Steel was a little peeved about it. If anyone had actually managed to drown in the ocean, it would have taken them three months to re-boot. This would have delayed things, either while she waited for them to come back online or while she looked for a replacement.
If anything, she’s in a bigger hurry now than before we got to Earth. I think she’s worried about Krupp and Daimler coming after her, but I’m not sure. Krupp has to re-boot, himself, which gives us a three-month head start, but Steel seems worried, nonetheless.
We’re in the Pleiades now. Four hundred stars in an open cluster just twenty-five light years across. Compare that to the thirty or so within twenty-five light years of the sun and then toss in streams and whorls of interstellar dust and gas glowing blue in reflected starlight. The sky is an opal filled with fire.
We’ve come to Circe to pick up the new ultra-lights and some other new equipment Yuri has been designing. And to meet for some reason with the curator of the Antigone Institute. Circe is a ringed planet, like Saturn, except that the planet itself is terrestrial. It was the first project in the Pleiades, originally colonized in the twenty-ninth century by militant separatist neo-Feminists. Even after all this time it’s still about eighty-five percent femmes. They were first going to call the planet Lesbos, but the majority thought that was too obvious, so they decided to name it after the sorceress who turned men into pigs. This ruffled a lot of feathers at the time, but I guess the war taught people how expensive ruffled feathers can be. The name is still considered an act of open contempt or defiant patriotism, depending on who you ask.
Speaking of feathers, they’re everywhere: crests and tails and bird tattoos. Not everyone has the avian genome work that’s characteristic of the Pleiadean style, but it’s pretty prevalent. It’s like walking around inside a casino floor show.
We landed at Medea spaceport and immediately tubed out to the Antigone Institute, so we didn’t get to see much of Boleyn. That was a shame; I would have liked to spend some time there. From the Institute we could see the skyline across the bay. They’ve gone far beyond anything else I’ve seen in the use of structural free-form Lucite. Boleyn itself is completely transparent—soaring, whimsical shapes inspired by long-stemmed cocktail glasses and melted chandeliers. Suspended globs and spires are connected by airy bridges that look like they liquefied and were caught by the wind. With the rings behind it arcing up across the southern sky it’s absolutely stunning.
We’ve made so many beautiful places.
The Institute itself is housed in the dome that covered the original colony before they finished engineering the atmosphere and could live outside. It’s huge. The old service airlock has been transformed into a grand, arching entrance that leads into the main gallery—still the largest collection of bio-aesthetics in the known galaxy.
Steel had us stop in the tree-orchid grove beside the waterfall. Petals like tongues and arms and slippers, white dappled with royal, flame blending to sullen coals, stamens crowned with shocking chrome-yellow pollen: the blooms were the size of cartwheels. They waved lazily above us on ten-meter stalks as thick as my thigh, spangled with mist.
“Lys said she would meet us here.” Steel spoke above the roar of the falls. “Mo,” her new eyes were grave, “I’d like you to come with Alice and me ...” I looked at Alice. Alice looked detached. “After what happened at home—at Neuschwanstein—I think you should know ...” The rest of the crew was a study in the variety of ways one can disguise heightened interest. Marcus straightened, glanced at Steel, and was stoic. Archie studied her hands. Yuri had climbed up a few feet on the rocks around the waterfall; he adroitly extended a look at Steel into an invitation to Tamika to follow him up. Jemal was the worst at it, the most ingenuous. He had to realize that everyone else was disinterested before he found a bed of plume-flowers to give his attention to.
And then she didn’t go on. “Yuri?” she said. He looked down at Steel from the rocks. “You know where to go?”
“Sure.” Marcus glanced at him; Yuri adjusted. “Yes, Captain. I remember. I just hope they remember me.”
“What do you mean?” Steel asked.
“Well, it’s only been a couple of years for me—it’s been over three decades for everybody else.”
