"Nothing profound," she said. The hand in hers belied her.
"You've been like a mother to me," the Jamaican said. "That's why I dare turn to you now."
A mother, a mother? No, a mother image. In your mind, Chris, you are an ordinary linker, I am a godlike holothete. The truth is, I've simply been an easy-going superior who gave you some advanced instruction. (You are youth and loveliness. I am agedness that suddenly is reaching-against its own will, reaching.)
Joelle felt the wind stiffen, minute by minute. She had to raise her voice: "Thank you. Ha, let's stop talking about me and attack your problem. Tell me whatever you wish, dear."
Dear.
"I've been nerving myself to this for weeks," said Chris, as if around an obstacle. "Ever since we all agreed we've accomplished enough, we can soon head home. Not that I was scared of you. I was scared of myself, afraid to look straight at the conflicts inside me. Can you help?"
"I can try."
"You, you'll recall it was jolly at first aboard ship. women and nine men applicants won top grades in tests for the crew assignments, the girls had a fine thing going for them, especially after Joelle opted out of that particular sport. Then Chi and I got serious. When he died- Juan Chichao, planetologist, went into a ravine to examine a granitic outcrop, and fell dead. Later analysis showed that plants growing there exuded a lethal gas in the heat of noontide, which an inversion layer trapped and concentrated. The Betans were heartbroken. They had had no idea. That vapor was harmless to them. Looking back, I suppose I did go a bit wild, grieving, afterward hanging around, he handled her tasks gallantly well. They were somewhat menial, too, demand for a computerman being small while the expedition endeavored to learn about an entire world. Torsten stabilized me. He's been incredibly kind, strong, thoughtful. I shudder to think what a mood drug zombie I might be by now if it weren't for him."
I could not have done that for you, could I? twisted within Joelle. Aloud: "You underrate yourself. You're healthy, you'd've recovered on your own." Reluctantly: "Still, it's obvious he gave you a large boost. You feel in his debt." I have watched you and him day by day, I have watched you hour by hour, Chris.
"I do that. When we get back to Earth, he wants to marry me."
"Why, how splendid," Joelle said automatically.
Chris gulped. "I'm in love with Dairoku."
Similar appearance to Chi's? I never thought so, but-"How does he feel?"
"I'm his good friend, respected shipmate, and enjoyed bedfellow," said Chris in a rush. "Along with Frieda, Esther, Marie, and Olga. And you'd be too, if you wanted. Since we heard of the time travel capability, he's been talking more and more about a girl he knew in Kyoto. . . . He's courteous to me, considerate, yes, I'd call him affectionate, but that. . . that's where he stops."
"Have you told him how it is with you?"
"No. Not really. The things one says on a mattress-they're discounted afterward, aren't they? Should I?"
"I'll have to think about that," Joelle said. "And then quite probably I'll guess wrong."
They tramped on. The wind loudend, the sea ramped. Clouds in the east lifted their wall higher, startlingly fast. Wrack blew off them, to scud across indigo heaven.
Chris hunched shoulders against a gathering chill. "What of Torsten?" she asked.
"You don't have to marry anybody, you know," Joelle bit off in abrupt irritation.
"Of course not. But-"
"He won't pine away. He'll find someone else after we return. Or a series of someone elses."
"Yes, to be sure. But. . - if I can't have Dai. . . do I want to let Torsten go? I'd like to tell you more about him, little things, and have you advise me what's wise. Not that I'm being totally selfish, I trust. He does love me. . . - But then, you know Dai, you and he have worked together, maintaining the engine and the jet. Maybe you can give me an idea if I might -just maybe I might-" Chris hugged Joelle's hand to her bosom.
Do not respond!
How curious are the ways of love. I doubt they are less powerful in us than in the Betans, and here they have brought history to a turning point. Joelle found strength in a rehearsal of facts.
* * *
The ancestors of the Betans were omnivores turned hunters along the coast, specialized neither for land nor water, though they could swim faster than they could run. Perhaps dexterity and intelligence were selected for when shifts in ocean currents, due to shifts in hemispheric glaciation, made for poor "fishing" but abundant game ashore, large beasts such as cold climates often favor. Eventually, fully sapient, the species spread widely, some of its members too far inland ever to visit the sea. They remained bound to the cycle of day and night.
The female was half again as big as the male, her body proportionately stouter but her limbs the same length. Thus she was more powerful, more agile in the water, but comparatively slow and awkward on land. She had four outlets for nourishing infants. You could scarcely call these teats, their structure was so different, nor call their product milk. As a rule, she bore four young in a litter, of which three were male; her equivalent of chromosomes determined the sex of offspring, not her mate's. Ova had been released one at a time over a period of some one hundred hours during breeding season, and had ordinarily been fertilized by separate partners.
This occurred about noon. Parturition came in the late afternoon of the following day, making the gestation period comparable to man's. The infants arrived, out of a compartmented womb, at intervals roughly corresponding to their conceptions. Due to the mother's size, this went more easily than for humans. She nursed them through the night, during which they grew fast, then started weaning them in the morning. While nursing she was not breedable, and she continued to give suck, diminuendo, long enough that she stayed infertile until the next midday. Hence the normal spacing of births was four Betan years, or seventeen Terrestrial months.
