“All but one or two in a million, and those are mostly for health or mixed-sex reasons. They are approved by the R. M. A. and every major health, legal and educational authority in the country. Virtually all religious denominations have welcomed them. But you refuse.”
“Welcomed, sir? I don’t believe any of them.”
“I see. You don’t believe that this country is heavily overpopulated? You don’t believe that before consexes came out the years of adolescence were years of miserable misfits trying to adjust to a half-baked situation? And that boys slept promiscuously in spurious natural sexual relations, that girls had illegitimate babies sometimes from the earliest years it is possible to conceive, and that mere children contracted serious venereal diseases from these methods.
“You think you can do without all this. And what sort of substitute will you have? Tearing about on a rocket-scooter or getting drunk! Raping a woman or just stealing her handbag! And if and when you grow up . . .
“Did you know that there are ten million bachelors and the same number of spinsters in this country who have never been married nor had a so-called love affair but are sexually wholly satisfied and consummated? Did you?”
“It may have been in the papers, sir.”
“Tell me.” He spoke kindly and coaxingly for a moment. “Is it because you’ve picked up some little bad habit? It’s very common, nothing to be ashamed of. This thing will help you.”
“No, sir.”
“Come on now, man of principles. Square with me. Haven’t you? Are you sure you’ve never committed . . . well, self-abuse?”
“What, sir? I—I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Come off it, lad. No one has ever never done anything wrong.”
“But I haven’t, sir.”
“Do your parents approve of your attitude?”
“I think so, sir.”
“You think so? That’s not good enough. Now come on. Be a good chap and let us fit you a consex. It’s much nicer than natural sex or any of that. You don’t want to be the odd man out, do you?”
“No, sir—”
“Good. All right, then. Nurse, he’s accepted after all. Get it out, will you.”
“No, I haven’t, sir. No!”
“I am an authority on this, lad. You mean to say you still haven’t accepted that the government knows what is best for the nation after all I’ve told you?”
“I haven’t, sir, no. It’s not the government—”
“You haven’t? But I thought just now you said you had.”
“I didn’t want to be the odd man out; but I can’t wear one of these.”
“Then you will be the odd man out, won’t you? What d’you mean, you can’t? Come into the laboratory and let me show you.”
There was silence then for nearly half an hour. Now I know what one of those laboratories looks like, I can imagine the sexiatrist taking him round, telling him to peer into a microscope and see tiny microbes swiveling about in plasma, showing him charts of the amino acids, the blood-types, the cell-types, the skin-types, etcetera, pulling out samples for quick-fire experiments, and showing him a few easily digested examples of living tissues artificially made for various purposes. Then the door opened and in they came.
“Well, what did you think of it?”
“Very interesting, sir.”
“Impressive, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now what do you say? It’s up to you. You have some idea how it works now, and you’re not afraid any longer, I hope.”
“No, sir.”
“You’ll consider it.”
“I am considering it, sir.”
“Oh, good. Do you think you’ll be able to decide now?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Good. I’ll call the nurse then, shall I?”
No answer. He rang the desk bell.
“You won’t refuse us after all that, now, will you?”
“Well. . . Please, sir . . .”
“I’m going to ring your parents.”
The nurse came in, dropped my clothes on the bed, and shut the door. I heard the phone click as I slid out of bed, then click again.
“I’ll give you one more chance,” said the sexiatrist. “In case you’re ashamed or anything. Nurse, tell me, do you wear a consex?”
“Yes, doctor, I do.”
“A male consex?”
“Yes.”
“And you like it? It’s comfortable, not unhealthy? You can do what you like? You don’t feel guilty about it?”
“I love it,” she said. “I’ve never had difficulty with it. It always responds to my lead and never disobeys.”
“Thank you. Now, boy, are you satisfied?”
“What happened the first time?” the boy asked the nurse with a mixture of sheepishness and daring.
The nurse said nothing. I wondered if she blushed. The boy said: “My father called it an artificial prostitute.”
“Nonsense, lad. You don’t know what you’re talking about. They say worse things about holy matrimony, so-called.”
“I have religious objections,” said the boy. “I can control myself without all this.”
“All what? Without all what?” the doctor asked sharply.
“This . . . appliance.”
“It’s only living flesh,” he said. “Look, here’s one. See? I touch it. If God hadn’t meant this stuff to exist, it wouldn’t exist, would it? Now you touch it. Don’t your parents wear one?”
“No, sir, they don’t.”
“Ah! Well, you’re quite free to do as you please. Don’t be afraid to go against them. As I told you, the authorities have called you up for the purpose of giving you one, and you are protected by the law. We shall support you to the hilt. Your parents don’t object to fluoridation, do they? Or antismog in the air?”
“Yes, sir, they do.”
“Hmmm.”
I heard a muttered “Nut cases” outside my door, and the nurse opened it for the sexiatrist. He strode through, booming.
