by Moshe Ben-Or
If the rapist was a Survivor, it got even worse. There was never sufficient evidence to prosecute a Survivor, or even arrest him. He would have to do it in public, in front of the Dean or the Chief of Police, and announce to them that it was rape. And maybe not even that would be enough.
He says you consented, honey! It’s his word against yours! You say he stuck a gun in your face? You have any proof of that? Those bruises could be from rough sex, or just a lovers’ quarrel. Doesn’t sound like a case to us!
As for the A-tabber girls, poor things… At least the lucky ones had been assigned to an A-tabber boy’s room right after Induction. Housing shortage, you know. Sorry, there’s only one bed.
The whisper had permeated campus until it was no whisper, but a shout. Find a man, girl! Find a man! They would have to be deaf not to hear.
And they did find men. All who could, except for the truly clueless. They found them, and they kept them, and they brought a friend along. They would do anything to be safe. The greatest fear in their lives was not having a man, now. Having to walk across campus alone.
Some hid in the workshops or in the dormitories. Some planned carefully, and trusted their luck. But all who could, found a man.
By the time bits and pieces of the draft Personal Staff Regulation started making the rounds, the girls didn’t care anymore. If they had a man already, they knew who would Pin them. If they didn’t, they just wanted a man. And the whispers had started right on cue, of course they did:
“It’s not that bad, honey, it really isn’t! Look, we live with them anyway. They already do whatever they want. If you don’t do what he wants, your man will throw you out. And then who’ll keep you safe? Everyone knows that other girl, you know, the one that got thrown out. Poor thing…
“And look, it says so right here, they can’t just take back their Patronage! They have to have Grounds and petition the Dean. There has to be a Proceeding.
“They can’t throw us out, honey! They can slap us around, it’s legal, but they can’t throw us out anymore! They slap us around anyway, all the time. We’ve all been through the Siege; you know how it was for them, up there on the Wall. They can’t help it sometimes. Just have to live with it, that’s all.
“It even says so right here, ‘...in the event of serious injury...’ the Dean ‘ll switch ’em bloody, he will! You know that other girl, the one whose man threw her down the stairs. Broke her nose. Cops wouldn’t do a thing...
“So how is this a bad deal, honey? They own us already! The Dean might as well make it a formal thing, it’s better that way! At least there’d be rules…
“No, he’s not turning us into slaves, silly! That’s not at all what this is!
“Look at those new tabs! You’ve seen these around campus already. We’ve all seen ‘em. They’ve been around since the second week of the Siege. Who wears tabs like these? Look, here’s a section in the draft about them! Personal Staff with Special Status! We get all the same rights, pretty much. They just get grandfathered in, so they don’t count against the new slots.
“It’s not a bad deal at all, really, if you think about it! Just… old-fashioned, that’s all. It’s just old-fashioned, honey, like everything else nowadays!
“Everything got broken in the Collapse. We can’t live the way we used to anymore. It just wouldn’t work.
“We used to hate these old-fashioned clothes, remember? What would we do now without them? Our boys fought a whole war with black powder guns! Maybe the old way is the right way, now...
“You know, honey, it’s not all that different from how it was for girls under Hernan the Great, if you think about it. They survived, didn’t they? We wouldn’t all be here if they didn’t! It’s better than what we have now, for sure! Ten times better. It’s a hundred times better than what those poor things have to live with, outside the Wall!
“Have you listened to the nurses talk about what it’s like out there? That’s what it would be like in here, too, if it wasn’t for the Dean. He’s taking care of us, honey! He’s taking care of us so we don’t end up like those poor things outside the Wall!
“Every time he told us all to do something, he was right. He told us what to do, and we did it, and that’s how we made it through the Siege. Like, don’t like, but we did, didn’t we? How’s this different? He knows better than us! That’s why he’s the Dean!”
And on March fifteenth it came out. The full Regulation, sitting at the registrar for all to take. The girls didn’t protest, they didn’t shout. They went and got a copy, and read it board to board. And then they started getting ready.
