Clearly, Mother de Gupta dearly loved motherhood – mostly, for the chance that it offered her to boss around small, helpless people. Pitar had been taught the grand saga of Mother de Gupta in his crèche-school. A school where domineering women controlled every detail of childhood, preserving and conveying society’s cultural values.
Pitar had never forgotten his stifling days in that airless nursery school. Mother de Gupta’s husband, the equally-famed Captain de Gupta, had been the author of Mercury’s purdah laws of gender separation. It didn’t take genius to understand that old man’s motives.
Lucy was serenely ignoring the savage old matriarch behind the glass. She was studying her own reflection in the tilted, shining pane.
“I have earned every link in this chain,” she declared. “Five hundred marital liaisons! How awkward my postures were, and my body damp with secretions... But now I truly understand why marriage is a sacrament! Look! Look at my beautiful mangalsutra! I always wanted one! It is classical! I have dignity now! With a chain around my neck, I can hold my head up high!”
With a heroic effort, Pitar made no response to this strange outcry. First, Lucy had miscounted their number of liaisons; and second, he had always suffered far worse from the burdens of marriage than she.
Women had it easy in marriage. Basically, all that was required from women was to lie on a bed and point their knees at the ceiling. Society forced him to wrap himself in a veil, to skulk like an assassin into the women’s quarters – as if his identity, and his purpose there, were dreadful secrets.
A custom of total secrecy, for actions that were legally required! When incompatible worldviews collided, these were the monsters engendered. Ten dutiful years of marital intercourse, creeping in and out of airlocks – and yet women called men hypocrites.
“I have done my duty for ten years,” Lucy declared to her own reflection. Suddenly, she turned on him, eyes flashing. “Sometimes it’s all I can do not to laugh like a fool.”
“At least, after ten years of marriage,” offered Pitar, “they don’t make us listen to those silly love-songs, any more.”
A thoughtful silence passed, and then she fixed her gaze on his. “This arranged marriage is a vehicle of political oppression!”
Pitar tightened his lips. The women of Mercury were particularly dangerous when they started harping on their alleged ‘oppressions.’ They rarely died of being oppressed, but men were frequently beaten to death for that subject.
“You told me, once,” she said, “once, here in this very Anteroom, that marriage was an oppressive moral debt that we owe to the founders of this world.” Lucy stroked her gleaming, golden neck. “I never wept so much! But, of course, you were telling the truth – the truth as men see it, at least.”
Stung, Pitar rose at once from his dainty chair, which toppled to the stone floor with a discreet glassy clink.
“Our ancestors must have been insane,” Lucy said, with the serene expression of a woman uttering things no man would dare to say aloud. “They gave us this bizarre, twisted life – a life we would never have chosen for ourselves. Our marriage – our oppression – is not our fault. I don’t blame you, Pitar. Not any longer. You shouldn’t blame me, either. You and I are victims of tradition.”
Pitar steepled his fingers before his face and touched them to his moustache. “Mrs. Peretz,” he said at last, “it’s true that our ancestors had profound, creative ideas about a new society. They tried many new things, and many experiments failed. It was hard to create this world, our world, the living world, from bare rock. I myself have huge technical advantages over our ancestors – and yet I make mistakes, building this world, every day.”
Lucy gazed at him, blinking. “What? What are you talking about now? Aren’t you listening to me? I just told you that none of this is your fault! You, being my husband, that is not your fault! Can’t you understand that? I thought you’d be happy to hear that from me, today.”
“Mrs. Peretz, you are not taking my point here! I have a larger point than any merely personal point! I’m saying that we can’t blame our ancestors, and vilify them, until we come to terms with our own human failings! Consider the legacy that you and I are leaving to our own future! You can see that, can’t you? That is just and fair. That’s obvious.”
Lucy was not seeing the obvious at all. Or rather, Lucy was seeing the obvious in some alien, feminine way, in which his denial of their immediate suffering was an evil lie. He had offended her.
“Did we surrender too much?” Lucy demanded. “Did we say ‘yes’ too often?”
