwalk that lined the front of the row of shops. Megan could tell it was a hardware store because an illuminated liquid crystal sign in the window said so. The whole street was a bizarre mix of ancient and modern -- the road was hard-packed dirt, the boardwalks wooden planks, yet there was no lack of electric lighting. Megan climbed down on the other side and asked, "Where do you get your... girlimals, Jason?" She had reasoned that this would be the place to start. Since the women for livestock and... entertainment were all clones of Janica and her crewmates, it seemed possible that Janica might be somewhere near the point of sale.

Jason pointed down the street. "Fourth building down this way. You'll see the big display window."

Megan shuddered internally at the notion of "displaying" the women for sale, but hid it well -- she had been getting a lot of practice in suppressing her reactions -- and extended her hand. "Been very nice meeting you, Jason. I'll try to swing by and say hi on my way back to my ship."

Jason shook hands with her. "Nice meeting you too, Martin. Say, last night was perfectly understandable, but you sleep with the dolly the next time, okay? I don't want to feel like I don't treat my guests well."

Megan was staggered by the question of how she could possibly get through an entire night alone with a woman who looked exactly like Janica, lived for passionate sex, and was under orders to provide it in copious amounts to Megan. And who wouldn't stop no matter what Megan said and who wouldn't be summoned away as she had been last night. Megan determined that if she did stop by Jason's farm, she would be prepared with some reason why she couldn't stay for the night. She slapped his arm in a friendly way. "Sure thing, Jason. See you soon." She waved at Bret, who returned the wave enthusiastically with a huge grin.

She closed her eyes and sighed as she watched Jason enter the store with Bret, leaving her standing on the boardwalk. Yesterday had been such an appalling experience from the moment she'd set foot on the first outpost of local society. Today probably wouldn't be much better.

She walked down the boardwalk, past a feed store, a pharmacist's, and one that sold home furnishings. Farther on were a few larger buildings that Megan suspected might be factories. When she reached the store Jason had pointed out she stopped and groaned audibly. Yes, she thought, I was right about what today was going to be like.

The sign above the door proclaimed it to be the Girlimal Emporium. In the first display window there were two women modified into dogs, each of them barking energetically at Megan, and presumably anyone else who passed by. For the first time, Megan saw a "dog" with Janica's face.

The Janica-dog didn't look especially angry, for all her barking. In fact, she was wagging her tail, probably pleased by the attention her barking was meant to attract. As with Jason's two dogs, the barking sound was eerily authentic. The barking itself must be part of the training the women get, it occurred to Megan, perhaps aided by surgical modifications of the larynx -- she had already speculated about that when she'd heard the "cows" mooing yesterday. Megan shook her head miserably, thinking of the tragedy that this woman, born with all of Janica's genes and capable of so much, had been prevented from developing any human level of intelligence and, without her consent, surgically reduced to the life of an animal. Megan's anger flared again. Once she was able to make sure Janica was safe, Megan intended to leave plenty of dead bodies lying around. There would be men left alive to take care of the women until Earth authorities could return here in force. But Megan swore to herself that the "gods" would be dead.

Megan forced herself to move towards the shop's door, and saw now that the display window beyond it contained dollies -- seven of them, all naked, one of each "model," including, of course, Janica. There were partitions between them, perhaps because they would be one big tangle of arms and legs in a sexual orgy if they had all been in the same enclosure, which might interfere with customers getting a full view of each one. They had all been sitting on the floor behind the display window, but as Megan came into view each one sprang up to her feet and came closer to the window. Mostly they felt at the glass with their hands as if trying to reach Megan, though two of them were kissing the glass instead. Each one looked at Megan with overflowing sexual ardor, as if she had been in love with Megan all her life and had despaired of seeing her again. Megan was sure customers passing by were sold immediately on the idea of having one of these for their very own. To Megan, it was all appalling. The one with Janica's face, of course, was the most distressing. The others, in other circumstances, might have amused Megan with their display of how much they wanted her, though Megan knew their faces as well, but to see Janica acting the same way, with no personal recognition of Megan but simply a blatant sexual need for her, was almost more than Megan could take.

