She simmered down a fraction. “Have you ever landed there yourself?”
“Well, no, but I’ve met port officials, customs officers, and also the pilots, crews and longshoremen who crew the lighters.”
“But you’re still spreading cheap rumors about male harems and such jetsam!”
Rex turned to Happy, still performing make-work in the background while he gaped in fascination at the war of words going on between officer and passenger. Oh, they’d love this down in the crew’s mess later on. For once, Happy Harrison would hold the center of the stage.
“Happy,” Rex called, “bring us some more coffee, eh?” Then, “Citizeness, let’s sit down and go at this more reasonably. You’re headed for Amazonia yourself, aren’t you? Do you mind my asking why?”
She glared at him still, for a moment, then quickly took the nearest chair. Guy, who had stood, upon her arrival, sat himself again as well.
Patricia O’Gara snapped, “I’m an anthropologist. Well, an ethnologist, really,” as though that explained all. She looked at Guy Thomas. “These men have been joshing you with this fling. Amazonia is the most advanced planet in the confederation.”
“By what standards?” Ravelle said sarcastically.
She turned her wrath on him again. “By any intelligent ones! The only true matriarchy in United Planets.”
It occurred suddenly to Guy Thomas that the S.S. Schirra was spaceborne. So engrossed had he become in the debate that he had failed to notice the low throb that denoted engines at strain.
“Zen!” he said. “We’re on our way. You know, it’s my first time in space.”
The second officer looked at him sourly. “And if you land on Amazonia, it might well be your last. You’ll be lucky to get off again.” He turned to Patricia O’Gara before she could say anything to that. “And if you disagree, I speak from experience. Never in the ten years I’ve been on this run have I ever known of a case of a man leaving the planet for elsewhere.”
She scowled unhappily at him, but managed to retort. “Are you sure that isn’t because the citizens of Amazonia don’t want to leave, that they’d rather remain on their own world, which they find more disirable than any alternative?”
Ravelle leaned back in his chair as the steward served them with the fresh coffee he’d requested. “I didn’t say I’d never seen a citizen of Amazonia leave the planet, I said I hadn’t seen any men leave it. On several occasions we’ve picked up women headed back to Earth as embassy personnel, or even to some other planet on rare trade missions.” He spoke the next sentence more slowly. “But I’ve never seen, or heard of, a man who was allowed to…escape.”
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.”