“Do you mean, Mrs. Peretz, that day, ten years ago, when I said ‘yes,’ and you also said ‘yes’?”
“No, no, you never understand anything that’s important... All right, yes, fine. Fine! That’s what I meant.”
“Do you mean to say that I should have rebelled? That I should have refused our arranged marriage?” Pitar paused. He attempted to look composed and solemn, as he thought furiously.
Lucy spoke up meekly. “I meant to suggest that I should have rebelled.”
“What, you? Why?”
Lucy said nothing, but she was clearly marshalling her thoughts for another unplanned outburst.
The anniversary morning, which had started so calmly, had taken a dreadful turn for Pitar. If men knew that he was talking in this way to a woman – especially his own wife – he would be challenged to a duel. And he would deserve that, too.
“All right,” Pitar said at last, “since this is our anniversary, we need to discuss these issues. It was brave of you to bring those up. Well, I happen to think that the two of us are excellent at marriage.”
Lucy brightened. “You think that? Why?”
“Because it’s an established fact! Look at the evidence! Here we are – you and me, husband and wife – living four kilometres under the surface of the North Pole of the planet Mercury. Our air, water, food, our gender politics, everything that we value, is designed and engineered. And yet, we thrive. We are prosperous, we live honourably! We are two respectable married people! Anybody in this world would say that Pitar Peretz and Lucy Peretz have a normal, solid, and fruitful relationship. We gave the world a son.”
His wife scowled at this firm reassurance. “They’ll want other children from us. No day passes when the lady elders don’t nag me about procreation.”
“They have to say that to us. They did their part, and now that duty is ours.” Pitar raised his hand, to forestall another outcry. “Now, I know – before Mario Louis Peretz was built – I felt some qualms about my fatherhood. Maybe I over-expressed those emotions to you. That was my mistake. I was young and foolish then. I didn’t know what fatherhood was. We can’t always know what is good for us in the future. If you asked a boy or girl to consent to puberty, of course children would never grow up! They’re just children, so they would rebel, and say no.”
His wife made no reply to his wise and reasonable discourse. Instead, Lucy was gazing, with a damp look of dawning surprise, at the blast-scarred stone wall. The idea of annulling puberty seemed to have fired her imagination.
“Even though our children are built, it’s a wise social policy that children should have two parents,” Pitar said doggedly. “Maybe we were forced to conform to that tradition, for the sake of futurity. But the truth is, fatherhood was good to me. Today, there’s a boy, eight years old, who depends on me for guidance in this world. So now I realise: life can’t be all about me. Me, and my own favourite things: interaction design, aesthetics, robotics, metaphysics... When you and I built a child, that forced me to realise how much this life matters!”
This heartfelt, responsible declaration would have gone over splendidly in any male discussion group; with Lucy, though, it had simply dug him into deeper trouble. Lucy looked bored by his worthy sentiments, and even mildly repelled. “So,” she said at last, “the boy made you happy?”
“I wouldn’t claim that I’ve achieved the Peak of Eternal Light! But who among us has?�
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“I’m glad that you’re happy, Mr. Peretz.”
Pitar said nothing. He recognised one of those passive, yet aggressive remarks that women deployed for advantage.
Whenever women said the opposite of what they so clearly wanted to say, hell was at hand.
It was no use reasoning with women. Their brains were different. He had to change his tactics.
“How can I be happy,” Pitar offered at last, “when I’m sitting here in the ‘Anteroom of Profound Regret’?”
“Husbands never regret leaving their wives here. The formal name of this Anteroom is merely a social hypocrisy. One lie among so many in this world.”
“Mrs. Peretz, please stop being so politically provocative. Who can’t be sorry in this miserable Anteroom? Can you deny that this room is gloomy, stuffy and in very poor taste? Be reasonable.”
“Well, yes, this ugly Anteroom of yours is ugly, but not in the way you think... This room is harsh, and cold, and repulsive, but that’s all the fault of you men.”
“We men never asked for this Anteroom! Never! If it was up to us men, we’d go straight to the Boudoir. The Boudoir is augmented and ubiquitous, and it has beer and snacks, too!”
