A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

  “Maybe I am…” Maria muttered. “Maybe I am…”

  A cold steel shield seemed to come down behind Roger’s eyes. “You’re really serious about this?” he said flatly. “You won’t come back to the Heisenberg? And if…if we should be forced to leave this solar system…?”

  “Oh, come on, Roger,” Maria snapped, “you’re not planning on that and neither am I. Madigan will be defeated, you’ll push your resolution through Parliament, the Institute will be reopened, and…” And nothing will really be changed, she thought. Except what matters most to these people. You’ll win out in the end, Roger. You always do. And that’ll give me the easy way out. She shuddered. She wondered why she felt so trapped, so overcome by self-loathing.

  “For once tonight you’re making sense,” Roger said coldly. “This is only a temporary withdrawal. If…if I can’t convince you to listen to reason…at least will you promise me that…that you’ll keep out of public sight…”

  “Appearances are more important to you than reality now, aren’t they?” Maria said sadly. “This isn’t my husband speaking now, it’s the Managing Director of the Heisenberg, isn’t it?”

  “I see no conflict in those roles even if you do,” Roger snapped. “Will you please—”

  “I’ll stay out of sight for now to please you,” Maria said. “It’s the least I can do, isn’t it?” And to please myself, she thought. Truth be told, I’m not very proud of who I am right now.

  “It certainly is!” Roger said. “I’ll keep in touch with you from the Heisenberg.”

  “You do that, Roger,” Maria said. I only wish you really meant it in some kind of human sense.

  “Goodnight, Maria.”

  “So long, Roger,” she muttered, and unplugged from the circuit.

  Afterward, she stood for a long time at the window, looking out at the lights of the alien city spread beneath her like a mocking reflection of the distant stars. From this vantage point, both seemed equally far away, equally abstract, equally beyond the reach of her heart. Suspended between the world she had known and the world she had come to love in some cold alienated way like a woman enamored of the image of a man she could never touch, Maria was alone in the Pacifican night, isolated from both worlds, trapped in the desolate reaches between.

  18

  A panoramic shot of the Institute of Transcendental Science as seen from the air; a silver disc abandoned and isolated in an endless sea of green like a ruined temple in some primeval Terran jungle.

  Female voiceover: “Sisters of Pacifica! The Institute of Transcendental Science now lies empty and abandoned. Only Parliament can reopen it, and if we can prevent such a resolution from passing for thirty days, the faschochauvinist Transcendental Scientists will leave Pacifica forever. Falkenstein has trapped himself by his vainglorious attempt to blackmail our planet into submission.”

  Cut to a closeup on Susan Willaway.

  Susan Willaway: “But we cannot slack in our determination. If Carlotta Madigan should win this vote of confidence behind her smokescreen of false evenhandedness, there will be new Parliamentary elections, and the dupes of Falkenstein will wage an all-out campaign to seize control of the new Parliament.”

  A medium shot on Susan Willaway, her head and shoulders haloed by a large hologram of Pacifica floating in the stellar blackness.

  Susan Willaway: “That is one reason for consigning Carlotta Madigan to oblivion. But there is another. The Transcendental Scientists have now left Pacifica, so the full weight of Madigan’s determination to ban both Transcendental Science and Femocracy from this planet now falls on our Terran sisters alone! It is now revealed as nothing but an attempt to deny ongoing free media access to interstellar Femocracy! It is treason to both Sisterhood and Pacifica’s own media access laws! The so-called Madigan Plan now stands revealed as the fraud it always was.”

  A long shot of male Institute students trooping into helicopters, taken from Falkenstein’s own footage.

  Susan Willaway’s voiceover: “The student body leaving the Institute of Transcendental Science, That’s right, sisters, all male, buckos, one hundred percent! Even after Madigan announced that our own Ministry of Science would control admissions, the Institute was still allowed to function as a faschochauvinist brainwashing academy with the active and knowing collaboration of the Madigan administration! In secret! After she lied to us in order to break our strike!”

  Cut a closeup on Susan Willaway, smiling sardonically.

