Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

The Alabastrine spoke up. “Boot I’m to meet with high ooficials of Bannerhook Indoostrials, oover the impoortation oof…”

“Sure you are, hooter. If you’re important enough, someone will come up to Charming. Maybe take your fee personally.” Some of the locals tittered at this sally, though Méarana did not understand the humor.

The express boat was equipped with Ramage-built Judson 253 alfven engines, rated for in-system use. So even though Stranger Station was almost thirty-two units up, the crawl was only eight days. By grabbing the strings of space and pulling herself along, the boat could “borrow” some of the local speed of space and maintain a constant acceleration of two standard gees down to Hera Orbit, where she would flip and decelerate at the same rate, “paying back” into the fabric of space. Within the vessel, counter-grids kept the apparent gravity to just over a single gee.

Once the boat was underway, the passengers unstrapped and moved about the cabin. A few headed toward the café, others remained seated and donned virtch hats so they could immerse in games or plays. In the café, the news crew from Sumday set up a game of five-handed rombaute at one of the tables. Méarana sat at a table with Billy, ignoring the scandalized glances from the Bolders. Mixing the sexes at table!

The woman in the borke joined them, introducing herself as Dame Teffna bint Howard. Méarana sent Billy to the service bar to buy three winterberry blues. Shortly, a woman from the other news crew—Great Rock News on Alabaster—joined them as well. She had a White Carthusian with a twist and a small deck salad of chaffered lettuce and wet walnuts. “Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked, without awaiting an answer. She belonged to that class of people, Méarana surmised, who never imagined unwelcome.

She introduced herself as Jwana Novski. Typical of Westland Alabastrines, she was tall and lean, with coal-black skin, long thin nose, and blond hair—but she spoke without the characteristic “hoot.” When asked, she explained that news faces on her world strove for a general Gaelactic accent. “We’re quite aware that people in the older sectors don’t take us seriously because of our accent.”

The Angletar dame asked what had brought two off-world news teams to Boldly Go, and Jwana said that they were to cover the trial of a celebrated wildman named Teodorq Nagarajan. Succumbing to the wanderlust that his kind often suffered, he had worked his way into the Periphery on a trade ship and had made a name for himself on a number of frontier worlds with his antics. He had, apparently on a dare, gone down to Boldly Go, where he had been caught. “He is what we call a ‘hunk,’” said Jwana, making a fist with her right hand.

“But how could a man get down from Stranger Station?” asked Méarana. “Aren’t we screened before embarkation?”

Jwana bobbed her head toward Dame Teffna, as if to say How do we know what’s under the wool? But Méarana thought customs inspectors were not so dim that they would not look underneath!

“Oh,” said Jwana, “they can be bribed as easily as anywhere else. And if a man is hunk enough, they might even ‘solicit the bribe,’ if you know what I mean.”

The face for the other news team heard her and laughed. “If he took a bath first!”

Méarana glanced at the Angletar dame, but the woman’s eyes were hardly visible through the white grill across the eye-slot. “MO’ to the point,” said the dame in a silky contralto, “I heah that his, ah, vigah, might result in an extended sentence.”

Billy had returned by then with the drinks and sandwiches. “What strapim for man he go down?”

The Alabastrine pushed her chair a little away from the Terran. “I don’t understand your, um, accent.”

Méarana said, “Fou-Chang’s Gazetteer mentions that men are not allowed on the surface, but doesn’t say what happens if they go.”

“Oh, well,” said Dame Teffna, “there’s not much immigration to Boldly Go. So poor Teodorq will have to, ah, ‘contribute’ to their gene pool, as much as he can for as long as he can hold up.”

Billy Chins laughed. “Then why not plenty men more go down there jildy?” Jwana and the news face at the other table, who was playing dummy that hand, laughed as she rolled the dice.

“Saving only one thing,” said Dame Teffna from behind her screen. “When they finish with him, they cut his head off.”

The news faces and Billy stopped laughing.

“Surely, y’all knew that, dears,” said the dame. “It does take some of the edge off the humor.”

“Here,” said the news face from Sumday. “This is a flat of the man.

He was in Pish-Toy City on the Southern Scarp—that’s on Sumday—and he tried to rescue what he thought was a princess being abducted, and…Well, he got himself in the news back home, like everywhere else he’s been. Be a shame to shorten him.” She handed the flat to Jwana, who passed it on to Dame Teffna. “I’ve seen him. He was on Alabaster, too.” When the Angletaran sighed over the picture, Jwana leered. “I told you he was a hunk.”

Billy Chins blinked, and looked at Méarana before he handed the flat to her. “Billy Chins no like piksa men. Like piksa women.” But his eyes, the harper saw, were bright.

Méarana took the “piksa” from him and saw that it was a normal flat holo. It showed a very large man with raven, shoulder-length hair pulled back in a tail. He wore a sleeveless vest made of blue canvas. Both shoulders were intricately tattooed. He stood grinning on the top step of what Méarana thought an official building while police freed him of his bonds.

And around his neck hung a medallion in the same style as Méarana’s own.

“Billy,” Méarana told her servant. “Change of plans. This is a man I want to see.”

The news faces exchanged knowing looks and Jwana again made a fist with her right hand. “I like a woman,” she said, “who knows what she wants.”

Boldly Go’s single continent, known simply as The Mainland, rose from the One Great Sea just north of the equator. Elsewhere, scattered strings of volcanic islands marked the submarine rifts of her oceanic plates. The official history was that she had been settled exclusively by women to begin with; but other accounts claimed a later Revolution; and still others a plague affecting only males. The survivors, they said, had made a virtue of their necessity.

Whatever the beginning, the end had been the same. Across the quadrant, men told themselves that the matriarchs did not really mean what they said, and the whole planet was just waiting for the right man to come along. They were invariably surprised to learn that, yes, the matriarchs really did mean it; and whether they had been waiting for the right man or no, he was not it.

For their part, the matriarchs maintained a corps of Amazons to keep the “bad ones” of the desert from troubling the settlements, and to caution their sister matriarchs. Alliances among “Nests” were quick, heartfelt, and abandoned on a moment’s bad faith. Still, the Sisters of the Corps, though they fought one another lustily when one matriarch offended another, maintained the Amazon Joint Navy, second to none in Lafrontera. K. P. Charakorthy, the famed “Pirate of the Blue Sun,” had learned this when his fleet had had come for booty and honor and had departed with neither. It had cost Boldly Go one city—J’lala on the Purcell River—and Charakorthy his entire fleet.

Charming Moon was one of three moderate-sized bodies that stirred the One Great Sea into unusual and irregular tides. The old Commonwealth seed ships that had salted this region of the Spiral Arm had found the Sea already pregnant. Certain chemical reactions almost always tossed off amino acids and eukaryotes and sundry other bits of living matter, although they seldom elaborated further. So Boldly Go was already terraformed and waiting when the Ramage settlers made their way there.