Megan squeezed her eyes shut, telling herself several times, I can't find Janica if I don't go in. She pulled open the door and entered.

Her ears were assaulted immediately, and it was a tribute to the effective air-conditioning that her nose wasn't. Along one wall were a dozen of the "cow" variant, in small cages stacked three high, each standing over a bucket in the cage presumably meant for receiving wastes, with small troughs for feed and water attached to the front corners of the cage. Each had suction tubes for both breasts that were presumably put into operation periodically for milking. Along the other wall were similar stacks of cages for "dogs," most of the women in them sounding a variety of barks and yips. Behind a glass partition, probably there as a barrier against that smell, were a number of overweight women clearly intended to be fattened still further as "pigs," and farther towards the back were separate stalls in which women with powerfully-muscled legs and no arms were standing, or in many cases walking on treadmills for exercise.

Megan didn't see any dollies, other than the ones in the window display. As she was looking around, the proprietor came forward from the back of the store to greet her, with a broad grin.

"Welcome..." His smile faltered, replaced with a puzzled look. His greeting had been automatic, but now he seemed to be processing Megan's odd style of dress, at least, and very likely the more disturbing fact he had never seen her before, which would probably be impossible.

Megan smiled tensely, her fingers twitching towards and away from her blaster, hoping the man was not suddenly recognizing her as not sharing his own gender. "I'm from Earth."

"Oh!! Okay, now that makes sense then! I always wondered whether someone from Earth might come to Freeworld." He offered his hand to shake, which Megan cautiously accepted, and went on, "In that case, doubly welcome, to the Girlimal Emporium! I'm Jamis, the owner." Jamis squinted out the window. "Are there more of you?"

Megan breathed a little easier. She seemed to be safe for the present. "No, I'm just an exploration scout. We didn't know anyone was here." She wanted to ask where all of these women had come from, but Jamis spoke first.

"I guess in that case, you won't be here to stay." He looked disappointed, perhaps at the loss of a potential customer. He looked around. "I don't suppose any of the girlimals in stock would be useful to you. Other than the dollies." He brightened a little. "I'm sure you've got a lonely job. I could fix you up with a dolly if you're going to be on the planet a couple of weeks."

Puzzled, she looked behind her towards the front of the store. "A couple of weeks? You've got dollies right here."

He followed her gaze. "Oh, those aren't for sale, of course. Those were trained as display models, not meant to be imprinted. They'd seek sex from anyone around you, not just you, and I'm sure you wouldn't want that. A properly imprinted dolly wants to please only you." He laughed self-deprecatingly. "I'm sorry, here I am explaining technology to someone from Earth. I'm sure you're way ahead of us. But that's the problem, you see. I imagine on Earth a dolly can be imprinted for you while you wait, but we're not quite at that level here. It takes some time."

"You do the imprinting here? Or where?" The conversation seemed to be headed back towards the right track.

The man shook his head. "Not here, no. That's all done at Olympus."

"Olympus. Where's that?"

In an awed voice, the man said, "It's where the gods live. My whole stock comes from Olympus."

Olympus. That makes sense, Megan supposed. As if Hercules had cleared out all the original gods (read "Women In Power") and had taken over their heaven. She wondered if she'd find a statue of the goddess Hera smashed to pieces on the floor at Olympus. Excited at the possibility that she was near the end of her quest, she asked, "How do I find Olympus?"

