The Female Man

I

Who am I?

I know who I am, but what’s my brand name?

Me with a new face, a puffy mask. Laid over the old one in strips of plastic that hurt when they come off, a blond Hallowe’en ghoul on top of the S.S. uniform. I was skinny as a beanpole underneath except for the hands, which were similarly treated, and that very impressive face. I did this once in my line of business, which I’ll go into a little later, and scared the idealistic children who lived downstairs. Their delicate skins red with offended horror. Their clear young voices raised in song (at three in the morning).

I don’t do this often (say I, the ghoul) but it’s great elevator technique, sticking your forefinger to the back of somebody’s neck while passing the fourth floor, knowing that he’ll never find out that you haven’t a gun and that you’re not all there.

(Sorry. But watch out.)

II

Whom did we meet in that matron blackness but The Woman Who Has No Brand Name.

“I suppose you are wondering,” she said (and I enjoyed her enjoyment of my enjoyment of her enjoyment of that cliche) “why I have brought you here.”

We did.

We wondered why we were in a white-walled penthouse living room overlooking the East River at night with furniture so sharp-edged and ultra-modern that you could cut yourself on it, with a wall-length bar, with a second wall hung entirely in black velvet like a stage, with a third wall all glass, outside which the city did not look quite as I remembered it.

Now J (as I shall call her) is really terrifying, for she’s invisible. Against the black curtains her head and hands float in sinister disconnection, like puppets controlled by separate strings. There are baby spotlights in the ceiling, which illuminate in deep chiaroscuro her gray hair, her lined face, her rather macabre grin, for her teeth seem to be one fused ribbon of steel. She stepped out against the white wall, a woman-shaped hole, a black cardboard cut-out; with a crooked, charming smile she clapped her hand to her mouth, either taking something out or putting something in—see? Real teeth. Those disbodied, almost crippled hands clasped themselves. She sat on her black leather couch and vanished again; she smiled and dropped fifteen years; she has silver hair, not gray, and I don’t know how old she is. How she loves us! She leans forward and croons at us like Garbo. Jeannine has sunk down into a collection of glass plates that passes for a chair; her cup and spoon make a tiny, spineless chattering. Janet is erect and ready for anything.

“I’m glad, so glad, so very glad,” says J softly. She doesn’t mind Jeannine’s being a coward. She turns the warmth of her smile on Jeannine the way none of us has ever been smiled at before, a dwelling, loving look that would make Jeannine go through fire and water to get it again, the kind of mother-love whose lack gets into your very bones.

“I am called Alice Reasoner,” says J, “christened Alice-Jael; I am an employee of the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology. My code name is Sweet Alice; can you believe it?” (with a soft, cultivated laugh) “Look around you and welcome yourselves; look at me and make me welcome; welcome myself, welcome me, welcome I,” and leaning forward, a shape stamped by a cookie-cutter on to nothing, with pleasant art and sincere gestures, Alice-Jael Reasoner told us what you have no doubt guessed long, long ago.

III

(Her real laugh is the worst human sound I have ever heard: a hard, screeching yell that ends in gasps and rusty sobbing, as if some mechanical vulture on a gigantic garbage heap on the surface of the moon were giving one forced shriek for the death of all organic life. Yet J likes it. This is her private laugh. Alice is crippled, too; the ends of her fingers (she says) were once caught in a press and are growing cancerous—and to be sure, if you look at them closely you can see folds of loose, dead skin over the ends of her fingernails. She has hairpin-shaped scars under her ears, too.

IV

Her pointed fingernails painted silver to distract the eye, Alice-Jael plays with the window console: the East River clouds over to reveal (serially) a desert morning, a black lava beach, and the surface of the moon. She sat, watching the pictures change, tapping her silver nails on the couch, herself the very picture of boredom. Come up close and you’ll see that her eyes are silver, most unnatural. It came to me that we had been watching this woman perform for half an hour and had given not one thought to what might be happening around us or to us or behind us. The East River?

(“An artist’s conception,” she says.)

