James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 03

by Bodicea

  “How so?”

  “They glorify war, conquest, revolution, individual achievement. Men are focused on changing history, on making it. Women focus on continuity, on the nurturing environment for families. Women have a communal spirit.”

  “Some of the greatest leaders of my planet were women,” Lear said.

  “All of the great leaders of this planet were women,” Ciel answered quickly, almost like a retort. “So, you would trust a man to do anything a woman could do?”

  “Generally, with some exceptions, accounting for anatomical differences and personal preferences.”

  “Men participate equally with women in your culture?”

  “The goal of my culture is that every individual should contribute to the utmost of his or her ability. I have two sons. One of them wishes to be a pilot, and I discourage him from it.

  Not because it is a bad choice, but because it is not a promising career. My other son is too young to have made up his mind yet, but he will also choose …”

  “Two sons?” Ciel said. “How extraordinary.”

  “My next child will be a daughter,” Ciel told them. “I would like to think she would aspire to the command grades as I do. Perhaps, one day, she will even command our ship.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Not at the present time, but I have decided to have a female child.”

  “Your technology permits you to make that selection.”

  “No technology is involved, I simply will myself to have a female. Do you not have this capacity?”

  “Indeed we do not,” Ciel and the other woman were staring at her now, as though she were an alien creature. “Because of the virus, almost all children are born female any way.”

  “So, you chose to have sons,” the other woman said. “Why?”

  “At the time, I was very involved with the Odyssey Project, the Project that brought me to your world. I knew my husband would handle the raising of the children, and I thought it more appropriate that he raise boys.”

  “You let a man raise your children?”

  “It was the optimal arrangement.”

  “When you say ‘husband,’ you refer to a single consort, belonging only to you.”

  “Aye,” Lear answered.

  “So, your society maintains the monogamous marriage model,” said Ciel.

  “Most people on my planet’s are Iestans, and Vesta taught…”

  “Vesta,” the other two women said in unison and made the sign of the circle.

  Sensing a breakthrough, a common point of reference, Lear siezed on it. “You know of Vesta?”

  “Vesta, the Daughter Goddess, Vesta, the Guide, Vesta the Life-Giver,” Ciel repeated.

  “Indeed, she is the Prophet of our world. She appeared to us … to many of us … shortly after the Bloodening, told us not to despair. She said our world was in her care.” Lear quietly pulled out the golden perfect circle that was Vesta’s symbol. She had worn the amulet on a chain around her neck since she was thirteen.

  Cield beheld it, and took it in her hand. “Amazing, after all these millennia, that you should come here, and also walk in the path of the Daughter.”

  “I have always walked on the Daughter’s path,” Lear assured them, she added a quote from Between the Darkness and the Light. “’The path of truth is open to all who seek it, and the guidance of the Daughter is availed to all who ask in Her Name.’”

  “’Wherever you pass along the path, acknowledgement of the Daughter affirms the truth of your passage,’” Ciel finished. “It is as though the Goddess’s blessing were upon our meeting,”

  “I do hope so,” Lear said. “I think it’s… it’s very significant that, despite our centuries of isolation, we have kept our faith.”

  “How did you learn of Vesta?” Ciel asked.

  “Mostly from my mother, grandmother, and aunts. I also spent two years at an Iestan school, as is customary in my family.”

  “When I was a young girl, I was taught in the wisdom of Vesta, raised in it, by my commune-family,” Ciel said wistfully. She leaned into Lear as though conspiratorially. “That’s changed in the last two generations. Some on our world have come to believe that expressions of Vesta are somewhat … vulgar.”

  Ciel drew back, paused, as though she had said too much. “But that you should cross so much space and after so many centuries retain the spirit of the Goddess.” She turned to the other woman, words were failing her.

  “I think, if you give us a chance, you will find we have much more in common than you realize,” Lear told her. “Our history may have worked out differently, but we are your sisters.”

  Ciel nodded. Although she said nothing more, there was a sea-change in her demeanor.

  Lear sensed that she had gained an ally at last.

  After a few wrong turns in the confusing warren of service tunnels beneath the Moonbase, Keeler and Alkema reached the Hangar Bay. Team three had already set lights on the walls and hovering near the ceiling. Keeler adjusted his facemask to the new brightness.

  The greater part of the bay was empty, dusty, and old. There were pipes and conduits on the walls, and many old tool and equipment racks, now empty and abandoned. Near the front was a kind of lift that reached from the floor of the chamber up to the landing pad above.

  No one had to point out to him what they had found. Parked just off the side of the landing pad, where it would have descended into the ground, was a spaceship.

  The ship was elliptical in shape, a bit more than half the size of an Aves. Its skin was smooth as an eggshell, thin around the perimeter then blended in toward the main body. It appeared to gleam in the midst of the dark landing bay beyond the light that was available to reflect. The middle section made an egg-shaped bulge, top and bottom. It rested on an articulated tripod of landing legs.

  Keeler moved slowly around it. There was no obvious hatchway, not even a seam showed in the surface of the craft. Nor, could he spot anything like thrusters, viewports, or weapons of any kind.

