expected to make sense. But the next time, a young girl had thrown stones.
A knock sounded at his door, but he barely noticed. Scenes of the past engulfed him—there but not there, like a holographic tableau into which he’d blundered. His life had been in danger. And then, at the moment when he’d faced the most serious threat to his safety, at a rally in Nairobi that got out of hand, he’d been seized by CenCom’s security forces and whisked away into custody.
“Would you prefer me to open your door?” HANA asked.
“What?” he said. “Oh. No, I’ll....”
He was certain CenCom intended to jail him. Instead, it lectured him on the importance of the artifacts to be found on a strange planet in some backwater arm of the galaxy, and loaded him unceremoniously onto the freighter Ann Bonny just as she was about to lift off. Did it realize it had saved his life.
And if it did, why?
The knocking resumed, so insistent this time he couldn’t ignore it.
“Come in.”
The door slid open and he saw the pale complexion and almost colorless hair of Shelly Matiz in the opening. She glanced cautiously around first, as if searching for hidden occupants; her stocky figure was stiff and tense. The door closed behind her. He waited curiously for her to reveal what was so important she had to come in person.
“Marit.”
He acknowledged with a slight inclination of his head. Something about Shelly was familiar. He’d thought it as soon as he’d met her after boarding. But everyone except a small, necessary crew had gone into cold sleep and there hadn’t been time to pursue the thought any further.
“You going down again, when Madel gives the okay?”
“Yes, Yeo Matiz. That’s my plan.”
Her body betrayed her tension in a series of almost imperceptible jerkings and twitchings. They were all tense right now. Riding so close to that alien ruin was unsettling, and Shelly was no more immune than he to its psychic effect. Nevertheless, he watched her cautiously. Something about her face haunted him.
“Is there something you wanted to have me do for you?”
“Your kind can’t do anything for me, Stud!”
The reply was contemptuous, yet it wasn’t unusual and he’d heard worse in the past. A memory surfaced suddenly. He had indeed seen Shelly Matiz before he’d been sent to the Ann Bonny.
“Know who you are, Marit,” she said. “Know all about you and your activities. Don’t know how you managed to get CenCom to assign you to us. But I recognized you at once.”
She’d been a face in the crowd at that last rally. He’d noticed her because of the blue Commerce Fleet uniform, a rarity anywhere too far from Homeport where the ships landed. He waited, aware of the all-seeing and all-hearing presence of HANA, and suddenly glad for it.
“Came to warn you,” Shelly said. “You probably feel safe. But CenCom can’t protect you on that planet down there.”
“I have no wish to offend anyone, Yeo Matiz,” he said carefully. “If my actions so far—”
“Your actions are disgusting!” The bone-white features were crisscrossed with a thin, angry network of red.
“I don’t know what—”
“Don’t think I haven’t seen the way you talk to Dori. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you lean toward her all the time. Think it’s all right out here to flaunt your body, don’t you, Stud?”
He watched her cautiously, saying nothing, aware that anything he said might upset her precarious control. When he was ready to fight, he’d pick a better time and place than this.
“Stay away from Dori, Stud. Or I’ll make you pay for it.”
Abruptly, she turned and strode out of the cabin, the door barely having time to open for her. He stared after her. He’d met Shelly’s type before, the extremists who would’ve been happy to stick the knife in men wherever they encountered them. But he hadn’t expected problems with them out here, where the darkness of space between the stars seemed to obliterate petty quarrels. Only this was no petty quarrel to them. Women like Shelly placed the sanctity of a male life somewhere below their concern for the caterpillar that crawled across their path.
The irony was that there was nothing about Dori Tsing’s glacial hardness that he found even momentarily interesting. Shelly apparently didn’t share that evaluation.
Her visit only served to underline the urgency of his letter. He picked up the stylus again.
Five hundred years ago, two things had happened. A new generation of high-speed supercomputers were developed, as much like what went before as Homo sapiens resembled Australopithecus. And a small Swiss drug company had developed a reliable spermicide that was XY specific.
Pioneering women began to refuse to bear male children. The computers supported this aim because it was logical; males weren’t needed in the same numbers as females. The male birthrate declined. The social custom of marriage broke down—it had been waning in any case, at the end of the twentieth century. Computerized technology meant more women could work at home and keep an eye on their daughters at the same time; crèches helped those who didn’t. Women, with the aid of the computers, took control.
Not that males had given up their power without a struggle. A number of bloody male/female battles scarred the record, and even a couple of limited nuclear attacks that had the effect of seriously weakening the influence of the superpowers and isolating population groups in some parts of Africa and the American Southwest. But on the whole, the transition had been peaceful. Perhaps, as one of his teachers suggested, men had tired of the roles of provider and protector after so many centuries. There were certainly advantages to being a sought-after minority.
He smiled, thinking of other, more immediate advantages he’d personally exploited. I should’ve been born in an earlier century. Maybe the nineteenth, both the last bastion of male supremacy in Europe, and a time when he could have enjoyed playing the “romantic artist” role. Now that would have been living.
Luckily he’d been born in this one. He knew himself only too well. How would he ever have settled down to work if he’d been free to follow the siren song of the hormones in his youth? Just as well the women had gained power.
The biggest difference this made, so the history cubes instructed, was that female-dominated governments rejected absolute answers and became more deeply committed to compromise than ever before. Male input was considered interesting, but too simplistic and polarized to be very useful.
Then CenCom came into being, a vastly superior biocomputer that soon absorbed the network of lesser computers into itself. CenCom became the teacher, protector, trusted advisor and friend of humans. Only very slowly had anyone begun to notice the danger that the computer might become their ruler too. Cloning was not an interesting experiment, as some thought. It was the beginning of a computer-dominated evolution.
He stopped writing again, for there was no use in pawing at old wounds. This “letter” wasn’t going to reach anyone, let alone his own cell. Now there’d be an endless repetition of the traits a machine found acceptable, and the elimination of those it disliked. But he wasn’t on Earth any more. If and when he ever reached home again, the issue would have been resolved one way or another decades before.
He was an artist, better at communicating with his hands than his words. He was used to responding to the nonverbal messages of art. Beside the small pad on the bedside table lay a ring of polished beads from Ithaca 3-15d. He set the stylus down and picked them up, caressing the minute indentations thoughtfully with his thumb and forefinger. They warmed immediately under his touch. He was aware of a small, pleasant tingling sensation, as if something in their composition caused a reaction when it came in contact with human skin.
The planet was intriguing. Under other circumstances, he