His brain works, but we know for a fact that it performs physical functions only. No consciousness, no narrative-of-the-self. He’s like a particularly useful bacterial culture. You get to map all his processes, test the drugs, maybe fool around with his endomorphins. They got this microscope that can trail over every part of his body. You can see life inside him, pumping away.
Soon as I saw him, I got this flash. I knew what to do with him. I went to my mentor, wrote it up, got it out and the company gave me the funding.
People think of cells as these undifferentiated little bags. In fact, they’re more like a city with a good freeway system. The proteins get shipped in, they move into warehouses, they’re distributed when needed, used up and then shipped out.
We used to track proteins by fusing them with fluorescent jellyfish protein. They lit up. Which was just brilliant really since every single molecule of that protein was lit up all the time. You sure could see where all of it was, but you just couldn’t see where it was going to.
We got a different tag now, one that fluoresces only once it’s been hit by a blue laser. We can paint individual protein molecules and track them one by one.
Today we lit up the proteins produced by the samesex markers. I’m tracking them in different parts of the brain. Then I’ll track how genetic surgery affects the brain cells. How long it takes to stimulate the growth of new structures. How long it takes to turn off production of other proteins and churn the last of them out through the lysosomes.
How long it takes to cure being homo.
It’s a brilliantly simple project and it will produce a cheap reliable treatment. It means that all of João’s friends who are fed up being hassled by Evangelicals can decide to go hetero.
That’s my argument. They can decide. Guys who want to stay samesex like me … well, we can. And after us maybe there won’t be any more homosexuals. I really don’t know what the problem with that is. Who’ll miss us? Other samesexers looking for partners? Uh, hello, they’re won’t be any.
And yes, part of me thinks it will be a shame that nobody else will get to meet their João. But they’ll meet their Joanna instead.
Mom rang up and talked for like 17 hours. I’m not scared that I don’t love her anymore. I do love her, a lot, but in my own exasperated way. She’s such a character. She volunteered for our stem cell regime. She came in and nearly took the whole damn programme over, everybody loved her. So now she’s doing weights, and is telling me about this California toy boy she’s picked up. She does a lot of neat stuff for the Church, I gotta say, she’s really in there helping. She does future therapy, the Church just saw how good she is with people, so they sent her in to help people change and keep up and not be frightened of science.
She tells me, “God is Science. It really is and I just show people that.” She gets them using their Personalized Identity for the first time, she gets them excited by stuff. Then she makes peanut butter sandwiches for the homeless.
We talk a bit about my showbiz kid brother. He’s a famous sex symbol. I can’t get over it. I still think he looks like a pineapple.
“Both my kids turned out great,” says Mom. “Love you.”
I got to work and the guys had pasted a little card to the glass. Happy Birthday Ron, from Flat Man.
And at lunchtime, they did this really great thing. They set up a colluminated lens in front of the display screen. The image isn’t any bigger, but the lens makes your eyes focus as if you are looking at stuff that’s ten kilometres away.
Then they set up a mini-cam, and flew it over Flat Man. I swear to God, it was like being a test pilot over a planet made of flesh. You fly over the bones and they look like salt flats. You zoom up and over muscle tissue that looks like rope mountains. The veins look like tubular trampolines.
Then we flew into the brain, right down into the cortex creases and out over the amygdala, seat of sexual orientation. It looked like savannah.
“We call this Flanneryland,” said Greg. So they all took turns trying to think of a name for our new continent. I guess you could say I have their buy-in. The project cooks.
I got back home and found João had sent me a couple of sweet little extra emails. One of them was a list of all his family’s addresses … but my best address is in the heart of Ronald Flannery.
And I suppose I ought to tell you that I also got an encryption from Billy.
Billy was my first boyfriend back in high school and it wasn’t until I saw his signature that I realized who it was and that I’d forgotten his last name. Wow, was this mail out of line.
