Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19

by The Ruins of Isis (v2. 1)

  Vaniya glanced at Rhu, and said, "No, I think not, he is not really strong enough for the journey. He would burden you. You didn't really want to go, did you, Rhu?"

  Rhu lowered his eyes to his plate and murmured, "I am at your command, Vaniya."

  "Then I think not," said Vaniya, "But we have an honored guest of the City of Ariadne at our table. Perhaps, Scholar Dame, your Companion would enjoy the diversion of a hunt after being cooped up in the city like this since his arrival?"

  Dai's glance at Cendri said plainly, a command, "Get me out of this.'" The first day in the Ruins—and some point of protocol might send him off on a Hunt? She could see that in his face as clearly as if she were reading his mind.

  She said coolly, not looking at the man, "I am sorry to refuse, but I thought it had been made clear that my Companion is my trained assistant. I cannot by any means dispense with its presence as we are beginning our work."

  Dal looked grim. Well he might, Cendri thought, when it was taken so completely for granted that Cendri had the right to give him orders like this. She tried to catch his eye, give him a reassuring smile—after all, when all was said and done they had to make a joke of it—but his eyes were resolutely averted.

  Misunderstanding—fortunately—the frown on his face, Vaniya said cheerfully to Cendri, "I hate saying no to men, don't you? They sulk so. Perhaps another time a hunt can be organized especially for your Companion, when the land is safer."

  The man bowed and withdrew. Cendri saw him gesture surreptitiously, unobserved by Vaniya, who was applying herself heartily to her breakfast. After a moment she saw Rhu return the gesture, below the rim of the table. His lips moved; Cendri could not hear what he said—in fact, she thought, he had probably not spoken aloud—but she was perfectly sure that what he said was, "We were not born in chains."

  The light was growing, and the sun clear of the horizon. Vaniya firmly stamped one or two more papers and handed them to her private secretary, a childlike young woman, fair-haired, and well advanced in pregnancy. "We have heard nothing of the promised students from the Women's College. At what hour did they commit themselves to be here, Calissa?"

  Calissa said, "Laurina, who teaches history at the college, is already here. I believe she brought a message—"

  Laurina came into the dining-room. She was wearing a wide sunhat and, Cendri was glad to see, stout shoes. She bowed to the Pro-Matriarch and said clearly, "I am ashamed for my colleagues. And for your colleague, Vaniya."

  Vaniya said, looking as if she were bracing herself against bad news, "What has Mahala done now, child?"

  Laurina was squirming. She was very fair-skinned and somewhat freckled under the short curly red hair, and her pale skin was pink between the freckles. "As you know, Vaniya, Mahala is one of the Trustees of the College, and she has sent word—" she lowered her eyes and twisted her hands, in agonized embarrassment, "that none of the woman students shall work with the Scholar Dame until Mahala has had a chance to speak with her, and make certain that—that—" her voice gave out and she glanced pleadingly at Cendri. "Scholar Dame, I am ashamed!"

  Cendri was angry—for Dai's sake; they needed some kind of help in the ruins. She was also angry at the insult. She said, "Does the Pro-Matriarch Mahala think I am likely to harm the students, Laurina?"

  "That woman!" Vaniya grated, "shameless, insolent, discourteous to our honored guests, dishonoring the will of the High Matriarch—what excuse does she give? What reason can she possibly have?"

  Laurina said uncomfortably, "That until she has seen and—and spoken with the Scholar Dame she does not consider it wise to expose her students to the hazards of male scholarship."

  "In the name of the Goddess," Vaniya exploded, "How can scholarship be male or female? That is like speaking of the feminine nature of the atomic table of the elements, or the maleness of a volcano! Laurina, truthfully, has my fellow Pro-Matriarch gone mad?"

  "I am not qualified to judge, Vaniya. But I am ashamed of my students for hiding themselves like shellfish at low tide!" She looked at Cendri, hesitantly. "Will you have me as their unworthy representative, then?"