Steel smiled. “Yes. Lys was pleasantly surprised to hear from me. But don’t worry. I’m sure she has everyone alerted to your impending arrival. Marcus?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“You can get everything loaded?”
“I’m sure we’ll make out all right, Captain. They’ve still got a dedicated freight tube direct to Medea. Security looks good.”
“Good. Archie?”
Archie looked up from her digital studies. “I’ve already filed my reports—”
Steel tensed slightly, “Nothing about Drake.”
“No, of course not. How could I?”
She eased again. “Of course.”
“But I could use a little time to collate my notes.”
“Certainly. Would you like to go back to the ship?”
“No. I can do it here. If that’s all right.”
Steel gazed at her with that same mix of empathy, patience and determination that I had seen before. “Yes.” She looked around at everyone, “We shouldn’t be long.”
For a moment we waited for Lys to arrive and I tried to decide who to observe. My eye was drawn to Alice, her hands behind her, digging a toe into the dirt beside the tile path. When I glanced at Archie she returned my gaze, eyes filled with caution, with weariness, with the search for wisdom. Aluminum geodesics arched far above us. Macaws and Birds-of-Paradise flashed brightly through the air.
An explosion of white rounded the curve in the path and stretched her arms out toward Steel. “Well, it looks like the Flying Dutchman rounded the Horn after all!”
As they embraced I recognized her. Even so, even though it made sense that Steel would move in these circles, I still had to ask Archie, “Is that—?”
“Lysistrata-24. Yes.”
“The person who—”
“Who negotiated the Treaty of Alcyone. And signed it.”
I remembered. She had changed her style of plumage since then, but her face was unmistakable. Wow, I thought, we are playing in the big leagues now.
She took just a second to take in Steel’s new appearance and then looked around at the rest of us. Where hair might have been, white feathers sprouted. From a pronounced widow’s peak (There’s an archaic term. I wonder what it’s called now?) dazzling plumes grew into a tufted crown that erected as her facial expression brightened. The line of feathers continued down her spine, spreading into a snowy peacock’s tail five feet long. Ivory eyes the size of my palm tipped each quill. Her pubic mound was covered in a soft triangle of white down.
She smiled and her tail spread slightly. “Everyone looks like they’re holding up fairly well.” Her eyes rested on me for a moment. Wariness? Acceptance. She turned to Steel, “It was disappointing to hear that Drake decided to leave the project. He was a very good resource.” Then back to me, “But I’m glad you found someone to take over for him.”
Steel came over to me. “This is Mohandas. He’s already proven to be very valuable. To the project and to me.”
Lysistrata-24 appraised me. “Good,” she said. She took my hand, “It’s good to meet you.”
“Uh, thanks. Me, too. To meet you, I mean. It’s an honor.” How do you talk to the person who managed to end the most devastating war (psychologically as well as physically) humanity had ever fought? It was like meeting Lincoln. Or my namesake. She moved over to Alice:
“Sorry we have to put you through this again,” she said, putting an arm on her shoulder, “It must be getting rather tedious.” She smiled warmly at her.
Alice just shrugged and looked somewhere else. “It’s okay,” was all she said.
“Well.” Lysistrata-24 appraised Steel. “Shall we?”
Steel nodded and beckoned me to follow with her eyes.
>
The Institute is much more than just the Botanical Gardens, of course. It’s the largest center of learning and research outside the solar system, established right after the war. Maybe to make up for it, I don’t know.
We followed the path through the engineered gardens until we came to a Musahdi lift that carried us far above them, rising past terraced galleries and displays dedicated to various subjects—natural history, technology, medicine. There was a wonderful holographic working model of the brain based on the Farrel group’s work; it was about fifty stories tall. You could walk around inside it and follow the nerve impulse patterns.
About two hundred stories up we stepped off onto a balcony that led into the war archives. I could tell it was less visited than the lower floors. It was lonelier, sadder. It had been a war that had produced no heroes, only horrors. We passed under a large plaque that read “The War of Liberation.”