  “There’s no energy signature,” the Leader of Team Three told him. “Our scans read it as a solid body all the way through.

  “Your scans are wrong,” Keeler told them. “This is a ship, a ship from the Colonial Era.”

  “Do you recognize the design?” someone asked.

  Keeler shook his head. “Never seen anything like it. Some of the Commonwealth ships were shaped like giant disks, but something this small… it must be a shuttlecraft, perhaps an escape pod.”

  “Or a probe,” Alkema suggested.

  “Looks a bit like a personal transport pod,” said someone in Team Three.

  “It does,” Keeler agreed.

  “It looks too small for interstellar travel,” said someone else. “Unless it’s some kind of stasis pod.”

  “How can we be sure its Commonwealth and not, something local, or alien?” one of the crew asked.

  In answer, Keeler waved his hand over the rear quarter of the ship. In response, a very weak and faded logo appeared, the Crest of the Commonwealth. It remained for a little time, then vanished.

  “It was a Commonwealth Ship, all right. Civilian, as opposed to military. The crest would have contained arrows and swords if it had been a military ship. Someone brought this ship here, and then left it behind.”

  “What are you?” Keeler asked of the ship, his voice quaking. He reached out toward it, but stopped short of actually touching it. It didn’t matter what it was. It was an artifact of the Commonwealth, and it had been waiting here for thousands of years to discovered. He turned to the crew. “My friends, whatever else happens from here, the entire Mission to Esmerelda has just been made worthwhile.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Honey World!” Eddie Roebuck exulted at the top of his lungs. “World of Women. Twenty woman for every man!” With that, he jumped on the bar and pounded on his chest like an ape in heat.

  Eliza Jane Change stared up at him from the other side of the bar. “I don’t
think you really appreciate…”

  “Twenty Woman for every man!”

  “This planet is not …”

  “Twenty-to-one. Twenty One! I’m outnumbered, but no sweat …” Eddie sang. “I might just have to call up my notorious alter-ego, ‘Professor Night.’”

  “Professor Night?”

  “’Za, Professor Night, Interplanetary Man of Mystery! Babe Magnet from the Rings of Gigantor to the Deuterium Clouds of Archon.”

  Eliza Jane Change raised an eyebrow. “Deuterium Clouds?” Eddie was singing, “His name is Professor Night/But you can say his name is/Professor Night/It’s the name you want to touch/But you must not touch/Because his name is Professor Night/And you must have no fear/Because his name can be said/ By anyone …” It was times like this when Eliza Jane wondered whether it would be worth developing social skills if only to avoid spending so much of her time with someone whose development had been not just arrested, but tried, convicted, and sent to a juvenile rehabilitation complex.

  “You do realize the reason there are so few men is because a disease killed off most of them.”

  “What, the White Plague? That burned out thousands of years ago. We’re immune to it.” He raised a glass of ale and yelled to everyone in the bar. “To immunity!”

  “To Immunity!” no one answered. Eliza Change sighed and moved away from him toward a private booth, trying to focus her attention to the large data pad she had brought down with her. Its face was covered with frighteningly complex numbers and equations, as though an insane mathematician had begun speaking in tongues and someone had transcribed his rantings. These were the Vanguard Equations, one of the primary tools for hyperspatial navigation. Eliza Change was studying the parallax component of the stellar motion formula. She thought she might find away to improve its accuracy.

  Eddie climbed down from the bar and left the small robot, Puck, in charge of the glasses and drinks. He sat down on the back of the seat of her booth. “Hey! Is it true if you’re a man on the planet, all you do is watch sports all day and wait until a woman wants to nail you?” Change did not look up from her pad. “I think that is what Specialist American’s report said. Not much of a life, is it?”

  Eddie dismissed her with a snort. “It’s better than living a giant space-faring shopping mall and almost getting wasted by killer mutant space nasties. What do you want from life, anyway?”

  “What does life want from you?” a voice inside her asked. She kept it to herself.

  Eddie looked at her data pad and saw that it obviously did not apply to him. “I think an assol like me could thrive in a good way on that planet. I visualize myself being in prime demand among those bodacious Bodacian females.”

  “I can almost guarantee they have never seen anyone like you, Eddie.”

  “Truth.”

  Her datapad chirped at her. “Incoming message for Lt. Navigator Eliza Jane Change.”

  “Receive.”

  It was a text message from Executive Commander Lear, requesting confirmation that she was uninterested in attending the reception on Bodicéa, then encouraging her to come, and finally reminding her that she would be in command of Pegasus during the absence of Keeler, Miller, and Lear, with sub-references to the appropriate command protocols. The message seemed to disappoint her.

  “Are you going to go?”

  “No.”

  “Beauty! Can I go instead?” Eddie said.

  “I don’t think so,” she closed the message and turned to him. “Have you heard from Matthew? He hasn’t sent me a message since yesterday.”

  Eddie laughed. “Beauty, like he would send a message to me. I’m not the one he spends tortured nights dreaming about.” He hesitated. “On the other hand…” Eliza put up her hand. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Eddie slid down in the booth next to her. “Must be tough. I don’t know how I could without once a day hearing him say, ‘I’m still on the ship. Nothing is happening. Everything is exactly the way it was yesterday. I miss you. See you later.’”

