Amazon Planet

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Had it not been for the sounds of Zeke and his young companion before him, he probably would never have found the way of retreat. The building was a meandering one, something in the nature of a Spanish or Mexican habitation of early times. The wall on Heliopolis Street had been blank, save for the door. From the outside, there was little to indicate what lay within.

Within was surprisingly extensive. There were three small patios in all, with numerous rooms of varying size leading off. It had been a sumptuous house, in its time; now it was run down.

In a way, it was a labyrinth and a person unfamiliar with the windings of its halls and walks could have become temporarily lost.

Ronny pounded after the faint sounds of Zeke and Tanais, running as softly, himself, as he could. He didn’t know whether the girl warriors behind him had actually seen him or not. But in any case they would spread through this building in brief moments. He had to get out.

Suddenly he could hear Zeke no longer.

The other had either paused, waiting for Ronny and for another shot at him, or he had passed out of the house and made his escape.

The only alternative Ronny could accept was the latter. He continued to run in the direction he had last heard the Sons of Liberty head who had so strangely and murderously turned on him. He came abruptly to a narrow door and instinctively knew that beyond lay the street. In fact, he could hear the sounds of a hovercar lifting and then zooming ahead. Ronny prayed to whatever gods might be listening that it was Zeke making his getaway. He grabbed the door latch and flung it open, half expecting a blast from the big man’s shooter.

There was no blast. There was no sign of Zeke or Tanais in the alleyway beyond. They had already made good their escape.

He wished that he had time to think about Teucer and Minythyia, and about Zeke, for that matter. Why in the name of the Holy Ultimate had the man tried to finish Ronny off?

He sped down the alley, hoping he was taking a direction that would place him as far as possible from the Amazons behind in as short a period of time.

He came out on a side-street, puffing, and brought on himself the stares of various pedestrians in the vicinity.

He slowed down to a walk, grinning inanely, as though ashamed of being caught running.

“Beautiful day, eh?” he said to the world in general.

Somebody snorted. All turned to look away from him.

He walked as rapidly as was compatible with his desire to remain inconspicuous. His sickness had given way now to more simple symptoms of hangover. He had a crushing headache and was still up to less than his full strength, but at least he felt his mind was clear.

As he walked, he tried to think it out.

Most things he could think of added up to very little sense. First, why wasn’t this whole” area saturated with Hippolyte’s police, warriors, guards—call them what you would? He had been on various police-state planets during his years with Section G. If there was one thing they had in common, it was a plentitude of armed, competent secret police. He couldn’t imagine that house on Heliopolis Street not having been overrun with Hippolyte’s people within a matter of a quarter hour after he had revealed the situation of the underground hideaway.

And Zeke! Why had the revolutionary attempted to kill him? Was Zeke, rather than Teucer, the traitor to the Sons of Liberty? Had Teucer found out something about the big man? Why had Zeke been, well, indignant, at the suggestion that the Hippolyte’s people had never heard of the underground?

And Minythyia! How could it possibly make sense that the daughter of the Hippolyte was serving as an ordinary police private, or whatever she was? How could such people as the major and Clete treat her, address her, as though she was a nobody? The splendor of the throne room of Hippolyte’s palace gave lie to any theory that there was a comradeship between these women warriors that would allow the daughter of the supreme ruler to be treated as an equal by low ranking officials.

And Teucer! How did Teucer fit into it all? What was it the other was so anxious to talk over with him! And if he wasn’t a refugee from Lybia, what was he?

He called it all quits for the time and looked about. He was at a large square. Before him was a park with four colossal statues dominating its center. He concentrated, in spite of the headache, recalling the maps supplied by Sarpedon in the Octagon. The maps of Themiscyra.

Yes, he thought he knew where he was. The river, the Thermodon, would be over that way about four blocks. In that direction, to his right, was the sanctuary. Perhaps a mile away. He dare not go there. If anything seemed likely at all, it was that the Amazon police were going through his things with fine-toothed combs. He wondered with wry humor what poor Podner Bates was making of it all. He hoped the little man wasn’t in trouble for befriending Ronny Bronston.

The police were after him, his only contact with the Sons of Liberty, Zeke, had tried to kill him. He had no way of communicating with his superiors, nowhere to go and no funds…

Wait a minute. There were no funds, here on Amazonia.

He stuck a hand into the belt pouch of his outfit and fished forth the plastic card he had taken from Tanais when he had searched the boy there on the floor.

