The Y Chromosome

by Leona Gom

  “A study-leave. Very appropriate. And the child is the product of your studies. Do you plan to present him to the others like some exciting new discovery you’ve made? They’ll obviously have to know about him eventually.”

  Delacour looked across the water, rocking the baby lightly. She didn’t answer for several moments. “You can’t keep isolated here forever,” she said at last. “You know that.”

  “We were doing so for centuries before you came.” He picked up another stone, pressed it between his palms. He wished he could harden himself into a stone on the creek bed, with no thoughts, no feelings, no memories.

  The baby whimpered and circled his fists in the air, and Delacour stroked his back, cooing, “There, there, it’s all right, there, there,” and he wound down again into sleep, the tiny fingers of one hand hooked into the buttonhole of Delacour’s shirt. Through his thin hair his scalp gleamed as though it had been oiled.

  “What have you named him?” Daniel asked. He tried to make his voice casual, disinterested, fighting his attraction to the child, knowing that such caring would only make the knowledge of him a greater grief. He was helpless to save him from the future Delacour had planned; all he could hope was that she felt enough mother-bond to protect him from the most obvious cruelties. He watched the way her hand was stroking the baby’s back: she could have been any mother, caressing her child.

  “Bowden wanted to call him Adam-Markov — you know, after the writer of the journals — but that’s, well, a bit much to burden him with.”

  “Considering what else his life will be burdened with.” He threw the stone he’d been holding, hard, so that it crossed the stream and landed on the other side, startling a small, rock-coloured bird into flight.

  She ignored his remark. “I suppose we should have named him by now. He’s three months old, after all. He must have been conceived the first time we made love. Which … surprised me.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it seemed the least pleasant of the times. The most … violent.”

  He winced, remembering it, the way he had thought he had hurt her, and been glad. And from that hurting this child had come.

  “History tells us children were often conceived by violence,” he made himself say. “You should know that.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “So you know what you might be bringing back to the world.”

  She didn’t answer, her eyes narrowing against the sun, which splashed into her eyes as a wind tugged away the shade above her. Her face went from dark to light, dark to light, a pattern of leaves.

  The baby stirred again, and began a muffled wailing against Delacour’s chest, pumping at the air with its legs.

  “You poor thing,” Delacour said, “I bet you’re hungry.” She unbuttoned the child from its holder and reached in her pocket for a tissue to wipe his face, but as she pulled it free something else fell out, a small metal clasp that clicked into a crevice between two rocks. She bent over to retrieve it.

  “I almost forgot about this. It’s Highlands’s barrette. She left it in our apartment.” She held it out to Daniel, who took it reluctantly. “She may not even want it, but give it to her, will you?” She turned back to the baby, wiped at his wet, straining face.

  Daniel looked at the object in his hand. A barrette in the shape of a butterfly, its blue paint half chipped away, the elastic on it stretched and loose. It was like some cruel reminder of Highlands’s trip and its failure. He could imagine giving it to Highlands, her derisive snort for the vanities imposed by cities. Perhaps she had even left it behind on purpose.

  He remembered, suddenly, her hand on his shoulder before he came down here, and it gave him a surge of comfort, that even in his worst moment, the collapse of everything, she had reached out to him, her hand on his shoulder, absolution. She hadn’t touched him like that since before he’d gone away. He slipped the barrette into his pants pocket.

  The baby was wailing louder, beating at the air. Delacour began to undo her shirt, letting her breasts, heavy with milk, slip free. She pulled the child to her, and he took the nipple hungrily. Milk trickled from the corners of his mouth.

  Daniel watched them, the sight of her nakedness wrenching him with memory. He forced himself to look away, not remember making love with her, angry at himself for feeling anything at all. Was he still the same fool he had been in Leth?

  Across the stream a deer suddenly stepped from the trees, stood gazing at them. “Look,” Delacour breathed.

  Daniel picked up a stone, threw it in the direction of the deer. The sudden gesture of his arm was enough to startle the animal, and in one leap it was gone, back into the forest, before the stone even landed.

  “Why did you do that?” Delacour demanded.

  “I was saving its life.” He knew the remark didn’t make much sense, but she didn’t ask him to explain. They looked at the spot where the deer had vanished. A breeze pushed around them from the west, smelling faintly of coolness, a distant rain.

  “Daniel,” Delacour said suddenly. “If you could choose to stay here, or to live in the city, which would you do?”

  He glanced at her, without moving his head. “Why do you ask?”

  She shrugged. “Just curious.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I’d choose. I’ve forfeited my right to make such choices. Once the world finds out about the baby it’s the world that will make those decisions.”

  “It’s just a hypothetical question. Imagine there were no baby. Tell me where you’d rather live.”

  “Hypothetical. I see.” It was just another of her games. Yet he felt his thoughts engage the question, felt, in spite of himself, his mind begin to arrange the idea in his head into two logical columns. If he could freely choose. On the one hand, his life here on the farm, isolated, bound to the repetitive seasons; on the other hand, the life in the city, University, the excitement of books and ideas — and Delacour.

