“And what about the Pacificans?” Maria shouted in his face. “What about a way of life that has worked for three hundred years for men and women? Are these people nothing but pawns on some cosmic chessboard?”
“You’re shouting at me, Maria!” Roger shouted.
“So I am,” Maria said, with a colder, more controlled anger. “But then you’ve just admitted that you’re willing to commit cultural genocide, and I would think that’s something worth shouting at.”
“Cultural genocide! What rot! If the psychosexual balance on this planet weren’t abnormal in the first place, none of this would even be necessary.”
“Oh, really? From our pinnacle of psychosexual equality, health, and justice, you’ve passed judgment on Pacifica and found it wanting?”
“Great suns, Maria, if you’d clear your mind of all this female emotionalism, you’d realize that the men of this planet are psychosexually arrested adolescents,” Roger said petulantly. “If they functioned as proper adult males, do you think they would have even permitted the Femocrats to land? Pacifican women have historically dominated the buckos to an unwholesome degree, and while our methods may seem slightly extreme, all we’re really doing is restoring the natural balance.”
“Female emotionalism!” Maria screamed. “You stand there spouting faschochauvinist slok and you have the temerity to lecture me about female emotionalism!”
“Stop shouting at me, Maria!”
“Stop shouting? I’ve just begun to—”
Suddenly, with a series of sharp bellows and a great crashing of underbrush, two big bipedal godzillas exploded from the jungle, stumbled into the electronic barrier field, howled in pain and outrage, and stood there on their massive hind legs, waving their atrophied forelimbs at each other futilely, threatening each other with guttural roars and gnashing teeth.
“That’s us, Roger!” Maria shouted over the din. “Two brainless godzillas shrieking and screaming at each other! That’s what we’re turning this whole planet into—a feral, stinking jungle infested with enraged monsters thirsting for blood!”
Evenly matched and knowing it, the two godzillas stood there for long moments, bellowing imprecations without attacking. Finally, they turned their backs on each other, and with a last chorus of animal rage, disappeared back into the jungle along their separate vectors.
“No more of this, Roger,” Maria said. “I can’t take it.” She turned and began walking back toward the Institute building.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m moving into the Institute dormitory,” she said over, her shoulder. “At least till you come to your senses, I have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Tears filled her eyes as she walked away without looking back. I’m running away from Roger, she thought, but where am I running to? Our own damned Institute—what a gesture of futility! I’ve got to get out of here for a while. I’ve got to find someplace where I can be alone and think. Gotham, maybe. Things seemed to make more sense there. Maybe the Pacificans have an answer. We surely don’t. I’m not even sure we know what the question is.
Trembling with tension, Cynda Elizabeth parked her floater on the deserted residential street and walked down the footpath through the dense copse of trees to the hidden and secluded dock where Eric moored his sailboat. He was waiting for her at the end of the dock when she reached the shore; standing hands-on-hips, his hard masculine body armored in the black pseudo-military tunic that had become a fad with Pacifican men lately, a silhouette of razor-edged darkness against the brilliant nightscape of the city. A tremor of dread went through her; that dark figure looked so distant and ominous against the lights of Gotham, and his pose seemed a deliberate ideogram of macho defiance.
“Well, so you actually had the balls to show up,” he said. “Have to give you credit for that, at least.”
Cynda reached out to touch him, but something stopped her, as if he had surrounded himself with an impenetrable psychic barrier, and the gesture died in mid-air. “What’s wrong, Eric?” she said lamely.
He laughed bitterly. “What could be wrong?” he said. “The lady is here to get it off with me, isn’t she? The fact that she’s trying to turn every woman on the planet off men shouldn’t matter, should it?”
“That…that’s not my doing…” Cynda stammered. “I tried to stop—”
“You’re the leader of the Femocrat mission, aren’t you?”
Cynda sighed. “In name only,” she said. “You have no idea—”
“I guess not. And frankly, I don’t give a damn.”