The front entrance did look something like a Greek temple from a distance. Behind that a sprawling building, looking as if it had been expanded haphazardly over the years, covered several acres of cleared land at the top of a hill. On the hillside to one side, several more acres had been cleared for... "livestock." There seemed to be six or seven dozen women in the "cow" format, placidly nibbling at the ever-present lettuce or resting on the ground, mooing contentedly. At the far end of the field stood a huge barn, at least three times the size of Jason's, separate from the temple, near which several teams of women in horse form pulled various carriages or farm implements, driven by men holding whips at the ready. The exercises seemed to have no purpose other than giving the women practice at pulling things and to strengthen their legs. There was a small pen of "pigs" near the barn. Another group of men were playing with a number of women converted to dogs, encouraging them to fetch sticks, balls, et cetera, while the women barked excitedly, their tails twitching back and forth. Some of the other dog-women had wandered off on their own, to dig holes with their paws or to snuffle at tree-trunks and bushes, though no doubt their olfactory systems weren't equipped for the world of smells true dogs could perceive. It must be, thought Megan, that they had simply been trained to behave that way.

In every one of the groups, Megan could see individual women with Janica's face, along with Heather's, and the others Megan was rapidly becoming much more familiar with than she had been.

Standing invisible for the moment among the trees, Megan couldn't immediately see a way to reach the temple without being seen. She felt positive Janica must be inside it somewhere. She walked around the building, still hidden safely in the trees, looking for entrances other than the front one. Of the building's windows, the one farthest back on the side of the temple away from the barn seemed the best bet. It was the window at the least distance from the trees, and Megan thought it looked quite useful as a quick exit, so she'd enter that way so she could easily find it when she was leaving. Assuming Janica was physically up to climbing through a window. Megan suspected there would be reasons to hurry at that point.

She sat with her back against a tree and rested, nibbling at the provisions from her pack when she felt hungry, waiting for nightfall. She'd need all her energy at that time.

Megan slipped on the night-vision glasses from her pack, gripped her blaster, stood up, took a deep breath, and walked through the lettuce, picking up her feet as she walked and setting each one down as gently as she could to avoid noise. The grounds were absolutely quiet. Near sunset she had heard a number of barking women urging the "cows" back into the barn -- another part of their training with which she was familiar -- and all of the women were now secure for the night in the barn or the temple, the men gone from the field. Megan had still not got used to the quiet of planet with no animal life other than humans, and she found she did need to make a little occasional noise just to reassure herself she hadn't suddenly gone deaf.

There was no light emanating from the chosen window. Megan spent several minutes sliding the lower half of the window upward a centimeter at a time, listening carefully for any sound that might signal someone had heard her. She'd had no doubt the window would be unlocked -- the occupants of the temple, presumably mainly the gods, would never expect the worshipful farmers and shopkeepers to attempt a surreptitious break-in, even assuming the farmers or shopkeepers would think there was anything inside that they needed. She finally crawled in, finding herself in what appeared to be a storeroom for electronic equipment. Bet they didn't have that in authentic Greek temples, she thought.

Now that she was in the room, she thought she could hear a distant sound. She stopped, holding her breath, trying to determine its source, but it was too vague, and not consistently present. Listening through the room's door, she decided the noise wasn't near enough to endanger her for the moment. Softly easing the door open, she stepped into a corridor.

She took off her night-vision glasses and stowed them in her pack. The dim old-fashioned glowballs at intervals along the corridor gave more than enough light -- she wished it was a little darker, in fact. The noise she had first heard before opening the door was resolving itself: it sounded like the periodic combined shouts of a number of men. She froze again, but the sound wasn't getting any nearer. It reminded her, incongruously, of the cheers at a sporting event. Not what she expected in a temple, though she admitted to herself that the building's purpose had probably never been quiet religious contemplation.

There were no signs on any of the doors or walls, in keeping with the fact that the limited population using the temple presumably knew where everything was. Megan wondered whether she should take the time to look in every door. She decided to get a feeling for the overall layout first.

Turning left into another, long corridor, she saw that halfway down on the right was a large double-door. As she walked towards it, the shouting sound drew nearer, but still not to the point of seeming dangerous. She listened at the crack between the doors. The sound wasn't coming from inside. She cautiously, slowly, pulled one open, looked inside, and froze, not expecting anything like the sight that met her eyes.

