He laughed bitterly. “What could be wrong?” he said. “The lady is here to get it off with me, isn’t she? The fact that she’s trying to turn every woman on the planet off men shouldn’t matter, should it?”
“That... that’s not my doing...” Cynda stammered. “I tried to stop—”
“You’re the leader of the Femocrat mission, aren’t you?”
Cynda sighed. “In name only,” she said. “You have no idea—”
“I guess not And frankly, I don’t give a damn.” “Look,” Cynda said, “could we go out on the boat and—”
Eric glared at her. “We’re not going anywhere tonight,” he said. “This is it, lady! You’ve used me for an effing dildo for the last time.”
Cynda’s knees trembled. Wearily, she sat down on the hard wooden dock and looked up at Eric, who towered above her, still locked into his arrogant stance of outraged machohood. “I haven’t used you, Eric,” she said. “Really I haven’t”
He crouched down beside her, balanced on the balls of his feet, the tight fabric at the seat of his pants hovering above the splintery weathered emeraldwood of the dock. “Haven’t you, Cynda?” he said. “I plug into the net. I’ve seen what you’re putting out. What we’ve been doing is an act of macho aggression, isn’t it? A metaphor for war and faschochauvinist domination? ‘Perverted,’ by your own standards.”
“No! I mean, I’m not like that!”
“No? Then what are you like, lady?”
“Great Mother, I don’t know any more!” Cynda sighed. “Well, then I’ll tell you!” Eric snapped. “You’re an effing pervert, Cynda. You hate men. You think you’re a superior creature. You believe that wongs are disgusting organs attached to inferior breeders whose proper place is kneeling at your feet licking your fucking boots...
He smiled cruelly at her and fingered the fly of his trousers. “But the thing is, your body wants that disgusting weapon of faschochauvinism inside you,” he said. “You despise men, but oh, how you love cock!” He undid the front of his pants and worked his piercer free of the clothing with one hand. It grew huge and hard and somehow menacing as he waved it at her.
“Look at it, lady, and tell me you don’t want it up you,” he said. ‘Tell me you don’t want to put it in your mouth and suck it till it fills you with loathsome male seed!” “You’re being disgusting!” Cynda cried, unable to take her eyes off the throbbing piercer, even while her flesh crawled away from him.
“Sure, I’m being disgusting,” Eric said. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You consider what you want to do disgusting and perverted. Your body wants it, but your mind is out there telling the world just how disgusting it is. Your cunt is out of sync with your brain, you’re all fucked up inside, and that’s exactly what it means to be a pervert, isn’t it? Hypocrite is just another word for it.” “That’s not so!” Cynda insisted.
Eric stood up, his piercer waving free in the warm night breeze above Cynda’s face like some ghastly banner, like some foul faschochauvinist ensign. Yet she found her eyes transfixed by it, and her lips wanted to—
“Then straighten out, Cynda,” Eric said. “Put your mouth...e stopped short, laughed sardonically. “Put your mind where your mouth wants to be. Stop the crap you’re putting out. Don’t try to keep other women from being the same damn thing you want to be.”
“I...I tried, really I did,” Cynda said. “But I couldn’t, it’s out of my hands.”
“Jellybelly oil!”
“It’s the truth!”
“Well then, take yourself out of their hands,” Eric said more softly.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Defect. Ask for political asylum. Tell the whole damn planet that what you’ve been saying is a lie. Come over to our side.”
“Your side? Whose side? Falkenstein’s? Bucko Power’s?” Eric held his piercer centimeters from her lips, stroking it languidly. “This side/’ he said. “The side your body’s on already.”
“I can’t do that,” Cynda said. He brushed the head of his piercer teasingly over her lips. An electric shock passed from her lips to her groin and her mouth flowed forward. Eric laughed and danced back half a step.
“Why not?” he said.
Why not indeed? Cynda wondered. Admit it, you hate Bara. You’ve begun to hate what we’re doing here, you’re no longer sure we’re even right. And you’re a breeder-lover, Cynda, a dirty, perverted breeder-lover. You want that piercer inside your flower, you want to suck on it, you haven’t eaten honey once since you came to this planet. He’s right, that’s what you are, a pervert. What’s stopping you? Why won’t you go all the way?