  Cendri smiled at her, realizing how much bravery it must take to defy the Pro-Matriarch Mahala. In a society like this, where law seemed to be at a minimum and everything handled by personal relationships with superiors and mothers and older kin, it must have seemed a shocking thing to Laurina to go against such a ban. "I hope you will not get in trouble for coming without the others, Laurina."

  Laurina's smile glowed at her. She said, "I don't care if I do or not," and Cendri sighed a little, even while Laurina's gesture moved her. Evidently the young woman had developed a full-fledged case of hero worship. She would have thought Laurina, who was about her own age, was too old for such a school-girlish attitude, but perhaps on a world where one's immediate social superiors were all women, this kind of thing lasted longer.

  Laurina added earnestly, "It was not absolutely forbidden. But the Pro-Matriarch spoke, and of course everyone was afraid to make her angry, so the matrons at the college suggested it would be wiser and more courteous not to go. But I am my own woman, and I do not see how merely listening to what the Scholar Dame has to say can damage me. I do not suppose she will force her opinions upon me, if I cannot accept them in conscience!"

  Cendri wanted to laugh at the young defiance of that. She discovered instead that she was moved. "I am happy to have your help, my dear, and perhaps when the other students see that I have not damaged you in any way, they will decide that their consciences and their duty will permit them to come."

  "But this is sheer politics!" Vaniya fumed, "How dare that woman set the whole city at odds this way? Is she hoping that if Rezali dies without naming a successor, some grand outcry from the people will place her upon the High Matriarch's seat? What will it profit her to do this?"

  Cendri thought it prudent to ignore that. She could not, after all, make any legitimate comment about local politics. She told Vaniya that, since the promised students had not appeared, they would need some help in carrying their gear and that it was ready to transport; bringing Laurina with her to their room, she gave her charge of the graphic recording equipment. She hated to feed the young woman's crush on her by singling her out for special attention this way, but Laurina, as a student, was better fitted to deal with such a responsibility than Vaniya's unskilled servants and poor relations who had been assigned to the task.

  Surreptitiously she saw Laurina examining the equipment. Dal was organizing the materials, putting them in order for use. Somehow everything got organized—even Rhu volunteered to help—and they started through the garden toward the shoreline and the path which led upward toward the ruins at We-were-guided. Vaniya stood and watched them go. Cendri thought she seemed distressed; but whether it was at the action of her fellow Pro-Matriarch, or something else, she could not be sure.

  Of course this is not what she wants. We-were-guided is a holy place to her. How can I make her understand that we will not desecrate it? Or will our very presence do that?

  She knew Dal would never understand this. He was trained in all the traditional disciplines of archaeology, but he was oriented only to measurable things; micrometric measurements of the skulls of tomb inhabitants, computer analysis of tools to judge the size and physiology of the hands, limbs or appendages that had used them, measurements, judgments based on arbitrary standards.

  But could he really understand, from these things, the true essence of the past? Could computer analysis of a tool and the hand which held it ever provide the complex reasons why a society assumed its form? She had applauded louder than any other student in her section when a famous anthropologist, returning from a study of the customs of the Delta Kamellins, a curious crew of aboriginal humanoids in the Orion system, said he wasn't interested in the statistical analysis of the comparative length of their sexual appendages, or of how frequently they used their anterior, as contrasted to their posterior appendages; his interest was i
n the complex social and emotional factors which caused them to choose one appendage over the other, and those things were not subject to such analysis.

  So with Cendri. She was interested in the complex and living culture of the Matriarchate. She could have been equally interested in a past culture like that of the hypothetical Builders. But Dal was not, she felt, interested in the life of the Builders at all. He did not care what kind of beings they had been, or what motives lay behind their ruins or the daily rituals they had once performed in those ruins. He wanted to know what they had done, and when, and even to a certain limited degree how. But the why would forever escape him; and the tragedy of this was that he would not miss it.

