What's the matter with me? I'm an anthropologist, I'm not supposed to make Judgments iike this. It must be fatigue. She listened to Vaniya saying, "But enough of me and mine, you will learn as you live among us."
She sought for a neutral topic. "Miranda told me that your High Matriarch lies very ill. Is a stranger allowed by custom to inquire about her health?"
Vaniya sighed. "Our beloved Mother and Priestess has fallen into a coma. She is neither recovered nor dead; it is uncertain whether she will even recover consciousness to designate whether I myself, or my colleague and fellow Pro-Matriarch Mahala will assume her ring and robe. This is a doleful state for one who has served the Goddess for more than eighty years; yet I cannot bring myself to regret it, Cendri, for it has brought us the one thing we must have; time."
"I do not understand—"
"Our beloved Mother's last conscious words were to bid me make you welcome to the ruins at We-were-guided, and lodge you with me," Vaniya said, "and even Mahala dares not disobey that command, while our Mother and Priestess still breathes. But when she breathes her last, then—then we cannot know who will assume her ring, and if it is Mahala—if it is Mahala, her plans for We-were-guided do not bear thinking about!" Vaniya frowned, then, with an effort, smiled at Cendri and said, "So you must make haste, my dear Cendri, to explore the ruins and verify that they are, indeed, the ruins of the Builders—which we know, but once this is confirmed by an independent outside scientific study—"
Cendri asked, trying to make her voice level and courteous, "Is the Pro-Matriarch Mahala opposed to the study of the Ruins?"
"You must not trouble yourself with our politics," Vaniya said, and though she smiled, the words were a warning; a keep-off sign, Cendri thought, despite their cordiality.
She said, "Surely you understand, Vaniya, that such an archaeological exploration is a long piece of work; there is no way we could possibly do this in a few days, or months!" Dal had spoken in terms of years! "Archaeology is the most deliberate of sciences; ruins which have stood for millions of years cannot be evaluated in a little while! And if your High Matriarch is likely to die at any time— how long is she likely to live?"
"Our surgeons will not even hazard a guess, although Lohara said she might linger for a season or more; and of course it is possible she will recover her consciousness and speak me her successor, in which case—" she smiled, rather grimly. "I have one of my own household stationed near her bedside, so that if she does so, Mahala could not conceal it!"
Rhu said, "And no doubt the Lady Mahala has likewise stationed one of her Inquirers for a similar purpose?"
"No doubt, sacrilegious bitch," Vaniya said, then, with an effort, added, "But you must not trouble yourself about politics either, Rhu, this is no proper welcome for our honored guests. Miranda, will you sing for us, my child?"
Obediently, Miranda took a small stringed instrument from a case near the window, sat down with it in her lap, and began to sing. Her voice was very pure and clear, evidently well-trained, though not, Cendri judged, of performing quality for public display. She sang several songs, all short, all mournful, in a strange melancholy minor scale. To Cendri's questions, she explained, in a soft, diffident voice, that they were mostly rhythmic songs of work-women; songs of the looms, of the herdwomen, songs of the sea and the nets, songs for weaving cloth and spinning it. She added, to Vaniya, "Will you not have Rhu sing for our guests?"
Rhu protested to Vaniya in an undertone, but she said briskly, "Don't be shy!"
"I would prefer to listen to the Lady's singing," he said, not looking at Miranda.
"Miranda should not tire herself now."
"My lyrik is in my room—"
"Use mine," Miranda said, timidly, and Rhu glanced at Vaniya for permission, then took it, protesting faintly, "If I re-set the strings for my voice, the Lady will have the trouble of re-tuning them afterward for herself—"
"I don't mind," Miranda said, not looking at him, "Please sing, Rhu."
