by John Kessel
Acrobat
It’s Hypatia Camillesdaughter who’s behind this. If the proposition to extend the franchise passes, she will run the Society. Is this the person you want making fundamental decisions for all of us? She’s the female Thomas Marysson.
DeepThinker
Carey is an example of what Hypatia is fighting for. The Reform Party’s opponents might plausibly warn against the male warrior, but it’s harder to raise the alarm about a man who seeks to express himself as a nurturer. He is simultaneously a throwback to the male founders and a harbinger of the new man. Opponents mutter sourly that the radicals are using fatherhood; they say, what is fatherhood but patriarchy? But the image of Carey and Val flying together in Looker’s latest is hard to argue against.
Descartes Before the Horse
@Acrobat: We have a constitutional system. There are features built into it to prevent any one person from gaining too much authority. They’ve been in place and working for more than eighty years. Removing artificial restrictions on the franchise won’t change that.
OldGuy
Carey’s mother, Valentin’s grandmother, is one of the most influential women in the Society. Carey Evasson has been a significant person since he was a teenager—remember Lune et l’autre? Val’s grandfather on his mother’s side was Jack Baldwin, whose forest you can go sit in. You should do that sometime, and look out at the place that people like them made. This is just another act in a long story.
NewGirl
@OldGuy: Is there a point to your aimless rambling?
Entropy’s Child
The point isn’t fatherhood or custody or voting. It’s male demonism. The history of the human race is one of mindless slaughter by men or groups of men motivated by issues of masculinity that have more to do with evolutionary psychology than culture. They’ll say they are killing for freedom, or for God, or for the welfare of their children, or for love. But that’s just a veneer. Not all men are equally whipsawed by these impulses—or else we couldn’t exist—but check out the rhetoric of the Spartans and get back to me. Biology can be moderated but it can’t be ignored, any more than you can ignore a black hole at the center of your solar system. I’m afraid the Society is being sucked back into that black hole.
AnotherMother
All this talk about Evasson obscures the fact that the basic issue is what is best for his son. Evasson has been the beneficiary of every privilege our polity has to offer. Stop talking about him.
The problem here is Roz Baldwin. She came from Earth, and she was raised by her father, and so even though she’s lived among us for twenty years she doesn’t understand the Society. She let this situation get out of hand, and now the welfare of her son should be taken out of hers. The Board should take Val back and put him in the custody of his grandmother. Let his mother, and Carey—if he really cares at all, and is not just using Val to increase his celebrity—see him on some strictly controlled basis. Too many people’s welfare, beyond their own, is at stake.
RealGuy
@DeepThinker: stop trying to understand Carey—you can’t.
Men know what Carey’s going through in a way no woman ever can. Every day we navigate the world of female hegemony. The woman walking down the concourse beside us lives in a different reality.
Cousins women simply can’t accept the limitations of their epistemology. The Society’s history of persecution by patriarchy makes it easy for them to believe there’s nothing that goes beyond the properly schooled female’s understanding. But the way men survive is by constructing an oppositional consciousness that functions in their every interaction. This way of seeing is inaccessible to the female.
It’s hard for our sisters to see that, and painful for those who accept it. It may seem exclusionary for us to claim the inviolate nature of male consciousness. But there it is.
DeepThinker
@RealGuy: why do you assume that I am female?
Tiresias
I’m sick of all this bipolar thinking. “Male” and “female” are categories that apply completely to no one. To the degree that the Society insists on forcing everyone into those crude pigeonholes, it is doomed.
NewGirl
I hope that people are prepared for the trouble that will come if the Reform Party loses the election. The patriarchies are watching us. What will they, through the OLS, do if the Reform movement is crushed? I think violence is coming to the SoC.
Norasdaughter
Hypatia Camillesdaughter and Carey Evasson are agents of Persepolis.
