The Shore of Women (11 page)

LAISSA

I had acted to establish my independence from Mother, but still had the chore of moving my personal possessions to my room in Zoreen’s quarters. After checking to make sure that my mother wasn’t home, I went to my old room.

I had left only a few of my belongings at Shayl’s and had sent her a message, telling her that she could send them to Zoreen’s tower. I was sure that she wouldn’t want to keep them, and I didn’t particularly care whether she sent them on or threw them out. I only wanted her to know that I had found another companion, that she had not been the only one I could have chosen. I wanted her to be jealous, and perhaps to regret what she had lost.

I went into my old room and stared at the boxes, surprised at how little I wanted to take. I had packed old toys, pillows, message spools marking special occasions, gifts from Mother and my aunt and my grandmother, and had planned to take it all, along with my clothing, to Shayl’s rooms. Now my belongings seemed only a reminder of times I preferred to forget. As I looked down at my wrist, I realized that I was still wearing Shayl’s bracelet, the gift she had given me at my party. I tore it off and left the room.

Button had wandered into the outer chamber. He retreated to the window and watched me warily. As I moved toward him, he lifted a hand, warding me off.

“Button, I’m sorry for what I did to you.”

He turned from me and gazed out the window.

“I shouldn’t have done what I did. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

He was silent.

“But I also thought I was doing the best thing for you.”

“No,” he said. For a moment, I thought he understood what I was trying to explain, but he probably would have said “no” to anything I had to say. “Mother says you don’t live here now. Go away.”

I walked toward the door, thinking of how lonely his life had been. He had never gone out of the tower except with Mother or with me; his toys were his only companions. He had met other boys infrequently, for we had been told often enough that boys were unruly and hard to manage in groups. Visitors usually ignored him, and often he had been sent to his own room before they arrived. His only obligation was to stay as physically strong as possible, doing his exercises under Mother’s guidance, working out on his machines. Learning anything else was useless, for the mindwasher would erase it before he was sent out, leaving only his ability to speak, a sense of something lost, and perhaps a residue of memory to fuel his dreams.

The contrast with my own life was striking. I tried to imagine myself growing up that way and being forced to live outside. Would I become like a man? Would men, living here, become more like us? Everything I had been taught denied it; men had a propensity for violence that was both genetic and hormonal. The biological well-being of humankind as a whole required some of their qualities, but the survival of civilization demanded that women, who were less driven and able to channel their aggressiveness constructively, remain in control. Over these harsh facts, many of us had erected a structure of suppositions to soothe ourselves, believing that men were happier as they were, that they were capable of little more, that they would destroy everything we had built.

I considered what history I knew at that point. Once men and women had lived together and had formed bonds. The old records showed that a woman might love a man as I had loved Shayl. Such love had been, of course, a trap. I could not imagine a woman willingly putting herself in the power of a man; women had given power to men, and men had nearly destroyed everything. It could not be allowed to happen again.

I glanced at Button before leaving the room. History, I was beginning to see, might be instructive. I had read a few tales of women bought and sold, of depending on men for food and shelter, of being forced to endure contact with male bodies, of being murdered by men. Our ways were surely better.

Zoreen was sprawled on the floor among her papers and books, reading. I tiptoed over the floor, careful not to step on anything, and sat on the couch.

“Are those real?” I asked, waving a hand at the piles of paper.

“Real documents? Of course not. These are copies—they’d hardly let a student handle the originals.” She picked up one book, a thick pile of paper, and waved it at me. “The real books don’t look like this at all. The pages are bound together, or decorated.”

“Then why have all this paper? Why don’t you just use a screen, or a reader and microcopies?”

Zoreen sat up. “I do, for most reading, but sometimes I want to make a note on a page, or underline a passage, and it’s easier to have the paper in my hands. Eventually I’ll just put my notes into the system, and then I can get rid of some of this. Why, does this mess bother you?”

“Not really, but it would still be easier to make your notes another way.”