  Susan Willaway: “If Falkenstein’s stupid macho arrogance hadn’t led him to close the Institute as a blackmail threat, we might never have learned of this perfidy on the part of Carlotta Madigan until a faschochauvinist scientific elite, brainwashed and controlled by Transcendental Science, was unleashed to rule our planet by superior military force!”

  A series of shots of Femocratic League of Pacifica demonstrations and rallies and newschannel footage of the Femocratic Thule strikers.

  Susan Willaway’s voiceover: “But let’s not give Falkenstein or Madigan too much credit for their stupidity. For it was the strength of Sisterhood which forced Falkenstein to take his desperate gamble and reveal the true treasonous nature of the Madigan Plan. And it will be Sisterhood which finally puts an end to the career of this traitor to her sex and her planet! Remember this treason on election day! Remember that only Sisterhood has saved Pacifica from becoming a Transcendental Science puppet-state! Down with faschochauvinism! Down with treason! Down with Carlotta Madigan!”

  Wearing a short yellow dress bought in a large Gotham boutique, Cynda Elizabeth wandered incognito through the tense and sullen streets of the city. Ever since her confrontation with Bara Dorothy, she had spent much of her time aimlessly walking the streets of the capital, as much to fill her empty days as anything else.

  Refusing to front for a policy with which she had registered her official opposition, she had been barred from all strategy sessions and command decisions, and her sisters, fearing ideological contamination, avoided her like a plague-carrier. She had taken her stand, and now she was very much alone, both at the Sirius Hotel and out here among the Pacificans.

  At first, she had fantasized about meeting another Eric, satisfying her perverted desires one more time before the mission failed and was expelled to an Earth where the only men were pallid breeders, pale shadows of Pacifican buckohood. At times, she toyed with the idea of defecting, of finding her own destiny here among men and women who openly shared in ease and pride what she must hide forever within her soul.

  But this notion always evaporated like morning mist in the clear hard light of day. She was what she was, and though these Pacificans might be a happier breed, Eric had taught her that she could never be truly one of them. And truth be told, what she now saw in the streets made her wonder whether what she had perceived as the harmonious Pacifican psychosexual balance had ever really existed outside her own perverted wish-fulfillment fantasies.

  Every park seemed to have its own impromptu orator hectoring a sexually polarized audience, condemning either Femocracy or Bucko Power, but always, so it seemed, Carlotta Madigan. In most cafés and restaurants, women sat with women and men with men, and the occasional mixed couple stood out like some atavistic anomaly. Every day, there was at least one Femocratic and one Bucko Power rally somewhere in the city. On the streets, men and women eyed each other in passing with suspicion and hostility. The Pacifica that had been now seemed like a thin veneer of harmony that once had masked this bottomless reservoir of contending faschochauvinisms. Perhaps it had only maintained itself by self-consciously ignoring the genetic flaw in the human species itself.

  Which we and the Transcendental Scientists have now brought bubbling up from the racial tarpits of the past, Cynda thought as she turned off onto a little side street lined with small sidewalk cafés. And that alone gave direction and a strangely altered sense of duty to the newborn confusion of her life.

  For what she had seen on Pacifica had taught her that the true enemy
was faschochauvinism itself, both the male half of the equation which Femocracy had vanquished on Earth and the female half which had destroyed the manhood of the Terran breeders and made love between men and women a perverted and impossible dream. If this mission failed, it would fail because the Pacificans, for all that had been directed against them, clung successfully to that narrow and fragile path between.

  And when that happened, Bara and her ilk would be tarnished by that failure, her own position would be vindicated, and the sisters of Earth might be ready for some small voice of change. So she couldn’t risk throwing that possibility away by destroying her credibility by being caught in a liaison with a Pacifican man. She had been lucky with Eric, but she dared not trust to such luck again. It was her duty—to herself, to her species, and in some elusive way to Sisterhood itself. Even, ironically, to those secret sisters who might long to dare what she had done.