• • • • •
Mira, Carey, and Val met Hypatia, Juliette, and the rally organizers in the refectory near the square. Mira had trouble liking Juliette. Her voice—pitched low, full of drama—made Mira’s skin crawl, so she asked Val if he wanted to take a walk. But Val was excited to be in on the planning, and said no.
Feeling useless, Mira got up to go outside.
“Wait,” Hypatia said.
Today Hypatia was dressed like the most conservative of Matrons in a simple buff tunic, her hair in a very short cut she had adopted as the election approached. She drew Mira over to another table.
“I want you on the stage with me today,” she said. “You know Carey, you know Val. On that first night they came to see you before anyone else.”
“I don’t make speeches.”
“No speech. Just tell your story. You’re a young woman, not political, on the side of change.”
“Hypatia, I’m Looker.”
“Nobody knows that.” It was true. By now everybody in and out of the Reform Party was convinced Hypatia was Looker. Even though Mira had wanted her identity kept secret, she was annoyed.
“I can’t do it,” Mira said.
“You’re not used to public appearances, but you will be. I see it in you. Public attention is power. You can change things.”
“Not this way.”
Hypatia sighed. “All right. But do me one favor: At the custody hearing I want you to speak for Carey. Will you do that for me, and Carey, and Val?”
“All right. Can I go now?”
“Go.”
Mira left the refectory.
Kamal Vashtisson Square was a small underground plaza. Vashtisson, a noted architect, had designed the apartment clusters that spread along the west interior of the crater; if you turned on the public information app in your Aide you could see an image of him sitting on a bench in the square. Surrounding the square were the refectory, a gym, and a nursery school. In its middle some red-barked Japanese crepe myrtles grew in big planters. Vashtisson would be dismayed by the dull space they had named after him.
Today a low stage fronting a five-by-eight-meter screen had been erected at one end, in preparation for the rally. Mira climbed up on the wall of a planter so she could get a better look at the square.
A crowd was gathering. Men wearing work clothes were outnumbered by better dressed non-voters living on the Men’s Standard. Some wore video shirts that showed images of their children, and sliding across their shoulders the slogan “A working father.” Claiming concerned fatherhood was the new fad, a statement that you cared about more than sex, which was a good way to get laid.
Transgendered women, whose grievances exceeded those of men, and whose cause was part of the Reform platform, were there in significant numbers. Two students from the Discussion Group handed out signs: “No Revolution Without Men” and “XX ≈ XY.” Around the edges of the square nervous constables, male and female, spoke in one another’s ears in order to be heard over the hum of the growing crowd.
Heavily rhythmic pop music suddenly blared from the plaza’s speakers—Klarasdaughter’s “Lost the Time to Speak.” A couple of men began dancing. Mira climbed on the edge of one of the planters so she could see better. One of the dancers, tall and slender, beard stubble whitening his chin, moved with the grace of someone formally trained. His coveralls were from Agriculture—East Five was the major agricultural sector of the colony, with extensive rack f
arms for produce and factories turning yeast and soybeans into a hundred different products.
On the stage the big screen started cycling through images of everyday scenes from the Society: men at work, children at play, residences, classrooms, a field of wildflowers on the crater slope. Between them the screen went black save for a quotation in light blue. “Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself.” Then an image of rows of solar collectors on the crater ridge, each smearing the sun into a parallel line of reflection. “Much we hold dear must be done away with.” A teenage girl and boy necking on a bench in a garden. “Every idea an incitement.”
The crowd numbered perhaps three hundred, two-thirds of them men. The volume of the music rose. A syncopated, nervous rhythm, very loud percussion, harmonized pipes over it, an extremely simple melody, and Klarasdaughter’s slurred, androgynous voice:
Die in a hovel
Live in a dream
Depends on the script
Pretend it’s a novel
Not what it seems
Depends on the script
Breathe in the vacuum
Burn in the sun
Fall on your knees
Know that you’re done
Angels from heaven
Demons from hell
Depends on the script
As the music rose to its loudest, Hypatia stepped onto the platform and the crowd cheered. She raised her arms and a field of raised arms greeted her, cries of “Solidarity!” With her came the other three candidates for the Board: Tamara Ruthsdaughter, Pat Sarisdaughter, and Daquani Jeffersdaughter. Daquani, a trans woman, was another of Hypatia’s lovers, the child of a colleague at the university. The opposition joked that if she were elected, Daquani would be both the first male member of the Board in thirty years and Hypatia’s second vote.
