The Y Chromosome

by Leona Gom

Highlands put it on, then pulled up her pants, the elastic snagging on her bony hips.

  Bowden came and stood between the two of them, both so tall she felt dwarfed beside them, but she knew what she had to say. She spoke to Highlands, but she was looking at Delacour.

  “I promise you,” she said, coldly, “we’ll stop the pregnancy.”

  “Bowden —” said Delacour.

  “I promise you.”

  Highlands looked from one to the other. “Do you have that power?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes,” Bowden said. “I have that power.”

  They waited for Delacour to speak, but she only stood there, not looking at either of them. Then abruptly, she pushed past them and went into her sleeproom, closing the door behind her.

  They stared after her, the sudden silence in the room like an unexpected argument.

  “Well,” Highlands said finally. “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll make her stop it,” Bowden said. “It will be okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll make her stop it. I promise.”

  Highlands finished buttoning up her shirt. Bowden noticed with surprise that her fingers were trembling.

  “Delacour made a promise, too. She didn’t keep it.”

  “I’m not Delacour.”

  Highlands didn’t answer, only looked at the closed door to Delacour’s sleeproom. Then she went over to the sofa and picked up her coat, laid it over her arm and stroked it, as though in welcome.

  “You know how important this is,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Highlands only stood there, stroking her coat. Finally she said, “Well. Thank you.”

  When she had gone, Bowden sat down on the sofa and waited for Delacour to come out of her room. She was determined not to go in to her. She poured herself a glass of wine, something she rarely did, programmed in some light music, and waited. She concentrated on her breathing, the predictable chug of her heart. After half an hour she got up and took out a shoe whose sole had come loose and which she’d been meaning to fix. She tried to glue it back on, but it was the wrong kind of glue and didn’t stick, so she put the shoe away and poured herself another glass of wine and wandered distractedly around the apartment, running her hand over the backs of the furniture.

  She had just sat back down, deciding that Delacour would not come out again, when she heard the door shuffle open. She forced herself not to turn around. She took another sip of wine.

  Do you have that power?

  Delacour had taken off her clothes and was wearing her blue sleeping-robe. She looked as though she had just woken up, her eyes stale with sleep, her hair rumpled, the right side of her face red and textured with the pattern of the decorative throw pillow on her bed. She sat down beside Bowden on the sofa, not a position from which they could easily talk to or look at each other. They sat there for a long time. I won’t begin, Bowden told herself; it always puts me at a disadvantage.

  At last Delacour spoke. “I’m sorry,” she said carefully. “I should have told you. I know you’re angry with me.”

  Bowden didn’t answer.

  “I want to have the child, Bowden.”

  Bowden got up, sat in the chair opposite Delacour. She swallowed, took a deep breath. “I know why you’re doing this, Delacour,” she said. “You told Highlands it would be exciting, and that’s what it is for you, something exciting, with no further consequences. Highlands is the one we should listen to, the one who’s lived with the males, who understands them. She knows what a horrible mistake this is. You haven’t given real thought to what it all means, what a risk it is for all of us. You’d be bringing back into our world something so terrible — This is the most selfish and thoughtless and dangerous thing you’ve ever done, and you’ve got to stop it. If you don’t —” Her voice wavered. “If you don’t, if you have the baby, and it’s a male, I’ll kill it. I swear I will.”

  She knew it wasn’t the way to do it, that it should have been a conversation, a debate, the way Highlands did it, but she didn’t have that skill. She sat rigid, her final words ringing in her head.

  Delacour smiled. “You would kill the child, would you, Bowden? I thought not killing was what made us better than the males. Do you really think you could do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It would be murder.” Her voice still sounded amused.

  “In history, people did that. In war. If we were forced, and had children by the enemy, we would kill them. We had that right.”

  “Those were extreme times, Bowden.”

  “This is an extreme time.”

  “Well, I can’t imagine you doing it, Bowden. Killing a child.”

