The Grapple

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Their average age was fourteen. There hadn’t been one single girl aged over sixteen, at least in the first six induction waves. The youngest were barely twelve. That was the official low-end cutoff. But some were younger still. Every third would offer herself to an instructor by the end of her first week. And they’d all get slapped bloody, and be told in no uncertain terms that a shit inductee wasn’t worthy of a Poly Man’s dick. A worthy girl had tabs. A worthy girl was a Poly Girl.

  The instructors had been picked very carefully. The Dean had a strict policy about that.

  The boys had gotten azure and purple tabs mostly, except for the thousand or so who’d gone straight into the Campus Police. A few got gold. There were even some emerald. But the girls, in their overwhelming majority, had been handed red tabs. They were smart enough to go to the technical colleges, one day. Perhaps most of them even would. But first they needed a basic education. A real education, not what had passed for such on prewar Paradise. H&SS was now a giant prep school.

  The girls weren’t here to learn how to fix power coils, anyway. That’s not why the Dean had brought them to campus. Quite a few had gone from inductee barracks straight to an instructor’s room. In fact, in every class, an instructor had taken at least one. Their names were announced in front of the rest, at graduation. Sometimes the Dean’s hints were quite explicit.

  Plenty of men on campus had turned out to like ‘em young. The Planetary Director of Power Generation and Grid Management was the record-setter there. His youngest Pin was a purple-tab acceleree who’d gotten a Dean’s Exemption to the lower age cutoff on account of stellar IQ. Within three days of meeting the good professor in late February, she was moving into his cottage. And no, she wasn’t his substitute daughter. Juliana Flores made no secret of how she spent her nights. She was proud to be her Patron’s favorite. He treated her like a princess, and she loved him.

  Doctor Barboza’s favorite girl had just turned ten, last week. The Dean didn’t care, as long as she made it to class on time and did all of her homework.

  When Chief Delavre had brought it up, the Dean’s answer had been instructive.

  In the name of protecting that girl from the man who worshiped the ground she walked on, he’d said, the old world would have taken a cavalier of the Order of Merit and co-laureate of the Crown Prize from his lab, and thrown him into a filthy cage with thieves and murderers, to rot. In the name of democracy and equality, it would have handed her two birthrights and the option to purchase a third, same as every dumb-as-a-board barrio ninny. She would’ve sat in some lab for two centuries, messing with machines, and used maybe one, if the planet got lucky.

  In this world, four or five years from now when she could pass the med exam, that girl would get her implant yanked. In between helping Doctor Barboza with his research and continuing it after he was gone, she would bear at least a dozen babies, all carrying her priceless DNA. And his.

  A world that cared more about the genes of mushrooms and pond scum than it cared about the genes of its people was not a world that deserved to survive. In the long term, it wouldn’t, anyway. The Dean had done his best to keep that world alive while it had existed, in the name of humanity. But now that it was gone, he’d be damned if he’d let it be rebuilt.

  Barboza’s favorite girl had approached him, not the other way around. A little birdie told her that he’d be looking. Her own observation had confirmed immediately that what the little birdie’s anonymous note had said was true. Girls always noticed attention. She knew what attention meant, in this new world, and what was expected of her in response.

  It took her two days to find out that he had no one so far. All three of her Induction best friends had been in on it. They’d staked out his cottage and followed him around campus to make sure. They were all roommates. It had been easy for the other three to skip about and make excuses in the chaos of their first few days out of Induction. Sciences was already strict, but H&SS was simply overwhelmed back then, before things had gotten properly organized. One had earned a switching, but it was only three blows, in private, with rubber. Not even on bare skin. She’d been through worse, she didn’t care.

  Then they’d simply knocked on his door one evening, and asked. All four of them, together.

  A Senior Lecturer could take all of them, and still have two slots to spare. They’d heard it would be formal soon, they’d seen a draft. They wanted to go as a package. They ended up staying the night.

  Barboza was, by far, not the only man on campus that sort of thing had happened to.

  From the moment they moved out of the inductee barracks, the Refugee girls had only one thing on their minds. If they weren’t living in a Poly Man’s room, if they weren’t sleeping in a Poly Man’s bed, something was wrong with them. A Poly Girl had a Poly Man, to love and obey and cherish. If she didn’t, she was nothing. When they got a man, they became pliable as wax, and no dog could have matched their loyalty.

  Their whole world was gone. They’d been given another. The instructors had had them for six weeks.

  It wasn’t just bitch-slaps and yelling in those barracks. That would have been enough for nine out of ten of those girls, but Lucir was a thorough man. He hadn’t overthrown Palmer by being sloppy.

  The girls’ instructors had come from the medical school, from the third top-rated psych department on the planet. They’d been given an objective. They’d been given all the tools of their trade. And they’d been freed to use them. Morality was no longer an obstacle. There was only the all-important Goal.

  The instructors had done their jobs well.

  The Survivor girls had hissed at their rivals like cats, but there was nothing they could do about them but try harder.

  Find a man, girl! Find a man! Do whatever you have to do! April First is just ‘round the corner!

  They tried their best. They tried everything. Most had succeeded. But many had failed. And then Pin Day came, and went. And there were no more open Personal Staff slots.