I’ll read it to you. Ron, it starts out, long time no see. I seem to recall that you were a Libra, so your birthday must be about now, so, happy birthday. You may have heard that I’m running for public office here in Palm Springs—well actually, Billy, no I haven’t, I don’t exactly scan the press for news about you or Palm Springs.
He goes on to say how he’s running on a Save Samesex ticket. I mean, what are we, whales? And who’s going to vote for that? How about dealing with some other people’s issues as well, Billy? You will get like 200 votes at most. But hey, Billy doesn’t want to actually win or achieve anything, he just wants to be right. So listen to this —
I understand that you are still working for Lumiere Laboratories. According to this week’s LegitSci News they’re the people that are doing a cure for homosexuality that will work on adults. Can this possibly be true? If so could you give me some more details? I am assuming that you personally have absolutely nothing to do with such a project. To be direct, we need to know about this treatment: how it works, how long a test regime it’s on, when it might be available. Otherwise it could be the last straw for an orientation that has produced oh, … and listen to this, virtue by association, the same old tired list … Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Melville, James, Wittgenstein, Turing … still no women, I see.
I mean, this guy is asking me to spy on my own company. Right? He hasn’t got in touch since high school, how exploitative is that? And then he says, and this is the best bit, or are you just being a good little boy again?
No, I’m being a brilliant scientist, and I could just as easily produce a list of great heterosexuals, but thanks for getting in a personal dig right at the end of the letter. Very effective, Billy, a timely reminder of why I didn’t even like you by the end and why we haven’t been in touch.
And why you are not going to get even a glimmer of a reply. Why in fact, I’m going to turn this letter in to my mentor. Just to show I don’t do this shit and that somebody else has blabbed to the media.
Happy effin birthday.
And now I’m back here, sitting on my bed, talking to my diary, wondering who it’s for. Who I am accountable to? Why do I read other people’s letters to it?
And why do I feel that when this project is finished I’m going to do something to give something back. To whom?
To, and this is a bit of a surprise for me, to my people.
I’m about to go to sleep, and I’m lying here, hugging the shape of João’s absence.
Today’s my birthday and we all went to the beach.
You haven’t lived until you body surf freshwater waves, on a river that’s so wide you can’t see the other bank, with an island in the middle that’s the size of Belgium and Switzerland combined.
We went to Mosquerio, lounged on hammocks, drank beer, and had cupu-açu ice cream. You don’t get cupu-açu fruit anywhere else and it makes the best ice cream in the world.
Because of the babies I had to drink coconut milk straight from the coconut … what a penance … and I lay on my tummy on the sand. I still wore my sexy green trunks.
Nilson spiked me. “João! Our husband’s got an arse like a baboon!”
It is kind of ballooning out. My whole lower bowel is stretched like an oversized condom, which actually feels surprisingly sexy. I roll over to show off my packet. That always inspires comment. This time from Guillerme. “João! Nilson, his dick is
as big as you are! Where do you put it?”
“I don’t love him for his dick,” says João. Which can have a multitude of meanings if you’re the first pregnant man in history, and your bottom is the seat of both desire and rebirth.
Like João told me before I came out here, I have rarity value on the Amazon. A tall branco in Brazil … I keep getting dragged by guys, and if I’m not actually being dragged then all I have to do is follow people’s eye lines to see what’s snagged their attention. It’s flattering and depersonalising all at one and the same time.
The only person who doesn’t do it is João. He just looks into my eyes. I look away and when I look back, he’s still looking into my eyes.
He’s proud of me.
In fact, all those guys, they’re all proud of me. They all feel I’ve done something for them.
What I did was grow a thick pad in Flat Man’s bowel. Thick enough for the hooks of a placenta to attach to safely.
I found a way to overcome the resistance in sperm to being penetrated by other sperm. The half pairs of chromosomes line up and join.
The project-plan people insisted we test it on animals. I thought that was disgusting, I don’t know why, I just hated it. What a thing to do to a chimp. And anyway, it would still need testing on people, afterwards.
And anyway, I didn’t want to wait.
