‘No.’ Trish rolled away from her. ‘I’m all right.’
‘This is the last night. Sanjula’s in tomorrow.’
‘I know.’ Trish lay still and listened to the street sounds. They were probably safer here than in their flat at home, but the knowledge that all the women in the house were there to escape the violence of men made that violence seem closer, more tangible.
‘I found a man dead in the street this morning,’ she said. ‘Wirehead. They kill each other like animals. I don’t want to live here any more.’
‘What’s wrong, Trish?’
‘Nothing.’ She buried her head between Carole’s breasts. ‘Everything.’
They held each other tightly, silently comforting one another. Then Carole said: ‘I can’t sleep. I’m going to get a cup of tea. Want one?’
‘I’ll come.’
They pulled on sweaters and shoes and padded into the kitchen. While the water boiled, Trish moped around the room, tidying away toys that the children had left scattered across the floor. Under the table, she found a model starship. The starship.
She swore. ‘Look at this. They come here running away from men, and what do they give their kids to play with? Phallic symbols!’
‘Training up the next generation,’ said Carole drily. ‘Or maybe it belongs to somebody’s mummy. It would make a bloody good dildo.’
‘Ouch!’ Trish dropped the toy on the table, and glared at it. ‘Why doesn’t anybody else see the links, or am I just paranoid?’
Carole poured out the tea. ‘Not everyone has a feminist for a mother.’
Trish snorted. ‘Bloody wishy-washy liberal.’
‘Val brought you up to see the links.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ She picked up the toy starship again. ‘Look at this thing. “The culmination of Western science.” Direct descendant of the V2 rocket. They’ve raped the planet to develop the technology to build it. We can’t feed our people, thousands die every day in earthquakes and floods and famines, but don’t worry - they can go to the stars. Why? Why do men ignore what needs to be done here? What blind arrogance makes them destroy the lives of women the world over for something so worthless?’
Carole handed her a mug of tea, and kissed her gently. ‘There’s going to be one hell of a post-coital depression once it’s blasted off,’ she said. ‘OK, so they’re sending a ship to the stars, but it won’t get there for thousands of years. I wonder how our wonderful technocrats will sell that one. All the money, the resources, the skill, all the vision will be gone, and nothing to show for it. Maybe then opinion will swing our way.’
Trish laughed. ‘Post-coital depression. Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I hope— What the hell was that?’
The screech came again, from directly beneath the boarded-up window. Carole ran across the room and peered through a gap between the planks. ‘There’s a cat in the yard,’ she said. ‘But, my God, what are those?’
Trish joined her. ‘They’re penises!’ she exclaimed. They stared at one another with gradually dawning delight.
‘Oh wow,’ said Carole. ‘It is true!’
Trish whooped. ‘Come on!’ she yelled. ‘Let’s get ‘em!’
She snatched up the baseball bat, threw back the bolts on the door, and burst into the yard.
A small tortoiseshell cat was backed into a corner, surrounded by about twenty snarling penises, some human, others much smaller. Trish charged at them, yelling, and struck out two-handed at the nearest of the creatures. The bat connected with a squelching thud, and the penis split open along its length, spraying her with its blood. The rest scattered as she lay about her in a frenzy of disgust, crushing the boneless creatures against the concrete floor of the yard. Blood spurted, drenching the walls and her hands and clothes, fuelling her frantic loathing.
Carole’s hands on her arms brought her to a halt. ‘They’re dead,’ she said softly. ‘You can stop now.’
Trish lowered the bat wearily and gazed at the smears of skin and blood defacing the yard. Then she threw up.
Carole was very pale. ‘I wish I’d never been heterosexual,’ she said faintly. ‘I’ve had things like that inside me.’ She turned her face away, and leaned against the wall, shaking.
Gingerly, Trish picked up one of the dead penises. Its head was crushed, but it was otherwise intact. ‘I’m keeping this,’ she said. ‘Proof.’
‘Proof of what? What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know. But while they’re on the loose they’re fair game. That’s a few less rapists in the world. Let’s see how many more we can get.’
~ * ~
TEN
Val jacked into the Net and her senses coalesced into the compact blob of her cyber-persona. She had self-defined as an amorphous rose-coloured ink-blot, which irritated the tidy minds of several academic cubes, tetrahedra, and spheres of her acquaintance. But it felt comfortable, and she wasn’t always the same shape.
She tasted for news, and her persona entered the entrance hall of pillars. Scanning the ranks of colour- and scent-coded indexing blocks, she homed in on the geographical index and tapped it with one wired finger. The pillar opened up to absorb her and she tumbled through into the next level.
Country-blocks chimed, subtle scents guiding as she sought out Sudan. Passing into the bath of colour, she emerged in an almost empty hall. Briefly, the ink-blot flexed into a tight knot, screwed in on its anger as, back in the real world, her self swore. The global Net was as uneven as any other structure, densely layered in places, in others spread gossamer-thin across the void of data-blankness. The richness of African experience was such a dark and empty place for blank-eyed data hacks.