  And she knew it was useless to argue with Dal about all this. She could only—if she were fortunate—follow his study and analysis of the ruins, and come to her own conclusions about the things she wanted to know about the Builders. And even that was a poor substitute, she thought with a bitterness so deeply submerged that she was not fully aware it was there, for spending her own precious and irrecoverable time on Isis doing his work instead of her own research into the live, growing, real culture of the Matriarchate which was all around them. How could Dal be content to waste his time on beings which had been dead for years, centuries, millennia?

  As they began to climb the hill toward the ruins, she turned and got a glimpse of Dai's face. This, she reminded herself, firmly, was his moment. She had been doing her own work since she landed, her notes were full and precise, and even though there were tremendous gaps in her knowledge of the Matriarchate—their mating customs, for instance, still lay in utter darkness—she had still more than tripled all extant knowledge of the daily life of the Matriarchate. Until this very morning Dal had not had the slightest chance even to begin his work. And even now, he must pretend to take a subordinate position to Cendri.

  She herself had spent an enormous amount of time on the ship outbound, on tapes and hypno-learners, and she felt she could give a passable imitation of a professional archaeologist. But she knew within herself that she was just that, an imitation of one.

  She saw that Laurina, close beside her, was apparently bubbling over with a thousand unspoken questions, politely repressed in honor—or awe?—of the Scholar Dame from the Unity. If she were a real Scholar Dame, she thought, at least part of her commitment would be to teaching, and not merely to her own research, and she realized that this, too, was an important part of her mission to Isis. They were going to judge the quality of the Unity's scholarship by her. Cendri Owain. The Scholar Dame Cendri Malocq.

  Laurina, encouraged by her smile, asked shyly, "May I ask the Scholar Dame—" she had evidently been well briefed, and reminded herself overnight, of the forms of courtesy in use on University, "what instruments she carries for use in her research?"

  The formal terms of courtesy should have made Cendri feel at home, as she would have felt with a teaching assistant from her own college on University. Instead, for some reason, it made her feel lonely, excluded, apart from the easy companionship of the women to which she had been briefly admitted, here on Isis. She said, "You were to call me Cendri, Laurina. And yes, of course, you may ask me anything you like. The instrument in your care—" she indicated the graphic-recording console, "is to record, as permanently or temporarily as I wish, whatever I see or hear today. It is like photographic camera equipment—do you not have that on Isis?"

  "Yes, of course, our little girls use them for toys, and also they are used in nurseries or hospitals, when patients or infants must be continually observed without disturbing them," Laurina said. "But where are your supplies—"

  "That is the way in which they differ; no perishable supplies or sensitized material for storage of the record is needed," Cendri told her. "Once it is activated, we need only activate a certain sequence to replay, projected on any desired space, a complete holographic record of what we have seen and heard. We can even—not here, but on a world with the adequate compensating machinery and equipment—reproduce, to a small and limited degree, replicas of certain artifacts, so that the cultural treasures of one world need not be removed so that other worlds can enjoy their semblance. And if, a hundred or a thousand years from now, some new research light-years away should cast additional light on what we find here, scholars on University could, to some extent, find out what we have discovered here, even if these ruins should have been since obliterated by tidal wave, earthquake or time."

  "That is not likely," Laurina said, "Already we know that within We-were-guided, the ground never quakes, and no tidal wave can reach so far."

  Cendri thought, I wish I could be sure of that. But she knew already that this was an article of faith with the women of Isis, and in fact, the ruins themselves could not have stood so long unless located in a spot singularly immune to the general seismic properties of the rest of the continent of Isis.

  They were approaching the ruins now, crossing the area directly in front of the enormous black-glass gates. She dropped back beside Dal, and said, in a low voice, and in their own language, to avoid overhearing, "You should go in first, Dal, if we can manage it. I owe you that."

  He smiled briefly at her, and said, "That isn't important now. But before we go in I want to get graphics of the exterior—look at those gates!"

  "I'd say, whatever they were, they were larger than human, wouldn't you?" she asked, looking at the vast, towering arches far above their heads. He made a negative gesture.

