by Darrell Bain
"Good idea," Donna said.
Rita squeezed my hand approvingly. She probably didn't realize how uncomfortable I still felt with the situation. At least I had said her name, though.
We strolled slowly along the rows of Leyland Cypress that lined the boulevard leading toward the campus, almost alone on the sidewalk. Most people must have still been home with their eyes and ears tuned to their screens. I was tempted to scan the newswebs with my comphone but no one else seemed interested, so I didn't.
As we neared the college, I began to hear a peculiar noise, like the muttering of a distant thunderstorm, but the discordance came to me as a cadence, as if it were being conducted rather than occurring spontaneously.
"What's that noise?" Donna asked.
Seyla stopped, bringing the rest of us to a halt to avoid running into her. She frowned and squinted her eyes as if it would help her hear better. After a moment, she said, "Sounds like that class I was in last year when the prof failed everyone."
"No, it's rhythmic," Donna said. "Like someone chanting."
Listening closely, I agreed with her. We walked on. The noise became louder. It was discernable as voices now, some seeming to be opposing the others. We turned a corner and the sex gate came into view. There was a crowd around it, split into four smaller groups, two large ones on one side of the gate and two smaller ones on the other side. The groups were separated on each side by police in riot gear. Floodlights from nearby squad cars illuminated the side of the gate where most of the crowd was gathered. The two groups were shouting at each other and at the line of people, old and young, who were attempting to run the gauntlet along the tenuously divided aisle being held open by the police. Some of them shouldered hastily constructed signs:
SEXUAL FREEDOM NOW!
YOUTH FOR THE ELDERLY!
THESE ARE THE DEVIL'S GATES!
GOD SAYS: THREESCORE AND TEN!
It looked to me as if there were not nearly enough cops in proportion to the number of demonstrators and I didn't like the looks of the yelling mobs. Most of them were dressed in ragged jeans or the cheap jumpsuits the fourth worlders from Old Houston favored.
"Wait up," I said. "I don't like the looks of those goons." I felt instinctively in my pocket for the little automatic I was licensed to carry, knowing it wasn't there. Right after I was issued my permit, I took it everywhere with me but I had gradually gotten out of the habit. Nothing requiring a firearm ever happened in North Houston and I rarely went anywhere except to class or a bookstore. I still like printed books, even though I could have downloaded them and read them on my comphone just as easily.
"There's cops there," Donna said. "Come on."
I hung back, then followed reluctantly when Rita began to move forward again. The chanting became louder, but I still couldn't make out what was being shouted because the groups were overriding each other.
At my suggestion, we angled around to approach the gate from the end where the lesser crowd was gathered. I guess I'm not very brave. Just as we got to the end of the clear lane the cops were maintaining, a nude woman emerged from the gate. She was short and stocky and not very pretty, except for the glossy red hair flowing down to her shoulders.
"There's one!" a male voice shouted. The opposing demonstrators surged forward. A shield went flying into the air as a cop was bowled over. The open path narrowed, then closed completely as the cops were buried under a writhing tangle of bodies.
"Help! Help me!" a woman's shrill scream rose over the tumult. "Hel-" Her voice was cut off as sharply as a broken phone conversation.
"I got 'er, I got 'er!" a medley of drug-roughened voices shouted in triumph, louder than the cacophony of cursing, yelling cops and the screams and grunted obscenities of the tangled mob as they fought each other with clubs and fists.
Donna sprang forward like a frightened gazelle and disappeared into the mob before any of us could stop her. Seyla screamed and followed her into the chaotic rioting.
"Christ on a chip," I said, the worst curse I knew. My knees buckled like warm taffy as an adrenaline surge spread through my body. I would have fallen if Rita hadn't been holding onto me. I took a step forward while my heart hammered in my chest, expecting violent action but not getting it. Another step and my legs stiffened. "Stay here!" I yelled to Rita and plunged into the mob. I could have saved my breath; she was right behind me.
A siren warbled in the distance, heard only dimly as I struggled to find Donna and Seyla. All I could see was thick, burly necks and breasts jouncing under pullovers and worn jumpsuits. Grimacing faces with teeth bared crossed and recrossed in front of my eyes, dipping and weaving. Fists and clubs were swinging. I caught a blow on the side of my head and another in the ribs. Dazed, I swung a balled fist at the nearest dirty face. The woman dropped out of sight and another replaced her. She was waving a paring knife, but her arm was entangled with two others. Another blow to the head sent me reeling. The siren undulated above the noise, coming closer and closer. I felt a sudden fearful terror and knew the subsonics must be beating on my brain. I was barely able to keep from turning tail and running. "Rita! Where are you? Donna! Seyla!"
Some of the mob began covering their ears to keep out the undercurrent of subsonic compulsion. I ignored it as best I could; it helped that I knew what it was. Beyond a grubby man bending over in front of me, I caught a glimpse of Rita. She was struggling with another woman, trying to pull her away from a prone figure. The man in front of me raised up, still holding his ears. I kicked him in the crotch and he went down, sucking in a gasp of pain. I stepped over him just as Rita finally gave up pulling at her opponent. Instead, she backed up a step on the bloody grass and kicked her in the head. She fell onto her side, giving us a chance to stare at what was laying on the ground in front of her.
