Amazon Planet up-5

by Mack Reynolds

  She took several deep breaths, half opened her mouth as though to respond, but closed it again. But she hadn’t given up the battle. Guy Thomas could see that. She was simply building up steam.

  The Schirra’s second officer bored in. “You still haven’t mentioned why you’re going to Amazonia, Citizeness.”

  “I’ve told you I was an ethnologist. All my life I’ve studied the origins of man, societies and cultures and particularly political and socioeconomic institutions from the most primitive, up to and including the most recent.”

  “What’s that got to do with Amazonia?”

  “Just this. When I decided to escape the planet of my birth…”

  Ravelle looked down at the papers before him. “Victoria,” he said.

  “…I took plenty of time deciding what alternative world I would choose to make my home. Amazonia stood head and shoulders above all others.”

  Guy Thomas frowned and spoke for practically the first time since she had entered. “Victoria,” he said. “I’ve heard of that planet. One of the first hundred or so colonized.”

  She looked at him scornfully. “Victoria. Named after some silly queen back in the old days on Earth. A period when man’s domination over woman had reached a particularly ridiculous height. Man was the brains, man was the head of the family, man was the breadwinner. Only the exceptional woman was thought to have enough sense to be worth educating at all, beyond simple reading and writing. No, her place was in the home, in the kitchen, in the nursery. She was supposedly a child that had to be taken care of by her husband, her lord.”

  “Victoria,” Ravelle murmured. “Don’t think I’ve been there.”

  “Lucky you,” she snapped. “The colonists fled Earth because the institutions they favored were being thrown into the wastebasket. Women were beginning to recover some of the ground they had lost. This was simply unbearable to the Victorians. Their only answer was to migrate to some new world where they could continue their antiquated customs. Victoria! where any new ideas, where the slightest of changes, are anathema.”

  Guy said, “Well, you seem to have risen above it. I thought you said they discouraged women obtaining an education.” The girl and her strong opinions fascinated him. On the surface, at least, he wouldn’t have seemed to be one to hold overly hard to his own beliefs. The impression he gave was of one who would flow with the current, and the swifter it flowed, the more readily. Not for him to contradict, or insert his own mild opinions when the controversy grew hot.

  She took him in, again, as though wondering if it was worthwhile answering. Then, “Even in the so-called Victorian period, back on Earth, with all its crushing of feminine inititive, some were strong enough to rise above its restrictions. Scientists such as Curie, novelists such as Sand, Austen and the Brontes, medical pioneers such as Nightingale, politicians such as Victoria herself, rebels such as Carrie Nation.”

  “You seem to be up on the period,” Rex Ravelle said wryly.

  “Why not I took the same stand myself. Against parents, relatives, friends…” she hesitated only briefly, “…against any men of my acquaintance who might ordinarily have been potential husbands.” Her voice was bitter now. “In the eyes of all, I desexed myself by refusing to become a chattle in some man’s kitchen.”

  Quiet Guy Thomas might be, without imagination he was not. Into his mind flashed the long years this less than hefty girl must have put in bucking the tides of her native culture. The rejection of the femininities, the aggressive effort to hold her own in a world made for men.

  Rex Ravelle said, “So now you think you’re fleeing to Utopia. You’re swinging the pendulum to the other extreme, eh? Amazonia where no men dominate and men are the weaker sex. Well, at least it’s admittedly different. On one world or the other, in United Planets, they’re trying every political theory, every socioeconomic system, even every religion ever dreamed up by man.” He shrugged as he shuffled the papers before him, as though indicating that she was free to choose her own poison, if she would.

  But Pat O’Gara’s voice was snappish again. “You sound as though the Amazonian ideal is a new one, as though a matriarchy is a brand new idea dreamed up by some offbeat yokes.”

  Her answer had been to Rex Ravelle, but Guy said mildy, “I understand that there’s various mention in early myths of the Amazons, but, well, it’s not exactly historical, is it? It was all back before Homer’s day, along with centaurs and the Golden Fleece, the Trojan War, and all.”

