Sax shook his head. He tried to imagine what that meant.

Michel said, “Her father died: Her mother married her stepfather when she was eight. From then on he mistreated her, until she was sixteen, when she moved to the mother’s sister. I’ve asked her what the mistreatment consisted of, but she says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Abuse is abuse, she said. She doesn’t remember much anyway, she says.”

“I believe that.”

Michel waggled a gloved hand. “We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.”

They stood there looking into the caldera.

“It’s hard to believe,” Sax said.

Michel looked glum. “Is it? There were fifty women in the First Hundred. Odds are more than one of them were abused by men in their lives. More like ten or fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated, struck, mistreated . . . that’s just the way it was.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

“Yes.”

Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless with a single blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had needed to do it, though. Or so it had felt at the time.

“Everyone has their reasons,” Michel said, startling him. “Or so they think.” He tried to explain— tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it something other than plain evil. “At the base of human culture,” he said as he looked down into the country of the caldera, “is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then sometime in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies used to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father— this strategy often lasts forever, and the people of that culture worship their king and their father god, and so on. Or the ego ideal might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to the brotherhood of men. There are names and full descriptions for all these complexes— the Dionysian, the Persean, the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all exist, and they are all neurotic, in that they all lead to misogyny, except for the Dionysian complex.”

“This is one of your semantic rectangles?” Sax asked apprehensively.

“Yes. The Apollonian and the Heraclean complexes might describe Terran industrial societies. The Persean its earlier cultures, with strong remnants of course right up to this day. And they are all three patriarchal. They all denied the maternal, which was connected in patriarchy with the body and with nature. The feminine was instinct, the body, and nature; while the masculine was reason, mind, and law. And the law ruled.”

Sax, fascinated by so much throwing together, said only, “And on Mars?”