Damburst, though, was there, and she moved forward eagerly now, searching the sub-halls for news of her friends.
There was very little. Satellite pictures, visually enhanced to show the night scene of water pouring through the dam, swallowing new villages as the old reappeared in the drowned valley behind. Character-screens displayed numerical data: time, duration, cubic volume of water, speed of travel, height of the wave, estimated number of casualties. A man’s voice provided commentary - a more ‘accessible’ fleshing out of the dry data, strongly shaped by unthinking value-judgements.
Annoyed, Val cut off the voice, blacked out the figures. The voices she wanted to hear had no access to the Net, no global cyber-reality. Heart beating too fast, persona changing shape rapidly, she swam the flow of pictures, seeking one village, one house. Amira, who had been so kind to her during her field-work; what had happened to Amira and her happy, fat children?
But to a satellite in geo-stationary orbit, one African woman and her family were of no interest. The cameras had not zoomed down here, and she was whisked over the village as the tidal wave bore down the valley. She stopped, wound back the film, froze the shot, stared but could not see. She was too late to pay for real-time control. Last night, Amira had died, or lived, and the Net would not help Val to find out which.
Somewhere in the depths of the Net, in a side-room off a minor hall, her scholarly book glowed with a pale light.
Drowned Communities, Disrupted Lives: A Woman’s Perspective on the History of High Dams. It was the latest of twelve titles, the fruits of thirty years’ painstaking, part-time research. The rose-coloured ink-blot slowly and sadly wended its way through the Net’s indexing system, and stopped in front of the book.
‘Amira.’
A voice replied, speaking the translated sentences that Val had constructed out of the interview she had recorded, through an interpreter, with the Sudanese village woman. A shadow of Amira’s life was stored here in the Net for those few who chose to seek it out.
‘Amira.’
An itching in the centre of her persona interrupted her reverie. Recalled, she drew back through the multi-layered system, back to the home bubble of her call-sign, and jacked out. The itch, as ever, took a few moments to disperse.
A flashing light indicated somebody at the door. S
he flipped on the screen.
‘George!’
‘Hello, Val.’ His voice was weak, and he looked thin. ‘I’m sorry—’ He paused, and looked down. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Yes. I’ll be in the sun-room.’
She activated the downstairs door and got up, puzzled and slightly nervous. They had seen little of one another since splitting up six months previously, and at times she had missed his warm humour and generous humanity. The decision had been a hard one, and she still resented having to make the choice between a partner and work, but her work was more important to her these days, and so she had asked him to leave. She still remembered him with enough love and affection to wish that things could have been different, and she was annoyed to find her heart beating rapidly as she heard him at the door to her apartment.
His footsteps along the hall were unfamiliar - hesitant, lighter than she remembered. She turned to greet him as he came into the room, but her welcoming smile faded as she saw him; gaunt, pale, and stooped. ‘George! What’s happened?’
He came into her arms and clung to her, like a frightened child. ‘Val, I’m sorry. I’m going to pieces. I needed someone to be with.’
‘Are you ill?’
He sighed, and let go of her. ‘Can we sit down?’
She nodded, and they sat at opposite ends of the sofa, and looked at one another. Searching for some way to express her shock at his appearance, she finally said: ‘You’ve lost weight.’
He stared at his hands, his fingers lacing and unlacing themselves in unfamiliar movements. ‘I’ve lost everything,’ he said.
‘Do you want to talk?’
He hesitated. ‘I don’t know. I wish I could just tell you, but what would you think?’
He looked at her in such despair that she felt afraid. What could George have done that was so bad? ‘Please tell me,’ she said.
‘Maybe you’ve heard. There’s been no news, but it must be happening everywhere. My boys are ... Have you heard anything?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m researching a new book, I’m a bit out of touch. What’s wrong with the boys?’
‘We’ve had two suicides and a murder in the last three days. They’ve all been tranquillized and locked in their rooms for their own safety. They just can’t cope. And I’m not surprised. I can’t cope, and I thought I was more of a man than that.’
‘George, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He spread his hands in despair. ‘Our penises have got up and walked away.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve lost our penises. They’ve gone, detached themselves, they’re autonomous beasts.’
Her eyes moved involuntarily to his groin. He covered his fly with his hands, then took them away again, and shrugged.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘That idea was invented as an excuse for rape. It’s part of you, and it’s under your control. But—’ Suddenly shocked, she asked: ‘Has one of the boys attacked you?’
‘No. No, it did it all by itself. It’s like my worst nightmare. I was— Well, it came off in my hand.’
‘And ran away?’
‘Yes. It laughed at me.’
