Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19

by The Ruins of Isis (v2. 1)

"Are there many such quakes here?"

  "Unfortunately, a great many." Miranda added, in quick reassurance, "You need not be afraid, Scholar Dame; you will be lodged in the house of the Pro-Matriarch, near the ruins at We-were-guided, and the ground never trembles, for those who built it hold the ground under their protection."

  Interesting; if the society which built the ruins, whether or not they were the hypothetical Builders, had the technological know-how to locate their city away from tectonic stress lines! Unlikely, though, that they could be the Builders. The city was far, far older than the Isis/Cinderella colony, which had been here less than seventy standard years, but certainly not old enough to be the mysterious Builders who were supposed to have seeded the Galaxy millennia before any known race. No surviving technology would have enabled a society to predict tectonic stress and seismic activity—or freedom from it—from any site more than a few thousand years in advance.

  And from what Miranda had said about the builders of the ruins holding the ground under protection from quakes—they evidently had some quasi-religious veneration of the site. She wanted to know about that. She wanted to know everything about this culture!

  Builders ruins! Builders! Who could possibly care about a prehistoric race who might not even have been human, when the whole Galaxy, the whole Unity and beyond, were filled with endlessly fascinating cultures which were still here, alive, working, to be seen and studied! Again she felt the sense of frustration. Did these women of the Matriarchate want to keep everyone away from their culture until it was dead, and had to be studied like that of the Builders, from almost undiscernible clues left behind by their few imperishable artifacts?

  Not, she thought, looking through the clear plastic of the vehicle's window, that the Matriarchate was likely to leave many imperishable artifacts to be studied millions of years later. Her first impression of the city was of low, regular buildings, made of something like sun-dried adobe, smoothed and decorated with bright paintings, which varied so much in quality that Cendri suspected each house was decorated, not by professional artists or painters, but by its own inhabitants.

  The houses were arranged in clusters, irregularly, in park-like gardens. The car moved leisurely along narrow streets which seemed reasonably full of men and women and little children, dressed in the same confusing variety of clothing Cendri had seen on the spaceport. There was no uniformity, though in general those who were working—a man hanging lengths of brilliantly dyed fabric on a wooden framework, a woman pushing a barrow piled high with bright green globes which could have been vegetables or playthings—wore rather less than those few who were doing nothing.

  The earthquake had not made havoc in the city—probably due to the specialized construction of the houses—but everywhere there were piles of rubble being cleared away, and people hauling out broken, torn or smoke-damaged wall-screens to be repaired. A group of men were working in an excavation which had evidently caved in.

  There were children everywhere; those beneath the age of puberty went naked except for sunhats and sandals, and looked browned and healthy. The older ones were working alongisde their elders, helping to clear away earthquake damage. The younger ones were playing games which looked, to an inexperienced observer, like aimless running around, although a group of small girls was squatting in a patch of sand, playing some kind of game with flat stones, and a mixed group of preadolescents were turning a jumprope and jumping through it in precisely-timed patterns.

  It was late afternoon, and the sun moved, low and slanting, over the roof of a low white building, surrounded by ornamental shrubbery. "You have come here at an unfortunate time, Scholar Dame," said the Lady Miranda. "This is the Residence of the High Matriarch of Isis, which is also the Temple of the Goddess. It was she who sent for you—or rather, for the Scholar Dame di Velo; but at this moment our beloved Matriarch lies in a coma, near to death."

  Cendri did not know what, if anything, it was proper to say. Depending on the society's attitude toward death, such an occasion might call for condolences—or for congratulations! She murmured non-committally, "I am sorry to have come at an inconvenient time."

  "I fear the inconvenience will be mostly to yourself, Scholar Dame," the Lady Miranda said, twisting the end of her long braid. "I fear that if our Mother and Priestess should die without naming a successor, it will be a long time till we know which of the two Pro-Matriarchs will assume her rank, ring and robe; so everything is likely to come entirely to a stop until we have consulted the Inquirers. And, I fear, your work would be halted, too, until such time as we have resolved the differences between the two Pro-Matriarchs—my mother, Vaniya, and her rival and colleague, Mahala. Those differences, so my mother tells me, are very many, and go back to the days when they were little girls squabbling over games on our motherworld of Persephone."

