The Destruction and the Rebirth are two periods of history we are all taught to some degree, since those events are part of religious doctrine as well. Mother, like many, was not a believer, and I had always been a skeptic, believing that religion was of use only to those women the Mothers of the City served, but I had been taught my share of doctrine.
Once, women had given men the power over life that women had held since the beginning of human history; so we have all been taught. Men had used their power for evil, and the world had been devastated and poisoned in ancient times by the weapons men had controlled. The great fire came and, after it, the long winter. Only scattered communities in isolated places had survived, living for ages in underground shelters, for life on the surface was not possible. Earth refused to yield crops, animals sickened and died, and humankind’s damaged genes whelped monsters.
Below ground, life had gone on, in a fashion. Even in the shelters, many did not live, and tunnels holding the dead were sealed off from the living. These shelters, we are told, were our purgatory, places in which to pay for our sins. Gradually, Earth began to heal itself, and in time, it became necessary for some to venture above ground.
At first, only men who had fathered all their children were sent out, for the communities had to be preserved from genetic damage, but these men, weakened by age and inexperienced in the wild, often could not fend for themselves. Younger men were sent outside, along with women who could not bear children—and there were many of those in ancient days, for the earth had punished us by robbing many women of their ability to give life.
Those women who remained behind had to teach their children while doing much of the work of the community. As they gained more control of the biological sciences, they learned how to find out which men had sustained the least damage to their genes, and how to sort them out from others. To love one man, and to bear only his children because of that love, was a luxury these societies could not afford; it was soon clear that such love had always been an evil, had brought women to forgive men instead of protesting their foolish ways. One judged a mate on his health and strength—nothing else mattered. Defective children died out; other children grew stronger. Women regained their ability to bear healthy young, and those who did so ruled.
Perhaps those early men, living outside and returning to the shelters only infrequently to donate their sperm, their game, and their news of the healing Earth, still believed that they would regain their power, that in time, their lives would be as they were before. Perhaps, guilt-ridden over what their kind had wrought, they were content to let women take over more responsibility. Or maybe they welcomed their life of hunting and roaming and adapted to it readily because it was the life to which they were best suited. But the pattern had been fixed.
Our scriptures tell us that the spirit of Earth, in the form of the Goddess, soon began to speak through the mouths of women. “You continue to sin,” She said. “You readily allow men to come among you, even though they have scarred Me. You gave men power over Me, and they ravaged Me. You gave them power over yourselves, and they made you slaves. They sought to wrest My secrets from Me instead of living in harmony with Me. You have sinned and have not yet turned away from wrongdoing.”
So the Goddess spoke, and many women abased themselves and wept over their foolishness and promised to keep to the right way. Those who were wisest became the Mothers of their communities, contributed sons to the world outside, and guided other women, who bore their daughters and lived their lives apart from men. But history also shows that some women turned away from the Goddess and often had to be expelled, and that a long time passed before women reclaimed their true place.
The Rebirth came. Here, and on other continents as well, we left our shelters and retreated inland, away from the greatest devastation, and built our cities and the shrines that would guide men to us. Much of the land beyond was surrendered to the Goddess, left to renew itself untouched by humankind. The ten thousand years of man’s rule, an aberration in human history, were past.
That is our story, but in the light of Zoreen’s speculations, the story seemed to take on a new meaning. If men, even some men, had once been capable of the compassion and intellect that were the proper province of women, then our way of life was not merciful and just, but only a cruel necessity, a way to survive and no more. Civilization had been preserved at the cost of depriving all men of it. We also paid a price, for we were bound by these patterns, unable to alter them, for our survival still depended on them. Those who had become the Mothers of our cities were not only the wisest, but also the most merciless. Those sciences that might lead to new and more powerful weapons were controlled, and innovation discouraged; and, because of this, most of us still learned only what women hundreds of years ago had known, for to know more might risk the death of all. Even the surrendering of much of the earth’s lands to the Goddess in atonement for our sins might have been only an act of fear and cowardice. We had made our world a small one. Our cities stand on only part of our continent, and rarely do our ships travel through the skies over the oceans to far cities; the women there remain images and voices on our screens. We send few ships to map the lands we have abandoned.
What Zoreen had said at my party was true; we did little that was new.
How could thinking of this ease my mind? It would replace my doubts with a cold practicality. For all to live, some would have to suffer, and all would have to hold to the ways that had made survival possible.
Zoreen shuffled a few papers. “At any rate,” she murmured, “ancient men might have done some good deeds, but they also committed most of the evil ones. They had armies with weapons, not just unarmed patrols. They beat and killed women, beat and killed each other, raped, terrorized whole cities—you should read some of the old literature. It was quite commonplace. In a city like this, we wouldn’t have been able to walk down a street without fearing for our lives in the time before the Destruction. We do have different natures, I fear. Men destroy; women build and nurture. It’s because we carry our children inside us, and men can’t. Even the most exceptional men probably had to fight their own impulses constantly.”
