Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  I put my arm around her. I think she needed the contact. She leaned her head on my shoulder as she said, “You have to understand, Mo, the war ... the war was horrible. Horrifying. Women had never started a war before. It became vital to our ... our image of ourselves that we hadn’t started this one.”

  I remembered talking with Lysistrata-24 as we walked through the archives on Circe, “It’s pretty hard to say who actually started the war—” I think I was trying to make her feel better.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she cut me off, “It doesn’t matter who fired the first shot.” She turned to me. “We had created our own culture, our own nation. A purely feminine nation. No men in government, no men in any positions of power. We were in the process of deporting all men, purging ourselves of what we called ‘masculine energy.’ But even so, the first time we came into conflict with another human organization, another nation, it devolved into violence and destruction. We failed to avoid war. We failed to prevent it.”

  I rubbed her shoulder. “As the saying goes, you were only human. Preventing a war is a lot harder than it looks.” I was starting to understand. It was tragic, but I think I was starting to understand. “So ... so you went to Eden to ... to validate your—”

  “We went to Eden with our own set of prejudices.” She shook her head. “Maybe I should have ... Drake had lived on Circe for centuries. He worked right there at the Institute.”

  “The Antigone—?”

  “Yes. Maybe I should’ve used someone else. I thought it would be enough that he was a man, but ... but Drake agreed with me on everything. We were, we were simpatico, tuned into each other. Maybe I should have gotten someone from Draco, from Earth, maybe, or someone like you. Someone who had a different perspective, a different agenda. A different bias.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “When Steel wanted to save the children— Listen to me. ‘Save the children.’ ” She laughed, “We wanted to save them from dying. The Edenites wanted to save them from not dying.” Memories returned to her, touched her, softened her. “John just wanted Steel to be happy. His ‘wife.’ ” It was painful to hear her say the word ‘wife.’ She said it like it had been said to me so many times back when I was married. Like the very idea of having a wife was contemptible, pathetic. “ ‘Estelle,’ ” she said, in the same tone. “It was almost comical. Her name was like some mystical song to him, yet he put her through childbirth.”

  I tried to swallow whatever bile was rising up in me. After all, it had been a long time since I’d been married. But I couldn’t keep silent. The anger slipped out, “You might want to curb your judgment. Unless you’ve actually been in that situation.”

  “Situation?”

  “Married. To someone you love. Who loves you. It’s not really something you can look at from the outside and understand what’s going on. Isn’t that why you went to Eden in the first place? To try to understand that stuff? It sounds like you pre-judged a lot more than who causes wars.”

  She looked at me, then looked at the deck. “I don’t know. Maybe so. We tried, Mo, we really did. I tried, but I was a product of my culture, too.” Something made her sad, ashamed. “In the end, he just wanted her to get what she wanted.” She shuddered at a memory, “But none of us, none of us gave even a thought to what John might have wanted.” I could tell she was recalling conversations, confrontations that had taken place years ago. “It wasn’t, it wasn’t just that we knew the children would die if they stayed there with him. It was,” she looked at her lap and shook her head again, “it was that he was male. A man. We simply assumed his desires would spring from ... I don’t know ... from baser instincts, more primitive, more, more violent, possessive instincts. We just dismissed them. They didn’t enter into the discussion at all. If he brought them up I don’t think we even noticed.” She looked at me: alone, lonely, maybe, or maybe bereft. “We just rode over him. We rode over him. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would.” Then with renewed passion, “It was because it was a male dominated society. We thought that Eden’s whole ethos and mores were somehow more primitive than ours because it was a male dominated—”

  “How can you keep saying that?” I asked. “What makes you think that Eden’s society was male dominated?”

  “Well, it’s obvious—”

  “I saw how it worked. I was there. Men and women went to Eden to build a civilization. They built it and shaped it for the benefit of their children. Men and women. Their decisions and attitudes and everything they did shaped their society for the benefit of children, not the benefit of men.”

