by Leona Gom
When at last he fell into a restless sleep it wasn’t Bluesky whose face filled his dreams; it was Delacour’s, an erotic and confused dream of running and capture and harsh desire, and he awoke in the morning covered in sweat, exhausted as though the dream had been reality, which after all was no more strange.
It was three days before Delacour came again. They made love on the sofa in the centreroom.
After, she pulled her shirt on and went to the kitchen to get herself a drink of water, rummaging for a glass in his cupboards as though they were her own. She came back and sat down beside him, one leg stretched straight out on the sofa and the other on the floor, giving her the look of someone prepared both to rest and to leave. He could see the dark scribble of her pubic hair under the bottom of her shirt.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“What about?” He wished she would go — what was the point of pretending they were like other lovers, beginning a companionable evening? It was a mockery of the lazy tenderness of afterlove, and he knew that what he must be wary of now was imagining her a friend, a confidante. They were not two equal, free people; he mustn’t be deceived into believing they were.
“Yourself.” She reached over and picked a thread from Daniel’s shoulder.
“You know who I am.”
“Do I?” she said, leaning back.
“I’m not very complicated.”
She laughed, a loud, confident sound, but one that seemed to end prematurely, incomplete. “Ah. No simple person ever says she’s not very complicated.”
“I’m not as complicated as you.”
She set the water glass in the palm of her hand, turned it back and forth like a key in the wrong lock. “On the farm,” she said suddenly, “when I saw you, who was it you were with? Is it someone you’re mated to?”
“Not yet. But we have an agreement. We’ve planned to be mated when I go back.”
“How did she decide to choose you? Or was it her choice? Does the Leader arrange the matings?”
“Of course not. We choose whom we want.”
“And there’s no … difficulty for her in choosing a male, when others don’t?”
He shifted uncomfortably, thinking of Bluesky. “She sees no difficulty with it,” he said stiffly.
“When you go back, will you tell her what happened here, with us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would she mind?”
“Perhaps. A little. We have no claims on each other until we’re mated.”
“And then?”
“It depends on the people. Most of us have monogamy-bonds. It’s just too difficult, otherwise. The farms are so small.”
“So there’s no rule about it. It’s just a matter of practicality?”
“I suppose so. What does it matter? Why do you want to know?”
She smiled lazily, closed her palm on the bottom of the water glass. “Just curious. The mating patterns of others interest me.”
“What about you and Bowden? What kind of mating pattern do you have?” He knew he had no right to ask, but then neither did she of him.
She took several moments before she replied. “We have no monogamy-bond. Still, it … troubles her when I go with others,” she said finally. There was an edge to her voice, so he only nodded and picked at the edge of the sofa, where a thin curl of stuffing was leaking through a frayed seam.
“Anyway,” Delacour said, her voice cheerful again, “your mothers, your male mother —”
“Father.”
“Yes, of course — how odd to use that word for humans. Your father. What’s he like?”
“He’s a very kind man, very patient and gentle.” Thinking of him brought such a surge of love and pain that he could hardly speak.
“Gentle and kind? That doesn’t sound like what we know of males. Isn’t he … aggressive, dominating?”
He shook his head vehemently, determined to convince her. “He’s the least aggressive of any of us. Even less so than my mother. When the animals have to be killed, he refuses to do it. And Kit —” suddenly he remembered: he had told her he and his father were the only two males “— thinks so, too,” he finished lamely.
If Delacour noticed anything, she didn’t pursue it. “I suppose there always were males like that,” she said. “But they were in the minority.”
“We’re not that different from you.”
“Don’t you see ways in which you think, feel, behave differently from the rest of us?”
“I don’t know. How can I tell if the way I am is the result of my just being an individual or of my being male?”
“But your response to things — do you think you get angry more easily than others, for example?”
Daniel shifted uneasily. “Of course I get angry. Highlands says I have a bad temper. But hers is just as bad.”
“Do you find yourself wanting to — hit things, people, animals?”
How much should he tell her? Thinking about it frightened him suddenly, too — how much of his temper was his maleness? Because Highlands and Cayley and Johnson-Dene seemed to him just as bad might mean nothing; perhaps he was only perceiving them so to justify himself. “Sometimes,” he said carefully. “Don’t you?”
She laughed. “I’ve been known to be … cranky. I suppose it’s a question of where you stop. Feeling and acting aren’t the same thing.”
“Yes,” he said, relieved.
“Still — how do you explain the world we’ve made, so different from the male world? Consensus governments, no wars, no killing — except by very ill people, and there were only two in the whole country last year. Violence against others as it was before the Change is virtually nonexistent.”