April First is just ‘round the corner! You only have two weeks left, girl! Find a man!
But the thing was, there simply weren’t enough men.
Poly was a rigid hierarchy, it always had been. A uniformed, patriarchal hierarchy. It had started as a military academy, after all. Even the professors wore uniforms, they always had. They’d only stopped switching students after the Revolution. That’s when they’d turned the School of Field Medicine into the School of Nursing, hired the first female professors and admitted the first girls.
The decades after Palmer had mellowed things out. A free-spirited College of Arts had grown out of a tiny Department of Graphics and Media, and a laid-back School of Business had grown around the old Department of Finance. H&SS had turned from a tiny afterthought into a huge college, almost as large as Engineering and Science combined. The bounds had gotten a bit blurry for a while.
But the Siege had brought it all back into nice, sharp focus. Even the switchings were back. Not just in private, with rubber switches, the way they’d done it in Palmer’s day. No, if the offense was bad enough, they’d do it in front of the Assembly. Strip you naked in front of the whole school, tie you to the post and work you over with a piece of spring steel, shoulders to buttocks, like they used to do under the King. Any undergrad. The Dean didn’t give a damn about your gender.
It was set in concrete now, like it had been in olden times. The Dean was at the top, the A-tabbers at the bottom, and in between it went by rank and school. If you wanted to see where a man stood, just look at the lapel tabs. Look at the colors, look at the stripes, they’ll tell you all you need to know. Any man. Any girl, too.
The Regulation went by rank. By the time it was out officially, everyone basically knew what it would say.
The Dean was allowed eight girls, he hadn’t shorted himself. A Senior Lecturer got six, a Professor four, an Assistant Prof three. Every other Survivor got two, and the A-tabber boys got one.
The Campus Cops were special, but not special enough. The A-tabber Assistant Patrolmen got one girl each and the Survivor Patrolmen got two, same as their thin-striper friends among the student body. Most of the cop officers got three, but Chief Delavre got six and the Deputy Chief got four.
Female professors and TAs could Pin girls, because Staff was Staff, and that wasn’t a surprise. Only technical men could Pin technical girls, no surprises there either. No one could Pin a girl of higher rank than himself. Well, gee, you don’t say!
The thing was, the numbers just didn’t work.
When the bombs fell, most of the profs, TAs and grad students had lived off-campus. The cottages on Professors’ Row dated all the way back to the Monarchy. They were old and cramped, and short on modern amenities. And there’d been a huge shortage of them anyway.
There were a few profs who still lived on campus, for whatever reason. The Dean, writing his memoirs. His needs were simple. He had no one, anyway. Palmer had killed his whole family and afterward it just hadn’t worked out. Martín had moved back to campus after the aircar crash that’d killed his wife. He’d mostly lived in his lab from then on. It was more convenient to just walk back to Professors’ Row to catch some z’s, and he didn’t have to look at his old furniture and remember her, that way. Pillár had lived in his lab, too, for all that he had a wife and daughter. He made an effort, he really did, but his alloys and ceramics had al
ways been more important to him than them, and his wife just put up with it because she had no choice. Garcia was there because he had Call, Menendez – because he liked undergrad girls way too much. Marty Milena liked her pond scum and mushrooms more than people, and her girlfriend was her TA…
And that’s kind of how it went. Mostly young, mostly single, mostly scary smart, mostly workaholic, mostly lacking in the social graces and mostly male. All the rest had family elsewhere in the city, and commuted by train. A few drove in from the suburbs.
For the grad students and TAs, it was even worse. Their stipends had been a pittance, and many were married. The neighborhood right outside campus had been way too expensive for them. The grad dorms were tiny, and hard to get into. It made far more sense to get a place somewhere else in the city, and take the train in. A few had even commuted by airbus, clear from the other side of town over by the casinos.
