The Shore of Women (12 page)

What Zoreen had said at my party was true; we did little that was new.

How could thinking of this ease my mind? It would replace my doubts with a cold practicality. For all to live, some would have to suffer, and all would have to hold to the ways that had made survival possible.

Zoreen shuffled a few papers. “At any rate,” she murmured, “ancient men might have done some good deeds, but they also committed most of the evil ones. They had armies with weapons, not just unarmed patrols. They beat and killed women, beat and killed each other, raped, terrorized whole cities—you should read some of the old literature. It was quite commonplace. In a city like this, we wouldn’t have been able to walk down a street without fearing for our lives in the time before the Destruction. We do have different natures, I fear. Men destroy; women build and nurture. It’s because we carry our children inside us, and men can’t. Even the most exceptional men probably had to fight their own impulses constantly.”

I was thinking of Button, the only male I had known. What if the boy were capable of more than I had imagined? What if he could have been trained for much more and instilled with an understanding of our ways? Maybe we could have been helping men adapt to our cities in some manner. I tried to push that thought aside. We could not change the natures of men, could not allow them any power again.

Zoreen grinned suddenly. “You actually seem interested in all of this.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I looked away. “I guess I should tell you. Shayl, needless to say, wasn’t too happy when I told her. I was told I could take general science, but I was advised to concentrate on history and human culture, too.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t want to,” I said. “I’m still not sure I will.”

“You ought to consider it. Not because I’m doing it, but because there’s a lot going on in the subject now, which is more than you can say for other things. We’re revising a few old assumptions, sorting out more of the pre-Rebirth documents from post-Rebirth ones, seeing which ones were altered the most. It’s exciting, Laissa. It might change the way we look at the past.”

I was thinking to myself that historians would alter only the way historians themselves viewed the past; no one else would care, especially if it raised disturbing ideas. “But I wasn’t told to be a historian, or a recordkeeper. I was told I might make a chronicler, although I can’t imagine why.”

“A chronicler.” Zoreen let out her breath. “I was going to say I’m surprised, but for some reason I’m not. It seems to fit you somehow. The tests and advisers are usually right. Maybe you should listen to them.”

“But. . .”

“Oh, I know. Don’t think I didn’t notice how my old friends started avoiding me as soon as I started my studies. Even my mother isn’t happy about it. I was surprised you asked me to your party at all, in fact.”

“And then you came and joked about what you were doing. You really made it sound…”

“Well, what else could I do? They were going to think badly of me no matter what I said.” Zoreen stood up and stretched. “I’ve done enough for today—I feel restless. Let’s go out.”

We left the towers behind and wandered in the streets among the houses nearby. Zoreen examined several tables of handicrafts before trading a small music box for a silver necklace. Some of the women behind the tables of wares greeted Zoreen by name, and she seemed to know others as well.

“At least here,” Zoreen murmured to me, “no one’s going to care much about what I do. I’m just one of the city’s Mothers, and history’s just a lot of stories that have nothing to do with them. Some of them like hearing stories about the cities when they were new.”

We came to a hydroponic garden, where tables were arranged around the glassed-in complex. Below, women in green smocks were tending to the vats while others served meals at the tables. Here, we could eat for nothing in trade except praise for the food or advice on what new seasonings might be tried. We selected salads and then sat down at one small table.

As we were finishing our food, a group of young women crossed the grass and giggled as they sat down at a long table near the grape vines. Shayl was with them. I looked directly at her. She did not greet me.

I set down my fork, imagining that Shayl was mocking me in front of her friends. “Let’s go,” I murmured. Zoreen nodded. As we stood up, I encircled her waist with one arm.

When we reached the path bordering the lawn, Zoreen pushed my arm away. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“I know what you meant,” Zoreen said in a low voice; I had to bend my head forward a little to hear her. “You wanted Shayl to think we’re more than just roommates and friends. You want to get back at her, make her think you have someone else now. Fine. Just don’t use me to do it.”

“I’m sorry, Zoreen.”

