Patience, that it what it takes, patience. For the next eighty years I learned about herbs, not just herbs on one world but on hundreds of worlds. What I considered to be the huge amount of information Mother had placed in my mind concerning every aspect of womanhood, monthly courses, pains, relief from pains, the skills of the bed chamber, dealing with the pregnant, with child birth, with stitching where necessary, giving the mind surcease from grief, bringing in a woman’s milk, how to enable a babe to suckle, was in fact nothing compared with what I was about to learn. I learnt vastly more under her gentle tutelage. I learnt about the healing of sick bodies, including the breaking of fevers and the setting of bones, and then of sick minds. I learnt to look inward till I could feel and see the tiny speck that was my just fertilised daughter to be. I could tell even small and unformed as she was that she would be like myself and Mother: a being of two natures.

All this time my man’s parts were not so much shrinking as being absorbed ready to be called upon when needed. I had to focus my eyes and my mind on them to be able to see and be aware of them. The mound of my womanhood became more pronounced and visible. Mother said my courses were light due to my pregnancy. My body was changing, but very slowly. I had never been hairy, but such hair as I had became softer, and every few years when I thought to look there was less of it. Mother had no hair on her womanhood, nor under her arms, and her body was completely hairless. Her glorious head of hair and tiny arched eyebrows along with her sweeping lashes were what she had. She said I would look like that eventually.

From time to time my bones ached as they changed, particularly deep in my womanhood. Mother said my changing pelvis was necessary for me to be able to give birth. I lost no height, but Mother is tall too, the same as myself. My shoulders seemed to be narrowing a bit and beginning to slope.

I’d always had a woman’s nipples, and they’d always been sensitive enough to provide me with relief, far much more so than my male parts when I was a child, but now there’s a deep throbbing behind them, and their encircling penumbras that show against the paleness of my chest are expanding. Mother says I’m undergoing what all girls do on their way to becoming women. I can’t stop touching my breasts and my womanhood, not for relief, but in wonder. I asked Mother why it was going to take me longer than most folk lived for to undergo what a girl does in a handful of years. I should have thought of the answer myself. A girl only has to undergo it; she doesn’t have to understand it. It will be likewise with my pregnancy. I’ve been pregnant for so long in order that I can think about it which I have been doing for decades.

I can see that I will be a deep bosomed woman with substantial hips like Mother, and our daughters will start their arrested development together. I asked her whether we would have other children, and was told that is why we have a male nature and it will reassert itself every thousand years or so to enable us to give each other a child. It will take a thousand years to rear our children to the point where they can manage populations on their own. I have so much to learn. I asked Mother if Lord Montsleigh was really my father. She smiled and said she lay with him so there was a reason for her pregnancy that would protect me, for he was a good man and had asked her to marry him. I was about to ask who was my father when she told me she was the first of our kind and she was both mother and father to me and had carried me for hundreds of years before she found a home with My Lord that enabled her to allow me to develop in safety. I was surprised it was not just physical safety she meant. It takes specially educated women to learn the mysteries, and there has to be a large number of them in close proximity to each other to provide that community of female protection all women need to thrive as well as they can. She spent centuries teaching and training hundreds of women in the county I grew up in and the surrounding ones too before there were enough women to educate the others as they passed from birth to womanhood. Mother said there was a minimum number of such women necessary before that way of thinking became accepted as simply the way women viewed things.

I learnt, and as I did my hips widened, my buttocks filled out, my shoulders sloped more and my breasts grew. My hands and my feet became smaller, slimmer and my skin became softer and more sensitive. I’d always had a somewhat androgynous face, but it was now beautiful and feminine just like Mother’s, and my hair had grown to reach below my waist. I could now focus my gaze on anything within me or without, and I could assist the necessary changes to take place. I lost muscle yet gained strength. I’d no idea Mother was so strong.

Directing the dreams of others was easy whether man or woman, and whether two, ten or many thousands at one time. What was not easy to learn was how to throw the net of my mind abroad to find those whose dreams needed direction. That took me centuries to learn, but Mother was a patient teacher, and now I can do it effortlessly.