  “Perhaps, but men still benefited.”

  “You talk like men built their culture all by themselves. What did the women do for the last thousand years, just sit around wishing things were different?”

  “Mo, men have ways of dominating—”

  “You think women are the only people men try to dominate? We try to dominate each other as well. You could write a history of humanity as a series of events where men stood up to other men who were trying to dominate them.” I remembered the newbies on Valhalla, fighting alongside them. “Stood up to them and fought them for what they thought was right. Risked injury, risked, risked death, risked everything. Are you trying to tell me that women don’t have the courage to do that? What, men are aggressive and women are cowards? Is that your position?”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I understand. I just don’t agree with you. It isn’t about being dominated. It isn’t about being intimidated. My— my— the man I’m named after kicked the most powerful empire on Earth out of his country. Without firing a shot. It isn’t about being big or small, strong or weak, loud or soft. People shape their world by the things they do,” surprising tears came to my eyes for the things I had done, “and the things they fail to do.”

  “Mo, men have held the reins of power throughout most of history. They’re responsible for almost all of—”

  “You remind me of the old days. The old days. Back then everybody looked for a group of people they didn’t belong to and then blamed everything on them. Conservatives, anarchists, pacifists, Hindus, patriots, conservationists, women, men—anybody you weren’t was at fault, was the problem, was what was wrong with the world. It’s awfully easy to look at something you don’t like and decide it was made by somebody else.”

  Archie thought about this for a long time before she said, “So ... so you’re saying that, that women had as much voice in creating the civilization on Eden as men?”

  “I saw their voice everywhere. In their families, in their businesses, in how wealth is distributed, how power is used—”

  “Okay. Okay, I think I see what you’re saying, but,” she looked at me and I could see her scientific curiosity was engaged, “do you think—I mean, I mean, wouldn’t that mean that women also had an equal voice in creating the original civilizations on Earth?”

  “I don’t know,” I threw up my hands, “I know the feminists didn’t think so, but ... but what’s the alternative, Arch? That for thousands of years women just cowered in the corner afraid that men might be mean to them if they spoke their minds? Are women as courageous as men? As brave? As willing to risk violent reprisal, injury, death to stand up for what they believe? For what they think is just and right? Men did that over and over again. They threw off their oppressors or they died trying. Are you saying that women were too timid or, or too weak to do that? To even try? My wife was one of the most courageous human beings I’ve ever known. My—my mo—my mo—god DAMN it!” Every time I ran into the concept of my maternal parent I had no word. The word I had wasn’t the word I wanted, wasn’t the word I needed. I shook my head and went on, “If you’re courageous enough to be willing to risk everything you have, everything you are, you can’t be dominated by anyone, not for long. Certainly not for thousands and thousands of years.”

  “But, but—” I could see her chewing on the problem, “but why—? Why wo
uld women help create a culture where men had all the power?”

  I shook my head. “Well, I guess the answer to that question depends on how you define ‘power.’ Do you think women don’t have any power on Eden? Was Louise ‘dominated’ by John? What about Mrs. Fogarty’s daughter and her husband? You know, the couple that ran the boarding house? You think he dominated her? It seemed to me like he just kept his head down and tried to stay out of the line of fire.”

  Arch thought about that for a while. Then she said, “So you’re saying that, that men had some kinds of power and women had other kinds of power and it all sort of balanced out?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not about power. Maybe the reason women never threw off their oppressors is because they didn’t think they were being oppressed. Maybe a woman who was married to a man who spent his whole life down a coal mine trying to support his family didn’t think the man was a chauvinist pig, even though he didn’t want her to have to work down there with him. Maybe everybody was just doing the best they could. I can’t, I can’t tell you what ancient Earth was like—I’m not that old—but that’s the way it looked to me on Eden. It seemed to me that women had lots of power and men had lots of power and there was an ongoing conversation about how that power would be used. But it was always, always ultimately decided by what was perceived to be best for their children. Always.”

