A Woman a Day

by Philip José Farmer

  Leif and Halla were silent for a long while. The tension of their slow trip, the many halts, the sickening odors of human bodies packed closely in a poorly ventilated space, and, above all, the terrible tiredness left in them after the chase and battle, combined to make them ill-at-ease, irritated, and, though it was contrary to their disposition, sullen.

  Halla put her head upon his shoulder and whispered, “I’m beginning to think you’ve regretted what you’ve done.”

  He mastered the impulse to snap at her, but she was too sensitive to miss the roughness beneath the pretended gentleness.

  “I thought the world was well lost for you,” he replied.

  The next instant, he knew he shouldn’t have said that, for he felt tears soaking his chest. He hugged her to him and said, “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. What I meant was that I couldn’t have done anything but what I did. Any other course would have made me lose you, and I just couldn’t stand that. It’s funny, too, for I never thought one woman could mean so much to me.”

  She sniffled and murmured, “Oh, I’m glad, Leif, glad you said that. Yet, because of me, you’ve become an exile and you’ll be called a traitor. What about your parents, your friends?”

  “Let me explain myself,” he said. “And then there’ll be no more talk about this. It’ll be settled. From then on I won’t have any regrets, sorrows, or self-pity coming from either you or me. I hate all three of those sentiments. They destroy you, eat you up. Have you got that through your head?”

  She didn’t raise her head from his breast to look at him, but he felt it nod.

  “Good. Now—my parents are dead, and my close friends are none. I’ve been gone twelve years from March. Twelve years sacrificed for my nation. No, not for my country, for humanity. Because I don’t believe in boundaries, and I hope that after this cold war is won, the lines that mark off man from man will melt away. I doubt it, though.

  “During those years, the only countrymen I’ve known well have been Zack Roe and Ava. The others have been fleeting shadows, faces and voices and hands that I met but once or twice. Ava was the only one I could call a friend, and our relationship was peculiar. For one thing, after our first year of living as supposed man and wife, I fell into the habit of thinking of him as her. Occasionally he did something that jarred me, and I would sharply remind myself that he wasn’t a she. And I surmise that during the last five years Ava began thinking of himself as female, too. I imagine that it was for that very reason he was so generally truculent with me. He had to assert his masculinity or lose it. He’d been somewhat feminine to begin with; that was why he could so well carry out his disguise. But he was in danger of losing his true identity, and I... well, I was always teasing him about his costume because I wanted to remind him of what he really was.”

  “Why’d he have to be a woman?”

  “All because of the rigid morals of General Itskowitz of the Cold War Corps. He thought it was necessary that the hospital be controlled by both a man and a woman. The woman would oversee the nurses and the sick females and those bearing children. We could pick up a surprising amount of information and contacts from these. The logical candidate for the head nurse would be one of our women spies, but the good General didn’t think so. It seemed to him that two people living as close as we would be doing would be bound to overlook the conventions and begin acting like man and wife. That’d never do. And since he couldn’t induce me to marry anybody, he sent Ava as my spouse.

  “When you think about it, you see how absurd his attitude was. Is it any more immoral to command a man to make love to a woman than it is to order him to kill a man?”

  Halla didn’t reply to that. She said, instead, “I’ll bet Ava suffered.”

  “He did. In the first place, he was a very devout man. It hurt him to eat the food of the Jacks. In the second place, he was married, and he did not get to see his wife for all those years. Six more months, and he would have gone home, for Timestop was due to arrive. When that came, he was scheduled to leave the Haijac. His work would have been done. He’d have been greatly rewarded when he got back to March.

  “Moreover, it irked him to see me making love to various women. He was as virile as any man, but he had to restrain himself because of his moral laws and also because of the part he was playing. It made him even madder that most of the lovemaking was done on the orders of the CWC. I was to influence this man and that man through his wife or sister or mistress. Most deplorable. Yet, curiously enough, it was done at the command of the aforesaid and rigidly narrow General Itskowitz. As long as it was enemy women, fine. But not with one of my own countrywomen. No, sir! I was surprised, I’ll have to admit, when Ava said he’d stand off the Uzzites in the tunnel and give us a chance to go ahead. It didn’t seem like him. You’d think he’d cling fiercely to the last gasp. It was possible he’d get back to March and his wife and child.”

  Her voice was muffled because her mouth was next to his shirt. She said, “I know he did it because of me.”

  “You?”

  “Yes. He was a man, as I sensed from the very first. I could tell the difference in his emanations.”

  She touched the two rudimentary antennae beneath her mass of red hair.

  “He was a man. He could not help falling in love with me. Or, at least, feeling passion.”

  He straightened, then forced himself to relax. “When was this?”

  “When you were with Jim Crew, operating on Anadi, and we were waiting to go to Canada. It was then, you know, that he told me my sister was dead. I didn’t tell you why he disobeyed Roe’s orders not to inform me of that. He did it for revenge, a desire to hurt me.

