Next we watched women swim in the coral lake that formed one side of the amphitheater, their bodies assuming different angles in an ever-changing variety of graceful strokes.
“Terpsichorean swimming,” Megan said as I gazed in pleasure.
“Skin pigmentation varies so among all the women,” I remarked. “Are some differences due to atmospheric factors?”
“No,” she answered, “purely genetic. Many of us come from various racial backgrounds and when we gene-select for our births we do not interfere with this. We enjoy all the differentiations among us. Genetic change is of great concern to us on this new world and we do continuous genetic analysis, especially on those born here. Diana says that if changes occur it may be only after several generations.”
She touched a key. “The pentathalon is beginning. The blonde girl you saw earlier is Cytheria, one of our finest pentathletes.”
This event was taking place so close to us that I looked up from the holograph to see Cytheria running with long fluid strides, crystal javelin poised; then the taut bracing of her nude golden body, the smooth powerful throw; then her steps—delicate, dancing—her body teetering, leaning perilously forward with the force of her throw, her eyes fixed on the glittering flight until her implement struck and stood quivering in the earth as applause swelled around us.
I murmured, “May I see that again on the holograph?”
“I also would like to see her again,” Megan said.
We followed her through all her events, leap-and-vault, ten-kilometer run, skim-discus, five-kilometer swim. She was a feast to my eyes, she above all her nine glorious competitors, my absorption in her scarcely distracted by Vesta’s serving of another feast, for the palate—a lavish tray of delectable bite-size morsels, no two alike, and a lovely complementing wine.
The pentathalon events concluded and Megan declared, “Cytheria will receive the victor’s award. She has undoubtedly won.”
I asked happily, “What has she won?”.
“A garland. Fashioned of crown-shaped leaves from a most regal tree that grows in profusion far north of us. She’ll wear it with pride at the fete tonight and be celebrated by all of us, she and all the athletes.”
The marathon had begun, a fifty kilometer run over a grueling course laid out in the foothills, with several hundred women of greatly disparate age competing. “This is the best time to show you Cybele,” Megan told me. “The dynamics and challenges of the marathon are fascinating, but the event is several hours in duration.”
We made an unobtrusive exit. Megan smiled at my frown of concern as we took a hovercraft near the entrance. “These craft are our main means of local transportation and we have a great many. None belongs to anyone. Someone may take the one we came in.”
We landed in what I soon learned was the main square of Cybele. As Megan assisted me from the hovercraft my eyes were taken by an immense mural forming one entire curving side of the square. The figure of a woman stood next to an EV in waist-high grass—a heroic figure with raised head and proud straight shoulders, confident and splendid in a white shirt and black pants, standing with hands on her hips, her dark hair tousled and blowing in the wind, her eyes of emerald . . .
Megan did not speak nor did I. For some time I gazed at what I knew to be the depiction of the landing upon Maternas, without necessity for asking its subject, the woman who stood beside me with white shirt susurrous in the light breezes of this fine warm day. Finally I looked away to the structures carved from the foothills forming Cybele’s main square, buildings simple in design and apparently purely functional. My eyes followed the curves of hills upward, taking in a labyrinth of dwellings, glazed and burnished jewels in the sunlight, long balconies and rock bridges interconnecting the whole into a unity of great delicacy and beauty.
I asked in amazement, “Do all of you live here?”
“Most. Some live beside lakes and streams nearby, like Vesta and Carina. Several dozens are scattered all over Maternas, preferring to live in isolation and seeing the rest of us only occasionally.”
“How many of you are there?”
“In fifteen years we have increased from four to ten thousand. I’m currently occupied with the design of a new colony, necessary because of our growth. It will be on the coast not far from here. We have decided to call it Kendra.”
“I know of her,” I said softly. “Minerva showed me some of your history. She was a very great woman.”
“Yes. She was.”
Still I gazed at Cybele, stunned by the artful, symmetrical, logical design of it. “Who created this?”
“It is my basic design. Colony design was my specific training on Earth. But all of us worked to create it.”
“Is there anything you do not do well?” I murmured, looking at her.
Again there was shyness in her eyes, but her smile was pleased. “Let me show you our council chambers.”
“What form of government do you have?” I inquired as we walked toward this structure.
She answered first with a chuckle; then said, “Very little. We believe each of us is the best judge of her own interests. We place highest value on self-reliance, privacy, respect for each other, and instinctively we oppose authority, uniformity, any kind of fixity . . .”
I was listening with concentration, trying to absorb her words along with my surroundings. The essential element in the massive main room of the council chambers was simplicity—in the pillars and walls and all of the furnishings: a long crystal table, smaller tables apparently for discussion groups, functional chairs. Soft grays and blues and greens were conducive to reflection; no bright color intruded, no cleverness of line distracted the eye.
“. . . Our primary function is simply protection of the colony,” Megan was saying, “and preventing any individual from interfering with another, which happens even in a rationally based society . . .”