  Cendri felt troubled. She had been intensively trained in the ethic which forbade a sociological student, or an anthropologist, to take either side between rival factions on any world; was it proper that she should actually be lodged in the home of one of the rivals? Well, she supposed it had all been arranged long before she came here, and indeed Miranda's next words confirmed this: "I myself know nothing of politics, nor of the many rivalries and differences between them," she said, "I am the loyal daughter of my mother, regardless of what the rights and wrongs of the matter may seem to others. And my mother has told me; on the last day when the High Matriarch could speak coherently, it was of this she spoke; that you should be brought here, and lodged at our house, which is located so near to the ruins at We-were-guided that from the upper rooms, the Ruins can be seen clearly, and from our front gates, it is only a little walk along the shore. It seemed to the High Matriarch that your work could best be done from there. And of course this has made the Pro-Matriarch Mahala very angry; partly because she hates my mother, as I have said, and perhaps, I think, because the Mother Rezali had not confided the honored guests to her care. But then, during all her years on Isis, the Pro-Matriarch Mahala has made it a point of honor to disbelieve in the Builders—" "You believe in them, then?" Cendri asked. "Oh, yes," Miranda said. "I have communicated with them very often. But Mahala, you understand, is one of those women who believes in nothing unless it fits certain rules she has invented for herself, and so she says that our contact with the Builders is all superstition and nonsense. She has not examined the evidence, you understand. She is, I believe, a very stupid woman."

  It took Cendri a moment to digest this unbelievable statement. Communication? With the Builders? She blinked at Miranda's matter-of-fact tone, forcibly reminding herself that the Builders—if they had ever existed at all, which most reputable scientists doubted—were supposed to have left their ruins no less than two million years ago! Surely, surely, the Lady Miranda's statement must have some symbolic, or religious, interpretation! And she could not even inquire about it until she knew precisely what weight was given to religious matters in this society!

  She felt intensely frustrated, but she made her voice noncommittal again. "It will indeed come most conveniently to our work, to be located so near to the ruins. That was most thoughtful of the High Matriarch."

  "It was a decision demanding courage," Miranda said, "and now it is likely to go for nothing—depending, of course, on who is appointed High Matriarch in her place. Her death at this time may undo all the work she has done—she has believed for many years that we on Isis should have more contact with the Unity, but it has taken this long for the time to be ripe for this opening gesture; inviting the Scholar Dame di Velo here to explore the ruins. There are still those who fear any kind of contact with the worlds dominated by men; they feel they can only bring contamination to our society—" she broke off and said anxiously, her fingers nervously twisting her long braid. "Please—my mother said I must be certain not to offend you, since you are from a world dominated by males—and there are those here who feel you will have nothing to offer us but temptation—I'm not saying this at all well," sh
e said, with her diffident smile.

  Cendri said neutrally—the one thing she must not do was to question, publicly, the prime postulate of their society—"The worlds of the Unity are not, of course, dominated by males, Lady Miranda. Oh, perhaps a few hundred years ago, on such worlds as Pioneer and Apollo, there were certain—certain inequities. But on my own home world they were never very great, and on University, men and women are quite equal."

  Miranda raised her feathery eyebrows in obvious skepticism. She said, "I am not, of course, well enough informed for intelligent comment on this, Scholar Dame. But it does conflict with everything I have ever heard."

  Cendri smiled. "And of course I could never convince you, Lady Miranda. The simplest thing would be for your world to send some—" she hesitated, phrasing it carefully, "Some of your finest students there, so that each woman might see for herself that she is welcomed as the equal of any man, and accepted only on the basis of her individual talent and aptitude for scholarship."