  “Matthew’s the kind of guy who sends a message even if he doesn’t have anything to say.

  It’s not like him to miss a transmission. Maybe something happened.” Eddie got what passed for a thoughtful expression on his face. “Let me ask you something, Beauty. Have you sent a response to any of Flyboy’s boredom reports?” They both knew the answer to this was negative.

  “Let me ask you this. Any women on his ship?”

  “One… some Marine …”

  “Married Marine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A Marine, what are they like? Organized? Efficient? Devoted to Duty?”

  “What’s your point?” As if she didn’t already know.

  “I’m just saying, maybe they got to talking and … he just forgot to send you a message today. That’s all. Man gets tired of talking to himself.” Eliza wanted to protest. Matthew was as loyal as a Carpentarian Spaniel. She knew, though, that Eddie would point out that she had never given him anything to be loyal to. She turned herself away from it, and tried to whip some sense into the Vanguard Equations.

  Sensing, finally, the termination of the conversation, Eddie climbed to the top of the bar and announced at the top of his voice. “Attention crew! For the duration of our stay at the fair planet Bodacious, every night is ladies’ night at Fast Eddie’s InterStellar Slam ‘n’ Jam.” It would have been a more effective announcement if the bar had been open.

  Zilla swooped down over the southern sea of Bodicéa, making a descent even sharper, defined into an even narrower corridor than Basil had followed on its northern trek a few days earlier.

  In the main cabin, the commander of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus was struggling into his dress uniform. Less than an hour before, he had received a message from Executive Commander Lear. His presence had been requested by the Inner Circle at some tropical island that was described as a “Diplomatic Retreat.” Two days of negotiation and she had given him one hour’s notice. His hair was still wet from the shower.

  “Do I still stink of sulfur,” he asked.

  David Alkema hesitated. Delivering bad news was not the most effective part of his repertoire. “I think so, commander. It could be residue from the environmental suits.” The commander sighed. “Right, right, you’re dambed right.” Alkema reached into his landing kit and pulled out a small plastic device, shaped to fit into the palm of the hand, with a metallic nozzle at the edge. “Use this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Electro-static ionizer. It will ionize any sulfuric molecules on your person and strip them away.”

  “Do you always carry one of these with you?”

  “When I think I’ll need one. It works on lint, too.”

  Keeler activated the device and waved it around his cuffs. “You know, if General Hazzaz had had a man like you by his side in the Sixth Crusade, he could have conquered the known universe.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You realize that would have meant a thousand years of slavery for most of the human race.”

  “I’m relieved you’ve never expressed a similar ambition, sir.” Alkema checked his reflection. Sailor beware, he thought. “A planet of women, this should be very interesting.”

  “If by interesting you mean, scary beyond human imagining, I couldn’t agree more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Keeler sighed. Alkema was very clever, very quick, and very sharp-witted, and as he matured, wisdom would either temper those qualities and make him a leader among souls, or would render him pedestrian, slow, and dull, consigning him to mediocrity. Keeler only wished they had met at University, but Alkema had been in his first year at some second-tier regional college when the Odyssey Project had chosen him. Keeler sat down heavily on his landing couch and began lacing up his favorite pair of dress boots.

  “Nature seeks balance,” he explained. “Balance is maintained by an alternation of tension and harmony in all things. Men and women a
re fundamentally different from one another, each possessing fundamental strengths and fundamental weaknesses. Of course, there is a great deal of difference among individuals. A man picked at random may be more like a woman in some aspects than a given woman, or vice versa. Over the broad brush of society, however, these differences still define us as men or women. From this tension, and from the effort put forth to harmonize and control this tension, emerges the shape of our culture.”

  “However, take away one side of the equation, one set of checks and balances, and the culture will swing entirely the other way. This is not a situation God through nature intended, not a situation contemplated by the Grand Design. Men and women were meant to cooperate, to share equally the responsibility. Our yin and their yang complement each other. When you were a boy, I am willing to bet your mother was always telling you things like ‘don’t climb on that bell-tower, you’ll fall off and break your arm,’ or, ‘Don’t play with the Thean battle-staff, it’s not a toy, you’ll put your eye out and possibly knock the planet off its axis.’ Whereas your father, he probably encouraged you to take risks, let you stay out late, gave you your first drink of moonshine when you were nine, things like that.”

  “Except for the bell-tower, the battle-staff, and the Moonshine, that’s pretty much true.”

  “And you probably did hurt yourself a few times, and your momma cried out, ‘Oh, my baby, my poor little baby,’ and your father said, ‘Here, put some Moonshine on it, it’ll be fine.’

  In the end, they created you, a well-balanced individual.”

  “But what if all you had growing up was one parent, or two parents with identical agendas? Suppose you were never allowed to get hurt, never allowed to do anything that could remotely possibly result in harm. You would have grown up cowardly, tentative… you would never take a chance on anything. On the other hand, if you grew up without someone to hold you back from your more reckless impulses, you would have developed gangrene in your broken arm and had it replaced with cloned tissue and cybernetics. It would look the same as the previous arm, but you would know.”