I was thinking of Button, the only male I had known. What if the boy were capable of more than I had imagined? What if he could have been trained for much more and instilled with an understanding of our ways? Maybe we could have been helping men adapt to our cities in some manner. I tried to push that thought aside. We could not change the natures of men, could not allow them any power again.
Zoreen grinned suddenly. “You actually seem interested in all of this.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I looked away. “I guess I should tell you. Shayl, needless to say, wasn’t too happy when I told her. I was told I could take general science, but I was advised to concentrate on history and human culture, too.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t want to,” I said. “I’m still not sure I will.”
“You ought to consider it. Not because I’m doing it, but because there’s a lot going on in the subject now, which is more than you can say for other things. We’re revising a few old assumptions, sorting out more of the pre-Rebirth documents from post-Rebirth ones, seeing which ones were altered the most. It’s exciting, Laissa. It might change the way we look at the past.”
I was thinking to myself that historians would alter only the way historians themselves viewed the past; no one else would care, especially if it raised disturbing ideas. “But I wasn’t told to be a historian, or a recordkeeper. I was told I might make a chronicler, although I can’t imagine why.”
“A chronicler.” Zoreen let out her breath. “I was going to say I’m surprised, but for some reason I’m not. It seems to fit you somehow. The tests and advisers are usually right. Maybe you should listen to them.”
“But. . .”
“Oh, I know. Don’t think I didn’t notice how my old friends started avoiding me as soon as I started my studies. Even my mother isn’t happy about
it. I was surprised you asked me to your party at all, in fact.”
“And then you came and joked about what you were doing. You really made it sound…”
“Well, what else could I do? They were going to think badly of me no matter what I said.” Zoreen stood up and stretched. “I’ve done enough for today—I feel restless. Let’s go out.”
We left the towers behind and wandered in the streets among the houses nearby. Zoreen examined several tables of handicrafts before trading a small music box for a silver necklace. Some of the women behind the tables of wares greeted Zoreen by name, and she seemed to know others as well.
“At least here,” Zoreen murmured to me, “no one’s going to care much about what I do. I’m just one of the city’s Mothers, and history’s just a lot of stories that have nothing to do with them. Some of them like hearing stories about the cities when they were new.”
We came to a hydroponic garden, where tables were arranged around the glassed-in complex. Below, women in green smocks were tending to the vats while others served meals at the tables. Here, we could eat for nothing in trade except praise for the food or advice on what new seasonings might be tried. We selected salads and then sat down at one small table.
As we were finishing our food, a group of young women crossed the grass and giggled as they sat down at a long table near the grape vines. Shayl was with them. I looked directly at her. She did not greet me.
I set down my fork, imagining that Shayl was mocking me in front of her friends. “Let’s go,” I murmured. Zoreen nodded. As we stood up, I encircled her waist with one arm.
When we reached the path bordering the lawn, Zoreen pushed my arm away. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I know what you meant,” Zoreen said in a low voice; I had to bend my head forward a little to hear her. “You wanted Shayl to think we’re more than just roommates and friends. You want to get back at her, make her think you have someone else now. Fine. Just don’t use me to do it.”
“I’m sorry, Zoreen.”
The anger in her green eyes faded. “It isn’t that I couldn’t care more about you, Laissa, but even I have some pride. I don’t want to be just a replacement for someone you loved, who doesn’t love you. Shayl was the one who rejected you, wasn’t she? It wasn’t the other way around.”
I nodded.
“I guessed it before. You didn’t have to make it seem otherwise. It wouldn’t have changed my feelings.” She took my arm as we walked toward the street. “Come on. I’ll take you to one of my favorite spots. It isn’t a place I’d go with many others.”
“Where’s that?”
“The wall.”
I tightened my grip on her arm. “I don’t want to go there.”
“I don’t mean inside the wall. The patrol wouldn’t want us wandering around in there anyway without a reason. I mean on top of the wall. You must have been there at least once.”
“Only when some of us were taken to Devva. I didn’t like it. I went straight from the lift to the ship.”
“Then you have to come, just this once.”
I sighed and gave in.
We rode through the tunnel and entered the wall, where one of the lifts carried us to the top. I thought of what was behind the doors of the wall and wished that I hadn’t agreed to come. Men were in some of the rooms on the first floor, lost in an imaginary world of erotic images provided by their mindspeakers as sperm was taken from their bodies to be analyzed in the wall’s laboratories and used for impregnation if it was found suitable.
Although I looked forward to becoming a mother, I did not look forward to the day when I would go to the wall to receive sperm, but consoled myself with the knowledge that, unlike women of ancient times, I would have no physical contact with the child’s father. I intended to be very careful about which progenitor I picked, unlike some of the Mothers of the City, who settled for anyone who was strong and without defects. I would answer many prayers, and call many men, and ask for analyses of all of them before I chose. Strength and health would not be enough; I would pick one with the rudiments of intelligence and sensitivity. I would probe their thoughts with the mindspeaker before I decided.
