A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

  “Yes, Bara,” Mary Maria said, properly chastened. “But surely you don’t think—”

  “No reflection on you at all, Mary,” Bara said sincerely. “You’re not…” She paused. You’re not Cynda Elizabeth, she had been about to say. But there was no point in surfacing that problem with someone who was subordinate to them both.

  She shrugged, and smiled at Mary Maria, brushing the unsavory business aside. “Now then,” she said in a more businesslike tone, “I believe we should open our blitz with the standard sort of anti-faschochauvinist material…”

  “We’d better stick with more subtle stuff at first, though,” Mary Maria said. “Faschochauvinism is very subtle here, what with women almost dominating the political and economic structure.”

  Bara frowned. “I wouldn’t exactly call the posturings of these Pacifican buckos, as they call themselves, subtle,” she said.

  Mary laughed. “They certainly have no low opinion of themselves as desirable sex-objects,” she agreed. “Unfortunately, neither do Pacifican women.”

  “Well, that’s what we’ll work on initially,” Bara Dorothy said. “Forget economics and politics and concentrate on male sexual dominance.” She allowed herself a small smile. “Our friends from the Heisenberg have done an excellent job of pushing these buckos into even more sexually arrogant attitudes than they possess naturally. They’ve synced male faschochauvinism into support for their bloody Institute. Very well. Let’s rub the Pacifican sisters’ noses in it. Falkenstein is polarizing the breeders in support of his own cause, and it’s already tending to polarize the sisters against him, though they have no positive focus. Let’s give it to them. Let’s make Femocracy the leader of the opposition to the Institute on this planet”

  Mary Maria pondered that a moment. “Excellent,” she finally said. “The Transcendental Scientists have given us a perfect local issue to polarize the sisters around. We’ll build our campaign around that. I’ll get right to it”

  As Mary Maria left, Bara Dorothy swiveled her chair around and regarded the large map of Pacifica. What a prize this planet is! she thought. The center of the Galactic Media Web! Feminize Pacifica, and the ultimate goal of a Femocratic galactic civilization will become achievable in decades, not centuries.

  And the situation is perfect—a woman is already head of government, and women already have a superficially dominant economic status, so the change will be very subtle when Sisterhood controls the Pacifican Web product. We’ll maintain “News of the Galaxy” and the entertainment exports with the tremendous pool of local talent, only the underlying mythic substructure will change. And the beauty of it is that the Pacifican sisters are so much better at that kind of thing than we are. What a contribution they’ll make to the cause of Sisterhood after liberation!

  And that, she thought, is perhaps the greatest strength of Femocracy. The only change we seek is the awakening of full consciousness in sisters everywhere. No imposed political hegemony from outside—just fully conscious sisters on every human planet exercising their rightful dominion in their own ways, liberated from the animalistic breeder faschochauvinism that nearly destroyed the Earth.

  Our unity is one of shared consciousness, not of an imposed political order, not the simian territorial aggression that’s the only kind of unity breeders can understand. In Sisterhood, diversity becomes a strength, not a source of weakness and conflict in the endless breeder battle for a total supremacy that no tribe of them can ever achieve. That’s why our victory is inevitable.

  Bara Dorothy sighed. Someday, perhaps, we’ll be able to clone ourselves like those damned Transcendental Scientists. Then there will be no further need for breeders at all and the grand dream will become a reality—a galaxy of women, a humanity permanently at peace, a unity of Sisterhood infinite in time and space, enduring for as long as the stars continue to shine.

  A very rapidly cut montage of clips from old tapes and ancient Terran films: a prehuman simian smashing the skull of another hairy hominid with an animal bone; a Roman legion pillaging a village of Gauls; mounted Cossacks whipping Jews to their knees from horseback; a Nazi SS squad machine-gunning men, women, and children in a village square; a screaming woman running down a jungle road clutching a napalmed baby while helmeted soldiers look on with professional indifference. Over all this, intermittent quick flashes of nuclear explosions.

  Woman’s voiceover: “From the prehuman past to the final Holocaust, history has been the story of man’s inhumanity to man—and to woman.”