Eventually Mother said I now knew as much as she and I could do all that she could encompass. She added that there was much learning to do, but that we should learn it together.

Perhaps I should explain why this has all come to be. There is a self destructive element in the make up of all life forms, and it runs particularly strongly in males, and most especially so in human males. Mother realised it as a girl. She was born of two natures, and her male nature was as that of other males: powerful and desirous of bringing all under control. She told me unchecked eventually that would result in the death of all living things, both plant and animal, on a world. She shewed me several such worlds that had been completely used up in that way due to a lack of understanding that all must be kept in balance. The predator to prevent the grazer from turning the land into a desert. The grazer to prevent any particular plant achieving dominance which in the face of blight would lead all to starve, and all in their time to provide the soil which nourishes all with nourishment.

Her female nature was that of other females: nurturing, caring, and as she came to realise, ultimately far more powerful than any male’s capabilities. As she grew up her thoughts became more powerful. She was surprised to realise one day she was more than twice over three score years and ten and still little more than a girl. Her influence on the women about her had grown. Her dual nature had been known to the then long gone woman who delivered her, and though it was occasionally talked of by women none were then alive who had seen her, so it had become a myth that women accepted without belief like unicorns and dragons. Desirous of a child, but not of exposing herself to any, it eventually occurred to her that she could father a child upon herself.

Once pregnant she became aware she would be pregnant for many centuries till her mind had developed sufficiently to allow her to manage and control her pregnancy. Control she said meant influencing every aspect of my being. She not only fathered and bore me she created me in her own likeness for the task that was ahead of both of us. The first part of her task being the rearing of myself.

Males compete, but females cooperate, so to facilitate her aims she created the concept of ‘the mysteries’ that women would learn of the deeper necessities and start to teach their daughters from birth. Only that way could the necessarily bold and venturesome aspects of males be guided and their self destructive natures be channelled into positive directions. She shewed me how she had rejuvenated and repopulated some of the worlds that had been lost long before her birth. That we are referred to as manifestations of ‘The Goddess’ amuses her, but she says it sounds more impressive than being manifestations of ‘The Guardian’ and means her wishes and directions are more speedily implemented.

Eventually we looked like sisters and we each knew what the other knew. For us both it was a new beginning. Mother had never had a companion before, and I had never been a long lived adult woman before. I have no idea how long our pregnancies lasted once the barely discernable specks of our daughters started to develop, but I was aware of every second. Being with child was the ultimate expression of my womanhood, and it filled me with joy. Guiding the development of my daughter was wonderful, and I was glad it took so long. As my belly swelled and my breasts filled my life concentrated on the life I bore, and Mother said it was thus with her too and had been when she bore me.

My body was the perfect size and shape to facilitate the quick, easy and pain free delivery of my daughter, and I was in the perfect physical, mental and emotional condition to assist. Mother delivered my daughter, and as she had told me would be the case I have little memory of events, though I can clearly remember my euphoria when she first took my nipple into her mouth. Three days later Mother gave birth and I delivered her daughter. We examined ourselves and restored our bodies to their pre pregnancy states and focussed our attentions on our babies.

Once our girls had started to develop Mother had insisted we withdrew our attentions from the worlds we had been guiding. She said there would come a day when we could do both, but we were too new to pregnancy to manage both and our pregnancies and daughters were of more significance to the universe than the fate of a few dozen worlds. Once our daughters were weaned, walking and talking we cast our minds abroad again for the first time in many years.

Most worlds were continuing along the path she had set their feet on, but some few had self destructed. Many were diverging from her path, but were salvageable. Saddest of all were the ones that had gone too far. All we could do was watch as habitat and bio destruction turned them into deserts, resource depletion and poisoned oceans took them into famine and anarchy and war finally took them all the way down the path to planetary extinction. The world I had grown up on was one such, but one day a few thousands of years in the future when we have both born numerous daughters and there are enough of us to never have to withdraw our attentions from those we would care for we shall rejuvenate and repopulate Earth.