A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

  “I…I don’t know what to do,” she said softly. “Show me.” He grinned, and now the cruelty and laughter was more open, and it sent shivers up her spine as his expression seemed to somehow emphasize the colossal muscles of his arms, so dangerous, so enticing. He cupped her face in his hands and drew her mouth down. He slid through the surprised resistance of her lips. It choked her. It felt warm as roasted meat and smooth as velvet. He moved it inside her mouth uttering little soft cries.

  It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to Cynda Elizabeth. It frightened and repelled her. It made her mouth go soft and her body throb with flame. It was like eating honey and like nothing else in the universe. She had to fight back a retch and yet she wanted to swallow it whole.

  After a long time, he curled his hands in her hair and drew her head up to face him. He was breathing heavily, and his eyes had a faraway dreamy look. Cynda found her own breath coming in counterpoint to his.

  “And now…” he murmured.

  He bent over her, undid the fastenings of her shirt and trousers, and silently worked them off her body. Then they were naked together, under the starry skies, the boat rolling beneath them in complex rhythms. Now I’m going to get it off with a Pacifican breeder, Cynda thought, with a strange, almost mindless calm. With a man. Out here where no one can see.

  She waited for Eric to lie down on his back and offer up his piercer. “Well?” she finally said. “Well?” He looked genuinely puzzled. Am I going to have to show him? Cynda thought. She touched his chest and gently pushed him backwards. He resisted.

  “Oh,” he said with a little laugh. “No, lady, that’s not my style.” And he moved forward against her resistance now, pressed his strong hard body against her, and pushed her over onto her back against the gunwale.

  Then his full weight pressed upon her, and with a liquid thrust of his entire lower body, he pierced her to the core.

  Cynda screamed. She moaned. Waves of sensation traveled up her body from the junction of their union as he began pumping his piercer in and out of her with the motion of his whole body. She groaned in fear and delight; her arms fell over the side of the boat, her fingertips gently caressing the rippling surface of the water as the motion of his heavy body slammed her up against the hard edge of the gunwale again and again.

  Her head lolled back, her eyes closed, and for a fleeting moment the fantasy came—the great hairy macho violating her flesh with slavering animal savagery. But then it was gone, and she was just there, right now, in a place she had never been before. He was brutal, quick, and hard; then languid, tender, and slow; then urgent and building; then easy and smoldering again. He was unexpectedly subtle, varying rhythms like a master musician.

  Her eyes flicked open and closed at random, her head rolled back and forth, her hands flailed at the water, then relaxed into its cold caress. Whirling patterns inside her eyes. Images of his flushed face. Stars swirling overhead at crazy angles. The edge of the gunwale cutting into her back. Wet coldness at her fingertips. An enormous weight pulsing against her. A building, keening, rising wave of unbearably sweet tension that—

  —broke into a flash of painful pleasure exploding from her lips in a wordless scream—

  Gasping for air, drifting back from a nameless somewhere, she saw his face as he groaned like a savage. She felt a tremendous spasm ripple his body, and he burst like a fountain inside her, rolled his eyes, sighed once, and it was over.

  Cynda Elizabeth had gotten off with a Pacifican…man. It had been nothing like doing it with a Terran breeder, nothing like the machos in the history tapes, and not much like her secret fantasies either. It had been itself, unique and strange, nothing more, nothing less.

  She sat there quietly for a long time, ignoring the man beside her, staring at the far-off lights of Gotham, trying to decide just how she felt. There had been a physical pleasure she had never experienced with a Terran breeder or a sister; a fleshly rightness, a natural mindless flow, a visceral sense that this was the way it was meant to be, out here in the anonymous dark. Yet the mental dimension of what had happened was twisted, unwholesome, terrifying, and in some way demeaning.

  Finally, she looked at Eric. His strong face was utterly relaxed, but something in his eyes seemed to be laughing at her. Strangely, he seemed even more alien to her now, after the ultimate physical intimacy she had experienced. Unfathomable, his mind occupying some unguessably different dimension. A bucko, she thought. A Pacifican bucko…Great Mother, what kind of creature really is that?

