The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  —

  Sexual differentiation in humans occurs at about the fifth week of gestation. Prior to this time the fetus is sexless, or more precisely, it has the potential to become either (or both) sex. Around the fifth week a single gene turns on, initiating a cascade of events that ultimately gives rise to testicle or ovary. In the male this gene is associated with the Y chromosome; in the female, with the X. An XY pair normally gives rise to a male; an XX pair, to a female.

  The two genes have been identified and produced by artificial means. Despite a general reluctance in the scientific community as a whole, our laboratory has taken this research further. Recently, we have devised a method to attach either gene to a common rhinovirus. The virus is ubiquitous; among humans it is highly contagious. It is spread primarily through water droplets (sneezing, coughing), but also through other bodily fluids (sweat, urine, saliva, semen). We have attenuated the virus so that it is harmless to mammalian tissue. It incites little, if any, immune response, resting dormantly inside cells. It causes no apparent disruption of function.

  When an infected female becomes pregnant, the virus rapidly crosses the placenta, infecting cells of the developing fetus. If the virus carries the X gene, the fetus will become a female; if it carries the Y, a male. In mice and rabbits we have been able to produce entire litters of males or females. Experiments in simians have been similarly successful. It is not premature to conclude that we have the capability to do the same for humans.

  Imagine whole families of males or females. Districts, towns, even countries. So simple, it is as though it was always meant to be.

  —

  My daughter is a beautiful girl. She knows enough about sex, I think, to satisfy her for the present. She plays with herself often at night, sometimes during the day. She is very happy not to have to wear diapers anymore. She used to look at my penis a lot, and once in a while she would touch it. Now she doesn’t seem to care.

  Once maybe every three or four months she’ll put on a pair of pants. The rest of the time she wears skirts or dresses. My wife, a laborer, wears only pants. She drives a truck.

  One of our daughter’s schoolteachers, a Church woman, told her that Christian girls don’t wear pants. I had a dream last night that our next child is a boy.

  —

  I admit I am confused. In the ninth century there was a German woman with a name no one remembers. Call her Katrin. She met and fell in love with a man, a scholar. Presumably, the love was mutual. The man traveled to Athens to study and Katrin went with him. She disguised herself as a man so that they could live together.

  In Athens the man died. Katrin stayed on. She had learned much from him, had become something of a scholar herself. She continued her studies and over time gained renown for her learning. She kept her disguise as a man.

  Some time later she was called to Rome to study and teach at the offices of Pope Leo IV. Her reputation grew, and when Leo died in 855, Katrin was elected pope.

  Her reign ended abruptly two and a half years later. In the midst of a papal procession through the streets of Rome, her cloak hanging loose, obscuring the contours of her body, Katrin squatted on the ground, uttered a series of cries, and delivered a baby. Soon after, she was thrown in a dungeon, and later banished to an impoverished land to the north. From that time on, all popes, prior to confirmation, have been examined by two reliable clerics. Before an assembled audience they feel under the candidate’s robes.

  “Testiculos habet,” they declare, at which point the congregation heaves a sigh of relief.

  “Deo gratias,” it chants back. “Deo gratias.”*3

  —

  I was at a benefit luncheon the other day, a celebration of regional women writers. Of five hundred people I was one of a handful of men. I went at the invitation of a friend because I like the friend and I like the writers who were being honored. I wore a sports coat and slacks and had a neatly trimmed four-day growth of beard. I waited in a long line at the door, surrounded by women. Some were taller than me, but I was taller than most. All were dressed fashionably; most wore jewelry and makeup. I was uncomfortable in the crowd, not profoundly, but enough that my manner turned meek. I was ready to be accosted and singled out.

  A loud woman butted in front of me and I said nothing. At the registration desk I spoke softly, demurely. The woman at the desk smiled and said something nice. I felt a little better, took my card, and went in.

  It was a large and fancy room, packed with tables draped with white cloths. The luncheon was being catered by a culinary school located in the same building. There was a kitchen on the ground floor, to the left of the large room. Another was at the mezzanine level above the stage at the front of the room. This one was enclosed in glass, and during the luncheon there was a class going on. Students in white coats and a chef with a tall white hat passed back and forth in front of the glass. Their lips moved, but from below we didn’t hear any sounds.

  Midway through the luncheon the program started. The main organizer spoke about the foundation for which the luncheon was a benefit. It is an organization dedicated to the empowerment of women, to the rights of women and girls. My mind drifted.

  I have been a feminist for years. I was in the room next door when my first wife formed a coven. I gave her my encouragement. I celebrated with her the publication of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. The sisters made a slide show, using some of Valerie’s words. It was shown around the East Coast. I helped them out by providing a man’s voice. I am a turd, the man said. A lowly, abject turd.

  My daughter is four. She is as precious as any four-year-old can be. I want her to be able to choose. I want her to feel her power. I will tear down the door that is slammed in her face because she is a woman.