He looked so doleful, and the image of a penis scurrying across the floor was so absurd, that she burst into laughter. George shrank back in his seat and clutched at his groin. Val clamped a hand over her mouth, but she couldn’t stop laughing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she spluttered. ‘I just... I can’t... Oh, dear!’ She exploded into guffaws again.
He stood up. ‘I’ll go.’
‘No.’ She stopped laughing. ‘I’m sorry. It just sounded— Is it true?’
‘I’ll show you, if you want.’
‘No, don’t.’ She didn’t want to see, not now, not like a stranger exposing himself. Her eyes were on a level with his groin. She stood up, held out her arms, and they hugged tightly. ‘You’re welcome to stay here, George, if you need to.’ The weight of her offer settled on her shoulders as she added, it seemed inevitably: ‘I’ll take care of you, for as long as you need.’
~ * ~
ELEVEN
Grandmothers were looking after the children so that the younger women could go searching for food and firewood. An anonymous plane had dropped sacks of rice, dura flour and powdered milk the previous day before roaring away northwards, but rice still had to be cooked, and there was not enough to last the whole village for more than a few days.
Amira had walked miles, and was returning to the makeshift village with a bundle of sticks on her head when she saw a human foot sticking out from behind a rock. She stopped and stared at it warily, but it didn’t move. After a few minutes, she advanced cautiously, and peered over the rock.
A body was lying huddled with its face to the stone. It was thin and bony with dry skin like dead leaves. Amira lowered her bundle to the ground and rolled the figure over on to its back.
Dead eyes stared, the eyeballs rolled up into the skull so that only the whites showed, and the jaw hung slack. With difficulty, Amira recognized Shilluk, a young man from her village. He had disappeared three days prior to the earthquake, leaving his wife and young baby behind.
Amira was puzzled; she couldn’t see what he had died of. There was no sign of injury, he couldn’t have drowned up here above the flood-line, and he could hardly have starved in four days. She pulled open his djellaba to examine him further, and rocked back on her heels with a gasp. He had no genitals.
Looking more closely, she saw two empty flaps of skin that must once have been testicles, but his penis was gone. She knew that Shilluk had been potent because he had impregnated not only his wife, but Amira’s own sister as well, in a rape that had led to her husband divorcing her.
Amira grinned down at the dead man. ‘Did you die of shock when your best friend ran away, eh?’ she asked him. But his wife would want to see the body. She fastened his clothes again and heaved him on to her shoulder. He weighed scarcely more than the bundle of sticks, as though only the husk of a man remained, and she carried him easily.
She wondered if her own husband was lying dead somewhere. Perhaps all the men had met with the same fate. Well, she had borne five children already, and three still lived. At twenty-six she was tired of pregnancy, and her husband had never been kind to her. She realized that she had been awaiting his return, expecting him all the time, dreading the demands he would make when he came. Her stride lengthened, and she began to sing.
Back at the village, hers was not the only news, nor even the most important. Other women out foraging had found ripe melons and plantains growing wild, and date palms laden with fruit. They had returned with their baskets full, and the village was bubbling over with excited chatter.
Amira’s find sobered the excitement for a while. Shilluk’s wife was grief-stricken, and flung herself on his body, sobbing wildly. She had loved her handsome husband, and they had been married for barely a year.
Shilluk’s mother and sisters-in-law took over, and Amira wandered away, wishing she had left him behind the rock.
‘Amira!’ An old woman’s voice hailed her. Old Naandi, Shilluk’s grandmother, came limping after her. ‘Did you look at him?’ she asked as she came up to her.
Amira nodded.
‘Have you smelled the air?’ Naandi asked next. ‘It’s very sweet today. And you know, those children, they’ll be sick, they’ve eaten so many melons.’
Amira frowned. Naandi was not in the habit of rambling. ‘ I don’t understand, grandmother.’
‘The Moon will be full tonight. She likes to dance, you know. And I think tonight, the Earth will dance with her.’ Naandi looked at her with bright eyes. ‘The Earth is female, everyone knows that. Men, they don’t understand her. But now, there are no men - and we have melons.’ She smiled. ‘The dam was men’s work.’
She hobbled away, chuckling to herself. Amira watched her go, and began to smile too. Then she went in search of her daughters.
~ * ~
TWEL
VE
George’s toothbrush was back on the shelf. Remnants of stubble littered the sink. Val rinsed them away, thinking about her research. She had not used the Net in three days, and her old sense of entrapment was creeping back. She glanced in the mirror, and her reflection glared at her. Traitor, it told her. You promised me; no more compromise.
‘He’s sick,’ she said, turning away from her own gaze. ‘He needs me. It won’t be for long.’
And indeed he was sick. She had never known George to be other than energetic and busy; now he lay in front of the fire all day, curled up around his pain. They were sleeping together, like a mother and frightened child, and she had seen his loss. She didn’t know how to respond, except to stay with him and hold his hand.
New Worlds 4 Page 14
