A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

  Falkenstein’s voiceover: “As we now pass this torch of knowledge to Pacifican Institute graduates, so will those graduates become an elite passing the torch on to their entire people. This is the great upward sweeping spiral of human evolution—upward and onward, time without end, worlds without limit. If this be Faustian faschochauvinism, let us make the most of it!”

  Bara Dorothy smiled across her desk at Cynda Elizabeth. The little breeder-loving fool drummed her fingers nervously on the desktop, apparently still unable to grasp how perfectly the strategy was working. But then she had been against calling the strike in the first place, Bara thought. She seemed to have lost her clear sense of the true purpose of the mission long ago.

  “I still don’t see why you’re so pleased,” Cynda whined. “The strike strategy has been a dismal failure. The Institute is still open, Falkenstein has countered with a male strike, and now the government can’t close down the Institute without a direct confrontation with the breeders.”

  Bara Dorothy shook her head impatiently. “What is the purpose of this mission?” she asked, as if quizzing a dull little girl.

  Cynda Elizabeth stared at her blankly.

  “Not to close the Institute,” Bara Dorothy continued, “but to unite the sisters of Pacifica in Femocratic consciousness so that they will seize power and establish a Femocratic government on this planet! Great Mother, Cynda, have you forgotten that?”

  Cynda opened her mouth, then nibbled her lower lip as if she had been about to say something, and then thought better of it.

  “Therefore,” Bara said, “the present situation is ideal. The strikes have drawn the line between sisters and breeders with utter clarity. Everything that Falkenstein does now to mobilize this loathsome Bucko Power movement behind him will also mobilize the Sisterhood behind us. As the strikes begin to wreck the Pacifican economy, even that traitor to her sex, Carlotta Madigan, will no longer be able to equivocate. There will be a victor and a vanquished—and soon.”

  “But how can you be so sure that the breeders won’t win?” Cynda said. “They’re half the population, and they’re in a position of rough equality.”

  “Democratic politics!” Bara snorted. “You’ve become infected with the local ideology, Cynda! You think this issue will be decided by votes?”

  “But that’s the way they do things here…” Cynda said fatuously.

  “That’s the way they did things here!” Bara replied triumphantly. “But the fate of this planet will now be decided by power, and power here, as everywhere, is in the hands of Sisterhood! The breeders of this planet may now unite against us, but they’re still macho breeders, which means that the Pacifican sisters are their sex objects. Whereas fully conscious sisters have no sexual need for breeders. So when the final confrontation comes, the breeders’ own contemptible piercers will force them into capitulation.”

  “But…but most Pacifican women are heterosexual,” Cynda said. “They want men as much as men want them.”

  For the moment, you little fool, for the moment, Bara thought. “Unfortunately, that’s quite true,” she said. “Therefore, it’s time to raise Pacifican Sisterhood to full consciousness, to erase their atavistic craving for the local breeders. Then they will be truly united in total Femocracy; then they will fully come into their own rightful power and make that power felt—decisively! Mary Maria is already preparing material for the media campaign.”

  Cynda Elizabeth frowned. A sickly look came into her eyes. The filthy little breeder-lover! “What’s the matter now, Cynda?” Bara Dorothy said slyly, twisting the knife a little deeper, daring the little pervert to reveal her true atavistic feelings. “Do you feel sorry for the stinking macho swine? Do you lack the will to fight through to final victory? Are you a secret breeder-lover at heart?”

  Emotions flashed across Cynda Elizabeth’s face: a flush of anger, a tremor of fear, a white-skinned effort at control. You’re such a transparent little fool, Bara thought.

  “If…if those are official charges, bring them officially,” Cynda stammered. “Otherwise…otherwise keep your innuendos to yourself!”

  “That’s the spirit,” Bara said sardonically. “Come on, cheer up, I’m not bringing any charges.” Not yet, she thought. She laughed almost gaily. “Come on, sister, let’s enjoy this moment together. At last we can unfurl our true banner openly and unite proudly with our Pacifican sisters behind it. Doesn’t that thrill you? Don’t you want to stand up and cheer?”