“Look,” Cynda said, “could we go out on the boat and—”
Eric glared at her. “We’re not going anywhere tonight,” he said. “This is it, lady! You’ve used me for an effing dildo for the last time.”
Cynda’s knees trembled. Wearily, she sat down on the hard wooden dock and looked up at Eric, who towered above her, still locked into his arrogant stance of outraged machohood. “I haven’t used you, Eric,” she said. “Really I haven’t”
He crouched down beside her, balanced on the balls of his feet, the tight fabric at the seat of his pants hovering above the splintery weathered emeraldwood of the dock. “Haven’t you, Cynda?” he said. “I plug into the net. I’ve seen what you’re putting out. What we’ve been doing is an act of macho aggression, isn’t it? A metaphor for war and faschochauvinist domination? ‘Perverted,’ by your own standards.”
“No! I mean, I’m not like that!”
“No? Then what are you like, lady?”
“Great Mother, I don’t know any more!” Cynda sighed.
“Well, then I’ll tell you!” Eric snapped. “You’re an effing pervert, Cynda. You hate men. You think you’re a superior creature. You believe that wongs are disgusting organs attached to inferior breeders whose proper place is kneeling at your feet licking your fucking boots…”
He smiled cruelly at her and fingered the fly of his trousers. “But the thing is, your body wants that disgusting weapon of faschochauvinism inside you,” he said. “You despise men, but oh, how you love cock!” He undid the front of his pants and worked his piercer free of the clothing with one hand. It grew huge and hard and somehow menacing as he waved it at her.
“Look at it, lady, and tell me you don’t want it up you,” he said. “Tell me you don’t want to put it in your mouth and suck it till it fills you with loathsome male seed!”
“You’re being disgusting!” Cynda cried, unable to take her eyes off the throbbing piercer, even while her flesh crawled away from him.
“Sure, I’m being disgusting,” Eric said. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You consider what you want to do disgusting and perverted. Your body wants it, but your mind is out there telling the world just how disgusting it is. Your cunt is out of sync with your brain, you’re all fucked up inside, and that’s exactly what it means to be a pervert, isn’t it? Hypocrite is just another word for it.”
“That’s not so!” Cynda insisted.
Eric stood up, his piercer waving free in the warm night breeze above Cynda’s face like some ghastly banner, like some foul faschochauvinist ensign. Yet she found her eyes transfixed by it, and her lips wanted to—
“Then straighten out, Cynda,” Eric said. “Put your mouth…” He stopped short, laughed sardonically. “Put your mind where your mouth wants to be. Stop the crap you’re putting out. Don’t try to keep other women from being the same damn thing you want to be.”
“I…I tried, really I did,” Cynda said. “But I couldn’t, it’s out of my hands.”
“Jellybelly oil!”
“It’s the truth!”
“Well then, take yourself out of their hands,” Eric said more softly.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Defect. Ask for political asylum. Tell the whole damn planet that what you’ve been saying is a lie. Come over to our side.”
“Your side? Whose side? Falkenstein’s? Bucko Power’s?”
Eric held h
is piercer centimeters from her lips, stroking it languidly. “This side,” he said. “The side your body’s on already.”
“I can’t do that,” Cynda said. He brushed the head of his piercer teasingly over her lips. An electric shock passed from her lips to her groin and her mouth flowed forward. Eric laughed and danced back half a step.
“Why not?” he said.
Why not indeed? Cynda wondered. Admit it, you hate Bara. You’ve begun to hate what we’re doing here, you’re no longer sure we’re even right. And you’re a breeder-lover, Cynda, a dirty, perverted breeder-lover. You want that piercer inside your flower, you want to suck on it, you haven’t eaten honey once since you came to this planet. He’s right, that’s what you are, a pervert. What’s stopping you? Why won’t you go all the way?
She looked up at Eric, a dark figure of knowing macho arrogance, thrusting his piercer at her like a weapon, the perfect image of all that was loathsome faschochauvinist pride.