V

“I am,” says Jael Reasoner, “an employee of the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology and a specialist in disguises. It came to me several months ago that I might find my other selves out there in the great, gray might-have-been, so I undertook—for reasons partly personal and partly political, of which more later—to get hold of the three of you. It was very hard work. I’m a field worker and not a theoretician, but you must know that the closer to home you travel, the more power it takes, both to discriminate between small degrees of difference and to transport objects from one universe of probability into another.

“If we admit among the universes of probability any in which the laws of physical reality are different from our own, we will have an infinite number of universes. If we restrict ourselves to the laws of physical reality as we know them, we will have a limited number. Our universe is quantized; therefore the differences between possible universes (although very small) must be similarly quantized, and the number of such universes must be finite (although very large). I take it that it must be possible to distinguish the very smallest differences—say, that of one quantum of light—for otherwise we could not find our way to the same universe time after time, nor could we return to our own. Current theory has it that one cannot return to one’s own past, but only to other people’s; similarly one cannot travel into one’s own future, but only to other people’s, and in no way can these motions be forced to result in straightforward travel—from any baseline whatever . The only possible motion is diagonal motion. So you see that the classical paradoxes of time-travel simply do not apply—we cannot kill our own grandmothers and thereby cease to exist, nor can we travel into our own future and affect it in advance, so to speak. Nor can I, once I have made contact with your present, travel into your past or your future. The best I can do in finding out my own future is to study one very close to my own, but here the cost of power becomes prohibitive. My Department’s researches are therefore conducted in regions rather far from home. Go too far and you find an Earth too close to the sun or too far away or nonexistent or barren of life; come too close and it costs too much. We operate in a pretty small optimal range. And of course I was doing this on my own, which means I must steal the whole damn operation anyway.

“You, Janet, were almost impossible to find. The universe in which your Earth exists does not even register on our instruments; neither do those for quite a probable spread on either side of you; we have been trying for years to find out why. Besides you are too close to us to be economically feasible. I had located Jeannine and not Joanna; you very obligingly stepped out of place and became as visible as a sore thumb; I’ve had a fix on you ever since. The three of you got together and I pulled you all in. Look at yourselves.

“Genetic patterns sometimes repeat themselves from possible present universe to possible present universe; this is also one of the elements that can vary between universes. There is repetition of genotypes in the far future too, sometimes. Here is Janet from the far future, but not my future or yours; here are the two of you from almost the same moment of time (but not as you see it!), both of those moments only a little behind mine; yet I won’t happen in the world of either of you. We are less alike than identical twins, to be sure, but much more alike than strangers have any right to be. Look at yourselves again.

“We’re all white-skinned, eh? I bet two of you didn’t think of that. We’re all women. We are tall, within a few inches of each other. Given a reasonable variation, we are the same racial type, even the same physical type—no redheads or olive skins, hm? Don’t go by me; I’m not natural! Look in each other’s faces. What you see is essentially the same genotype, modified by age, by circumstances, by education, by diet, by learning, by God knows what. Here is Jeannine, the youngest of us all with her smooth face: tall, thin, sedentary, round-shouldered, a long-limbed body made of clay and putty; she’s always tired and probably has trouble waking up in the morning. Hm? And there’s Joanna, somewhat older, much more active, with a different gait, different mannerisms, quick and jerky, not depressed, sits with her spine like a ruler. Who’d think it was the same woman? There’s Janet, hardier than the two of you put together, with her sun-bleached hair and her muscles; she’s spent her life outdoors, a Swedish hiker and a farmhand. You begin to see? She’s older and that masks a good deal. And of course she has had all the Whileawayan improvements—no rheumatism, no sinus trouble, no allergies, no appendix, good feet, good teeth, no double joints, and so forth and so forth, all the rest that we three must suffer. And I, who could throw you all across the room, though I don’t look it. Yet we started the same. It’s possible that in biological terms Jeannine is potentially the most intelligent of us all; try to prove that to a stranger! We ought to be equally long-lived but we won’t be. We ought to be equally healthy but we’re not. If you discount the wombs that bore us, our pre-natal nourishment, and our deliveries (none of which differ essentially) we ought to have started out with the same autonomic nervous system, the same adrenals, the same hair and teeth and eyes, the same circulatory system, and the same innocence. We ought to think alike and feel alike and act alike, but of course we don’t. So plastic is humankind! Do you remember the old story of the Doppelganger? This is the double you recognize instantly, with whom you feel a mysterious kinship. An instant sympathy, that informs you at once that the other is really your very own self. The truth is that people don’t recognize themselves except in mirrors, and sometimes not even then. Between our dress, and our opinions, and our habits, and our beliefs, and our values, and our mannerisms, and our manners, and our expressions, and our ages, and our experience, even I can hardly believe that I am looking at three other myselves. No layman would entertain for a moment the notion that he beheld four versions of the same woman.

