Free Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 by The Ruins of Isis (v2.1) Page B

fellow woman for the
prestigious post of your assistant, rather than choosing a man who could have
won scholastic honors on his own. I understand how rude it must seem for me to
criticize your choice, and I can well understand that a young woman might well
desire for her Companion to be trained in her own field so that she might have
the pleasure of his attendance on an assignment far from her home world. But
you could have brought a capable woman for assistant, my dear; we would
willingly have extended hospitality to your Companion, simply for your
convenience and—" she smiled, indulgently, "the amusement of your
leisure."
                 Miranda
was blushing; she said something almost reproving to her mother in an
undertone. Cendri was debating half a dozen answers, realizing—and the memory
stung—that the Scholar Dame di Velo had chosen a male for her assistant, and
that she, Cendri, had originally intended to accompany Dal in much the same
capacity that Vaniya now indulgently allotted to her "Companion." But
any answer would only satisfy a selfish desire to defend her own customs against
Vaniya's—an ignoble desire for an anthropologist!
                 Finally
she said, "Within the Unity, Lady, men and women do not compete for posts
of honor. We try to assign work to the person best qualified to do it,
regardless of male or female, and it would never occur to me that I should
appoint a woman for assistant, any more than a man would choose a male
assistant because—" she broke off, remembering that the male pronoun was
not used except in a sexual connotation, "because the male was male."
                 Vaniya
said, thoughtfully, "Yet there is a proven biological difference which
simply unfits men for certain tasks. It would seem to be kinder not to force
men to compete in spheres where they are not qualified." She glanced at
Rhu and Dal, saying, "You two must really not take this personally, but,
Scholar Dame, don't you find it tends to unfit a man for his real function,
when he is allowed to develop his mind too much?" Cendri noted the
deliberate use of he and his. "Men are such
magnificently physical creatures at their best, and many women feel that
allowing them to cultivate womanly talents such as art and music will make them
weak and even impotent. Of course, there are exceptions—" she looked
dotingly at Rhu. "But are the men of the Unity still—still pleasing to
women?"
                 Cendri
saw that Dal looked ready to explode; she looked warningly at him, but he only
smiled. "Lady Vaniya," he said, "five hundred years ago on my
homeworld of Pioneer, our men shared at least one of your beliefs,
that the cultivation of art, music and scholarship would indeed make men
womanly and weak. Only in the last hundred years on Pioneer have men been
allowed to cultivate serious scholarship, and my own grandfather looked with
scorn on the idea that a real man could be a Scholar, far less an artist or
musician."
                 "Then
your world—Pioneer—retains some traces of matriarchal rule, Dal?"
inquired Vaniya seriously, and Cendri had trouble keeping her face straight.
Dal refused to look at Cendri, but his voice was sober. "I am not enough
of a Scholar to discover any such traces, Lady."
                 Oh,
damn you, Dal! Cendri thought, trying not to choke on stifled laughter, nobody
alive could be enough of a Scholar to discover traces of matriarchal rule on
Pioneer, because there weren't any! If ever a culture was patrist and
woman-suppressive, it was that one! This was wicked of Dal! Making fun of the
Pro-Matriarch, right to her face!
                 But
thoughtfulness displaced her laughter. It wasn't just reversal of
woman-suppressive cultures, then; it was an exaggeration, of trends already
present in the Unity, on worlds such as Pioneer, which went to extremes; if all
the softer and more scholarly talents were unmanly, and men's sphere