  No. He closed his eyes, set the columns up again. On the one hand, his life in the city, hiding, always afraid, his very self a constant, shameful wrongness, bound to Delacour and able to live only as she allowed it. On the other hand, his life here on the farm, the freedom of the land, people who loved him, people he loved, Shaw-Ellen —

  Shaw-Ellen. And, yes, he did love her. Perhaps he hadn’t really understood that until this moment. He had learned to love her. He wanted to live his life with her.

  “I’d stay here,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t feel yourself a prisoner here?”

  Daniel looked at the trees across the creek. “No. Not now. I was more a prisoner in the city.”

  “I see.” The baby had finished nursing, his head lolling back against Delacour’s arm. His eyes were half closed, like those of a doll whose lids were weighted. Delacour pulled him slowly away from her and laid him on his stomach on a rock at her feet, rubbing his back. “So you’re happy here? You’re satisfied?”

  Am I? He remembered the conversation he had had with Christoph, the answers they had given each other. He thought for a while before he replied.

  “None of us is ever completely satisfied. There are always things we desire and can’t have. It becomes a question of appreciating what we do have.”

  “What a wholesome philosophy.” She was probably, he thought, being sarcastic.

  But then, he remembered, this was just a game she was playing, a game he was playing. It was easy for him to see everything so clearly now that choice was no longer possible. “Of course,” he said, “this is all just hypothetical. I can’t choose. Soon there will be nowhere I can belong.”

  “Nowhere. Or everywhere.”

  Daniel shrugged. It was useless to argue with her. The child had been born, and nothing could undo that. Their lives would all be changed, beyond imagining. She
had forced her will on all of them, impervious to any argument, and now she would follow her perverse plan to its end. What Delacour wanted was to recreate the world. This one bored her; she would change it into one that might be more interesting. Before the Change was Chaos, and it was Male — Perhaps that was really what she wanted, chaos. She had asked him if he would be satisfied here. He should ask her if she could ever be satisfied.

  To his surprise, he felt a sudden pity for her, for what in her was like him, the restlessness. But he had a place he belonged, at least for now, a family, a home. And things wouldn’t work out the way she wanted them to. If she thought the world would revere her for what she had done, she was wrong, he was sure of that; people would see her as freakish and as dangerous as her child. Of course, ultimately it would depend on who was left to judge.

  She stood up abruptly, took a step back, as though she felt his thoughts, his pity. “Well. I think I’ll go back up.” She turned, began to walk away, her feet grinding on the rocks.

  “The baby —”

  She stopped, didn’t turn around. “I’m leaving him with you.”

  “What?”

  “I’m leaving him here. On the farm.”

  Daniel scrambled clumsily to his feet. He looked, confused, from her to the baby lying on the rock. “What do you mean?”

  She turned then, faced him. The flap of the holder hung down over her stomach, making her suddenly seem flat and thin, a blue cut-out pasted on a green background. “I mean what I said.” Her voice was flat, too, like words printed on a page.

  “I don’t understand.” His heart was galloping against his ribs. It must be another trick, another one of her cruel games. “Are you making a joke?”

  “I’m not making a joke. I’ve decided. The baby will stay here. It’s where he belongs. I assume that will be agreeable with you.”

  “Stay here,” he repeated. He wouldn’t let himself believe her. Why would she have changed her mind? “But — if you refused to stop the pregnancy you must have wanted the child. And now you’re willing to give him up? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  She stared past him and over the squirming child, across the stream, as though something in the distant trees had snared her gaze. She rubbed her right hand up and down her left arm, the gesture of someone getting cold. “Perhaps not.”

  Perhaps not: her words had the tone he had heard in his own voice when he’d asked the child’s name, too deliberately casual and dismissive, the tone that feigned uncaring, that was hardening itself against loss, against pain.

  So he began to let himself think it was true. That she was actually intending to leave the child here. The breath he had been holding broke from his mouth, almost a laugh. What she said made no sense, no sense at all, yet why would she lie?

  But she must have a reason. He had to understand it, what would make her come to this decision, against everything she had professed she wanted. She must have other motives, conditions she would set. He ran through their conversation in his mind, looking for clues, but nothing betrayed her intentions, nothing until —

  “Is it because of what I said about choosing the farm? Would you be doing this if I’d chosen the city?”

  She dropped her eyes to him, looked at him for several moments. “It makes it easier,” she said.

  “But it wasn’t what made you decide,” he said, feeling foolish. Of course she must have made up her mind before she came. “What did make you decide?”

  Again she was silent for several moments. At last she said, “Bowden.”

  “Bowden? What do you mean?”

  “I mean I wouldn’t be giving him up if it weren’t for her.”

  “Bowden promised Highlands she’d make you stop it. If she couldn’t do that, how could she make you give him up now?”

  “Well, first she said she would kill the child.”

  “What?” Daniel glanced quickly at the baby, then back at Delacour, in disbelief, the memory of his own murderous impulse outside her door that night flooding over him. But he was a male — he thought that was why — how could Bowden, placid Bowden, have such thoughts, even imagine such a thing?

