Amazon Planet

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