by Leona Gom
“You didn’t cut your face hair,” Daniel accused.
“I know,” his father said. “I forgot.”
“You said it was the most important thing,” Daniel insisted. “How could you forget?”
“I know,” his father said. “I just forgot, that’s all.”
“They’re coming out,” Montney said. “Now they’re going into Mother’s house.”
Daniel turned again to look. He could see Highlands opening the door to her house, inviting the stranger in.
“It’s like some kind of inspection,” Daniel said.
“She won’t come in here, will she?” Montney asked.
“No,” Daniel’s father said, sounding firm and confident again. “Of course not. Your mother won’t let her. No one can enter the longhouse without the Leader’s consent.”
And the thought of Highlands seemed to reassure them all. She was the one they could count on; she would protect them. When Daniel was young he had sometimes been afraid of her temper, the fights she would have with his father, not the way a brother and sister were supposed to behave at all, but the older he got the more he liked and admired her, her quickness and self-assurance. Once he told his father he wished Highlands were his mother, and his father, looking at his mother across the yard taking down the clothes from the line, slowly, her placid face upturned to the sky like a cup filling with sunshine, said, “There are skills just as important as intelligence, Daniel. Intelligence can let you down. But love doesn’t.” It didn’t make much sense to Daniel, but it sounded like something that might one day, so he knew he should probably remember it.
Still, it was Highlands Daniel would go to when he wanted to talk, choosing her over both his mother and father, even though the things she told him were often not the things he wanted to hear. It was Highlands whose approval he wanted most of all, perhaps because it was not easily given.
“What if they want to stay overnight?” Montney asked suddenly. “It’s late for them to make it back to Fairview.”
“I don’t think they’ll want to stay,” Daniel’s father said. “They haven’t unsaddled the horses. Doctor would have told the other one that hospitality is not one of our virtues. And your mother will show her the shed with Cayley’s old broken bed and imply that’s where they’d have to sleep.” He laughed, and so did Daniel and Montney, giggling at the thought of the way Highlands would handle it, enjoying herself.
“Still,” Daniel’s father said, “I don’t like it that she came with Doctor. She may be a doctor, too.”
“Maybe she’s the one Doctor told us about,” Montney said. “The new one she was going to train and tell about us.”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel said. “She’s too old.”
Montney got up, began to prowl restlessly around the room, idly picking up the school-books stacked in small neat piles on the shelves. Daniel had read them all, some more than once, and he was always the first to pounce on the person who came back from town with the boxes of new library books. Now that he was eighteen, he could go into town himself if the farm gave its permission — he could spend a whole day, if he wanted, in the library, a building, they told him, full of a thousand books. The thought of it filled him with excitement. He would have to be careful, of course, and dress in the special townclothes that were made of heavier cloth than what he usually wore on the farm in summer. But his father went into town sometimes, and Kit from East Farm had gone to Leth for a whole week. Leth: where the university was, where Daniel had dreamed of going, before he had to accept that it was forbidden, too dangerous for a male.
Male. He had looked it up in the dictionary once, that same dictionary that Montney was pounding lightly with his fist. Male, it said, from French “mal” and Latin “male”. 1. bad, abnormal, inadequate; 2. sub-species of human extinct in 21st century.
“They’re coming out of Mother’s house,” Montney said suddenly.
Daniel and his father turned, crouched at the crack between the logs, and peered out. Doctor and the stranger were coming out first, followed by the others, who remained standing together on the porch while Doctor and the stranger walked a few steps farther, then turned back. Everyone on the porch, in almost perfect, graceful unison, bowed.