  The sequence ends with a series of shots of various Terran cities being vaporized by thermonuclear explosions.

  Woman’s voiceover: “The final glory of the phallic urge to power—the last war, the one that nearly destroyed the planet that gave us birth. But what could have been humanity’s last sunset became the dawn of a new age…”

  A series of shots smoothly dissolving into each other: women in animal skins suckling babies around a campfire; the Madonna cradling the Christ child in her arms; a pirouetting ballerina; a female nurse tending the wounded in a field hospital; Russian peasant women scything wheat; women marching down an urban street; Carlotta Madigan addressing the Pacifican Parliament.

  Woman’s voiceover: “For the history of humanity has also been the unsung story of woman. Woman, the giver of life; woman, the inventor of love; woman, the guardian of home; woman, the healer of broken bodies and spirits; and now, at last, woman, the bringer of peace.”

  A medium shot on a hollow-eyed man dressed in rags, squatting on a heap of rubble. Two tall bright-eyed women in shorts and tunics stand flanking him as the camera moves in for a tighter shot on the man’s psychically ravaged face.

  Man (speaking directly into the camera): “What can I say? For millions of years, we ruled the Earth and fought for glory and the final result was…this. We believed in peace, too; we believed in it so strongly that we fought ten thousand wars and piled up a mountain range of corpses to achieve it.” He shrugs. “We tried. We failed. We saw no other way. Now we are few and tired and destroyed by our own hand. Now there is nothing for us to do but listen to our wives and daughters and mothers and sisters whose counsel we never sought and hope that they can find the path that has eluded us since we came down from the trees to become killers of the plain. We give up. We hand on the torch to cleaner hands…”

  The young women help him, tottering, to his feet. Cut to a series of shots of the broken cities of Earth, new buildings beginning to rise from the rubble, bright-eyed women bustling about everywhere—ending with a long zoom down the shattered skyscraper canyons of New York which becomes a shot of the Statue of Liberty, eerily still intact, the noble lady holding her torch aloft haloed by a rising sun…

  Man’s voiceover: “And now, Transchauvinist Science brings you the latest wong-throbbing episode of ‘Soldiers of Midnight.’ Hang on to your whackers, buckos!”

  A full shot of a languid harem scene, all gauzy draperies and rose-colored light. A man reclines on a couch—bare-chested, with bright red nipples, wearing only filmy blue pantaloons, and dreamily sniffing a yellow flower. He starts at an off-camera commotion.

  A moment later, two similarly dressed men stumble backwards into the frame, pursued by three huge women dressed in skintight black with enormous rubbery red dildoes sprouting from their crotches, over four feet long and thick as a man’s arm. The women grip these gigantic dildoes with both hands and use them as exceedingly awkward clubs with which to batter the retreating men, buffetting them about the face and buttocks to the sound of much shrieking.

  But the dildoes are so long, rubbery, and heavy that the women bumble and stumble about as they slap at the men with the things, crazily off-balance. Two of the women accidentally bump into each other and react angrily. They begin to fence with each other, battering their rubber cocks against each other in a gross parody of a swordfight. The third woman, still chasing the men, lets go of her dildo for a moment as she turns to look. The rubbery appendage droops, its head dr
ags on the floor, and the woman, looking the wrong way, trips over it, and goes flying head over heels into her battling sisters. They all fall to the floor in a tangle of bodies, where they belabor each other with the dildoes like pillowfighting children while the man on the couch continues to sniff his flower with a superior attitude…

  Suji Corwin glanced out the window in boredom. Arching over the low skyline of residential Valhalla, the permaglaze dome loomed grayly, keeping out the biting cold of Thule, but not the everlasting somber twilight that hovered over the antarctic continent like a perpetual fog of gloom. Inside the little rented room, twelve women sat in a circle delivering their pallid opinions on the state of the universe, which today seemed to revolve around the new programming that Femocracy was pumping into the net. It seemed to Suji that most of them were as bored by all this as she was.