She looked up at Eric, a dark figure of knowing macho arrogance, thrusting his piercer at her like a weapon, the perfect image of all that was loathsome faschochauvinist pride.
He is using it as a weapon, she realized. What we’re saying may not be the whole truth, but it isn’t a total lie either. This is what we’re fighting on this planet, and this is what Falkenstein has called forth in the Pacifican breeder. This is what the men of this planet will become if Bucko Power wins out. This is the face of the beast. Great Mother, help me, I feel myself drawn toward it, but I know that it’s wrong, a flaw in my own genes, in his, in both halves of our divided species. Perhaps Sisterhood isn’t the only answer, but it’s the only one I know, and this... this is surely something worth fighting, in the world, and in myself.
Slowly she rose to her feet “I am what I am, Eric,” she said. “And you are what you are. I thought perhaps it could be different, but I can see that it’s not.”
Eric stared at her harshly. Slowly his expression soft-ned—to regret, sadness, embarrassment. Clumsily, he tucked his piercer back into his pants and closed them with a gesture of finality. “I guess so,” he said quietly. “I guess I just made a fool of myself.”
Cynda shrugged. She smiled wanly. “Maybe the way things are just made fools of both of us,” she said. “Maybe we’re all just a flawed species, men and women. But I know that I still believe in some kind of Sisterhood, no matter how flawed. I can’t betray that, Eric. Not for you, not for my own sexuality, not for anything. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” he said. “I may believe in Bucko Power, but I can’t say that this bucko feels very powerful right now.” She touched him briefly on the cheek. The lights of the city mocked the darkness behind him, and overhead the stars were lonely points of light lost in a cold immensity. “I guess this is goodbye,” she said.
He sighed and nodded his silent agreement.
“Try not to hate me too much,” Cynda said, and then she was running down the dock, staggering with sadness and seething with rage at she-knew-not-whom.
White clouds with just a hint of gray in their fluffy underbellies scudded rapidly across their course as Royce put the Davy Jones on another northward tack, zigzagging the sailboat east toward Gotham against a stiff westerly wind.
Of all the times for Royce to win the endless argument and get her to make the slow trip from Lorien to Gotham under sail, this period of shrill and frozen crisis had seemed the most unlikely to Carlotta Madigan. Perhaps it was a mutually agreed-upon symbol of the altered nuances of their relationship; perhaps it had had something to do with the realization that under these circumstances, the economy straining from the Thule strikes and no path of action presenting itself; her time was less valuable than she wished it to seem.
But as they sailed toward Gotham, tacking endlessly, north, south, north, against the prevailing winds, Carlotta began to understand what Royce meant about using the trip to think, about learning from the dynamics of wind, tide, and inertia. How like the political events of the past months this is! she thought. The wind blowing squarely against us, conning the ship of state on an endless series of diversionary tacks, clinging to some semblance of a true heading only by balancing the forces off against each other.
And now that process seems to have reached a dead end. How can we find a clear channel now, and ho
w can we steer Pacifica through it past the jagged rocks of destruction on either side?
She studied Royce, intent now on balancing off the tension in the boomline against the inertia of the tiller, internalizing the forces within our own relationship, she thought. And we seem to be making it work, with give and take, zigs and zags, and a little accommodated tension between us. Why can’t we apply the same process politically, as Pacificans together? All at once, something hopeful began to glimmer just beyond her conscious grasp...
“I wonder, Royce,” she said, “if we shouldn’t just construe these strikes as civil insurrections and proceed on that basis...
Royce shrugged. “According to the Ministry of Justice, a ‘civil insurrection’ has to involve an extralegal attempt to violate a law or the Constitution,” he reminded her. “Way they see it, these are legal strikes, period.”
“But what about Parliament?” Carlotta said. “I doubt the strikers would defy a resolution of Parliament, even if it war on shaky legal grounds.”
“Hmmmm . . Royce muttered. “The depth polls are interesting. Thirty percent of males support the Bucko Power strike, and about the same percentage of women support the Femocrat strike, and virtually all men are against the Femocrat strike and all women against the male strike. But something like twenty-seven percent of the total population is fed up with both strikes, and that vote isn’t sexually polarized...”
