It is of the same basic sort as life on Earth or Demeter, proteins in water solution, plants which photosynthesize, animals which eat the vegetation and each other. That is no surprise, on a globe as similar—mean diameter 11,902 kilometers, mean density 5.23 g/cc, liquid water covering sixty-five percent of the surface. Compared to, say, Mercury or Jupiter, the three worlds are practically triplets.
Yet their slight differences condition the nature and fate of everything that is alive upon them.
Joelle Ky and Christine Burns wandered along an eastern shore. Around them reached wilderness. It lay within fifty kilometers of a megalopolitan complex holding fifteen million souls; but the Betans cherished their countrysides. Indeed, you might never recognize a city from above. You would see a historic core, buildings crowded into a thousand hectares or less, otherwise a parkscape interrupted by an occasional road, garden around an artificial lake, or elegant spire. Most of the city was underground. Even agricultural regions lacked the regimented look of human fields and pastures.
Joelle and Christine had parked their aircar and gone off afoot. The vehicle was one lent them—instantly, upon request—by a local matriarch eager to oblige. Neither seats nor controls suited their bodies, but the autopilot took charge once Joelle had given instructions, and on a short flight like this they could sit any old way.
They walked for a while, silent, before Joelle gathered resolution to say, “You wanted us to find a place where we could talk in private, Chris,” and wondered why that should be hard. Could she be flinching from what she might hear?
Emissary’s computerman drew breath. “Yes, I did,” she replied in her musical Jamaican English. She was tall and lissome, with gentle features and fawn eyes. Her skin was almost ebony, her hair a black aureole. Today she wore a dress whose scarlet defied the landscape. “You needn’t have brought us this far. Anywhere beyond earshot of camp would have done.” She laughed. Ever since they met, Joelle had envied the ease with which she laughed. “Our hosts would scarcely eavesdrop, what?”
“Oh, a change of scene,” the holothete replied. She struggled to express: You wish to confide in me. My cold self feels the warmth of your need. Do you not deserve a beautiful setting for your confessional? She failed. “I’ve visited here before. I like it.”
“Me too. Why did you never tell the rest of us about it?”
“Plenty of other areas are equally good. You know I have to go off alone every now and then.”
“Well, this is right for you, Joelle.”
That awakened an awareness of it, almost leaf by leaf. Habituation dropped away and she felt how the gravity took seven or eight kilos off her Earth weight and altered slightly the manner of walking, of every motion. She couldn’t sense a reduced air pressure, but she noticed heat relieved by a salt blast from the sea on her right, and odor after odor, sweet, sulfurous, rosy, cheesy, spicy, indescribable. Surf boomed; wind skirled; a flying creature on leathery wings fluted.
The sky was deep purplish blue. Centrum stood low in the west, well-nigh motionless, three-fourths again the angular size of Sol viewed from Earth, an orange disc at which she could safely gaze for a second at a time. Opposite, clouds towered immense above the eastern horizon, darkling in their depths save where lightning winked, red and gold on their edges. They cast that glow down onto the ocean, which elsewhere ran gunmetal color and whitecapped till it crashed on a shingly beach.
The Terrestrials walked above, through bushes that scraped at their calves and sprang shut behind them. Inland, canebrakes rattled together and solitary trees fluttered fronds along thin, wildly whipping boughs. The level sunbeams brought forth infinite shades of brown, sorrel, ruby, apricot, ocher, gold, a somber, Rembrandtesque richness.
Eight years, Joelle thought. Can I still truly remember a Kansas cornfield, a Tennessee greenwood?
The surroundings fled, for Chris had taken her hand.
Joelle’s fingers replied, shyly, and the two women paced onward. At last Christine said, her tone muffled, “I hope you’ll not mind if I… unload my trouble on you.”
“No. Go ahead.” Joelle’s pulse stammered. She picked her words: “You realize, though, I am the last of our crew who should try giving personal advice. What do I know of emotions?”
“More than the rest of us. Would you stay a practicing holothete if you didn’t find that a full kind of existence?”
“Hardly a human existence.”
“It is, it is. Whatever a human can do is human.”
“By definition, if you insist. That doesn’t mean a, an ascetic and a libertine are the same. I’ve had nowhere else to go but where I am.”
Christine regarded her. “I don’t want to pry,” she said at length. “If I start that, slap me down, please. But I think you know more about people than you realize you do.”
“How? I grew up in the project that developed holothetics, since I was two years old, a war orphan adopted into a military research reservation. It turns out a holothete must begin almost that early. You were—eighteen, did you tell me?—when you started training to become a linker. My first memory is of being linked. It marks a person.” Joelle squeezed the clasp that joined hers. “I’m not complaining. On the whole, I’ve had a satisfactory life. However, it’s not been like yours.”
“Not in the least? I… well, you’ve shunned intimate relationships on this trip, I’ve seen you fend off advances that weren’t always casual, but—Forgive me, I do not want to pry. Still, gossip—no, common knowledge, to speak plainly—you’ve had your involvements.”
Eric Stranathan, Joelle remembered, and for an instant Beta was altogether gone, he and she were at Lake Louise and there was nobody else. Afterward he, a proud man, a son of the Captain General of the Fraser Valley, could not endure the idea of being a mere linker vis-à-vis her (for this was when the understanding of what it meant to be a holothete had exploded into bloom) and bade farewell. You wouldn’t have heard of Eric, Chris. You weren’t born then. You’re thinking of my occasional lovers since, mostly fellow holothetes, bodily pleasure and little else, except, I suppose to a degree, Dan Brodersen.
“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. [When six 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—[Yuan 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 flinging around. [She 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 loudened, 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, youand 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. At 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 outre 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, B
etan 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.
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