  Archie considered this for a long time before she said, “I’ll have to think about this. It’s an interesting perspective. I’ll ... I’ll have to think about it.”

  I laughed and shook my head, “Actually, it was children that I originally wanted to talk to you about. I mean, before we got, you know, side-tracked.”

  “Children?”

  “Yeah. Our captain’s children.”

  “What ... what about them?”

  I considered my words carefully. I wanted to understand what had happened, why it had happened, and at that moment I was feeling closer to Archie than I ever had. Her ability to perceive her own prejudice, her own bias, was very reassuring to me. We’d been through a lot together—she’d nursed me back to health at Neuschwanstein, I’d helped get her down the escarpment on Eden—but I don’t think I’d actually trusted her until that moment. Her relationship with Steel was obviously very complex. It was hard to say who was calling the shots and when. And what I wanted to discuss was delicate, had always been delicate back to the beginnings of the craft of human conversation. I finally said, “The thing I can’t understand is how. How could Steel get pregnant? Where did she get the eggs? Unless I’m completely off the mark she has to be several centuries past menopause. And unless rich people are completely different from everybody else, she had her eggs harvested before she hit puberty anyway.”

  Archie didn’t say anything for a while. When she did speak she was very careful about what she said. “Steel is very ... um ... wealthy ... I don’t think I want to— That is, I think I’d prefer you get this information from her. We ... we had some profound, um, profound disagreements on ... on how to best, uh, proceed.” She smiled at me, “I’m sorry. This probably isn’t helping very much, is it?”

  “Not really,” I smiled back, “except for the part about her being wealthy, which I think I already knew.” I looked at my hands and wondered. What would I have done had I been Steel? What would I have done had I been an incredibly wealthy, powerful, female human being faced with the opportunity, the challenge, of traveling to a place like Eden? To travel back in time to a previous epoch, as alien to us as anything I could imagine. What would I have done? I couldn’t get Archie to say anything more about it.

  Chapter 29

  On black velvet: five jewels sparkled beside an immense jade dome. Plato Park, its geometric components hewn and polished, tumbled metallic in low orbit above the aquamarine hemisphere of New Moorea. The tiny moonlets, works of art in themselves and far too small to produce significant gravity, would not be visited directly by the Lightdancer or any starship. A small fleet of spherical shuttles, gaudy bubbles in primary colors powered only by Musadhi graviton impellers, communicated between the moons and any visitors. They also served to carry laborers, material and supplies up from and down to the surface of the planet.

  One was carrying us toward an unfinished, nickel-iron icosahedron. Through the panoramic view port of our shuttle we could see it rotating slowly, miniature in the distance, beyond its polished companions. Triangles faceted one third of the moon, the remainder was still pitted and cratered. Yuri’s friend Eddie had agreed to meet us in his workshop on this final piece of his homage to Platonic idealism.

  He would not meet all of us. As always, when the Lightdancer was in space, one of us—in this case a very special one of us—stayed behind, floating in the habitation module as the ship fell around New Moorea. The image of her tousled hair drifting around her face as she bade us goodbye was engraved on my memory.

  We gazed into infinite blackness as geometry rolled toward us. What was diminutive for moons was colossal for sculpture: jewels grew to toys, to houses, to mountains: a tetrahedral pyramid with edges four kilometers long swelled toward us, loomed over us, fell past us, lit the awe in our faces with silver light glinting off endless planes, endless plains. We fell into the garden.

  She should see this, I thought. She might not get another chance. She should get a chance to see everything. No one gets to see everything, but she should get a chance, she should get a chance—

  The next moon, cubical, was even larger, but scale was beyond comprehension, distance ungraspable. Each square face was vaster than a small county: perfect, featureless, mirroring the bottomless cosmos or the watery surface of New Moorea or the blinding fire of its star as the mirrors turned. The absurd afterthought of the microscopic bubble in which we traveled drifted past, affecting nothing.

