by John Kessel
Hypatia touched him on the arm. “Sirius is dying to interview you. People are eager to know your reaction. They may not care about the politics, but they care about the story. Feed that. You’ve been betrayed. Mira told you she was on your side, she shared your bed, and when the chance came, she knifed you in the back. You are hurt, angry.”
Carey shook his head. “I don’t want to complain about Mira.”
“Your restraint shows a true generosity of spirit.” Hypatia’s voice was understanding. This was the flipside of her sarcasm; on occasion she had to be sincere or she would just be the glory hound her enemies accused her of being. Dedication to the ideal justified her immense egotism.
“I can tell how angry you are,” she said. “Use that righteous anger in the service of our cause.”
Carey looked around the room. They were surprised. Some were embarrassed for him, others annoyed. “I don’t believe in righteous anger.”
“We can’t change the Society without a fight,” Hypatia said.
“If there is a fight, the Society will be destroyed.”
“So we do nothing?” Jon said. “Everything stays the same? The Matrons win?”
Most of the room seemed completely flummoxed by Carey’s reaction. Hypatia drew back and watched him.
“What do you want to do, Carey?” Cleo said.
“I want to work. I want to do something useful with my time.”
Hypatia said, slowly, “This is the most useful work you can do. It’s work that only you can do. You have to give this interview.”
“Oh, I’ll do the interview. Believe me, I want to talk to them.”
“Then let me help you prepare,” she said. “We’ll strategize. We can run some scenarios, test the semiotics.”
Carey laughed. “Hypatia, you are an inspiration, but I don’t think I want your help.”
“You need it,” Hypatia said.
“I don’t think so,” Carey said.
“Look,” someone said.
On the pixwall was an image of Erno Pamelasson over a banner headline: “Terrorist on OLS Team?”
• • • • •
Interview with Adil Sparrow Abekesson, conducted by Bushnagi Misra of the SCOCOM staff, 13 February 2149. Abekesson, ninety-six, worked for forty years as a constable, rising to chief of watch. He ran unsuccessfully three times for the Board of Matrons. At the age of seventy-two he resigned from the constabulary, declared male privilege, forsaking the franchise, and pursued a career as a vacuum sculptor. His works have been on display in galleries on Mars and Europa as well as the moon.
I am a direct descendant of Adil Al-Hafez, one of the seldom-acknowledged founders of the Society of Cousins. He and Nora Sobieski were lovers. They came here, with a hundred others, and lived in a hole in the ground for twenty years, working to build the Society. He died at the age of fifty-three from exposure to radiation from an unpredicted solar flare. She gets a park named after her; he gets some obscure ridge on the lunar surface.
Before the crater was pressurized we lived in what is now part of the dorms in East Three. Very primitive. I was no athlete, even less of a scholar, and I guess I gave my mother a hard time, but I was popular with the girls. I wasn’t the best student—I hated to be stuck in one place, doing one thing. I wanted physical activity, interacting with people. I decided to become a career constable.
The constabulary is a volunteer organization, but it’s hard to get in. You have to demonstrate the right temperament. I liked to compete with others, but I scored high on social compatibility and so they let me in. They’d already figured out that although you don’t want too much aggression in your average citizen, you need a degree of it in a police force. Plus, it provides an outlet for people like me.
Q: People like you?
Men.
Q: Cousins women aren’t competitive? No desire to dominate? No violence?
Oh, sure. There’s some vicious competition between women in the Society. They attack each other over ideology, they’re jealous of their prerogatives, they jockey their sons into status positions, they gang up against each another, they fight with their sisters and daughters—lots of daughters carry on vendettas against their mothers once they start their own families.
If you are able to become a Sienna or Green or Ebony you have an edge, but if your family was founded last week you are nobody. The Greens have been living in some of their places so long they act as if they own them.
But not so much violence, no. If you cross one of the unwritten rules, to say nothing of the written ones, you get shamed. What’s the biggest punishment we have? Exile—to be cut off from your family, friends, society. Short of that, it’s Invisibility, which is maybe even worse because you are still here, having some minimal contact with other Cousins, but except for those interactions necessary to your survival they ignore you. The highest suicide rate is among the Invisible.
Q: Why don’t people ignore the declaration of Invisibility? It can’t be enforced if the average Cousin doesn’t enforce it.
Some people do ignore it, but only in the smallest of ways. The constabulary will write you up, and you will come before a Council of Peers. But it seldom comes to that. How are any social rules enforced? Not just here—anywhere you go, it’s the pressure of conformity. A society will not function when people do as much as the law allows and no more than it requires.
That’s why the constabulary is volunteer; it comes out of the community.
Q: So you volunteered to be a constable out of desire to serve?
No. I wanted the power to tell people what to do. Maybe it was mixed with wanting to see people do the right thing, but I’m old now, there’s no point in me hiding my motives from myself or anyone else.
About forty percent of the constabulary are men, same as the general population. More men apply than women, but still they’re in the minority. They’ll tell you it’s not by design, it’s just because men drop out. And they do—once they realize that chances for advancement are limited.