And so, on the seventeenth of November 3771, at around nine in the morning when the first urgent news bulletins had come in, most everyone with any seniority on campus had taken off to be with their folks. None would ever return.
By six in the evening, when the city was burning and the barrio rats were rioting all over the place, the only ones left on campus were those who’d had nowhere else to go. About fifty-eight hundred people, some three thousand boys and twenty-eight hundred girls, most of them undergrads from out of town. And about a hundred profs from Professors’ Row, and the Deputy Chief of Campus Police with six officers only two of whom had functional pistols. And Him. The Dean. Lucir. The Man Who Had Overthrown Palmer.
He’d literally slept through the bombings. Had been taking a catnap on his couch. Spent all of his time before that puttering about, getting ready for his evening class. Never turned on his cube, never picked up a pair of net glasses to check the news. Woke up with the power out, wondering why the house AI hadn’t rung his alarm, with Pillár and Martín banging on his door.
Everyone had kind of been milling around the Admin building, trying to figure out what to do. He’d marched in like he owned the place, with Pillár and Martín trailing. Just started snapping orders. Everyone fell to. You couldn’t help but obey him.
“You, what’s your name? Yeah you, with the TA tabs! Jose? Good. Round up the students, Jose, we’re having an Assembly.
“I bloody well know the campus nets aren’t working! You’ve got legs, start moving. Get the rest of your staff to help you, they’re couriers now, we have no records to process.
“Where’s Doctor Milena? Down in her lab? All right, that’s what I’d expect. Send a runner to get her. Tell her to leave her TA with the algae. And tell her to conserve the batteries, best she can. The algae have to live long enough for us to restore power.
“Doctor Pillár, Doctor Martín, here’s what I need from you. There is a doomsday capsule down in the sub-subbasement where you work. It’s been there since I was a student, if not since Hernan the Great. You walk past the door every day. Yes, the one with the red and yellow stripes that no one has access to. You’re not supposed to have access to it until an override code has been entered into the lock, or it’s been hit by EMP, or a couple-three other Really Bad Things are detected by the AI.
“Go down there, open it up, boot everything. You were a power technician in a past life, weren’t you Doctor Pillár? And Doctor Martín, I don’t believe there is anything technological you cannot do. I need you two to get electrical power to Doctor Milena’s lab, before her battery backups run out, then fix whatever else needs fixing to keep her tanks going. I need her algae alive and her Havenite fungi happy, or we’ll all starve to death. Conscript whomever you need. Start with that Facilities electrician over there.
“Anybody here from Facilities Physical? What’s your name? Pedro? All right, Pedro, do you have any digging machines around? We need to dig a trench. All around campus, as deep and wide as possible, and pile all the dirt up on the near side in a nice, tall berm. Perfect, military earthmovers are exactly what we need. Sitting in that old maintenance cage, they should be right as rain. Split track is not a problem. I see eight Doctors in Engineering right here in the first row, and we have a campus full of undergrads to put in some elbow grease.
“Anybody here can fix some track?
“Doctor Jamesson, very good. The other thing I need from you, Doctor Jamesson, is a functional fabricator. One that can work steel and iron, or at least high-strength polymer. I believe you are a specialist in fabricator design, are you not? Good. There should be a tiny portable fabricator in the doomsday capsule, somewhere. It’s going to be an antique, but I know you’ll make it work. You can bootstrap your way from there.
“Take whatever you need, conscript whomever you want, but get me those two things. A working earthmover and a working industrial fabricator that can work steel, at least one of each. Earthmover comes first, as close to immediately as you can manage.
“Get going, gentlemen, time’s a-wastin’! All our lives depend on you!
“Chief, I am sorry I forget your name… Delavre. All right, Chief Delavre, here’s what I need. There is a young man, a grad student, his name is Hesus Peron. Yes, Diego Peron’s son. That’s why he can afford to live right outside campus.