“Mr. Peretz, you are living in pure male delusion,” Lucy said sternly. “That Boudoir, where you and I have conjugal relations, that isn’t even my room! I have a private room of my very own. It’s much nicer than that tacky bordello where we have to interact.”
Pitar was dazzled by this brazen assertion. “Other men sleep in my own marriage bed?”
“Sir, that is not ‘your’ bed! And anyway, it’s very sturdy.”
“Sturdiness is not the issue there!”
“Well, it is to us women.”
“Fine, be that way!” Pitar cried. “If you want a surprise, you should see my barracks! We men live in luxury now! We have gymnasia, saunas, tool-sheds, anything anyone would want.”
“I’ve never seen your male barracks,” said Lucy thoughtfully. “That place where you sleep, without me.”
This was a dreadful thing to say. Only the lowest, most dishonourable woman, a woman lost to all shame, would violate purdah, risk everything, and creep into a man’s room.
The remark shocked Pitar, so he retreated into silence. His wife said nothing as well. The silence between them stretched, as their silences always did, and Pitar realised, with a long, tenuous, ten-year stretch of his imagination, that he liked it when Lucy shocked him.
It touched something in him. He felt metaphysically authentic. Shock put him in stark confrontation with life’s unspoken realities. It took daring to become real.
This was like that vivacious disaster, eight years ago, when he’d been in a duel for Lucy’s honour.
Pitar was a thinking man, but sometimes even the most reasonable man couldn’t back down from an insult. Pitar had not won that duel – in fact, he’d gotten a solid beating from his punctilious opponent. But in standing up for her, and for honour, he’d won a moral victory.
Furthermore, after the duel, Lucy had been allowed, by a long unspoken tradition, to leave her female purdah, and visit him in his clinic. Lucy came there publicly, flaunting herself, sometimes twice a day, to ‘heal the defender of her honour.’ She could stay there in the medical ward as long as she pleased, and express herself on any topic, and no one would dare to object.
Neither of them had known quite what to do with this unexpected intimacy, for they were only nineteen years old. But that incident had been truly exciting – a different side of life. Another mode of being. The scandal had changed him, and she had changed too, in her own way. A marriage under threat had depth, breadth and consequence.
Sometimes, there was a steep price to pay for self-knowledge – young men learned about themselves in a hurry. Mature men learned from experience.
“Lucy,” he ventured at last, in a low voice, “if I asked you to visit my barracks room, what would you do?”
“I didn’t mean to suggest anything disgraceful,” she said. “But men always come here, through these Anteroom airlocks. Women never visit your half of this world, not at all. How can that be fair?”
“Fair? The rules of decorum are very clear on those matters.”
“Please don’t look at me like that,” Lucy begged. “Truly, I’m proud that my husband has decorum and defends my honour. It would be awful if you were some vile coward. But anyone – man or woman – can see there’s something very strange about our customs! Men inside other planets don’t duel!”
“Men on other planets don’t live ‘inside’ of their planets,” Pitar corrected. “Mercury’s moral code may not be perfect – I will grant you that. It may even be that the men of this world, who are just so many fools like me, are all stupid brutes. But even if that’s so – at least the ladies here are true ladies! You can admit that much to me, can’t you?”
“Well,” said Lucy, “being a ‘lady’ doesn’t work in the way that you imagine it does, but... All right, fine, I married you, I’m your lady. I can see you’re angry now. You’re always angry when I’m not a lady, when I talk about what’s just and fair.”
“Let’s be objective,” said Pitar. “Let’s consider those sleazy women who orbit Venus. No one ever calls them proper ladies!”
“Well, no, of course not,” Lucy admitted. “Those women can’t even fly down to their own planet’s surface! That’s quite sad.”
“And what about the Earth, that so-called motherworld? Earth women were all Earth-mothers once, and look what became of them! They’re polluted, they’re filthy, a laughing-stock! Don’t get me started on those Martian women! Preening around on Mars, freezing on red sand, pretending that they can breathe!”
“I’m sure those women are doing their best to be decent women.”
