Slow Train to Arcturus

by Eric Flint

  "Which was conspicuous by absence when Howie here was taken into custody. Like the assault, more petty malice, eh, Howard," The judge said archly.

  Howard flushed. Even coming from the sheltered environment of New Eden there was no mistaking that look. "No… uh Ma'am. I did take it away from her. I dropped it in some bushes a little distance away."

  "Why?"

  Howard shrugged. "I didn't want Kretz and me to be attacked again, I suppose."

  "That does seem a fair probability. I must tell you, Captain LaGarda, that I have listened to the recording of your Mayday call." She gave a little snort. "It was apparent even then that these two came from outside the Matriarchal Republic of Diana. Of course we expect them to comply with our rules here, but you hardly helped to explain the law to them by assaulting them. I consider it to be unworthwhile to pursue these charges in a formal court, as extenuating circumstances, mostly caused by you, would have any penalties set at such a level to be not worthwhile. The alien comes from a Matriarchy too, and is deserving of better treatment."

  She stood up. "These charges are dismissed. Out of here all of you." She pointed to Howard. "Except you. We have to sort out your future."

  So a few minutes later, Howard found himself alone with a woman. He tried not to look at her nakedness. Maybe jail would have been a better option. She looked hungrily at him. "You're very big and muscular, aren't you," said the judge.

  "We do a lot of physical work, farming," said Howard. "I don't understand why your men are all so small?"

  "A little genetic engineering after the oh-33 revolt," said the Judge. "History. Some crazy men decided to start a revolution, claiming that they were stronger. So we made sure that future generations would not have the problem again. I suspect that I'll get several petitions to sterilize you."

  Desperate to move the conversation elsewhere-preferably toward getting the two of out of this Gomorrah. "And clothes? I don't wish to offend, but we… I am very uncomfortable without clothes."

  "They're a source of vanity," said the judge, stretching and displaying a complex pattern of flames and leaves painted on her body. "They were banned by our original charter. Besides they're a place to conceal weapons. And, for you men in particular, to hide your intentions."

  Howard decided not to even venture onto the vanity of the body-paint. Or the fact more clothes could only improve some people's physical attractiveness. Instead he tried another tack. "My companion. The alien Kretz," asked Howard. "What are you going to do with him? He needs to get back to his own kind, Ma'am Judge."

  "Ah." She scowled. "He's a problem. As a male he can't just be allowed to wander around. There are a few women with exotic tastes in what they choose to add to their harems. But it would be very awkward for someone to enter into such a contract, as he says that soon he will become female. Anyway, as a male, the disposition of another male is not your problem."

  "But I need to know, Ma'am," persisted Howard. "I promised to look after him."

  "Well, as a male in the Matriarchy of Diana, your promises to another male have no standing. If whichever woman wins the bidding for you wants you to know, then she can make enquiries," said the judge firmly.

  "You are going to sell me into slavery?" said Howard in horror.

  "It's not slavery, dear. Like a child, a man has to belong to somebody," the judge said kindly. "You men can't help yourselves. You're creatures of base and uncontrolled instincts, weaker in mind and body than women. You instinctively turn to women for wiser counsel. It's all that testosterone. It interferes with your thinking. You need a woman to take care of the rational side. It is the natural human pattern, you know. Matriarchal societies predated patriarchal societies, and humankind moved from bestiality to civilization. Then along came patriarchal societies and patriarchal rule, and it was all downhill from there. It led to conflict and psychological trauma, especially for men. Men are much happier when they have women to tell them what to do. To take responsibility for their actions for them and see they don't get into trouble."

  "The Society of Brethren believe that all men are created equal in the eyes of God," said Howard stiffly.

