AUTHOR'S NOTE: Note that for the purposes of variety, I use 'Paya' and 'Matriarch' interchangeably when she is speaking. However, when Paya Herself is actually present, all her respective pronouns will be capitalized, i.e., She, Her instead of she, her. See additional Author's Notes at the end.

xXx

Escthta had no words. As She approached and spoke, he felt his bones vibrate with Her nearness; when he tried to look at her, his eyes seemed to see only light. She towered over him, and he felt unworthy and small in her presence. H'chak-di responded to an unasked question in her strange speech, and he nodded to himself. Of course she would be interested. It was the Matriarch's will that H'chak-di be brought here. But this was no Matriarch; Paya rode her now, and she had no thoughts, no mind but Paya's.

Paya addressed him and he was struck dumb; the force of Her thoughts, Her will put him down to his knees, and he saw the truth She asked of him. He uttered it in the simplest of phrases, unable to put words together in any kind of coherent pattern. He heard Her again, and the shock of Her glory made his eyes water, and he answered again, in the words that were the shortest expression of truth.

"Then you know who I am," She said, in a voice that made his soul, his mind as transparent as glass. In this moment, with the blinders loosed from his eyes, he saw only the barest hint of Paya's brilliance, and it nearly destroyed his mind. He choked, his eyes watering, and answered, "Paya, our Holy Mother and Creator."

Almost instantly, the brilliance faded, leaving the Matriarch in what was, to Escthta, abject darkness. She seemed satisfied, and leaned back, regarding them with her inscrutable eyes. The silence hung over them like a shroud, until a small voice broke it gently.

"Paya?"

He lifted his head, coming out of his mental shock, and looked for the source. It was H'chak-di, who gazed on Paya's avatar with open, unblinking eyes. He had the unyielding temptation to pull her down to her knees, but he found the urge suppressed even as he moved his hand. It twitched and then came to rest near his thigh. He looked at the Matriarch again, and her gaze was knowing: You need not force her hand, Protector.

Escthta began to protest, but a lifted forefinger silenced him- no, it removed all his urges to speak.

"She is right to wonder, Protector. After all, she has traveled a long distance. She should know with whom she speaks."

Behind him, Escthta heard the restless shifting of Thtarok and the rest of the Council. He opened his mind again, which still stung from Paya's power, and felt their emotions, a mixture of fear and awe. He then turned, looking up at H'chak-di.

"And who are you?" H'chak-di's words startled him, and he made a small snort of surprise, jerking back and looking at the human again. He could understand her! The words, so strange and alien, were suddenly clear. Before he could respond, the Matriarch answered.

"I am the Matriarch. Paya, the Allmother, speaks to her people through me. I am the earthly vessel for her power." She said all this matter-of-factly, and Escthta felt locked in a surreal experience that he could not escape from.

"So, Paya is a goddess?"

"Yes."

"And she 'speaks' through you?"

"Yes." The Matriarch was smiling gently. "You don't believe me."

H'chak-di's face bloomed in surprise. "It's not that."

"You haven't believed in God since your father died." The accusation, though quiet, reverberated through the room, and Escthta winced for H'chak-di, already feeling the sting of the Matriarch's barb.

"I haven't believed in my God. You're not my God." H'chak-di's words were equally penetrating, and Escthta looked at the Matriarch, his mind beginning to panic. He moved toward H'chak-di, alien tongue or no, and tried to use his mind to silence her.

"Leave her be, Protector." Paya's voice was cold. "She has a point." Paya turned away, moving toward a door at the end of the room opposite the one they had entered. "Come with me. You as well," she added, pointing to Hir'cyn.

xXx

Paya's chambers were dark, with gilt-embroidered curtains hung from a center skylight and pulled to the walls, so it gave the effect of a huge pavilion, the color of which was not easily discerned. Here the lengths of fabric appeared blue, there red, and in other places orange or purple. The great open space they created had one cushioned dais with several pillowed areas for seating around it. The enormous Hunter settled herself on the dais in a reclining position, gesturing to the cloth rolls and floor cushions around her. Anise settled on one and found it was quite comfortable, though it smelled of old incense and disuse.

