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.
Free enterprise, in a human sense, had never existed here. As if to compensate, war and similar follies had always, by human standards, occurred on an incredibly small scale. The world state had ample reserves for a space program.
Soon Betans discovered the T machine orbiting Centrum, exactly opposite their planet. In the next ten centuries, with vast effort and patience, they found guidepaths through a hundred separate star gates; they colonized half a dozen uninhabited globes; they met a score of other intelligent races, learned from them, and thereby enriched beyond measure their own civilization.
But at the same time, the foundations of that civilization were being eroded away, ever faster. The biological revolution went far more slowly than anything that important would have gone through mankind; still, it went, inexorably. While males, having overcome their physical dependence on females, were generation by generation losing their spiritual dependence as well, chemistry made controllable the reproductive cycle. A female could be in heat or not as she chose, whenever she chose.
The psychological effects of this were at once liberating and devastating. The primordial harmony with sun and stars was no more-or was, at most, a matter of conscious decision. If she entered a hitherto masculine field like spacefaring, she had to settle not just her working relationships, but the question of her identity, who and what she truly was. She never quite succeeded. Confusion and embitterment spread, also to those who stayed home. Too often sexuality became a weapon.
Prophets, philosophers, and common folk alike sought after a viable, satisfying new ideal. The example of alien sentiences, the knowledge that the Others existed, made their quests doubly intense, their disappointments doubly agonizing.
When Emissary arrived, the psychosexual dilemma had brought Beta to a crisis. Restlessness, eccentricity, mental illness, crime, tumult were steeply on the rise. No matter how busy, prosperous, interested in what they were doing, few of the more fortunate were altogether happy, and in many the sadness underlay their whole beings.
Some actually urged using time travel to abort the entire development of science; but if nothing else, this was impossible because no path was known which would fetch a ship out at Centrum very far in the past, nor did it seem likely that any could be found. Proposals heard much more often, that the race go "back to nature" by an act of will, were equally quixotic. Without modern technology, nearly the whole population, belike the whole species, must die; and that technology could only be run by the sexually emancipated. There was nowhere to go but forward. . . in what direction, though?
Then Emissary arrived.
As communication improved, year by year, excitement waxed among the more discerning Betans. What had been an intriguing academic project took on a gigantic significance. These bipeds were not simply a new type of sophonts. They were by birthright what the Betans were struggling to become.
Their sexual pattern occurred in several breeds elsewhere, but there too many differences existed as well, too profound, affecting too much the forms that it took. (For instance, one race, winged, was perpetually migratory, around and around its world. None of its institutions, mores, attitudes, beliefs were adaptable to surface dwellers.) Humans, despite every divergence, had a basic likeness to their hosts. Proof lay in the affinities which developed between individuals of the two kinds.
From scientific study, from literature, from friendship, Betans could hope to learn what it meant to be that kind of male and female, and how to be it. This would not happen in a single generation or a single century; what insight was gained might take a thousand years to transform civilization; the end result would surely be no copy, but uniquely Betan. Yet here could well be an approach to understanding. The lodestar for which so many had searched for so long, blind in their pain, could well be Sol.
Fidelio had begged it of Joelle: "Teach us your ways of love."
Neither she nor Christine paid close heed to the weather. Sunset gales were sometimes dangerous, but Centrum was Earth-days above the horizon. Besides, those winds came out of the west. Rain this early was unusual but welcome, lifting the heat. If any fell, afterward their clothes and footgear would quickly dry. They walked on bearing their private storms.
But at last Chris drew the older woman to her, for else the air would have ripped the words from her mouth: "I say, don't you think we'd better head back?"
Joelle looked around. The sky was inky. Lightning forked, thunder banged. Gray rags of cloud flew beneath. Spindrift blew stinging off a sea that reared, trampled, crashed, exploding its darkness into white foam-bursts, grinding the shingle together with a noise as of mighty millstones. She could not see far, but to the end of sight, bushes moved in brown, gold, red waves; trees were flailing; torn-off leaves and fronds whipped past, away into murk. The wind roared and yelled. It closed around her and thrust like a chill, turbulent billow, like the solar tidal bore that had drowned Alexander Vlantis. And still it strengthened.
"Yes," she called. "Shelter in the car. Not try to lift before this is over."
They turned about. Now the rain smote, first in spears, then in axes, then in a hammer whose single stroke went on and on forever. It torrented over the hard-baked soil, clutching at feet, until that began to dissolve in mud. The women slipped, fell, crawled half erect, clung to each other for help, and staggered on. The tempest filled Joelle's skull with blast, shriek, yowl. Thunder shook her bones.
This is impossible! a walled-off part of her cried. In eight Terrestrial years, twenty-five Betan, we've met nothing of this kind before evening. . . never!
The holothete within her responded passionlessly: What are twenty-five years in the duration of a world? Given sufficient time, anything that can happen will happen. Probably a massive cold front, sliding down from the arctic on a freakish path, has driven the terminator storms ahead of it. You should have checked a meteorological report before you left. But do not feel guilty. Only when you are in rapport with your machine can you think of everything.
