Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 (11 page)

 
          
The
Matriarchate had recruited women from all over the Unity and settled on a
planet which they renamed Persephone, For a few generations they had remained
part of the Unity, and Cendri had read of a few scientists who had been hired
to work there and their research lavishly funded—Persephone had been a rich
planet then— to re-discover what the Matriarchate believed, or professed to
believe, was the original form of humanity, female in form, and without the
y-chromosome creating maleness.

 
          
Some
interesting research had been done, but the partheno-genetic females created by
this research had proved sterile after the second generation, and the
Matriarchs had resigned themselves to retaining some males in their society as
breeding stock.

 
          
About
that time they had founded their daughter colony of Labrys; after the
bureaucratic blunder which wiped out almost eighty per cent of the Labrys
population, they had become paranoid, and withdrawn from the Unity—that was one
version; the other was that the Unity had ejected them for being in violation of
the First Principle, that all worlds participating in the Unity should grant
equality to all citizens. Persephone had insisted on its right to determine who
should be defined as a citizen. And after that, there had been almost nothing
heard of them. The remnants of the Labrys colony were repatriated, embittered.
Then, less than fifty years ago, Persephone, undergoing climatic changes, had
taken over, on normal Unity homestead laws, an uninhabited pelagic planet,
almost without arable land, known as Cinderella. As non-members of the Unity,
they had had to pay an enormous surcharge for the privilege. They had promptly
re-named it
Isis
, and dropped almost out of contact.

 
          
During
the early stages of the negotiations about the Builder ruins, Cendri had heard
the Dame di Velo raging about that. Even then—the Dame di Velo had been a young
woman when Cinderella was resettled as Isis—she had known about the ancient
ruins on Cinderella and had convinced herself they were Builder ruins. The Dame
herself had tried to raise a fund to homestead Cinderella by archaeologists
instead, and keep it in perpetuity for a mine of information about the supposed
Builders. But the colony of Persephone had outbid them.

 
          
"A
tragedy," the Dame di Velo had called it, "the greatest tragedy of my
professional life; that a world which was a mine, a veritable mine of
archaeological information, should be turned over to a crackpot culture, for
them to spin and weave and fish and ignore the most famous artifact in the
known Galaxy!"

 
          
But
scientific foundations traditionally found it hard to raise money, and the
Unity's basic stipulations stated that no viable colony should be denied the
right to homestead any arable planet. So the Matriarchate settled on
Cinderella/Isis, and closed their doors to the Unity. They traded, Cendri had
read, in pearls and nacre from their oceans, in magnesium, arsenic, selenium
and gold. Their jewelry was famous to the luxury trade everywhere. They
imported platinum and titanium, and certain fluoride compounds—Cendri was not
sure whether it was for their plastics industry or for their teeth—and a few
organic chemicals. But until the negotiations which culminated in the invitation
to the Scholar Dame di Velo to come here, no citizen from the Unity had set
foot on
Isis
.

 
          
Cendri
had grown cramped and cold, standing by the window, and was about to return to
the comfortable nest of cushions where Dal still lay curled up, when she saw a
light below.

 
          
The
city of
Ariadne
was dark at night. Cendri had expected
that; most of what was usually called "night life" was oriented to
solitary males from the spaceport districts, and based mostly on selling them
sex and entertainment. Remotely she wondered what the solitary males on this
world did for entertainment. There seemed to be nothing akin to marriage as it
was known on Cendri's world and Dai's. Cendri had become accustomed to extreme
differences of sexual customs from world to world. On University, for instance,
her best friend had come from a world where group marriage was the norm and the
worst perversion imaginable was to make love in groups of fewer than four. And
considering the number of children she had seen in the dining room tonight,
there must be some allowances for sexual contact.

 
          
But
whatever they did at night on
Isis
, they
did it silently and in the dark, without need of bright lights. She had seen
dim lights on the upper stories of the few buildings that had them, but
otherwise all was dark; so the row of lights, slow, winding, bobbing quietly
along at a steady pace, drew her eyes and her attention. She had thought it the
torch of some kind of night watchman—if night watchmen were men here—could any
world, even a matriarchy, be free of crime? But there were too many of the
small lights for that. She drew back the curtain a little and leaned out the
window. It was
a torchlight
procession, winding slowly
through the gardens behind the Pro-matriarch's house and down along the shore.