Did I say a moment? Not for an age of moments, particularly if the layman were indeed a man.

“Janet, may I ask you why you and your neighbors do not show up on our instruments? You must have discovered the theory of probability travel some time ago (in your terms), yet you are the first traveler. You wish to visit other universes of probability, yet you make it impossible for anyone to find you, let alone visit you.

“Why is that?”

“Aggressive and bellicose persons,” said Janet with care, “always assume that unaggressive and pacific persons cannot protect themselves.

“Why is that?”

VI

Over trays of pre-cooked steak and chicken that would’ve disgraced an airline (that’s where they came from, I found out later) Jael sat next to Jeannine and glued herself to Jeannine’s ear, glancing round at the rest of us from time to time to see how we were taking it. Her eyes sparkled with the gaiety of corruption, the Devil in the fable tempting the young girl. Whisper, whisper, whisper. All I could hear were the sibilants, when her tongue came between her teeth. Jeannine stared soberly ahead and didn’t eat much, the color leaving her little by little. Jael didn’t eat at all. Like a vampire she fed on Jeannine’s ear. Later she drank a sort of super-bouillon which nobody else could stand and talked a lot to all of us about the war. Finally, Janet said bluntly:

“What war?”

“Does it matter?” said Miss Reasoner ironically, raising her silver eyebrows. “This war, that war, isn’t there always one?”

“No,” said Janet.

“Well, hell,” said Jael more genuinely, “the war. If there isn’t one, there just was one, and if there wasn’t one, there soon will be one. Eh? The war between Us and Them. We’re playing it rather cool just now because it’s hard to work up an enthusiasm for something forty years old.”

I said, “Us and Them?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Sweet Alice, making a face. “After the plague-—don’t worry; everything you eat is stuffed with anti-toxins and we’ll decontaminate you before you go—besides, this all ended more than seventy years ago—after the bacteriological weapons were cleaned out of the biosphere (insofar as that was possible) and half the population buried (the dead half, I hope) people became rather conservative. They tend to do that, you know. Then after a while you get the reaction against the conservatism, I mean the radicalism. And after that the reaction against the radicalism. People had already begun gathering in like-minded communities before the war: Traditionalists, Neo-Feudalists, Patriarchalists, Matriarchalists, Separatists (all of us now), Fecundists, Sterilists, and what-have-you. They seemed to be happier that way. The War Between the Nations had really been a rather nice war, as wars go; it wiped the have-not nations off the face of the earth and made their resources available to us without the bother of their populations; all our machinery was left standing; we were getting wealthier and wealthier. So if you were not one of the fifty percent who had died, you were having a pretty good time of it. There was increasing separatism, increasing irritability, increasing radicalism; then came the Polarization; then came the Split. The middle drops out and you’re left with the two ends, hein? So when people began shopping for a new war, which they also seem to do, don’t they, there was only one war left. The only war that makes any sense if you except the relations between children and adults, which you must do because children grow up. But in the other war the Haves never stop being Haves and the Have-nots never stop being Have-nots. It’s cooled off now, unfortunately, but no wonder; it’s been going on for forty years—a stalemate, if you’ll forgive the pun. But in my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting. I’m a fanatic. I want to see this thing settled. I want to see it over and done with. Gone. Dead.