I started out partnered with Kristine Umber Kristinsdaughter. You may know about her; she was eventually Chair of the Board of Matrons. But back then she was just a constable, albeit she had five years on me. They always paired the new men with experienced women.
In normal times, there’s not a lot for a constable to do. You’ve got the legal right to use force, but not the occasion. A constable here is as much a social worker as a police officer. We’re often dealing with juveniles who get themselves into trouble. Their mothers are watching. Domestic disturbances are rare. Lost children, industrial accidents, crowd control at civic events and celebrations. That’s most of the job. Acts of physical violence—we see maybe a couple of dozen per year, usually between adolescent boys. Murders—there hasn’t been a murder here in thirty years.
The constabulary is small, about seventy members for a population of sixty thousand. In Persepolis the ratio is two hundred fifty per hundred thousand; in New Guangzhou it’s three hundred fifty; in Mayer, that libertarian utopia, it’s five hundred. Tell me about the freedoms in the outer world.
Most of the constabulary are part-timers, with a core, one-third of the total, who are career. I was career. I wanted to be a watch captain; eventually I wanted to be the chief of the watch. I got to be chief of the watch, only the second man ever to hold that job. I was watch chief for eighteen years, longer than anyone ever.
I was well liked. At least two women married into the Sparrows just to be with me. I was a father and an uncle to a flock of kids. Kids liked me. Men liked me. Women liked me. I ran for the Board of Matrons three times. You know about that?
Q: You lost all three times.
I came close the first time. I was the first man to run for the Board in more than a decade. I got a lot of support from people in the Tower; the social workers liked me, I was popular with the constabulary and the colony bureaucrats.
But I’m a Sparrow, and my mother started the family only one generation back. Look at th
e list of Board members over the last thirty years and you’ll see the same family names over and over: Crimson, Sapphire, Amarillo. Like they say, all the colors of the rainbow. Except we don’t get rainbows here.
Q: Don’t you feel that this system is oppressive to men? You’re scrutinized every minute of your life.
Privacy is overrated. At least we don’t have the everyday violence that goes on everywhere else. You make sure you write that down. Yes, Cousins men don’t have as many legal rights, but they’re free from the exploitation that goes on in patriarchal societies.
In a hierarchy, whether it’s founded on money or power—and the ones who have money get power, and the ones with power get money—there’s one man at the top and everything flows down from him. At most maybe there’s a few at the top, but there aren’t many, and they’re usually men. At each level a person can step on the neck of anyone on the next level down, until you reach the bottom and there’s nobody to step on, except maybe your children. You can step on people on your own level, too, and maybe establish a little pyramid down there with you at the top, but you’re still down there.
Here, that happens some, but it doesn’t rule. The Matrons won’t let it.
Q: Aren’t the Matrons at the top of the pyramid?
After one generation, the levels get mixed around. Some women get wide influence for years, even decades, but to get there they have to have lots of friends. They have to earn the respect of most other women. The families take care that nobody gets the invested personal power that a prime minister or a caudillo or a dictator has.
Still, for a man it’s impossible. That’s my story, I guess.
I complain about the powerful families, how if you choose a political career they put a lid on your ambitions, but what is man in the patriarchies? A strong back and a pair of hands.
And you look at human history. Men are very creative when it comes to wielding force. They are crazy with the desire to hurt. It’s not culture, it’s biology. All that twenty-first century cant about behavior being culturally determined was blasted away eighty years ago.
So what’s your option? Either change men by messing with the human genome, or create a social structure that limits their autonomy. The Society chose the latter. Tough on the ones like me. But if you pile up the total injustice I have faced in ninety-six years, does it exceed the amount I would have faced if I lived in Tycho, say, or New Guangzhou?
• • • • •
As evening settled in, Erno sat under an olive tree in a café and watched the girls and boys flirt in every possible combination. Soon some of them would retire for a session in a university practice room. Ten years earlier he had been one of them, trying so hard to seem deep, his every other sentence a lie. Declaiming his lousy poetry, imagining some soul connection while he admired women’s breasts.
Her hair was still tangled, her mouth still drunk
And laughing, her shoulders sweaty, the blouse
Torn open, singing love songs, her hand holding a wine cup.
Her eyes were looking for a drunken brawl,
Her mouth full of jibes. She sat down
Last night at midnight on my bed.
In Persepolis, Amestris would be preparing for dinner with Sima or Hala. Or maybe she was still in the office, trying to appease their lingering clients. Or in the apartment, listening to music, swimming in a mist of mood tea.
On the café wall ran a Here’s the Point! segment about the Val Rozsson custody decision. Mira claimed she and Carey Evasson were behind the BYD hoax. He remembered the flicker of her eyes when, in the van fleeing the cable station, he’d asked her who Looker was. Under the circumstances, could he rely on her to meet him at Materials later?
As he pondered this, he was startled to see his own face on the screen, over the banner, “Terrorist on OLS Team?”