He is using it as a weapon, she realized. What we’re saying may not be the whole truth, but it isn’t a total lie either. This is what we’re fighting on this planet, and this is what Falkenstein has called forth in the Pacifican breeder. This is what the men of this planet will become if Bucko Power wins out. This is the face of the beast. Great Mother, help me, I feel myself drawn toward it, but I know that it’s wrong, a flaw in my own genes, in his, in both halves of our divided species. Perhaps Sisterhood isn’t the only answer, but it’s the only one I know, and this…this is surely something worth fighting, in the world, and in myself.
Slowly she rose to her feet. “I am what I am, Eric,” she said. “And you are what you are. I thought perhaps it could be different, but I can see that it’s not.”
Eric stared at her harshly. Slowly his expression softened—to regret, sadness, embarrassment. Clumsily, he tucked his piercer back into his pants and closed them with a gesture of finality. “I guess so,” he said quietly. “I guess I just made a fool of myself.”
Cynda shrugged. She smiled wanly. “Maybe the way things are just made fools of both of us,” she said. “Maybe we’re all just a flawed species, men and women. But I know that I still believe in some kind of Sisterhood, no matter how flawed. I can’t betray that, Eric. Not for you, not for my own sexuality, not for anything. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” he said. “I may believe in Bucko Power, but I can’t say that this bucko feels very powerful right now.”
She touched him briefly on the cheek. The lights of the city mocked the darkness behind him, and overhead the stars were lonely points of light lost in a cold immensity. “I guess this is goodbye,” she said.
He sighed and nodded his silent agreement.
“Try not to hate me too much,” Cynda said, and then she was running down the dock, staggering with sadness and seething with rage at she-knew-not-whom.
White clouds with just a hint of gray in their fluffy underbellies scudded rapidly across their course as Royce put the Davy Jones on another northward tack, zigzagging the sailboat east toward Gotham against a stiff westerly wind.
Of all the times for Royce to win the endless argument and get her to make the slow trip from Lorien to Gotham under sail, this period of shrill and frozen crisis had seemed the most unlikely to Carlotta Madigan. Perhaps it was a mutually agreed-upon symbol of the altered nuances of their relationship; perhaps it had had something to do with the realization that under these circumstances, the economy straining from the Thule strikes and no path of action presenting itself; her time was less valuable than she wished it to seem.
But as they sailed toward Gotham, tacking endlessly, north, south, north, against the prevailing winds, Carlotta began to understand what Royce meant about using the trip to think, about learning from the dynamics of wind, tide, and inertia. How like the political events of the past months this is! she thought. The wind blowing squarely against us, conning the ship of state on an endless series of diversionary tacks, clinging to some semblance of a true heading only by balancing the forces off against each other.
And now that process seems to have reached a dead end. How can we find a clear channel now, and how can we steer Pacifica through it, past the jagged rocks of destruction on either side?
She studied Royce, intent now on balancing off the tension in the boomline against the inertia of the tiller, internalizing the forces within our own relationship, she thought. And we seem to be making it work, with give and take, zigs and zags, and a little accommodated tension between us. Why can’t we apply the same process politically, as Pacificans together? All at once, something hopeful began to glimmer just beyond her conscious grasp…
“I wonder, Royce,” she said, “if we shouldn’t just construe these strikes as civil insurrections and proceed on that basis…”
Royce shrugged. “According to the Ministry of Justice, a ‘civil insurrection’ has to involve an extralegal attempt to violate a law or the Constitution,” he reminded her. “Way they see it, these are legal strikes, period.”
“But what about Parliament?” Carlotta said. “I doubt the strikers would defy a resolution of Parliament, even if it was on shaky legal grounds.”
“Hmmmm…” Royce muttered. “The depth polls are interesting. Thirty percent of males support the Bucko Power strike, and about the same percentage of women support the Femocrat strike, and virtually all men are against the Femocrat strike and all women against the male strike. But something like twenty-seven percent of the total population is fed up with both strikes, and that vote isn’t sexually polarized…”
“And that figure should grow every day as the economy continues to deteriorate.”