  "Can't tell anything at all by ceremonial doors and gates; to find that out, we'll need to find the doors they used all the time, every day." But it was not a reproof, just an impersonal comment, and Cendri thought, with a sigh of relief, he's himself again. This was what he needed. There had been a time when they had shared their studies like this; before their marriage, before she had—though temporarily—abandoned her own.

  She saw Rhu and Laurina, and Vaniya's servants, burdened with their equipment, watching them, wondering what the alien scholars from University would do now. Suddenly she wished she could get rid of all of them, get rid of the pretense that she was the Scholar Dame from University, and he her unregarded assistant, so that they could be free to interact in their own normal pattern, without pretense or sham. But when she said so to Dal, almost yearningly, he shook his head.

  "Out of the question. Let's not get involved in side issues now, Cendri, there's a job to be done."

  He was right; there was no point questioning the postulates on which they were free to explore the ruins of Isis. After all, wherever they might have gone, there would have been some kind of adverse working conditions. She said, "You want graphics of the exterior. Shall I teach Laurina to use the recorder so that I can be free to make written or voice-scriber notes?"

  He frowned. "That might be a good idea," he said, "but I hate to trust it to a stranger, and a woman at that."

  "Dal, any qualified assistant we get here is going to be a woman," she reminded him, and he chuckled. "Right you are. And you did tell me she was a professor of history at the college here, so she must have a considerable amount of intelligence." He turned around, glancing at Laurina, and beckoned her close. "Show her how to work the thing, will you, Cendri?"

  Laurina looked shocked. She whispered, "Do you allow it to talk to you in that tone?"

  Cendri felt a moment of despair. The brief moment of naturalness between herself and Dal had suddenly evaporated again, into the pretense that was their life on Isis! She said, with a trifle more sharpness than she intended, "My assistant is a scholar in his own right on University, Laurina, and as such he is fully qualified. We do not make distinctions of this kind on University. There is work to be done, and we have no time to waste in preserving such artificial distinctions. The important thing is that together we are qualified to make these explorations, and which of us gives the orders is a matter we do not really stop to consider." She thought: maybe I can actually make a point about scholarship on University!

  Laurina looked c
rushed. She said, almost in a whisper, "I did not mean to offend the Scholar—I mean, I did not mean to offend you, Cendri. Forgive me—"

  "That's all right." In a sense, Cendri knew, she was using Laurina's hero-worship for her to enforce a point of view which went against all Laurina's cultural and ethical preconceptions. Was she justified in doing this? Could the end ever justify the means? There was no time to explore complex cultural and ethical questions now. She said, with a pleasant smile, "I presume you would like to know how to use the graphics-recorder?"

  "I would indeed," Laurina said, and she looked awed, "if you will trust me with it."

  "Very well, then." Cendri moved to her side, and began demonstrating the complex controls. She found Laurina a quick pupil, and after a few minutes had no hesitation in turning it over to the woman for the recordings.

  "From now you record everything that we see and explore," she instructed. "First of all, get the gates from all angles...."

  Slowly, working together, they recorded the giant gates, the two huge black-glass towers just inside the gates, and the courtyards inside them. Then, slowly, they began to explore the streets of the ancient city—although "streets" was hardly the word for the huge, regular, but strangely ordered spaces between buildings. After a very brief survey, Dal beckoned Cendri to his side. She went, ignoring Rhu's shocked stare.

  "I want to check out a preliminary impression," he said, low-voiced. "First of all, what strikes you first about these ruins?"

  She knew immediately what he meant.

  "Their newness," she said, "they don't look as if they had been here more than a couple of thousand years at most. I'd almost say a couple of hundred, but that's impossible; they were here when Cinderella was discovered and mapped."

  He nodded, biting his lip. He said, "Right. And on a planet as seismic as this, how in the hell did they manage to escape the quakes?"

  She hazarded, "Some form of building that can resist almost infinite earthquake stresses?"