"As the Lady and the honored guests wish." With courteous resignation, Rhu began to tune the instrument he had called a lyrik, bending his head close to the strings. Cendri watched him beneath lowered eyelids—she suspected that staring at him was at least a social error and perhaps more. Rhu was, she suspected, four or five years younger than herself and Dal; thin and dark, his hair elaborately curled and waved. He wore a tunic of metallic blue fiber which left his tanned shoulders bare; a tight belt of silver plates circled his narrow waist, and his long slim legs were bare, except for silvered sandals ornamented with pearls. He had a narrow, curly beard and small moustaches, and his thin face looked sad. He asked Vaniya, "What shall I sing?"
"Whatever you like, my dear," she said indulgently, "A hunting song, please, men always like them."
Nodding, he began a long ballad which, as nearly as Cendri could make out, celebrated the pleasures of the chase, of the spear, of carrying the slain beasts home in triumph. Cendri had no interest in the subject, though she tucked away the random knowledge that while these women lived in cities, much of their life still entered upon the agricultural cycles of the year.
In spite of the boring recital of the pleasures of the hunt, she had to delight in the voice, a superbly trained baritone which Cendri judged would have won him fame as a concert singer on virtually any civilized world. Rich, full and golden, it swelled to fill the room without being loud, or died to a whisper which was, nevertheless, audible to the furthest corner; women stopped talking to listen, and when one of the children prattled something, its mother quickly hushed it.
A voice like this, tucked away on Isis?
When the song ended, she spoke a few words of compliment to Rhu, who smiled with shy pleasure. "The Scholar Dame is kind, but I wish she could have heard my voice before it was spoilt by changing; as a child I had truly a fine soprano."
Vaniya said regretfully, "Yes, Rhu has splendid technique, but of course it is wasted on a man's roughened voice."
Dal said directly to the Companion, "If you ever get tired of living on this world, a voice like that would make your fortune anywhere inside the Unity. Believe me."
He blushed like a boy. "The honored guest is kind; how may I thank him?"
"Sing something else," Dal said, and Rhu glanced at Vaniya for permission, then bent his head close to the harp, and sang, in a low voice;
I am only a man
And I have no part in Paradise;
Twice have I tasted bliss
And twice have I been driven forth;
Once when I left my mother's womb
And again when I was driven forth
From my mother's house.
The golden baritone dropped to a mournful croon, his hands swept the strings with an anguished cadence;
When I am done with life
Will the Goddess take me, perhaps,
To her loving breasts?
Cendri discovered that she was blinking away tears; not only at the beauty of the voice, but at the agonized sadness of the song. Dal, too, looked visibly shaken.
"Men's songs are so sentimental," said Vaniya lightly, "but that one always comes near to making me cry. Men enjoy self-pity so much, don't they?" As Rhu put the harp in the case and returned it to Miranda, she filled a cup with wine and held it indulgently to Rhu's lips. "Here, my dear. Rhu has given us so much pleasure, I think he deserves a treat."
Suddenly Cendri was filled with an overwhelming revulsion. In spite of Vaniya's kindness, despite the pleasant atmosphere and the excellence of food and wine, she found it hard to conceal her sense of disgust and shock. She had read about this phenomenon in her textbook, one of the manifestations of culture shock; she supposed it was due to fatigue.
Vaniya looked sharply at her.
"You are weary, Cendri. The journey must have been long and fatiguing."
"Yes," Cendri admitted.
"Then you must go and rest—"
"But before we leave you, Vaniya, may we ask if we may begin our w
ork at once in the Ruins—?"
Vaniya sighed regretfully, and said, "Alas, I still have much to do with the disasters which the earthquake left behind; I shall have no leisure for some time to take you there; perhaps in a few days I can arrange to take you, and then, when you have been properly introduced to this—which is a very sacred place to us—you will be free to work there as you choose."
Cendri, listening carefully to the words of the Pro-Matriarch, realized; in spite of their solicitous courtesy, she had just been warned not to try and go there on her own. Why not? She told herself that it was natural enough, the ruins which Vaniya called We-were-guided were one of their greatest shrines or sacred places; but the argument did not quite convince her.
Maybe it isn't the Pro-Matriarch Mahala who is opposed to the exploration of the Ruins. Maybe it's Vaniya herself! Twice, now, they've side-stepped a direct answer on that!