“Andrews, ah, Andrews, you’re a sensible lad. Now you’ve just become a man and learned all about it. How d’you like it?”
“All right, sir.”
“Feels okay, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “very nice,” though sneakingly I sympathized with the boy out there. I knew the voice of all the temporal powers was speaking through the sexiatrist, and all the pressures were being brought to bear, but I admired him for resisting.
The sexiatrist knelt and held me.
“Now, sir,” he said, “now, Mr. Andrews, would you mind very much if we showed our friend here how nicely the little consex fits? We have to show you how it feeds, too, because it’s going to grow and mature right along with you. That’s why it’s important this lad Topolski has his fitted now.”
I detected the tiny note of disdain at the boy’s foreign name, and half inclined to retort at the sexiatrist for the one he had used all along.
“He doesn’t have to, does he?”
“Now don’t you start,” said the doctor, and he drew me forward, levering off my pants at the same time.
“What’s wrong with that?” asked the sexiatrist, showing the consex fitting like a fig leaf and looking as innocuous as a fold of skin. “I’ve even thought,” he went on, half to himself, half to the young nurse, “that they’re far more aesthetic than the bare uni-sex, and this return to clothing oneself at all times and in all places is quite unnecessary. The time will come when things will turn full circle, and we shan’t be afraid to go completely nude again.”
I saw the point. I began almost to like my consex, even though the sensation it could give was disturbingly overwhelming. But the boy turned away after a cursory examination. He said nothing.
“Well?” asked the big man, and I realized all of a sudden the mental pressure, the semi-mesmeric force of it that I had allowed to ride me, and that this small dark twelve-year-old was bucking. “You don’t wan
t a black mark on your book, do you?”
I wondered, What book? I did not know, then, that the State’s records kept its finger on this one more aspect of a man’s “suitability.”
“I do a lot of sport,” he said weakly, almost visibly wilting, and looking for somewhere to hide. He must have felt awful, foolish and mixed-up.
“Ah, so that’s what it is! Well now. Dearson, the world champion marathon runner, actually wears his running! And all the other athletes have them. They simply take them off and wrap them in a little blanket—like this one— while they’re participating. No trouble at all. Now come on, be a good chap. We’ll just take your measurements—most of them are compulsory—and leave it to you to come back later and collect your consex. How about that?”
“All right,” he said. I saw him stiffening his resistance again to the paternal air, and felt fairly sure the internalized authority would not be strong enough in him to bring him to accepting the consex. But he would have to submit to the tests as required. The sexiatrist would ring his parents later, then he would have to return and sign the many forms, by one of which he would delegate to the Minister of Health responsibility for his sexual welfare—a condition mentally as unacceptable to him and his parents as the consex was physically unacceptable.
I was dressed and dismissed, yet I lingered at the specialist’s door waiting vaguely for something. Then the boy gave his address. It was just round the corner from mine.
The fact that we were neighbors does not seem important, perhaps. But it’s going to be. I am going round when I have a chance, to ask Topolski the real reason why he refused to put on the “appliance.”
* * * *
ONE WORD ON TV STARTS UPROAR IN COMMONS: “/ would have used it in similar conversation with any group of grown-up people.” (Kenneth Tynan on the BBC)
* * * *
WILL THE PILL AFFECT AMERICA’S MORAL STANDARDS? ... A growing number of mothers are asking gynecologists to prescribe birth-control pills for their daughters—particularly daughters leaving home for colleges. “It doesn’t happen too often,” says Dr. Gardiner of Indianapolis, “but when it happens once a week, it seems as if it’s every day.”
* * * *
GINZBURG SPEAKS FOR “SEXUAL HONESTY” . . . Ginzburg is on his way to jail to serve a five-year prison term on obscenity charges upheld last week by the Supreme Court. The Court held in a five-to-four decision that advertisements for Eros magazine and two other Ginzburg publications pandered to prurient appetites...
* * * *
RELIGION TAKES A LOOK AT PLAYBOY “PHILOSOPHY” ... The Church, says the Christian Advocate, must stop ignoring what it calls “playboyism”—because it represents a “new religious alternative” ...
* * * *
Six years ago, a slim volume called New Maps of Hell put science fiction on the literary map. The author, a gifted comic novelist taking a fling at literary criticism, was a staunch supporter of the Virile Virgin, or “Look, Ma, no hands,” social-mural school of s-f. The genre, he contended, was suited only to abstract, or wide-screen, ideas. For instance: “The role of sex in science fiction seems bound to remain secondary.” And: “What will certainly not do ... is any notion of turning out a science fiction love story.”
Nor was Mr. Amis alone in his views; most editors in the field agreed with him at the time.
“Coming-of-Age Day”—particularly since it found print as a first story by an unknown—is evidence enough of what has happened in the few years since. (It is true that the British magazines—like British radio—have abandoned Puritan restraints more eagerly than the American; but for exhibit B, try William Tenn’s “The Masculinist Revolt,” or Willard Marsh’s “The Sin of Edna Schuster,” both from F&SF.) As for the science-fiction love story, there never was any question about it—not since del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (1938); nor, for a moment, while Sturgeon was writing; and not with stories like Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” (9th Annual), or Leo P. Kelley’s “O’Grady’s Girl,” in F&SF last year.