  “When we were in the woods, and I shot the bear with the stunner — it wasn’t hard for me to do, Delacour. Because it was necessary. And when we were riding toward the farm, and I thought, maybe there really are males there, I picked up the stunner again. I was prepared to use it. Two shots from a stunner could kill a person.” She was exaggerating a little, but not a great deal.

  “I see,” Delacour said. She no longer sounded amused. She looked at Bowden for a long time, the easy, delicate music Bowden had programmed scrolling around them like a mockery.

  “What you said about me,” Delacour said at last, “it’s all true, I suppose. I don’t deny it. But it’s more complicated than that.”

  “What do you mean, it’s more complicated?”

  “I admit I’m curious, that the idea of having a child, perhaps a male child, conceived in the old way, is exciting to me. But it’s not just some experiment, some … specimen I’m creating. It’s not —” She paused. “It’s not an entirely cerebral issue. I want this child. I won’t believe it’s some demon come to destroy us. It might not even be a male. I feel a … protectiveness for it. It’s hard to explain. Stopping it would be extremely difficult.”

  Bowden stared at her, nonplussed. It was the last thing she’d expected to hear Delacour say, and she tried to evaluate it coldly, as just another attempt to disarm her. It might be just the sort of argument Delacour thought would be most persuasive for Bowden.

  She dropped herself down at Delacour’s feet, the supplicating posture Highlands had used. “Delacour, please. What you’re feeling is just hormonal reaction. It won’t last. Of course stopping it will be difficult, but you have to think beyond that, for the good of the rest of us. In a year’s time you’ll agree that having such a child would have been a horrible mistake.”

  “I wish you could understand, Bowden.”

  “If it’s a child you want, we can think again about having one of our own. I’ll agree to it. Would that satisfy you?”

  “It’s not the same,” Delacour said softly.

  They sat in silence for a while, not looking at each other. “I’m tired,” Delacour said at last. She got up, stood for a moment, indecisively. Then she reached a hand out for Bowden’s head. Bowden pulled back, and Delacour’s hand faltered, fell back to her side.

  “Come to bed,” Delacour said.

  “No.”

  The music rose and fell around them, easy repetitions. Delacour walked to the doorway of her sleeproom. “We can talk about it more tomorrow,” she said, not turning around.

  Bowden didn’t look at her. “I told you what I’d do,” she said. “I meant it.”

  Delacour hesitated, half turned, then changed her mind and went into her sleeproom. After a long time, Bowden heard her get up from her bed and close her door.

  I’ll kill the baby. She could hear her determined voice, and she turned her head to the side, as though the words were a branch pulled forward by someone ahead of her on a path. Did she really think her threat would work, that Delacour would say, Oh, well, in that case of course I’ll stop it? So now what would she do?

  Killing: what the males had done. Would t
hey have justified it, too, as she was doing, that it was necessary, one small death balanced against a greater good? Wasn’t that sometimes how whole wars began, with one killing? The most fundamental basis of her society was nonviolence: could she really oppose it so completely? Surely there must be another way, another choice. Perhaps it would be easier if she hadn’t met Daniel; she would be able to think of the child as nonhuman. She got up and paced around the room, picking things up and setting them back down. She could see the baby suddenly, lying on the sofa, its strange blue eyes watching her, its small, delicate mouth — she squeezed shut her eyes.

  She had promised Highlands. Too much was at stake for her not to keep that promise.

  Damn Delacour, she thought furiously. Damn her. It would be so easy to stop it — how dare she imagine doing anything else?

  She paced about the apartment until her feet began to hurt, and finally she let herself drop wearily into the chair Highlands had last been sitting in, reaching back to pull free the two books Delacour had brought home. Her eyes caught on the title of one: The Journal of Adam Markov, Volume 20. At least it wasn’t the Pre-Change Original this time, just a copy. She remembered reading some of the journal, it seemed like such a long time ago, before she and Delacour had gone north. She had fallen asleep and had the nightmare about the riots. All that violence: she shuddered. And Delacour would risk bringing everything back. She had liked Adam Markov, she recalled, but even in him there was the time when, watching the television, he wanted to join with the rioters, to pick up a weapon and kill, for no reason. How could any of them be trusted, ever? But then how could she be trusted, she, Bowden, who was thinking now of killing a child?