  “Well?” he said, his voice seeming to come from very far away.

  “Well what?”

  “Well, did you enjoy it?”

  “I…I don’t know…”

  He laughed ironically. “Well at least that’s a unique response,” he said.

  “Are you playing with me, Eric? Have you been playing with me all along?”

  He looked directly into her eyes and now there was no humor in his face at all. Something unstated, something true, seemed to pass between them. “I’m just as sincere as you are…sister,” he said.

  She forced a laugh, touched his knee briefly, and looked out over the water, away from the lights of the city, out to the eastern horizon, where the brilliant starry sky abruptly vanished into the impenetrable black sea, a crisp hard line between the commonality of galactic space and the singularity of this dark unknown world. And here we are, she thought, two humans bobbing on the interface. What kind of creature are you, Eric Lauder? Great Mother, what kind of creature am I?

  Like a wraith on her rented floater, Maria Falkenstein roamed the night streets of Gotham, moving through the city but unable to touch it, isolated from the people by who she was and why she was here. Since she and Roger had come here from the Cords, she had taken to these lonely nighttime wanderings while he was off politicking, searching for she knew not what, perhaps nothing at all.

  Cafés drifted by, bright with lights, humming with people. A crowd poured out of a theater in a babbling roar. A man in a jump-harness touched down on the street a few meters away, then bounced onward on another long arc. A group of teenagers on powerskates bracketed her on both sides, zipped off down the street, and across a bridge to the next island. Maria turned off the busy street and onto a byway that led over a bridge to a small island, a wooded hill that rose sharply out of the bay.

  The road spiraled up around the island, which was apparently a park. Warm yellow lights illuminated the pathway, and here and there blue bongowood benches were set into manicured alcoves in the wild shrubbery. Pacificans sat on some of these benches: lovers, old people talking, children playing some obscure game with balls and little figurines. The top of the hill was a clear circle of green lawnmoss, and the city stretched not far below in all directions.

  It was not a cold mountaintop view that reduced the maze of brightly lit streets and the faerie traceries of the bridges to an abstract holoview panorama, but something more subtle, above the city yet part of it, preserving the human dimension. The people on the streets were part of the pattern, the boats and hovers skimming around the bridges seemed almost close enough to touch. Gotham lived below her; the noises of the city were a metropolitan babble, not a distant hum.

  Maria turned off the float unit at the top of the hill, the floater settled to the ground, and it suddenly came to her that she wasn’t searching for anything on these excursions into the alien city, she was fleeing—fleeing into anonymity, fleeing from Roger and herself, from what they were and what they were doing to this planet that seemed so thoroughly at peace with itself.

  “Talk with the Falkensteins,” she thought bitterly. Talk with Roger while he uses me as a prop. Free media access, the sacred Pacifican right. She wondered what those people down there would say if they knew that the last program had been a scripted exercise in cynical deception. That the ludicrous raving Femocrat and the self-righteous bucko had been actors off the Heisenberg, that the whole thing had been scripted by psychopoliticians and refine
d by the Arkmind.

  She shook her head. Some of them surely must have guessed, she thought. I sounded false even to myself. “As a woman, I can see how the Femocrats are trying to poison minds here…” And what are we doing, Roger? What about us?

  Maria knew all the right answers to that one. Political necessity. Future human evolution riding on what happened here. The end justifies the means. And the Femocrats were a poison, a social carcinoma that had to be kept from spreading at all costs.

  But Roger, in the process of fighting that poison, aren’t we becoming the very thing they accuse us of being? In fighting a lie, aren’t we turning it into the truth? Faschochauvinism, the loathsome catchword they use to justify their own disgusting gender fascism…but isn’t stuff like “Soldiers of Midnight” faschochauvinism? Haven’t the psychopoliticians constructed an entire scenario based on polarizing the men against the women? Haven’t you been trying to play Royce Lindblad off against his own woman, Roger? Aren’t you using me as a model of the dutiful wife supporting her husband against her own sex? And how many women have managed to get through an Institute? Is it really all a matter of intrinsic mental differences, or could the Femocrats have chanced upon a small truth?

