“Yes, you don’t,” Evasdaughter said cheerfully. And instead of explaining, she turned back to the lesson.
Erno didn’t remember another thing for the rest of that class, except looking at his shoes. Why had she treated him like that? She made him feel stupid. Yes, she knew more biotech than he did, but she was the teacher! Of course she knew more! Did that mean she had to put him down?
When he complained to his mother, she only said that he needed to listen to the teacher.
Only slowly did he realize that Evasdaughter had exhibited what he had always been taught was male dominance behavior. He had presented a challenge to her superiority, and she had smashed him flat. After he was, smashed, she could afford to treat him kindly. But she would teach him only after he admitted that he was her inferior.
Now that his eyes were opened, he saw this behavior everywhere. Every day cousins asserted their superiority in order to hurt others. He had been lied to, and his elders were hypocrites.
Yet when he tried to show his superiority, he was told to behave himself. Superior / inferior is wrong, they said. Difference is all.
FIVE
One thing Tyler had said was undoubtedly true: this was a test. How devoted was Erno to the Society of Cousins? How good a judge was he of Tyler’s character? How eager was he to see his mother and the rest of his world made uncomfortable, and how large a discomfort did he think was justified? Just how angry was Erno?
After Erno got back to his room, he lay awake, unable to sleep. He ran every moment of his night with Tyler over in his mind, parsed every sentence, and examined every ambiguous word. Tyler had never denied that the Philosopher’s Stone was a bomb. Erno looked up the term in the dictionary: a philosopher’s stone was “an imaginary substance sought by alchemists in the belief that it would change base metals into gold or silver.”
He did not think the change that Tyler’s stone would bring had anything to do with gold or silver.
He looked at his palm, long since washed clean, where Alicia had written her number. She’d asked him to call her before he did anything stupid.
At 1545 the next day Erno was seated in the amphitheater among the crowds of cousins. More people were here than had come the previous week, and the buzz of their conversation, broken by occasional laughter, filled the air. He squinted up at the dome to try to figure out just where they had placed the stone. The dome had automatic safety devices to seal any minor air leak. But it couldn’t survive a hole blasted in it. Against the artificial blue sky Erno watched a couple of flyers circling like hawks.
1552. Tyler arrived, trailing a gaggle of followers, mostly young men trying to look insolent. He’d showed up—what did that mean? Erno noted that this time, Tyler wore black. He seemed as calm as he had before, and he charted easily with the others, then left them to take a seat on the stage.
At 1559 Debra Debrasdaughter took her place. Erno looked at his watch. 1600.
Nothing happened.
Was that the test? To see whether Erno would panic and fall for a ruse? He tried to catch Tyler’s eye, but got nothing.
Debrasdaughter rapped for order. The ranks of cousins began to quiet, to sit up straighter. Near silence had fallen, and Debrasdaughter began to speak.
“Our second meeting to discuss—”
A flash of light seared the air high above them, followed a second later by a concussion. Shouts, a few screams.
Erno looked up. A cloud of black smoke shot rapidly from a point against the blue. One flyer tumbled, trying to regain his balance; the other had dived a hundred meters seeking a landing place. People pointed and shouted. The blue sky flickered twice, went to white as the imaging system struggled, then recovered.
People boiled out of the amphitheater, headed for pressurized shelter. Erno could not see if the dome had been breached. The smoke, instead of dissipating, spread out in an arc, then flattened up against the dome. It formed tendrils, shapes. He stood there, frozen. It was not smoke at all, he realized, but smart paint.
The nanodevices spread the black paint onto the interior of the dome. The paint crawled and shaped itself, forming letters. The letters, like a message from God, made a huge sign on the inside of the clear blue sky:
“BANG! YOU’RE DEAD!”
“You’re Dead!”