  A good quarter of the girls on campus couldn’t find a Patron. Even among the Survivors, there was always that other girl. Among the Refugees, the proportion of ownerless girls rose to near one third. And their plight was always before the eyes of the rest. If a man had Grounds, he could Petition. The Dean had already granted one.

  Keep your man, girl, don’t give him Grounds! No matter what happens, keep your man!

  There was a reason why, on a campus whose female graduates had been made infamous last year for having the lowest average fertility rate and highest average age at first marriage on the planet, the Office of the Dean was now inundated by a flood of forms whose letterhead bore the words “Petition for Removal of Contraceptive Implant” in large, officious block script.

  On paper, the girls didn’t have a say in the matter. The decision was entirely up to their men. But in practice they were the ones behind the flood. They had primordial instinct to tell them what would secure and improve their position in their new arrangements, and they followed that instinct wholeheartedly.

  Those petitions were more precious to the girls even than the official Petition to Arm Personal Staff. They would beg and cajole their men endlessly, and most would give in right away. The girls were their girls. Their property. They wanted their property safe. And most of them wanted it happy. Life was just easier that way.

  The amazing thing, thought X, was not that no one had seen the Design from the beginning, but that no one could still see the Design. Within the next two to three months, when the necessary facilities were ready, the Dean would grant the flood of petitions, the way he’d granted the flood of the other petitions when the campus weapons lines had run off enough guns and knives and Chief Delavre was ready with his abbreviated training program. Two to three months after that, every second Personal Staff girl on campus would be pregnant. And after that, there would be a flood of promotions among the men. And satellite campuses. They were already planning the first ones.

  Klaus Weinberger
was a Doctor of Applied and Comparative Sociology. He wasn’t inventing any of this.

  Among the Poly Girls there was a hierarchy. The girls from the technical colleges, the ones with the emerald, azure, purple and gold lapel tabs, were the ones best off. Yesterday’s ridiculous nerds were now flattered and fawned upon by their less-fortunate peers, sometimes even desperately seduced.

  Medicine, engineering, accounting, data science, computer science, robotics, mathematics, the industrial disciplines, the pure and applied sciences, those were the majors to be envied. The useful girl was the one whom the Minister truly protected. Technical girls got good, ample rations, even meat on occasion. The most favored, professors’ Personal Staff and the like, were able to wield substantial power by proxy.

  But a surprising number of the technical girls had ended up without a set of Personal Staff tabs on their lapels. They’d been slow on the uptake when it came to social intelligence, and now it was too late to correct their mistake. The Dean had cracked down on crime, and the campus was much safer than it used to be. The Campus Police would make serious efforts, if a technical girl was involved. But the safety of an ownerless girl, even a technical girl, was always conditional.

  Her golden senior’s tabs had not protected the girl who’d been forced to run across campus, near-naked and dripping blood, to seek treatment for a torn anal sphincter courtesy of Professor Pillár. They could secure her compensation neither for the trauma of what had been done to her, nor for the six tissue welds she’d required. The most they could do was secure her a transfer to a different directorate. Doctor Hernan Pillár, Senior Lecturer in Applied Materials and Planetary Director of Mining and Heavy Industry, was far more useful to the Minister than some senior-year accountant. All he got was a stiff talking-to.

  Below the technical girls were the girls with the light green tabs of the nursing school. Their skills were much in demand, especially in the case of the ones who’d been about to graduate as nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants when the bombs fell. During the Siege they’d been invaluable, and the Campus Police still protected them with special zeal. Their workplaces were female-heavy, which gave them safety in numbers. Most were, at any rate, owned either by some emerald-tabber from the med school, or by one of the campus cops who guarded them whenever and wherever they went off-campus. The overwhelming majority of the rest had attached themselves to men whose wounds they’d treated during the Siege.

  Of all the girls, the nurses had reacted fastest and earliest to the sea change that had washed over Poly. By the third week of the Siege, long before the Dean had formalized the current social arrangements, most were already hunting for men. The nurses had instincts.

  Below the nurses were the red-tab girls from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. They had administrative skills. They’d been taught to operate databases and use information management AIs, to collate and present data, to do research. They were trainable in simple technical tasks.

  Well over half of the red-tab girls were owned formally. Most of the rest, at least among the Survivors, had a permanent protector. Some had even wheedled their way into a man’s room. A Third Girl’s life was always insecure, but it was better than the alternatives.

  As with any ownerless girl, much about the condition of an ownerless red-tabber depended on the directorate she happened to work in. There was a world of difference between the girls who worked for Diego Vargas or Marty Milena and the girls who worked for Hesus Barboza or Hernan Pillár. But, in most cases, ownerless red-tab girls could complain if abused too badly, and their complaints were sometimes even listened to. Ownerless H&SS girls were decently fed, and their protectors’ little gifts went a long way toward making the lives of most at least somewhat tolerable.