Then my attention was taken entirely from her words. Between two pillars stood a life-size sculpture, ivory-colored, smooth and warm, sensuously carved, of two slender nude women coming together in embrace; they leaned toward each other on tiptoe, one’s hands clasping the other’s shoulders, one’s hands circling the other’s waist. Their small lovely breasts were just lightly touching at the nipples; their parted lips were also just lightly touching . . .
I gazed at the sculpture, struck by the grace and tenderness of the two figures. Then I became aware that Megan had stopped speaking and was observing me.
“Are you displeased?” she asked as I looked at her.
“Displeased?” I repeated in surprise. Then I realized that I hadn’t felt any sense of shock or even slight discomfort at the sculpture; I had simply enjoyed its aesthetics.
“I should have remembered,” she said apologetically. “There is much public art in Cybele that celebrates the love among us. But the art in these rooms where only the adults assemble—”
“Let’s go on,” I said firmly, and asked as we walked, “Since you don’t have formal government, you must have laws, surely?”
“We have a Central Code and a yearly vote to determine if any part of it needs to be changed, and—”
I halted before a huge painting, its background the soft coral hues of this planet, its foreground a woman with dusky skin and burnished black hair, her nude body voluptuous, her mouth avid on the full breast of a slender blonde who lay arched, arms flung up and concealing her face, luminous thighs parted, pale hair curling up around the dark cupped hand and fingers that lay curled intimately within.
Disconcerted, I walked on, and blurted the first question that came to mind: “Do you have courts? There must be criminal acts here, even occasionally.”
“We have occasional . . . errors in judgment or deed—which need to be atoned for. Then we have an informal tribunal composed of six, chosen by lot to decide the nature of the atonement.”
I’d noticed that she remained curiously undisturbed by the art which had had so opposite an effect on me. Perhaps she had
simply grown accustomed to it. “Minerva tells me that you have no arbiters to settle disputes among you when your . . . Joinings are dissolved.”
She said quietly, “We have no equivalent of divorce arbiters or courts. We recognize no contract between two people arising from passion or sentiment. And most disputes are caused by property considerations, and we have no transferring of property here, no bequeathing of it. There is too much on this world for all of us to share.”
She led me to a series of small enclaves. “These are areas for individual contemplation, for those who wish a period of solitude before they assist with the decisions of our world.”
I walked into one of the enclaves, into a blending of soft warm whites through deep grays, the colors of the mind, I thought, just before the drifting into sleep. There was a piece of sculpture in this room, smooth curves of silver; and I gazed at it for a long moment before I realized that it was two women, featureless and with highly stylized limbs, bound together in a passionate knot of consummation. I stared at the inextricably twined limbs and said with a smile, “Is that physically possible?”
Megan was also looking at it, hands on her slim hips; she cocked her head to one side and said seriously, “Zandra’s interweaving of arms and legs needs some deciphering, but the physical position is possible.” She added with a grin, “With a considerable degree of athletic ability.”
Laughing, we walked on, into a high-vaulted chamber of small interconnected rooms well lighted and with lumiscreens and other optiscan equipment.
“This is a most interesting place,” Megan told me. “It was designed by me but constructed under the direct supervision of Minerva. It houses all knowledge we accumulated to bring with us, all that we’ve acquired since coming here. It’s an electronic-storage historical archive, but Minerva chooses to call it . . . a library.”
She led me to an inner room warmed by fire-grottoes and covered floor to curved ceiling with rows of objects I had seen only in old films and photographs. She said, “Minerva has revived the ancient art of bookbinding. Only in the past few years has she had the time. She and Christa have taught themselves penmanship, have taught it as well to several of our children who expressed enthusiasm for learning it.”
“May I look at . . . a book?” I spoke the word with reverence.
She hesitated, then chose. “This is poetry by Selene, one of the Inner Circle I never knew, she died many years ago. Before we came here we acquired a number of rare works, some with great difficulty—they had been suppressed for hundreds of years. Such as this newly bound book of poetry by a legendary woman named Sappho.”
I held the books in my hands with awe, first hefting them, then staring at shaped print I’d never seen in such form in a lifetime of lumiscreens. “You must come here very often,” I said, returning each book carefully to its shelf, knowing I would implore Minerva for permission to return.
“Seldom,” Megan murmured, “I lack the time, and must do my reading by lumiscreen.” She took down a large book which lay upon its own shelf, the cover of rich coral and gold brocade. “In this book Minerva records by hand our Joinings.”
Again I stared, the first time I had ever seen interconnected writing thus formed. Megan turned back pages to find the entry:
Christa and Minerva
Joined in their Love
1.11.26
“How wonderful,” I whispered, deeply moved. “How very beautiful.”
She closed and returned the book to its shelf. “There are other books,” she said, “which record our births. And our deaths.”
Reluctant to leave, I gazed behind me as she led me from the room.
“Let’s go into the adults’ discussion room,” she said. “Zandra’s latest sculpture is there and Minerva tells me it’s magnificent. I haven’t had the . . .”
Her voice trailed off and she stood rooted as did I in the entryway of a room whose contents I didn’t see; my eyes were riveted to the figures on a fleece-covered platform between two permanently burning torches.
