Mack Reynolds: Amazon Planet

Ronny shook his head.

“He evidently didn’t know that when Matt Halloday finally realized what was going on, that he simply got in touch with Section G, on his communicator, and had the gun assigned to Damon Kane’s coordinates changed. Anybody trying to fire it, without the correct coordinates just blows the booby trap.”

He turned to say something to Pat O’Gara, who was sitting upright in bed now, a fist to her mouth, her face ghost-like. But then he felt the mists roll in, and fell to the floor himself. Ronny Bronston awakened in bed.

It was a clean, light room, and he felt unbelievably clean himself. A woman—who must have been a doctor, she looked like a doctor—said, “You’re awake.”

“Not very,” he said. “Go away.” And went back to sleep.

When he awoke again, nothing had changed, save that two persons sat next to his bed and several more stood behind, none of whom he immediately recognized save Major Oreithyia, who for the first time he had seen her, was not in uniform. No, he did recognize the others now. They were members of the committee who had questioned him before he had been taken in to meet the Hippolyte.

Of the two seated women, one was the Hippolyte herself. However, she wasn’t garbed now in the regal outfit of the palace throne room. She still bore her strength of character in her face, but the air of supreme command was gone. He didn’t recognize the woman seated next to her and it must have shown in his eyes.

The Hippolyte said, “This is the Myrine of Lybia.”

Ronny nodded, he had guessed, even as she spoke. The Hippolyte said, “Are you strong enough to talk? The doctor says your wound is doing nicely.”

He hadn’t even known he had been wounded. He wondered which of the enemy had managed to hit him. It didn’t surprise him. In the heat of combat you often copped one without feeling it until later.

“I’m all right,” he said.

The Hippolyte said, “The Schirra is still in orbit. Evidently, the satellite which houses the UP Embassy has some personnel which wishes to transfer back to Earth. Do you think you can undertake the reembark and return to Earth with a message from Amazonia to the Department of Interplanetary Justice and whatever other officials are involved in this sweeping scheme to prod all man-settled planets into progress?”

Ronny looked at the two of them warily. He shook his head. “I don’t think I have a clear enough picture as yet, to give a comprehensive report.”

The Hippolyte nodded. “You will have. In actuality, it’s all very simple. Ask us what you will. We’ll cooperate. The Myrine has come all the way from Lybia to join in my final discussion with you.”

Ronny looked at the Lybian Amazon head. She held the same dignity as did the Hippolyte, but was evidently prone to hold her peace.

He said. “It was all show, wasn’t it?”

“Largely.”

“Podner mentioned that you have no police. You have no armies either, have you? Neither one of you?”

“That is correct,” the Hippolyte said. “We haven’t had for almost two centuries.”

Ronny shook his head, again. “When I was given this assignment, I went to the Octagon library. I checked everything it had on Amazonia, which was precious little. A great deal of it dealt with the founding of your organization, its original principles, the things you did on Earth to recruit members. It held all the bylaws of your organization, all the plans you expected to put through once you landed on your colony planet. All the pamphlets and books dealing with the Amazon movement, and why it was rebelling against man’s domination.”

Myrine opened her mouth for the first time, coming forth with nothing more than a chuckle.

“That was over two centuries ago,” the Hippolyte said. “I think we’ll save time, Ronald Bronston, if I take over. You see, at first I imagine we were something like the Mormons who settled Utah back in the old times. We had a multitude of ideas, principles, beliefs, and a great deal of faith in what, as we look back at it today, was obviously extremism. But we were no incompetents. And like the Mormons we quickly became pragmatic. Just as they gave up their polygamy when it proved impractical, we gave up the domination of one sex over the other. Not so quickly, perhaps, but step by step.”

The Myrine twisted her face in humor and it suddenly came to Ronny Bronston that she was an extremely handsome woman and must have been a beauty in her youth. She said, “We still have a few signs of it about, especially here in Paphlagonia.”

The Hippolyte nodded. “More symbols than anything else, even here. At any rate, once again, similar to the Mormons, when our first colony ships landed all property was community owned, save, of course, personal things. Our original ideas of a female-dominated socioeconomic commonwealth proved nonsense within the year. The smallest unit of a life form is that unit which can reproduce itself. In the case of the human race, a woman and a man…”

The Amazon leader of Lybia twisted her face again.

“Or, as Citizen Bronston would undoubtedly put it, a man and a woman.”

Ronny grinned at her suddenly. He would have liked to have known this person better, and doubted that he would ever have the opportunity.

“At any rate,” the Hippolyte went on, “our experiments revealed that only as a partnership can the relationship reach its ultimates. And so we adapted. We had various advantages over many other Earth colonies, I am sure. In spite of our initial enthusiasms, we were not fools. Our colonists were composed of survival types. Nor were we inadequately equipped. A great many of our society back on the home planet who weren’t able to come, gave their full support of our attempt. We must have been one of the richest colonizations that ever burnt off into the stars. In short, we had the wherewithal to experiment, and the good luck to have one of the richest planets man has yet discovered.

“And so we prospered. We experimented here, we experimented there. Now you see the result we have thus far attained.”

“When did you stop having a military?” Ronny asked curiously.

“From the beginning. We’re women, remember.”

Ronny said dryly, “I seem to remember such women in history as Elizabeth the First, Catherine the Great and Zenobia who didn’t exactly avoid war.”

Hippolyte nodded. “But they were women living in a man’s world, and having to adopt men’s methods in order to realize their ambitions. Ours was a woman’s world. One of our original revolts was against the incessant armed conflict that has persisted since the early days of man’s dominance.”

He said, “Why the big masquerade? Why let those stories go around about the Amazons on this planet, the harems of men?”

The small group standing behind the two seated Amazon leaders stirred in suppressed laughter.

“Why encourage all this nonsense by such things as sending as delegates to the UP on Earth, big strapping muscular type women, all done up in uniforms that look straight out of the Trojan War?”

The Hippolyte chuckled wryly. “I thought anyone as astute as yourself, Ronald Bronston, would have figured that out by this time. We were defenseless. We neither had, nor wanted a military. But we knew we stood alone, a matriarchy in a confederation of two or three thousand planets dominated by men. Frankly, we were afraid. We were afraid man’s instinct would be to pull us down. So it was we put up our false front. So it was we let rumors spread that we would give any man pause before he landed on our world. Of recent decades, our spies have brought rumors back to us that intensified our fears. We heard that the institutions of some of the member planets of UP were being subverted. That governments were being overthrown through the connivance of certain UP agencies.” She nodded. “What you told us under Scop made us realize our fears were well grounded.”