Im in Chapter Eleven of Volume Two. Since for the present Eliot is no longer an outlaw, he gives an interview to an Earthling reporter. The interview is being televised for _every_ human-inhabited world; so Eliot avails himself of the chance to tie up a psychological loose end for himself. That is, he addresses the woman who once used him and left him, who now lives on one of Jupiters moons.... _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ “Hasseba Yoder, this is your former husband: the one whom you pursued on your own initiative, and the one whom you discarded on your own initiative. There are countless modern women who persist in pretending that they live in terror of being re-enslaved at any moment by hairy, stinking male barbarians of a thousand years ago; yet you, for one, surely cannot even pretend that you were ever in danger of mistreatment by me. From the very start of our acquaintance, you enjoyed both physical strength superior to mine, in part because the modern system strives to put women generally in positions of power over men; and the assurance that the _same_ system would accept your word over mine in any sort of dispute. For many centuries, it was true that women were unjustly treated as less valuable than men, and often were not believed if their word contradicted a man’s word; but that state of affairs vanished before you were even born. In the _modern_ reality, you knew that the game was rigged in your favor, so that you could amuse yourself by humiliating me constantly, keeping me always anxious to appease you. If I were carried back in time, I would be able to empathize perfectly with battered wives, because I endured exactly the same ordeal as many of them endured in those past generation -- although, in fairness to you, you never dealt me physical injuries as bad as what some cruel husbands dealt out in ancient times. But you sure did keep me under your thumb, and not in a loving way. “It was, however, only since returning Earthside that I learned of one extraordinary piece of treachery on your part. I now know that, from our commitment ceremony on Earth, all through our eight Earth-years on Mars, and into the anticlimactic endgame on Callisto, you caused me to believe that Life Directorate was denying us reproductive approval. You pretended to be as aggrieved about this as I was; and with a remarkably convincing look of tender concern for my feelings, you solemnly advised me that it would be for the best if we did not take advantage of being on Mars to ignore that governmental prohibition. But now I know that you recruited a girlfriend of yours in the Life bureaucracy -- this being before Doctor Sohrab cleaned house there -- to _falsify_ the notice of child-refusal to us.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 22:29:24 +0000
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