Standing in a row, they joined hands and raised them high. More cheers. The music receded and Hypatia moved front and center, right up where the people crowded close. When she spoke, floating mikes picked up her voice and amplified it.
“I am happy to see so many men and women here,” she called out. “So many fathers and sons! Friends and lovers! Women! All you strong, brave women! Women who have no fear.
“Women afraid of men could destroy this colony!” she shouted. She waved her arm at the candidates behind her, and then out at the crowd. “But we aren’t afraid!”
More cheers.
“A society where orthodoxy is never challenged stagnates. We need to take risks. What has the Society accomplished scientifically or artistically that can match the achievements of the other lunar colonies? What would you rather watch, our boring idealisms or the tragic melodramas produced in Persepolis? Whose music would you rather hear? Whose virtualities would you rather experience?”
Hypatia carried on in this vein for a while, conjuring up great works of art—music, drama, video—and explaining how in the midst of tragedy, always, humans male and female had created the deepest and most meaningful art. She stopped short of asserting that violence and social disruption were a small price to pay for a vibrant and evolving society, but it was not a reach from where she stood to that place.
“We are not here to protest! We are here to resist! Protest is when you object to an injustice. Resistance is when you, by your own actions, ensure that the injustice no longer takes place!”
As Hypatia warmed to her theme, painting her picture of a reborn Society, Mira stopped listening. She’d heard Hypatia’s arguments before, spiced with humor, a dash of history, an appeal to principle, and ridicule of those who didn’t understand. Mira got down from her perch and circled round to where she could see both the platform and the faces of the people watching.
The man with the beard stubble who had been dancing so well now stood near the front, a head taller than most around him. His expression wasn’t that of a believer, or even somebody who sought to believe. Mira imagined he had paid some attention to the election but not much. He had some simple job and he lived in a dorm, alone.
The Society was constructed so that men would not be tempted to unite. Every man to be embraced by his mother, bound by affection and obligation to sisters, loved by many women, able to find meaningful pastimes suited to his temperament and calling forth his best efforts, so that he might earn the praise of his fellows, make himself exceptional, be loved and petted and fucked within an inch of his life. A paradise. Yet here he was, and here were scores of others. What more did they expect the Society to give them?
She felt a desire to push through the crowd, grab the man’s arm, and take him away from the rally. She would kiss him. She would tangle her hand in his hair and ask him where he had learned to dance, and who he had danced with. Did he love anyone, and did that person love him still?
“—and this is what we are fighting for,” Hypatia said, quieter now, the microphones picking up every nuance. The crowd quieted with her. She held her arm out toward the back of the platform, and Val stepped from behind the screen. The people, hushed at first, began to applaud, and it swelled louder and louder.
Val came to Hypatia’s side. She seized his hand and raised it high, and the cheers got louder. Behind them, Val’s face was on the screen, wearing a big, embarrassed, irresistible grin.
As she watched him soak it up, Mira felt increasingly unhappy. She pictured him as he’d turned molten glass into a goblet, and remembered his beautiful self-containment, his commitment only to the work. His grace with his grandmother and great aunts and teachers. Even if this applause was what he wanted, it wasn’t what he needed. He was too young to be the focus of so much unmoored love. His father had experienced something like this, but that was not in service of a political program, and still he had barely survived it.
As she watched Val up there, grinning, raise both his arms, now in fists, to the largest roar yet from the assembled men and women, Mira turned her eyes back to the screen. The camera switched to the crowd, and there was the tall man, as carried away as all the others, shouting. The image split and they were both up there now, the boy and the man, the leader and the follower, flattened to two dimensions.