The anger in her green eyes faded. “It isn’t that I couldn’t care more about you, Laissa, but even I have some pride. I don’t want to be just a replacement for someone you loved, who doesn’t love you. Shayl was the one who rejected you, wasn’t she? It wasn’t the other way around.”

I nodded.

“I guessed it before. You didn’t have to make it seem otherwise. It wouldn’t have changed my feelings.” She took my arm as we walked toward the street. “Come on. I’ll take you to one of my favorite spots. It isn’t a place I’d go with many others.”

“Where’s that?”

“The wall.”

I tightened my grip on her arm. “I don’t want to go there.”

“I don’t mean inside the wall. The patrol wouldn’t want us wandering around in there anyway without a reason. I mean on top of the wall. You must have been there at least once.”

“Only when some of us were taken to Devva. I didn’t like it. I went straight from the lift to the ship.”

“Then you have to come, just this once.”

I sighed and gave in.

We rode through the tunnel and entered the wall, where one of the lifts carried us to the top. I thought of what was behind the doors of the wall and wished that I hadn’t agreed to come. Men were in some of the rooms on the first floor, lost in an imaginary world of erotic images provided by their mindspeakers as sperm was taken from their bodies to be analyzed in the wall’s laboratories and used for impregnation if it was found suitable.

Although I looked forward to becoming a mother, I did not look forward to the day when I would go to the wall to receive sperm, but consoled myself with the knowledge that, unlike women of ancient times, I would have no physical contact with the child’s father. I intended to be very careful about which progenitor I picked, unlike some of the Mothers of the City, who settled for anyone who was strong and without defects. I would answer many prayers, and call many men, and ask for analyses of all of them before I chose. Strength and health would not be enough; I would pick one with the rudiments of intelligence and sensitivity. I would probe their thoughts with the mindspeaker before I decided.

The lift came to a stop. The door opened, and we walked outside. A wind struck me in the face, a wind from outside, cold and biting. We were beyond the force field that protected our city.

The field was behind us, arcing up from a low railing. Zoreen turned toward the invisible shield. “There’s our tower.” She pointed toward one of the distant spires.

“How can you tell?” I asked. The towers, some pointed, others with flat roofs, looked similar to me from this perspective; in fact, I was struck by their uniformity. The small variations in materials or design were not as apparent from the wall, and I suddenly felt that the women inside them were themselves only variations on a theme, that individuality was an illusion, only life’s way of endlessly reproducing itself until it found the perfect form.

“But that isn’t what I wanted to show you.” She steered me away from that railing and we ambled toward the opposite side of the wall. Far to my right, a few women were boarding a ship. The round golden globe of the ship soon lifted and fled from the wall. I pulled up my thin collar against the cold and thrust my hands into the pockets of my tunic.

“Look,” Zoreen said as we came to the railing.

The hills near the horizon were brown and covered with leafless trees. Patches of snow dotted the flatter ground beneath us. A thick forest of pines, not far from the wall, and evergreen spears on the hills were the only bits of bright color visible. It was untamed land, and I wondered how anyone could live there.

“Isn’t it a sight?” Zoreen asked.

“It’s terrifying.” The images of the outside I had seen, even the quick glimpses I had caught from a ship the one time I had left the city, had not prepared me for this. I had expected to see a place more like an untended park rather than this wild landscape.

“It’s not like this all the time,” Zoreen said. “In the summer, it’s all green, and you can see flowers. In the fall, when the leaves start to turn, the hills are different colors, green and red and orange and yellow. You should see it then.”

I tried to imagine it, having spent all my life protected from seasonal changes. “It didn’t look this way from the ship.”

Zoreen laughed. “You probably took one peek and hid in your seat with your hands over your eyes.” She was silent for a bit. “Sometimes, I think of going out there.”

I was shocked. “You can’t mean that.”

“I meant in a ship, of course, with a destination. There are things out there no woman has ever seen. Sometimes, I hate being closed in. The city doesn’t seem so big when you look outside. Sometimes it seems that men have more freedom.”

