The Y Chromosome

by Leona Gom

  “You have to stop it,” he said.

  “Stop it?”

  “Yes. It could be a male. You have to stop it.”

  She hesitated. “It’s not that simple,” she said at last. “A person and her doctor have to go to considerable time and expense to produce ova-fusion implantation. A doctor wouldn’t want to stop a healthy pregnancy.”

  He stared at her, not understanding. “But that’s not true. A doctor will stop it whenever you want. It’s always your choice.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “From Doctor. In Fairview. She’d make it stop, even if the ones here wouldn’t. She’d come down and do it, if I asked her to.”

  “I see.” Delacour leaned her head against the back of the sofa.

  And then he understood.

  “You did it on purpose,” he whispered. “You wanted this.” His head felt like a room in which the law of gravity had suddenly disappeared, the furniture flying about, chaotic.

  She lifted her head, looked at him, her blue eyes forcing themselves into his. “I didn’t plan this,” she said quietly. “Please believe that.”

  “Then you have to stop it. Can’t you see that? If the child is a male — how could you explain it? Don’t you see what it would mean?” He paused, but she didn’t answer. “Delacour.” He had never spoken her name before. “Please.”

  Still she didn’t reply. He wanted to grab her, shake the right answer from her.

  “Daniel,” she said finally, “you have to realize that eventually people will find out. With the train up to the Peace now, you can’t remain isolated anymore. It has to happen sometime —”

  “And you want to be the one to make it happen.” His voice was thick with disgust. He didn’t believe she hadn’t planned it; it had been her intention all along, to conceive, from a male, another experiment, and he had only, after all, been something for her to use. He thought of the last time she had come, the things she had said, just another trick, when beneath everything must already have been her suspicion, or knowledge, of this. She had even brought a bottle of wine. To celebrate, she said.

  “You mustn’t assume it will be something disastrous.”

  “But it will! Of course it will! Before the Change —”

  “— was a different time. You said yourself you’re not that different from us now.” She leaned forward. “Think about it for a moment, Daniel. Doesn’t the idea excite you, even a little? If males became known again in the outside world, you wouldn’t have to keep isolated on the farms. You could be free. Don’t tell me you haven’t wished for that.”

  He shifted in his seat. “Of course I have. But I know I sometimes have to deny my own wishes for the good of others.” Even as he said it he felt guilty, knowing how much he had imperilled the good of others by his selfishness.

  But to his surprise Delacour’s gaze faltered, and he knew he had touched something in her.

  “And the child,” he pressed on, “think of the child.” He did so himself, now. He had spoken of a time such as this with Bluesky, and then with Shaw-Ellen, the special joy of it when they would decide they were ready — and now it had happened, not with Bluesky or Shaw-Ellen, but with Delacour, and there could be nothing of joy here, nothing but disaster. He forced himself to continue, to imagine it. “It would be a freak, despised and feared. What do you intend for it, once you’ve shown it so proudly to the world? To sell it to a zoo?”

  She flinched. “I’m not that evil,” she said quietly. “My God.”

  “You’re doing something evil. You’re interfering in something you have no right to.”

  She only sat there, looking past him, as though at someone else standing behind his chair. It was impossible for him to tell what she was thinking, her face impassive as a plate, as a picture on the wall. She was a stranger to him, an utter stranger, whom he had deluded himself into thinking he was beginning to know, to understand.

  “Of course you’re concerned,” she said finally. “And angry. But everything will be all right. You’ll see.” She stood up.

  “It won’t be all right! For God’s sake —” She was getting ready to leave, to walk out his door and carry on with her mad plan, against all logic, against all entreaties. He fumbled to his feet, went over to her, and clutched her arm. She stiffened, and he made himself drop his hand. Everything had happened so quickly: just a few moments ago she had been standing outside his door, and he had gone forward to meet her, eagerly, and now —

  “I suppose I should go,” she said, stepping back from him.

  “You promised me,” he said, desperately. “Does your word mean nothing to you?”

  “I didn’t expect this when I promised.” Her fingers twisted at her teacher’s-robe. “I’m sorry.” She turned and walked to the door.

  “Don’t you care at all about what will happen?” he cried at her back. “To the world? To the farms? To me?”

  “Daniel, I do —”

  “To yourself?”

  She hesitated. “Myself?”

  “The world will judge you the way I do. The world will despise you.”

  She put her hand on the doorknob, flexed her fingers, tightened them. When she turned to look at Daniel, her face had a slight, unreadable smile. “We’ll see,” she said. She opened the door. “Well.” She hesitated, rubbing her hand on the doorknob. “Goodbye then.”

  He couldn’t answer. Goodbye then. It was over, just like that. He had lost everything.

  When she saw that he wasn’t going to reply she stepped into the hallway. As she pulled the door closed behind her she kept her eyes down, fixed on her hand.

  He stared at the closed door. Goodbye then. This was no dream, no nightmare on which the door of daylight would suddenly open.

  He began to pace frantically about the room. How could he have trusted her? How could he have been such a fool?

