The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  TWO

  The founders of the Society of Cousins had a vision of women as independent agents, free thinkers forming alliances with other women to create a social bond so strong that men could not overwhelm them. Solidarity, sisterhood, motherhood. But Erno’s mother was not like those women. Those women existed only in history vids, sitting in meeting circles, laughing, making plans, sure of themselves and complete.

  Erno’s mother was a cop. She had a cop’s squinty eyes and a cop’s suspicion of anyone who stepped outside of the norm. She had a cop’s lack of imagination, except as she could imagine what people would do wrong.

  Erno and his mother and his sister Celeste and his Aunt Sophie and his cousins Lena and Aphra, and various men some of whom may have been fathers, some of them Good Partners, and others just men, lived in an apartment in Sanger, on the third level of the northeast quadrant, a small place looking down on the farms that filled the floor of the crater they called Fowler, though the real Fowler was a much larger crater five kilometers distant.

  Erno had his own room. He thought nothing of the fact that the girls had to share a room, and would be forced to move out when they turned fourteen. Keep your son close, let your daughter go, went the aphorism Tyler had mocked. Erno’s mother was not about to challenge any aphorisms. Erno remembered her expression as she had stepped forward to arrest the drunk: sad that this man had forced her to this, and determined to do it. She was comfortable in the world; she saw no need for alternatives. Her cronies came by the apartment and shared coffee and gossip, and they were just like all the other mothers and sisters and aunts. None of them were extraordinary.

  Not that any of the men Erno knew were extraordinary, either. Except Tyler Durden. And now Erno knew Durden, and they had spent a night breaking rules and getting away with it.

  Celeste and Aphra were dishing up oatmeal when Erno returned to the apartment that morning. “Where were you?” his mother asked. She looked up from the table, more curious than upset, and Erno noticed a bruise on her temple.

  “What happened to your forehead?” Erno asked.

  His mother touched a hand to her forehead, as if she had forgotten it. She waved the hand in dismissal.

  “There was trouble at a club in the enterprise district,” Aunt Sophie said. “The constables had to step in, and your mother was assaulted.”

  “It was a riot!” Lena said eagerly. “There’s going to be a big meeting about it in the park today.” Lena was a month from turning fourteen, and looking forward to voting.

  Erno sat down at the table. As he did so he felt the book, which he had tucked into his belt at the small of his back beneath his now rumpled suit jacket. He leaned forward, pulled a bowl of oatmeal toward him and took up a spoon. Looking down into the bowl to avoid anyone’s eyes, he idly asked, “What’s the meeting for?”

  “One of the rioters was knocked into a coma,” Lena said. “The social order committee wants this comedian Tyler Durden to be made invisible.”

  Erno concentrated on his spoon. “Why?”

  “You know about him?” his mother asked.

  Before he had to think of an answer, Nick Farahsson, his mother’s partner, shambled into the kitchen. “Lord, Pam, don’t you pay attention? Erno’s one of his biggest fans.”

  His mother turned on Erno. “Is that so?”

  Erno looked up from his bowl and met her eyes. She looked hurt. “I’ve heard of him.”

  “Heard of him?” Nick said. “Erno, I bet you were there last night.”

  “I bet you weren’t there,” Erno said.

  Nick stretched. “I don’t need to hear him. I have no complaints.” He came up behind Erno’s mother, nuzzled the nape of her neck and cupped her breast in his hand.

  She turned her face up and kissed him on the cheek. “I should hope not.”

  Lena made a face. “Heteros. I can’t wait until I get out of here.” She had recently declared herself a lesbian and was quite judgmental about it.

  “You’d better get to your practicum, Lena,” Aunt Sophie said. “Let your aunt take care of her own sex life.”

  “This guy Durden is setting himself up for a major fall,” said Nick. “Smells like a case of abnormal development. Who’s his mother?”

  Erno couldn’t keep quiet. “He doesn’t have a mother. He doesn’t need one.”