 
          
Well,
she had wondered what they did at night in Ariadne to amuse themselves. Now she
had seen something, though of course she had no idea what it meant.
A moonlight picnic?
There were two moons, large and
beautiful, in the sky.
A skinny-dipping party?
A religious festival?
They might be going out to hunt, fish,
swim, eat, copulate, or pick mushrooms which only flowered by moonlight, as
they did on Cendri's own home world at one season. Near the head of the
procession she could make out a tall, broad-shouldered figure which might very
well have been the Pro-Matriarch herself.

 
          
She
watched the lights winding along the shore, where the surf tumbled and boomed
softly with small breaking whitecaps. They moved further away and became small
twinkling fireflies in the distance. Then they reappeared, no more than tiny
points of light, winding slowly into the very center of the ruins which Miranda
had called We-were-guided.

 
         
And
their spaceship lay there. Thinking of Miranda's rapt expression when she spoke
of contact with the Builders, Cendri wondered; was this, then, the procession
of some sort of religious cult which had grown up around the ruins? Had they
gone—Cendri found herself shivering—to try and appease the supposed spirits of
the Builders for their imminent invasion by outworlders bent on learning their
secrets? Perhaps, even, to appease their supposed wrath? Again she
shivered—ancestor-worship cults were notoriously bloodthirsty! Were they
offering sacrifices at the
Builder's

 
 
          
shrines
? And
what
sacrifices? They seemed a peaceful,
enlightened culture, with an adequate technology, but religious cults were by
definition outside of a society's rational structure.

 
          
Again
she sought out the distant twinkling lights, adorning ruins and spaceship. They
had formed into a circle. A garland of lights, Cendri thought drowsily,
watching it. She yawned, tired and thoroughly chilled—
Isis
' culture did not evidently run to central
heating, though in view of the daytime heat and general subtropical climate
that was not surprising; but now it was distinctly chilly. She thought
longingly of the warm cushions, and Dai's warm body, even in sleep wonderfully
comforting and reassuring.

 
          
Yet
she stood as if compelled, watching the distant torches that festooned the
ruins like Festival lights on the Sacred Tree of the Vhanni on Rigel Four—the
light that had begun to glow, like a reflection of the huge pale moons, at the
summit of the ruins. She was not conscious of cold now. She stood in amazed
fascination, watching the light, the slow, suffusing, comforting glow. It was
like a voice in her heart, filling her with kindliness, love, warmth____ her heart
went out toward the light, and for a moment she felt like the child she had
been, running to hide herself in the lap of a nurse___ a fragment of Rhu's song
lingered for a moment in her mind, When I am done with
life, will the
Goddess
take me
to her
loving breasts.

 
          
Cendri
started upright, shaking herself,
Had
she been asleep?
The moons had set, but the light lingered, a faint glow around the ruins, the
echo of the voice in her mind—had it ever been there, or had she been dreaming?
Reason said, I was dreaming, but enough of the warmth lingered that she was
reluctant to dismiss it as a dream. She was enough of a scientist not to trust
her own perceptions when they seemed to deny reason.

 
          
She
turned and called softly "Dal—"

 
          
He
came awake slowly, confused, "Cendri? Where are you?" She could see
him feeling about in the bed for her beside him. Had she been asleep, standing
bolt upright at the window? Was a bizarre dream enough cause to rob him of his
rest? But she said softly, "I'm here at the window, Dal. Come here, I want
you to see something—"

 
          
"Sharrioz!
At this
hour?"
He sat up, bewildered,
then
padded
softly, naked, across the room to her side. "Sweetheart, is something
wrong?"

 
          
"Dal,
look—toward the ruins—"

 
          
Blinking,
he pressed his face to the pane. "Lights—down there in the ruins—"

 
          
"I
saw them leave the house—hours ago now, I suppose. I have no idea what time it
was, but the moons were still in the sky. They went into the ruins—"

           
"Well," he interrupted,
"Why shouldn't they? Vaniya said, at supper, that they were a religious
shrine. Maybe they go to say their prayers by moonlight, or something. That's
your job—to study this culture!"

 
          
She
reminded herself that his truculent tone was not an insult; that he had been
roused from a sound sleep to see something Cendri herself had not been sure she
saw.

 
          
"That
isn't all," she said, "I saw a light in the ruins—near the tip of
that building, do you see, the one with a tip like a broken horn___ " The
light, to Cendri, was still faintly there, and the sight of it somehow roused
again, in her, the memory of that brief, ecstatic glow___

 
          
But
she was not sure, not now. If she had fantasied it, or if it had been an
illusion, born of a glimmer of reflected moonlight on some unknown shining
surface
..
.she would not suggest it. Not unless he saw
it independently, and felt what she had felt, what she seemed to feel faintly
even now, would it validate her own perceptions.