Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

long-run practicality would now never be known, for the matriarchy had been

the first society of its kind in the history of the world, and it had been

young When it died-but that whole balance was now completely upset. Aboard

the Javelin the males were rising ineluctably into the ascendancy. They

were, first, suddenly in short supply to service the mechanical details of

ship life-and almost all the important details of ship life were mechanical

in the broadest sense of the word, ranging from apprentice ship’s

electrician to Ertak’s ability to handle complex mathematical abstractions

as though they had some bearing upon real life. (“A female mathematician is

historically as unlikely an object as a female composer,” Kamblin bad once

observed-privately-to Jorn. “There’ve been a few of each-but never a good

one.”)

This was no longer a theory, but a fact of the situation in which they all

had to live, and upon which all their lives depended. Nevertheless many of

the women aboard the Javelin found themselves unable to adapt to it. Time

after time, in large matters as well as in small, they were betrayed into

revealing that they still

And all the Stars a Stage 95

thought of themselves as part of a power elite, definable simply by gender.

It was often annoying, sometimes infuriating, and once or twice had been

actively dangerous; yet in retrospect jorn found that he could not remain

indignant for long. It was hardly their fault. After all, they had been born

and raised in a society where they had been a power elite, as he had been