The mob was beginning to disperse by the time I got a look. The homely redheaded woman I had seen come out of the gate was barely recognizable. Blood and dirt and grass stains covered her body. Her one intact eye stared blankly at nothing. She was very dead.
A hand grabbed my arm from behind and twisted it up against my shoulder blades. "You're under arrest," a voice shouted in my ear.
"No, no, we were trying to help her," Donna said, getting up and separating herself from several other prone figures. Her top was hanging in tatters over her heaving breasts and tears were streaming down her face. It was the first time I had ever seen Don-Donna cry.
The pressure on my arm eased. Beside me, Rita spoke to the cop who was still holding onto me. "Honest, Officer, that's what we were doing. Oh, that poor woman."
The cop let go of me. "Let's see some I.D.," he said.
We all produced our student cards. The cop accepted them, all except for Donna's. "That's not you," he said. He dropped his hand down to his belted sidearm.
"Yes it is. I stumbled through this same gate yesterday when it first appeared."
The policeman sighed. "All right. Better get your picture changed as soon as the college opens again. If it does. God knows what's going to happen if this keeps up."
We were all able to walk away. The only halfway serious injury was a gash on my rib cage, but I had enough med supplies back at the house to take care of it, along with the bruises and scratches we all carried. I was still a little dizzy from the two blows to the head and my swirling thoughts didn't make me any steadier. Was this a typical example of how people were going to react to the gates, or just an aberration? And what the cop had said, "...if this keeps up". And all those fourth world goons. I didn't credit them with organizing the demonstration; this far into North Houston meant they must have been hired and transported in to take care of the rough work. I felt sick. I don't mind a person believing in causes I disagreed with, but God's Chip, why do they have to resort to violence? I wondered how much of it was going on elsewhere and suddenly, I had an urgent compulsion to get home and turn on some more news.
Chapter Four
Modern medicine is wonderful. I don't know how people us
ed to put up with having to go see a doc for every little thing wrong with their bodies, then having to get permission before buying anything much more complex than aspirin.
I straddled a straight-backed chair in the study while Rita applied a germicide and taped my ribs. Seyla had hardly been marked but Donna was beginning to show purple bruises all over her upper body. She stripped off what was left of her top and let Seyla rub some Hemacylin over the bruises. I looked away after she finished with her back and began working on her breasts.
I stood up and bent over, sideways and then as far back as I could. I didn't feel any grating or pain like the time when I cracked one of my ribs falling off a horse.
"Now let's get the news," Donna said, pulling on one of the new tops she had bought. Luckily, none of her new clothes had been ruined. When she plunged into the mob, she had dropped her bundle and no one had bothered it.
"Go ahead, I'll be there in a minute," I said. She and Seyla left.
"Is anything else wrong?" Rita asked.
"No. Come on." I led her into our room and pulled open the bottom drawer of the bedside caddy. I picked up the little automatic nestled in its holster and slid it out. There were two extra clips laying beside it and I picked those up, too.
"Lee-"
"Don't argue with me about this, Rita. I'm not going anyplace except bed anymore unless I'm armed." It had taken me half an hour to stop trembling after the mob dispersed. I was still scared and I guess my expression showed it.
"Okay, maybe you're right. Just please be careful with that thing." Rita didn't like guns. She didn't believe in the death penalty, either, but then she had never lived anywhere but in nice, protected middle-class neighborhoods. Same thing for Donna. I couldn't understand how she had gathered the courage to plunge into that boiling mob while I was still stupefied with fear.
"I'll be careful," I said. I picked out the lightest windbreaker I owned from the closet and shoved the automatic in one side pocket and the spare clips in the other. I just hoped I could make myself use it if I had to. I had never shot so much as a rabbit, let alone a person.
Seyla and Donna had both screens going. They were sitting together on the small lounger holding hands. I wondered what was going on with them. Seyla was acting as if the gender change of her lover was as natural a fact as breakfast from McDonald's. It didn't seem right to me, but if any of the others were concerned, they weren't showing it.
Russell still hadn't come home. I wondered if he was learning anything new about the gates. Surely someone was, somewhere, but if so, neither the networks nor the webs were telling us about it. There were plenty of other things going on, though.
All over the world, the sick, the elderly, gays and lesbians were clamoring to enter the gates, while at the same time, governments were pleading for them to wait until more was known about them. Their admonitions fell on deaf ears. Wherever controlled access was attempted, mobs swarmed over the guards and buried them by sheer weight of numbers. In other places, especially in America, a groundswell of religious opposition was beginning to build. We saw throngs of protesters waving signs and shouting out slogans about the abomination of the sex gates, assuring each and every person who entered one that it was akin to a pact with the devil and they would most assuredly go straight to hell..