  Ownerless white-tab girls from the College of Arts were at the bottom the Poly Girls’ pecking order. All they had was the uniform, a bunk in the dorms, and ration coupons enough for twelve hundred calories a day in unflavored algae paste and freeze-dried fungal mat from North Campus Grocery and a single 250-gram bar of brown laundry soap per month. Their only form of directorate salary consisted of four to six hundred calories in lunchtime stew and bread, depending on directorate and day of week. And they counted themselves lucky to have that.

  The only reason the white-tab girls had made it through the Collapse was that Dean Weinberger had mercifully chosen not to throw them off campus at the outset. And this had only been due to his overwhelming need for unskilled labor. These facts most CA girls were reminded of on a daily basis.

  The technically trainable ones had been filtered out months ago, and had traded white tabs for red. The ones who could find a Patron had long ago done so. The remainder possessed no broadly useful skills that couldn’t be replicated by any random ninny off the street, and had no prospect of acquiring any in the near future. Their only hope lay in attaching themselves informally to someone up the hierarchy, man or woman, who would keep them even moderately safe. For this they would cook and clean, fetch and carry, and do whatever else they had to do.

  Ownerless white-tab girls got passed around like packs of cigarettes. The Campus Police couldn’t care less what happened to them, as long as none were killed, or seriously injured. And there were a lot of them. The men had picked up on the Dean’s preferences right away. They’d even had a joke make the rounds. Pin any girl you want, the punchline went, as long as her tabs aren’t white.

  Professor Menendez was a great protector of white-tab girls. The man fancied himself a connoisseur of the arts. The Directorate of Textile and Light Industry was one of the very few where art skills were useful.

  Ninety-five percent of the planet was wearing shapeless, government-produced ersatz. Even most of the collaborationist upper class depended on centralized clothing distribution. But the Director of Textiles had a set of functional Tailors in his office, officially for the purpose of producing samples. When he was feeling magnanimous, which was often, his girls got to keep the samples after they modeled them for the boss. The sample show smoothly segued into a strip-tease, every time. Pretty pouts and plentiful varied sex always put the Director of Textiles in a generous mood.

  White-tab girls went out of their way to try and catch Doctor Menendez’s eye. If they managed to do so, they were eager to please. The director’s tastes were neither unpleasant nor unusual, and he liked his girls happy. Most white-tab girls had, at any rate, long ago gotten over any qualms they might once have had regarding paying for favors with their bodies. Servicing the Director of Textiles meant good money on the black market. And at least some protection from the likes of Hernan Pillár.

  Lately, Director Menendez had been spending entirely too much time with his girls, and not enough time doing his job. Unlike Pillár, with his routine of daily scheduled fifteen-minute sexual release to punctuate a hundred-hour workweek in the same way as morning workout, breakfast, lunch and dinner, Menendez was naturally lackadaisical, easily distracted, and prone to burst labor. Which would now serve X’s purposes nicely.

  “I want a report on Angeles Province,” growled X in his surliest tone, drilling the Director of Textiles with a murderous glare.

  “For two weeks, the government has been authorized to undertake limited production of military-grade textile items. You’ve known about the pending authorization for a month. I am yet to see a single sample poncho, never mind a production run. In the meantime, we have a rapidly developing guerrilla threat in the northernmost districts.

  “Leaving aside that fiasco, for three months now, your directorate has failed to meet the new provincial production quotas for work clothing and uniforms.

  “I find the situation most distressing.”

  “Yessir,” coughed Menendez in a single word, turning white as a sheet. “My apologies, sir.”

  “Tomorrow. Nine o’clock sharp. In detail, by facility. And your plan to rectify the problems.

  “And button your damned shirt! This is not a pub!”

  “Yessi
r!” replied Menendez as X slapped the connection out of existence.

  Everyone in Textiles would end up working through the night, thought X. By nine tomorrow, Menendez would be half-dead on his feet from terror and exhaustion. He would certainly screw up the briefing. By the time the epic dressing-down was over, he’d be sure that setting up a specialty textile mill in the north of the province had been his good idea, and that the timely arrival of said idea had saved him from great danger.

  It would all look as natural as sunset. Perfectly deniable, thought X.

  * * *

  “They come,” thought Reginald Freeman. “They come, and His Judgment comes with them.”

  Eli Levinson’s final estimate scrolled mercilessly across his net glasses, in all of its multi-digit horror.

  Two thousand battleships. Four thousand battlecruisers. A thousand carriers. Twenty-five thousand escorts. The mightiest fleet assembled in six centuries. The greatest enemy armada in the history of the League.

  “They outnumber us three to one in capital ships,” thought the admiral. “They outgun us four to one in throw weight of shell.”

  Nine thousand capital ships would clash here this day. Thirty thousand light combatants would fill the void with their missiles. More than two hundred thousand fighters and bombers would battle for control of Hadassah’s space.

  They did not expect this. They did not plan it. This was not what they had planned.

  Sayf al-Masrikh was supposed to bring large forces. Powerful forces. Mighty forces. But not this. Never this.

  “Upon this day it is decided,” the admiral’s lips moved silently, “who shall live and who shall die. Who by fire and who by water; who by plague and who by hunger; who by the sword and who by a wild beast...” Against nations and peoples it was decided. Against even the Heavenly Hosts themselves. And all Creation could end in an instant. This very moment, if it was His capricious will.