“Well, we won’t have to fight a duel with it—1 hope. So long as you can stab something with it, I think it’s better than nothing. You sure aren’t gonna be winning any fist-fights any time soon!” She paused a moment. “What about food for you two? I have a small kerosene-type cooker that’ll work here, or there are loaves in the emergency rations that supposedly give any of us what we need. They taste lousy, but they’re better than raw grass.”
“I could prepare something from the supplies,” Julian suggested, but Lori shook his head.
“No, not tonight. Tonight’s for resting and taking it easy. If Mavra can stand one of those loaves, so can I. I might like it a lot more than she does.”
“Or less. Still, very well, if that is your wish. I could try that grass, but I do not want to leave you alone here.”
“No! Eat one of the loaves, too. We’re heading for the coast, which shouldn’t be that far, right, Mavra?”
“Shouldn’t be. Certainly not a day’s walk.”
“When we are hard up, we will eat grass. Until then we will do what is easiest and most convenient,” he pronounced.
“As you say,” Julian responded, and went to get the rations.
Mavra was a little irritated. Julian had talked about the confusion over Tony and Anne Marie, but at least there were two of them. She began to wonder if there weren’t two Julians as well—the one that led them through a dark jungle safely, reconnoitered the area, and located and approved the campsite and the other one that she now was, subservient, obedient… somewhat sickening.
On the other hand, if she had four big tits, hands like claws, arms useless for much lifting and better designed as legs, and if the only hope she had of not being cast adrift as some kind of chattel slave was to keep the one husband who understood her happy enough to keep her around, then maybe she’d be two people, too, no matter how difficult it might be.
She had, after all, been in situations not any better than Julian’s. Ancient Earth wasn’t kind to most women. The way Tony, Anne Marie, and Julian had talked, that was true even now on much of the planet. Chinese peasant women still toiled in the rice paddies; the women in theocracies like the Islamic fundamentalist cultures were kept without rights, voices, or free movement. It was little better in much of sub-Saharan Africa, India, or even a lot of Latin America. In what they called the Third World, eighty percent or more of humankind was largely forgotten or ignored by the feminist crusaders in the industrialized West, most of whom also forgot or never knew that revolutions were often followed by reactions that could leave them worse off than ever. She had seen it happen.
She had lived it.
Time after time the great civilizations, the great ideas, the progress of whole masses of humanity were stopped dead and thrown back, often for longer than generations. Sometimes the darkness lasted many long centuries. Two steps forward and then one back was the norm, or so it seemed, but the darkness could rise and force one back even farther. If, as she’d been told, the status of women in some parts of Earth, let alone so much of it, was different from that in Erdom only by degrees, then the darkness still loomed, waiting to engulf the rest. And that darkness, the darkness of ignorance and slavery that was the dark side of humanity, would be replayed again and again if Nathan Brazil triumphed, even though he himself would have been appalled at that interpretation.
It didn’t have to happen. It certainly didn’t have to happen the same way and to the same people again. The Markovians—she still thought of the Ancient Ones by that name although Jared Markov, after whom they were named, had not yet been born this time around—were wrong in believing that there was a level of perfection attainable by races fighting their way up the evolutionary ladder. They were right to try to understand and fight the flaws, but the result was that the flaws were simply perpetuated.
That,at least, she could change. She might change. But if, and only if, she got into the Well first.
“I’ll take the first watch,” Lori said, breaking Mavra’s reverie. “I slept most of the way here, and I’m fine now.”
Mavra nodded. “All right. Julian and I will try to get some sleep. If the Dillians don’t come back in an hour or so, wake me. If they do, then give me at least four hours. I’ve functioned on that little for days at a time.” She thought a moment. “I don’t want to give you a loaded crossbow with that pair still out there if you’re not experienced in using one. I’ll get your saber so at least you can hit something over the head if it jumps on you, but what I really want is a loud yell. I’ll give you my watch. It’s a windup type, so it works anywhere, too.”
He grinned. “Don’t worry so much. I can see in the dark, remember? I’ve even been keeping track of the centaurs. I’ll be okay.”
“In fact, I should take the next watch, not you, for the same reason,” Julian pointed out. “The nights are long on this world, and it is best that the night guard be those to whom the dark is no barrier.”
“I won’t argue, but are you sure you’re up to it on so little sleep?” Mavra asked her.
“Yes. I do not need a lot of sleep, either. I make it up when I can.”
“Okay, it makes sense to me. If all else fails, we can let you sleep and ride as well.” Mavra yawned. “Me, I’m gonna take advantage of your kind offer.”
“You get to sleep, too,” Lori told Julian. “I’ll be all right.”
“Yes, my husband,” she responded, and lay down on the unoccupied bedroll.
Tony and Anne Marie came back a half hour later. By that time Mavra and Julian were both asleep, and the Dillians tried to make as little noise as possible. They didn’t need bedrolls or much else; like horses, they lay down only when crippled or very ill. Instead, they simply stood, their legs locked and the humanoid torsos bent back somewhat, and went to sleep.
Except for the occasional heavy breathing of the centauresses, it was soon deadly still.
Lori, too, wondered about Julian’s dual nature. He himself felt pretty well adjusted to the Erdomese form and now even to being male. Maybe too adjusted, he had to admit, considering some of his behavior of late, but he felt that he was being pragmatic about things. By Erdomese standards, he thought, he would always be a liberal, always remembering that the females had minds and thoughts and feelings and capabilities most of that society rejected and, hopefully, treating them better than most men there did. On the other hand, in that society any outspoken advocacy was a sure route to losing everything and to punishments including cutting out his tongue, castration, and beheading. For Julian it would mean instant death. With the church and its omnipresent spies and true believers programmed from childhood to believe in it and with the enforced insularity of most of the population from real knowledge of much of the rest of this world, nothing could or would change in Erdom’s society until and unless there was violent mass revolution.
It might well come eventually, but considering how things there were now, it most assuredly would not be in his or Julian’s lifetime. It wasn’t until experiencing a real totalitarian theocracy that he had realized just how hard a revolution could be, battling not only minds but genuine power. Technology, discovery, enlightenment, the scientific revolution—that had started things on Earth, or restarted them. But what kind of science could one develop when a battery would not hold a charge and tended to dissipate in even short transmission? When technology was rigidly and forever limited to water, and wind, and animal and human power? Without mass communication how could anything be organized? When even writing was limited primarily to the church and the hideously complex ideographic language was so complex that even priests were middle-aged before they fully mastered it, how could knowledge be disseminated?”