or am I going to have to do a bit of massaging on your brain? Or wind that beautiful body of yours a couple of times around a tree? I’m asking this for your own good, kid, believe me.”
“Yes, I do believe you,” she marveled. “I am becoming convinced that . that perhaps you are a person—at least of a sort—after all.”
“Sure I am—that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for an hour. And cancel that ‘of a sort’, too .”
“But tell me,” she interrupted, “a thought you used—‘beautiful’. I do not understand it. What does it mean, ‘beautiful body’?”
“Holy Klono’s whiskers!” If Kinnison had never been stumped before, he was now. How could he explain beauty, or music, or art, to this . this matriarchal savage? How explain cerise to a man born blind? And above all, who had ever heard of having to explain to a woman—to any woman, anywhere in the whole macrocosmic universe—that she in particular was beautiful?
But he tried. In her mind he spread a portrait of her as he had seen her first. He pointed out to her the graceful curves and lovely contours, the lithely flowing lines, the perfection of proportion and modeling and symmetry, the flawlessly smooth, firm-textured skin, the supple, hard-trained fineness of her whole physique. No soap. She tried, in brow-furrowing concentration, to get it, but in vain. It simply did not register.
“But that is merely efficiency, everything you have shown,” she declared. “Nothing else. I must be so, for my own good and for the good of those to come. But I think that I have seen some of your beauty,” and in turn she sent into his mind a weirdly distorted picture of a human woman. The zwilnik he was following, Kinnison decided instantly.
She would be jeweled, of course, but not that heavily—a horse couldn’t carry that load. And no woman ever born put paint on that thick, or reeked so of violent perfume, or plucked her eyebrows to such a thread, or indulged in such a hair-do.
“If that is beauty, I want none of it,” the Lyranian declared.
Kinnison tried again. He showed her a waterfall, this time, in a stupendous gorge, with appropriate cloud formations and scenery. That, the girl declared, was simply erosion. Geological formations and meteorological phenomena. Beauty still did not appear. Painting, it appeared to her, was a waste of pigment and oil. Useless and inefficient—for any purpose of record the camera was much faster and much more accurate. Music—vibrations in the atmosphere—would of necessity be simply a noise; and noise—any kind of noise—was not efficient.
“You poor little devil.” The Lensman gave up. “You poor, ignorant, soul-starved little devil. And the worst of it is that you don’t even realize—and never can realize—what you are missing.”
“Don’t be silly.” For the first time, the woman actually laughed. “You are utterly foolish to make such a fuss about such trivial things.”
Kinnison quit, appalled. He knew, now, that he and this apparently human creature beside him were as far apart as the Galactic Poles in every essential phase of life. He had heard of matriarchies, but he had never considered what a real matriarchy, carried to its logical conclusion, would be like.
This was it. For ages there had been, to all intents and purposes, only one sex; the masculine element never having been allowed to rise above the fundamental necessity of reproducing the completely dominant female. And that dominant female had become, in every respect save the purely and necessitously physical one, absolutely and utterly sexless. Men, upon Lyrane II, were dwarfs about thirty inches tall. They had the temper and the disposition of a mad Radeligian cateagle, the intellectual capacity of a Zabriskan fontema. They were not regarded as people, either at birth or at any subsequent time. To maintain a static population, each person gave birth to one person, on the grand average. The occasional male baby—about one in a hundred—did not count. He was not even kept at home, but was taken immediately to the “maletorium”, in which he lived until attaining maturity.
One man to a hundred or so women for a year, then death. The hundred persons had their babies at twenty-one or twenty-two years of age—they lived to an average age of a hundred years—then calmly blasted their male’s mind and disposed of his carcass. The male was not exactly an outcast; not precisely a pariah. He was tolerated as a necessary adjunct to the society of persons, but in no sense whatever was he a member of it.
The more Kinnison pondered this hook-up the more appalled he became. Physically, these people were practically indistinguishable from human, Tellurian, Caucasian women. But mentally, intellectually, in every other way, how utterly different! Shockingly, astoundingly so to any really human being, whose entire outlook and existence is fundamentally, however unconsciously or subconsciously, based upon and conditioned by the prime division of life into two cooperant sexes. It didn’t seem, at first glance, that such a cause could have such terrific effects; but here they were. In cold reality, these women were no more human than were the . the Eich. Take the Posenians, or the Rigellians, or even the Velantians. Any normal, stay-at-home Tellurian woman would pass out cold if she happened to stumble onto Worsel in a dark alley at night. Yet the members of his repulsively reptilian-appearing race, merely because of having a heredity of equality and cooperation between the sexes, were in essence more nearly human than were these tall, splendidly-built, actually and intrinsically beautiful creatures of Lyrane II!
“This is the hall,” the person informed him, as the car came to a halt in front of a large structure of plain gray stone. “Come with me.”
“Gladly,” and they walked across the peculiarly bare grounds. They were side by side, but a couple of feet apart. She had been altogether too close to him in the little car. She did not want this male—or any male—to touch her or to be near her. And, considerably to her surprise, if the truth were to be known, the feeling was entirely mutual. Kinnison would have preferred to touch a Borovan slime-lizard.
They mounted the granite steps. They passed through the dull, weather-beaten portal. They were still side by side—but they were now a full yard apart.
CHAPTER 4
Kinnison Captures
“Listen, my beautiful but dumb guide,” Kinnison counseled the Lyranian girl as they neared their objective. “I see that you’re forgetting all your good girl-scout resolutions and are getting all hot and bothered again. I’m telling you now for the last time to watch your step. If that zwilnik person has even a split second’s warning that I’m on her tail all hell will be out for noon, and I don’t mean perchance.”
“But I must notify the Elder One that I am bringing you in,” she told him. “One simply does not intrude unannounced. It is not permitted.”
“QX. Stick to the announcement, though, and don’t put out any funny ideas or I’ll lay you out cold. I’ll send a thought along, just to make sure.”
But he did more than that, for even as he spoke his sense of perception was already in the room to which they were going. It was a large room, and bare; filled with tables except for a clear central space upon which at the moment a lithe and supple person was doing what seemed to be a routine of acrobatic dancing, interspersed with suddenly motionless posings and posturings of extreme technical difficulty. At the tables were seated a hundred or so Lyranians, eating.
Kinnison was not interested in the floor show, whatever it was, nor in the massed Lyranians. The zwilnik