CHAPTER
FIVE
IT TOOK ERNO WEEKS TO find a black market surgeon who was both skillful and discreet. The clinic was in Shiraz, a neighborhood that had started as a roofed trench outpost, like many of the earliest colonies. Along its walls rose three ranks of apartments hollowed out of the rock. Dirt blackened the grout of the pavement in a street where men in colorful shirts sat on stools or lounged against tiled walls. A ring of children kicked a fabric ball in high arcs between them while their elders watched Erno impassively, their eyes flicking silently over the gleaming prosthesis where his left hand should have been.
Next door to the office of a dog announcing himself as a “Licensed Sagdid Practitioner,” the clinic presented itself as an apothecary. Beyond its arched doorway stood cluttered shelves of patent medicines, and behind a counter a bearded man. A couple of Aideless orangs loitered around the public data terminal. The man eyed the satchel over Erno’s shoulder.
“Salaam,” Erno said.
“Salaam. May I be of service?”
“I would like to speak with Dr. Jahanshah.”
“I am very sorry, sir,” the man said. “I do not know that person. May I fill a prescription for you?”
There followed a ta’arof dance of question and answer, compliment and self-deprecation. Erno offered increasing amounts of money to no effect: The man insisted he was mistaken in his belief that surgery was done here and so of course the shop had nothing to sell him. Erno’s allusion to his marriage into the Eskander family did nothing but arouse the man’s skepticism. Finally Erno took the cryobox from his bag, unsealed it, and showed the hand. The man stroked his beard. He disappeared into the back of the shop. Some minutes later he returned and without further conversation conveyed Erno back to the surgeon.
Dr. Jahanshah was a gaunt man with a precise manner. In his brightly lit surgery he
studied the hand for some time, turning it over in his own, flexing each of its fingers. He placed it under an X-ray microscope. He pondered the bones of the wrist, the hand’s version of radial and ulnar nerves. Dark lines ran through the heart of each metacarpal, and a spray of microscopic opaque spheres infused what passed for its flesh. “This is interesting. Not mechanical, but not quite biological. Where did it come from?”
“You tell me.”
Jahanshah assessed Erno through narrowed eyes. “You are from New Guangzhou?”
“I’ve never been there. Why do you ask?”
“Years ago, some Chinese crime families sought to adapt certain medical devices for other uses.”
“This is a medical device?”
“No, I would not say that. But see, even if I attach this to your arm, I will not be able to guarantee its function. If the prosthesis you wear now is unsatisfactory, you would do better to clone a hand from your own cells. I can grow one for you in a month.”
“That’s not what I want.”
Jahanshah bowed his head at Erno’s bluntness. “As you wish. I’ll need to take a magnetic resonance scan.”
“Can you do without it? I don’t know if it contains ferrous materials.”
“Might you at the least tell me where you obtained it?” the surgeon said, Persian manners ebbing. “Working in ignorance, I can’t speak for the result.”
“I don’t want you to speak at all,” said Erno.
• • • • •
Hung over, eighteen years old, he sat cross-legged on the edge of the gel mat and drew in a deep breath of Mayer’s slightly sour air. Through the window streamed morning light from an Earth landscape: forested mountains, blue sky with streaks of pink and orange clouds, a river in the valley catching silver fire from the sun. In the distance an eagle circled. As Erno tried to focus, the eagle froze in midglide, then jumped back and repeated its swoop.
A camera midge floated into his field of vision, hovering in front of his eyes. He waved vaguely at it; it danced away and then returned to fix its microscopic lenses on him again. For six months he had lived in this two-by-three-meter flop in the Hotel Gijon: a gel mattress, a false window, and dozens of surveillance bugs. Anything he said or did might be recorded—though Erno could not imagine why anyone would care what the residents of the Hotel Gijon did.