  She laughed long and loud in the face of the dirty little pervert’s hollow-eyed silence.

  14

  A stock historical shot of ancient Terran Nazis; phalanxes of male troops in black uniforms goose-stepping across the screen to the thunder of steel-soled jackboots on concrete, arms outstretched in phallic salute. A slow dissolve to an exactly similar shot on a Bucko Power demonstration marching to the same beat, emphasized by the continued jackboot thunder from the Nazi soundtrack. The chant of “Bucko Power! Bucko Power!” fades in on the soundtrack to the marching rhythm, and as it does huge surreal wongs sprout from the crotches of the Bucko Power marchers in hideous parody of the Nazi salute, their glans replaced by clenched fists.

  Cut to a closeup on a Falkenstein lookalike, superimposed on ancient stock footage of war-rockets blasting off from their pads; as each rocket spouts flame and rises, his eyes roll in orgasmic ecstasy. Cut to stock footage of a line of ancient tanks lumbering across a blasted landscape. A line of gigantic naked male figures is superimposed behind them, so that the tanks, with their long erect cannon, become their genital organs. As the cannon fire in ragged sequence, the male figures arch their backs in ecstasy.

  Female voiceover: “Throughout human history, men have openly identified their sexual organ with war, domination, vengeance, and violence. They’ve cocked their guns, screwed their adversaries, pierced their enemies, unzipped their avengers, and in general fucked people over, and hardly ever pricked their conscience over it.”

  An extreme, ludicrous, clinically unwholesome shot of a disembodied penis pounding in and out of vaginal lips. Intercut with this a series of shots—a sword plunging into a stomach, a fist smashing a face again and again, a closeup of the blazing muzzle of a machine gun, arrows plunging into an animal carcass in rapid-fire sequence—all set up, in angle and rhythm, to sync into the gross shot of sexual penetration.

  Female voiceover: “That’s why most women have always secretly perceived sex with men as violation, submission, bodily pollution, and rape…”

  A series of rapidly cut shots: a woman being raped by a soldier against the shattered wall of a building, a naked women on her knees sucking the penis of a cold man in black leather, a woman being buggered on a laboratory table by a man in a white smock, ending in a loathsome closeup of a ravaged vagina leaking blood and semen.

  Female voiceover: “The piercer penetrates your flesh, the man pounds away at you, crushing you with the weight of his body, and then he shoots his alien fluids into the deepest recesses of your being.”

  An extreme closeup of a bloody wong pumping away directly at the camera.

  Female voiceover: “Sex for the male is an act of aggression and conquest by its very biological parameters! Aggression and sex are united in the very essence of maleness. The piercer is the primal weapon of faschochauvinism, and the heterosexual act is the primal mode of violent macho fascism. A woman cannot allow a piercer inside her body without reinforcing this rock-bottom faschochauvinism with her own energy!”

  A rapidly cut reprise of previous footage: marching Nazis, tanks-as-male-organs, a fist smashing a face, a woman being raped by a soldier, the blazing muzzle of a machine gun, a Bucko Power march, a bloody pumping wong.

  Female voiceover: “When you allow a male to stick his piercer inside you, this is what you’re submitting to, millennia of it, time without end! Getting it off with men is donating your precious energy to the beast itself! But there is another way, and hundreds of millions of sisters have found it…”


  A series of crystalline, misty, artful shots of two strikingly beautiful women making love in an ethereal meadow, lush with green grass, rich with a profusion of multicolored blossoms. The shots melt and dissolve into each other sensuously, overlapping into a tender visual fugue, the visual analog of the ancient baroque music playing behind them. Mouths moist and gentle between thighs. Graceful fingers cupping tender breasts. Lips meeting lips in achingly sweet caresses. A hymn to lyrical self-contained female sexuality that climaxes into a complex multiply overlapping mandala composed of all the possible variations of woman-to-woman sexual ballet.