“And that figure should grow every day as the economy continues to deteriorate.”
“For sure... but it’s still not enough to make a majority of the Delegates brave enough to pass a resolution to end the strikes—not when they can avoid taking any position with a nice safe legalistic cop-out.”
Royce twisted the tiller and shifted the boom over. The sail flapped and luffed for a moment, then filled again as he established a southern tack. “Damn!” Carlotta said. “Why do we have to let Transcendental Science and the Femocrats control the parameters? Why can’t we find an effing Pacifican position that isn’t either-or?”
Royce eyed her speculatively. “I thought I had, but you didn’t agree,” he said.
“You did? I didn’t?”
“Infiltrate the Institute with Pacifican spies,” he said. “Get what we can during the trial period, then kick all of them off the planet. But you thought that was fascho-chauvinist jellybelly oil, remember?”
“Uh...” Carlotta muttered. “But we’re on a different tack now, aren’t we?”
“Aha!” Royce said. “At last you see the ineffable wisdom of my devious mind.”
“Not quite, bucko!” Carlotta said. But pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place. “But I’m beginning to see that maybe you and I really do agree on the basics, and maybe the two of us sitting in this boat have the essence of a real Pacifican position between us.”
“We do?"
“Look, neither of us wants a Femocratic Pacifica, and neither of us wants some elite male Transcendental Scientist caste lording it over the planet, right? Keeping Pacifica Pacifican is number one. Isn’t that an issue which transcends this out-worlder-fomented sexual polarization?” “Not if your idea is to kick all the off-worlders off the planet immediately,” Royce said. “I won’t support any move that will cut us off entirely from the Transcendental Sciences. I meant it, and I haven’t changed my mind.”
A slight flash of anger passed through Carlotta, but she instantly suppressed it. Her mind was cool and analytical now, reaching for compromise, not conflict Tacking against all opposing winds, even if they came from within. “All right, all right,” she said, “so let’s agree to disagree on that and see if we can’t fit even the disagreement into a Pacifican position, since it’s exactly the gap we have to bridge anyway.”
“If that’s what you’re selling now, I’m buying, babes.” “Okay, okay,” Carlotta said rapidly. “So what’s this Pacifican thing we’re trying to restore and preserve? The democratic process. Equity between men and women. A smooth psychosexual balance.”
“Liberty and justice for all,” Royce said sardonically. “Oh, so you think that’s just a tub of jellybelly oil?”
“I think it’s just words and fancy rules, Carlotta. What we had here didn’t depend on that The real Pacifican thing is—or was—a feeling, something in the soul. Community, trust, I dunno...”
After a long moment’s silence, Carlotta sighed. “Yeah, Royce, it’s just that feeling that we’ve lost,” she said softly. “Why can’t that be a political issue? If these off-worlders have proven anything, it’s that they can’t comprehend the thing that makes Pacifica Pacifica.”
“Pacifica for the Pacificans?” Royce said archly.
“Well, why not?” Carlotta answered, and suddenly everything clicked into place. “Pacifica for the Pacificans, and in the Pacifican way! Why not make that feeling the issue?”
Royce grinned. “The logic is a little fuzzy,” he said, “but I can sure see the media blitz!”
“The fuzzier the better!” Carlotta exclaimed. “Goddamn it, we’ll go with your plan to infiltrate the Institute, we’ll put your deal with Falkenstein into effect unilaterally, tell the planet we have done something, and demand the strikes be ended. Trust will be the issue—Pacificans must trust Pacificans, not any bunch of godzilla-brained off-worlders!”
“Amen to that,” Royce said.
“We’ll fudge the real isues!” Carlotta said. “We won’t say anything about infiltrating the Institute or setting one up on our own. The only issue will be Pacifica for the Pacificans, and anyone who disagrees is a traitor to the Pacifican way of life, a pawn of off-world meddlers, period!”
“Well, that sounds dirty enough to me,” Royce said. Once again, he shifted the boom and changed tacks. “The only trouble is,” he said as the sailboat headed northward, “that right now that’s precisely what nobody’s buying.”