  He winced, in anticipation, as she drew in her breath to blast.

  But it was Rex Ravelle who spoke next. He had been fussing over the ship’s papers pertaining to Guy Thomas and Patricia O’Gara, the sole passengers. Guy’s matter had already been finished with, her papers were in the second officer’s hands.

  He rapped in interruption, “Miss O’Gara! You have no exit visa from your home planet, Victoria!”

  She flushed, but not exactly in anger, this time. She said, “I told you I was a refugee from the world on which I was born.”

  “But that’s not the worst. Do you realize that you have no visa to land on Amazonia?”

  II

  Guy Thomas seemed to adapt easily to the routine of life aboard a spaceborne passenger freighter—the Guy Thomases of life drift easily along the buoy marked way, not for them to venture this way or that into unpathed waters.

  Had any of the ship’s officers or crew been called upon to make a snap judgement of Guy Thomas, to be expressed in one word, surely it would have been average. For Guy was all but unbelievably average; in height, in weight, in countenance, in color of hair and eyes, in clothing. It was necessary to meet Guy Thomas a half dozen times before one could remember the man.

  Following Earth Basic Time, he arose as late as possible in the morning still able to have his breakfast. He spent the next few hours either reading borrowed fiction tapes of the most bland variety, or taking in the Tri-Di shows they had brought along. After lunch he often idled around the ship, making a nuisance of himself, staring at officers and crew at their duties, managing from time to time to get into compartments off bounds to passengers, so that he had to be ordered away wearily—albeit respectfully, since he was a paying passenger—by engineer or signalman, ship’s cook or navigator.

  Largely, he seemed impressed by these men of space. For all but a few, such as Happy Harrison, it was far more than a job. It was a sharing in the big dream that man was currently embarked upon. The big dream of achieving his destiny, his explosion into the stars, his releasing of the bounds that had for so long tied him to Mother Earth. Out here were the stars, and the officers and crew of the Spaceship Schirra were participating in their conquest.

  Colorless, perhaps innocuous would be better, though he might be, he was company, and on more than one occasion he sat in the copilot’s acceleration chair with the deck officer who was standing easy watch. Easy, since there is so very little do do when a vessel is in underspace. Guy Thomas proved a good listener and a means to break the boredom of a watch when no watch is truly needed in this era of automation.

  He sat and listened to it all, dropping occasionally only the affirmations, questions or answers, that were needed to keep the conversation flowing, indicating that his attention was focused on the other’s biographical discourse, romances, opinion of United Planet’s affairs, bigoted beliefs, off-color jokes, wistful descriptions of family at home, or spaceman’s, dreams.

  They told him of far planets with offbeat cultures that would make even Amazonia pale by comparison. They commented upon the fact that nowhere in all his explorations had man found other intelligent life. They told of shipwrecks and of rescues, and of shipwrecks without rescue. And always he listened, as though fascinated by every word.

  He didn’t exactly avoid the firey Pat O’Gara, but in the presence of that aggressive feminist, usually let others bounce the ball of argumentation. Seldom did he get in a word, on either side of the almost continual controversy that Citizeness O’Gara manage
d to keep astir. But seldom, obviously, did he wish to add his own small supply of fuel to the source of heat.

  Once or twice he was unable to avoid participation at the salon table, or afterwards during the evening’s leisure hours, when Pat and Rex Ravelle, her usual opponent, had it out. He suspected, as would have anyone, that the second officer was debating more out of amusement than sincere conviction; only his opponent was so blinded by her own earnest belief as not to realize her leg was being pulled.

  Over coffee, following dinner one evening, Rex had typically slipped her the needle.

  “All right, suppose I concede women are just as competent to handle government, although I’ll be a funker if I can think of any historic—”

  She let him get no further than that. “I assume you’ve never heard of Elizabeth the First, of Cleopatra, of Zenobia, of Catherine the Great!”