  She opened the book, began flipping through the typed pages, which seemed stiff and uninteresting after the flow of Adam Markov’s script, the words embedded by the force of his own hand into the same pages she had been holding. This journal was much later, she could see, than the one she had read before. He was old now, among the last of the males. His daughter, she remembered — Elizabeth — had been killed in the riots. Then there was Jenny, Elizabeth’s mate, the one he disliked, thinking the bonding unnatural. Bowden smiled wearily. Unnatural: perhaps Delacour was right, that we learn everything, even what we call unnatural.

  She decided to read a little of the journal before she went to bed. If nothing else, she thought, it would confirm the rightness of her promise to Highlands.

  She flipped to the last pages, pausing at a long, detailed entry on which Delacour had put a marker, beside which she had written, “disengagement/confirmation” and “cf. 127,” whatever that meant; but Bowden decided this time she wouldn’t just read what Delacour had flagged, so she turned back a few pages before she began, and read all the entries to the end.

  • • •

  THE JOURNAL OF ADAM MARKOV

  Volume 20

  Nov. 24, 2097:

  Lovely day, sun on the snow so bright it squeezed tears out of my dry eyes. Went down to the Centre, Eleanor coming out of her house at just the time I shuffled by, as though it were coincidence, but I smiled and let her think she’s fooled me. Poor old thing, how long must she sit there and wait in case I come. Played cards at the Centre, me just three points away from the booby prize, but Carl got that, thank God.

  Fell on my front step, a goddamned fucking sneaky piece of ice under the snow, but no damage done, I hope. Arthritis not bad today: the dry weather, maybe the B-12s kicking in. Amanda phoned, to tell me Mrs. Melnyk died — I didn’t even know the woman, but I can’t deprive Amanda of her little pleasure.

  Nov. 26, 2097:

  The damn toilet seat cracked right across this morning — good Christ, surely I haven’t gotten that obese. But it’s been pinching my ass for weeks, I should have known this was coming. Mike’s Plumbing: I look around for Mike, feel like a senile fool when the clerk tells me he’s been dead for years, and I knew that, of course I knew that. So I look for some other man, and in the whole place, not a single man, the place is even owned by a woman now, the clerk tells me, plainly getting pissed off at the way I’m snivelling on. But she helps me pick out a new seat and I hobble home with it, noticing on the street how there’s no men younger than forty — that’s how old they’d be, I guess, the last of the men, those sickly boys I remember from the sixties. Under forty it’s only women. Ova-fusion women. The old order changeth.

  In the paper last night: the MLA from Strathcona defeated in the by-election by a woman, and he says it’s not fair — because there’s so many women now their votes should count only half as much as a man’s, he says. Not wanting to give it up. He’s not the only one. All those big bosses still refusing to hand over to the women, the mentality of the riots, wanting to see it all in ruins rather than let them have it. And me whining about where’s Mike — it’s the same thing, I’m just as bad.

  Oh, hell. I forgot to stop at the bank. Jesus Christ, I’m getting so feeble upstairs I might as well be brain dead.

  Nov. 27:

  In exactly three weeks I’ll be eighty-four years old. The thought depressed me so much I just sat here and smoked up half my grass. Stupid. But what am I saving it for? I fed Mary Wanna some fish fertilizer, and she promised to make me some more. Shall we not suffer as wittily as we can?

  Nov. 28:

  Leslie over today, the first time in it must be a month.

  It hurts me to look at her, that face with Elizabeth’s delicate mouth, the funny little blip on the nose she must get from me.

  “Hiya, Gramps,” she chirped. “How’s my favourite old fart?”