In primitive milieus, the mother was handicapped ashore, yet must remain there to care for the young during the initial night of their lives. Her mates-three, on the average-usually brought in food, while she worked around the rookery or camp and guarded it. (Betan eyes have superb dark adaptation.) As marriage customs developed, they naturally took a polyandrous form.
Perhaps because of infrequent sexual intercourse, as well as the somatic disparity, inherent psychomental differences between male and female became much clearer on Beta than on Earth. The former tended strongly to be aggressive, inventive, handy, abstraction-minded, but not very creative in those arts that appeal directly to the emotions. The latter tended to be staid, persistent, ruthless at need, practical-minded, but artistic, with a feeling for the living world that males could never quite fathom. Nearly all societies were matriarchal, and the Great Mother was the religious archetype.
This was the case because of the means of bonding, which kept parents together and thus assured proper care of the slowly maturing young. In man, it was year-round libido. In the Betan, concupiscence was if anything a disruptive force, rousing passions that could prove uncontrollable. Many institutions in many distinct cultures evolved to keep a wife in heat the exclusive partner of her husbands and to protect the virtue of a daughter.
Rather than permanent low-grade rut, nature on Beta used nutrition to weld male to female. Besides nursing their babies, she nursed him.
Garbling a single word (there were thousands) for the fluid she produced, Emissary's scientists called it enin, and the process of its production they called enination. Enin fed sucklings of either sex. It also contained a hormone which promoted their growth- and was essential to the health and vigor of the adult male. He needed only small quantities, and tapping them from her gave him such intense pleasure that soon he was sated; but he must come back several times per planetary rotation. (She enjoyed being tapped, though for her the sensations were mild and diffuse.) In this way the normal female was sure of retaining her spouses.
At breeding time she went dry. The pheromone she then gave off incited her mates to lust. A
t the end of the period they were famished. When, early in pregnancy, she resumed limited enination, it was an occasion of joy, the highest feast of numerous faiths.
This direct dependence generally gave males a sense of mystery and awe about females. In some areas the sexes even formed two distinct sub-societies, with separate laws, rituals, and languages; the common "tongue" might be a pidgin.
Universally, a basic unit was the husbands of a given wife, together with adolescent sons. They were supposed to form an indissoluble fraternity. Of course, in practice this could fail. Bachelorhood was everywhere rare, requiring outrageous sorts of prostitution, and homosexuality unheard of. After civilizations grew sophisticated and cosmopolitan, efforts increased to make the sexes-not "equal," which was hardly thinkable-but more closely integrated.
As on Earth, the state eventually appeared, both sedentary (along the fortunate seashores) and nomadic (in the grim continental interiors). As on Earth, it brought forth public works, wars, conquests, enslavements, tyrannies, corruptions, decline and fall. Also as on Earth, it was the agent of considerable material and intellectual progress.
Yet no Betan state was really comparable to any Terrestrial one. The heads were invariably female-a monarch might be proclaimed divine-and kept male combativeness curbed. Family structure preserved their subjects from being mobilized into machine-like armies or atomized into anomie. Furthermore, given access to the sea, any healthy person could live by old-fashioned marine hunting, and so swim away from oppression. Accordingly, most nations were either quietist and tradition-bound, or active but rational. Their imperialistic ventures were usually for well defined objectives, and ceased when these had been attained.
On the whole, then, Betan history, with its ups and downs, was less harrowing than Terrestrial. On the other hand, private violence between males was commoner.
At last came a scientific-industrial revolution. It brought its hazards and disasters, but never passed as near the abyss as did Earth's, in large part because it took place quite gradually in these conservative, female-dominated civilizations with their strong environmentalistic ethics. In the long run, though, it changed the character of Betan life more thoroughly than Earth's changed the human condition.
This came about through biological science, which had been favored above physics. Researchers learned how to synthesize the key hormone in enin.
Upheaval did not come overnight. Countervailing forces were custom, habit, religion, law; emotions, including those associated with tapping; recurrent sexuality; desire for progeny. Nonetheless, now males could live apart from females for as long as they chose, and stay hale.
Young individuals started postponing marriage and seeking mates who would be more than pragmatically suitable. For the first time, Beta saw an analogue of romantic love. Meanwhile the mystique surrounding the female in the male mind (and often in her own) began to dissipate.
Some males turned celibate in order to explore-explore Beta and the neighbor planets, science, philosophy, achievement. Monastic orders were founded. Extreme idealism engendered fanaticism, with all that that entailed. A larger number of males simply realized they were free to go as far as they wished into areas like engineering, for which the matriarchs had had sharply limited enthusiasm. A high-energy industry came into being and proliferated.
By no means did the revolution take place in a single convulsion. Thoughtful individuals of both sexes worked to contain it. One result was world government. Another was space travel. Since much of the ancient reverence for life, embodied in the female, remained, it came natural to direct the new technology outward, where it could not harm the mother planet but would, rather, bring in new resources.