“Here’s a photo from his dissertation cover. The nanites died, but they mostly didn’t flip, it’s pretty decent. Here’s his address. I need you to find him immediately and bring him here. It’s vital. Bring him by force if you have to.
“Take some undergrads along for security. Coach Alvarez over there can round you up a good dozen of the kind you need. I bet you know most of them already. They were all in your lockup just last week.
“Issue them hockey sticks, coach. I hear your boys are all right in a brawl!”
And then some idiot freshman over by the water cooler had whispered: “Who is that old guy? Why’re we listening to him?”
And the senior next to him cuffed him on the back of the head, stage-whispering back: “Shut up, you idiot! That’s Lucir! That’s Doctor Weinberger! The Man Who Overthrew Palmer! He says frog – you jump, fuckstick!” And that was the end of that.
By next morning he was wearing the black tabs with the four thick stripes.
He’d saved the campus, thought X. Saved everyone here. But two out of three boys at that emergency Assembly would die up on the Wall.
The rest would come down as men. Rough men, the kind the times called for. The kind who could keep a girl safe when the fragile edifice of civilization crumbled around her ears like a house of cards, and decency turned to savagery overnight. The kind the planet had spent centuries locking up in prisons and asylums, because they simply couldn’t fit into its version of civilized society. The kind it now desperately needed, warts and all.
Those men would demand. And the girls would give. The warts were what they were, and they would adjust themselves to them, if that was the price of safety. But there were only about a thousand of them. A thousand boys, for twenty-five hundred girls.
Even with just those numbers, there weren’t enough profs to soak up the excess. Almost half had died up on the Wall. They’d lead the defense, after all. Leaders always took the worst casualties.
But those numbers weren’t the only numbers in the picture. There was also the Dean’s Accelerated Studies program.
The moment there were functional aircars, the teams had gone out. Professors, grad students, TAs, some undergrads for security. All over the province and beyond, wherever they could reach in a day’s trip. They’d had batteries of tests along, and they’d picked out boys and girls. Intelligence tests, psychological tests, physical tests, there was a whole slew, down to the kids’ DNA. They’d brought in five thousand boys aged sixteen through nineteen, almost all of them confirmed orphans and the rest separated, with family presumed dead. No one from a stable situation. No one with anything to go back to. Most without even a sibling. Completely alone as they stepped out the ‘car.
They’d gone through hell, all of them. They
’d seen family die of starvation and disease. They’d eaten corpses. They’d seen people hacked to death over a potato. They’d hacked people to death over a potato themselves. They’d run from cannibals. They’d killed cannibals in self-defense. They’d stolen, they’d robbed and they’d raped. They’d crossed every line but two: They had never turned cannibal themselves. And they had never betrayed their own.
They were starving and sick, most of them, but psychologically sound for the circumstances, with high IQ and good genes. Their average age was seventeen. Their first day on campus had given them new names. They’d been told to forget their past. It no longer existed.
They’d been reborn. Induction Day was their new birthday. Poly was now their home.
The University is my family. They’d all chanted that at Induction, a million times over, until it sank in and set hard. It was on the Poly crest.
Six weeks of Induction had made them a band. They would die for the University, and they would obey its orders without question. They were plausible as the future technicians who would help put the planet back on its feet.
But the teams had also brought in seven thousand girls. All with the same qualifications. Like the boys, they’d be dead within weeks if they hadn’t come.
They went through the exact same Induction. Like the boys’, theirs had begun with their Second Birthday. Standing naked and dripping wet after shower and delousing, shorn of hair head to toe, they’d screamed “The University is my family!” until they were bleeding from the throat, while an armed instructor in an upperclassman’s uniform barked new names at them and slapped them stupid if they failed to remember, or dared to refer to themselves in the first person instead of the third.
The thing was, the instructor was male. All the instructors were.
Poly Girls had Poly Men. They had them and they obeyed them. The instructors would make them scream it until it sank in, and they’d slap them half-unconscious if they forgot it.