“Oh come now. Those women orbiting Saturn and Jupiter? Let’s not be ridiculous here! And I hope you’re not defending those post-female entities around Neptune and Uranus.”
“Foreign women live quite properly inside the asteroids.”
“Not like ladies live in our own society! Asteroidal women don’t have our giant canyons, and our polar water-glacier! I will grant you – the asteroids have some fine resources. They have ice, and some metals, they’re upscale in the gravity well. But us, the genteel people here inside Mercury, we have much purer, finer metals than they do! Metals, in planetary quantities! And we possess tremendous solar energy! Every Mercurian day, our robots harvest more power than some puny asteroid could generate in ten years!” Pitar drew a deep breath of the Anteroom’s stuffy air. “You certainly can’t deny all those facts!”
Lucy said nothing, and therefore denied nothing.
“I don’t want to be ungallant,” Pitar concluded, “but those women bred in the asteroids, they have no gravity! Not one trace of decent gravity. So they are grotesque! What decent man could be doomed to marry some flabby, blob-shaped, boneless woman, with hands on her legs, instead of human feet? I shudder at the thought! Their lives are unimaginable.”
Lucy ran both her hands along her elongated skull and through her lustrous, thin, white hair. “Pitar, that’s all true. Those foreign people are contemptible.”
“I’m glad that you can see that. And there’s an important corollary to your conclusion,” said Pitar in triumph. “If those foreigners are grotesque – and we both agree, they certainly are – then that proves that we are not. Maybe we suffer – me, and you, too, we both suffer some oppression, maybe – life, and honour, and decency, they aren’t all about fun and amusement... But when it’s all it’s said and done, you and I are Mercurian people. I am who I am, and so are you.”
“I am a Mercurian woman,” Lucy said. “But too much is always left unsaid.”
Lucy gazed suggestively at the airlock, but he did not leave, having become too interested.
“Mrs. Peretz, it’s all mere custom,” Pitar said at last. “Sometimes, we behave so proudly here, as if we owned the Peak of Eternal Light... And yet, the texture of
our existence is mere tradition. The truth is, speaking metaphysically, it’s all social habit! Once, in the past, this whole world was like this sorry Anteroom that we’re stuck in now...”
Pitar lifted his arms. “I know that life isn’t just and fair. And I wish I could change that, but how? If you want to reform gender relations, you should take up those issues in the political councils of your elder ladies. What can you expect me to do? Those old witches treat men of my age as if we were larvae.”
“I didn’t ask you to do anything,” Lucy pointed out. “I even told you that it wasn’t your fault.”
“Well, yes, you said that, but... isn’t it strongly implicated that there’s something I should do? Surely we don’t meet in here, face to face, it’s our anniversary... We can’t just whine.”
A very long silence passed. Pitar began to regret that he had complained about complaining. This act of his was meta, and recursive. No wonder she was confused.
“We have bicycles,” Lucy offered.
“What?”
“We have bicycles. Transportation devices, the ones with two wheels. Men and women can meet outside of the purdah, when they ride on bicycles. No one can accuse us of impropriety when we’re seated on rolling machines.”
“Mrs. Peretz, I have seen bicycles – but I’m not taking your point.”
“Suppose that we say,” Lucy offered haltingly, “that we’re exploring the modern world. There are lots of new mineshafts where only machines have gone. If we ride a few kilometres – I mean together, but on bicycles – how can they say that we’re harming custom? Or offending decency?”
“What do you mean now, bicycles? Aren’t those contraptions dangerous? You could fall off a bicycle and break your neck! Bicycles are mechanically unstable! They only have two wheels!”
“Yes, it’s hard to learn to ride a bicycle. I fell off several times, and even hurt myself. But I learned how! Bicycles are perfect for low-gravity planets. Because bicycles stress the legs. They strengthen the bones. Bicycles are a healthy and modern invention.”
Pitar considered this set of arguments. Of course he’d seen women riding on bicycles – and the occasional man as well, maybe one in ten – but he’d paid no real attention to this fad. He’d considered bicycling some girlish affectation – those women in their faceless helmets and their black, baggy clothes. Speeding about on these gaily coloured devices...
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