There were riots and looting in many of the larger cities, including Old Houston. The fourth worlders weren't protesting anything. They just used the massive disorganization caused by the gates as an excuse to steal and burn, and while the police and military were busy, to kill. We saw one episode where a carload of upper class businessmen tried to detour through a fourth world ghetto. They were pulled from their vehicle and slaughtered for no apparent reason-except perhaps because they were affluent. In a way, I couldn't blame the fourth worlders for their resentment. Most of them were old enough to remember the time when the state and federal governments still supported the indigent and were too uneducated to understand government officials had finally gotten it through their heads that the well they had been watering the masses from for so many years had finally run dry. I don't think that's an excuse for looting, though, and especially killing. The standards are very stringent, but if a person is truly unable to work, they can still get a stipend from Washington or from most states, enough to keep food in their bellies, and the public hosclinics will take in anyone who is so ill that over-the-counter drugs don't help.
The elderly, those over seventy, could still draw social security, too, even if the credit wasn't quite what it used to be. On one of the old networks, two commentators were discussing that and other subjects. I couldn't tell whether they were real people or graphies. Probably they were actual; I doubted many graphics programmers were on the job at the moment. At any rate, they were finding problems everywhere. One of them was pointing to a graph.
"...obvious that when enough of the elderly have opted to change their sex and become young again, their social security checks will have to be cut off; otherwise the government will run out of money soon. Also..."
"...and think about this: the world is already under tremendous population pressure. How can we possibly feed all these new young men and women, especially when they start having babies?"
"...enough jobs to support them all. Unemployment already..."
They went on and on. After a while, we got tired of listening and switched programs. It wasn't that they weren't focusing on potential problems; they were, but repetition will bore anyone eventually.
***
In a conservative Mideast country, we saw crowds of veiled women in traditional black chadors being held away from a gate guarded by what looked to be hastily deputized men, most in traditional Arab dress. While we watched, the number of women rapidly increased. A few minutes later, they swarmed over the guards and surged up to the gate until they were pressed together as tightly as sardines in a can. Those who were pushed into the gate blinked out of existence so quickly, it created a strobelike effect as more women crowded forward to disappear in turn. The view switched to the other side of the gate where naked men burst into view like Tokyo commuters boiling out of a levitrain exit. They stumbled, fell, got up and scattered in all directions, bowling over anyone in their path.
Rita cheered. "Good for them! It's about damn time those ragheaded bastards see what they've created. I hope they put every fucking old Arab man who goes through a gate into one of those damn black tents. See how they like it then!"
I hadn't realized Rita was such a feminist. Or maybe she wasn't. I wondered how I would feel if I had to wear those hot black clothes and veil and be sequestered away from everything important in my country. I couldn't imagine it, but it did make me think of one thing the commentators hadn't touched on. In America, we tend to have an unconscious perception that just because men and women are treated equally here, the same must be true in the rest of the world. It doesn't make any difference how many times you see evidence to the contrary, or whether you're a man or a woman. Like racial prejudice, you have to actually live on the receiving end before you can truly understand what it entails. I thought Rita's reaction was just a spontaneous response to overloaded sensory input, heightened by academic knowledge of how most Muslims still treated females. That just goes to show how wrong a person can be, as I found out later in the day through another webwork report. Some bright webster had gathered enough statistics to show that a lot of normal women (by that I mean heterosexually normal) were entering the gates, even here.
"Why do you think that's happening?" I asked Rita.
"If you don't know, I can't tell you," she said.
"Why not?"
"You wouldn't understand. Let it go for now."
I shut up, but I didn't let it go. Were there that many women who didn't like being female? Why not? I knew I wouldn't like it, having periods and babies and so forth, but it seemed to me that if a person grew up with that kind of body, they ought to accept it, just like I accepted the fact of my odd-colored hair and slight ph
ysique. What was the big problem?
I got up and rummaged in the cooler, looking for something simple to munch on before bedtime. There wasn't much there; none of us had been shopping lately.
"I'm going to go get us something to eat," I said. "Anyone else want to tag along?"
"I'll go," Donna said. She disentangled her hand from Seyla's and stood up.
I had been expecting Rita to offer to go with me, but she demurred. I started to tell Donna that I could manage, but then I saw a warning sign in Rita's eyes and remembered I was supposed to be treating Donna like an old girlfriend.
"Okay, thanks, Donna," I said. I pulled out my automatic and chambered a round, then clicked on the safety and put it back in my pocket. Donna raised her brows in question.
"Just a precaution," I said.
"Bring back some more wine," Seyla called just as we were walking out the door. She winked at Donna, bringing a faint blush to her face. I tried not to think of what the wink might mean. I closed the door and clicked on the security system.
The streets were deserted but it was getting late and they might have been anyway, gates or no gates.
We walked along side by side. I tried to stay a little in front so I wouldn't have to see the little bounce of Donna's breasts with each step she took.
"Lee, I want to thank you for coming to my rescue when I tried to help that poor girl back at the gate," Donna said.
"No problem. I just don't know why you tried. You might have been really hurt."
"It was an impulse," she said, "but I'd do it again if I had to."
"Why?"
"Sympathy, I guess."
"You didn't even know her."
"Yeah, but it seemed like she was a sister of sorts. You know?"