  “You see, he tried to make love to me, and I wouldn’t let him. He was, in his way, as crazed about me as Candleman had been about my sister. He babbled that he had suffered too long, that he couldn’t stand it, that I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, that he couldn’t help himself, and that it wouldn’t hurt us. I don’t think he knew what he was saying. It was not he that was talking, it was his poor, frustrated body.

  “I said I’d have nothing to do with him. And he turned on me, and where he had been pleading, he raged, he threatened. Finally, he told me my sister was dead. I cried. To quiet me, he gave me a grief-runner drug and allowed me to discharge my sorrow. But he hated me. Still, I know that it was because of me he sacrificed himself. I think, once he’d broken his own code, he could not go on living. His act was one of atonement. Poor fellow!”

  “Yes,” he said, stroking her hair, “and poor girl, too. You seem to inspire passion in every man who sees you. I’ll have to watch and guard you every minute.”

  “You won’t have to watch me, Leif. I’m honest, and I love you.”

  “I’m not worried. I have you, and that’s enough. You’re my wife—or will be—my country, my people. I don’t want any more.”

  Halla kept her face buried against his chest and did not say anything for a moment. He could tell she was too happy to speak. Softly, because he knew they were quite sensitive, he stroked the little bumps of her vestigial antennae. Finally, when he thought that perhaps she was falling asleep, she said, “And the Haijac Union? What about it?”

  “I’ll explain. You see, Halla, we have known for a long time that only the extreme efficacy of the weapons which all nations have, with the exception of Bantuland, has kept us from a hot war. So, all have resorted to a cold war with the Haijac Union against the others. But the main cold war has been between the Jacks and the Marchers and Israelis. So far the Union has been half-successful in their war against the Israeli Republics. Both have hoped their CWC’s could aggravate natural weaknesses existing in the other and so accelerate them that when the time came for all-out battle, the other would go down quickly.

  “The Israeli weakness is dissension between the conservative and liberal states. The Jacks know that, and their agents, I think, have been working to make even more dissension. At this moment, the Republics are on th
e verge of canceling the centuries-old constitution of confederation and becoming totally independent states. In fact, Sephardia and Khem have already done that.

  “However, the anti-Haijacs have an advantage. We know and admit our faults, but the Union refuses to recognize it has any. That’s good. For us. Because we utilized their blind suspicion and uncompromising adherence to the Sturch’s principles to make them conquer themselves. You know I invented the technique: Jacques Cuze.

  “Furthermore, their fanatical belief in their pseudoscientific cosmology will bounce back and hit them in their faces. You know that when they detect unrest in the people they gandy-goose interest in Timestop, the Day of Reward. After the public’s mind is taken off its troubles, the hierarchy eases the pressure and lets things go back to normal. But that can be done only so long. Then the accumulated disappointment of the mob will backfire. Provided, that is, it is given weapons to use.

  “That is what will happen. We CWC-ers did not allow the last Timestop furor to die down. We kept provoking incidents. We fed inciting literature, via the comics, to the people. We’ve whipped up such a frenzy that the Sturch has had to go along. It’s a contagious fever that’s so strong even some of the hierarchy are swallowing their own medicine. And soon you’ll see Timestop officially announced. Many hierarchs will try to stop it, of course, but once it’s done, they can’t halt it. Timestop will get nearer. The men on the top level will get more frantic. Some will lose their heads and arrest the lamechians who started the business. But when they do that, they’ll discredit themselves. They’ll be demonstrating that lamech-wearers aren’t perfect.

  “There’ll be dissension and paralysis in the Allthing, the governing council. The Sturch will split. Many sincere men will follow the lead of our agents. Then, Timestop arrives. A dozen men will appear, claiming to be Isaac Sigmen sailing in from his last voyage on the stream of time. These, of course, will be CWC agents. Some of these men will die, martyrs to the cause. But they’ll be commemorated as heroes in March.

  “The Metatrons and Sandalphons of the various states of the Union will disagree. Secession will result, and the Union will break.

  “But we hope to avoid war, because it might be disastrous, and because it might be the very thing to re-unite the Jacks. If possible, we’ll remain at peace and allow them to disintegrate under their own weaknesses. Moth and rust will corrupt, for the Sturch has laid up no treasures in heaven.

  “It’s funny, but time will come to a stop for the Haijac; it will go static. And anything that remains static, rots. So, it may take a century, but the Sturch will die. We, through various means, will feed our democratic ideals to them. By then we, of course, may be much changed ourselves. 1 think the Primitives are going to influence us very much. It may be we’ll find our own ideals are rather inadequate, that we’ll profit from Africa and what it has to offer.”

  There was a lull as Leif paused for breath. During that moment, the Malay pilot, reassuring a passenger, said, loudly and distinctly, “Miss, don’t worry. We get stuck in the mud every once in a while but somehow we keep going forward.”