“Oh, don’t worry!” she added. “Nothing spectacular is going to happen. All I will do in three days or so is ask you about the tourist trade in your lovely homes. What’s wrong with that? Simple, eh?

“But it will get things moving. The long war will start up again. We will be in the middle of it and I—who have always been in the middle of it—will get some decent support from my people at last.”

“Who?” said Jeannine crossly. “Who, who, for Heaven’s sake! Who’s Us, who’s Them? Do you expect us to find out by telepathy!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Alice Reasoner softly. “I thought you knew. I had no intention of puzzling you. You are my guests. When I say Them and Us I mean of course the Haves and the Have-nots, the two sides, there are always two sides, aren’t there?

“I mean the men and the women.”

Later I caught Jeannine by the door as we were all leaving; “What did she talk to you about?” I said. Something had gotten into Jeannine’s clear, suffering gaze; something had muddied her timidity. What can render Miss Dadier self-possessed? What can make her so quietly stubborn? Jeannine said:

“She asked me if I had ever killed anybody.”

VII

She took us topside in the branch elevator: The Young One, The Weak One, The Strong One, as she called us in her own mind. I’m the author and I know. Miss Sweden (she also called Janet this) ran her hands over the paneling and studied the controls while the other two gaped. Think of me in my usual portable form. Their underground cities are mazes of corridors like sunken hotels; we passed doors, barricades, store windows, branch corridors leading to arcades. What is this passion for living underground? At one barrier they put us in purdah, that is, some kind of asbestos-like fireman’s suit that protects you against other people’s germs and them against yours. But this time it was a fake, meant only to hide us. “Can’t have them looking at you,” said Jael. She went apart with the border guard and there was some low-voiced, aggressive byplay, some snarling and lifting of hackles which a third party resolved by a kind of rough joking. I didn’t hear a word of it. She told us honestly that we couldn’t be expected to believe anything we hadn’t seen with our own eyes. There would be no films, no demonstrations, no statistics, unless we asked for them. We trundled out of the elevator into an armored car waiting in a barn, and across an unpaved, shell-pocked plain, a sort of no-man’s-land, in the middle of the night. Is the grass growing? Is that a virus blight? Are the mutated strains taking over ? Nothing but gravel, boulders, space, and stars. Jael flashed her pass at a second set of guards and told them about us, jerking her thumb backwards at the three of us: unclean, unclean, unclean. No barriers, no barbed wire, no searchlights; only the women have these. Only the men make a sport of people-hunting across the desert. Bulkier than three pregnancies, we followed our creatrix into another car, from out that first one, through the rubble and ruin at the edges of an old city, left standing just as it had been during the plague. Teachers come out here on Sundays, with their classes. It looks as if it’s been used for target practice, with holes in everything and new scars, like mortar scars, on the rubble. “It has,” says Jael Reasoner. Each of us wears a luminous, shocking-pink cross on chest and back to show how deadly we are. So the Manlanders (who all carry guns) won’t take pot-shots at us. There are lights in the distance—don’t think I know any of this by hearsay; I’m the spirit of the author and know all things. I’ll know it when we begin to pass the lit-up barracks at the edge of the city, when we see in the distance the homes of the very rich shining from the seven hilltops on which the city is built; I’ll know it when we go through a tunnel of rubble, built fashionably to resemble a World War I trench, and emerge neither into a public nursery (they’re either much further inside the city proper or out in the country) nor into a brothel, but into a recreation center called The Trench or The Prick or The Crotch or The Knife. I haven’t decided on a name yet. The Manlanders keep their children with them only when they’re very rich—but what posit I? Manlanders have no children. Manlanders buy infants from the Womanlanders and bring them up in batches, save for the rich few who can order children made from their very own semen: keep them in city nurseries until they’re five, then out into the country training ground, with the gasping little misfits buried in baby cemeteries along the way. There, in ascetic and healthful settlements in the country, little boys are made into Men—though some don’t quite make it; sex-change surgery begins at sixteen. One out of seven fails early and makes the full change; one out of seven fails later and (refusing surgery) makes only half a change: artists, illusionists, impressionists of femininity who keep their genitalia but who grow slim, grow languid, grow emotional and feminine, all this the effect of spirit only. Five out of seven Manlanders make it; these are “real-men.” The others are “the changed” or “the half-changed.” All real-men like the changed; some real-men like the half-changed; none of the real-men like real-men, for that would be abnormal. Nobody asks the changed or half-changed what they like. Jael flashed her civil pass at the uniformed real-man at the entrance to The Crotch and we trundled after. Our hands and feet look very small to me, our bodies odd and dumpy.