She made, resignedly, the only possible answer, that they awaited a time of the Pro-Matriarch's convenience. As they climbed to their room, she was anticipating without enthusiasm Dai's probable comments on that, and on the society as they had seen it tonight; but Dal was silent and thoughtful. Finally he said, when they were safely shut into their room, "Did you ever hear a voice like Rhu's?"
"Not since the Orpheus Musicians visited University; they had a baritone almost as good."
"And Vaniya keeps him for a pet and snubs him—a talent like that! I'd like to kidnap him and smuggle him off to University! Might cause a diplomatic crisis, though. There must be some kind of penalty for alienating the affections of the Pro-Matriarch's Companion. And speaking of Companions—" he put his arm around Cendri's waist.
"If you're very nice, I may let you sleep in the Amusement Corner with me."
Cendri laughed, putting her arms up around his neck. "Don't you be arrogant with me, love, on this world I could have you put out at night like a puppy dog!" But she let him scoop her up in his arms and carry her to the padded alcove. It was considerably more comfortable than that high, narrow bed!
"This seems to be my only proper function on this world," Dal murmured against her lips, "I might as well take advantage of it!"
"Don't be ridiculous, darling," she whispered, drawing him down to her, "We'll call it a second honeymoon."
Dal had made a joke of it. And yet there was a trace of bitterness behind the words which told Cendri that in Dai's heart it was very far from being a joke.
Late in the night, Cendri rose and went to the window. She
looked down on the ruins of the ancient site which the Pro-
Matriarch had called We-were-guided. Dal slept, satiated and, she
hoped, a little comforted and pacified. How would she keep him
from going mad with frustration here? When she herself would be
doing his proper work, and he must pose as her assistant and
subordinate___ she had been foolish ever to accept this deception!
Dal had insisted. He had said it was enough for any Scholar simply to have the privilege of working on the Builder ruins, and in any case he would have the credit for the work when they were back on University. Yet she quailed at the thought of seeing his pride wounded, day after day, in a society like this where he was reduced to the status of a housepet like Rhu, a boy kept for a woman's pleasure! She marvelled at Vaniya—the woman was many times a grandmother, and her Companion young enough to be her grandson! Well, in the Unity it was not unknown for some rich woman to dote on a handsome and talented youth, and to keep him as a sort of pet. But there it was always done with a little more respect for the young man's pride, and the woman usually felt some shame about it. Cendri told herself that her revulsion was just a cultural prejudice. She turned her eyes to the moon-flooded landscape, which covered the low slopes behind the city with such brilliance that shapes and outlines were clearly perceptible. At the center of the ruins of We-were-guided, surrounded by them, and at their very center—enshrined, the thought came without volition—lay a familiar outline, dwarfed by distance; one of the old models of starship.
Was this the very ship in which the women of Isis/Cinderella had come to their world?
The original Matriarchate—Cendri remembered—had been founded a few hundred years before, by a group of historians who held a mad theory that the original human stock had come from a world with a primitive matriarchal culture, and that decay in human cultures had set in when the worship of a Mother Goddess, a planetary Earth-mother, had been overthrown and superseded by climatic changes which convinced the primitive society that the worship of sun and rain gods, regulating the weather, was more important than the Goddess cults.
So the Matriarchate is founded, then, in religious fanaticism and it will never be understood except by understanding its religious beginnings....
The Matriarchate had recruited women from all over the Unity and settled on a planet which they renamed Persephone, For a few generations they had remained part of the Unity, and Cendri had read of a few scientists who had been hired to work there and their research lavishly funded—Persephone had been a rich planet then— to re-discover what the Matriarchate believed, or professed to believe, was the original form of humanity, female in form, and without the y-chromosome creating maleness.
Some interesting research had been done, but the partheno-genetic females created by this research had proved sterile after the second generation, and the Matriarchs had resigned themselves to retaining some males in their society as breeding stock.
