She tightened her jaws. “Which was always very oppressive to women. Suttee. Purdah. Kinder, Küche, Kirche. You name it.”
Janet interrupted. “But, Indira, that’s all in the past. Really, it is. Oh, yeah, sure, you still run across a few guys with some Neanderthal notions, but it’s never a real problem.”
Indira was shaking her head.
“That’s beside the point, Janet. You’re right—today. But the modern equality between the sexes is only possible because of the vast wealth of twenty-second century civilization. Even then, it didn’t come without long and bitter struggle. But our kids aren’t going to be living in that kind of world. They’ll be living in the Bronze Age—”
“If I can find any bronze,” muttered Julius.
“—and abstract ideas have very little power in the face of social forces that emerge out of the material circumstances of real life.”
She chewed her lip, unconsciously imitating Julius.
“I’ll have to give it some thought. We won’t have much maneuvering room, but there’ll be some. Socioeconomic forces are the locomotives of history, but they’re not impervious to cultural influence. And there was always a lot of variation in human history, within a range. I’d have much rather been a woman among the Iroquois, for instance, than a woman in ancient India.
“Or—” she frowned at Julius “—among the Hebrews.”
“Bad enough I catch hell for what I do,” complained the biologist. “Now I got to catch hell for what my ancestors did three thousand years ago?”
Unexpectedly, Hector intervened in the discussion.
“I think you might be worrying too much, Indira. There’s something you’re overlooking. I don’t know much about history, but I know for sure that there’s a factor in the equation here that never existed on Earth.”
He jerked his head, toward the south.
“The owoc.”
Indira was puzzled. “I don’t get it, Hector. The owoc won’t be able to stop—oh, hell, I wish Julius would stop calling them `dimbulbs,’ even in jest, but I can’t deny that they aren’t exactly mental giants.”
Hector was shaking his head.
“You’re missing the forest for the trees, Indira. It’s not anything that the owoc would do. It’s—just the fact that they are.”
He gazed at the blank faces staring at him.
“Don’t you see? The kids already think they’re half-owoc. Hell, they’re even starting to speak in their own dialect—English, basically, with a hefty dose of Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. And lots and lots of hoots. Sometimes, I can’t understand what the kids are saying anymore.”
He sighed. They still didn’t understand.
“Look, folks. Just three days ago, I saw one of the littler boys—Kenny Wright—climb up onto Ludmilla’s neck. For all the world like he was a tiny male owoc looking for his favorite spot. He didn’t fit, of course, and at first I was afraid Ludmilla would beat him into a pulp. But she just seemed to take it for granted. Even carried Kenny around like that for half an hour.
“So maybe you’re right, Indira. You know human history, I don’t. But what I do know is that our kids aren’t—they aren’t just human, anymore. They’re something a little different. Something new.”
Indira was doubtful. But a small hope was born in her heart that day, at the deathbed of Vladimir Koresz. A small and faint glimmer, under the growing tidal wave of an historian’s fear.
They buried Koresz three days later, near the kolocluster. All the humans in the colony attended, even Adams. And it seemed that every owoc in the valley was there also. Several of them owed their wellbeing to Koresz, who had over the years managed to find cures for a number of the illnesses which afflicted the creatures. The owoc, of course, did not understand the means by which Koresz worked his magic. Nor did they seem to care. They simply called him, in their hooting language, “the Stroke of Slow Beauty.” (Humans, thought Indira, would have said: “the Touch of Long Life.”)
Fortunately, not all of Koresz’s skill went with him into the grave. Janet would never be his equal as a doctor, of course. Neither her own keen mind nor his careful tutorship could make up for the years which the doctor had spent learning his craft. But she was still very good. Much better—much, much better—than the medical practitioners which the human race had possessed for all but the last three centuries of its existence. And Janet had drawn around her four children who showed a deep interest in medicine. She believed that at least one of them, Maria De Los Reyes, had the potentiality for becoming a great doctor.