A bright young female correspondent said, “Sources in the OLS Secretariat’s office confirm reports that Erno Pamelasson, member of the team investigating the treatment of males in the Society of Cousins, was, before his banishment from the rogue colony, involved in bioweapons production. Details have been smokescreened by government PR operatives, but in the last twenty minutes exponential pressure has been put on the OLS Secretariat by numerous expert investigation subroutines. OLS Secretary General Raine Devra has agreed to open her receptivity to a thirty-minute press opportunity. We plug you now into the Unfiltered Lunar Forum.”
Erno drew back a little into the shadows beneath the tree. Around the tables some of the students turned their attention to the pix.
The Secretary General appeared on the screen. In polished tones she made a statement about the GROSS virus and Erno’s involvement in the plan, stressing how the virus was never instantiated. She then took questions.
“Madam Secretary, how is it possible that you appointed this man to the SCOCOM team without knowing about his terrorist history?”
“What makes you assume that I did not know?”
“Why would you appoint him if you did?”
“Because he is not a terrorist. He was a rebel against the Society of Cousins, not in service to it.”
“Yet you kept it a secret. You trust a banished gene hacker from a renegade colony to represent the rest of the moon?”
“Who better to give us an insight into the secret researches of the Cousins than a person who has worked in the very labs where such weapons would have been created?”
While the Secretary General did her dance for the reporters, Erno slipped away from his table. Given that he might be thrown off the SCOCOM team by the time he returned to the hotel, now could be his only chance to find out anything about the IQSA. It was barely the end of the second shift, but rather than risk getting stopped, he should go now. He sent a text to Mira: coming early.
Better not to use public transit, so he had a long walk ahead of him. He left the campus, crossed to the inner slope of the crater, and descended a pathway through the woods. The path was scattered with needles from the taller pines, and the juniper scent was heavy. A kilometer and a half later he struck off on a quiet road across the crater’s farmland.
At the entrance to the Northwest Lava Tube more people were out. Erno walked purposefully down the concourse. Periodically a tram glided by overhead. He passed what had been the old Oxygen Warehouse, but where the club door had been there was a blank stucco wall.
Beason might be the one who had leaked Erno’s secret, but one way or another it had to trace back to Marysson. Marysson would figure he could lie his way out of any uncomfortable questions about GROSS. Lying was easy to do in the OLS, where spreading misinformation seemed to be the purpose of popular newsnets.
Past the free enterprise zone, Erno took the tram down a side tunnel to Materials. When the avatar at the complex’s gate asked him for his ID, he gave his SCOCOM security clearance. He had a bad moment, but then the doors slid open.
Mira waited on the other side. She looked surprisingly calm for somebody who had just admitted to crimes, blown Carey Evasson’s parenthood rights to flinders, outraged the Reform Party, crossed Hypatia Camillesdaughter, and put herself on news feeds across the moon.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Erno said. He looked around. “This place is deserted.”
“Once a month they schedule a skeleton shift,” she said. “That’s why I said come tonight.”
She took him to an office containing two desks, one of them almost bare, the other with a tablet, stylus, and some personal memorabilia. Mira sat in one of the chairs and nodded toward the other.
He took it. “I expected, after what happened today at the hearing, you wouldn’t be able to meet me,” Erno said.
“My roommate is moving out and right now everyone’s confused. Tomorrow I may be kicked out of the Society. But it’s tonight.”
Erno leaned back in the chair, watching her. He had no good idea what relation this woman bore to the girl he had known a decade earlier. “I can give you some pointers on being exiled.”
>
Mira opened a drawer in the desk and took out a ring. She played with it, idly slipping it on and off, not looking at him. She said, “They won’t exile me. You’ll probably be gone before I will.”
“You saw the report about me?”
Mira stood the ring on the desktop and spun it. She studied the spinning silver sphere. “I did. This is probably our only chance to renew our acquaintance. Still writing poetry? You were crazy about words. It was your only attractive trait.”
He smiled. It had always seemed to him that Mira was as much performing a parody of insensitivity as being insensitive. “My poetry stank.”
The slowing ring wobbled and drifted toward a photo of Mira and her brother, her maybe nine, him six. Mira stopped the ring. She looked him in the eye.
“So who are you working for, what do you want, and why do you expect me to give it to you?”
There was no point in attempting to keep anything secret. “I work for myself, but I’m doing this one thing, sub rosa, for Cyrus Eskander.”
“Your father-in-law.”
“If I had any other option, I wouldn’t do it. He hates the Society.”
“And you don’t?”
“Ten years away have changed my viewpoint. I use whatever influence Cyrus lends me to work against him.”
“Yet you run around in secret doing his dirty work while SCOCOM whets the ax for us. What does he want?”
“He thinks this information embargo is all about covering up tech that Eva’s developed. A scanner. According to physicists, Eva’s papers from thirty years ago say it’s possible to scan any object down to the subatomic level. But building such a scanner is difficult. Nobody on Earth has ever been able to do it.”
“Physics is full of dead theories,” Mira said. “The luminiferous ether. String theory. If Eva’s theory doesn’t work in practice, then it’s wrong.”
“I’m told that in cases of exotic physics like this, constructing such devices is as much art as engineering. One lab may succeed where another fails.”
“In the time I’ve worked here, nobody here has ever said a word about a scanner.”