“For sure…but it’s still not enough to make a majority of the Delegates brave enough to pass a resolution to end the strikes—not when they can avoid taking any position with a nice safe legalistic cop-out.”
Royce twisted the tiller and shifted the boom over. The sail flapped and luffed for a moment, then filled again as he established a southern tack. “Damn!” Carlotta said. “Why do we have to let Transcendental Science and the Femocrats control the parameters? Why can’t we find an effing Pacifican position that isn’t either-or?”
Royce eyed her speculatively. “I thought I had, but you didn’t agree,” he said.
“You did? I didn’t?”
“Infiltrate the Institute with Pacifican spies,” he said. “Get what we can during the trial period, then kick all of them off the planet. But you thought that was faschochauvinist jellybelly oil, remember?”
“Uh…” Carlotta muttered. “But we’re on a different tack now, aren’t we?”
“Aha!” Royce said. “At last you see the ineffable wisdom of my devious mind.”
“Not quite, bucko!” Carlotta said. But pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place. “But I’m beginning to see that maybe you and I really do agree on the basics, and maybe the two of us sitting in this boat have the essence of a real Pacifican position between us.”
“We do?”
“Look, neither of us wants a Femocratic Pacifica, and neither of us wants some elite male Transcendental Scientist caste lording it over the planet, right? Keeping Pacifica Pacifican is number one. Isn’t that an issue which transcends this out-worlder-fomented sexual polarization?”
“Not if your idea is to kick all the off-worlders off the planet immediately,” Royce said. “I won’t support any move that will cut us off entirely from the Transcendental Sciences. I meant it, and I haven’t changed my mind.”
A slight flash of anger passed through Carlotta, but she instantly suppressed it. Her mind was cool and analytical now, reaching for compromise, not conflict Tacking against all opposing winds, even if they came from within. “All right, all right,” she said, “so let’s agree to disagree on that and see if we can’t fit even the disagreement into a Pacifican position, since it’s exactly the gap we have to bridge anyway.”
“If that’s what you’re selling now, I’m buying, babes.”
“Liberty and justice for all,” Royce said sardonically.
“Oh, so you think that’s just a tub of jellybelly oil?”
“I think it’s just words and fancy rules, Carlotta. What we had here didn’t depend on that. The real Pacifican thing is—or was—a feeling, something in the soul. Community, trust, I dunno…”
After a long moment’s silence, Carlotta sighed. “Yeah, Royce, it’s just that feeling that we’ve lost,” she said softly. “Why can’t that be a political issue? If these off-worlders have proven anything, it’s that they can’t comprehend the thing that makes Pacifica Pacifica.”
“Pacifica for the Pacificans?” Royce said archly.
“Well, why not?” Carlotta answered, and suddenly everything clicked into place. “Pacifica for the Pacificans, and in the Pacifican way! Why not make that feeling the issue?”
Royce grinned. “The logic is a little fuzzy,” he said, “but I can sure see the media blitz!”
“The fuzzier the better!” Carlotta exclaimed. “Goddamn it, we’ll go with your plan to infiltrate the Institute, we’ll put your deal with Falkenstein into effect unilaterally, tell the planet we have done something, and demand the strikes be ended. Trust will be the issue—Pacificans must trust Pacificans, not any bunch of godzilla-brained off-worlders!”
“Amen to that,” Royce said.
“We’ll fudge the real issues!” Carlotta said. “We won’t say anything about infiltrating the Institute or setting one up on our own. The only issue will be Pacifica for the Pacificans, and anyone who disagrees is a traitor to the Pacifican way of life, a pawn of off-world meddlers, period!”
“Well, that sounds dirty enough to me,” Royce said. Once again, he shifted the boom and changed tacks. “The only trouble is,” he said as the sailboat headed northward, “that right now that’s precisely what nobody’s buying.”
“Then we’ll effing well sell it to them!” Carlotta said sharply. “And we’ll make ending the strikes the test issue. Anyone in favor of continuing the strikes is an un-Pacifican son of a bitch! We’ll introduce a resolution in Parliament and force the Delegates to stand up and be counted.”
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