About that time they had founded their daughter colony of Labrys; after the bureaucratic blunder which wiped out almost eighty per cent of the Labrys population, they had become paranoid, and withdrawn from the Unity—that was one version; the other was that the Unity had ejected them for being in violation of the First Principle, that all worlds participating in the Unity should grant equality to all citizens. Persephone had insisted on its right to determine who should be defined as a citizen. And after that, there had been almost nothing heard of them. The remnants of the Labrys colony were repatriated, embittered. Then, less than fifty years ago, Persephone, undergoing climatic changes, had taken over, on normal Unity homestead laws, an uninhabited pelagic planet, almost without arable land, known as Cinderella. As non-members of the Unity, they had had to pay an enormous surcharge for the privilege. They had promptly re-named it Isis, and dropped almost out of contact.
During the early stages of the negotiations about the Builder ruins, Cendri had heard the Dame di Velo raging about that. Even then—the Dame di Velo had been a young woman when Cinderella was resettled as Isis—she had known about the ancient ruins on Cinderella and had convinced herself they were Builder ruins. The Dame herself had tried to raise a fund to homestead Cinderella by archaeologists instead, and keep it in perpetuity for a mine of information about the supposed Builders. But the colony of Persephone had outbid them.
"A tragedy," the Dame di Velo had called it, "the greatest tragedy of my professional life; that a world which was a mine, a veritable mine of archaeological information, should be turned over to a crackpot culture, for them to spin and weave and fish and ignore the most famous artifact in the known Galaxy!"
But scientific foundations traditionally found it hard to raise money, and the Unity's basic stipulations stated that no viable colony should be denied the right to homestead any arable planet. So the Matriarchate settled on Cinderella/Isis, and closed their doors to the Unity. They traded, Cendri had read, in pearls and nacre from their oceans, in magnesium, arsenic, selenium and gold. Their jewelry was famous to the luxury trade everywhere. They imported platinum and titanium, and certain fluoride compounds—Cendri was not sure whether it was for their plastics industry or for their teeth—and a few organic chemicals. But until the negotiations which culminated in the invitation to the Scholar Dame di Velo to come here, no citizen from the Unity had set foot on Isis.
Cendri had grown cramped and cold, standing by the window, and was about to return to the com
fortable nest of cushions where Dal still lay curled up, when she saw a light below.
The city of Ariadne was dark at night. Cendri had expected that; most of what was usually called "night life" was oriented to solitary males from the spaceport districts, and based mostly on selling them sex and entertainment. Remotely she wondered what the solitary males on this world did for entertainment. There seemed to be nothing akin to marriage as it was known on Cendri's world and Dai's. Cendri had become accustomed to extreme differences of sexual customs from world to world. On University, for instance, her best friend had come from a world where group marriage was the norm and the worst perversion imaginable was to make love in groups of fewer than four. And considering the number of children she had seen in the dining room tonight, there must be some allowances for sexual contact.
But whatever they did at night on Isis, they did it silently and in the dark, without need of bright lights. She had seen dim lights on the upper stories of the few buildings that had them, but otherwise all was dark; so the row of lights, slow, winding, bobbing quietly along at a steady pace, drew her eyes and her attention. She had thought it the torch of some kind of night watchman—if night watchmen were men here—could any world, even a matriarchy, be free of crime? But there were too many of the small lights for that. She drew back the curtain a little and leaned out the window. It was a torchlight procession, winding slowly through the gardens behind the Pro-matriarch's house and down along the shore.
Well, she had wondered what they did at night in Ariadne to amuse themselves. Now she had seen something, though of course she had no idea what it meant. A moonlight picnic? There were two moons, large and beautiful, in the sky. A skinny-dipping party? A religious festival? They might be going out to hunt, fish, swim, eat, copulate, or pick mushrooms which only flowered by moonlight, as they did on Cendri's own home world at one season. Near the head of the procession she could make out a tall, broad-shouldered figure which might very well have been the Pro-Matriarch herself.
Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 Page 7