He stopped long enough to scrutinize the thing more carefully than he had before. It revealed little. His name and genos name. His address and, yes, the fact that he was a student. Thank the Holy Ultimate that students were paid to attend school in this fantastic economy. Tanais would have a supply of hours to his credit. The card, without doubt was valid.

If it wasn’t, he, Ronny Bronston, would soon find out.

In his walking, he had passed several of what he assumed were taxi. stands. Empty hovercars waiting for fares. There was a stand located alongside the park.

Taking his chances, he opened the door of a cab and slid inside, behind the driver’s joystick. He looked over the controls, noted the fare box screen and figured out its workings. He had driven twice with the major in limousines, once with Minythyia in a sports vehicle. Beyond that, he had driven hovercars, of slightly different design, on a dozen different worlds. On most, the wheel was used, but he had operated cars directed by sticks before. If anything, they provided a more delicate control.

He began experimenting. You dropped this lever. No, first you dropped the brake. Then you lifted clear of the street with this.

A voice said, “You have forgotten to put your hours card on the screen, Madam.”

He jerked his head around, inadvertently.

The voice was some sort of built-in recording. He brought his purloined card out and put it on the screen, and started all over again.

He was going to have to operate it manually. He had no idea of how to set the coordinates on the auto controls. He would have had to have a more complete knowledge of the city for that.

He got under way without much difficulty and concentrated on his destination. He was going to have to experiment, he wasn’t quite sure of the location.

However, he made it with little difficulty, cruising up and down the streets until he spotted the place. There were hovercars before it, but none that looked particularly as though they were police or military.

He stopped, removed the stolen hours card from the screen and climbed from the vehicle, half expecting it to say something further. It didn’t, and the moment he was out, took off into the traffic, evidently heading for some taxi park. He looked after it. Give credit where due. It was an efficiently handled service.

He looked up at the building. A fairly large number of persons were coming and going through the elaborate entrance. Most of them were women, but there were a few males. He continued to have difficulty telling them apart. Civilian clothes were all but identical. This was a continuing surprise. His first impression, picked up on the ship, and later in his audience with the Hippolyte, was that practically all women wore the armor-like uniform of the Amazon warrior. But here there were no such outfits in sight.

It was a minor puzzle, and he had major ones to solve. He mounted the steps and entered the building. Now his problem had only begun. He was afraid to ask questions. Just as surely as he did, he would stand out like a walrus in a goldfish bowl.

He doubted that his destination was on the first floor, although it might have been. He mounted, instead, to the second, and prowled up and down, hopefully.

Ronny Bronston’s luck continued to hold. There were name plates on the doors. He found what he was looking for twenty minutes later on the third floor: Patricia O’Gara.

There was a door eye and he activated it.

In less than a minute the door opened and she was there, smiling at him.

This was the crux, now. If she showed any indication that she was aware of the morning’s developments, he was going to have to overpower her. She said “Why, Guy! Guy Thomas!”

He grinned at her. “Can I come in?”

She stepped back. “Of course. So you managed to land all right. How in the name of Artimis did you know where I was?”

“Minythyia pointed the building out.” The questions didn’t bother him. At long last the Scop had worn off.

He followed her into a small living room. Evidently, she had been assigned a fairly comfortable apartment by the powers that be. She had been on the planet a couple of days before he landed.

“Minythyia?” she said, even while gesturing toward a seat for him. “I’ll bet this will come as a surprise to you. Do you know who that madcap Mynythyia is?”

“You mean the daughter of the Hippolyte?” He sank into the chair with relief. “Ummm, somebody mentioned it. Imagine her acting as a lowly customs officer.”

Pat said primly, “Everybody works on Amazonia. There are no parasites. Only children and the retired are without positions.”

“Great,” Ronny said, “but you expect a bit of nepotism even in the feminine Utopia. Look, I’m famished. You haven’t got anything to eat around here, have you? And some pain killer? I’ve got a headache.”

“Why, of course,” she said. “The auto’s in here. Order anything you wish. Oh, I forgot. Do you have an hours card?”

“Well, no.” He was going to have to take it easy with the card of Tanais. He had no way of knowing whether or not, or when, the student might report the loss of that valuable document. He couldn’t afford to have the computers on the lookout for it.