“Hmm,” I said absently, “I’d always heard it called the Pleiadean War.” Or the Feminist Insurrection, but I didn’t say that.
Lys smiled. “You must be from Draco,” she said.
A hologram filled one entire wall to our left. It was one of the early rallies in Benazir Square, in the original Boleyn—the one that had been destroyed. Thousands of women filled the square, dressed in fashions of the last millennium. They faced the huge dais backed by the colossal banner that had become so familiar on the net: the curved white raindrop of the Yin sign centered in a field of red.
Then I saw her.
“There you are!” I said, feeling like a rube as soon as the words left my mouth.
The three of them stopped and looked at the image. There was Lysistrata-24 standing on the dais, to the left and slightly upstage of Saba and Indira-3. Everyone on the platform had iridescent black plumage—but they weren’t uniform; there was a wide variation in style.
“Hmm,” Lys smiled—wistfully? No, she was too dignified to be wistful. There was regret there, though, and pain, and some residual anger. I wondered who she was angry at. “It’s hard to believe that was over a thousand years ago.”
I nodded.
“We celebrated our millennial five decades ago. It was quite a party.”
“I’ll bet.”
We moved on.
Another hologram: a wrecked spaceship on a cratered plain under a harsh, black sky. Beside it a mosaic of faces—a memorial to the four thousand men who had perished. I had to stop and listen to the docent—it was a warm, female voice:
“On September 17th, 2934, the transport Karachi lifted from Circe bound for Monde Bleu in Draco. It carried 4,022 forced male émigrés as part of Circe’s controversial gender purification program. At the time tensions between the newly formed Pleiadean Congress and Draco were very high. In July of 2934 the Congress had passed the Independent Network Act, taking the 4.3 million women of the Pleiades off the net. The Draconian High Command responded by mounting an expeditionary force that was en route to the Pleiades to ‘restore order.’ Due to a malfunction in the Circe planetary defense system, the Karachi was mistaken for a Draconian military vessel and fired upon. Severely damaged, the Karachi impacted on Circe’s largest moon, Ariadne, and all aboard were lost.”
There followed a list of names.
“That’s what started the war, wasn’t it?” I asked.
Lysistrata turned and walked back to where I was standing. She looked at the image and said, “In history it’s hard to tell where things start and stop, but the Karachi incident did lead to a hardening of positions on both sides.”
I looked at the faces.
“It was a tragedy,” she continued. “Both governments blamed the other for the wreck. Both denied responsibility.”
“But it was your responsibility, wasn’t it? I mean, not yours—the Pleiades’. Circe’s.”
“One could certainly make a case for that. We were the ones who shot them down. Of course, we wouldn’t have been so trigger-happy if Draco hadn’t sent the expeditionary force.”
“Well, yes. But—I mean, the gender purification, the—the Independent Network Act ...” I wasn’t sure I wanted to argue politics with her, but her position seemed—I don’t know ... I don’t know. Maybe I would have felt the same if I were her.
“Those were mistakes. Tactically and philosophically.” She looked at the holo for a moment more, “A lot of us were very angry back then,” then turned and walked on.
Steel wasn’t just staying silent, she was staying neutral. Her bearing was balanced, non-confrontational. Quiescent. Alice was being patient—she had the patience of the powerless—and there was embarrassment, too, as if this were all somehow her fault. Not the war, but us being there. Something.
As we penetrated farther into the archives, Lysistrata continued to speak: “You’re probably not aware of the conditions on Earth back in the mid-twenties. The things that led us to colonize Circe in the first place—”
“I remember,” I said.
“Oh?” she turned to me as we walked past holos of the war, each more horrific than the last, “you were there?”
“Not on Earth,” I answered, “but in the system.” I added, “I was married.”
“Oh.” A different ‘oh.’ She searched my eyes for a moment, “That must have been difficult.” Steel was paying close attention. Alice wasn’t. She didn’t seem to be.
