Wizard

3 The Screamer

The Coven was established late in the twentieth century, though not under that name. It was more political than religious. Most accounts of the group's early days state that the original members were not at first serious about many of the things they did. Few of them believed in the Great Mother or in magic. Witchcraft was, at first, merely a social glue that held the community together.

As time went on and the dilettantes grew bored, as the moderate and the fainthearted moved away, the remaining core began to take its rituals seriously indeed. Rumors of human sacrifice began to be heard. It was said the women on the hill were drowning newborn male babies. The resulting attention served to draw the group tighter against a hostile outside world. They moved several times, ending in a remote corner of Australia. There the Coven surely would have perished, since all had sworn not to reproduce until parthenogenesis was a reality. But the Screamer arrived and changed all that.

The Screamer was an asteroid-millions of tonnes of metallic iron, nickel, and ice, with impurities running through it like the veins in a cat's-eye marble-that became, one fine May morning, a sizzling line of light through the southern sky. The ice burned away, but the iron, nickel, and impurities smashed into the desert on the edge of property owned by the Coven. One of the impurities was gold. Another was uranium.

It was well that the Screamer hit near the edge since even at that distance the blast killed sixty percent of the faithful. News of the asteroid's composition quickly spread. Overnight the Coven changed from just another forgotten deathlehem into a religion rich enough to stand beside the Catholics, the Mormons, and the Scientologists.

It also brought the group unwanted attention. The Australian Outback would seem an unlikely place to begin a search for a refuge remote from society, but the desert had proved far too reachable. The Coven wanted to find a new meaning for the word "remote."

This was the 2030's , and it so happened there was an ideal place to go.

When two bodies orbit around a common center of gravity, as the Earth-Moon system does, five points of gravitational stability are created. Two are in the orbit of the smaller body, but sixty degrees removed. One is between the two bodies; another, on the far side of the smaller one. They are called LaGrangian points and designated L1 through L5 .

L4 and L5 already held colonies and more were building. L2 seemed the best choice. From there the Earth would be completely hidden by the Moon.

They built the Coven there. It was a cylinder seven kilometers long with a radius of two kilometers. Artificial gravity was provided by spin; night, by closing the windows.

But the days of isolation were over almost before they began. The Coven was one of the first nongovernmental groups to move into space in a big way, but they were not the last. Soon the techniques of space colonization were refined, cheapened, standardized. Construction companies began to turn them out the way Henry Ford had turned out Model T's. They ranged in size from the merely gigantic to the Brobdingnagian.

The neighborhood began to look like Levittown, and the neighbors were odd. Just about any sizable lunatic fringe, band of separatists, or shouting society could now afford to homestead in the LaGrangians. L2 became known as Sargasso Point to the pilots who carefully avoided it; those who had to travel through it called it the Pinball Machine, and they didn't smile.

Some of the groups couldn't be bothered with the care and feeding of complex machinery. They expected to exist in pure pastoral squalor inside what was really just a big hollow coffee can. The developers were often happy to accommodate them, reasoning that all that expensive hardware, if installed, would only be abused. Every few years one of these colonies would come apart and fling itself and its inhabitants across the sky. More often, something would go wrong with the ecology and people would starve or suffocate. There was always someone willing to take one of the resulting hulks, sterilize it with free vacuum, and move in at a bargain price. The Earth never ran short of the alienated and the dissatisfied. The United Nations was happy to get rid of them and did not ask too many questions. It was a time of speculation-of instant fortunes and shoddy practices. Deals were made that would have shocked a Florida real estate developer.

The Sargasso Point incubated cultures more like carcinomas than communities. The most repressive regimes humanity had ever known took shape and died in the LaGrangians.

The Coven was not one of them. Though they had been around only fifty years at L2, it qualified them as founders. Like the first settlers everywhere, they were appalled at the quality of people moving in around them. Their own early days were forgotten now. Age, wealth, and the unforgiving environment had mellowed then hardened them into a viable group with a surprising amount of personal freedom. Liberalism had reared its head. Reform groups had replaced the original hard-liners. Ritual was once more put in the background, and the women turned to what most of them had no way of knowing was actually the group's original ethic: lesbian separatism. The term "lesbian" was no longer strictly accurate. On Earth, for many of the women, lesbianism had been a response to injustices suffered from the male sex. In space, in isolation, it became the natural order, the unquestioned basis of all reality. Males were dimly recalled abstractions, ogres to frighten children, and not very interesting ogres at that.

Parthenogenesis was still a dream. To conceive, the women had to import sperm. Eugenics was easy in one sense: male fetuses could be detected early and stilled in the womb. But with sperm, as with everything else, the watchwords were still caveat emptor.