Talon seated himself next to her, folding his legs together, and resting his palms on his knees. His back was ramrod-stiff, and Anise caught his snatched glances at her. Clearly, he knew something she did not. The other Hunter, the old one that had accompanied them for the past day, also seated himself, but he eased one elbow onto a roll pillow and kept a half-lidded watch over the proceedings.

Paya lifted one hand and a door closed somewhere nearby as a slave went to fetch something. Her ornately woven headdress glittered in the light from the morning sky overhead, though the sun had not yet reached its peak. Her mandibles tapped against each other, clacking and jingling at the same time. "You have given her a yautja name?"

The question was directed at Talon, and Anise knew that the strange word was their people. She heard his voice, his words, and understood them. "Yes. H'chak-di." Anise recognized the collection of syllables. It was his name for her, as he called her for so many weeks. She looked at Paya to see how the name resonated with her.

Paya's features eased somewhat. "You have a knack for irony, Protector." She turned to Anise and her tusks moved in what Anise recognized as amusement. "Your name, do you know what it means?"

"No."

"It means, 'woman of mercy.'" Paya's smile widened into a genuine grin. "Your Protector has little idea of the many meanings your name will take on—"

"What is his name?" Anise interrupted.

Paya's smile dimmed, but she motioned with one hand at Talon. "What have you been calling him?"

"Talon. It was… the best I could think of."

Paya nodded slowly and she made a graceful wave of one large hand. "Names tell us much about people and ourselves. It is a decent enough name for him."

"But what is his real name?"

"Why don't you ask him yourself? You can, now."

Anise turned to Talon, suddenly timid. "What is your real name? I've been calling you by something not yours, and I don't think….it's right…" Her voice trailed off under Talon's intense gaze.

"Escthta." His answer was a deep rumble with a hissing noise laid over it. It was a sound she could not be sure she would be able to replicate, but she tried it and had moderate success. "What does it mean?"

"In our language, it means 'mind-born'." He tilted his head to the side in curiosity. "I have been calling you something untrue as well. Your name, Anise. What does it mean?"

Anise smiled softly. "It is a small, white flower."

Talon—no, Escthta—nodded slowly. "It is appropriate, then."

xXx

"Now that the introductions are all finished, perhaps we can move on," Paya interrupted. Escthta jerked his head up, aware again of the Matriarch's presence. A slave had entered the room, carrying a tray with a steaming metal carafe and four small drinking bowls. He poured out a small amount of hot black liquid into each of the earthenware bowls, offering them to Paya first and then to the guests. When all had taken their drink, he excused himself, leaving the carafe.

H'chak-di sniffed hers cautiously, and Escthta did as well, although he knew what it was. No mere liquor, it was c'ntha, an elixir made of steeped leaves and an alcohol. It was a spicy mixture, but the warmth filled the gut with comfort. Some drinkers brewed a mild hallucinogenic variety, but he smelled none of the telltale bite the hallucinogenic herbs imparted. It was an interesting choice for Paya, but it meant that she herself was intent on being comfortable.

A polite chattering from the dais signaled that Paya was ready to speak. "H'chak-di," Paya began, "you have been brought here under false pretenses."

Escthta was stunned silent. He was ordered to obtain a human female by Thtarok, who would have come by his orders from the Council and Paya. If this set of suppositions was incorrect, what did they really want with her?

"Three months ago, in the peak of the summer's heat, the Council was held." Paya rolled her wrist, swirling the c'ntha and throwing the spicy smell up into the air. She seemed to be carefully considering her next words.

"Just before the Council's biannual meeting, I was in seclusion to receive Paya's blessing. Paya came upon me, and there were things revealed to me." She took in a lungful of air, holding it and releasing it slowly as she pondered how to relate her experience. "To put it bluntly, Paya has been testing us, and we have been failing her trials."

A sip of the c'ntha. "Paya does not punish us directly. She is a Mother, and part of mothering is allowing your young to make mistakes and learn from them. We have not been learning from the opportunities she has granted us, and we are suffering."

She contemplated the cup and then spoke again. "We must make amends, and set ourselves back on the correct path. Correction will take many years, but as we are a long-lived people, this will not hinder our efforts."

The Matriarch looked at them, at H'chak-di's confusion and Escthta's shock, and Hir'cyn's shuttered expression. "Elder Hir'cyn, you have been doing a lot of research for an Elder." Hir'cyn's expression did not slip, but Escthta felt a small blip of surprise. Hir'cyn had doubtless felt that he was being discreet, but obviously this was not the case. Paya did not wait for a reply, but instead looked at Escthta.