  I wonder why they’re dabbling in Femocracy? she thought. Are their buckos acting strangely lately, like Ron? Are they offended by much of the Transcendental Science programming like “Soldiers of Midnight”? Or are they just curious about what it’s like for women to sit around together without buckos and form their own silly little secret society? Or is everyone just a media critic these days?

  “Did you catch ‘Soldiers of Midnight’?”

  “Yeah, I laughed my guts out.”

  “So did Bill.”

  “Your bucko thought it was funny?”

  “Uh-huh. He was surprised that Femocrats had a sense of humor.”

  “I’m surprised that there’s a man who can laugh at his wong,” said Marta, a big heavy-set woman whose remarks usually seemed more pointed than those of the others.

  Beth Louise, the Femocrat who had started this little group, grimaced ironically. “If they don’t laugh with us, they have to face the fact that we’re laughing at them,” she said, “And they can’t admit that. Typical breed—male defensive reaction.”

  “Yeah,” said Olivia, the other member of the group who tended to dominate conversation. “Even down to hedging it with that old garbage about Femocrats—meaning women—not having a sense of humor.”

  “Seems to me it’s the buckos who’ve lost their sense of humor these days,” Suji blurted. “They’ve gotten so serious since these Transcendental Scientists began polluting the net.” Let me crack a joke about “Soldiers of Midnight” or laugh at “Space Opera,” and Ron freezes like the damned icecap, she thought. And the way he watches those Transcendental Science documentaries so religiously. If I want to get off with him while one of them is on, he bites my head off.

  “Men have always been the humorless half of the species,” Beth Louise said. “How else could they look at ten thousand years of faschochauvinist history with a straight face?”

  “What’s that old saying, ‘A stiff wong knows no conscience’? Well, come to think of it, it has no sense of humor either.”

  “Yeah. Did you ever laugh while you were getting it off with some bucko?”

  “Oh, shit! Instant wong-wilt!”

  Suji joined in the general laughter, getting more into the spirit of things. Maybe there was something going on here, after all. Buckos did seem to be off on their own crazy vector these days, thanks to the un-Pacifican garbage that was being pumped into their heads by those creeps off the Heisenberg. Their wongs were still seeking the same familiar berths, but they seemed to be going a little mano in the head. Maybe it is time we women got together and straightened this mess out, Suji thought. Maybe there’s something to this Sisterhood stuff, after all.

  A full shot on a very stylized laboratory. Bubbling beakers, sparking apparatus, ominous flashing lights in the background. In the foreground, a line of four men dressed as Transcendental Scientists with cavernous vampire makeup around the eyes are dancing to syncopated music. Behind them and to the right, three grotesque figures mimic their steps in a hideous robotized parody: a Frankenstein monster, a rotting male corpse, a Trilby in a diaphanous white gown with dead looking eyes. All three are wired into a gothic control console emitting intermittent sparks.

  Transcendental Science chorus (singing horribly):

  “Rooty-too-toot

  “Rooty-too-toot

  We are the boys from the Institute…”

  Cut to a closeup on a woman who looks superficially very much like Carlotta Madigan, the towers and bridges of Gotham in the background.

  Woman: “Very funny, right? No? You say what an Institute of Transcendental Science will do to Pacifica is no fit subject for humor? You say what the boys from the Institute have already done takes the fun out of our little musical comedy? You say your bucko’s acting strangely? You say he’s hiding leather underwear under the bed and manacles in the closet? You say he’s starting to talk like Faust, masturbate with model spaceships, and ordering you to vote for an Institute of Transcendental Science?”

  The woman’s face becomes knowing, conspiratorial. She winks at the camera. “Well boys will be boys, and they love their new toys. It’s happened before, on many planets. Once the boys from the Institute set up their mad doctor labs, whole armies of good buckos find themselves marching off into the never-never land of superscience fiction pan-piped by their peters. But of course it can’t happen here. Or can it, sisters? Maybe it’d be wise to plug into some of those new tapes Femocracy has donated to the accessbanks and find out what Faustian faschochauvinism is going to mean to you…”

  Roger Falkenstein picked idly at his wahfish almondine, looking across the table at Royce Lindblad, who was sneaking a glance around the crowded restaurant, watching the people who in their turn were sneaking glances at them. Could it be that this was Lindblad’s subtle way of making a public statement? Having a meeting had been Falkenstein’s idea, but lunch together in a public restaurant had been Lindblad’s suggestion. Falkenstein decided to venture a probe.