  “Parthenogenesis,” Aunt Sophie said. “I didn’t think it had been perfected yet.

  “If they ever do, what happens to me?” Nick said.

  “You have your uses.” Erno’s mother nudged her shoulder against his hip.

  “You two can go back to your room,” Aunt Sophie said. “We’ll take care of things for you.”

  “No need.” Nick grabbed a bowl of oatmeal and sat down. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said to Aphra. “I can’t see what this guy’s problem is.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t vote?” Erno said. “What’s fair about that?’

  “I don’t want to vote,” Nick said.

  “You’re a complete drone.”

  His mother frowned at him. Erno pushed his bowl away and left for his room.

  “You’re the one with special tutoring!” Lena called. “The nice clothes. What work do you do?”

  “Shut up,” Erno said softly, but his ears burned.

  He had nothing to do until his 1100 biotech tutorial, and he didn’t even have to go if he didn’t want to. Lena was right about that, anyway. He threw the book on his bed, undressed, and switched on his screen. On the front page was a report of solar activity approaching its eleven-year peak, with radiation warnings issued for all surface activity. Erno called up the calendar. There it was: a discussion on Tyler Durden was scheduled in the amphitheater at 1600. Linked was a vid of the riot and a forum for open citizen comment. A cousin named Tashi Yokiosson had been clubbed in the fight and was in a coma, undergoing nanorepair.

  Erno didn’t know him, but that didn’t prevent his anger. He considered calling up Tyrus or Sid, finding out what had happened to them, and telling them about his adventure with Tyler. But that would spoil the secret, and it might get around to his mother. Yet he couldn’t let his night with Tyler go uncelebrated. He opened his journal, and wrote a poem:

  Going outside the crater

  finding the lost tunnels

  of freedom

  and male strength.

  Searching with your brother

  shoulder to shoulder like men.

  Getting below the surface

  of a stifling society

  sounding your XY shout.

  Flashing your colors

  like an ancient Spartan bird

  proud, erect, never to be softened

  by the silent embrace of woman

  No females aloud.

  Not bad. It had some of the raw honesty of the beats. He would read it at the next meeting of the Poets’ Club. He saved it with the four hundred other poems he had written in the last year: Erno prided himself on being the most prolific poet in his class. He had already won four Laurel Awards, one for best Lyric, one for best Sonnet, and two for best Villanelle—plus a Snappie for best limerick of 2097. He was sure to make Bard at an earlier age than anyone since Patrick Maurasson.

  Erno switched off the screen, lay on his bed, and remembered the book. He dug it out from under his discarded clothes. It had a blue cover, faded to purple near the binding, made of some sort of fabric. Embossed on the front was a torch encircled by a laurel wreath. He opened the book to its title page: Stories for Men, “An Anthology by Charles Grayson.” Published in August 1936, in the United States of America.

  As a fan of Earth culture, Erno knew that most Earth societies used the patronymic, so that Gray, Grayson’s naming parent, would be a man, not a woman.

  Stories for men. The authors on the contents page were all men—except perhaps for odd names like “Dashiell.” Despite Erno’s interest in twentieth-century popular art, only a couple were familiar. William Faulkner he knew was consid
ered a major Earth writer, and he had seen the name Hemingway before, though he had associated it only with a style of furniture. But even assuming the stories were all written by men, the title said the book was stories for men, not stories by men.

  How did a story for a man differ from a story for a woman? Erno had never considered the idea before. He had heard storytellers in the park, and read books in school—Murasaki, Chopin, Gather, Ellison, Morrison, Ferenc, Sabinsdaughter. As a child, he had loved the Alice books, and Flatland, and Maria Hidalgo’s kids’ stories, and Seuss. None seemed particularly male or female.