Free enterprise, in a human sense, had never existed here. As if to compensate, war and similar follies had always, by human standards, occurred on an incredibly small scale. The world state had ample reserves for a space program.
Soon Betans discovered the T machine orbiting Centrum, exactly opposite their planet. In the next ten centuries, with vast effort and patience, they found guidepaths through a hundred separate star gates; they colonized half a dozen uninhabited globes; they met a score of other intelligent races, learned from them, and thereby enriched beyond measure their own civilization.
But at the same time, the foundations of that civilization were being eroded away, ever faster. The biological revolution went far more slowly than anything that important would have gone through mankind; still, it went, inexorably. While males, having overcome their physical dependence on females, were generation by generation losing their spiritual dependence as well, chemistry made controllable the reproductive cycle. A female could be in heat or not as she chose, whenever she chose.
The psychological effects of this were at once liberating and devastating. The primordial harmony with sun and stars was no more-or was, at most, a matter of conscious decision. If she entered a hitherto masculine field like spacefaring, she had to settle not just her working relationships, but the question of her identity, who and what she truly was. She never quite succeeded. Confusion and embitterment spread, also to those who stayed home. Too often sexuality became a weapon.
Prophets, philosophers, and common folk alike sought after a viable, satisfying new ideal. The example of alien sentiences, the knowledge that the Others existed, made their quests doubly intense, their disappointments doubly agonizing.
When Emissary arrived, the psychosexual dilemma had brought Beta to a crisis. Restlessness, eccentricity, mental illness, crime, tumult were steeply on the rise. No matter how busy, prosperous, interested in what they were doing, few of the more fortunate were altogether happy, and in many the sadness underlay their whole beings.
Some actually urged using time travel to abort the entire development of science; but if nothing else, this was impossible because no path was known which would fetch a ship out at Centrum very far in the past, nor did it seem likely that any could be found. Proposals heard much more often, that the race go "back to nature" by an act of will, were equally quixotic. Without modern technology, nearly the whole population, belike the whole species, must die; and that technology could only be run by the sexually emancipated. There was nowhere to go but forward. . . in what direction, though?
Then Emissary arrived.
As communication improved, year by year, excitement waxed among the more discerning Betans. What had been an intriguing academic project took on a gigantic significance. These bipeds were not simply a new type of sophonts. They were by birthright what the Betans were struggling to become.
Their sexual pattern occurred in several breeds elsewhere, but there too many differences existed as well, too profound, affecting too much the forms that it took. (For instance, one race, winged, was perpetually migratory, around and around its world. None of its institutions, mores, attitudes, beliefs were adaptable to surface dwellers.) Humans, despite every divergence, had a basic likeness to their hosts. Proof lay in the affinities which developed between individuals of the two kinds.
From scientific study, from literature, from friendship, Betans could hope to learn what it meant to be that kind of male and female, and how to be it. This would not happen in a single generation or a single century; what insight was gained might take a thousand years to transform civilization; the end result would surely be no copy, but uniquely Betan. Yet here could well be an approach to understanding. The lodestar for which so many had searched for so long, blind in their pain, could well be Sol.
Fidelio had begged it of Joelle: "Teach us your ways of love."
Neither she nor Christine paid close heed to the weather. Sunset gales were sometimes dangerous, but Centrum was Earth-days above the horizon. Besides, those winds came out of the west. Rain this early was unusual but welcome, lifting the heat. If any fell, afterward their clothes and footgear would quickly dry. They walked on bearing their private storms.
But at last Chris drew the older woman to her, for else the air would have ripped the words from
her mouth: "I say, don't you think we'd better head back?"
Joelle looked around. The sky was inky. Lightning forked, thunder banged. Gray rags of cloud flew beneath. Spindrift blew stinging off a sea that reared, trampled, crashed, exploding its darkness into white foam-bursts, grinding the shingle together with a noise as of mighty millstones. She could not see far, but to the end of sight, bushes moved in brown, gold, red waves; trees were flailing; torn-off leaves and fronds whipped past, away into murk. The wind roared and yelled. It closed around her and thrust like a chill, turbulent billow, like the solar tidal bore that had drowned Alexander Vlantis. And still it strengthened.
"Yes," she called. "Shelter in the car. Not try to lift before this is over."
They turned about. Now the rain smote, first in spears, then in axes, then in a hammer whose single stroke went on and on forever. It torrented over the hard-baked soil, clutching at feet, until that began to dissolve in mud. The women slipped, fell, crawled half erect, clung to each other for help, and staggered on. The tempest filled Joelle's skull with blast, shriek, yowl. Thunder shook her bones.
This is impossible! a walled-off part of her cried. In eight Terrestrial years, twenty-five Betan, we've met nothing of this kind before evening. . . never!
The holothete within her responded passionlessly: What are twenty-five years in the duration of a world? Given sufficient time, anything that can happen will happen. Probably a massive cold front, sliding down from the arctic on a freakish path, has driven the terminator storms ahead of it. You should have checked a meteorological report before you left. But do not feel guilty. Only when you are in rapport with your machine can you think of everything.
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