  The Lady Miranda laughed. She said, "The very fact that men are accepted as scholars points to prejudice and inequity," she said. "It is a biological fact, long proven by any impartial scientist, that the average man's brain is smaller than the brain of a woman, that female children are taller and heavier at puberty, and of course after puberty, males are so much at the mercy of their compulsive sex drives that it is impossible to educate them. Male children, of course, can be educated, if it is skillfully done. But only in a society where males make the rules could anyone accept the idea of a true scholarship for adult functioning males."

  Firmly Cendri reminded herself that she was not there to debate, or to defend the Unity, or the world of University. She said diplomatically, "I am sure in your experience you have found it so, Lady, but I do assure you that on University we have many great male scholars."

  Miranda nodded, and after a moment Cendri realized that she was being humored; that Miranda was being diplomatic and polite. "Of course they have taught you to think so, Scholar Dame, and you have never had, I am sure, a chance to do research without cultural bias."

  Since this was exactly what Cendri would have liked to say to Miranda, she wanted to laugh. "Let us hope for a day, then, Lady, when your scholars from Isis can see for themselves."

  Miranda returned the smile, with spontaneous friendliness. "I wish we might! It has been spoken of, you know, in the councils of the High Matriarch—that we should send scholars to University, have more trade into the Unity, share problems with other worlds; we need to know more about water-table technology, and the mathematics of reserve technology and arid-land cultivation; and more about pelagic ecology. The High Matriarch believed, too, that we have a responsibility to the women of the Unity, to show them the example of a sane society in function, and that until they are shown our example, they could never follow it. But so many of the women here are paranoid on the subject! They still believe—or, in the case of some politicians, pretend to believe—that the worlds of the Unity are just lying in wait to seize us again, and put us under male domination, as they did with our first colony on Labrys..." she paused, looked at Cendri and asked "You know the story—?"

  "I only know that the colony on Labrys was destroyed," she said. "The official story is that an overanxious administration miscalculated the speed with which their Sun was to go Nova, and resettled them on a world with an unstable orbit. There are not many records; most of those which remain call it a colossal bureaucratic blunder, for which the Unity paid a heavy indemnity. But indemnities, of course, cannot wipe out the loss of life, and it would not be at all surprising if some people called it a plot against the Matriarchate."

  "It is so called," said Miranda, soberly, "and there are those who think me a traitor because I have said that I, myself, would like to go and study on University—"

  "I hope someday you may," said Cendri, and Miranda smiled gaily and said, "I would like to see other worlds. I am not afraid of male-dominated worlds! I—" she laughed again, a merry, defiant sound, "I defy any male to dominate me!"

  She sounded completely confident, and Cendri thought how incongruous it was that this young woman, delicate, pretty, pregnant, should express such defiance. She would have said, if she had been on her own home world, There are a great many men who would really enjoy trying it, my dear, and you might enjoy it, too, if you would give it a fair chance! In some things, dominance is not so bad! Miranda was pregnant, surely she must have found that out! But of course she could not say this; so she only rejoiced that the Lady Miranda was in a feminine gossiping mood—she supposed this was a typical mode for a world of women—and encouraged it.

  "You yourself would like to study on University? Are there many women interested in that, do you think?"

  "I am sure there are," said Miranda. "There are many women from the College of Ariadne who have volunteered to assist the Scholar Dame from Unity in her researches, if she will have them. But there are also those who fear that this is sacrilege, that your work there will deprive us of the love and concern of the Builders—"

  "The—" Cendri swallowed hard, "the—the love and concern of the—the Builders?" For a moment she felt certain that she must have misunderstood Miranda's speech. Miranda's eyes were glowing.

  "Oh, yes! You will feel it, too, you are a woman—"

  Cendri blinked again. How could she possibly do any dispassionate work on the Builder ruins when she found them an object of religious worship—a worship which, judging from Miranda's expression, fell just short of idolatry!