She shrugged. “I know it seems odd, but you’d be surprised at how many historians keep piles of paper in their rooms. One of them told me it’s because they start thinking of how much from the past has been lost, how easily things can disappear, so they make microcopies and keep papers, or give them to other historians, as well as recording it all on spools. The more copies there are in different forms, the more likely the past is to survive.”

“You sound as though some might want to lose it deliberately.”

Zoreen nodded. “Let’s put it this way. There are those who think much of it’s best forgotten.”

“Anyway, it seems to me that, with all these copies around, it might just become harder to find the one you’re looking for,” I said. “And if so much was lost, then how can you be sure that what you learn about the past is true? How do you know that your own assumptions aren’t shaping the way you interpret and understand these documents?”

She smiled. “Why, Laissa, you surprise me. You sound as though you’re interested in the subject. I didn’t think you cared.”

I waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, I don’t, not really.”

“Are you still going to do physics?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose you wanted to do what Shayl was doing when you thought you’d be living with her, and now…”

I shook my head. “That isn’t it. It’s just that I was advised against it. I was thinking of doing something else even before I decided not to live with Shayl.” I had altered the details of my confrontation with Shayl when telling Zoreen about the incident, making it seem that I had decided not to live with my old friend because of her doubts about me. “I’ll probably do general science. I can go on to physics later, maybe.”

“How utterly useless.”

I leaned forward. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t mean the subject itself is useless, but the way we go at it is. All we do is study what’s known, what was discovered ages ago. After all, we wouldn’t want to push too far, considering the violent applications of science in the past. It’s stultifying—perfect for someone like Shayl.”

“You’re hardly one to criticize someone else for keeping to what’s known,” I said. “Besides, we should be cautious. Using scientific knowledge to build weapons perverts the whole enterprise.”

Zoreen’s eyes widened. “What a proper statement that is, and yet our past achievements in the sciences, the most important ones, took place during times when people were building their most powerful weapons. One might almost say that building the weapons brought about other, more constructive discoveries that otherwise wouldn’t have taken place.” She tilted her head; her long, brown hair swayed. “You know, most of the physicists in ancient times, before the Rebirth, were men.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

She chuckled. “Oh, Laissa. You sound like so many others. Even the Mothers of the City often sound like those we serve, those who don’t know any better.”

I seized on one point. “If what you say is true, then it’s because men worked in the sciences that their efforts were directed toward such enterprises.”

Zoreen laughed even more at that. “And we made most of our advances when we had to find ways to enclose our cities, to secure our walls, to build weapons our ships could use to strike at men. Since then, we’ve done very little. Unpleasant facts, Laissa. I’m not saying that the need to push against the boundaries of knowledge has to be linked to such aggressive impulses, but, for whatever reason, we haven’t managed to replace it with another motivation. And in the past, there were men who questioned how science and technology were used, who saw the dangers. Iree of Teesa’s Clan is the expert on the period just before the Destruction. She’s written about it; she knows more about it than anyone else. Iree deals with primary sources, records of the period, not post-Rebirth documents. There were many men who saw what was coming and tried to work against it.”

“Men wouldn’t have had the ethical sense.”

Zoreen pushed a few papers aside. “Let me ask you this. Why do you think so many women don’t want much to do with history or historians?”

I smiled. “Oh, come now, Zoreen. You know why.”

“Because it’s sordid? That’s what girls think, and a lot of the Mothers of the City as well, even though they once knew better. It isn’t the real reason. Most women just don’t want to admit that men had the capacity to think and act in certain ways. They’d rather believe that men always had certain innate limitations, because to believe otherwise raises a lot of questions about the way things are.”

I could not think of a reply.

“Look,” Zoreen said as she held out her hands, “it doesn’t really change things. Whether or not men could behave ethically or peacefully isn’t the point. The point is that they used their power, the power women gave them, to destroy the world, and can’t ever be allowed to do that again. Nothing changes that. Most historians simply think it would be better for more of us to admit that ancient men weren’t quite what a lot of women prefer to think they were.”

The Destruction and the Rebirth are two periods of history we are all taught to some degree, since those events are part of religious doctrine as well. Mother, like many, was not a believer, and I had always been a skeptic, believing that religion was of use only to those women the Mothers of the City served, but I had been taught my share of doctrine.