We went inside; “Jael!” I exclaimed, “there are—”

“Look again,” she said.

Look at the necks, look at the wrists and ankles, penetrate the veils of false hair and false eyelashes to measure the relative size of eyes and bone structure. The half-changed starve themselves to be slim, but look at their calves and the straightness of their arms and knees. If most of the fully changed live in harims and whore-homes, and if popular slang is beginning to call them “cunts,” what does this leave for us? What can we be called?

“The enemy,” said Jael. “Sit here.” We sat around a large table in the corner where the light was dim, snuggling up to the fake oak paneling. One of the guards, who had followed us inside, came up to Jael and put one giant arm round her, one huge paw crushing her bearishly to his side, his crimson epaulets, his gold boots, his shaved head, his sky-blue codpiece, his diamond-chequered-costumed attempt to beat up the whole world, to shove his prick up the world’s ass. She looked so plain next to him. She was all swallowed up.

“Hey, hey,” he said. “So you’re back again!”

“Well, sure, why not?” (she said) “I have to meet someone. I have some business to do.”

“Business!” he said fetchingly. “Don’t you want some of the real thing? Come on, fuck business!”

She smiled gracefully but remained modestly silent. This seemed to please him. He enveloped her further, to the point of vanishment, and said in a low voice with a sort of chuckle:

“Don’t you dream about it? Don’t all you girls dream about us?”

“You know that, Lenny,” she said.

“Sure I do,” he said enthusiastically. “Sure. I can see it in your face whenever you come here. You get excited just looking at it. Like the doctors say, we can do it with each other but you can’t because you don’t have nothing to do it with, do you? So you don’t get any.”

“Lenny—” she began (slipping under his arm) “you got us figured out just right. Scout’s honor. I’ve got business to do.”

“Come on!” he said (pleading, I think).

“Oh, you’re a brick!” cried Jael, moving behind the table, “you surely are. Why, you’re so strong, some day you’re going to squash us to death.” He laughed, basso-profundo. “We’re friends,” he said, and winked laboriously.

“Sure,” said Jael dryly.

“Some day you’re gonna walk right in here—” and this tiresome creature began all over again, but whether he noticed the rest of us or saw someone or smelt someone I don’t know, for suddenly he lumbered off in a great hurry, rousting his billy-club out of his azure sash, next the gun holster. Bouncers don’t use their guns at The Prick; too much chance of hitting the wrong people. Jael was talking to someone else, a shadowy, thin-lipped party in a green engineer’s suit.

“Of course we’re friends,” said Jael Reasoner patiently. “Of course we are. That’s why I don’t want to talk to you tonight. Hell, I don’t want to get you in trouble. See those crosses? One jab, one little rip or tear, and those girls will start an epidemic you won’t be able to stop for a month. Do you want to be mixed up in that? Now you know we women are into plague research; well, these are some of the experiments. I’m taking them across Manland to another part of our own place; it’s a short-cut. I wouldn’t take them through here except I have some business to do here tonight. We’re developing a faster immunization process. I’d tell all your friends to stay away from this table, too, if I were you—not that we can’t take care of ourselves and / don’t worry; I’m immune to this particular strain—but I don’t want to see you take the rap for it. You’ve done a lot for me in the past and I’m grateful. I’m very grateful. You’d get it in the neck, you know. And you might get plague, too, there’s always that. Okay?”