  “Of course I couldn’t really believe she would do it, but, still, it was … unsettling. That she would even make such a threat. That perhaps she thought herself capable of such an act. That others might feel the same.”

  “Did she? Think herself capable?”

  Delacour hesitated. “She might have,” she said finally. “But when the baby was born, and I saw her holding him, so … tenderly, well, then I was sure she couldn’t. In fact” — she brushed a fly from her leg “— I think he convinced her that she wants a child of her own. Our own.”

  But Daniel was still trying to push from his mind the image of Bowden, threatening to kill, to kill a child. It was no reassurance to him to think that people, especially people like Bowden, could have such thoughts, ones as ugly as his own had been as he stood outside Delacour’s door. They were thoughts that belonged to pre-Change times, to pre-Change males. He remembered how he had explained to Travers about the way males had forced people, the way it came from the desire for power-over and that the seeds of it were in all of them, but that the pre-Change males had nurtured and valued and taught it to their male children. The same, then, he thought, could be true for killing, the ultimate power-over.

  He made himself concentrate on what Delacour had just said. Bowden had held the child tenderly. Yes. Thought was not action.

  “So how could she make you give him up, then?”

  Delacour shifted her gaze down the stream to where it disappeared in a thick white braid around a bend. “She’d leave me,” she said quietly.

  Daniel nodded, not looking at her. There was only the noise of the stream, a blackbird calling in the distance.

  Bowden would leave her. Why should that explanation press in him some small nerve of disappointment? What did it matter that it was Bowden who had made the decision, Bowden, not Delacour herself caring enough about the future of all of them to do what was right? The important thing was not the reasons, or the person who made them, but the result.

  And the result was that the child would stay here. The farms would not be revealed. They were safe. He felt like laughing, like shouting into the air.

  And suddenly he realized Delacour was walking away.

  “Wait,” he said desperately. “Don’t go.”

  She stopped, turned, but not completely, so that she stood in profile, facing the bank, waiting. But Daniel could find no words in the churning of his mind, everything he wanted to say to her suddenly impossible, beyond language, and he only stood helplessly looking at her, already so far away. He would think about her in the years to come standing just that way, in seeming ambiguity, facing half away from and half toward him, still, like a photograph thumbtacked to his memory.

  The baby was whimpering and kicking small bits of gravel onto himself. Daniel bent, his hands trembling, to pick him up, and the child, feeling a stranger’s hands on his back, began to shriek. “It’s okay,” Daniel said. “It’s okay.”

  When he straightened with the child to look back at Delacour he saw she was at the incline and pulling herself up it in large, clumsy steps. At the top she paused, as though she were not sure of the way, but she didn’t turn around, and after a few seconds she began walking in the direction of the farm. Daniel could see her blue shirt flash in the trees and then she was gone, leaving a swirl of birds behind her in the air.

  “It’s okay,” Daniel said to the baby. “It’s okay.” He began to cry, pressing the child to his chest. The tears ran down his cheeks, fell on the white hair of the child. He rocked himself lightly from side to side until finally both of them quieted. It’s over, he told himself, it’s over. He had been given another chance. It was more than he deserved. He put his hand on the back of the child’s head and tipped him to look int
o his face. He was overcome again by such a surge of feeling for him that he could hardly breathe.

  His child. His son. A male to whom he would have to explain the world. He was the father now. Would he be as patient as his own father had been? Would he be able to teach the boy contentment here?

  Or would he — Delacour’s predictions spilled into his mind — have to prepare him for discovery, for the inevitability of the outside world? For a time without First Law. If First Law can be changed — the sentence he had refused in the longhouse completed itself without his willing it — then life will become as it was before the Change.

  Frightened, he clutched the baby to him again, his heart pounding as though he had just saved him from danger.

  “No,” he whispered into the child’s damp neck, “no.” There would be other ways to complete the sentence. There had to be. They were safe, he had thought a few moments ago: but they had to mean more than himself, or the other males, or the farms. They had to mean everyone, the world. If the males ever returned to the Outside they could not become as they once had been. They would have to nurture and value and teach each other different things than they had then.

  At last, the baby squirming in his arms, he turned and walked back to the farm.

  8

  BOWDEN

  SHE KNEW DELACOUR WAS crying, so even though there was room to ride two abreast, Bowden pulled her horse back, let her be alone. It wasn’t until they had gone several kilometres that Delacour slowed her horse and waited for Bowden to come up beside her. They rode on for a while without speaking, the morning sun dabbing at them through the trees.

  “I didn’t think I’d feel this damned awful,” Delacour said.

  Bowden knew what she meant, could feel the loss herself. In a way, the time after the baby’s birth, once they had resolved its future, had been the happiest she and Delacour had spent together. The child had, except for its one physical difference, been like any normal infant, and she had been drawn to it in spite of herself, had enjoyed taking care of it when Delacour was out. When she thought of her vow to kill it, she almost wept. Perhaps she had known all along she could never do it. Or was that just what she wanted to believe, now? If Delacour hadn’t agreed to give him up, she didn’t know what she would have finally done. Gone mad, perhaps.