  He supposed the cousins did have their own stories for men. Nick loved interactive serials, tortured romantic tales of interpersonal angst set in the patriarchal world, where men struggled against injustice until they found the right women and were taken care of. Erno stuck to poetry. His favorite novel was Tawanda Tamikasdaughter’s The Dark Blood—the story of a misunderstood young Cousin’s struggles against his overbearing mother, climaxed when his father miraculously reveals himself and brings the mother to heel. At the Men’s House, he had also seen his share of porn—thrillers set on Earth where men forced women to do whatever the men wanted, and like it.

  But this book did not look like porn. A note at the beginning promised the book contained material to “interest, or alarm, or amuse, or instruct, or—and possibly most important of all—entertain you.” Erno wondered that Tyler had found this particular 160-year-old book in the lava tube. It seemed too unlikely to be coincidence.

  What sort of things would entertain an Earthman of 1936? Erno turned to the first story, “The Ambassador of Poker” by “Achmed Abdullah.”

  But the archaic text was frustratingly passive—nothing more than black type physically impressed on the pages, without links or explanations. After a paragraph or so rife with obscure cultural references—“cordovan brogues,” “knickerbockers,” “County Sligo,” “a four-in-hand”—Erno’s night without sleep caught up with him, and he dozed off.

  Heroes

  Why does a man remain in the Society of Cousins, when he would have much more authority outside of it, in one of the other lunar colonies, or on Earth?

  For one thing, the sex is great.

  Men are valued for their sexuality, praised for their potency, competed for by women. From before puberty, a boy is schooled by both men and women on how to give pleasure. A man who can give such pleasure has high status. He is recognized and respected throughout the colony. He is welcome in any bed. He is admired and envied by other men.

  THREE

  Erno woke suddenly, sweaty and disoriented, trailing the wisps of a dream that faded before he could call it back. He looked at his clock: 1530. He was going to miss the meeting.

  He washed his face, applied personal hygiene bacteria, threw on his embroidered jumpsuit, and rushed out of the apartment.

  The amphitheater in Sobieski Park was filling as Erno arrived. Five or six hundred people were already there; other cousins would be watching on the link. The dome presented a clear blue sky, and the ring of heliotropes around its zenith flooded the air with sunlight. A slight breeze rustled the old oaks, hovering over the semicircular ranks of seats like aged grandmothers. People came in twos and threes, adults and children, along the paths that led down from the colony perimeter road through the farmlands to the park. Others emerged from the doors at the base of the central spire that supported the dome. Erno found a seat in the top row, far from the stage, off to one side where the seats gave way to grass.

  Chairing the meeting was Debra Debrasdaughter. Debrasdaughter was a tiny sixty-year-old woman who, though she had held public office infrequently and never for long, was one of the most respected cousins. She had been Erno’s teacher when he was six, and he remembered how she’d sat with him and worked through his feud with Bill Grettasson. She taught him how to play forward on the soccer team. On the soccer field she had been fast and sudden as a bug. She had a warm laugh and sharp brown eyes.

  Down on the stage, Debrasdaughter was hugging the secretary. Then the sound person hugged Debrasdaughter. They both hugged the secretary again. A troubled-looking old man sat down in the front row, and all three of them got down off the platform and hugged him. He brushed his hand along Debrasdaughter’s thigh, but it was plain that his heart wasn’t in it. She kissed his cheek and went back up on the stage.

  A flyer wearing red wings swooped over the amphitheater and soared back up again, slowly beating the air. Another pair of flyers were racing around the perimeter of the crater, silhouetted against the clusters of apartments built into the crater walls. A thousand meters above his head Erno could spy a couple of others on the edge of the launch platform at the top of the spire. As he watched, squinting against the sunlight, one of the tiny figures spread its wings and pushed off, diving down, at first ever so slowly, gaining speed, then, with a flip of wings, soaring out level. Erno could feel it in his own shoulders, the stress that maneuver put on your arms. He didn’t like flying. Even in lunar gravity, the chances of a fall were too big.

  The amplified voice of Debrasdaughter drew him back to the amphitheater. “Thank you, Cousins, for coming,” she said. “Please come to order.”

  Erno saw that Tyler Durden had taken a seat off to one side of the stage. He wore flaming red coveralls, like a shout.