  “Touché,” Guy murmered.

  Rex grinned. “Okay, I’ll take that. There’ve been exceptions. But that’s not the point. Suppose we’d admit women are potentially as competent to handle state affairs as men. But why should we think they can handle them any better? There’s no proof, and no reason to believe it would develop that way.”

  Pat O’Gara said testily, her face pinking as usual in verbal combat, “It’s unfortunate, Ravelle, that you’re so uninformed on the subject. Otherwise, we’d be able to discuss the matter on a higher level.”

  The ship’s officer continued to smile mockingly, “Aw, you can’t get by with that, you know.”

  “The fact is,” she said contemptuously, “that such government as existed during the overwhelmingly greater period of man’s existence was predominantly in the hands of the women. It has only been in comparative recent history that man usurped the female position of control of society.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Jerry Muirhead, the third deck officer protested. “I got lost somewhere. What’s all this about women running the shooting match for most of history?”

  “What do they teach you in the Space Academy when it comes to primitive society and anthropology?” she scoffed.

  Guy Thomas said apologetically, “As a matter of fact, Jerry, it seems to me that I have read that earliest man did trace his descent through the matrilineal line. But…”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Rex said. He grinned around at the other deck and engine officers seated in the salon cum messhall. “I think we’ve got a traitor among us, men.”

  Guy said quietly, “It means that the children of a relationship between a man and woman took the woman’s name.”

  Pat snorted her superiority again. “Which means, in turn, that women dominated the family. That in case of a ‘divorce’ the children remained in her clan, not that of the father’s. That property, such as there was in those days, was inherited by her relatives, remaining in her clan and that of her children on death or split-up of a relationship.”

  Jerry twisted his youthful face. “Well, I don’t know about that, but whether or not kids were named after their mothers or fathers, it was the men who really ran the tribe.”

  “If you mean they did the hunting and the fighting, largely you may be right,” Pat said overbearingly. “Although even in those fields the women had a great deal more to say about nomination of chiefs and the deposing of them. You should read Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht.”

  “Das what?” Rex scowled.

  “It’s been translated into Earth Basic,” Pat said. “The Motherright. It’s possibly the first serious work on gyneocracy.”

  They looked at her.

  She said, smugly, “Or would you rather, gynarchy? They mean approximately the same thing. Rule by women. Why even as recently in time as the Iroquois Confederation, women were the great power among the clans and didn’t hesitate when occasion required to ‘knock off the horns’ as it was technically called, from the head of a chief and send him back to the ranks of the warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also rested with them.”

  Rex Ravelle said, “It’s not quite the picture of braves and squaws that I’ve been familiar with, Pat, my dear.”

  Patricia said firmly, “Then you’re the victim of a false picture that male propagandists and pseudo-historians have painted. There was, admittedly, division of labor among the primitives and ancients. Men made superior hunters and warriors. The women did the just as important agricultural work, raised the children and maintained the long houses or the adobe community houses. But they also dominated in such government of the tribe as was necessary.”

  Rex said impatiently, “All right, suppose we take that. But what it amounts to is you’re admitting that back when women ran tribal affairs the race was nothing but a bunch of savages. It wasn’t until man took over that we started gettting anywhere.”

  “Hear, hear,” the chief engineer called from another table. “Well put, for a deck man.”

  “It’s according to what you mean by getting anywhere,” Pat said, with unwonted mildness. “I wouldn’t deny that when descent and government changed, institutions changed.” She pursed her generous mouth. “For instance, war became one of the new institutions.”

  Guy Thomas cleared his throat at that one. “I was of the opinion that war we have always had with us.”

  She turned on him. “Then you are mistaken. War, as we still know it on some of the more backward member planets of UP, is a comparatively modern development and didn’t evolve until man’s domination of government.”