One of the other Stories for Men was about Harry Rodney and Little Bert, two petty criminals on an ocean liner that has struck an iceberg and is sinking, with not enough lifeboats for all the passengers. The patriarchal custom was that women and children had precedence for spaces in the boats. Harry gives up his space in a boat in favor of some girl. Bert strips a coat and scarf from an injured woman, steals her jewelry, abandons her belowdecks, and uses her clothes to sneak into a lifeboat.
As it happens, both men survive. But Harry is so disgusted by Bert’s crime that he persuades him to run away and pretend he is dead. For years, whenever Bert contacts Harry, Harry tells him to stay away or else the police might discover him. Bert never returns home for fear of being found out.
SIX
In the panic and confusion, Tyler Durden disappeared. On his seat at the meeting lay a note: “I did it.”
As a first step in responding to the threat to the colony, the Board of Matrons immediately called the question of ostracism, and by evening the population had voted: Tyler Durden was declared invisible.
As if that mattered. He could not be found.
SEVEN
It took several days for the writing to be erased from the dome.
A manhunt did not turn up Tyler. Nerves were on edge. Rumors arose, circulated, were denied. Tyler Durden was still in the colony, in disguise. A cabal of followers was hiding him. No, he and his confederates had a secret outpost ten kilometers north of the colony. Durden was in the employ of the government of California. He had stockpiled weapons and was planning an attack. He had an atomic bomb.
At the gym entrance, AI’s checked DNA prints, and Erno was conscious, as never before, of the cameras in every room. He wondered if any monitors had picked up his excursion with Tyler. Every moment he expected a summons on his wristward to come to the assembly offices.
When Erno entered the workout room, he found Tyrus and a number of others wearing white T-shirts that said, “BANG! YOU’RE DEAD!”
Erno took the unoccupied rowing machine next to Ty. Ty was talking to Sid on the other side of him.
A woman came across the room to use the machines. She was tightly muscled, and her dark hair was pulled back from her sweaty neck. As she approached, the young men went silent and turned to look at her. She hesitated. Erno saw something on her face he had rarely seen on a woman’s face before: fear. The woman turned and left the gym.
None of the boys said anything. If the others had recognized what had just happened, they did not let it show.
Erno pulled on his machine. He felt the muscles in his legs knot. “Cool shirt,” he said.
“Tyrus wants to be invisible, too,” said Sid. Sid wasn’t wearing one of the shirts.
“Eventually someone will check the vids of Tyler’s performances, and see me there,” said Ty between strokes. “I’m not ashamed to be Tyler’s fan.” At thirteen, Erno and Ty had been fumbling lovers, testing out their sexuality. Now Ty was a blunt overmuscled guy who laughed like a hyena. He didn’t laugh now.
“It was a rush to judgment,” one of the other boys said. “Tyler didn’t harm a single cousin. It was free expression.”
“He could just as easily have blown a hole in the dome,” said Erno. “Do they need any more justification for force?”
Ty stopped rowing and turned toward Erno. Where he had sweated through the fabric, the “Bang!” on his shirt had turned blood red. “Maybe it will come to force. We do as much work, and we’re second class citizens.” He started rowing again, pulled furiously at the machine, fifty reps a minute, drawing quick breaths.
“That Durden has a pair, doesn’t he?” Sid said. Sid was a popular stud-boy. His thick chestn
ut hair dipped below one eye. “You should have seen the look on Rebecca’s face when that explosion went off.”
“I hear, if they catch him, the council’s not going to stop at invisibility,” Erno said. “They’ll kick him out.”
“Invisibility won’t slow Tyler down,” Ty said. “Would you obey the decree?” he asked Sid.
“Me? I’m too beautiful to let myself get booted. If Tyler Durden likes masculinists so much, let him go to one of the other colonies, or to Earth. I’m getting laid too often.”
Erno’s gut tightened. “They will kick him out. My mother would vote for it in a second.”
“Let ’em try,” Ty grunted, still rowing.
“Is that why you’re working out so much lately, Ty?” Sid said. “Planning to move to Earth?”
“No. I’m just planning to bust your ass.”
“I suspect it’s not busting you want to do to my ass.”