Doctor bowed, too, and the stranger, hesitating a moment, bowed as well, awkwardly, holding her head up to keep everyone in sight. Then the two of them untied the reins of their horses from the post by Highlands’s house, mounted, and rode off. Doctor gave a quick look behind her and waved, furtively perhaps. Daniel felt his hand go up, too, without thinking, to wave back. He liked Doctor. He wished he could have talked to her. Daniel, she was always fond of remembering, was the first male she had ever delivered. Until then, she’d confessed to his mother, she’d never quite believed what the doctor who was training her told her about the existence of the males; she’d thought it was just some bizarre story to test her gullibility. Now, of course, the farm could not imagine being without her, and they were as anxious about the new doctor she would have to tell and trust as they first had been about her.
“Let’s go,” Montney said, heading for the door. Daniel followed him, his thoughts turning already to the raspberry field and his dropped pail, into which the ants might have gotten by now.
“Wait,” his father said. “We have to make sure it’s not a trick.”
Through the window Daniel could see Highlands approaching the longhouse. “Your mother’s coming,” he said to Montney. “Let her in.”
Montney unbolted the door, and Highlands stepped inside. She was so tall she had to bend to keep from hitting her head.
She was smiling. “I especially liked the way we bowed,” she said. “Weren’t we good?”
“Wonderful,” Daniel’s father said. “Well, what did she want?”
“It’s okay. It was Doctor’s supervisor. She just decided to come out and do a work-load check on Doctor. Nothing to worry about.” She rested her forearm on Montney’s shoulder, let her hand with its long, thin fingers dangle in the air.
“Did she ask about those of us who weren’t with you?” Daniel asked.
“I said three of our farm were out in the fields. It seemed to satisfy her. I think she was just curious about us. But it went all right. Doctor winked at me when she left.”
“I told you it was nothing to worry about,” Montney said to Daniel’s father.
“You can’t be too careful,” he said.
“You didn’t cut your face hairs,” Montney accused. He turned to his mother, a triumphant excitement on his face. “He didn’t cut his face hairs,” he repeated.
Highlands looked at them both coldly. “I can see that,” she said. “We’ll have to bring it up at next Meeting, Christoph.”
“That’s not right!” Daniel’s voice shivered with the effort of standing up to Highlands. He’d never done it before, not really. But he was eighteen now, an adult, even if he was a male. “Father had early work-load today. He doesn’t usually forget. You don’t know what it’s like, every morning —”
“No, Daniel,” his father said quietly. “Highlands is right. It’s too important to forget.”
He hated seeing his father give in so easily, let her win without even trying. He didn’t used to be like that. Daniel was suddenly angry at all of them, his father for his meekness and deference, Montney for telling, Highlands for using her position as Leader to humiliate his father. He could feel his cheek muscles tightening, his lips squeezing themselves thin as though his whole face were under pressure. His madface, his mother used to call it affectionately when he was a child — but he was an adult now: his anger would no longer be amusing. He made himself relax, drop his eyes to the floor.
Highlands said nothing for a moment, only looked from one to the other of them. Finally her gaze settled on Daniel’s father. “Well, no harm done, I guess,” she said. “You’re only human.”
His father smiled wryly at her. “Nice of you to think so.”
She looked at Daniel then, and perhaps because she said nothing to him he knew suddenly and to his surprise that she was pleased at the way he had defended his father, even though she shouldn’t be — she shouldn’t allow such a challenge to her authority, not even from an adult. He felt confused and uncomfortable. And some-thing else, too, something he would think about later, when he was alone. He felt powerful.
2
BOWDEN
“I CAN’T DECIDE WHICH of these vidspools to use,” Delacour said. “What do you think?”
Bowden put down the book on geriatrics she was reading and walked across the centreroom to where Delacour sat, her desk scattered with more than a dozen spools of film. The player built into the back of the desk was showing one of them, pictures of a male, late twentieth century, judging by the clothes; he was jumping from a high building and as he fell he was being transformed into something else, an animal of some kind, a wolf perhaps, which then pursued and caught two other males running from him. It all took only a few seconds, as though Delacour had the spool on “accelerate,” but Bowden knew it was how the film was supposed to look.
“Is this still your male empowerment series?” she asked.