  “A motion has been made to impose a decree of invisibility against Thomas Marysson, otherwise known as Tyler Durden, for a period of one year. We are met here for the first of two discussions over this matter, prior to holding a colony-wide vote.”

  Short of banishment, invisibility was the colony’s maximum social sanction. Should the motion carry, Tyler would be formally ostracized. Tagged by an AI, continuously monitored, he would not be acknowledged by other cousins. Should he attempt to harm anyone, the AI would trigger receptors in his brain stem to put him to sleep.

  “This motion was prompted by the disturbances that have ensued as a result of public performances of Thomas Marysson. The floor is now open for discussion.”

  A very tall woman who had been waiting anxiously stood, and as if by pre-arrangement, Debrasdaughter recognized her. The hovering mikes picked up her high voice. “I am Yokio Kumiosdaughter. My son is in the hospital as a result of this shameful episode. He is a good boy. He is the kind of boy we all want, and I don’t understand how he came to be in that place. I pray that he recovers and lives to become the good man I know he can be.

  “We must not let this happen to anyone else’s son. At the very least, Invisibility will give Thomas Marysson the opportunity to reflect on his actions before he provokes another such tragedy.”

  Another woman rose. Erno saw it was Rosamund Demisdaughter.

  “With due respect to Cousin Kumiosdaughter, I don’t believe the riot in my club was Tyler’s fault. Her son brought this on himself. Tyler is not responsible for the actions of the patrons. Since when do we punish people for the misbehavior of others?

  “The real mistake was sending constables,” Rosamund continued. “Whether or not the grievances Tyler gives vent to are real or only perceived, we must allow any cousins to speak their mind. The founders understood that men and women are different. By sending armed officers into that club, we threatened the right of those men who came to see Tyler Durden to be different.”

  “It was stupid strategy!” someone interrupted. “They could have arrested Durden easily after the show.”

  “Arrested him? On what grounds?” another woman asked.

  Rosamund continued. “Adil Al-Hafez said it when he helped Nora Sobieski raise the money for this colony: ‘The cousins are a new start for men as much as women. We do not seek to change men, but to offer them the opportunity to be other than they have been.’”

  A man Erno recognized from the biotech factory took the floor. “It’s all very well to quote the founders back at us, but they were realists too. Men are different. Personalized male power has made the history of Earth one long tale of slaughter, oppressi
on, rape, and war. Sobieski and Al-Hafez and the rest knew that, too: The California massacre sent them here. Durden’s incitements will inevitably cause trouble. This kid wouldn’t have gotten hurt without him. We can’t stand by while the seeds of institutionalized male aggression are planted.”

  “This is a free speech issue!” a young woman shouted.

  “It’s not about speech,” the man countered. “It’s about violence.”

  Debrasdaughter called for order. The man looked sheepish and sat down. A middle-aged woman with a worried expression stood. “What about organizing a new round of games? Let them work it out on the rink, the flying drome, the playing field.”

  “We have games of every description,” another woman responded. “You think we can make Durden join the hockey team?”

  The old man in the front row croaked out, “Did you see that game last week against Aristarchus? They could use a little more organized male aggression!” That drew a chorus of laughter from the crowd.

  When the noise died down, an elderly woman took the floor. “I have been a cousin for seventy years,” she said. “I’ve seen troublemakers. There will always be troublemakers. But what’s happened to the Good Partners? I remember the North tube blowout of ’32. Sixty people died. Life here was brutal and dangerous. But men and women worked together shoulder to shoulder; we shared each other’s joys and sorrows. We were good bedmates then. Where is that spirit now?”

  Erno had heard such tiresome sermonettes about the old days a hundred times. The discussion turned into a cacophony of voices.

  “What are we going to do?” said another woman. “Deprive men of the right to speak?”

  “Men are already deprived of the vote! How many voters are men?”

  “By living on the colony stipend, men choose not to vote. Nobody is stopping you from going to work.”