“But perhaps that’s only because this world had an unnatural beginning. It would pick what it liked and discard what it didn’t. It seems to me that so much of life around us —” he waved his hand vaguely in the air “— the university, the way we work and think and live together — all that is chosen from the ways of the pre-Change world. This world didn’t have to struggle through centuries of trial and error, of primitive science and religion and medicine and survival of the fittest.”
She was watching him, listening to him, with what he thought was interest. But it reminded him of the kind of interest Cayley showed in him as a boy in her classroom when he tried to impress her, not the kind of interest that really came from an engagement of intellect, from the excitement of hearing new ideas.
“Ah, yes,” she said. “Survival of the fittest. Of course there are those who say that’s what happened during the Change. When creatures continue to use responses no longer appropriate to survival, nature eliminates them.”
“Except now there’s me to account for. An error made by nature.”
“Or nature giving males another chance.”
Daniel laughed. But her comment made him vaguely uncomfortable. “I wish you didn’t see me as so different from you,” he said. “I have one very small chromosome unlike yours. That’s all. Otherwise we’re the same.”
“Yes — but what a chromosome! It’s the one that wanted to destroy the world.”
He thought from her tone that she might be mocking him, but he wasn’t sure. She was only repeating, after all, the judgment of history. “I don’t think it was that simple,” he said.
“No?”
“The males might have been victims, too, just doing what they were taught, what they thought was expected. The males who were like my father never sought power-over, so they were discounted, unvalued.”
“I see.” She gave him a teacherly smile. “It’s a clever student who perceives the opposite of a truth might not have to be a lie. It might simply be another truth.”
“I’m not your student.”
“You came to one of my classes.”
“Only one. The
day you talked about the male as virus.”
She laughed. “An absurd theory, that’s all. You mustn’t take it personally.”
“I suppose I can’t. I’m not a person. I’m a male.”
She looked at him for the first time with something like sympathy in her face, and she leaned over and stroked his arm. He tensed, but didn’t pull away. He stared at her nose, so small, the skin stretching over it as smoothly and tightly as bark over a knot in a tree.
She took her hand away. “Perhaps I should go,” she said.
He nodded. She stood up, put on her clothes. At the door she paused, turned. “Do you want me to come again?” she asked softly.
He looked up at her miserably. “No,” he said. She put her hand on the doorknob. “Yes,” he said.
The next day he pulled himself dully through his classes, trying not to think of anything but his work. He sat in a library centre for hours, his brain beginning to feel like a pencil worn down to a stub by all it was expected to understand. He finished his report on the new weather study, but when he read his paper over it seemed confused and chaotic, endorsing the report at the same time as saying it was too conjectural. No. Yes. He took a drink from the glass of water he’d brought with him to his table, and when he set it down on the corner of one of the pages he noticed how it magnified the words and letters underneath. IsoBARS AT HIGH level. sucH A CONCLUsion. He moved the glass across the page, pausing to read the magnified portions, as though it were a code, a hidden message telling him what to do. temPERATURE RIses. aneMOMETER READings. Finally he drank what was left of the water, set the glass aside, and put his head down on the desk, willing himself to sleep, the only escape possible. He fell into a light doze, and when he awoke he found he had drooled on his paper. He had to stop himself from laughing hysterically.
He walked wearily to his apartment. It was late; the night-lighting had already come on, and the corridors, empty of all but the occasional cleaner, seemed wider than they did in the daytime. He became aware of a low hum, perhaps from the lights, or from the invisible machines that ran the building.
And then, his hand reaching for his doorknob, he remembered something Delacour had said to him last night, when she’d asked about Shaw-Ellen: When you go back, will you tell her what happened here, with us?
The implication of her question was suddenly clear to him — she was giving him choices; she was giving him the freedom to go back.
And if that was true, then he wasn’t just a tethered animal growing fond of its jailer.
So when she came to him two days later he greeted her at the door with a smile.
“Well,” she said, “you’re looking cheerful.”
“Would you rather I weren’t?”
She looked at him oddly. “Of course not.”
She pulled a bottle from her coat pocket and set it down on the counter. “I’ve brought us some wine. We can celebrate your being cheerful.” She came up beside him, slid her hand inside the collar of his shirt, along the ridge of his neck, settling on his chest, her thumb circling in the small depression in his throat. With her other hand she took the bottle from him and set it back on the counter. “For later,” she said softly.
They made love, as they had the last time, on the sofa in the centreroom, but taking longer this time, trying to give pleasure as much to each other as to themselves.
After, Delacour got up, pulling off her shirt, which had wadded itself in some complicated way around her neck, and padded naked across the room to get the wine. Daniel watched her easing the cork from the bottle, her thumbs with their short nails pressing the cork up into an exclamatory pop. She found two glasses and poured them each full, came back, and handed him one.
“Thank you,” he said, thirsty, taking a deep swallow, which made him cough; he felt the sprinkle of wine up his nose.
