She flushed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bore you.”
“You’re not boring me, confound it.” he growled. “I’m just trying to make heads and tails of what goes on in this drivel-happy country.”
“Very well. Times have changed again. In a truly affluent society, the woman is no longer dependent upon the man, nor he on her. Nor, are the children dependent upon either. As in the days of the gens, society as a whole sees that nothing harms the child.”
“You mean,” he said accusingly, “parents don’t raise their own kids on this crazy planet?”
“It’s not the way I’d put it, but at the risk of shocking your conservative beliefs, Guy Thomas—”
“Call me Ronny,” he said wearily, “everybody else does.”
“A nickname? With a name like Guy, I wouldn’t think you needed a nickname. You know, you certainly seem different than you were on the Schirra. It’s as though you were playing a part then.”
“Go on about raising the kids,” he said.
“Actually, for the past couple of millennia during which parents were in a position to be complete dictators over their children, no matter how unfitted they were for the position—”
“Hey, now wait a minute!”
“Why? Take an example. A silly little slob in her mid-teens goes out with a juvenile delinquent on a drunken party. In the back of the vehicle in which they’ve been speeding up and down the roads, threatening the lives of others, she fails to take certain precautions. The slob who was her companion, is forced to marry her. Nine months later, the child is born, and, hocus-pocus, a miracle takes place. She is a sainted mother. They’re parents! And ipso facto, capable of raising, training, educating the child. Artimis, Ronny! You don’t subscribe to this, do you?”
“It’s a rather extreme example,” he said wryly.
“Not as extreme as all that. How many parents had the time, the training, the intelligence level, sometimes even the desire, to raise healthy, balanced children? One set of parents in ten? I doubt if it was any more.”
“So in Amazonia the State raises the children.”
“There is no State in Amazonia.”
He closed his eyes in pain. “Here we go again,” he said. He opened them and glared at her. “But before we go into that, I don’t want to miss something we passed over. In all this gobbledygook about family and marriage, you seem to have left out the consideration of one very basic item, in your coldblooded scientific approach.”
“What other approach can science have?” she scoffed. “In science you deal with facts, not romanticism.”
“That’s the point I wanted to bring up. In everything you’ve said about the relationship between man and woman, and between parents and children, you haven’t even had a nod in passing at the word love.”
She looked at him scornfully. “So?”
“So the very basis of these relationships are just that. Love. And that remains unchanging down through the centuries, though it may sound like a lot of jetsam to an ethnologist such as yourself.”
She sighed in exasperation. “Ronny, you keep insisting on believing that the institutions with which you are familiar are unchanging and have always been. Actually, that term love, as you’re using it, is a comparatively modern invention. Romantic love first came on the scene during the Middle Ages—back when so many of the aristocracy were off on crusade, when romantic verse and song were being developed by the troubadours and those fair knights who were smart enough to stay at home from the wars, and when adultery was the full time occupation of a considerable portion of the gentry who had nothing else to do.”
“Cynicism doesn’t become you, Pat,” Ronny said.
She sighed again. “Down through the ages there has always been passion, and there’s always been lust, and, of course, above all there has always been the sexual instinct. But romantic love, I repeat, is a fairly new invention. If you will read the mythology of the Greeks, the doings of the Gods, you’ll see that they had lust aplenty, but can you point out one myth that portrays true romantic love, with its self sacrifice and so forth? Or get into the historic period. Can you find in all the writings of the Romans, a real love affair? Did the wives of any of the Emperors love them? Compared to the later timeless romances such as that between Disraeli and his wife, Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, President Madison and his Dolly, or even the Duke of Windsor and the woman he loved?”
She snorted at him. “Here on Amazonia, for possibly the first time, we can contemplate a true love between the sexes. No longer does one economically dominate the other. No longer is one at the mercy of the other, because of unfair laws. Both are equal, and—”
“Oh, now, really…” he began, overriding her voice.
And it was then that the door hummed.
Pat looked at the screen. “I wasn’t expecting anybody,” she frowned.
The frown turned into a scowl. “It must be broken. There’s no one on the screen.”
Ronny swiveled, quickly. The screen set in the door showed blank. Pat O’Gara reached toward the release button set into the control arm of her chair.
He said, “Wait a minute, Pat!”
But she had already pressed.
The door opened and Minythyia, clothed in her Amazon uniform, a quick draw holster on her right hip, was revealed, leaning on the door jam.
She grinned at them mockingly. “So,” she said, “leave you for half an hour and you dash off to some other women. I can see we’re going to have some words in our family, Cutey.”
Pat said, “Minythyia!”
The Amazon said to Ronny, “Come along, boy. We’ve got a date with my mother. She evidently has a few questions she’d like to ask you.”
XI
Minythyia followed him down to the street silently. The overcar she’d had earlier was parked near the curb, once again, he noted, in a zone marked prohibited. He was somewhat surprised that she had no other guards with her.
“How’d you know where I was?” he said.
She chuckled, as though fondly, at him. “Where else could you be? You had no place else to go. I forgot it at first but then, after I left mother and the others, I recalled pointing Pat O’Gara’s building out to you.”
“I was a flat to come here,” he muttered. “You realize, obviously, that Citizeness O’Gara had nothing to do with it. I intruded on her. She knows nothing about me, nor why I’m on Amazonia.”
“Of course, Cutey,” Minythia yawned. She banged at the control levers of the little vehicle, brought them off the street and zoomed forward, pressing him back into the seat.
He was disgusted with himself. He had spent the last precious half hour batting his gums about non-essentials when he should have been desperately trying to figure out some manner in which he could have escaped this insane planet. Some manner in which he could have appropriated a space launch and got himself out to the UP Embassy.
Instead, here he was, recaptured by a slip of a girl—or so she appeared, when not in uniform. He looked over at her. It was the confounded uniform that made these women look so aggressive and truculent.
He said in nasty irritation, “Where’d you people ever come up with the idea that women made superior warriors to men?”
She looked at him from the side of her eyes, mockingly, as usual. “My dear husband, whoever contended that women make better warriors than men? Didn’t Heracles and Theseus and their Greeks clobber the original Hippolyte and her warriors? And Achilles, when he fought Penthesileia before the walls of Troy, did he have any trouble defeating her?” she leered. “And you know what the legends tell us he did to her afterwards. But anyway, no. I’d never claim that women made better warriors than men. Now soldiers are another thing.”