Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 (22 page)

 
          
Laurina
was squirming. She was very fair-skinned and somewhat freckled under the short
curly red hair, and her pale skin was pink between the freckles. "As you
know, Vaniya, Mahala is one of the Trustees of the College, and she has sent
word—" she lowered her eyes and twisted her hands, in agonized
embarrassment, "that none of the woman students shall work with the
Scholar Dame until Mahala has had a chance to speak with her, and make certain
that—that—" her voice gave out and she glanced pleadingly at Cendri.
"Scholar Dame, I am ashamed!"

 
          
Cendri
was angry—for Dai's sake; they needed some kind of help in the ruins. She was
also angry at the insult. She said, "Does the Pro-Matriarch Mahala think I
am likely to harm the students, Laurina?"

 
          
"That woman!"
Vaniya grated, "shameless,
insolent, discourteous to our honored guests, dishonoring the will of the High
Matriarch—what excuse does she give? What reason can she possibly have?"

 
          
Laurina
said uncomfortably, "That until she has seen and—and spoken with the
Scholar Dame she does not consider it wise to expose her students to the
hazards of male scholarship."

 
          
"In
the name of the Goddess," Vaniya exploded, "How can scholarship be
male or female? That is like speaking of the feminine nature of the atomic
table of the elements, or the maleness of a volcano! Laurina, truthfully, has
my fellow Pro-Matriarch gone mad?"

 
          
"I
am not qualified to judge, Vaniya. But I am ashamed of my students for hiding
themselves like shellfish at low tide!" She looked at Cendri, hesitantly.
"Will you have me as their unworthy representative, then?"

 
          
Cendri
smiled at her, realizing how much bravery it must take to defy the
Pro-Matriarch Mahala. In a society like this, where law seemed to be at a
minimum and everything handled by personal relationships with superiors and
mothers and older kin, it must have seemed a shocking thing to Laurina to go
against such a ban. "I hope you will not get in trouble for coming without
the others, Laurina."

 
          
Laurina's
smile glowed at her. She said, "I don't care if I do or not," and
Cendri sighed a little, even while Laurina's gesture moved her. Evidently the
young woman had developed a full-fledged case of hero worship. She would have
thought Laurina, who was about her own age, was too old for such a
school-girlish attitude, but perhaps on a world where one's immediate social
superiors were
all
women, this kind of thing lasted longer.

 
          
Laurina
added earnestly, "It was not absolutely forbidden. But the Pro-Matriarch
spoke, and of course everyone was afraid to make her angry, so the matrons at
the college suggested it would be wiser and more courteous not to go. But I am
my own woman, and I do not see how merely listening to what the Scholar Dame
has to say can damage me. I do not suppose she will force her opinions upon me,
if I cannot accept them in conscience!"

 
          
Cendri
wanted to laugh at the young defiance of that. She discovered instead that she
was moved. "I am happy to have your help, my dear, and perhaps when the
other students see that I have not damaged you in any way, they will decide
that their consciences and their duty will permit them to come."

 
          
"But
this is sheer politics!" Vaniya fumed, "How dare that woman set the
whole city at odds this way? Is she hoping that if Rezali dies without naming a
successor, some grand outcry from the people will place her upon the High
Matriarch's seat? What will it profit her to do this?"

 
          
Cendri
thought it prudent to ignore that. She could not, after all, make any
legitimate comment about local politics. She told Vaniya that, since the
promised students had not appeared, they would need some help in carrying their
gear and that it was ready to transport; bringing Laurina with her to their room,
she gave her charge of the graphic recording equipment. She hated to feed the
young woman's crush on her by singling her out for special attention this way,
but Laurina, as a student, was better fitted to deal with such a responsibility
than Vaniya's unskilled servants and poor relations who had been assigned to
the task.

 
          
Surreptitiously
she saw Laurina examining the equipment. Dal was organizing the materials,
putting them in order for use. Somehow everything got organized—even Rhu
volunteered to help—and they started through the garden toward the shoreline
and the path which led upward toward the ruins at We-were-guided. Vaniya stood
and watched them go. Cendri thought she seemed distressed; but whether it was
at the action of her fellow Pro-Matriarch, or something else, she could not be
sure.

 
          
Of
course
this is not
what she
wants. We-were-guided is a
holy
place
to
her. How
can I make her understand
that we will not
desecrate
it? Or
will
our very presence do that?

 
          
She
knew Dal would never understand this. He was trained in all the traditional
disciplines of archaeology, but he was oriented only to measurable things;
micrometric measurements of the skulls of tomb inhabitants, computer analysis
of tools to judge the size and physiology of the hands, limbs or appendages
that had used them, measurements, judgments based on arbitrary standards.

 
          
But
could he really understand, from these things, the true essence of the past?
Could computer analysis of a tool and the hand which held it ever provide the complex
reasons why a society assumed its form? She had applauded louder than any other
student in her section when a famous anthropologist, returning from a study of
the customs of the Delta Kamellins, a curious crew of aboriginal humanoids in
the Orion system, said he wasn't interested in the statistical analysis of the
comparative length of their sexual appendages, or of how frequently they used
their anterior, as contrasted to their posterior appendages; his interest was
in the complex social and emotional factors which caused them to choose one
appendage over the other, and those things were not subject to such analysis.