  What he had to do, he knew, was tell Highlands immediately what had happened. There was no way now to avoid his confession. If he had told her the truth right away things would never have come to this. He sat down at his desk, took out a piece of paper and pencil, and wrote down the date, in a cramped script that hardly resembled his, and then, “Dear Highlands.” The pencil drooped in his fingers. What could he say? Where even to begin? The image of the farms burning, a vengeful purge, and himself holding the leading torch, what he had seen that first night he and Delacour made love, seared his mind again.

  He got up and pushed his chair back so abruptly it nearly toppled over, and stumbled outside into the hall. He got onto a moveway which took him into University, and when he got off he found himself in the History sector. It made him laugh out loud, and an elderly person with a red walking stick looked at him strangely and raised her cane as though to prod him awake.

  He saw a door to the outside and took it, and stood for a long time letting the cold October air scrape at his lungs.

  The door beside him opened. Someone stepped out wearing a teacher’s-robe. The wind billowed it out hugely in front of her.

  He ran.

  Twice he fell; the pillows of snow beside the path cushioned his falls, although he still scraped one knee enough to bleed. But when he stumbled, dripping with snow and perspiration, back into his apartment, he knew what he would do.

  He would go home. Every moment he had stayed here had made things worse. He would go home, make his horrible confessions in person. Highlands had to be told, without anymore stupid delays or excuses. If he left on the morning train he would reach her sooner than a letter.

  With a feverish energy he began to pack. There wasn’t much, really — a few clothes and hygiene items, but mostly books and papers, which he forced himself to take, resisting the urge to leave them all, as though they were responsible for everything. In an hour he was finished. He sat down among the four suitcases and stared around the apartment, tryi
ng to imagine himself gone, everything that had happened to him here erased.

  He would have to inform University that he was going, he remembered; he couldn’t just disappear without explanation. He dug through the papers left in his desk until he found an absence form and filled it in, and then he went out to the University maildrop and left it there. He scribbled a note to Mitchell-Star as well, simply saying he had to go home, and slid it under her door. He stood outside her apartment for several moments, even raised his hand to knock, but he knew it would be a mistake. His throat went tight and hard, a pain he couldn’t swallow away. She had been his only friend here, his only real friend.

  Back in his apartment, he was anxious to leave, but it was still several hours before the train left. He tried to sleep, but as soon as he drifted off he would jerk awake, thinking he had slept through the timer. His thoughts were full of Delacour, of what she would do. Would his leaving alarm her, make her think he had gone somewhere to plot his revenge? He didn’t want her to think anything but the bitter truth, that she had won and that he was going home to hide.

  He would leave her a note, he decided, as he had for Mitchell-Star. If he left it at her apartment, he could address it to Bowden, too; it would be easier then to make the message formal and to the point. He tried several versions, but the one he finally copied and slipped under their door sometime in the dark early hours, when it seemed he must be the only person in the whole complex still awake, said: I thought I would let you know that I am going back to the farms, and that I have filed my absence papers with University. I simply find the life here too difficult. Thank you again for having me to dinner. — Daniel

  He stood outside that door for a long time, too, wrenched with memory. Delacour. He thought of their lovemaking, their conversations that seemed now to be all fragments and half-truths. He imagined her inside, curled asleep into the arms of Bowden. And inside her, growing, something she had stolen from him, something she could use to destroy them all.

  A rage against her began suddenly to throb wildly at his temples. He felt like kicking, beating at the door until she opened it, then beating at her. His hand clenched the doorknob, as though he were going to rip it away, use it as a weapon.

  He could kill her. Yes, he wanted to kill her. The thought was clear and strong in his mind. If she were standing in front of him right now he could solve everything so simply — he could kill her —

  He shuddered, leaned against the wall, and closed his eyes. Nausea welled up into his throat; he swallowed several times, tasting it.

  He had wanted to kill her. How could his mind have formed the unspeakable idea? Murder. Since the Change it was practically unknown, the act of someone deranged. It was what the males had done. He bent over, took a long, shuddering breath. Do you find yourself wanting to hit things? And he had answered ingenuously, Sometimes. Don’t you?

  Finally he made himself straighten and walk away. But he couldn’t forget the feeling that had overwhelmed him. He thought about it as he stood waiting for the bus to take him to the train station, and all the way there, barely noticing the city passing by his window. He remembered how he had read in one of the pre-Change books a male saying that as childbirth makes a woman from a girl, killing makes a man from a boy. It sounded too barbaric, too absurd, to be serious, he had thought, explaining it away; the male must have been speaking in a metaphor. And now, he had seen the barbarism in himself.

  But in a curious way, he would think later, when he was back home, it was that incident that changed something in him, that reached inside and shook forever the boy, the child, from him.

  When the train arrived he took a seat that faced forward, toward the north, and began his long trip home.

  6

  BOWDEN

  BOWDEN LOOKED AT THE note for some time. She remembered who Daniel was, of course, and the dinner, and how Delacour had insisted on seeing her to her apartment and didn’t come back for a long time. Her leaving now had something to do with Delacour, Bowden thought angrily. The note might be just a courtesy, but she doubted it.