Compelled, I walked toward the sculpture. The heat that slowly rose to my face had nothing to do with the firelight that played over the two golden figures, one standing, one kneeling. The standing figure had risen to the balls of her feet, slim legs apart and rigidly braced, slender body arched, head flung back so that the curve of throat was full and the shoulder-length hair hung suspended; her arms fell straight down from her shoulders, the tendons in her hands revealing tension as the frozen tension of her features revealed her rapture. Her body seemed both to yearn toward the figure kneeling to her and to strain away, as if to delay the greater ecstasy to come from the lover who fiercely clasped her hips, the fingers of both hands deeply sunk into the soft flesh. Tendons stood out on the kneeling woman’s wrists, her arms, across her shoulders, down her neck; her eyes were half-lidded in a face austere in its hunger, and she stared in her own rapture between the parted thighs as if straining, herself, not to end this moment before she would press her lover forward the final distance onto her waiting mouth, her tongue.
Waves of heat continued to pass through me as I stood hypnotized by the two rapturous figures. Never had I dreamed that eroticism could be so purely and powerfully captured in stone. Megan, I eventually saw, was also transfixed, her color heightened. She had perhaps become accustomed to the other art we had seen, but she now appeared as stunned as I.
Our fixation on the work broke simultaneously; and without a word we left the room. And I realized as we emerged from the council chambers into sunlight that I hadn’t seen any other contents of that room Megan had called the adults’ discussion room . . .
After a while I spoke into the bemused silence between us, asking about the subject of so much interest to me. “The children here, may I see one of their schools?”
Megan landed the hovercraft on a wide grassy knoll overlooked by rock homes built high in the hills. Three-sided structures were laid out over the knoll, seeming casually built, almost haphazard in placement. We strolled across the grass which was strewn with playthings and held the presence of children so strongly that I could almost hear their laughter.
Megan gestured to the structures. “Of course our children are all at the games today. Our classrooms, such as they are, are open always to surrounding playgrounds. We begin teaching in infancy, as soon as awareness begins, but at every age our children play constantly in full development of their physical capacity, in the full joy of childhood.”
“Minerva tells me that all of you have opportunities to contribute your experience, your presence.” I asked, smiling, “Is Megan also required to contribute her presence?”
“No woman on this world enjoys doing so more than I.”
This answer was given with such simple honesty, the voice contained such effort to hold its even tone, that I turned away from this proud and gifted woman so that she would not see my anguish at her loneliness.
She helped me into the hovercraft. “There is one other place I would like you to see,” she said softly. “We have enough time. I must be back at the games in fifteen minutes.”
She’d made this statement without a glance at the placement of the suns or at any chronometer. I asked, “How do you know what time it is?”
“I always know, even asleep. An inner clock tells me.”
Bleakly I wondered if anyone had ever broken through that solid wall of discipline to cause her to forget what time it was, however briefly.
The hovercraft soared high over Cybele, coming to land on a peak that overlooked both the colony and the sea. I sat for a moment gazing at the large square shape cut from the mountain, with rounded edges and no seam anywhere and covered with intricate carvings. Then I stepped onto a granite mountaintop deeply etched by a sighing wind that whipped my tunic about my legs and whirled my hair into my face.
Megan stood beside me; her voice was bell-clear in the mourning wind: “In this place are mingled the ashes of all the dead of our Unity.”
I walked to
the structure, passed my hands over some of its carvings.
“Having no time, we made it hastily.” Megan’s voice was uninflected. “For the first dead of our planet. Then a plague struck us down—”
“Yes, I read of it in your history.” I had been moved to tears by Minerva’s eloquent account of the pain of that time.
“Those deaths devastated us all,” she said, “and Zandra came to this mountain and remained here alone, refused to leave for the ten months it took her to make these carvings.”
Wishing to be with my own thoughts in the windswept grandeur of this place, I turned my face from her, my eyes sweeping the vista of coral ocean and the hills of Cybele, its homes indistinct save for the creative art that had shaped their beauty into the land.
I reflected that the colonists who had first come to the American continent centuries ago had created a brilliant time in history, when the very best of a person was called upon, courage no less than wisdom. But in the centuries afterward on my quarrelsome and strife-torn birthworld there had never again been a time like that, or kinship such as this, on this new world where a great artist would isolate herself for months in her grief at the death of many, to make this a more fitting place . . . I caressed the carved stone that held precious contents within, as melancholy as if I too had known these dead . . .
Megan broke into my thoughts. “We must return now.”
I told her. “I am honored that you brought me here.”
We flew in sober silence to the amphitheater, landing beside an entryway. I reached to her then. “You should look like a leader,” I said gently, and rearranged soft strands of her dark hair which had been put into disarray by the mountain winds.
She smiled. “I suspect I rarely look like a leader.”
You always do, I thought. Always.
“Great Geezerak,” Mother muttered to Megan. “I thought you’d abandoned me to all these athletic paragons.” She turned to me. “My dear, would you be good enough to assist me with the presentations?”
Daughters of a Coral Dawn Page 15