I don’t think there is any serious doubt now about the tolerance of the field for the whole range of human interests and human behavior. What is at issue in the new work is not topic, but treatment. Today it is symbolism and surrealism the Old Guard is fighting.
Josephine Saxton here gives us a love story in the new vein— and another “First.”
<
* * * *
THE WALL
JOSEPHINE SAXTON
It was as if the landscape was divided into two halves, split across by some change in the light, in the atmosphere, in the colors of the air and the earth. It was a great flat valley that rose so shallowly to the summits of the surrounding escarpments that the change in height was scarcely noticeable, but indeed the difference in height between the floor and the horizon was some five hundred feet. A great curving saucer. But the saucer was cracked across from east to west by a difference. The horizon on the north and the horizon on the south when looked at from west or east looked scarcely different from one another when seen in turn, but to bring the eyes forward would have shown how great indeed the difference between these two halves was, and the eyes looking thus would discern a definite line across this area of the world, coming closer, winding upward, until it was close enough to be seen as a wall.
It was a very high wall, thirty feet in height, and it was very ancient in its stone, dark blue, hard, impenetrable, but rough and worn. Crystalline almost, its surfaces sprang this way and that, revealing whole lumps of glittering faceted hardness, with smooth places where mosses and orange lichens had got hold; and at its foot many creeping plants; tough twisted vines bearing clusters of ungathered raisins, convolvulus white and pink, and ivy in many colors, thick, glossy and spidery. Here and there stones had fallen from its old structure, two and three feet thick, and in one place, almost halfway across the floor of the valley, there was a hole through the wall, only six inches across its greatest measurement, and three feet from the floor, which was moist red clay on the north side, and dry white sand on the south side. The top of the wall was sealed to all climbers by rows of dreadful spikes which curved in every direction, cruel, needle-sharp, glassy metal rapiers set into green bronze. They were impenetrable in every way, these swords, and stood endless guard between north and south.
The valley was the home of rats and snakes of many kinds, and thousands of spiders ran in the dust at the foot of the leafy creepers, and rabbits burrowed in the clay on the north side, and lizards scuttled in the sand on the south side. There were two sources of water: one a spring which flooded a puddle in the clay—the water here was cold and green and clear—and the other a limpid pool in the sand under a rock, the water therein being warm and slimy and gray. There were no trees to be seen anywhere, only the earth with the sparse grasses; no habitation save the rabbit warrens.
At either side of the hole in the wall lived a man and a woman. The man lived on the north side where it was usually cold and damp, and the woman lived on the south side where it was usually warm and dry. These two were tall and thin and beautiful, strong and lean, but something was to be seen in their way of moving that spoke of inner suffering, some twisted thing which showed on the outside, almost imperceptible, something from the heart. He was fair in color, with yellow-gray hair to his shoulders and a beard of great length which tangled in great curls, with blackberry thorns and stains of purple juice in his beard from the raisins he had eaten over the years. His feet and hands were horny with callouses from running and scrabbling for wild rabbits, but his fingernails were specklessly white, for, in his idle hours, of which there were many, he sat and cleaned them with a little stick of thorn wood and rubbed them down to a neat shape on a stone in the wall. He wore a threadbare suit of lovat green thorn-proof worsted suiting, a dark-green silk shirt which was of the finest quality, with gilt cufflinks which had only enough cuff just to stay hanging in the threads, and a tie which could not be seen for the wild beard.
&
nbsp; The woman was dark and brown like a nut that has been polished. Her hair was dark, so dark it was not black but something beyond black, and her lashes and brows matched it in depth and thickness, and the hair fell straight and heavy to her thighs in great thick locks with not a wave or curl. Her hands and feet also were immaculately clean, but she had callouses on her knees from kneeling in the sand at the side of her pool of water, washing her hair until it shone. Her breasts were still full and young, bearing the marks of suckling an infant, but that was in another life. She was dressed in a dark blue dress of courtelle jersey with brass buttons long ago turned mouldy green. The dress fitted her figure and had a pleat in the back of the skirt, and she showed a little bit of nylon lace, sometimes when she walked, peeping out from under the dress, a very dusty white. She always carried a handbag with her. It was a large white plastic beach bag with bamboo handles, and in it were all manner of bottles containing sun oil, hand lotion, face cream and skin food—none of which she ever used— handkerchiefs, hairpins, dried-up cigarettes, old bills, papers and letters and a paper bag with a clean sanitary pad and two little safety pins wrapped up tight. There was also in the bag a brush and comb, a necklace of heavy beads, several photographs, some dried flowers and several recipes for the making of home-made wines, Irish soda bread and potted meat.
The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology] Page 42