  If only Carlotta Madigan hadn’t ruined everything by her incomprehensible blunder, Cynda thought more wanly. Men and women had been coming together again here until that disastrous Parliamentary vote. Now things were flying apart again and no conceivable outcome seemed inevitable or even possible…

  Yet somehow, walking down this back street, Cynda once more had the illogical conviction that these people would in the end manage to preserve their own complex identity. Here, in these small cafés secluded from the clamor of the main boulevards, she saw that men and women still gathered together in couples, and above the cafés were three and four floors of apartments, where surely much private life must go on as it always did.

  In the end, were not the Madigans and the Parliaments, the demonstrations, the propaganda, and the politics, only the quicksilver surface of a people’s reality? Was not the real Pacifica right here on this quiet back street, multiplied by a thousand, by a million—the millions of interlocking private lives and personal realities that were the true essence of any society, basically unchanging, like the subconscious underpinnings of surface human thought itself?

  Like this tall, gray-haired older woman wandering up the street toward her. How could any off-worlder really know what was going on behind those haunted-looking eyes? A Bara Dorothy or even a Carlotta Madigan might take that expression as symbolic of the deep political conflict enveloping the planet, but couldn’t she just as well be pining for a lost lover or worrying about a sickly daughter or even her job? Who knew what—

  The woman paused as their paths intersected. Her eyes lit up with an ironic flicker, and as they did, Cynda Elizabeth recognized that face. She had seen it on the net dozens of times; only this strange context had masked the woman’s identity.

  “You’re Maria Falkenstein!”

  “And you’re Cynda Elizabeth!”

  They stood there in awkward silence for a moment. What does she see? Cynda wondered. The face of the enemy? What do I see, a Transcendental Scientist? How strange! she thought. We’ve been fighting each other for months, and yet there’s been no human contact. And here we are, suddenly face to face in a back street in an alien city, and it’s the human reality that seems unreal.

  “I…I thought you people had all gone back to the Heisenberg,” Cynda finally stammered.

  “Everyone but me,” Maria Falkenstein said. She shrugged with a strange diffidence. “I suppose my little secret will be all over the net by morning…”

  “No…” something made Cynda say. “I’m…I’m out of all that now…I…if you can understand…”

  Maria Falkenstein smiled a strange little smile at her. “I’m probably the only person on this planet who could,” she said.

  “You, too, eh?” Cynda blurted. You, too, what? she wondered. Unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, she suddenly felt a strange bond to this enemy of all she had believed in, a communion that went beyond words or understanding. For some unfathomable reason, there seemed to be an instant spark of sisterhood between them that had nothing to do with either shared ideology or sexual attraction.

  “This is peculiar, isn’t it?” Maria Falkenstein said. “We should be at each other’s throats, shouldn’t we?” She laughed. “What would your people say if they saw us standing here like this? What would Roger say?”

  “I hardly know what to say myself…”

  “Well, then may I make a highly improper suggestion, one enemy to another, Cynda?” Maria Falkenstein said. “Let’s sit down and have some wine together. This is too outré an opportunity to miss, don’t you think?”

  “All right,” Cynda said woodenly. “Why not?” They found an outside table at the nearest café. Maria ordered a bottle of floatfruit wine, poured two glasses, and then they sat there staring silently at each other for long moments.

  “Well…?”

  “Well…”

  “Why aren’t you on the Heisenberg?” Cynda finally said.

  “Why aren’t you at the Sirius Hotel?”

  Cynda frowned. She hesitated. But something began to loosen her tongue. Of all times, all places, all people, here, strangely enough, was someone she could talk to beyond political or ideological restraints. “I don’t feel I belong there any more,” she said. “I…I…”

  “So you wander the streets of Gotham trying to connect up to the reality of this planet and you find you can’t do that either.”

  “How did you know that?” Cynda said sharply.

  Maria laughed, took a sip of wine. “I’m sitting here in the same place as you now, aren’t I, sister?” she said. “Great suns, what a mess we’ve both made here! And what a mess we’ve made of ourselves in the process. I mean, here the two of us sit, and we can’t even work up a good healthy rage at each other. We’re committing treason to our causes at this very moment, you know.”