  Frankly, she didn't care all that much whether the Builder ruins ever got explored or not. That, of course, was Dai's prime concern; as for Cendri herself, the longer the exploration of the ruins was delayed by the deathwatch on the dying High Matriarch, the longer it would give her to explore and make notes on the fascinating and supposedly impossible society of the Matriarchate.

  The vehicle was stopping before a building somewhat taller than the ones inside the city walls. The Lady Miranda said, "Here is the Residence of my mother, the Pro-Matriarch Vaniya. Welcome, Scholar Dame. You must not be frightened," she added earnestly, "even though it is built with an upper story, we are so near to We-were-guided that the ground never shakes here, and you are as safe on the second floor as in the arms of the Goddess."

  Now I wonder, Cendri thought, is this an observed seismic phenomenon, or is it an article of faith, because of the supposed love and concern of the hypothetical "Builders"? She could not ask; she would simply have to take her chances. After all, earthquakes could strike anywhere, on almost any world, and she had never been afraid of living on an upper story; her small apartment on University was on the eighteenth tier of a huge residence complex, and she had never given even the most fleeting thought to earthquakes before this. She assured Miranda seriously that she was not afraid, and Miranda smiled.

  "And I am not afraid of all the threatened dangers from the Unity, Scholar Dame."

  Cendri had been on the verge of alighting from the vehicle; she stopped, her hand on the door-latch. She said in amazement, "The dangers of the Unity? What, I must ask, could we possibly have that is dangerous to you?"

  "War," said Miranda, and her face was suddenly grave. "It is a historical fact, Scholar Dame, that every society where men were allowed to rule has been destroyed from within by wars, because of the competitive, aggressive nature of the male animal. It is this, I think, that they fear."

  Cendri blinked at Miranda and said, "But our society—the Unity—is flourishing undestroyed, after more than five hundred years of peace, Lady Miranda. I cannot understand your logic at all."

  The lady Miranda looked confused.

  "I told you I didn't understand politics. You must talk to my mother about it. Come," she said, leaning across Cendri and opening the door-latch, "let me welcome you to our home, Scholar Dame."

  Cendri, moving her cramped knees carefully, got out of the car, watching Dal, equally stiff and cramped, and scowling as if he had had an unpleas
ant trip, getting out of the front along with the hauled-out baggage.

  I have a lot to tell him. How long will it be before we are alone to talk? I don't dare to speak to him in public here! She smiled at Dal, trying to encourage him, but he avoided her eyes; and Cendri's heart sank.

  This was the beginning of the most complex and difficult assignment she had ever had; her first work as an independent professional, not a student. And she wasn't even free to concentrate on it, because all her emotional energy was taken up with worrying about Dai's feelings! It was justified, she could sympathize with Dal completely, but still, she could not help resenting the drain on her energy!

  A short flight of steps—the first she had seen on Isis, except at the elaborate Residence and Temple of the High Matriarch—led up to the front door; the room into which Miranda led them was spacious, hung about with thin draperies and divided by the screen-like movable partitions, in pale colors. The floor was matted cleanly with what looked like woven reeds or tatami matting. All around the room were evidences of children's play, toys and cloth dolls, a child's shoe lying abandoned at one edge of the room, but the children themselves had been hastily cleared away; Cendri fancied that she could still hear childish voices, raised in surprise and protest at the interruption of their games.

  Yes, what is an Ambassador from another world to them? A Scholar from the Unity, and her mission, means less than nothing. When will I see these people as they really are, and not as they choose to present themselves to me? Will I have any chance at all, to do that? A sociologist can fade into the background, have a chance to observe. But I am here to serve elaborate political aims—aims 0/ the Unity, aims of the Matriarchate—and studying the ruins is only a pretext. What I am is living proof that the Unity will not endanger their way of life. That is my real mission, even though the Unity did not tell me so. I wonder if Dal has guessed it yet?

  The Lady Miranda was looking around the untidy, child-littered room distressfully. "Is it true that on the world of the Scholar Dame there are rooms reserved for formal meetings and policy?"