by John Kessel
After the night with Carey, she’d been unable to sleep. She’d loaded the footage they’d shot, but she hadn’t gotten any further than his image on the video editor. Carey on the stage at the Oxygen Warehouse. “Let me tell you what it means to be an untreated sociopath.” Raffish, self-assured, willing to try anything, his intellect hidden like a banked fire.
His legend as attractive trouble had started when he was fourteen. On the first night of Founders’ Week he’d arranged to meet some friends out on the lunar surface. He never showed up. At that time his mother was the chair of the Board of Matrons. The entire colony was mobilized in a week-long search, without success. Carey was presumed dead.
When, three months later, he turned up at the North Airlock, consternation turned to outrage. He had been living at an abandoned construction bunker in Esnault-Pelterie crater, where he had drugged himself silly and, amazingly, written a memoir, Lune et l’autre. As punishment he was made Invisible for six months, but his little book about the anxieties and pleasures of being an adolescent male in the Society became the rage among the young. The instant his internal exile expired, he emerged as the most popular boyfriend in the colony. It didn’t hurt that he was a rising star in martial arts, bound for the Lunar Olympics.
He drove Mira crazy. At times he acted so fecklessly she had to try hard not to look down on him. The fact that he had written the memoir, and was so openly and unselfconsciously critical of the Society, proved that there was more to him than fame or family or bedroom skills. But it didn’t look like anything would ever tap that quality, the heart of her desire.
The tram turned a sharp angle to arrive at the terminus. Bruises on her back from the hard stage of the club protested as she shifted in her seat. Right now Carey was probably at home with his nieces and nephews, or at the gym. She could call him.
Better that he should call her.
“West Airlock Complex,” the tram announced. Workers for the morning shift at the fusion plant, the solar collection fields, and the nanotech and biotech labs descended from the platform, where they would suit up to make the bus trip across the surface. Mira and a dozen others headed on foot down the spur toward the Materials Lab.
Mira had just reached her workstation when Roz Baldwin came by. She embraced Mira and kissed her on the cheek.
Preemptively Mira asked, “Did you ever reach Carey?”
“Not yet.”
So he hadn’t gone to her last night.
Roz had recently cut her red hair in a short bob that, despite the fact that she was a big woman, made her look girlish. She managed the Materials physical plant, and though she was not a difficult person, her humorlessness got on Mira’s nerves. “We’re moving you to a new station,” Roz said. “Come with me.”
To Mira’s surprise, Roz led her to a station in the workroom that housed Eva’s research team. It was a move up. Eva was the greatest physicist ever to come out of the Society. Her papers of twenty years earlier on Planck-Wheeler time and space were still widely cited. Mira’s skills in theoretical physics were pedestrian; she could find her way around a statistical report and she was good at running simulations, but Eva had never expressed much interest in her before. She wondered what was behind this sudden change in her status.
“Eva’s asking all the project groups to prepare progress reports for the Board. She’d like you to organize all the lab’s notes on fullerene scrubbers.”
“What’s going on?”
“The election,” Roz said. “If Reform takes control, expect some policy changes.”
Mira didn’t get her implication. “How soon does she need it?”
“Not immediately. Two, three weeks.”
“All right, then.”
“Okay. Oh, and if Val comes by later, send him to me.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
Mira watched Roz move across the workroom. Everyone in the lab knew her history. The same age as Carey, as a teenager she had emigrated to the Society with her father, the plant geneticist, Jack Baldwin, who became Eva’s lover. A year after arriving, Baldwin killed himself, and orphaned Roz was taken in by the Greens. She and Carey became lovers, had a son. The fact that she was not Eva’s biological daughter had resulted in the peculiar situation that Roz, Carey, and Val were all members of the Green family.
Mira wondered how much Roz knew about Carey and her.
When Mira ferried her things to the new station, she managed to knock a stylus off the back of the desk. She got down on her hands and knees and felt for it between the desk and the wall, and her fingers fell upon some small thing. She pulled it out—it was a ring. Dark silver metal—titanium?—with an inlaid pattern of two green vines twisted around each other, circling the band to join up with themselves. Mira slid it onto one finger. It was too large for her fingers, but fit snugly on her thumb. A man’s ring.
She put it into the drawer. When she broke for lunch, she grabbed an apple and a protein bulb from the lab refrigerator and sat in the break room. Two other grad students, Tanya and Peter, had the colony video feed on the wall.
On the screen Hypatia Camillesdaughter was talking with Mandy Moirasdaughter, whose blab show was a guilty pleasure for half the colony. “This is a dangerous moment in the history of the Society,” Hypatia said. “But with danger comes opportunity. Elimination of the two-tiered suffrage system will transform us.”
It was Mira’s day to encounter all of Carey’s other women. Hypatia taught History of Gender at the university. Her infamous essay about the Thomas Marysson revolt, “Stories for Men and the Bloody Y Chromosome,” came close to justifying the sabotage that had gotten Marysson and Erno Pamelasson exiled.