Delacour smiled, laid her hand along his cheek. Her fingers were chilled from holding the wine, and they sent a tremor up the side of his face.
She left her hand there for a full minute before she drew it away. Then she lay down on the floor, propping herself on one elbow, her right breast dragging down to rest in her armpit.
“I just want you to understand,” she said carefully, “that you have the right to end this. And so do I.”
Daniel thought about it, looking at her on the floor, her hair squashed untidily into the cup of her hand. She seemed young and guileless.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
“Good.”
“What if neither of us want to end it?”
She took a sip from her wine, set it down on the floor beside her. “We will,” she said. “Eventually.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ll get bored. Because we are in love with others.”
Because we are in love with others. What answer could he make? He said nothing, only looked down into his glass.
Delacour sat up, reached for her shirt. She began to unbutton it to put it back on, but, impatient, finally just slipped it over her head. Daniel watched the way her breasts lifted as she raised her arms, the way her ribs showed through her skin. The shirt fell, a white curtain, around her torso.
“I have to go,” she said. “I promised Bowden I’d help her with a report she’s writing for Hospital.”
Daniel nodded. Bowden: it was so easy for Delacour to move from one life to another, guiltless.
She slipped on her pants, reached for her coat. “Well,” she said, turning back to him.
Daniel lifted his glass. “Thanks for the wine,” he said.
She stood looking at him for a moment, then she leaned over and touched her hand briefly to his cheek. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be all right.” She pulled back, walked quickly to the door. “I’ll see you.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
After she was gone he sat for some time, drinking more wine and thinking about the evening. Why did he feel so oddly saddened? Nothing had happened that should have surprised or distressed him, that should have changed his feelings from what they were when he met her at the door. She said he had the right to end what was between them; a few weeks ago that would have made him feverish with relief.
He got up, brushed the lightcode on the side table to black, and stalked restlessly around the dark room. His head felt fuzzy, and he evaluated the sensation: if it was intoxication, it wasn’t very pleasurable.
When? Soon. She was still the one to choose.
He decided to go for a walk outside, but it was colder than he had expected, and it was starting to snow, so he came back inside and sat down in the rotunda nearest his apartment and looked out the window at the snow falling quietly into the deepcoulee. It relaxed him, and slowly his frustration with himself eased a little. His feelings for Delacour were not as simple as he would like them to be, that was all. Under the circumstances that shouldn’t be too surprising. It wasn’t as easy for him as it seemed to be for her to separate physical desires from emotions.
He smiled a little at his pale reflection in the window. A student who had sat down opposite him thought he was smiling at her and smiled back. They made casual conversation about the weather and school for a few minutes, and then they both got up and headed off down opposite hallways. That was what Delacour expected of him, he thought: they would pass some pleasant time together and at the end they would walk away down opposite hallways. Surely, given the alternatives, he should be relieved that was all she wanted.
It was several days later when he came home in the afternoon from his classes that he found Delacour standing outside his door.
He stared at her down the corridor, alarm freezing his body into stillness, an old instinct hoping for the luck of camouflage. What was she doing here, at this time of day, so blatantly waiting for him outside his door? He forced himself to step forward, reassuring himself
that she simply wanted to see him, and the thought made him smile, quicken his step. She saw him coming then, and waved.
When he reached her, she said, “I’m sorry for loitering about here, but I thought you’d be home by now. I had to see you.”
He unlocked the door. “It’s all right,” he said, “I’m glad you’ve come.”
She went inside, her teacher’s-robe snagging on the door; she paid it no attention, and it almost tore as it was pulled free. She sat down on the sofa, regarded him unsmilingly across the room. His alarm returned. Something was wrong.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Sit down.”
He did, in the chair facing her. “What’s wrong?” he said. “What’s happened?”
“Perhaps nothing.” She took a deep breath, began pleating her robe between her long fingers. She lifted her hand a little toward him, let it drop again into her lap. “I may be pregnant.”
“What?” He felt as though she had struck him.
“I may be pregnant. My menses should have begun by now.”
“But —” He looked at her in a horror of understanding. “But weren’t you monitoring yourself?”
“Monitoring? What do you mean?”
“Monitoring,” he said desperately. “For your fertile days. Your mucus secretions —”
She looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“The way the — the way Shaw-Ellen does, so she doesn’t, so we don’t make a child until we want to —”
“Ah,” she said, giving a little twitch of a smile. “You have to remember — making love and conceiving children are for us quite vastly different things; it’s like thinking that washing your face will make your hair fall out. There’s simply no connection.”
He nodded, not looking at her. It was his fault, all his fault. How could he not have thought about it? How could he expect her to know about monitoring, when such knowledge for her had been obsolete for centuries?