  Female voiceover (husky and sensuous): “When sister touches sister, there are no penetrations, no violent dialectic between the hard and the soft, the giving and the taking. All acts of love become congruent with each other, and the only power that exists is the tender loving power of bodies, minds, and hearts synced together, the power of sisterhood united…”

  A series of shots of Terran animals fading rapidly into each other: a noble stag with a great crown of antlers, surrounded by his harem of does; a magnificent peacock fanning his tail for an adoring hen; a great male gorilla pounding his chest at an intruder as females and young ones cower behind him; a lordly black-maned lion leading his pride across the veldt as he roars terror at the sky. Finally, a Cro-Magnon man, noble of countenance, powerful of build, his great arm draped protectively around his mate, who holds a suckling babe in her arms.

  Male voiceover: “From the ancient forest of the north, to the tropic jungles and the primeval veldt, the male virtues of courage, honor, and protectiveness have been graven in the genes of all the warm-blooded species that evolved on the planet Earth. Essential buckohood is something we share not merely with all human men in all times and places but with the great timestream of Terran evolution. Older than our species itself, it has taken us from the primal forests of our birth to our foreordained heritage in the stars.”

  The Cro-Magnon man becomes a toga-clad Greek, a medieval armored knight, an ancient astronaut in his gleaming spacesuit, a Transcendental Scientist, a Pacifican bucko, while the woman and child, going through similar transformations, remain at his side.

  Male voiceover: “And throughout this long march, woman has remained at man’s side, the hidden driving force behind the upward evolution of the species. For graven in the male genes is the urge to compete with his fellows in the fulfillment of the ideal of manly virtue, and what he competes for is the favor, love, and admiration of women. Women have been the judges of the manly virtues. They have chosen the brave, the strong, the just, and the wise to breed the next generations, and so they have been the creators of what we are today.”

  Cut to a panoramic shot of a street scene in some modern Terran city, the buildings shabby-looking, the pavement in disrepair. The camera zooms in and out, catching closeups of men and women: the men wispy and vapid-eyed, the women mannish, hard-eyed, feverish-looking.

  Male voiceover: “But when this evolutionary dialectic breaks down as it has on Earth, the inevitable results are the decay of the gene pool and a third-rate culture declining toward inevitable barbarism. For the bucko virtues are the essence of what has brought our species from the trees to the stars. When they are shunned by women as faschochauvinist, when men forget who they are, men and women alike begin the inevitable slide back down into the tarpit of racial devolution…”

  A medium shot on a virile, intelligent-looking Pacifican bucko, as he slowly devolves into a frail-looking Terran breeder, an emaciated mindless hulk, a hairy, slack-jawed prehuman simian.

  Hard cut to a phalanx of such ape-men shambling across a plain, whipped along by women dressed as Femocrats. The sky darkens, fills with stars, and a Transcendental Science Arkology appears above the ape-men. The creatures pause, their backs straighten, and they march off in rough unison in a new direction. As they march faster and faster, the hair melts from their bodies, they walk fully erect, the Femocrats drop their whips and become Pacifican women marching by their sides. As the sun rises, the procession becomes a Bucko Power demonstration marching triumphantly through the streets of modern Gotham.

  Male voiceover: “Here on Pacifica, these same forces are now at work. There are those who would reduce your manhood to simpering effeteness, to a pale cowering shadow of what a man is meant to be. But there are buckos with the will to resist, to be men among men, to lead this planet on into the great galactic civilization to come, men for whom ‘Bucko Power’ is not a rag of shame but a badge of honor…”

  Cut to a shot of naked men marching down another Gotham street, eyes resolutely forward, penises erect and proud. Women watch from the sidewalks. Some, ugly, fat, thoroughly repulsive, and dressed in the Femocrat mode, jeer and curse. Others, beautiful, lithe, wearing sexually provocative clothing, watch quietly with adoring eyes.

  Male voiceover: “And their ultimate allies are the real women of Pacifica themselves! For as long as men have the courage to be themselves, as long as buckos march proudly under their own true banner, flesh will call to flesh, male will call to female, and those women who are worthy will be proud to follow where their men lead. For only the brave deserve the fair, and only the fair are worthy of the brave!”

  A medium shot on the front rank of naked marching men as they raise their fists into the air.

  Chanting men: “What do you want?”

  Female chorus: “BUCKO POWER!”