  Maria sighed as she looked out over Gotham. It seemed to her that these Pacificans had something among themselves that no off-worlder could quite understand. The buckos preened and paraded their sexual wares like the hated faschochauvinists of the Femocrat fantasies, and yet only a Femocrat or a fool could deny that women were more than equal here. The women dominated their men politically and economically, yet the balance was not far from equal. Their absolutism about their legal principles was a tactical weakness, and yet, in another sense, was it not a kind of strength?

  Maria turned on the float unit and the floater rose off the Pacifican ground. I’m running from something, she thought, but am I not finding something, too? A people at peace with themselves. A society in some ways more complex than our own, a delicate balance of fragile improbabilities that we’re trampling upon in the service of our hard, clear, evolutionary certainties. Perhaps the Femocrats are right about us, and we’re right about them. And only these Pacificans have found a clear path, a world between.

  A cool wind blew in off the bay as Maria started down the hill. She glanced upward for a moment at the bright stars above the city. They seemed cold and hard and very far away.

  10

  A panoramic shot of a public square under one of the larger permaglaze domes of Valhalla, centering on a huge screen set up on the central lawn. A silver-on-black banner reading “Pacificans for the Institute” is strung above the screen between two trees, and a low podium has been set up in front of it. From the podium, a man in the gray workclothes of a Thule tech harangues the vast crowd that fills the square, his face mirrored in gigantic realtime on the screen behind him.

  Thule tech: “…here in Thule where our very existence and the economy of the entire planet depends upon the highest technological level we can achieve!”

  The crowd roars. It is almost entirely male, hardy no-nonsense types wearing functional workclothes. Here and there large placards wave above their heads. “Pacificans for the Institute.” “Back to Earth, Femocrat Mothers!” “Vote for the Future!” “Ban Big-Mouthed Bitches!” The placards are all uniformly lettered in silver on black, and indeed they seem mass-produced.

  Thule tech: “…the Managing Director of the Transcendental Science Arkology Heisenberg, Dr. Roger Falkenstein!”

  The crowd cheers loudly as Falkenstein’s face appears on the giant screen; cool, smiling, unruffled, an impressive contrast to the tumult in the square. The camera moves in on the screen as Falkenstein begins to speak so that he fills the-entire frame, speaking directly to the electronic audience.

  Falkenstein: “Thank you very much, I’m overwhelmed by the support that Pacificans for the Institute are demonstrating all over the planet as I speak to you now…”

  A quick intercut series of shots of male crowds all over the planet: Good Old Mountain Boys in a logged-out clearing, Gothamites in a domed amphitheater, an amorphous human sprawl along a bank of the Big Blue, a small island covered with male humanity. All wave the same mass-produced silver and black placards. Each shot centers on a large screen with Falkenstein speaking from it in realtime and a “Pacificans for the Institute” banner.

  Falkenstein: “Your laws forbid us from participating in Pacifican politics, but they do not forbid you from making your views plain. We cannot officially endorse Pacificans for the Institute, but you can support us as a spontaneous expression of the good sense of Pacificans everywhere. We stand ready to serve you. Give us the permission we need and we will transform Pacifica together…matter will form itself to your command…”

  A shot of the dead brown desert Wastes as a city grows magically from the sands, springing into being from nothingness with unreal speed.

  “…artificial suns will warm the frozen south…”

  Three small yellow suns appear in the lead-gray sky over the frozen white plain of Thule. The sky turns a brilliant blue. A billion years’ worth of mile-thick ice vanishes in an instant, and lawnmoss, trees, and fields of grain spring into existence on the bared brown earth.

  “…‘and death shall have no dominion.’”

  A shot of a group of ancient, wizened men and women, as backs straightened, gray hair turns blond, red, and black, and lines vanish from faces, like a long-term time-lapse shot run in reverse.

  Cut to Falkenstein’s face; cool, confident, intelligent.