Mira admired Hypatia’s biting wit; Hypatia did not suffer fools gladly, and she thought the Society of Cousins was rife with fools.
Mandy said, “Some people charge that you are just a narcissist and your movement is about personal aggrandizement.”
Hypatia laughed. “Aren’t you a narcissist, Mandy? I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves.”
“You’ve been married and divorced twice, from the Weavers and the Scarlets. You have male lovers and you don’t seem to have close women friends. And you’re the head of a movement aimed, among other things, at giving men the vote. Why should women support the Reform Party?”
“Women are active at every level in the Reform movement.”
“I didn’t say you lacked acolytes. But several former associates of yours are, to say the least, not fans.”
“It’s sad that supporters of the status quo resort to attacking my personal life instead of engaging with the issues.” Hypatia seemed deeply amused. “Every day men and boys go ignored in our families, and you ask me about my marriages.”
“That’s a new one—the idea that we ignore men and boys,” Mandy said. “All right, then. What’s to keep men, if they all have the vote, from trying to establish a patriarchy?”
Hypatia laughed. “You’re not serious.”
“On the contrary,” Mandy said. “Majority rule by males invariably leads to suppression of women and minorities. Look at Earth history.”
“Disenfranchising half the population to quiet your anxiety is a high price to pay,” Hypatia said. “We pay it every day—and what does it buy us?”
Tanya was watching with Mira, but Peter had his head down over a submolecular simulation he was running on his tabletop. He munched a sandwich and brushed crumbs off the image.
“Do you think she’s going to win?” Tanya asked.
Peter didn’t bother to look up. “I don’t care about voting.”
“Forget voting. Think of the opportunities in the patriarchal universities. Wouldn’t you like to study in Persepolis?” Tanya turned to Mira. “What do you think? Open information could make our future.”
“Science is already open,” Mira said. “We publish our papers for everyone in the solar system. We read the papers from everybody in the solar system.”
Peter
finally looked up. “There you go.”
On the wall, Mandy said, “The idea that gender is entirely a construction was demolished a century ago. No matter how it expresses, it’s in our genes. To deny the reality of the billions who devoted their lives to being ‘male’ or ‘female’ is inhumane. Are men and women myths?”
Hypatia examined her fingernails. “Gender determinism is a fog that keeps us from securing justice for everyone.”
Mandy smiled. “It’s that kind of statement, Professor Camillesdaughter, that convinces so many in the Society that you are Looker. Are you?”
“I wish I knew who Looker is, so I could give her a big, sloppy kiss.”
Mira’s face flushed. Tanya asked Mira, “You think she’ll take over the Board?”
Startled, Mira mumbled, “I’m not very good at politics.”
“I thought you were in the Discussion Group at the university.”
“Not lately. Their rules on what I’m supposed to believe change faster than I can keep up with.”
Tanya grinned. “Truth. Some friends and I are meeting at the temple tonight. Want to join us?”
“Sorry. I’m busy.”
Peter turned off the simulation and got up. “Hey, female hegemon,” he said to Tanya, “are we going to do any work today?”
Mira went back to her new desk and tried to focus on assembling her notes. She’d been working with two others on adapting bottom-up nanodevices to rebuild tissue damaged by contamination with fullerenes. The technology worked well in the lab, and it had large practical applications in environments that had been sloppy with their use of the hazardous materials.
But her head wasn’t in it. How could Mira compete with someone like Hypatia Camillesdaughter? She was everything Mira wanted to be. She saw the hypocrisy in the Society and did not let some phony notion of sisterhood keep her from telling the truth. She was funny and sarcastic and nobody treated her like an outcast.
The Reform Party had a slate of candidates pledged to her two-pronged program: open the Society to outsiders, and extend the franchise. If the franchise was extended, Hypatia would surely be able to win a colonywide election. She’d be head of the Board of Matrons, by some measures the most powerful woman in the Society.
Mira tried to call Carey, but only got his Aide. She told it to pass along that she had called, then regretted calling at all.
Midway through the afternoon Valentin Rozsson sauntered into the workroom. “Mira,” he said, “new workstation?”
“Hello,” Mira said. They embraced. He was taller than her and his red hair brushed her cheek. “Carey gave me your horse. It’s beautiful.”
Val brushed his hair back behind his ear. He had his father’s grace and his mother’s freckles. There was some quality about him—everyone saw it—an amusement at the world unlike the temper of a typical fifteen-year-old. His mind was quick, his smile disarming. “Is Roz here?”
“She’s in the back with your grandmother. She wants to speak with you.”
“I’m here to pick up a stock of glass for the workshop. Should be an order in the system.”
As low intern on the Materials totem pole, Mira took care of filling requests. She called up the Fowler Glass Institute account. Several varieties of colored frit and three grades of cullet: soda glass, combustion glass, lead glass.
“I’ll go down with you,” she said.