The lift came to a stop. The door opened, and we walked outside. A wind struck me in the face, a wind from outside, cold and biting. We were beyond the force field that protected our city.
The field was behind us, arcing up from a low railing. Zoreen turned toward the invisible shield. “There’s our tower.” She pointed toward one of the distant spires.
“How can you tell?” I asked. The towers, some pointed, others with flat roofs, looked similar to me from this perspective; in fact, I was struck by their uniformity. The small variations in materials or design were not as apparent from the wall, and I suddenly felt that the women inside them were themselves only variations on a theme, that individuality was an illusion, only life’s way of endlessly reproducing itself until it found the perfect form.
“But that isn’t what I wanted to show you.” She steered me away from that railing and we ambled toward the opposite side of the wall. Far to my right, a few women were boarding a ship. The round golden globe of the ship soon lifted and fled from the wall. I pulled up my thin collar against the cold and thrust my hands into the pockets of my tunic.
“Look,” Zoreen said as we came to the railing.
The hills near the horizon were brown and covered with leafless trees. Patches of snow dotted the flatter ground beneath us. A thick forest of pines, not far from the wall, and evergreen spears on the hills were the only bits of bright color visible. It was untamed land, and I wondered how anyone could live there.
“Isn’t it a sight?” Zoreen asked.
“It’s terrifying.” The images of the outside I had seen, even the quick glimpses I had caught from a ship the one time I had left the city, had not prepared me for this. I had expected to see a place more like an untended park rather than this wild landscape.
“It’s not like this all the time,” Zoreen said. “In the summer, it’s all green, and you can see flowers. In the fall, when the leaves start to turn, the hills are different colors, green and red and orange and yellow. You should see it then.”
I tried to imagine it, having spent all my life protected from seasonal changes. “It didn’t look this way from the ship.”
Zoreen laughed. “You probably took one peek and hid in your seat with your hands over your eyes.” She was silent for a bit. “Sometimes, I think of going out there.”
I was shocked. “You can’t mean that.”
“I meant in a ship, of course, with a destination. There are things out there no woman has ever seen. Sometimes, I hate being closed in. The city doesn’t seem so big when you look outside. Sometimes it seems that men have more freedom.”
“I suppose they do, in a way,” I said. “They’re free to freeze to death, or starve, or pick up some disease, or be killed by some animal or by another man.” I put my hands on the railing for a moment, then slipped them back inside my pockets. “They must have stories to tell. That would be real work for a chronicler, setting down some of their tales.” I paused. That was the first time, since speaking to Bren, that I had, however dimly, seen some work I might do. “Not many women would want to read them, of course.”
“I’ve sometimes thought of an expedition,” Zoreen said. “A lot was taken out of the ancient shelters, but I wonder what we might have left behind, what documents and artifacts might still exist in the places we’ve abandoned. But we’ll never do it. No one’s brave enough to go. I might be afraid to go even if I could.” She pulled her collar closer around her neck. “All we’ll ever see is another city, and the inside of a ship while we’re traveling there.” She turned toward me. “Birana’s out there now. She was, anyway. She couldn’t still be alive. Even someone with her strength couldn’t survive.”
“I didn’t know you knew her.”
“I wasn’t a friend, but I used to see her som
etimes out here on the wall, and we’d talk a little. She told me about some of the things she’d seen. She said some of the men scavenged for whatever they could find near the eastern and western sides of the wall, near the recyclers. Sometimes a few men will dig for whatever old stuff might be buried, even though there’s little they can find. Birana said that some tribes seem to stay near the wall most of the time, that sometimes they attack others traveling here. She could recognize a few of them by what they wore. The patrol usually checks to make sure those tribes aren’t nearby before they send men back out.” Zoreen gazed out at the hills. “Poor Birana. I don’t suppose she ever thought she’d have to go out there.”
I shivered. If Birana had kept away from her mother or if she had summoned help for Ciella immediately, she would have been safe; she might even have been standing on the wall with us now. “I wonder,” I said aloud. “Yvara said at the end that she believed other women might be alive out there, other exiles—that they might have found a way to live. I wonder if it’s true.”
Zoreen shook her head. “Look at what’s there, Laissa. An expelled woman couldn’t survive alone—she wouldn’t know how. The men are used to it, and even they have to struggle. Yvara would have said any wild thing by then.”
I was not so sure. There were many areas of Earth over which ships passed only rarely, that were abandoned. I was deluding myself, trying to believe that some sort of safe place might exist for the young woman I had forgotten and neglected. It would be better for Birana if she had died quickly instead of having her suffering prolonged.
“I tried to see her,” Zoreen said, “before they sent her out.”
This revelation surprised me. “But you said you weren’t her friend.”
The Shore of Women Page 12