  "My dear young man." She smiled patronizingly at him, her eyes roaming over his body a lot more than was comfortable. "Of course all men are, if not… physically. It's women who have the edge, mentally." She looked at her desk. "Now. I have a number of bids for you. Normally this would be arranged by your mother, but as you've so eloquently pointed out-your mother is not here. It's been agreed that, as in the case of orphans, the court will stand in loco parentis for you. And I must say-" she beamed-"you've attracted some very good bids, in spite of being so big. Some of these are women of power, wealth and influence, with wonderful harems. I'll arrange for the meetings this afternoon, shall I?" she said. She got up from her desk and sat down next to him. "We've got an hour or two to spend together in the meanwhile. I need to be able to give a testimony as your… ability," she said, putting her hand on his inner thigh.

  Howard backed away uneasily. "Uh. Please don't," he said nervously. "We… don't believe in relations before… or," he said hastily, a horrible thought occurring to him, "outside of marriage."

  "I wish that not believing in my relations would make them go away, honey," said the judge throatily.

  "I mean, uh, physical relations. Sex," he said desperately as she advanced on him.

  That stopped her. She put her head on one side. Shook her head in amazement. "You mean you've never… Oh honey, you need me. I can teach you all sorts of things you need to know. Give you the pleasure that only comes with experience." She was advancing again.

  Howard hastily turned his back and pressed against the wooden edge of the box. "No." he said firmly. "I am keeping myself pure for my marriage."

  "You'd better not take that attitude with me," she said sharply. "I can make things very difficult for you, young man."

  "I'm sorry, but no." Howard looked resolutely at the wall, and pressed himself into the security-poor security-of the corner.

  "If that's the way you feel, so be it. You're going to regret this." She walked away back to her desk. She leafed through a pile of papers and pulled one out. "This'll teach you a lesson," she said grimly. She flicked a switch on her desk. "Find Captain Lani LaGarda. Tell her that her bid has been accepted."

  Howard looked at her.

  She smiled with an unpleasant satisfaction at Howard. "You'll have the joy of living with a nonentity with no status, who can't even afford a place in the city, instead of a good catch with age and experience on her side. LaGarda will beat you too. She has a reputation for aggression."

  Miserably, Howard had to believe her about the last part anyway. He'd experienced it firsthand.

  The speaker on the judge's desk crackled. "Have located Captain LaGarda, ma'am. Shall I send her to your chambers?"

  "No. Send her to the clerk of the court, to have her deed of acceptance written up. And send someone to escort this male from my chambers, to his new mistress."

  So it was that Howard found himself marched off to the painted Jezebel who had got him into this situation in the first place. Now he had an extra problem, as well as being indecent and having somehow to find and rescue Kretz, and get on with Kretz's mission. Life out here was anything but pleasant and simple. Even being shot at might be easier to cope with.

  She was waiting in the foyer-a large room with more of the hunting scenes with the naked woman and her bow. And the sheep with branched horns. They must have a lot of these wild mutant sheep here.

  He felt a bit like lamb to the slaughter himself.

  17

  Extract from the Transcript of the Slowtrain funding debate of Lower House, SysGov.

  "Tolerance breeds tolerance. The only thing a tolerant society should not tolerate are things which impact on the lives, liberty and happiness of its citizens, such as, for example, bigots. Personally I think shipping them out of the system is a wonderful idea."

  –

 
; Carmen Albert,

  Representative for Ceres-West

  Kretz found some comfort in a female-dominated society. Mind you, so far he'd seen little or no evidence of it being any more rational. In his world, Miran females were older, and once they'd got over the hormonal riot of changeover, more stable. These females didn't have that advantage.

  The room full of women gave him his first chance to really study human female form. Fascinating convergence! He'd had a talk with Sister Thirsdaughter about child-rearing and had wanted to see human mammary glands. It was a bit that odd they only had two, and they were larger than the Miran ones. That was natural enough as they only had two, he supposed.

  "What are you staring at?" asked the large woman that they'd all had to stand up for. She'd sat herself down behind the desk, and everyone else in the room had sat too.

  "You," answered Kretz. "You're quite different from us, but quite alike. I have not had a chance to examine you without clothing. I am sorry if I am offending some taboo."