"You both discussed humans the other evening in the baths. How they are different, how they are the same." The Matriarch turned her head to H'chak-di, watching her.

"And we are the same," she continued," to the point of each of us being valuable to the other." Her cryptic words set off a warning in Escthta's brain. Something wasn't right here. He looked at H'chak-di and reached out to her with his mind, only to find a colorful bit of chaos where her normally enclosed mind would be. "Even controlled substances affect us in the same way." H'chak-di smiled a little, a blank smile for a human in the grip of a powerful hallucination that stole their mind.

"You see, Escthta, our biology is so similar that it might be said that one progressed from the other." She was talking evolution, the change of life over time. It had been proven centuries ago by scientists, but such results rarely had an effect on the average yautja.

"But it is not just biology that defines us," the Matriarch continued, bowing her head in acknowledgment of the fact. "No, it is more than that," she murmured, almost to herself. The Matriarch paused, as if debating a piece of information to divulge, and then decided against it. She looked at Hir'cyn, his expression still closely marshaled.

"Indeed, you have suspected it for months, have you not, Elder? That humans and yautja are linked? That we share some of the same traits?" She leaned over the arm of her reclining cushion and her eyes were sharp as she looked at him, baiting him with secrecy.

"Even," she paused for dramatic effect, "the same genetic material?"

xXx

Anise felt her muscles go limp. The drink, it was some sort of liquor; her insides felt like spilling themselves on her lap, but she managed to hold it down. She simply focused on breathing until the feeling passed. Breathing soon became easier, and with it, the world attained a warm glowing fuzziness, like viewing childhood memories through gauze. It was pleasant enough, and she smiled a little at the relief. So what if she was here with these aliens and they were talking about her? So what?

She turned her head to look at her companion, finding that it took a great deal of effort. Her body itself seemed disinterested in moving, and it was only wi that she looked around the room. Her vision seemed to have trouble following her head, so that she overcompensated. The room's curtains cast ghosts in her vision, and she finally just closed her eyes, unwilling to process all the sensory input.

Her mind produced for her lucid dreams; scenes that played on the backs of her eyelids even while she smelled the drink and the incense from the Matriarch's chamber. She saw her mother, sitting in a meadow and making chains of flowers. The French sun shone bright and then her father was there, telling her about plants and how she was named for a flower. There was a smell, that grassy scent, and then the anise near her nose, spicy and green. She reached up to take it from her father, as his large frame blocked out the sunlight for a moment.

"Pierre!" Her mother's voice rang clear, calling him to the house. Jake ran after him, walking in stride. The two men, tall and strong, moved with purpose through the dappled grasses. Anise sat up, looking at the house. There was a man in a uniform there, and then Papa turning him away. There was yelling, and then the wind scattered their words.

xXx

"I have your attention now, do I?" A slave was cleaning up Hir'cyn's drink, dropped as he got to his feet in surprise and outrage. She also eased up from her reclining position, cradling the c'ntha in her lap.

"We know that the universe continually moves toward disorder, but what of life?" She looked at Escthta and Anise again.

"Life creates order out of chaos, prefers systems to randomness. For all science's talk of probabilities and changes in entropy, we depend on not-probability, on structure, to survive, even to exist." She spoke now not as avatar, but as a scholar. Of course, Escthta realized, the Matriarch would have ample access to all the records in the Library, and more. Of course she would be educated. That, he thought, made her even more dangerous.

"Life prefers elegant structures; acid helixes and rings of carbon, symmetrical and electrically neutral. We are made of the same compounds, humans and yautja both. Even though they evolved on a completely different world, humans are much like us. They have two eyes, two ears, two hands, and two feet, just like us. They were born into a world of adversity, like us. They had to out-compete other species, just like us. They have large brains, like us, warm blood, light-based vision, hair. They have skin, not scales," she added, as if it had slipped her mind until now.

"And still, there is one respect with which humans differ from their ancestors and from yautja." She had begun to walk her dais, circling the back of the couch. "Humans reproduce differently." The Matriarch uttered each word, every syllable, clearly enunciating so that no mistake could be made about her words.