They left the administrative level and descended to the vast warehouse. Mira coded in the order and the system sent a bot down the cavernous room between twenty-meter-high ranks of storage bins. The bot found the designated slot, rose on hydraulics, forked a bin out of the array, brought it down, and trundled it off to distribution. A couple of mita workers scooped out each variety of three-centimeter glass disks, packaged them for transport, and loaded them onto a cart. Mira got into the driver’s seat, Val climbed into the passenger’s, and Mira drove them out the big doors at the end of the warehouse.
“Carey told me to say hello,” Val said.
“You’ve seen him?”
“At school. He was doing a mountain climbing tutorial in virtuality. He’s friends with the instructor.”
“He has a lot of friends,” Mira said, fixing her eyes ahead. She pulled the truck up in front of the lab housing the old stacked-pinch fusion reactor.
Mira got out; Val came around to the driver’s side. He leaned against it, his arms crossed. “He likes you.”
“He likes everybody.”
“That’s a problem?”
“I guess it depends on your frame of reference.”
“I don’t know about that,” Val said. He watched her for a moment. He had his father’s eyes: level brows, beautiful lashes. Just a boy, yet he acted with such self-possession.
“If Roz asks after you,” she said, “how much should I lie?”
Val kissed her cheek and climbed into the truck. “Tell her I’ve thrown over all propriety. Solidarity!” He grinned wickedly and drove away.
• • • • •
FROM The Odd Side of The Moon: Lunar Utopias and Social Experiments
#5: THE SOCIETY OF COUSINS
. . . the theory that human violence is fundamentally a male phenomenon, based on male reproductive strategies. All Cousins practices related to the treatment of boys and men are designed to channel “male demonism” into nondestructive enterprises, and to prevent those men with the patriarchal temperament from combining into the powerful, status-driven coalitions that the Society sees as the foundation of nationalism, war, colonialism, imperialism, unfettered capitalism, rape, infanticide, genocide, and the sad history of human tyranny.
Unlike girls, Cousins boys never reach their majority. Instead they are pampered and petted, indulged in their pastimes and challenged in their education. A boy may choose a career in any area of art, science, sport, or social service, or may choose not to work at all. Whatever path men pursue, their career choices are supported to the limits of the Society’s resources. This difference in treatment begins early. In a typical extended family, for instance, the daughters must share rooms while the sons are given their own.
This indulgence is paid for by the sacrifice of political power. A man obtains the right to vote and hold office only by giving up “male privilege” and becoming a permanent mita worker. Every citizen, through the mita, performs six hours per week of the mundane and unchallenging work that keeps the Society running. For a man to become a permanent mita worker carries no status—except to earn the franchise. Few men feel this is worth it.
The status of a man is determined, first, by the status of his mother, to a lesser degree by the status of his family, and finally, by his own accomplishments.
Sex is the common coin of Cousins society. There are few restrictions on sexuality, except for the protection of children under fourteen. Adolescence for boys is a sexual playground that goes on into adulthood. Men are valued for their sexuality, praised for their potency, competed for by women. In any family or group of women living together, male friends stop by one evening or another. They come and go; the women entertain them and assess their performance.
From puberty on, men are schooled by older men and women on how to give and take pleasure. A man who can give such pleasure is recognized and respected throughout the Society. Welcome in any bed. Admired and envied by other men. Every Cousins girl has vids on her wall of famous lovers: star athletes, dancers and acrobats, writers, musicians, singers, even scientists.
Though men may marry, they still live in the family of their mothers. Cousins marriage has nothing to do with the marriage of blood relatives, as is commonly misunderstood outside the Society. Similar to the concept of “walking marriage” among the Musuo on Earth, men may have sex with any consenting woman—and consent is given with a freedom that is unheard of in patriarchal societies. Fidelity is not demanded or encouraged. Under these circumstances, formal marriage between women and men is rare.
Homosexuality is encouraged, and men may marry other men,
but the concept of a large family made up solely of men raises alarms among the Cousins. To reduce this possibility, when men marry they still must live together within either of their families. If they divorce, they automatically return to their birth families.
The key to understanding sex and gender among the Society of Cousins is this: Though the performance of gender may be fluid, for legal purposes the Society ties the assignment of “male” or “female” strictly to biology. A person genetically female (by birth or chromosomal modification) is female, and a male is male. This leads to the curious practice that, with biological change of sex, transsexuals gain and lose responsibility, power, and legal rights. The many varieties of gender and nongender evident in other human societies may be present among Cousins, but their legal rights and cultural authority are nonetheless linked to their biology, not the gender they present.
There is an active transgender community in the Society, but to the Cousins legal system, transgender females are males, with no more rights than men. This is, in some ways, as much a source of political conflict as the treatment of cis-males.
Any children resulting from sexual congress belong to the mother. In practice it is often a matter of indifference who the father of a child may be. At home, men may be deeply involved in the lives of nieces and nephews, and beloved within their families. But they gain no authority from this, own no children, inherit no property.
• • • • •
Carey helped Jesse up from the mat. “Go again?”