  Falkenstein: “All this and more! We seek no political dominion, no disruption of the wise and just way of life you have evolved over the years. No pitting of man against woman, no pollution of the body politic with a ludicrous and perverted female fascism that is already the laughingstock of every truly civilized world. We are not ideologues, we are teachers. We are not demagogues, we are scientists. We are not wild-eyed godzilla-brained raving sexual chauvinists—but we know who is, and so, my friends, do you!”

  An almost subliminally fast flashed shot of Cynda Elizabeth’s face, contorted in a grimace of rage. Then a rapidly cut montage of crowd shots all over the planet as thousands of male throats break into a continuous growling roar…

  A series of wide-angle shots on shouting male crowds waving placards, each one in a different area of the planet; ugly, angry mob scenes made that much more ominous by a subtle red filter and an exaggerated soundtrack with almost subliminal dubbed-in animal growls. Another series of shots, these extreme closeups of male faces—features contorted by rage, hair wild and disarrayed, spittle spewing from their lips, a montage of masculine bestiality.

  Cynda Elizabeth’s voiceover: “Boys will be boys…”

  Cynda Elizabeth’s almond-eyed face appears—calm, wise, infinitely tolerant, and more than a shade patronizing.

  Cynda Elizabeth: “…or something. But as we all know, as Dr. Falkenstein has told us, Transcendental Science seeks no pollution of the Pacifican body politic, and wouldn’t dream of arousing wild-eyed godzilla-brained raving sexual chauvinism. So these buckos we’ve just seen obviously aren’t a mob of faschochauvinist savages, they’re just figments of our female imagination! Sure they are!”

  A closeup of a blond young woman, with a busy Gotham street in the background.

  Woman: “…never seen anything like it. Men screaming like animals for something they call science? Falkenstein’s got them thinking with their wongs…”

  A closeup of an older gray-haired woman sitting behind a desk.

  Woman (somberly): “There’s never been anything like this on Pacifica before. Men and women have always gotten along in a civilized manner here until the Heisenberg showed up. I’ve never placed much credence in Femocratic theories before, but after seeing what Transcendental Science has provoked in our men in a few short weeks, I’m beginning to wonder whether there might not be something to the notion of an inherent male urge to dominance through violence…”
>
  Closeup on a grimy, plain-looking woman standing by some gray machinery.

  Woman: “It’s getting hard to work with the buckos now. They get surly when they’re given directives by female supervisors. They tend to stick to themselves. They use the slightest excuse to launch into tirades against Femocracy. They’re not behaving normally. It’s time the government put a stop to this…”

  Closeup of a ravishing black-haired woman leaning against the side of a sailboat.

  Woman: “It’s thoroughly ridiculous. I can’t get off with a bucko anymore without getting into some insane political argument. I’m beginning to wish I was lesbo so I could get off with someone who would treat me like a human being. Why is Carlotta Madigan stalling? Why don’t we vote to kick these faschochauvinist troublemakers off the planet already?”

  A medium shot on Cynda Elizabeth. She shrugs.

  Cynda Elizabeth: “We’re not here to tell the sisters of this planet what to do. We’re here by fortunate accident, and we wouldn’t have even gotten involved if we hadn’t seen the vicious hand of off-world faschochauvinism at work. But as long as this alien presence remains to bring out the atavistic macho beast that lives in even the most civilized man, as long as Transcendental Science manipulates this faschochauvinist monster for its own ends, we’ll stay on Pacifica to fight it, as long as the women of this planet will allow!”

  Carlotta Madigan rolled away from Royce and lay there by his side in the darkened Lorien bedroom, breathing raggedly, filmed with sweat, her loins aching from the sorriest bout of lovemaking she had ever experienced with him.

  Her head pounded with frustration and her mind swam with loathsome images. Royce puffing and groaning atop her like some fucking machine. Ugly shouting men’s faces. Her legs clamped like pincers around his waist as she ground her pelvis against him, trying to get herself off and to hell with everything else, Carla Winkler calling her a traitor to her sex. Horrid flashed fragments from Transcendental Science porn operas—women screaming in terror, men in hard black leather, angry thrusting cocks, flesh violating flesh, chrome violating rubber.