  The first honoree came to the podium, reading a story about the bond between a wealthy woman traveler and a poor Mexican room-maid. After two paragraphs a noise interrupted her. It was a dull, beating sound, went on for half a minute, stopped, started up again. It came from the glassed-in teaching kitchen above the stage. The white-capped chef was pounding a piece of meat, oblivious to the scene below. Obviously he couldn’t hear.

  The woman tried to keep reading but eventually stopped. She made one or two frivolous comments to the audience. We were all a little nervous, and there were scattered titters while we waited for something to be done. The chef kept pounding the meat. Behind me a woman whispered loudly, male chauvinist.

  I was not surprised, had, in fact, been waiting from the beginning for someone to say something like that. It made me mad. The man was innocent. The woman was a fool. An automaton. I wanted to shake her, shake her up and make her pay the price.

  —

  I have a friend, a man with a narrow face and cheeks that always look unshaven. His eyes are quick; when he is with me, they always seem to be looking someplace else. He is facile with speech and quite particular about the words he chooses. He is not unattractive.

  I like this man for the same reasons I dislike him. He is opportunistic and assertive. He is clever, in the way that being detached allows one to be. And fiercely competitive. He values those who rise to his challenges.

  I think of him as a predator, as a man looking for an advantage. This would surprise, even bewilder him, for he carries the innocence of self-absorption. When he laughs at himself, he is so proud to be able to do so.

  He has a peculiar attitude toward women. He does not like those who are his intellectual equal. He does not respect those who are not. And yet he loves women. He loves to make them. Especially he loves the ones who need to be convinced. I sometimes play tennis with him. I apologize if I hit a bad shot. I apologize if I am not adequate competition. I want to please him, and I lose every time we play. I am afraid to win, afraid that he might get angry, even violent. He could explode.

  I want to win. I want to win bad. I want to drive him into the net, into the concrete itself and beneath it with the force of my victory.

  —

  I adm
it I am perplexed. A man can be aggressive, tender, strong, compassionate, hostile, moody, loyal, competent, funny, generous, searching, selfish, powerful, self-destructive, shy, shameful, hard, soft, duplicitous, faithful, honest, bold, foolhardy, vain, vulnerable, and proud. Struggling to keep his instincts in check, he is both abused and blessed by his maleness.

  Dr. P, a biologist, husband, father, and subject of a widely cited study, never knew how much of his behavior to attribute to the involuntary release of chemicals, to the flow of electricity through synapses stamped male as early as sixty days after conception, and how much was under his control. He did not want to dilute his potency as a scientist, as a man, by struggling too hard against his impulses, and yet the glimpses he had of another way of life were often too compelling to disregard. The bond between his wife and daughter sometimes brought tears to his eyes. The thought of his wife carrying the child in her belly for nine months and then pushing her out through the tight gap between her legs sometimes settled in his mind like a hypnotic suggestion, like something so sweet and pure he would wither without it.*4

  —

  I asked another friend what it was to him to be a man. He laughed nervously and said the question was too hard. Okay, I said, what is it you like best? He shied away but I pressed him. Having a penis, he said. I nodded. Having it sucked, putting it in a warm place. Coming. He smiled and looked beatific. Oh God, he said, it’s so good to come.

  Later on he said, I like the authority I have, the subtle edge. I like the respect. A man, just by being a man, gets respect. When I get an erection, when I get very hard, I feel strong. I take on power that at other times is hidden to me. Impossibilities seem to melt away.

  (A world like that, I think. A world of men. How wondrous! The Y virus, then. I think it must be the Y.)

  —

  In the summer of our marriage I was sitting with my first wife in the mountains. She was on one side of a dirt road that wound up to a pass and I was on the other. Scattered on the mountain slope were big chunks of granite and around them stands of aspen and a few solitary pines. The sky was a deep blue, the kind that takes your breath away. The air was crisp.

  She was throwing rocks at me, and arguing. Some of the rocks were quite big, as big as you could hold in a palm. They landed close, throwing up clouds of dust in the roadbed. She was telling me why we should get married.

  “I’ll get more respect,” she said. “Once we get married then we can get divorced. A divorced woman gets respect.”

  I asked her to stop throwing rocks. She was mad because she wasn’t getting her way. Because I was being truculent. Because she was working a man’s job cleaning out the insides of ships, scaling off the plaque and grime, and she was being treated like a woman. She wanted to be treated like a man, be tough like a man, dirty and tough. She wanted to smoke in bars, get drunk, shoot pool. In the bars she wanted to act like a man, be loud, not take shit. She wanted to do this and also she wanted to look sharp, she wanted to dress sexy, in tight blouses and pants. She wanted men to come on to her, she wanted them to fawn a little. She wanted that power.

  “A woman who’s been married once, they know she knows something. She’s not innocent. She’s gotten rid of one, she can get rid of another. They show respect.”

  She stopped throwing rocks and came over to me. I was a little cowed. She said if I loved her I would marry her so she could divorce me. She was tender and insistent. I did love her, and I understood the importance of respect. But I was torn. I couldn’t make up my mind.

  “You see,” she said, angry again. “You’re the one who gets to decide. It’s always you who’s in control.”

  “I am a turd,” I replied. “A lowly, abject turd.”