Delacour groaned, pressing the fingers of her right hand rigidly against her forehead. Bowden noticed, a little alarmed, that she had been biting her nails again.
“Yes,” Delacour said. “Archive keeps sending over more.” She gestured at her desk. “Most of these came in yesterday. Even if I eliminate the animal conversions, like this one —” she reached over and snapped off the player; the wolf was just changing back to a male “— and the robotics and machine enhancements, there still seem to be dozens of the self-activateds.” She picked up a spool labelled Incredible Hulk. “This one for instance. How do I classify it? Do you know it?”
“No, of course not.” Why should Delacour think Bowden would know about things like that, things that probably nobody in the world aside from Delacour and Archive had ever heard of?
“It’s about a male contaminated in some lab accident that turns him, at implicitly convenient times, into a powerful green humanoid monster.”
“A powerful green humanoid monster?”
“That’s right. A hero-quest subgenre, the male searching for normalcy. But the monster, of course, is aggression idealized, self unambivalent as perfect weapon, so it’s the usual paradox. Anyway —” She tapped the spool lightly on the desk. “Do I consider this a true self-activated, like Kung-Fu and The Mandrake, or is the lab accident interventionism?”
“I don’t know,” Bowden said. “Why do you bother with all this, anyway? Who really cares about all that ancient stuff?” She knew it was a mistake, saying that, but she couldn’t erase the careless words.
Delacour looked up. “It’s my work,” she said, speaking slowly, the way that made Bowden feel patronized, simple-minded. “I’m a historian. I teach history. It’s important.”
“I know it is. It’s just — all this stuff about the male. The Change was more than three hundred years ago. You can’t assume everyone is interested in those times.”
Perhaps Delacour heard the pleading in Bowden’s voice, because she sighed and said vaguely, “I suppose,” but the way her voice came down hard on the last syllable, suppose, still spoke more of irritation than conciliation.
They were silent for a moment, not looking at each other. They seemed to be arguing more and more lately, stupid little hurtful arguments, and it always left Bowden feeling helpless and inadequate, as though their lives were an untidy room, an unmade bed, dirty dishes in the sink, which could be cleaned and straightened if only they cared enough.
Impulsively, she went over to Delacour’s chair and sat down at her feet, resting her head in Delacour’s lap. She ran her hand lightly up and down Delacour’s bare leg, felt the soft static in her skin. Delacour’s hand settled on Bowden’s head, sifted through the thick red hair, which, she’d said, had drawn her to Bowden like a flame by which to warm herself when they first met eight years ago. Bowden could still remember the day: she had been working in Hospital, as usual, as a helper for old people, and she had gone down to Medical Archive with Shawna, another helper, to look for genetics records on one of their patients. And there they had seen Delacour, grumbling over misfiled vidspools. When Shawna had offered to help, she had said impatiently, “No, no, I’ll figure it out.”
But Bowden could feel Delacour’s eyes following her as she walked away down the aisle toward the genetics section, and she wasn’t quite as surprised as she pretended to be when Shawna, raising an eyebrow, told her the next day a message had come in on the ward computer asking for the name of the red-haired person who had been in Medical Archive yesterday.
“How did she know which ward we were on?” Shawna asked.
“She must be more resourceful than she seemed,” Bowden said.
She smiled now, thinking of it, and looked up. She liked it when Delacour played with her hair, the way it made her scalp tingle, goose bumps run warmly up her back. She could feel her whole body responding. She pushed her hand farther up Delacour’s leg, parting the loose teacher’s-robe, touching thigh, the prickle of pubic hair.
Delacour’s hand grew still on Bowden’s head. “I have to teach,” she said softly. “We haven’t time.” But she didn’t draw away.
“That’s too bad,” Bowden said. She pulled her hand back, not too quickly.
They sat as they were for a few minutes, Delacour’s fingers tightening, relaxing, in Bowden’s hair. Finally Delacour sighed, took her hand away.