She said, “You can use mine. You’d be amazed at the efficiency here. Within hours after I was off the Schirra, they’d assigned me this apartment, enrolled me in a school where I have special tutors to give me a foundation in the Amazonia culture, and began crediting me with hours for the time I put into my studies. I’m already a citizen. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“I suppose so,” he told her, following her into the small dining alcove.

She put her card on the payment screen and he stared down at the extensive menu set into the auto-table. After taking the headache-relieving pill, he dialed more food than he could reasonably have eaten.

“You are hungry,” she said. “There is no nepotism on Amazonia.”

The change of subject had stopped him for a moment. “Oh,” he said finally, watching the food begin to emerge. “Why not? It’s a natural development, you’d think.”

“Not if you understand the workings of an advanced society,” she told him righteously. “Since there is no profit to be gained by being, say, an admiral, rather than an ordinary seaman, there’s no motive in attempting to push your offspring into positions she can’t competently occupy.”

He was eating hungrily. “That’s right, everybody gets paid exactly one hour for putting in one hour’s time, don’t they? But there are other things than, uh, crass material payment. An admiral has power, position, honors, that sort of jetsam.”

“And how stupid they are unless you’ve earned them. Back on my home planet, Victoria, we have universities that grant so-called honorary degrees. Politicians, soldiers and what not, who can hardly read the sport sections of newstapes, or write more than their own names, are given doctor’s degrees. All it does, actually, is water down the deserved acknowledgement of the accomplishments of the scholars who have really earned such degrees.”

He was still forcing food into his mouth as though starved. He could hardly know when he would be able to eat again.

However, he couldn’t help bite away at the hand that was feeding him. “Sure, great. A real feminine Utopia. However—”

“Amazonia isn’t a Utopia, Guy,” she said. “Utopia is a dream world, a perfect world. We Amazonians realize that there is always another rung up the ladder of progress. Utopia can never be reached, but even if it could be, we would not wish it. The satisfaction is to be found in the common effort upward.”

“Very inspiring,” Ronny said sarcastically. “It’ll be a great day when in the course of this progress they get around to examining their marriage laws.”

She scowled at him, a hint of color beginning to come to her cheeks. He couldn’t help but remember the endless run-ins she’d had with Rex Ravelle on the Schirra.

“Marriage laws?” she said. “There is no marriage on Amazonia. They passed beyond that institution a century and more ago.”

He had been about to devour a chunk of some vegetable he had found in his stew, a vegetable he had never come upon elsewhere. Now he put down his fork and stared at her.

“Are you completely drivel-happy?” he demanded. “No marriage on Amazonia! I’ve never seen so damn much marriage in my life. And such an easy way of getting into it!”

It was her turn to stare. “Why, why, you’ve simply been misinformed,” she said definitely.

“Look,” he said. “This tutoring you’ve been taking; hasn’t anybody mentioned the fact that any Amazonia warrior can have three husbands?”

“Oh, don’t be a cloddy. Of course they can have three husbands, though that’s hardly what you’d call them. And a man can have three ‘wives’ for that matter, if he wished. Amazonians don’t believe in restricting personal relationships with too many laws. Actually, though, useage frowns on promiscuity and having close relations with even two or three persons at a time is considered rather far-out. However, some people are just built that way. They’re not one-man women, or one-woman men. You’ve had the problem down through the ages. On your own planet, Earth, don’t you have people who are continually getting married and getting divorced? And on my planet, Victoria, it isn’t at all unknown for a man to be supposedly happily married, but on the side be maintaining one or more mistresses.”

“Now wait a minute,” Ronny said accusingly, pointing at her with his fork. “I’m not talking about exceptional people having affairs, or getting too many divorces. I’m talking about the basic family. The way I understand it, an Amazonian warrior can have three husbands and she keeps them cooped up in what amounts to a harem.”

She rolled her eyes upward as though in plea to heaven. “See here. In the first place, that term warrior is nonsense. It means no more than calling every woman a lady on Earth or Victoria. The original meaning of lady was a titled woman, a gentlewoman, but eventually the term became a gentilism, and you called any female a lady, even if she was an alcoholic thief. The same on Amazonia. Some people like to draw on mythology, continuously, just for fun. Have you noticed how much of the art is based on Amazonian myth? But to hear you talk, you’d think every woman on the planet was a swaggering soldier.”

“All right, so I’ll admit that I’ve been surprised there aren’t more women in uniform. That’s besides the immediate point.”

“I was getting to the fact that you’ve been confused by some of the terminology. Far from the family on Amazonia consisting of a bully of a female warrior, dominating a harem full of men, there is no family at all.”