 
          
So with Cendri.
She was interested in the complex and living
culture of the Matriarchate. She could have been equally interested in a past
culture like that of the hypothetical Builders. But Dal was not, she felt,
interested in the life of the Builders at all. He did not care what kind of
beings they had been, or what motives lay behind their ruins or the daily
rituals they had once performed in those ruins. He wanted to know what they had
done, and when, and even to a certain limited degree how. But the
why
would
forever escape him; and the tragedy of this was that he would not miss it.

 
          
And
she knew it was useless to argue with Dal about all this. She could only—if she
were fortunate—follow his study and analysis of the ruins, and come to her own
conclusions about the things she wanted to know about the Builders. And even
that was a poor substitute, she thought with
a bitterness
so deeply submerged that she was not fully aware it was there, for spending her
own precious and irrecoverable time on
Isis
doing his work instead of her own research
into the live, growing,
real
culture of the Matriarchate which was all
around them. How could Dal be content to waste his time on beings which had
been dead for years, centuries, millennia?

 
          
As
they began to climb the hill toward the ruins, she turned and got a glimpse of
Dai's face. This, she reminded herself, firmly, was his moment. She had been
doing her own work since she landed, her notes were full and precise, and even
though there were tremendous gaps in her knowledge of the Matriarchate—their
mating customs, for instance, still lay in utter darkness—she had still more
than tripled all extant knowledge of the daily life of the Matriarchate. Until
this very morning Dal had not had the slightest chance even to begin his work.
And even now, he must pretend to take a subordinate position to Cendri.

 
          
She
herself had spent an enormous amount of time on the ship outbound, on tapes and
hypno-learners, and she felt she could give a passable imitation of a
professional archaeologist. But she knew within herself that she was just that,
an imitation of one.

 
          
She
saw that Laurina, close beside her, was apparently bubbling over with a
thousand unspoken questions, politely repressed in honor—or awe?—of the Scholar
Dame from the Unity.
If
she were a real Scholar Dame, she thought, at
least part of her commitment would be to teaching, and not merely to her own
research, and she realized that this, too, was an important part of her mission
to
Isis
. They were going to judge the quality of
the Unity's scholarship by her. Cendri Owain.
The Scholar
Dame Cendri Malocq.

 
          
Laurina,
encouraged by her smile, asked shyly, "May I ask the Scholar Dame—"
she had evidently been well briefed, and reminded herself overnight, of the
forms of courtesy in use on University, "what instruments she carries for
use in her research?"

 
          
The
formal terms of courtesy should have made Cendri feel at home, as she would
have felt with a teaching assistant from her own college on University.
Instead, for some reason, it made her feel lonely, excluded, apart from the
easy companionship of the women to which she had been briefly admitted, here on
Isis
. She said, "You were to call me
Cendri,
Laurina. And yes, of course, you may ask me anything you like. The
instrument in your care—" she indicated the graphic-recording console,
"is to record, as permanently or temporarily as I wish, whatever I see or
hear today. It is like photographic camera equipment—do you not have that on
Isis
?"

 
          
"Yes,
of course, our little girls use them for toys, and also they are used in
nurseries or hospitals, when patients or infants must be continually observed
without disturbing them," Laurina said. "But where are your
supplies—"

 
          
"That
is the way in which they differ; no perishable supplies or sensitized material
for storage of the record is needed," Cendri told her. "Once it is
activated, we need only activate a certain sequence to replay, projected on any
desired space, a complete holographic record of what we have seen and heard. We
can even—not here, but on a world with the adequate compensating machinery and
equipment—reproduce, to a small and limited degree, replicas of certain
artifacts, so that the cultural treasures of one world need not be removed so
that other worlds can enjoy their semblance. And if, a hundred or a thousand
years from now, some new research light-years away should cast additional light
on what we find here, scholars on University could, to some extent, find out
what we have discovered here, even if these ruins should have been since
obliterated by tidal wave, earthquake or time."

 
          
"That
is not likely," Laurina said, "Already we know that within
We-were-guided, the ground never quakes, and no tidal wave can reach so
far."

 
          
Cendri
thought,
I
wish
I could be
sure
of that.
But she knew
already that this was an article of faith with the women of
Isis
, and in fact, the ruins themselves could
not have stood so long unless located in a spot singularly immune to the
general seismic properties of the rest of the continent of
Isis
.

 
          
They
  were
  approaching the ruins  now, 
crossing the area directly in front of the enormous black-glass gates. She
dropped back beside Dal, and said, in a low voice, and in
their
own
language, to avoid overhearing, "You should go in first, Dal,
if we can manage it. I owe you that."

 
          
He
smiled briefly at her, and said, "That isn't important now. But before we
go in I want to get graphics of the exterior—look at those gates!"

 
          
"I'd
say, whatever they were, they were larger than human, wouldn't you?" she
asked, looking at the vast, towering arches far above their heads. He made a
negative gesture.