  I had to remind myself she’s an engineer and thirty bloody years old. She looks about fifteen, and acts twelve. But once I must have been that energetic, too, that self-confident, eager for what I thought life owed me. Still, it’s been hard for her — being one of the first ova-fusions in the world. (Brave new world that hath etc.) She was an experiment — it could have made her a total neurotic. I wish Elizabeth could have lived to see her.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked, because she expected it, because I needed to hear it myself, to remind myself that she was no orphan.

  “Oh, fine.” She pushed sharply at Fig, whose branches were lazing on the blue armchair she dropped herself into. At least she didn’t bitch about the plants the way she used to. “Actually,” she said, “I was just talking to her the other night. And she told me something about you I wanted to ask you about.”

  Well. Every rotten thing I ever said about Jenny leaped to my mind. I must have looked like a cornered felon.

  Leslie reached over and picked up a banana and peeled it slowly. “It’s about the Women’s Front,” she said, coyly, taking a big bite.

  “Oh.” So that’s what she after, I thought. I knew I’d have to be careful how I answered those questions, too.

  “Mom says that when they destroyed the Leth sperm bank you helped them.” She made her voice casual, almost indifferent, but she was watching me so closely I thought she must be counting every blink.

  “She says that, does she?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What does she say about herself?”

  “Oh, I’ve known for years that she was involved. But I didn’t know you were.”

  “She shouldn’t have told you anything about it. She could get in a lot of trouble.”

  “Oh, I know, I know. But that’s all in the past now. We all think it was the right thing to do.” She took another bite of the banana, chewed it noisily.

  I thought of the MLA from Strathcona: sure, everyone thinks it was the right thing to do.

  “Well,” she demanded. “Did you help?”

  I sighed. All in the past now. I suppose so. Ancient history. Senile old man can boast of his revolutionary youth. “Yes,” I said. “I helped. Not much. Mostly I just helped them gain access, pretending I had to pick up Elizabeth’s things. I looked harmless. I watched
the doors, carried some things in and out.” It hurt to talk about it, to think about it.

  “Ah,” said Leslie. She’d stopped chewing as I was talking and now swallowed whatever was left in her mouth. She set the banana skin on the coffee table like a large, freckled yellow flower. I stared at it, blinking hard, not wanting to remember.

  “It must have been difficult, deciding to do that, to destroy, well, the future of your own kind?”

  “They’d killed my daughter, for Christ’s sake!” I shouted. I was suddenly so furious at her.

  She sat back. Fig jabbed her in the neck. “Oh,” she said, in a little-kid voice. “I’m sorry.”

  “She was your mother. Jesus.”

  She was quiet for a long time, then finally she said, a mollifying voice, the voice they use on me at the Centre when I’m being crabby, “I never knew her, Gramps. I suppose I don’t feel the loss like you do.”

  And I guess somewhere around there she must have gone home. I can’t remember her leaving. I remember sitting there and crying for a while, and then I went and gave Mary Wanna some more fertilizer, although now that I think of it I just gave her a big dose yesterday, no wonder the house smells fishy, I thought it was my armpits, and then I sat down and began to write, and here I still am, here I am, still, my body turning into one huge cramp. It’s so hard to get to sleep. In youth the days are short and years are long;/ in age the years are short and days are long.

  Nov. 29:

  Cloudy today, windy, a chinook maybe, blowing a little rain around with the snow. Felt too achy to go out. These damn leg cramps. I should use the cane but I hate the merdy thing.

  I had a dream about what happened. Talking to Leslie jarred it loose, I suppose, a black bat memory flapping around my subconscious.

  Thinking back to that time is so painful. Which is why I never do it. Elizabeth, it’s all connected to Elizabeth. Would I have helped them if she hadn’t been killed? Probably not. I don’t want to think about it. The political is always personal, etc.

  So what should I have said to Leslie? Respect me, for what noble thing I did? Pity me, for I acted out of rage and despair? Forgive me, for the grouchy old fart I art?