So I quit the company and came to live in Brazil. João got me a job at the university. I teach Experimental Methods in very bad Portuguese. I help out explaining why Science is God.
It’s funny seeing the Evangelicals trying to come to terms. The police have told me, watch out, there are people saying the child should not be born. The police themselves, maybe. I look into their tiny dark eyes and they don’t look too friendly.
João is going to take me to Eden to have the baby. It is Indian territory, and the Indians want it to be born. There is something about some story they have, about how the world began again, and keeps re-birthing.
Agosto and Guillinho roasted the chicken. Adalberto, Kawé, Jorge and Carlos sat around in a circle shelling the dried prawns. The waiter kept coming back and asking if we wanted more beer. He was this skinny kid from Marajo with nothing to his name but shorts, flip-flops and a big grin in his dark face. Suddenly we realize that he’s dragging us. Nilson starts singing, “Moreno, Moreno …” which means sexy brown man. Nilson got the kid to sit on his knee.
This place is paradise for gays. We must be around 4 per cent of the population. It’s the untouched natural samesex demographic, about the same as for left-handedness. It’s like being in a country where they make clothes in your size or speak your maternal language, or where you’d consider allowing the President into your house for dinner.
It’s home.
We got back and all and I mean all of João’s huge family had a party for my birthday. His nine sisters, his four brothers and their spouses and their kids. That’s something else you don’t get in our big bright world. Huge tumbling families. It’s like being in a 19th-century novel every day. Umberto gets a job, Maria comes off the booze, Latitia gets over fancying her cousin, João helps his nephew get into university. Hills of children roll and giggle on the carpet. You can’t sort out what niece belongs to which sister, and it doesn’t matter. They all just sleep over where they like.
Senhora da Souza’s house was too small for them all, so we hauled the furniture out into the street and we all sat outside in a circle, drinking and dancing and telling jokes I couldn’t understand. The Senhora sat next to me and held my hand. She made this huge cupu-açu cream, because she knows I love it so much.
People here get up at five am when it’s cool, so they tend to leave early. By ten o’clock, it was all over. João’s sisters lined up to give me a kiss, all those children tumbled into cars, and suddenly, it was just us. I have to be careful about sitting on the babies too much, so I decided not to drive back. I’m going to sleep out in the courtyard on a mattress with João and Nilson.
We washed up for the Senhora, and I came out here onto this unpaved Brazilian street to do my diary.
Mom hates that I’m here. She worries about malaria, she worries that I don’t have a good job. She’s bewildered by my being pregnant. “I don’t know baby, if it happens, and it works, who’s to say?”
“It means the aliens’ plot’s backfired, right?”
“Aliens,” she says back real scornful. “If they wanted the planet, they could just have burned off the native life forms, planted a few of their own and come back. Even our padre thinks that’s a dumb idea now. You be careful, babe. You survive. OK?”
OK. I’m 36 and still good looking. I’m 36 and finally I’m some kind of a rebel.
I worry though, about the Nilson thing.
OK, João and I had to be apart for five years. It’s natural he’d shack up with somebody in my absence and I do believe he loves me, and I was a little bit jealous at first … sorry, I’m only human. But hey—heaps of children on the floor, right? Never know who’s sleeping with whom? I moved in with them, and I quite fancy Nilson, but I don’t love him, and I wouldn’t want to have his baby.
Only … maybe I am.
You are supposed to have to treat the sperm first to make them receptive to each other, and I am just not sure, there is no way to identify, when I became pregnant. But OK, we’re all one big family, they’ve both … been down there. And I started to feel strange and sick before João and my sperm were … um … planted.
Thing is, we only planted one embryo. And now there’s twins.
I mean, it would be wild wouldn’t it if one of the babies were Nilson and João’s? And I was just carrying it, like a pod?
Oh man. Happy birthday.
Happy birthday, moon. Happy birthday, sounds of TVs, flip-flop sandals from feet you can’t see, distant dogs way off on the next street, insects creaking away. Happy birthday, night. Which is as warm and sweet as hot honeyed milk.