“Then we’ll effing well sell it to them!” Carlotta said sharply. “And we’ll make ending the strikes the test issue. Anyone in favor of continuing the strikes is an un-Pacifican son of a bitch! We’ll introduce a resolution in Parliament and force the Delegates to stand up and be counted.”
Royce sighed. “But they’re sure to vote it down,” he said.
“Then screw Parliament!” Carlotta snapped. She smiled. She grinned. She laughed. Of courseI “That’s exactly what we’ll do,” she said.
Royce cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at her.
“We’ll really screw Parliament,” she said. “We’ll introduce a resolution to end the strikes and make damn well certain it’s voted down. Then we’ll have an electronic vote of confidence, and we’ll use the campaign to build a third force, a Pacifica for the Pacificans movement, good old-fashioned local nationalism. Then when I win the vote of confidence, there’ll be a new Parliament elected in which we’ll have sufficient Delegates representing our third force to block anything the Bucko Power creeps or the Femocratic League of Pacifica tries to do.”
Royce goggled at her in amazement. “That’s a lovely scenario,” he said, “but it can’t happen. It breaks down at the electronic vote of confidence. How in hell can you hope to win it?”
‘ By ending the strikes after the resolution fails but before the electronic vote,” Carlotta said. “The Delegates who voted down the resolution will look like perfect asses. They’ll be thrown out and replaced by our people.”
Royce shook his head numbly. “And how do you expect to accomplish this miracle of ending the strikes?”
Carlotta laughed. “When you start playing really dirty, life becomes a lot more simple,” she said. “We’ll use the campaign to cover a trip down to Valhalla. We’ll tell the male strikers that unless they end their strike, we’ll both come out for closing the Institute while permitting the Femocrats to remain on Pacifica, and we’ll tell the female strikers the exact opposite. And of course if anyone makes these threats public, we’ll deny everything and call it un-Pacifican off-worlder lies.”
“Whoo-ee!” Royce said. “That’
s some game of bluff! If we get called on it...”
“We won’t,” Carlotta said confidently. “Because ‘bluff is too timorous a term for it. Why not call it what it is— blackmail.”
Royce laughed. “You said it, I didn’t,” he said implishly. He giggled. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. “You can be one mean lady when you have to be, peerless leader,” he said approvingly. He shook his fist at a lone boomerbird passing overhead. “Pacifica for the Pacificans, jocko!” he shouted.
“Pacifica for the Pacificans!” Carlotta yelled back. The stem of the sailboat left a foaming white wake in the water, the wind half-filled the sail, and suddenly the zigzag tacking course seemed somehow appropriate; despite the worst efforts of the countering wind, it was a way to safe harbor. With a tiller in one hand and a boomline in the other, you could find a way to work your will against tide and wind, outside forces, and the blind hand of fate.
Royce grinned at her. “I’ll make a sailor out of you yet, Carlotta Madigan,” he said.
“What the hell do you mean by that?” she blurted refiexively. He didn’t bother to answer, but she thought she was beginning to understand.
15
A SERIES OF SHOTS RAPIDLY CUT IN EVER-INCREASING tempo: the Heisenberg in orbit, a rape scene from “Soldiers of Midnight,” Falkenstein’s smug face, the grounded Femocrat ship surrounded by Pacifican security forces, a lesbian sex scene from the Femocrats’ Lysistrata, Cynda Elizabeth, demonstrations, marches, rallies, striking pickets. On the soundtrack, an unintelligible babble of voices that grows ever louder, shriller, and more strident to the building rhythm of the cutting, as the sequence ends in a split-screen shot of a man and women screaming at each other with the animal voices of the mob, faces purpling with rage. Dissolve to a similar shot of two godzillas bellowing at each other with the same brainless mob voice.
Cut to a closeup of Carlotta Madigan; cool, calm, smiling her best Borgia smile.
Carlotta: “Welcome to Pacifica, the galaxy’s first real-life human godzilla epic. See men and women tearing at each other like jungle beasts! Watch the economy of the media hub of the human galaxy disintegrate! And finally, observe the Delegates to the most democratic Parliament known to man crawling on their bellies like reptiles!”
Norman Spinrad Page 28