“Yeah. Your ass has better uses.”
“My mother says Tyler’s broken the social contract,” Erno said.
“Does your mother—” Ty said, still rowing, “—keep your balls under her pillow?”
Sid laughed.
Erno wanted to grab Ty and tell him, I was there. I helped him do it! But he said nothing. He pulled on the machine. His face burned.
After a minute Erno picked up his towel and went to the weight machine. No one paid him any attention. Twenty minutes later he hit the sauna. Sweating in the heat, sullen, resentful. He had been there, had taken a bigger risk than any of these fan-boys.
Coming out of the sauna he saw Sid heading for the sex rooms, where any woman who was interested could find a male partner who was willing. Erno considered posting himself to one of the rooms. But he wasn’t a stud; he was just an anonymous minor male. He had no following. It would be humiliating to sit there waiting for someone, or worse, to be selected by some old bag.
A day later Erno got himself one of the T-shirts. Wearing it didn’t make him feel any better.
It came to him that maybe this was the test Tyler intended: not whether Erno would tell about the Philosopher’s Stone before it happened, but whether he would admit he’d helped set it after he saw the uproar it caused in the colony.
If that was the test, Erno was failing. He thought about calling Tyler’s apartment, but the constables were sure to be monitoring that number. A new rumor had it Tyler had been captured and was being held in protective custody—threats had been made against his life—until the Board of Matrons could decide when and how to impose the invisibility. Erno imagined Tyler in some bare white room, his brain injected with nanoprobes, his neck fitted with a collar.
At biotech, Erno became aware of something he had never noticed before: how the women assumed first pick of the desserts in the cafeteria. Then, later, when he walked by their table, four women burst into laughter. He turned and stared at them, but they never glanced at him.
Another day he was talking with a group of engineers on break: three women, another man, and Erno. Hana from materials told a joke: “What do you have when you have two little balls in your hand?”
The other women grinned. Erno watched the other man. He stood as if on a trapdoor, a tentative smile on his face. The man was getting ready to laugh, because that was what you did when people told jokes, whether or not they were funny. It was part of the social contract—somebody went into joke-telling mode, and you went into joke-listening mode.
“A man’s undivided attention,” Hana said.
The women laughed. The man grinned.
“How can you tell when a man is aroused?” Pearl said. “—He’s breathing.”
“That isn’t funny,” Erno said.
“Really? I think it is,” Hana said.
“It’s objectification. Men are just like women. They have emotions, too.”
“Cool off, Erno,” said Pearl. “This isn’t gender equity class.”
“There is no gender equity here.”
“Someone get Erno a T-shirt.”
“Erno wants to be invisible.”
“We’re already invisible!” Erno said, and stalked off. He left the lab, put on his suit, and took the next bus back to the dome. He quit going to his practicum: he would not let himself be used anymore. He was damned if he would go back there again.
A meeting to discuss what to do about the missing comedian was disrupted by a group of young men marching and chanting outside the meeting room. Constables were stationed in public places, carrying clubs. In online discussion rooms, people openly advocated closing the Men’s Houses for fear conspiracies were being hatched in them.
And Erno received another message. This one was from “Harry Callahan.”
Are you watching, Erno? If you think our gender situation is GROSS, you can change it. Check exposition.
Crimes of Violence
The incidence of crimes of violence among the cousins is vanishingly small. Colony archives record eight murders in sixty years. Five of them were man against man, two man against woman, and one woman against woman.
This does not count -vigilante acts of women against men, but despite the lack of official statistics, such incidents too are rare.
EIGHT
“It’s no trick to be celibate when you don’t like sex.”
“That’s the point,” Erno insisted. “He does like sex. He likes sex fine. But he’s making a sacrifice in order to establish his point: He’s not going to be a prisoner of his dick.”
Erno was sitting out on the ledge of the terrace in front of their apartment, chucking pebbles at the recycling bin at the corner and arguing with his cousin Lena. He had been arguing with a lot of people lately, and not getting anywhere. Every morning he still left as if he were going to biotech, but instead he hung out in the park or gym. It would take some time for his mother to realize he had dropped out.
