Here's hoping she gets it, went through him. So many just can't grasp the concept. Plain bewildered, or lost in superstitious terror. But Azzu-ena was extremely bright, and practical, to boot. Her doctor-father had had no sons, and brought his daughter up to his trade, which was unusual but not completely outlandish in Babylon. These archaic-Semitic peoples weren't what you'd call feminists by a long shot, but they weren't as pathological about it as many of their descendants would… would have, in the original history… become.

Well, there's the Assyrians, he reminded himself. They shut women up in purdah like Afghans in the twentieth. But they're just nasty in every conceivable way.

Of course, asu was not a very prestigious occupation among the Babylonians regardless of whether the doctor was a man or a woman. Medicine and surgery were just treating symptoms, to their way of thinking; the ashipu, the sorcerer/witch doctor, had the real power.

As one of the physicians on call for the King's women, Azzu-ena had been given the run of the Palace after her father died, including its huge library of clay tablets; she had talked much with foreigners, here where merchants and embassies from all the known world sought the court of the King; otherwise, she had been left mostly to herself and her thoughts.

"I see," she said at last. "Everything you have shown and told me in this past year has been true, so this must be also. I knew when I saw you cut the child from the womb-and yet the mother lived!-that your arts must be beyond ours…"

The doctor winced a little. Someone as intelligent as Azzu-ena would think about the implications of the Event: