Forbidden Thoughts

by Milo Yiannopoulos

  Hayden hesitated at the door. Anders was not certain whether the penitent meant to leave the Schola or not. “What will you do now?” the penitent asked.

  Anders blinked at the sunlight. He had not eaten since morning, when he had dined on a bland porridge. His stomach was empty, but he was dispirited at the Schola’s rejection. “I don’t know,” he said. “I traveled from the far east, over the Rounded Mountains, to learn the secret history of the World Gone By. I will not return home empty handed, but I am not sure that I can stomach the Schola any more today.”

  “No offense,” he added. Anders was a man who wished all well who did not wish him ill, and he did not wish to upset the penitent any more than he probably already did. Not after this particular penitent had helped him. Even Hayden’s small aid had been more help than any other that these strange folk had offered.

  The penitent tilted his or her head. “No... offense? Does this truly mitigate the impact of potentially hurtful thoughts?”

  “You people are very strange,” Anders said, and squeezed past the penitent.

  Hayden followed Anders through the streets without asking. Other penitents stared at Anders as they had before, and a few now bristled at the sight of him. After the third or fourth encounter with these angrier penitents, Hayden offered an explanation, “Your gender signifiers trigger feelings that they do not wish to feel. It is considered uncouth in this city to be obviously gendered. To say nothing of carrying a weapon, or wearing clothes made of animal skin.”

  The buckskin clothing Anders wore was so commonplace over the Rounded Mountains that he had thought little, if anything of it. Anders frowned briefly and said, “But you are not offended.”

  Hayden said nothing. When Anders looked back at the penitent, he saw a confused look on the individual’s face. It was an internal sort of confusion, the look directed at the penitent itself, not at Anders. Anders let it go and changed the subject as his stomach rumbled again. “Hayden, is there some place to eat around here? The inn where I am staying serves very poor food.”

  “They might be offended if they heard you say that,” Hayden said, but in the end, the penitent lead Anders to a small restaurant—“a place in which one may consume foods which originate within the Penitent City’s locale and which will not lead to heart disease or other health problems.” There, they dined on a bland and unfulfilling meal of leafy vegetables and a block of something that pretended to be meat but was certainly more vegetables, ground up and compressed.

  Sooner or later, Anders supposed, he was going to have to leave the city, if only to hunt for something that was genuinely edible.

  They spoke little during the meal, conflicting but unintelligible emotions wracking the penitent’s face the whole time. Finally, the penitent volunteered, “I am not offended by you.”

  “No,” Anders said, “I didn’t suppose that you were. Your people are very free to let me know when they have been offended.”

  “They have a right not to receive offense.”

  Anders’ brows furrowed. “I find their hatred of my beard offensive.”

  “But your beard makes them uncomfortable.”

  “Why should my beard make them uncomfortable? It is attached to my face.”

  Hayden lowered his or her eyes—Anders was rapidly growing annoyed at trying to figure what the penitent was, precisely—and toyed with a piece of leaf. “Because it is obviously masculine, it causes people to reflect upon their biological gender, which is rude. People should not have to contemplate the dice rolls that determined their birth circumstances.”

  Anders frowned at the penitent. “And Raider’s Bane? My axe?”

  “You might harm one of us. You might harm me.”

  “And no one should have to fear harm.”

  “That is an approved truth,” Hayden agreed.

  “What about me and my kind? Should we have to fear the barbarians that sometimes raid small villages like mine? My axe keeps me safe. It has kept my loved ones safe.”

  “The Penitent City would keep them safe.”

  “With what weapons?”

  “The Penitent City has never fallen to invasion. Not since the World Gone By.”

  “There’s little enough of interest for a barbarian here.”

  “You are an unassimilated citizen,” Hayden said.

  “I’m a tribesman from across the Rounded Mountains.”

  “We would not wish to offend you by assuming that you are not a citizen of the Penitent City.”

  “But it’s obvious that I’m not. I have a beard, carry a weapon and eat real food. Like meat.” Anders stabbed his block of compressed vegetable-things with a fork. Several penitents at surrounding tables jumped. Hayden shrunk away from him.

  “I will not hurt you,” Anders said, “or your friends. Calm down.”

  The sun had set by the time that they finished their meal. Hayden did not ask to accompany him and Anders did not offer, but Hayden followed him regardless. The penitent was becoming a fixture of the city in Anders’ mind, much like the crystal towers or the strangely smooth roads. It was only when the penitent followed him up the stairs in the inn and into his room that Anders paused.

  The door closed behind Hayden. Anders turned and the penitent shrugged off her robes. At some point, Anders realized, he had begun to assume that the penitent was indeed a woman, though he had not asked and could not have said why. He was gratified, then, to see a pair of dainty breasts topped by dark nipples and that the dark thatch of hair between her legs lacked the equipment with which he was most familiar.

  “I’m not offended by you,” Hayden said quietly.

  Anders was in the spring of his manhood, and so it went as such things go.

  “I’ve coupled before,” Hayden said later, her eyes locked on the ceiling, “both with those who were born with male sex and those who were born with female sex. I’ve never… ”

  “Yes?”

  “Your gender signifiers stirred something in me. I should’ve been offended. I should’ve hated the sight of your beard and weapon and the way you speak without concern for causing offense. The secret history of the World Gone By? As though there were one truth only for the past—and the implicit assumption of the word ‘history’ that it is the story of those who were born with the male sex?”

  Anders knew that a man must choose his battles carefully, and chose to address confusion instead of out and out wrongheadedness. “You saw a man,” he said, “and as a woman, you responded. As I responded to the sight of you, when I knew you to be a woman.”

  “I have seen those who were born with the male sex before,” she said, and perhaps for the first time, Anders heard hurt in her voice.

  He rolled onto his side and stroked her cheek. “There exists in the mind of the creator of all things the forms of all things that he created. He knows what the perfect deer is like, and a deer is better or worse for how closely it partakes in the form of the perfect deer. A deer that is sickly or crippled is farther from the form of deer than a robust stag with a glorious crown.”

  Hayden frowned and Anders continued. “It is not just deer. Light, water, bread, wine, people… everything has a form that exists in the mind of the creator of the universe. Including men and women.”

  “And you are closer to the form of those born with the male sex than the penitents here who identify as a masculine person?”

  “The form of man, Hayden. It is not offensive to say that.”

  “But it is!” she protested. “‘Man’ is a word that comes with connotations. Not all who identify as masculine can have a beard or carry weapons or couple with a penis.”

  Anders scratched his beard and thought about a fellow tribesman whose beard was thin and scraggly and altogether unsatisfying to look upon, and about the old men who could no longer carry an axe. “You are right about beards and weapons,” he said, “but if a person’s body does not grow in the way that a man’s does, and grows instead as a woman’s, they are not men, but women.
There are exceptions. The injured and old and those who cannot grow beards are still men. But the more comely a man is to a woman, the closer he partakes in the form of man. You, as a woman, responded to that, and in responding to that, you came closer to the form of woman.”

  Even in the gloom, Anders could see emotions working their way across her face.

  “I do not need you to be a woman,” she said angrily.

  “No,” he said. “You, alone among the penitents, understood that what you felt was something to be embraced. You, alone, partake the way you should in the form of what you are. But what is more like a young woman than to see a man and desire him? What is more like a man than to see a woman and desire her? In our desire, we are more closely partaking in the form of what we are—and being what we are meant to be makes us strong.”

  In the morning, Anders bathed and dressed. He had not bathed the day before, and had to have Hayden show him how to operate the strange thing she called a shower. Hayden bathed separately and once again donned the robes that made her shapeless and sexless. As she fastened the robes closed, she said, “I believe that I can get you into the place in which the truths of history are sheltered. It is locked, but I am studying to be an approved guide and so I have access denied to others.”

  “I would expect that your access would be guarded more closely,” Anders said.

  “Why? Approved guides are penitents among penitents. It is they who know most deeply how we must mourn our arrogance and mistakes.”

  Anders scratched his beard. “And you?”

  Hayden did not answer.

  At the Schola, Hayden took Anders in tow and bore the brunt of the hostile stares. Once, someone said something to her in a circumlocution that Anders could barely follow. She brushed the comment aside with a directness that made the penitent’s face wrench into a knot of stunned anger.

  Hayden pushed past the penitent and lead Anders through the labyrinthine corridors of the Schola to a library filled with books and penitents. Anders drifted towards the shelves, but Hayden grabbed him by the elbow and led him to a locked door set in the back of the library. There she produced a flat sliver of crystal with metal patterns embedded in it from within her robes and tapped it against the door. A click sounded from within the door and Hayden pulled Anders inside.

  The room was gloomy and dimly lit. “To save power,” Hayden explained. “There are few people who visit this room. Most do not care about the truths of the past, or consider the extravagances of the past to be shameful.”

  Anders did not so much walk as he did drift down the rows of the books. There, in the gloom, he saw some names that he knew from the World Gone By and many he did not. Here, the philosophers of whom the elders spoke; there, a name of a historian to survive the World Gone By. But Aristotle and Tacitus were too old, too far removed from the cataclysm that claimed all of history.

  Hayden watched silently as Anders combed through the books. He pulled one, and then another, thumbing through them and placing them back on the shelves with a reverence that the penitent had never before seen.

  “Too old,” Anders muttered, staring angrily at a book. “Too old. Where are the more recent history books?”

  Hayden did not know and did not answer. Anders began pulling books from shelves with more abandon, skimming and flipping through the pages and placing them on top of the shelves instead of in the freshly vacated spaces. For nearly an hour, he scoured the stacks until at last he found what he was looking for and sat cross-legged in the middle of the aisle with the book in his lap.

  The penitent passed the time by reshelving the books disturbed by Anders’ search. Their privacy remained secure and undisturbed.

  Anders’ face held a frown that deepened as he turned each page. “We went to the moon. To other planets and other moons and rocks and icebergs in the sky. And then we stopped. We stopped dreaming.” He did not voice the question that hung in the air, but Hayden understood what he sought.

  “We were arrogant,” she said. “We colonized those worlds physically and mentally. We forced our culture upon other races by broadcasting our entertainment to the stars. We were not goddesses. We were privileged, until finally a species that was strong enough to fight back against our colonial aggressions took exception and brought their war machines to Earth. It is thus that the World Gone By went by. At least,” she added, “that seems to be the consensus of the truths of the past.”

  Anders slammed the book closed and dropped it on the ground. “You knew.”

  “We are penitents. We lament the crimes of those who donated biological material for our births and the privilege that they abused. The purpose of the Penitent City is to atone for the crimes of the World Gone By.”

  “And yet,” he said bitterly, “you build towers that reach for the sky and walk upon roads that are unnaturally smooth while machines carry your burdens from tower to tower.”

  “They are alters of shame, meant to always remind us of the sins of our biological donors. Hence the hideous and embarrassing phallic shape of a tower, instead of something more appropriately genderless.”

  “No wonder they gleam in the sunlight. You must polish them incessantly. No doubt you take great pleasure in the polishing while you mourn your fathers’ crimes.”

  If Hayden understood his own circumlocution, she gave no sign of it. Anders had to assume that she did, as her kind was given to speaking so, and that she chose to ignore the intimation. “It is the machines of the Schola that maintain our towers,” she said. “We would not know how. The shame was thrust upon us by the Offended.”

  “The invaders?”

  “The Offended,” she said, but nodded as she corrected him once again.

  “I would see these machines.”

  “You see them every time you look at our city.”

  “I would see where they come home to rest when they tire.”

  “There is a courtyard in the center of the Schola, and in the center of that, a small building that the machines enter.” Hayden shrugged once, remained silent for a short time, and then shrugged again. “We will see if my keycard will take us inside the machine’s home. Follow me.”

  Her key did not, in fact, work, but Raider’s Bane did. At another secluded and locked door, this time hidden behind a thatch of overgrown bushes, Anders brought his axe to bear on the door. It cut through the metal but came to a sudden halt a fraction of an inch into the door. It jarred Anders’ arms and shoulders and made his palms sting. He was sure that the noise would summon the penitents, but at last he remembered that they worshipped sheep. No one would come. Even Hayden was cowering against the wall.

  There were small windows that the machines came and went through just outside of Anders’ reach. Raider’s Bane could make the reach easily, though, and Anders used its blade to pull stones away from a hole. The mortar that held the stones in was crumbling, and Anders had little trouble in making the hole big enough for even his broad shoulders to fit through. The machines did not seem to be interested in maintaining their own home.

  “What are you going to do?” Hayden asked as Anders prepared to climb through.

  “Kill the invaders’ machines,” Anders answered. “Every single one myself, if I must. But the ancients often used a central device to control their machines in the World Gone By. I hope that there is a…. computer? that I can terminate. Either way, I will destroy the machines that maintain a culture that keeps us repressed and ashamed.”

  “You’ll kill the city!”

  “So slowly you won’t even notice it,” Anders said, thinking of the way fences slowly crumbled and the way weeds tried to claim gardens. “But in the end, we’ll be free to grow again.”

  Hayden waited an hour, maybe more. When Anders emerged, his face was drawn and his eyes full of a nameless horror. Hayden, though she was braver than most she knew, was from a culture whose natural inclination was to the safety and comfort of ignorance. She did not ask what Anders saw there, and instead followed him back
to his rented room.

  If she noticed that the machines of the Penitent City were sluggish and unstable, she did not say anything. She did not say anything at all, in fact, but in Anders’ room, she offered him the only comfort she knew how to show.

  The machines began to die. They did not so much fall out of the sky as they did drift lazily to the ground. Anders, too, seemed to be dying and refused to leave the room. Hayden brought him food that he rarely touched and paid the rent.

  When her monthly shame did not come in the following week, she thought about terminating the ball of cells inside her. Experiencing menses was bad enough, a reminder of a biological identity she could not avoid, but to actively be harboring another creature inside of her—it was shameful. Hideous. Those who were born with a female gender and found themselves so infected usually spent the time of their pregnancy in hiding, lest they offend those around them. Most opted to terminate the process instead.

  Penitents did not breed very fast.

  Hayden, for a reason she could not name or articulate, chose not to terminate. For a reason she could still not name or articulate, she felt no shame in telling Anders—the father. The word should have stuck in her throat. She wanted to be angry at the word as it drifted around inside her head, but she could not. Instead, she stood naked in front of Anders and pressed his hand to her belly.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, and nothing more. Anders nodded and said nothing at all to her announcement, but she thought that there might have been some spark of life in his eyes that night.

  And she was glad for it.

  “I want you to leave the city with me,” Anders said to her the next morning. He was fresh out of the shower, his first in days, and she was showering as he watched the sky. The machines were all but gone now.