  She gave him no reply, but instead asked: "What are you?"

  "We call ourselves Miran. I believe your term for us is 'alien.' "

  There was sudden buzz from the watchers on the seats. "Silence," said the woman firmly. Then she turned to Kretz. "I can see that you aren't human. But what I want to know is whether you are male or female. Looking at you, you could be either or both."

  Something about the way she asked made Kretz suspect that this was a trick question. But he had no real idea what the trick was. All he could do was answer and hope he'd be lucky. "I am, at the moment, male. I should become female in about two of our years time. This is how Miran are. We begin as male and then become female. All animal life on our world that doesn't reproduce by binary fission follows this pattern."

  The woman at the desk made a note on her page. "It's a lesser charge, I suppose. As a male yourself you can't be held responsible for another male. So, where are you from? What are you doing here, in the Matriarchal Republic of Diana?"

  For a brief moment Kretz toyed with trying a lie, for instance that there were several thousand other Miran males armed to the teeth coming to fetch him. He decided to stick to the truth. These aliens were definitely more technologically advanced than Howard's people had been, although there were small signs of breakdown to be seen.

  "I am from the second planet of a sun some 1.8 light-years away. We saw this ship and came to investigate. We mean you no harm. My companions were attacked in the first habitat, by primitives with weapons that flung projectiles at us. Most of my friends were killed. I was separated from my companion. She is now back on our ship. I was hurt, fled down the central cable and reached the habitat of my companion. They are primitive humans, having regressed from technology, or for some reason turned their backs on it. They tried to help me, and sent one of their number with me, as an escort, helper and guide. I could not get back, but there is a lifecraft from our ship some four habitats on. We are trying to reach it."

  He paused. "The human who is with me has saved my life. I apologize if we have broken your taboos. I plead for you to understand. You are an advanced people. He is very primitive."

  The woman at the desk made a note on her pad, then steepled her fingers. "Nonetheless, you broke our laws about clothing. And while I am sympathetic about you trying to reach your mistress, and being separated from her, you were still moving in the wrong direction, without a woman to escort you."

  "We did not know of your law," said Kretz.

  "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," said the woman, firmly, in the manner of one using an accepted truism to clinch an argument.

  That struck Kretz as an excuse itself. After all, what kind of legitimacy did a regime have that did not inform its citizens (or visitors) of the rules it expected them to follow? That surely was its responsibility? The law-setter had failed, not the citizen.

  But there was no point in fighting with her about it. "I have no objection to being without clothes. The clothes that I wore were simply to protect me from space. It is cold and airless out there."

  "I know that," she said dismissively. "You could have taken them off once you were in."

  A thought struck Kretz. "These laws of yours apply to your people? You are humans?"

  The large woman nodded. "In full, alien, to human females. Males are considered as minors under law."

  Kretz nodded back, pleased to found a loophole. "I am not human. Therefore surely I don't fall under your law. My wearing clothes then is no worse than…" What was that animal Howard had found so amusing that he'd thought was another intelligent species called? "A pig wearing clothes."

  The woman frowned slightly. "You're very well informed about the animal-life on old Earth. Very well. It'll do away with a tricky case. I suppose, as you're not human, you belong to those who handle animal tissue."

  She turned to the woman who had escorted him in. "Have him shipped off to Dr. Geriant at the protein vat research unit at the university. Make him her problem, at least until he changes sex."

  Kretz wondered if he'd been cataclysmically stupid. They'd made no attempt to take the cuffs off his wrists and had transported him in the same cage-vehicle, and left him sitting in it for long enough for curious faces to peer from windows.

  Then two people came down with the woman who had brought him here. Howard would have approved. They wore clothing. From head to foot-some sort of overall garb in bright orange. They were both scowling. This looked like trouble. And then the shorter one-the one with the red head filaments peered at Kretz, and stopped scowling.