  When Delacour got up and wandered, yawning, into the centre-room Bowden handed her the note.

  “What’s this?”

  “It was slipped under the door.”

  She watched Delacour’s face carefully as she read. Yes, it had clearly been a message intended for Delacour, and its literal words were only a small part of its meaning. Delacour sank down onto the sofa, folded the note back up, running her fingers several times over the crease. She stared across the room without speaking.

  “You made love with her, didn’t you?” Bowden’s voice was tight. Delacour said nothing. “And you’ve done some real damage this time, haven’t you?”

  Still Delacour didn’t answer, only stared across the room, her fingers mechanically turning the note around and around.

  “All right, don’t talk to me, then,” Bowden said.

  “Oh, Bowden.” Delacour’s voice was low, miserable. “I’ve —”

  “You’ve what?” She could justify her anger this time, Bowden thought; this time Delacour had hurt someone else.

  “I’ve gotten into something deeper than usual.”

  Bowden’s hand tightened on her glass of juice. Deeper than usual. They were the words she had dreaded someday to hear, the words that meant Delacour might love someone else. She made herself walk slowly over to Delacour, sit down in a chair opposite her.

  “Tell me,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm.

  Delacour turned her face away, closed her eyes.

  “Tell me,” Bowden insisted. “This Daniel. What happened between you and her?”

  Finally, after a wait so long Bowden thought she would scream with impatience, Delacour turned her face to Bowden’s. Her eyes ground themselves into Bowden’s. “Not her,” she whispered. “Him.”

  “What?”

  “Him. Daniel is a male.”

  Bowden stared at her. It made no sense. “What are you talking about?” But a fear was starting to spread in her, a horrible, rummaging fear.

  “You remember what we saw when we were up at the Peace. The two people. And the way one of them looked different. It was Daniel. And he’s a male.”

  “Don’t be absurd. That’s not possible. It’s some trick, or a joke —” She gave a feeble laugh, leaned forward a little, trying to prod a conceding smile from Delacour, yes, of course, it was a joke, how could there be males alive, how ridiculous —

  “Bowden.” Delacour leaned forward, dropped her hands heavily onto Bowden’s knees. “It’s true. Believe me.”

  Bowden was so filled with horror she could hardly breathe. It was her childhood nightmare, turned hideously real. Her heart was racing, shouting, Run, run.

  “He’s nothing to be afraid of. You met him. He’s not that different from us.”

  “Not that different? A male? Not that different?”

  “I tell you, he’s nothing to be afraid of. He was just here to learn, to be educated, like any of us. All he wanted was to be —” she hesitated “— to be left alone.”

  “Delacour, for God’s sake — You’re saying they’ve come back, that after all this time they’ve come back, to take over again, to destroy us —”

  “He’s not like that. For heaven’s sake, he was just a terrified child.”

  “But who knows how many of them there are, what their plans are?”

  “He said there was just him and his father now. Look, he’s no monster — I think there’s more to fear in me than in him.”

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Bowden whispered.

  “I got to know him, Bowden. He’s no danger to us, I’m sure of it.”

  “And you slept with … him. With a male.” She looked at Delacour as though she were a stranger.

  “It was the usual thing to do, once, you know. I was just curious, t
hat’s all.”

  “Curious,” Bowden said dully. Around her she could feel the walls disintegrate, a blizzard wind of destruction and chaos sweeping across the world.

  • • •

  THEY TALKED AND ARGUED about it all morning, forgetting about going to work, about eating or getting dressed. It was only when Delacour finally shouted, “So what do want us to do? Do you want us to kill him? Do you want us to go up there and kill him? Is that what you want?” that Bowden sank down, exhausted, in her chair and sighed, “No.”

  But Delacour only looked at her sorrowfully, and finally knelt down beside her and put her head on Bowden’s lap. Bowden ran her fingers through Delacour’s hair, absently, feeling tired, defeated. She tightened her fingers in Delacour’s hair, lightly, could feel her tremble in response.

  “I’m sure it will be okay,” Delacour said. “I’m sure I can handle it.”

  “Handle what?” Bowden asked.

  “It’ll be okay,” Delacour said. “Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry, Bowden thought bitterly. As though she could forget what she had learned, as though she could ever feel safe again.

  At work in the next days she was barely able to function, and twice she found herself in a patient room with no memory of why she had come there. At lunch one day Shawna, one of the other helpers, said jokingly about a patient of theirs who had a habit of slapping at people when she spoke to them, “She’s like those males you see on the vidspools — she seems to like beating you up.”

  The others at the table laughed. “Maybe she thinks we enjoy it,” said one.

  “It’s not funny,” Bowden said tightly.

  The others stopped laughing and looked at her. “It was just a joke,” said Shawna. She leaned over to glance down at her new baby sleeping in the rollbed beside her.

  “We shouldn’t make jokes about pre-Change times,” Bowden said, picking up her glass of milk. It banged on her teeth when she lifted it to her mouth.

  One of the others shrugged. “Why not?”

  “We were being killed, murdered,” Bowden said. “How can we laugh at what the males did to us?”