Once, women had given men the power over life that women had held since the beginning of human history; so we have all been taught. Men had used their power for evil, and the world had been devastated and poisoned in ancient times by the weapons men had controlled. The great fire came and, after it, the long winter. Only scattered communities in isolated places had survived, living for ages in underground shelters, for life on the surface was not possible. Earth refused to yield crops, animals sickened and died, and humankind’s damaged genes whelped monsters.

Below ground, life had gone on, in a fashion. Even in the shelters, many did not live, and tunnels holding the dead were sealed off from the living. These shelters, we are told, were our purgatory, places in which to pay for our sins. Gradually, Earth began to heal itself, and in time, it became necessary for some to venture above ground.

At first, only men who had fathered all their children were sent out, for the communities had to be preserved from genetic damage, but these men, weakened by age and inexperienced in the wild, often could not fend for themselves. Younger men were sent outside, along with women who could not bear children—and there were many of those in ancient days, for the earth had punished us by robbing many women of their ability to give life.

Those women who remained behind had to teach their children while doing much of the work of the community. As they gained more control of the biological sciences, they learned how to find out which men had sustained the least damage to their genes, and how to sort them out from others. To love one man, and to bear only his children because of that love, was a luxury these societies could not afford; it was soon clear that such love had always been an evil, had brought women to forgive men instead of protesting their foolish ways. One judged a mate on his health and strength—nothing else mattered. Defective children died out; other children grew stronger. Women regained their ability to bear healthy young, and those who did so ruled.

Perhaps those early men, living outside and returning to the shelters only infrequently to donate their sperm, their game, and their news of the healing Earth, still believed that they would regain their power, that in time, their lives would be as they were before. Perhaps, guilt-ridden over what their kind had wrought, they were content to let women take over more responsibility. Or maybe they welcomed their life of hunting and roaming and adapted to it readily because it was the life to which they were best suited. But the pattern had been fixed.

Our scriptures tell us that the spirit of Earth, in the form of the Goddess, soon began to speak through the mouths of women. “You continue to sin,” She said. “You readily allow men to come among you, even though they have scarred Me. You gave men power over Me, and they ravaged Me. You gave them power over yourselves, and they made you slaves. They sought to wrest My secrets from Me instead of living in harmony with Me. You have sinned and have not yet turned away from wrongdoing.”

So the Goddess spoke, and many women abased themselves and wept over their foolishness and promised to keep to the right way. Those who were wisest became the Mothers of their communities, contributed sons to the world outside, and guided other women, who bore their daughters and lived their lives apart from men. But history also shows that some women turned away from the Goddess and often had to be expelled, and that a long time passed before women reclaimed their true place.

The Rebirth came. Here, and on other continents as well, we left our shelters and retreated inland, away from the greatest devastation, and built our cities and the shrines that would guide men to us. Much of the land beyond was surrendered to the Goddess, left to renew itself untouched by humankind. The ten thousand years of man’s rule, an aberration in human history, were past.

That is our story, but in the light of Zoreen’s speculations, the story seemed to take on a new meaning. If men, even some men, had once been capable of the compassion and intellect that were the proper province of women, then our way of life was not merciful and just, but only a cruel necessity, a way to survive and no more. Civilization had been preserved at the cost of depriving all men of it. We also paid a price, for we were bound by these patterns, unable to alter them, for our survival still depended on them. Those who had become the Mothers of our cities were not only the wisest, but also the most merciless. Those sciences that might lead to new and more powerful weapons were controlled, and innovation discouraged; and, because of this, most of us still learned only what women hundreds of years ago had known, for to know more might risk the death of all. Even the surrendering of much of the earth’s lands to the Goddess in atonement for our sins might have been only an act of fear and cowardice. We had made our world a small one. Our cities stand on only part of our continent, and rarely do our ships travel through the skies over the oceans to far cities; the women there remain images and voices on our screens. We send few ships to map the lands we have abandoned.