  Chanting men: “What do you want?”

  Female chorus: “BUCKO POWER!”

  A panoramic shot of a vast crowd of beautiful nude women, writhing provocatively, stroking their own bodies invitingly, pumping their fists rhythmically into the air.

  Women (chanting imploringly): “BUCKO POWER! BUCKO POWER! BUCKO POWER!”

  Superimposed on this shot, the serene, knowing, intelligent face of an idealized Pacifican bucko. This noble male head flashes through a series of transformations, becomes a ram, a bull, an eagle, a stag, a black-maned lion, a man again.

  “BUCKO POWER! BUCKO POWER! BUCKO POWER! BUCKO POWER!”

  “It’s revolting, Roger,” Maria Falkenstein said. “I can’t even bear watching the pathological filth you’re pouring out.”

  Beyond the cooling comfort of her inertia-screen, the midday heat of Godzillaland seemed almost visible as molecules of steam transpired by the rank green jungle just beyond the electronic barrier. Monstrosities thrashed and bellowed just out of sight as the Falkensteins walked from the Institute building toward their private quarters, yet it seemed to Maria that what was going on behind the silvery Institute walls was no less feral, no less savage, and no less mindless than the jungle world of tooth and claw that surrounded their little island of so-called civilization.

  “Perhaps you prefer the Femocrats’ brand of pathological filth?” Roger said irritably. “You certainly seem less than affectionate lately.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” Maria said, avoiding his gaze. It was certainly true that she was finding his touch difficult to bear, and even his company irritating. Indeed, she found herself wondering whether the loathsome and unprincipled media war that both sides were now waging had not even poisoned their own lives together. Not that she believed that the putrid Femocrat propaganda had warped her own perception of the male of the species in general and Roger in particular, but could Roger really direct such a campaign to arouse the worst sort of narcissistic male power-fantasies—and, yes, vicious faschochauvinism—without syncing into such latent feelings buried deep within his own psyche? Without exposing and exacerbating such unconscious pathology festering in the roots of our own society?

  Certainly the Pacificans have a deeper, more stable, and more just sense of psychosexual equilibrium than we do, she thought, and even they have been thoroughly poisoned by this war of competing faschochauvinisms. Can we really do it to them without doing it to ourselves?

  “Well, maybe it does have something to do with it,” she said. “Aren’t you in the very process of fighting
the Femocrats, becoming the very caricature of male faschochauvinism they portray? Aren’t you playing right into their hands by allowing their propaganda to become a self-fulfilling prophecy?”

  “Rubbish!” Roger snapped. “We didn’t start this. We wouldn’t have even tackled this planet if the Femocrats hadn’t targeted it first. Now that they’ve revealed their true colors openly, we have no alternative but to counterattack with equal vigor. You’ve got to fight fire with fire!”

  “Really?” Maria said sardonically. “I thought you fought fire with water.”

  “Ridiculous semantic sophistry!” Roger snapped.

  “No, it isn’t!” Maria said angrily. “If you try to fight fire with fire, you just create a greater conflagration and bum down the very thing you’re trying to save. And that’s precisely what’s happening here! The Femocrats shriek their nauseating antimale propaganda and you shriek back with equally vile male supremacist filth which validates everything they say about men, just as what they’re doing validates your Bucko Power bile! Where can it end, Roger? Where can you possibly expect it to end?”

  “With their defeat and our victory!” Roger snarled, his face contorted into a hideous mask of anger, a vein throbbing in his right temple. “With the crushing of their strike and their expulsion from Pacifica!” Never before had he appeared even remotely this ugly in Maria’s eyes.

  “And how do you expect that to be accomplished?” she said scathingly. “By the triumph of…of Bucko Power?”

  “If necessary,” Roger said coldly.

  Maria stopped dead in her tracks. She touched him on the shoulder, bringing him up short, and stared directly into his face, feeling the outrage building inside her. “You’re really serious about that, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re perfectly willing to destroy the delicate psychosexual balance of this planet and replace it with wild-eyed male faschochauvinism in order to preserve our position here?”

  “In a word,” Roger said, “yes!”