Amazon Planet

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.”