“I really have to go,” she said. She stood up, began pulling together her papers and books and vidspools for her class.
Bowden stood up, too. “Shall we eat with the others tonight?” she asked. “Or I could make us something.” Their apartment, like the others in their complex, had a small food-preparation area, but most people preferred to eat in the common dining-room. Bowden still owed a few hours of work in the kitchen this month, and she’d thought she would make them up this afternoon, after Delacour left; there were always leftovers she could bring home and reheat.
“Whatever you think. Don’t go to any extra work for me.”
“It’s no extra work.”
“Why don’t you come to class with me?” Delacour said suddenly. “You have the whole day off work, don’t you?”
“Well, yes —”
“So come. You might enjoy it. My best student is discussing compensation theory.”
“But — would she mind, somebody new coming in?”
“No, of course not. People are encouraged to drop in whenever they want. There are always a few there I haven’t seen before.”
“Well, all right. If you’re sure it’s okay.” She didn’t really want to go, but she was glad Delacour had asked her. And it would be more interesting than working in the kitchen.
She changed into a new pair of pants and pulled on the sweater Delacour had bought for her birthday. It was really too warm outside for something so heavy, but she thought it might be the kind of thing the students wore. She didn’t want to look like an outsider. She pulled a comb through her hair and pinned it back, watching her face in the mirror. She was attractive; it was no vanity to see that. But she was no longer young; she was almost forty, and Delacour was ten years younger, surrounded by people even younger than that. She pulled her lips back into a tight rectangle of smile; it made her cheeks hurt. When she relaxed her lips she noticed the way the skin around her mouth still held the tension lines, and she reached up and rubbed at them as though they were smudges of dirt.
Delacour was waiting for her at the door to the hallway. “It’s such nice weather,” she said. “Let’s walk outside.”
Surprised, Bowden agreed. Most of the time Delacour insisted on taking the moveways bec
ause they were faster; she had no patience with the wandering pathways outside. For her, the destination was usually more important than the journey.
They left their unit and took the stairs to the ground floor, then pushed open the heavy main door that led outside from Residential. The hot summer air rushed at them. They walked through the garden, Bowden stopping to exclaim at the tall gladioli and sensual orange roses that she bent to smell even though she knew they had no scent. Delacour broke a small fistful of needles from a pine tree beside the path and rubbed them between her fingers. Then she handed the cluster to Bowden. Not wanting to waste it now that it had been picked, and not knowing what else to do with it, she put it in the pocket of her pants.
At the end of the garden they turned onto the main walkway that paralleled their apartment section and led, to the east, to University and, to the north, to Hospital. It felt odd to take the east walkway; Bowden rarely had reason to go to University, and whenever she did she got lost. Of course, people who weren’t familiar with Hospital complained about how confusing it was, too, yet its corridors and rooms and units felt as familiar to her as her own hand; the map of it turned in her head like a globe, like a huge and beautiful atom.
The entire Hospital-University-Commercial-Residential complex was really one enormous building, more than three square kilometres in area, and up to ten storeys high in places, built along the east bank of the deepcoulee that loped down to Oldman River. Hospital still dominated the structure, since it was there that the whole complex began, when, after the Change, the country (although there were still two countries then) poured its wealth into frantic research; some of the old twenty-first-century structure was still standing, and the medical museum kept most of Dr. Kostash’s six labs intact.
It was an impressive building, no doubt about it, Bowden thought as they turned into University and she looked behind her, the sun wrinkling the air as it bounced off concrete and bondglass and sunsavers and metal. The building seemed to go on until it dropped below the curvature of the earth. Some of the old city still existed to the north and across the deepcoulee, but, as in most cities now, individual structures tended to be impractical and wasteful, and it had become easier just to replace them as needed by expanding the existing complex. The population had been more or less stable for the past century, of course, so there had been little new building of any kind; it had mostly been a matter of updating and replacing and maintenance.