The Neo-Amazons of New Amazon

I am Erodotus, the Mad Historian. No ears will any longer take in the warnings I give. Which are the dreams, my nights or my days? The nights are haunted by visions of civilisations long ruined, where men spoke tongues understood by none today, save one. In the day I struggle so to find an audience for my words, I might as well be speaking an incomprehensible tongue. They are all asleep, in the day as in the night, delving into the same pasts I see, addicted to those pasts as to those potions they take to prolong their dreams. There are those who dwell in the past to hide from the present, and those who search unfathomable pasts for answers, both equally mad. Yet the healers think me mad! Would that I had known it would come to this.

But first...

Legend has it that the peoples of New Amazon were visited by two plagues which shaped their present race, and are doomed to be scourged by another that will prove their end. The first of these was a pox which took all their menfolk, yet left the women untouched bar their grief. Their treasuries possessed stores of seed with which to sire new young; but any boys born fell ill with the same pox and did not last long. But the women knew not despair, for their cities were high in Science. They attempted to find cures for that dread disease, but all manner of elixir, herbal or alchemical, proved futile. The women then turned their efforts to finding a way to bear children without men, at which task they succeeded by a method (involving two women) still used in the present day.

The second plague was a tumour that sprouted within their bosoms. At first the tumour was small, but was always larger in the daughter than the mothers. Yet this cancer never took root elsewhere in the body, and did not harm its hosts. With the passing of millenia, it came to grow in place of the milk glands. It was found that the tumours had taken on the appearance of cerebra, and were joined to the spine by nerves. Thus it was that the intellective soul in these women came to reside in their breasts. Any blow to the head, once fatal, was now merely paralytic; but mobility was soon regained amongst the paraplegics as they learned to control their limbs with their new brains, perched on their chests. These brains did secrete a nectar from the teats for babes to suckle, and those who did not failed to grow brains on their chests, and, the cephalic brains of these people having regressed to those of beasts, could not sustain a soul.

In these people, the size of their brains became the criterion of beauty. Those with small brains thought and acted like fools, while those with vastly swollen brains were often afflicted with some disease, a cancer growing in their cancer. The righ proportion was highly sought after, some golden mean between brain and waist being indicative of a sharp mind in a healthy body. Each area of the brain was found roughly to correspond with some mental function, and a nice round shape demonstrated well-balanced thought. Those most well-endowed formed the caste of priests, poets, and philosophers. The craft of their chirurgeons reached its pinnacle in the reshaping of minds and bodies.

Still millenia on, after empries had risen and fallen, one tribe emerged seemingly from nowhere to assert dominion over the continent, founding a great city on the mouth of the New Amazon. Yes indeed, they were the founders of the empire of Wome that threaten our kingdom with their westward advance. The key to their military victories lay not in tactics or weaponry, but to the telepathy through which the Womans communicate. What is it like to be a Woman? I dare not speculate, but some captives have described it as being able to speak in images and thoughts to any other Woman. It is hard to be certain, for the verbal faculties of the Womans have deteriorated due to obsolescence, an understandable development if the reports of wordless telepathy are true. Our diplomats say that this telepathy is at once language and art and religion for Wome.

But all is not well in the state of Wome. Hearsay has it that centuries ago, a heresiarch gained an audience in one of the provinces, convincing some of the people to denounce life in the empire and retreat to the jungle, where their descendents still take refuge. They call themselves the Neo-Amazons. What is most striking about them is their rite of initiation - any Woman who wishes to join must have her right brain severed. Children born to the order have their right chest cauterised while the brains are no more than buds. Apart from these core facts, the rumours diverge; some claim that the Neo-Amazons guard a Fountain of Wisdom that enlightens any man who drinks from it; others that their present Queen was born of a virgin. What mysteries could explain the ways of this cult? And could the Neo-Amazons be merely symptoms of a deeper crisis in the empire, which led them to apostasy? To that end, I travelled into the heart of the New Amazon.

After an arduous journey, I discovered the capital of the Neo-Amazons. The sentinels reported my presence to their Queen, who agreed to grant me counsel.

I: Your Majesty, it is an immense honour to bask in your presence. I have come to learn of the ways of the Neo-Amazons. Many are the rumours which shroud your people. Would it be possible for you to lay the truth before me?

Queen: Yes, Erodotus, I have heard of these rumours, and they disturb me. Especially since the highest value for the Neo-Amazon is Truth. I will tell you our story, and you shall repeat it to everyone you know. That is as close as you will come to being one of us, but it is close enough.

I: I am a historian; I trade in myriad truths. But indeed, some truths are truer than others, and I am certain yours shall be one of those, Your Majesty. My quill stands ready.

Q: Many generations ago, The Grandma of Truth, before she was known by that name, was a centurion in the Woman legions. She was born lucky. Her family was noble, and when she came of age her well-rounded brains were the envy and desire of all Wome. Her images were all over mass telepathy. And she was also promising in the poetry of images so popular in the empire. She was destined for high places, and it is said that some in the royal family too were swayed by her beauty of body and mind. Yet she had always been one to question the ways of the world, and wrote a philosophical tract while fighting in the East. The tract, now part of our scriptures, was an incisive critique of the impact of mass telepathy on thought. To put this into context, you must realise that writing in the Woman empire has always been treated as an inferior, outmoded form of communication, grudgingly used by scribes in areas where precise records must be kept. And she chose to write this critique! It would not have received any readership, had not the fortuitous accident happened.

It happened in the last year of the war. Her right brain got smashed by a barbarian warrior. As you know, the right brain allows the Woman access to mass telepathy, and the left brain thought and feeling. It is an analogue to how the brain works in your race. Anyway, her military career was over. No way she could command without mass telepathy. Neither could she gain any acclaim as a poet or artist of any sort. Such was the injustice of Woman society.