Tomorrow, I’m off to Eden, to give birth.
46 years old. What a day to lose a baby.
They had to fly me back out in a helicopter. There was blood gushing out, and João said he could see the placenta. Chefe said it was OK to send in the helicopter. João was still in Consular garb. He looked so tiny and defenceless in just a penis sheath. He has a little pot belly now. He was so terrified, his whole body had gone yellow. We took off, and I feel like I’m melting into a swamp, all brown mud, and we look out and there’s Nilson with the kids, looking forlorn and waving goodbye. And I feel this horrible grinding milling in my belly.
I’m so fucking grateful for this hospital. The Devolved Areas are great when you’re well and pumped up, and you can take huts and mud and mosquitoes and snake for dinner. But you do not want to have a miscarriage in Eden. A miscarriage in the bowel is about five times more serious than one in the womb. A centimetre or two more of tearing and most of the blood in my body would have blown out in two minutes.
I am one very lucky guy.
The Doctor was João’s friend Nadia, and she was just fantastic with me. She told me what was wrong with the baby.
“It’s a good thing you lost it,” she told me. “It would not have had much of a life.”
I just told her the truth. I knew this one felt different from the start; it just didn’t feel right.
It’s what I get for trying to have another baby at 45. I was just being greedy. I told her. É a ultima vez. This is the last time.
Chega, she said, Enough. But she was smiling. É o trabalho do João. From now on, it’s João’s job.
Then we had a serious conversation, and I’m not sure I understood all her Portuguese. But I got the gist of it.
She said: it’s not like you don’t have enough children.
When João and I first met, it was like the world was a flower that had bloomed. We used to lie in each other’s arms and he, being from a huge family, would ask, “How many babies?” and I’d say “Six,” thinking that was a lot. It was just a fantasy th
en, some way of echoing the feeling we had of being a union. And he would say no, no, ten. Ten babies. Ten babies would be enough.
We have fifteen.
People used to wonder what reproductive advantage homosexuality conferred.
Imagine you sail iceberg-oceans in sealskin boats with crews of 20 men, and that your skiff gets shipwrecked on an island, no women anywhere. Statistically, one of those 20 men would be samesex-orientated, and if receptive, he would nest the sperm of many men inside him. Until one day, like with Nilson and João, two sperm interpenetrated. Maybe more. The bearer probably died, but at least there was a chance of a new generation. And they all carried the genes.
Homosexuality was a fallback reproductive system.
Once we knew that, historians started finding myths of male pregnancy all over the place. Adam giving birth to Eve, Vishnu on the serpent Anata giving birth to Brahma. And there were all the virgin births as well, with no men necessary.
Now we don’t have to wait for accidents.
I think Nadia said, You and João, you’re pregnant in turns or both of you are pregnant at the same time. You keep having twins. Heterosexual couples don’t do that. And if you count husband no 3, Nilson, that’s another five children. Twenty babies in ten years?
“Chega,” I said again.
“Chega,” she said, but it wasn’t a joke. Of course the women, the lesbians are doing the same thing now too. Ten years ago, everybody thought that homosexuality was dead and that you guys were on the endangered list. But you know, any reproductive advantage over time leads to extinction of rivals.
Nadia paused and smiled. I think we are the endangered species now.
Happy birthday.
Awake in the Night
John C. Wright
William Hope Hodgson’s quirky Victorian masterpiece The Night Lands, one of the flat-out strangest novels ever written, has had a large—although often unmentioned—effect on science fiction and fantasy over the generations since Hodgson’s too-early death, being one of the likely literary ancestors of works such as Clark Ashton Smith’s Zotique, Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. Now, in a new century, it has also inspired a Web site (http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/nightmap.html) and an anthology (William Hope Hodgson’s Night Lands, Volume 1: Eternal Love) devoted to new stories written as homages to Hodgson by various hands, both edited by Andy W. Robertson.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 70