Ronny pushed the rest of his food away.

“Zen!” he said. “That brings up a picture. No family at all. I suppose they find their children under cabbage leaves in the garden.”

She had to laugh, in spite of the fact that her face was already characteristically flushed in the debate.

“Don’t be drivel-happy,” she said. “This goes back to one of the arguments we had on the Schirra, the fact that nothing is so changing as human institutions. And among these is the family. Down through the ages we have seen evolve every type family imaginable, and we have seen, as well, periods when there was no family at all.”

“When?” he demanded. “I’ll admit we’ve had different types of family, under special conditions. Polygamy under the Arabs, because so many of the men were killed off in battle that there was a surplus of women; and polyandry, up in Tibet, before the advent of modern medicine. There was a surplus of men because so many women died in childbirth at that high altitude. But when was there no family at all? You’ve got to have some sort of family.”

“To begin with,” she said, “that example of yours of the Tibetans is probably wrong. Inadequate reporters of Tibetan society were probably describing a form of family that was one of the very oldest. All the men of the clan were married to all the women, all the children belonged to everybody. Your prejudiced reporter, his modern sensibilities shocked upon seeing such a society, might well report that the women had more than one husband. Of course they did, and the men more than one wife.”

Ronny was eyeing her in disbelief.

She went on. “That was a pretty primitive family if you ask me. In fact, I would call it no family at all. As man evolved, he hit upon a taboo, here and there, which prevented such relationships as those between parents and children. You can imagine the advantage this soon led to between those groups who had such a taboo, and those who didn’t—gentically speaking. Later on, some groups adopted a taboo against brother and sister relationships and again, those tribes which followed such a custom outstripped the ones who held onto the other type ‘family’.

“All this, of course, is oversimplifying. But eventually, out of these successful taboos, grew gentile society, in which each tribe was divided into genos as the Greeks had it, or gens as the Latins called them. It was forbidden to marry within your own gens. You had to take a husband or wife from some other gens, either within your own tribe, or from some other. All children from the relationship became members of the woman’s gens, when descent was in the female line. Later this was changed to descent in the male line and you took the name of your father’s gens. Very well, what it amounted to was that the gens was one enormous ‘family.’ All the children were the collective responsibility of the whole gens. All the adults were the mothers and fathers of all the children.

“However, this system fell of with the advent of civilization, the growth of herds and, with agriculture, the ownership of land. A man wanted his own children, who worked with him in the herds or in the fields, to inherit his property. He didn’t want it to go to the gens of his wife, as was the old system, or even his own gens. Slowly the family became monogamous, consisting only of a man, his wife, and his children.”

“Now wait a minute,” Ronny said. He was already tiring of both the subject and the lecture, but there was no easy way to break it off. “You mean not until comparatively recent times have we had a one-man-married-to-one-woman deal?”

“No, I don’t mean that. I think that as soon as our race had evolved much further than the outright animal, it began to tend toward a pairing relationship. That is, one man and one woman. This, I think, is eventually the normal relationship toward which we are trending and have always been. Even under gentile society, the usual thing was for one man and one woman to have a relationship. In those days it was easily broken and both could go their way, both were equal, neither had ties on the other. Man and woman complement each other. They act as a team and, instinctively you might say, the pairing family is the natural one.”

She plowed on. “But, yes, what we know as marriage and the family today, is comparatively recent. The marriage laws which developed, the marriage ceremonies, the religious teachings, the cultural taboos we came to think of as natural and normal, are new developments historically speaking. With the advent of the monogamous family, several needs had to be met. The man, wishing his children to inherit, had to make sure he was the father. Thus women were segregated, kept virtual prisoners in the gynaecea of the Greeks, the harem of the Arabs, the seraglio of the Turks. The laws and mores were such that a woman must be a virgin at marriage, but that was winked at in the man’s case. In fact, under the Code Napoleon, for example, the law conceded the right of the man to be unfaithful. A woman who was caught in adultery was punished with death, in some societies. There were other angles to these new marriage laws, however. In this new type family, with the man controlling all the wealth, the woman and children had to be protected from his being a complete brute. The laws forced him to remain with her during her pregnancy and while the children were young. He was obligated to support them.”

Ronny said impatiently, “Look, I don’t have time to take a complete course in the history of marriage and the family. Bring it down to here and now. What’s all this about there being no family and no marriage on Amazonia?”

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.”