Escthta found his voice. "You would not have brought her here just to talk about differences and similarities." He felt a chill curling around his ribcage, the cold grasp of incredulous fear.

The Matriarch finished her c'ntha and handed the bowl off to a slave. "Indeed, Escthta, I did not ask for her assistance in outlining differences and similarities."

"What is she here for, then?" Hir'cyn's voice was curt, almost to the point of being rude.

"Now we arrive at the other part of the story." The Matriarch smiled wanly and then sat again.

"Males do not know this, because it has not been historically necessary for them to know, but…" She clasped her hands and rested her elbows on her knees, leaning forward.

"There is a... situation on the broodworld. Fewer females are coming into season every Council, as I'm sure you've noticed." Escthta paused and then realized that he had noticed the numbers of available females dwindling. Not by enough to notice from year to year, but he distinctly remembered more females when he was first Blooded than he could recall in the most recent years. The Matriarch's eyes were steady, looking into Escthta's, though she kept her mind shut tight to him.

"Even with fewer females coming into heat, more pregnancies are being aborted spontaneously." The words held little meaning for the males, but Escthta felt H'chak-di's mind move away from its effervescence and back into reality.

"They are usually stillborn or deformed, so it is… good that they are not going to term." Her voice deepened with sorrow, and Escthta realized that she felt the loss of the sucklings as keenly as she would were they her own offspring.

"But even the healthy are falling from the womb. Once the female no longer carries a child, she should come back into estrus." The Matriarch shook her head. "But they are not, not until the next Council. And even then, some remain frigid."

Paya crisped her hands together and then straightened. "Many sucklings are, of course, carried to term, and are born healthy, strong children. But they're mostly males. Fewer than 1 in 25 successful deliveries is a female." She looked at the two males and then at H'chak-di before continuing. "The breeding population is not being replaced." Her words were strained; these were her people, her children that she talked about as scientific quantifications.

Escthta realized that was probably the only way she could handle speaking about it, was to distance herself from the awful truth with jargon. He saw a flash of her thoughtpath, or she allowed him a glimpse. It was strewn with the bodies of dead children, babies, fetuses, birthing mothers, knee-deep in sorrow and regret. He met her eyes, feeling again the sorrow of another over her loss, and he began to wonder if sorrow was a female complaint.

The Matriarch chuckled softly. She read his musings with her practiced mind. "It is not a solely female complaint, Escthta. Females simply have much more to lose."

Hir'cyn spoke up, breaking the long pause that followed. "Where does the human enter into all of this?"

The Matriarch nodded, looking at the recovering human seated on the cushions in front of her. "Humans do not have season. They never come into heat, they never move into estrus. Humans are always ready to breed. They keep their losses low and their number high. When a yautja female loses a child, she must wait for the next council to breed. A human female can breed again within six weeks, without weaning the first child."

The Matriarch stepped off the dais, seating herself on the same level as Anise, but still towering over her. The headdress only made her appear taller, and her being so close unnerved Escthta, but H'chak-di met her head on, her eyes strangely clear.

"With H'chak-di's permission, we will study the continuous ovulation of humans. Human reproductive tactics will be explored. Brain and body chemistry will be sampled and similar compounds will be synthesized for use in our females."

Paya turned her head to look at Hir'cyn. "The yautja will become continuous ovulators as well. Our worlds, our society will change. We will integrate and advance ourselves even further."

Hir'cyn snorted in disbelief. "That goes against everything we know in science. You can't affect individuals with chemical changes and expect them to get passed on to offspring. That's ludicrous."

Paya got to her feet and regarded Hir'cyn with a measure of wisdom and sadness, her long arms resting at her sides. "Our race has outlived many civilizations we have discovered, outlived species we have Hunted. But we have no future if we do nothing. We are reaching the end of our era. We are dying, Elder."

xXx

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a short chapter, but there is enough information here to make up for it. It is one of the dreaded information bombs, and I think I have done a better job of presenting it. This also reveals the major driving force of the yautja Matriarch, which I have been playing close to my chest.

The title of this chapter is taken from a track on the Chrono Cross Original Soundtrack; People Seized with Life is the song played when the Great Plot Machinery of the Game becomes visible and I found it a very fitting melody for the Matriarch's confessions. If you would like to hear the song, email me and I will send you a link to it on my website.