“Well,” I said, “I certainly learned pretty quickly where not to use phrases like ‘my wife.’ ”
“Yes, I would imagine.”
I should have just shut up—but, oh no, not me. “If you said it around any neo-feminists, you were treated like you owned slaves.”
I’m sure she’d had this conversation with much better rhetoricians than I could ever hope to be. I guess I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to have it with me. “Mm,” she said. I plowed on anyway. I don’t know why:
“If you let it slip that she was pregnant,” strange how close to the surface my anger was—considering the number of centuries that had intervened, “they treated you like some kind of Nazi sadist.”
She accepted my anger with grace and poise, not surprising for one of the greatest diplomats in history: “It must have seemed quite unfair to someone who hadn’t been on Earth.”
All I could say was, “Yeah.”
“Did your wife bear children?”
“Hmm?” I guess my thoughts were elsewhere, on lost moments long ago. “Oh, uh, no. No. She was pregnant once but, uh, you know, it didn’t work out. She, uh ... she, um, oh—what’s the word...”
“She aborted?”
“No, no. She, ah—oh , hell, what is it?”
“She miscarried?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” I guess I laughed a little. It’s weird what will strike you funny. And when. “It’s been a long time since I heard that word.”
She looked at me with great compassion. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“What? Oh, yeah, well. Thanks. It was a long time ago.”
We passed more displays. Some relics, some holos. All pretty grisly.
“Actually, we never liked the term ‘neo-feminist,’ ” she went on, “We certainly never applied it to ourselves. The Yin were very much different from the feminists of the twentieth century.”
I asked with real interest, “Oh, yeah? How so?” I found myself wanting to make friends with her. I guess I was embarrassed for getting angry.
“Well,” she started, “for one thing, the technological issues were quite different. Feminism arose at a time of mechanical innovation. It dealt with the social ramifications of integrating women into the work force. The Yin dealt more than anything with the controversies caused by unlimited life extension.”
“Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.”
“But we also came from quite different economic backgrounds.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yes. The feminists,” she stopped for a moment to adjust a display piece, some sort of weapon, I think, “were the last in a long line of rich, privileged
people complaining that their rights were being unfairly abridged.” She looked back at me. “They were carrying on a long tradition; one that stretched back through Jefferson, Paine and Adams in the eighteenth century all the way back to the medieval English nobles who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. Wealthy people, fabulously wealthy, whether you compare them to others alive on Earth at the time or any who had lived up to that time; people with nothing to complain about, really. And yet complain they did, and quite eloquently.”
This was all way before my time—she obviously knew much more about it than I did. But it was interesting. “And the Yin?” I asked.
“Well,” she thought for a moment. “Political movements depend on communication. Back in those days fast communication was a product of wealth. The feminists arose in the rich nations of North America and Europe where communication was cheap and easy. Where life in general was easy. They worried about things like ‘glass ceilings’ and whether or not advertising exploited the female form. At the same time the ancestors of the Yin—my ancestors—were languishing in the truly wretched poverty of eastern Africa and southern Asia. Some were surgically altered to make them more faithful wives—the theory being if they couldn’t experience sexual pleasure they couldn’t be tempted by it. Others were placed in arranged marriages as early as age four to boys they had never met, then shipped off to their new families to serve—in every sense of the word—as slave labor. They were denied the most fundamental education. They had their dress, behavior and thoughts dictated to them. They had no rights to be abridged.”
I could hear the passion in her voice—and I knew about this stuff. “Yes. My—uh, my –” She seemed pretty old. Maybe she had a father, too. “My father’s people originated in northern India. They moved to South Africa under the British and then to Mars a few centuries later. He told me a lot of what had gone on.”
“Hmm,” she nodded. “Perhaps you can understand why we never felt we had much in common with anyone so rich they could afford to burn their underwear as a form of political protest.”
“The feminists burned their underwear?”
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