  "I do believe the silly bitch is right this time! I suppose statistically that was inevitable," she said, sticking her head forward like an attacking tunnelworm. Kretz had to remind himself, pointedly, that exposed teeth were not always a sign of aggression. She could just be smiling. He wasn't that good at alien expressions on these unfamiliar faces yet.

  The red-head-filamented one turned to the woman who had brought him there. "Well, what are you waiting for, woman? Get him out of there. Hurry up."

  "First you insult me, then you argue with me, then you tell me to hurry up," said the woman who had driven the cage, moving with exaggerated slowness.

  "Yes. And if you don't hurry up I'll see that you get transferred to driving sludge. Now move it."

  The driver's pace accelerated dramatically, and Kretz found himself stumbling out. No attempt was made to remove the handcuffs, but the women led him inside the building.

  He was put into an empty room, an empty store, by the looks of it. "I'll be back down and have a look at him properly when I've adjusted the lysine levels in the batch in A17," said the woman, and left Kretz to himself and his fears. There was not much else in the enclosed space to distract him from them. The walls throbbed faintly with machinery-vibration. And no one came. The door was securely locked and there were no windows. Eventually-cold, tired, hungry and thirsty, Kretz lay down on the hard floor and slept.

  He awoke, aware that he was being stared at. It was the woman with the red head-filaments. "Hmm. I suppose I'll have to start with communication. Sign and point," she said. "And organizing food and drink and something for you to sleep on."

  Kretz sat up. "I can speak your language. Please, I am very thirsty."

  "Holy Susan!" the woman blinked. "Naturally that idiot from the court didn't tell me you could talk our language. Let's get you some water."

  She led him to another room, down the passage, gave him a container with water in it. At least his handcuffs were in front of him, unlike Howard's. He wondered what had become of the young man.

  "Now, where are you from?" she asked when he drunk his fill.

  Kretz gave his standard answers, told the same story. The only difference was that she seemed to understand it.

  "So what have you been eating?" she asked.

  Kretz did his humble best to name the foods that Howard and Sister Thirsdaughter had fed him. She took notes on a small pad with a tiny stylus-both taken fro
m the pocket of her orange overall. She stopped him and got descriptions from time to time. When he'd finished, she closed the pad, which was not the "paper" that Howard's people or the court had used but some kind of thin hard substance-probably a computer, Kretz realized.

  "Right, we'll analyze that lot and see what we can come up with on the ones that made you feel sick. In the longer term, you're almost certainly missing some dietary requirements. We'll have to see what we can synthesize. I'll need a tissue sample."

  "Tissue sample?" Kretz repeated.

  "A small piece of your flesh," explained the woman. "To grow you some food that will match your dietary needs. I could do it with other food material from your world but we don't have any. And the one thing that material taken from a species has: it has all the dietary requirements for that species, if not in the right concentrations and format. Looking at your teeth, you're probably omnivores." She scowled. "And if you even offer me that ridiculous cannibalism argument, I'll be tempted to let you starve."

  "I wouldn't think of doing so," he paused. "I presume you mean cell-culture. We do that on shipboard, as well some degree of other food synthesis." He paused again. "Transcomp needs information. What does 'cannibalism' mean, actually?"

  "A word to describe what politicians do," she said.

  "Could you clarify 'politician'?"

  "No," she said, showing her teeth in what could be humor. "I haven't understood them myself. They're a kind of parasite. An animal that looks superficially like us, but has no brain and lives only to breed and devour our food. Now, tell me, why is your fur in constant motion? It looks as if waves are running down it. Or is that just a light-property?"

  "Fur?" Another new term. Transcomp had deduced that it was probably another word for the long and apparently permanent filamentous manes which grew on the face and heads of the aliens.

  She confirmed that. "Hair." She touched her own. "You've got a layer all over."

  "Oh. That is not the same as your hair. It is an extruded cilia to try to help my body thermo-regulate. The motion is a relic of our evolution when it helped to keep us dry."