There were row upon row of cots, with a girl on each. They were all on their backs, seemingly asleep. They appeared to range in age from toddler to full maturity, with girls of similar ages grouped in rows from left to right. From front to back, the floor and the cots were color-coded in some way, some colors occupying more area than others. Every one of the girls was wearing a metallic-looking headband that held cottony patches to their temples on either side, and another pair of patches on their foreheads at either side, the patches all having wires trailing from them to a console at the side of the cot. In all the room, not one of the girls stirred. The only sound in the room was their soft, slow breathing.

One seventh of the girls looked like Janica at various different ages of her childhood. By the skin and hair color, Megan could tell which ones of the others were clones of Tanisha Ologwu, Aoife O'Lonigan, and Heather Lopez. Of the identities of the rest, Megan wasn't sure. Megan didn't know what the crew members other than Janica had looked like as children.

To Megan it seemed a little early in the evening for these kids to be asleep -- and certainly unlikely they would be unanimously asleep. Megan's experiences at youth camps had never been like that.

There were a number of doors around the sides of the room. The rational part of Megan urged her to try them. But a more emotional part of her was in charge for the moment, responding to the extreme spookiness of the environment, begging her to get out. She backed up quickly, remembering herself just in time to keep from banging noisily into the door behind her. She eased herself back into the corridor, breathing shakily, her mouth wide-open to keep her respiration a little quieter, the pounding of her heart seeming much too loud.

What in the HELL is going on in there? she demanded herself to answer. No answer was found to be forthcoming, and Megan forced herself to continue down the corridor.

On the left came another corridor -- the wall on her right still enclosed that same huge room she had just left -- and Megan, stopping and listening before reaching the corner, judged it safe and turned.

She was about to pass another door, the only one in a long corridor, when she noticed, to her surprise, that it was the first one she'd seen that had any type of lock. In this case it was a keypad, with ten numerically labelled keys in the standard arrangement.

After some rooting around, Megan pulled a different pair of glasses out of her pack, and a UV flashlight. Setting its frequency appropriately to detect skin oils, she found that four of the keys shone brighter than the others. Okay, those four keys in the combination, she told herself. Assume to start with that it's just a four-digit code, no repeated numbers. Just twenty-four possible combos in that case. She started keying in different combos one after another. On her tenth try there was a click from behind the keypad. She pulled the door open.

The room was enormous, and housed several large, round tanks. Seven of them, she counted. The lighting was much better than in the room with the sleeping girls. Each tank was supported on a metal platform, and there were walkways between the tanks, giving access to what it seemed must be control panels. Megan's eyes registered the general layout of the room in the first seconds, before focusing on what was inside the tanks. She looked within the middle tank of the seven, and its contents puzzled her to the point of holding her motionless, her jaw hanging open.

The tank was filled with a nearly-clear, just slightly yellowish fluid that filled it to its metal-covered top. Within the fluid, a cylindrical metal column, about a foot in diameter, rose from the equipment-covered floor of the tank nearly to its top. At Megan's eye-level, six, no, seven metal bars emerged radially from around the column, spokes that ended in circular metal collars, each surrounding the neck of a nude female mannequin, minus its arms and legs. The mannequins floated in the fluid, upright, facing the central column. Each wore a metal cap on its hairless head, from which a number of wires emerged, and each had rubber tubing emerging from between its buttocks, the tubing slanting downward from there to disappear into the midst of the equipment in the floor. Directly below each mannequin there was a cylinder in the floor, open at the top to reveal yet more equipment inside it.

The human-like figures inspired in Megan a seemingly endless stream of questions. First of all why, she wondered, have the gods stored limbless mannequins in huge liquid-filled vats? Even more puzzling: why do the gods have mannequins that portray pregnant women? Every one of the torsos had the enormously bulging tummy and huge overhanging breasts of a woman nearly ready to deliver, such as Megan had seen in images from centuries past, when women bore their own babies. What could the gods possibly be using them for?