  “I wish Alice would have come.” Steel was worrying, as I was, as I suppose we all were. Her features were lit from below by control panel displays. Ham was strapped in beside her, hairy arms wafting in microgravity. That had been a problem. Ever since we’d heard that Krupp was back online Steel kept Ham with her always, but he could only be in one place at a time.

  The conversation before we’d left the Lightdancer had been short and confrontational. Alice was getting tired of all the fuss over her and she was going to do what she was going to do, Steel’s concerns notwithstanding. Someone had to stay aboard the ship; Alice elected herself for the job. Well, at least Ham would stay with her. NO! She didn’t need Ham to stay with her. She would be FINE. She just wanted to be alone for a little while. OKAY?

  That sort of thing.

  So Alice was alone, unprotected, floating around on a starship falling through space and somewhere in that same space was a hypertrophied body-builder with anger management problems and I couldn’t do a damned thing about any of it.

  “Alice will be all right,” Arch offered, but it landed on barren ground. Where Steel had once seemed merely unattainable, she was now unavailable. Under siege from Krupp or from her own emotions, we couldn’t tell. Her communication with us had become terse and barely functional. I knew she was grieving. I don’t know what the rest of the crew thought.

  Take the great pyramid at Giza and make it twice the height of Everest. Mate it to its twin—base to base. Polish each face mirror-smooth with just the faintest hint of the swirls of interior geology marring the surfaces. The third monolith, an octahedron, tumbled toward us gigantically, overwhelmingly. We slid past an apex unnoticed.

  “Your friend must be quite a guy,” I said to Yuri, staring up or out or down at mind-altering mathematics.

  “Eddie’s a maniac. I like him,” Yuri replied. “This stuff is pretty wacked, even for him. I think he’s trying to get over a girlfriend or something. I haven’t really talked to him in a while. You know, talked.”

  “Well, he’s kept himself busy.”

  “Yeah.”

  The fourth sculpture, faces pentagonal, rolled toward us like a fantastic gaming piece,
a cosmic twelve-sided die. Blank, unreadable, it told us neither our future nor our past. It was ordered perfection in the chaos of night, serene, knowing, but not speaking. Like so many gods before it, it left us to our own devices, hoping for the best.

  As we silently swam through the ether toward the final movement in this celestial opus, the spiritual symmetry of our surroundings caressed us, entered us, coaxed us toward tranquility, balance. But we would not succumb. We couldn’t. We were on a quest, all of us, together. Wounded, perhaps, broken in ways, but still bound to a course we would not turn from. Balance was our enemy, dissonance our ally. We needed to keep toppling forward, always forward toward our goal. I looked around at all of us and wondered what I had been like before Steel found me. Could I even remember?

  It all came back to Alice. Worries gnawed at me. Unknowns multiplied exponentially as our distance from her grew. Even so, I could understand her resistance to our concern. What a hassle! What a hassle to be that important to people, so important that they constrained your choices in the name of keeping you safe. Keeping her safe, her eyes and her smile and her hands that never quite knew where to go. Keeping her safe.

  “How’s that arm working?” Yuri asked Arch.

  Archie flexed and twisted the smooth machinery that Yuri had manufactured for her on the ship—certainly not as good as a cloned arm, but better than nothing. “It’s amazingly graceful,” she said. “Elegant. A little heavy, though. I’m having trouble getting used to my new center of gravity. Throws me off balance sometimes.”

  “Sorry. It was the best I could do—”

  “Oh, I’m not complaining. It’s kind of wonderful. I just have to get used to it, that’s all.” She examined it as though it were magical, unreal. No one had seen a prosthetic in centuries. Was it significant to her that a man had made it for her? A male? No, that was unfair to her. She had seen; she had understood. She hadn’t been on the net on Eden, hadn’t been able to meld with John Cheatham. He had been alien to her. She had felt threatened, afraid, surrounded by strange, unpredictable beings that were different from her. Was that bigotry? Or just xenophobia? Anyway, she had seen.