“I suppose they do, in a way,” I said. “They’re free to freeze to death, or starve, or pick up some disease, or be killed by some animal or by another man.” I put my hands on the railing for a moment, then slipped them back inside my pockets. “They must have stories to tell. That would be real work for a chronicler, setting down some of their tales.” I paused. That was the first time, since speaking to Bren, that I had, however dimly, seen some work I might do. “Not many women would want to read them, of course.”

“I’ve sometimes thought of an expedition,” Zoreen said. “A lot was taken out of the ancient shelters, but I wonder what we might have left behind, what documents and artifacts might still exist in the places we’ve abandoned. But we’ll never do it. No one’s brave enough to go. I might be afraid to go even if I could.” She pulled her collar closer around her neck. “All we’ll ever see is another city, and the inside of a ship while we’re traveling there.” She turned toward me. “Birana’s out there now. She was, anyway. She couldn’t still be alive. Even someone with her strength couldn’t survive.”

“I didn’t know you knew her.”

“I wasn’t a friend, but I used to see her sometimes out here on the wall, and we’d talk a little. She told me about some of the things she’d seen. She said some of the men scavenged for whatever they could find near the eastern and western sides of the wall, near the recyclers. Sometimes a few men will dig for whatever old stuff might be buried, even though there’s little they can find. Birana said that some tribes seem to stay near the wall most of the time, that sometimes they attack others traveling here. She could recognize a few of them by what they wore. The patrol usually checks to make sure those tribes aren’t nearby before they send men back out.” Zoreen gazed out at the hills. “Poor Birana. I don’t suppose she ever thought she’d have to go out there.”

I shivered. If Birana had kept away from her mother or if she had summoned help for Ciella immediately, she would have been safe; she might even have been standing on the wall with us now. “I wonder,” I said aloud. “Yvara said at the end that she believed other women might be alive out there, other exiles—that they might have found a way to live. I wonder if it’s true.”

Zoreen shook her head. “Look at what’s there, Laissa. An expelled woman couldn’t survive alone—she wouldn’t know how. The men are used to it, and even they have to struggle. Yvara would have said any wild thing by then.”

I was not so sure. There were many areas of Earth over which ships passed only rarely, that were abandoned. I was deluding myself, trying to believe that some sort of safe place might exist for the young woman I had forgotten and neglected. It would be better for Birana if she had died quickly instead of having her suffering prolonged.

“I tried to see her,” Zoreen said, “before they sent her out.”

This revelation surprised me. “But you said you weren’t her friend.”

“I was feeling guilty, I suppose. No one spoke for Birana. I certainly didn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had—at least that’s what I tell myself. There are those on the Council who think we must be firmer than ever with transgressors, especially those who are Mothers of the City, as Yvara was. A lot of women will remember what happened to her. They’ll think of what happened to her daughter. If someone doesn’t care about her own fate, she’ll still have to consider what might happen to her child.”

“What did Birana say to you?” I asked.

“She didn’t say anything. I wasn’t allowed to see her. I asked again if I could, and a woman told me it wouldn’t do any good to ask any more. I got the message. They wanted Birana and her mother to believe at the end that no one in the city cared, that there would be no mercy for them. They wanted them to go out from the wall believing that. That’s why they’re probably dead now. They’d have no reason to cling to life, no hope that they would ever be forgiven. Imagine believing that every woman in the city cared nothing for you, had accepted your sentence.”

I tried to imagine it, could almost feel the despair of an exile. It would have been useless for me to try to see Birana, but knowing that didn’t ease my guilt at not having made the attempt.

“Some might say,” I murmured, “that your ideas could lead you astray.”

“I’m cautious enough. I know how far I can go. I just don’t deceive myself about how things really are.” Zoreen peered through the rungs of the railing again, then grabbed my arm and pointed. Far below, a group of men emerged from the evergreens, ran toward the wall, then stopped. They were tiny figures, clothed in what looked like the furs and hides of animals. I was sure that they could not see us, so far above them. They swayed and then began to dance, lifting their arms as they pranced before the wall.