Lena launched into a tirade, and Erno was suddenly very tired of it all. Before she could gain any momentum, he threw a last pebble that whanged off the bin, got up and, without a word, retreated into the apartment. He could hear Lena’s squawk behind him.
He went to his room and opened a screen on his wall. The latest news was that Tashi Yokiosson had regained consciousness, but that he had suffered neurological damage that might take a year or more to repair. Debate on the situation raged on the net. Erno opened his documents locker and fiddled with a melancholy sonnet he was working on, but he wasn’t in the mood.
He switched back to Tyler’s cryptic message. You can change it. Check exposition. It had something to do with biotech, Erno was pretty sure. He had tried the public databases, but had not come up with anything. There were databases accessible only through the biotech labs, but he would have to return to his practicum to view them, and that would mean he would have to explain his absence. He wasn’t ready for that yet.
On impulse, Erno looked up Tyler in the colony’s genome database. What was the name Debrasdaughter had called him?—Marysson, Thomas Marysson. He found Tyler’s genome. Nothing about it stood out.
Debaters had linked Tyler’s bio to the genome. Marysson had been born thirty-six years ago. His mother was a second-generation cousin; his grandmother had arrived with the third colonization contingent, in 2038. He had received a general education, neither excelling nor failing anything. His mother had died when he was twenty. He had moved out into the dorms, had worked uneventfully in construction and repair for fourteen years, showing no sign of rebelliousness before reinventing himself as Tyler Durden, the Comedian.
Until two years ago, absolutely nothing had distinguished him from any of a thousand male cousins.
Bored, Erno looked up his own genome.
There he lay in rows of base pairs, neat as a tile floor. Over at biotech, some insisted that everything you were was fixed in those sequences in black and white. Erno didn’t buy it. Where was the gene for desire there, or hope, or despair, or frustration? Where was the gene that said he would sit in front of a computer screen at t
he age of seventeen, boiling with rage?
He called up his mother’s genome. There were her sequences. Some were the same as his. Of course there was no information about his father. To prevent dire social consequences, his father must remain a blank spot in his history, as far as the Society of Cousins was concerned. Maybe some families kept track of such things, but nowhere in the databases were fathers and children linked.
Of course they couldn’t stop him from finding out. He knew others who had done it. His father’s genome was somewhere in the database, for medical purposes If he removed from his own those sequences that belonged to his mother, then what was left—at least the sequences she had not altered when she had planned him—belonged to his father. He could cross check those against the genomes of all the colony’s men.
From his chart, he stripped those genes that matched his mother’s. Using what remained, he prepared a search engine to sort through the colony’s males.
The result was a list of six names. Three were brothers: Stuart, Simon, and Josef Bettesson. He checked the available public information on them. They were all in their nineties, forty years older than Erno’s mother. Of the remaining men, two were of about her age: Sidney Orindasson and Micah Avasson. Of those two, Mica Avasson had the higher correlation with Erno’s genome.
He read the public records for Micah Avasson. Born in 2042, he would be fifty-six years old. A physical address: men’s dormitory, East Five lava tube. He keyed it into his notebook.
Without knocking, his mother came into the room. Though he had no reason to be ashamed of his search, Erno shoved the notebook into his pocket.
She did not notice. “Erno, we need to talk.”
“By talk do you mean interrogate, or lecture?”
His mother’s face stiffened. For the first time he noticed the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She moved around his room, picking up his clothes, sorting, putting them away. “You should keep your room cleaner. Your room is a reflection of your mind.”
“Please, mother.”
She held one of his shirts to her nose, sniffed, and made a face. “Did I ever tell you about the time I got arrested? I was thirteen, and Derek Silviasson and I were screwing backstage in the middle of a performance of A Doll’s House. We got a little carried away. When Nora opened the door to leave at the end of the second act, she tripped over Derek and me in our second act.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 51