  —

  A woman came to me the other day. She knew my name, was aware of the thrust of my research but not the particulars. She did not know that in the blink of an eye her kind, or mine, could be gone from the face of the earth. She did not know, but it did not seem to matter.

  She was dressed simply; her face was plain. She seemed at ease when she spoke, though she could not conceal (nor did she try) a certain intensity of feeling. She said that as a woman she could not trust a man to make decisions about her future. To my surprise I told her that I am not a man at all.

  “I am a mother,” I said. “When my daughter was an infant, I let her suckle my breast.”

  “You have no breasts,” she said scornfully.

  “Only no milk.” I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it to the side. I squeezed a nipple. “She wouldn’t stay on because it was dry.”

  “You are a man,” she said, unaffected. “You look like one. I’ve seen you walk, you walk like one.”

  “How does a man walk?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “I am courteous. I step aside in crowds, wait for others to pass.”

  “Courtesy is the manner the strong adopt toward the weak. It is the recognition of their dominance.”

  “Sometimes I am meek,” I said. “Sometimes I’m as shy as a kitten.”

  She gave me an exasperated look, as though I were a child who had strained the limits of her patience. “You are a man, and men are outcasts. You are outcasts from the very world you made. The world you built on the bodies of other species. Of women.”

  I did not want to argue with her. In a way she was right. Men have tamed the world.

  “You think you rise above,” she went on, less stridently. “It is the folly of comparison. There’s no one below. No one but yourselves.”

  “I don’t look down,” I said.

  “Men don’t look at all. If you did, you’d see that certain parts of your bodies are missing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She looked at me quietly. “Don’t you think it’s time women had a chance?”

  “Let me tell you something,” I said. “I have always wanted to be a woman. I used to dress like one whenever I had the chance. I was too frightened to keep women’s clothes in my own apartment, and I used to borrow my neighbor’s. She was a tall woman, bigger than me, and she worked evenings. I had the key to her apartment, and at night after work, before she came home, I would sneak into her place and go through her drawers. Because of her size, most of her clothes fit. She had a pair of boots, knee-high soft leather boots which I especially liked.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I want to. It’s important that you understand.”

  “Listen, no man wants to be a woman. Not really. Not deep down.”

  “Men are beautiful.” I made a fist. “Our bodies are powerful, like the ocean, and strong. Our muscles swell and tuck into each other like waves.

  “There is nothing so pure as a man. Nothing like the face of a boy. The smooth and innocent cheek. The promise in the eyes.

  “I love men. I love to trace our hard parts, our soft ones, with my eyes, my imagination. I love to see us naked, but I am not aroused. I never have thoughts of having men.

  “One night, though, I did. I was coming from my neighbor’s apartment, where I had dressed up in dark tights, those high boots of hers, and a short, belted dress. I had stuffed socks in the cups of her bra and was a very stacked lady. Very shapely indeed. When I was done, I took everything off, folded it, and put it neatly back in her drawers. I got dressed in my own pants and shirt, a leather jacket on top, and left. I was going to spend the night with my wife, who at the time lived separately from me a few blocks away.

  “On the street I still felt aroused. I had not relieved the tension and needed some release. As I walked I alternated between feeling like a man on the prowl and a woman wanting to grab something between her legs. I think I felt more the latter, because I wanted something to be done to me. I wanted someone else to be boss.

  “I reached the top of the hill and started down the other side. It was late and the street was dark. A solitary car, a Cadillac, crept down the hill. When it came alongside me, it slowed. The driver motioned
me over, and I took half a step back. My heart was pounding. He motioned again. I took a deep breath, swallowed heavily, and went to him.

  “He was a burly black man, smelled of alcohol. I sat far away from him, against the door, and stared out the windshield. He asked where my place was. I said I had none. He grunted and drove up a steep hill, then several more. He pulled his big car into the basement lot of an apartment complex. “A lady friend’s,” he said, and I followed him up some flights of stairs and down a corridor to the door of an apartment. I was aroused, frightened, determined. I don’t think he touched me that whole time.

  “He opened the door and we went in. The living room was bare, except for a record player on the floor and a scattered bunch of LPs. One was playing and was close to being done. I expected to see someone else in the apartment. But it was empty.

  “The man went into another room, maybe the kitchen, and fixed himself a drink. He wasn’t friendly to me, wasn’t cruel. I think he was a little nervous to have me there, but otherwise acted as if I were a piece of something to deal with in his own way in his own time. I did not feel that I needed to be treated any differently than that.

  “He took me into the bedroom, put me on the bed. That was in the beginning: later I remember only the floor. He took off his shirt and his pants and pulled my pants down. He settled on me, his front to my front. He was barrel-chested, big and heavy. I wrapped my legs around him and he began to rub up and down on me. His lips were fat, and he kissed me hard and tongued me. He smelled very strong, full of drugs and liquor. His beard was rough on my cheek. I liked the way it felt but not the way it scratched. He began to talk to himself.

  “ ‘The swimmin’ gates. Let me in the swimmin’ gates. The swimmin’ gates.’