  Cynda took a long swallow of wine. “Or vice versa,” she said. “I mean, this planet does seem to blur the hard edges. Take you. You’re a Transcendental Scientist, but you’re also a sister. I’ve always known intellectually that there were women on the Arkologies, but I’ve never confronted that reality before. What’s it like being…being a free woman in a faschochauvinist society?”

  Maria drank a gulp of wine. “Neither as faschochauvinist as you people think, nor as free as we like to pretend,” she said bitterly. “Once more the truth lies in that ambivalent region between where only the Pacificans seem to be comfortable. I wonder how they do it.”

  “So do I.”

  “You do?”

  “I think I’m learning to admire them,” Cynda blurted. “Envy them, even.” She drank more wine for courage, and perhaps to wash the taste of her own words out of her mouth.

  “You, too, eh?” Maria said. “You know, I think the two of us have gotten a dose of our own medicine. We came here to tell them how to live, and we end up…floating in our own limbo. Perhaps there is some cosmic justice in the universe after all.”

  “That’s why you didn’t go back to the Heisenberg?”

  Maria grimaced. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do now, and I’ll tell you why I didn’t go back to the Heisenberg,” she said.

  “You don’t know?”

  Maria shrugged and drank some more wine. “I knew I couldn’t tolerate being around Roger,” she said. “I hate what we’re doing to this planet I can’t stand being a collaborator in it any more. I wanted to be alone to think…vague, isn’t it? Hardly logical and scientific. And you, Cynda? Tell me, have you thought about defecting yet?”

  “Defecting!” Cynda snapped. “Certainly not!”

  Maria laughed tipsily. “Not even just a teensy little bit?” she teased. “Isn’t that what we’re really talking about? C’mon, old enemy, we can be honest about it with each other—who’s to know? Tell me you don’t find life here the least bit seductive…”

  Cynda sighed, poured more wine, and belted it down. “All right, all right, so I’ve thought about it,” she admitted. The wine, the months of hidden internal tension, the memory of Eric, the unreality of this situation must be going to my head, she thought. But what the hell, wha
t the hell, sometimes you gotta talk to somebody…

  “As long as we’re being so honest with each other sister,” she said, “I’m gonna tell you my deep dark secret—I mean, I’ve got to tell somebody who’s nobody, and right now for me you’re as close to nobody as anybody can get. I’m a pervert, I’m attracted to men. Buckos. Real men, not Terran breeders. I want them on top of me, I want their piercers—” Great Mother! she thought, bringing herself up short. What am I saying?

  “How shocking,” Maria said sardonically.

  “You’re being sarcastic!”

  “Maybe,” Maria said, “but these days I’m not so sure. Just when I’m thoroughly fed up with what our own men have done, I meet a Femocrat who…” She paused. She studied Cynda Elizabeth. “But if that’s true, why don’t you defect?” she said. “Why torture yourself for something you no longer believe in?”

  “But I do still believe in Femocracy!” Cynda insisted. “Earth is my planet, sisters are my people, and I’m proud of what I am!”

  “Including your feelings for men?”

  “No!” Cynda blurted. “I mean yes! I mean…look, we’re far from perfect, and so are men, but if sisters like me run away, nothing will ever change. I’m a Femocrat. I want men. It’s about time real Femocrats with these…these feelings stood up to the Bara Dorothys and tried to make Femocracy into something that works for everyone. Defect? Great Mother, the only thing I can defect from is myself.”

  Mother, what a conversation this is becoming! Cynda thought in amazement. And yet, if there really was such a thing as Sisterhood, wasn’t this exactly it? Two women speaking their hearts across the abyss of culture, ideology, and conflict? Sisterhood is truly powerful, she thought. In some strange way, more powerful…more powerful than its twisted perversion of itself!

  She looked across the table at Maria Falkenstein. “So you’re going to defect?” she said.

  Maria laughed bitterly. “How?” she said. “To what? If our side wins, Pacifica will just turn into what I’d be defecting from. If your side wins, it’ll become something more loathsome to me than what I left.”