  “You’re not afraid to be seen publicly with me, Royce?”

  “Afraid of what?” Lindblad said cautiously.

  The Sealane was a small restaurant fronting on a small downtown side street and specializing in Pacifican seafood prepared in various ancient Terran modes. There were sidewalk tables, but Lindblad had chosen a booth at the rear of the main dining room, more or less out of sight of the lunch-hour crowds on the street. Happenstance, or a calculated compromise?

  “Afraid of the conclusions that might be drawn…” Falkenstein said. “Afraid of Carlotta’s reaction…”

  Lindblad flushed. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let a simple lunch be politicized,” he said. “By you or Carlotta or the effing Femocrats or anyone else. This idiotic polarization has gone far enough, and if I’m making any statement, that’s it.”

  Falkenstein nodded. “If I’d thought our presence would cause the Femocrats to go this far, I’d have withdrawn from Pacifica,” he lied.

  Actually, of course, the current situation had been projected long ago, and the Arkmind predicted a favorable outcome. By syncing their psychosexual propaganda into opposition to the Institute, the Femocrats had made a ghastly mistake, for they had layed themselves wide open to the converse proposition—a vote against the Institute was a vote for Femocracy, female dominance, and the psychic castration of the Pacifican bucko.

  Theoretically, that would split the planet right down the middle and make any vote too close to call, but the Femocrats had inevitably ignored the facts that most Pacifican women were heterosexual and that the buckos ruled the bedroom as dominant sex-objects. In the crunch, enough women would vote in favor of their own buckos’ manhood to provide the necessary swing vote.

  Which was why Falkenstein had now moved his own base of operations from the Cords, where the mission had been successfully completed, to Gotham, where the critical lobbying would be taking place in the next two weeks. Beginning today with the pivotal Minister of Media, who now sat there studying him skeptically.

  “You know something Roger,” Lindblad finally said without any real hostility, “I think you’re full of jelly-belly oil. Nothing is about to make you
give up, especially when the Femocrats have played right into your hand.”

  Falkenstein found himself laughing unguardedly. Lindblad had a way of suddenly reminding him that despite his surface appearance of arrested adolescence, he wasn’t the second most important political figure on the planet simply because he was the lover of Carlotta Madigan. Indeed, Madigan might be the planetary Chairman at least in part because her lover was Royce Lindblad.

  “Since we understand each other, Royce, perhaps we can work together on this,” Falkenstein said. “Surely you share my distaste for what the Femocrats are doing…”

  Lindblad shrugged. “I won’t try to con you about that,” he said. “What we’ve got now is the Pink and Blue War at its most loathsome.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you like to get rid of the Femocrats before any permanent damage is done? You see how these people work. By the time their ship is repaired, they’ll have a sufficient political base among your women to force Parliament to vote on any move to expel them, a vote that would be a showdown between men and women. Their permanent presence here will soon be a fait accompli.”

  Lindblad sighed. “All right, Roger,” he said. “What are you really getting at?”

  “Force such a vote now, before it’s too late,” Falkenstein said. “Introduce a resolution yourself giving the Femocrats thirty days to leave Pacifica, withdrawing their media access, and confining them to their ship in the meantime. Every man on the planet will surely support you. And at this point, surely enough buckos can carry their women’s votes to push it through, if it’s strictly a vote against Femocrat meddling.”

  “Carlotta would never agree…” Lindblad said.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you that you could ride to the Chairmanship yourself on such an issue if she didn’t?”

  Lindblad drummed his fingers on the table. He’s tempted, Falkenstein thought. He’s really tempted. He held his breath as Lindblad pondered the proposition in silence.