Megan realized, after a few moments, that the identical faces of the mannequins in the tank were familiar. Recognition was made difficult by the bald heads, but the face was one Megan had been seeing, repeated endlessly, since she had arrived at the settlement, on "cows," on "horses," and on one of the dollies she had seen in the "girlimal" shop: it was the face of Polina Grishova, Aurora's pilot. Looking into the next tank to the right, the mannequins had faces again identical to each other, but different from those in the first tank. Again with difficulty due to the hairless scalp, Megan recognized the face of Sabrina Marion, repeated all around the tank.

Megan quickly scanned the rest of the tanks. Tanisha Ologwu was, as usual, easily recognizable by skin coloration alone... There! thought Megan. In the tank second from the end of the row, the face was Janica's. Easier to recognize than most of the others, since, despite the absence of hair, Megan would know her sister anywhere.

Megan's list of mental questions only grew longer.

Megan drew in a sudden breath, her hands flying to her face. She had suddenly realized that the eyes of several of the mannequins were tracking her as she moved.

And she could see, now that her eyes had taken in the general scene and began perceiving details, that most of the beach-ball tummies were dimpling and rippling, as if the baby inside -- or babies, the tummies were all too full to contain only a single child -- were kicking.

A silent roar seemed to sweep through Megan's hearing, from within her head rather than outside it. Above the roar, an internal voice was screaming, They're not mannequins! They're not mannequins!

Megan could see, now, the barely visible scars on the rounded shoulder nubs, where the arms had been surgically removed, and similar scars below the buttocks.

Completely frozen in place now, Megan watched in horror as one of the women -- one of the live women, all of them were alive, Megan now understood -- began wriggling like a fish at the end of a fishing pole. On her face, the usual blank expression Megan had seen on every woman on the planet other than the dollies was replaced with a grimace of pain. Seconds later, a baby slid out of the woman between the rounded mounds of buttocks where her legs had once been, the baby waving her arms -- it was a girl. Instantly machinery at the bottom of the tank burst into motion, severing the cord and drawing the baby into the cylinder beneath the woman, out of Megan's sight.

Megan's legs lost their ability to support her. Kneeling on the floor, she buried her head against her crossed arms, eyes squeezed tightly shut, and tried desperately to control her breathing, and still more desperately to hold back the contents of her stomach that were trying to escape. I can't leave a puddle of vomit in here! she told herself sternly. I can't leave signs I was here at all.

Just as Megan decided she was turning the corner towards controlling her reaction, the thought hit her: What if one of the women in the Janica tank is really Janica? Obviously Janny had been used originally to incubate the first clones -- they could not possibly have come from anywhere else. What if she's still serving that purpose?

Megan jumped to her feet in response to an imperative beyond her ability to argue with it, and burst out into the corridor, heedless of the possibility it might be occupied. Luckily, it wasn't. She stood there, torn by conflicting impulses. Part of her wanted to go back into the tank room and see whether Janica was among the breeders. Megan told herself that if, somehow, she managed to confirm Janica's identity as one of the tank's occupants, the shock might leave Megan unable to function at all. If Janny is alive, Megan told herself forcefully, I can't save her all by myself. Certainly not if she's in that tank. None of the women were breathing, so the machinery in the tank, probably through the collars encircling the women's necks, must be aerating and pumping their blood. I could get into the tanks with the blaster, she thought, but destroying all that machinery would surely kill every woman in there.

And if Janny is not in that tank, Megan went on, if she's somewhere else, I have no idea where to start looking, and searching the entire building is out of the question. I can hear that there are people here, and I've been lucky enough not to run into any, but that luck can't hold much longer. I have to get out of here! If I'm caught, I've failed Janny!

Megan headed quickly, and as quietly as she could, back to the storeroom through which she had entered.