The wind rose and rose. Lightning turned the rain to mercury, then lightlessness boomed down anew. Now the hail came. Stones bounced across the land and whitened it. They hit flesh, bruised, drew blood which instantly washed away. There was no breasting that barrage. The humans turned and groped west, backs to it, seeking for a lee.
A shadow loomed ahead, a tree to huddle behind. They lurched around it, blinded, deafened, embraced.
A whip-thin branch flayed open Joelle's scalp. She fell to hands and knees, down in the mud and tumbling water. A flash showed her the limb wrapped around Christine's neck.
It let go, it let her fall too. Quadruped, Joelle crept to her. Scarlet welled from Christine's mouth. She reached upward, into the hail. Joelle crouched, trying to be a roof. Christine's hands dropped, her eyes rolled back, lightning glimmered off their blankness. Joelle put lips to lips.
No use. A fractured larynx is swiftly fatal.
Joelle knelt under the tree with Christine's body in her arms.
XII
At the proper moment in her orbit around Demeter, Chinook's main engine awoke. For a few seconds, her electromagnetic shield against cosmic radiation was switched off. It came on again, rapidly building up a high positive potential on the hull, as soon as the plasma jet had reached dynamic equilibrium. At a standard one gravity of acceleration, which was about her upper limit when reaction mass tanks were full, the spaceship spiraled free and lined out for the T machine. Since it was at the L4 point, in the same path around Phoebus as the planet but sixty degrees ahead, the journey-with turnover at midpoint followed by braking-would theoretically take seventy-three hours, in practice a little more.
When everything was in order, Brodersen ordered all systems left on automatic and all hands to the common room. On his way there from the command center (which his mind, remembering cruises along Juan de Fuca and northward through the stern glories of the Inside Passage, still called the bridge) he felt Earth weight drag at him, a fourth more than what Demeter gave. He made sufficient interplanetary trips annually that he knew he'd adjust to this before long, together with watches set according to the Terrestrial day; but every time, his body was a smidgin slower about it. Passing down a companionway and a circular corridor, a yielding green carpet underfoot but otherwise bare gray and white paint, he wondered if he might not be thinking of himself as starting to get old, were it not for Caitlin...
Apart from furniture and recreation equipment, the common room was equally bleak. On notice as short as he'd given, nobody could have brought decorations or done anything else to add a touch of cheer. Yet when he saw her, the chamber came radiant.
From her backpack she had taken a brief crocus-colored dress. It set her like a sun against the large viewscreen before which she stood enraptured. Demeter filled a quarter of that scene, dayside cobalt blue shading into turquoise and sapphire, swirled with virginal white that here and there gave ocher glimpses of land, nightside a phantom of moonglow. The brilliance dazzled stars out of vision until you looked away, toward the frame, and let your eyes make ready to receive their myriads. "Glory, glory," he heard her croon, "and how could you not be a mother of life?"
"Easily," he couldn't help saying.
She jumped around, laughed for joy, and barefoot sped toward him. The added load on her seemed unfelt. Well, she does abolish gravity, flitted through him before the beloved mass collided and clung. She smelled of very recent soap and scrubbing, but also of herself, and an odor of sunshine lingered in loose hair. Breasts strained against the barrel of his chest. The kiss went on.
"Whoa, whoa, horsey," he muttered when they came up for air. "The others'll be here in a clockblink."
"The Others?" She had such range of tone, with her grin to see as well, that he heard the capital letter. "Is it peeping Toms they are? Maybe they'll learn somewhat. Maybe we can trade technical information."
"You know I mean the crew, you spinhead." He disengaged. "Things'll be complicated aplenty without them finding their aged and supposed-to-be-revered captain in your clutches."
"Should they find him in someone else's clutches? You cannot suppose they'll take me for your maiden aunt. I disqualify on two counts at least."
His gladness flickered out. "And that'll bring on worse than envy, I'm afraid. Especially- Later, I'll explain later. But look, Pegeen, macushla, I realize this is a grand adventure to you. Except it's not. It's an ugly business. It's too goddamn likely to turn into the kind that gets remembered as, `More fun, and more people getting killed-" Fist smote palm. "You could be among `em, oh, Christ, you could."
Sobered, she answered low, "Or you. Aye. If you want me to bounce less, I'll try my best, for you." Impulse returned, to send her fingers along his head and the blocky line of his jaw, caressing the slight bristliness. "But faith, Daniel, pessimism fits you badly, the fighter born that you are."
"I'm a realist, or trying to be. You live in a universe that's good and cheerful, same as yourself. I love you for that. You brighten mine up for me no end. Reality, though, reality doesn't give beans for our notions." Brodersen felt his ears warming, heard his words stumbling. He needed a way to phase out his sermon, and snatched at what seemed handiest. "Let me give you a for-instance. When I came in, I caught you claiming Demeter has to be
uh. . . viviferous because it's beautiful. That don't follow. Every planet I've seen is beautiful in its style, and nearly every one is dead and always has been. You make life out to matter more than it does."