  Captain Dave Buchwald seldom entered into the discussion. He was a taciturn man, heavy, straight of eye, and long used to command. So used, perhaps, that he seldom found need to issue orders. He expected his officers and men to handle the workings of the Schirra with such competence that his presence and decisions were seldom needed for the smooth operation of the ship.

  But he said now, voice low and courteous, “Without disrespect of your scholarly attainments, Citizeness, I would like to ask how far back in man’s history we must go to find this rule of the gentler sex. I confess, I too have been of the opinion that we have always had conflict with us.”

  “Conflict, yes,” Pat said quickly. “But war, in the modern sense, no. I understand, for instance, that in the past the bull gorilla would defend his little patch of ground which he and his family needed for sustenance against the encroachments of other gorillas or other animals in general. In such defense he might engage in combat, but I would hardly call this war. Any more than I would call two stag deer fighting for a doe’s affections, warfare.”

  Rex chortled, “Okay, define your terms as that old time comedian was always saying in the Tri-Di comedy we watched after lunch today.”

  Pat O’Gara reserved her sharpest tone for the second officer. “Raids, semi-organized skirmishes between tribes disputing over hunting grounds or whatever, personal feuds, and such, have certainly existed, even under matriarchal society, but war in the modern sense, no.”

  “Some examples, Citizeness?” the Captain rumbled.

  “Well, take the impact of the Spanish upon the Mexicans. To the very end, the Aztecs never quite figured out what it was the Conquistadors wanted. They had no concept of war as their European contemporaries knew it, and they were the most militaristically inclined of the New World tribes. When they fought, they dashed valiantly forth as individuals and it was considered much more valorous to capture an enemy than to kill one. Their conflicts were conducted for the purpose of securing victims for sacrifices to their gods, or for simple loot. So far as war was concerned, they never got to the point of waging it for the purpose of acquiring some other tribe’s territory and enslaving its people. It just never occured to them. Confused Spanish historians to the contrary, there was never any such thing as an Aztec empire, they never even completely dominated the valley of Mexico, an area about the size of the old state of Rhode Island.”

  She went on wryly, “In a way, it was pathetic, this conflict between the civilized white men and the Amerinds. Why, as late as the battle of
the Little Big Horn, some of the Sioux of Crazy Horse and Gall rode into the fire of repeating rifles armed solely with coup sticks, since it was a far greater honor in the tribes to count coup on a man by touching him without harming him, than it was to kill. The so-called wars the Indians waged from King Philip to Geronimo were actually no more than raids. They had no concept of war as the white man saw it.”

  Guy Thomas said uncomfortably, “This isn’t my field, but do you count the Trojan War as one of these, uh, raids, or was it a full scale military expedition? And, where does it fit in on your time scale? Had the men taken over as yet?”

  “That was a period of transition,” she said. “Some peoples were still matrilineal, some patrilineal. But read your Homer well, and you’ll see that the Trojan War was a sad example of warfare by any modern standard. The heroes, the champions, would spend most of their time standing around yelling boasts and insults at each other. Occasionally a couple would dash out before their respective hosts and fight man to man, as often throwing huge stones at each other as using weapons. And when one or the other was killed or injured, then the big wrestling match was brought on by each side trying to seize the corpse for its armor. Troy was never really under siege. It was just suffering a ten year series of raids against itself and its neighboring towns and allied cities. Siege weapons such as catapults and battering rams were as unknown as fighting in ranks. Later the Mycenaean Greeks were to learn, when the Doric tribes came in from the north with their patriarchal society and its institutions.”

  The captain grunted non-committally.

  But Pat O’Gara was in full voice. She concentrated on Guy Thomas. “So far as this war-we-have-always-had-with-us bit is concerned, that’s one of the inevitable stances of the misinformed—they think that institutions with which they are familiar are unchangeable, have always been and will always be. Actually, nothing is so prone to change as institutions, socioeconomic, cultural, religious, or whatever.