She saw that mass telepathy, once a gift, had now sclerosed into an institution, and like all institutions, was corrupted by the logic of power and inequality. It had too great a hold over Woman life. Now with only a single brain and out of the loop, she quickly fell from the public view. She realised that her work had only been popular because she had been beautiful. The works themselves were soon distorted after she'd released them to the public anyway.

The inane nature of most of the content, catering to the lowest common denominator, meant it had a stultifying influence on society. Worse still, the imagistic, dynamic nature of that medium meant that it discouraged deliberate, abstract contemplation of the type necessary to make it better, leading people to perceive only what is visualisable and obvious. Their imagination withered. Art lacked creativity, becoming mere recombinations of the same. As the faculty of reason atrophied, so did that of morality, necessarily. People were guided by nothing more than how things appeared to them. The Womans gravitated away from the universal toward the particular. Mass telepathy was doomed from the start. As a historian, Erodotus, you must know the legend of the three plagues of New Amazon; the Grandma realised that mass telepathy was the third plague.

That gave her the impetus to act according to her ideas in the tract. She spoke to her close friends by mouth. She was very persuasive, for she was a poet, and Womans could still appreciate good language in those days. She gathered a bunch of disciples, who ritually cleaved off their right breasts. Calling themselves the Neo-Amazons, they began to speak against mass telepathy.

I: These incidents you describe find no mention within Woman annals, of course.

Q: Of course. They [the Woman officials] would not have the people know the truth of what happened. The Guild of Mass Telepathy regulated what people knew and said, and had close links to the palace, as well as lobbying power with the Senate. So all news of this uprising were censored, and a legion was mobilised to quell any dissent.

The Grandma foresaw this development, and slipped into the jungle with her followers before they could be caught. The Woman legions combed the jungle to no avail, for the New Amazon rainforest is dense and deep. It is a miracle you made it this far, Erodotus.

I: Thank you for your kind praise, Your Majesty. I have journeyed through many perilous lands in search of truths, and that has prepared me well.

Q: You must tell me the tales of your journeys sometime, then. So it was that the Neo-Amazons hid in the jungle, clashing with the occasional Woman raid. The Grandma knew that to win this war, they needed staying power and numbers. She sent out preachers to proselytise. Converts went back with these preachers to the jungle, always a step ahead of the authorities. Rumours about the Neo-Amazons spread through the empire; some came of their own free will, others who had lost their right brains, often veterans, were outcasts who sought out a society that would accept them.

The Senate realised this was not in their favour, and decreed that any who lost their right brains had to be institutionalised within asylums to take care of them and prevent delusional behaviour. What a ruse! The Neo-Amazons launched guerilla attacks on these asylums to free the prisoners whenever they could. The Womans tightened security in response. But we do our best.

The Grandma realised that they would take generations to defeat the incumbents. She required that the Neo-Amazons, now living as hunter-gatherers, multiply as best as they could. The right brain of each newborn is cauterised. They grow up on a strict curriculum of military training, as well as an education of the intellect, lest we lose the reason that led us to exile. She believed we were best ruled by a philosopher-queen, chosen by consensus. And so I am here on her throne, because of the support of my people.

I: I had heard of such governments existing in the distant past, before the cataclysms; indeed it is supposed that they were the cause of these cataclysms.

Q: Yet there is no reason to suppose that those who were kings and queens by birth would never be responsible for such devastation, had they the technology. Indeed, I may possess the key to reclaiming the wisdom of the ancients...

I: What key have you found, Your Majesty?

Q: It is more accurate to say I was born with it than found it. My mother passed away soon after I was born, and on autopsy her womb was discovered to be full of brain running through their walls. It was thought likely by our healers that the same cancer which had given us our brains had now reached the next stage in its evolution. That I was the daughter of the Holy Tumour and the Virgin. Perhaps that is a clue to the nature of my powers.

I was visited by strange dreams every night in my childhood. I saw strange people in a strange world, speaking strange languages. I gradually came to understand those languages, since children pick these things up easily. I realised that my dreams were visions of the past, anamneses if you will. I had no control over where my mind was thrown each night, but there were enough trips to each region and period that I slowly pieced things together.

I: You incur a historian's envy, Your Majesty.

Q: And yet it is so infuriating, Erodotus, to be sent every night to some place and time which is not the one where you want to be in. But I realised that the wisdom of the ages accumulates; if on my trips back to those times when human knowledge was at its greatest I could learn the physics of spacetime and the workings of the brain, I might gain mastery over my random projections each night. And that might allow me to finally reclaim that unsurpassed wisdom mankind once held.

I: A stunning masterplan, Your Majesty! But surely true wisdom is true because it exists in all times and none; if that be so, then it can be found just as well in the present.

Q: I am surprised that a historian of all people should say that.

I: Your Majesty, I study the past not to learn its wisdom, but to learn its folly, that we may avoid it. Wisdom, we must seek in the present so we may find in the future.

Q: That is true. But it would not be wise to attempt to recreate it out of nothing when so much wisdom has already been earned. And at what price! For I have seen millions shed their blood time and again for the untruths held by others, and many a great thinker who failed to convince the powers that be and paid with their lives. But mostly, I see the lives of ordinary people, trying to understand how to live their lives, yet never finding that wisdom until too late, and I fear the same fate could be mine.

I: You have seen much and gained great wisdom, Your Majesty, not from the past itself, but from your experience of the past. I should like to travel to the past as you do.

Q: The strain of cancer that forms my brain cannot take root in those already colonised, Neo-Amazon or Woman. But there may be hope for others.

I: Might Your Majesty be suggesting that the Fountain of Wisdom is real?

The Queen, smiling, beckoned me, as she parted her robes...