Astonishing how each of them has to be reassured of my loyalty! says Jael Reasoner. Even more astonishing that they believe me. They’re not very bright, are they? But these are the little fish. Besides, they’ve been separated from real women so long that they don’t know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like. The specifications we send them every year grow wilder and wilder and there isn’t a murmur of protest. I think they like it. As moths to the flame, so men to the social patterns of the Army, that womanless world haunted by the ghosts of millions of dead women, that discarnate femininity that hovers over everybody and can turn the toughest real-man into one of Them, that dark force they always feel at the backs of their own minds! Would I, do you think, force slavishness and deformity on two-sevenths of my own kind? Of course not! I think these men are not human. No, no, that’s wrong—/ decided long ago that they weren’t human. Work is power, but they farm out everything to us without the slightest protest—Hell, they get lazier and lazier. They let us do their thinking for them. They even let us do their feeling for them. They are riddled with duality and the fear of duality. And the fear of themselves. I think it’s in their blood. What human being would—sweating with fear and rage—mark out two equally revolting paths and insist that her fellow-creatures tread one or the other?

Ah, the rivalries of cosmic he-men and the worlds they must conquer and the terrors they must face and the rivals they must challenge and overcome!

“You are being a little obvious,” says Janet pedantically from inside her suit, “and I doubt that the power of the blood—”

Hsst! Here comes my contact.

Our contact was a half-changed, for Manlanders believe that child care is woman’s business; so they delegate to the changed and the half-changed the business of haggling for babies and taking care of children during those all-important, first five years—they want to fix their babies’ sexual preferences early. This means, practically speaking, that the children are raised in brothels. Now some Manlander real-men do not like the idea of the whole business being in the hands of the feminized and the effeminate but there’s not much they can do about it (see Proposition One, about child care, above)—although the more masculine look forward to a time when no Manlander will fall away from the ranks of the he-men, and with an obstinacy I consider perverse, refuse to decide who will be the sexual objects when the changed and the half-changed are no more. Perhaps they think sex beneath them. Or above them? (Around the shrine of each gowned and sequinned hostess in The Knife are at least three real-men; how many can a hostess take on in one night?) I suspect we real women still figure, however grotesquely, in Manland’s deepest dreams; perhaps on that morning of Total Masculinity they will all invade Womanland, rape everyone in sight (if they still remember how) and then kill them, and after that commit suicide upon a pyramid of their victims’ panties. The official ideology has it that women are poor substitutes for the changed. I certainly hope so. (Little girls, crept out of their crčche at last, touching those heroic dead with curious, wee fingers. Nudging them with their patent leather Mary Janes. Bringing their baby brothers out to a party on the green, all flutes and oats and pastoral fun until the food gives out and the tiny heroines must decide: Whom shall we eat? The waving limbs of our starfish siblings, our dead mothers, or those strange, huge, hairy bodies already beginning to swell in the sun?) I flashed that damned pass—again!—this time at a half-changed in a pink chiffon gown, with gloves up to his shoulder, a monument of irrelevancy on high heels, a pretty girl with too much of the right curves and a bobbing, springing, pink feather boa. Where oh where is the shop that makes those long rhinestone earrings, objects of fetishism and nostalgia, worn only by the half-changed (and usually not by them unless they’re rich), hand-made from museum copies, of no use or interest to fully six-sevenths of the adult human race? Somewhere stones are put together by antiquarians, somewhere petroleum is transformed into fabric that can’t burn without polluting the air, and won’t rot, and won’t erode, so that strands of plastic have turned up in the bodies of diatoms at the bottom of the Pacific Trench—such a vision was he, so much he wore, such folds and frills and ribbons and buttons and feathers, trimmed like a Christmas tree. Like Garbo playing Anna Karenina, decorated all over. His green eyes shrewdly narrowed. This one has intelligence. Or is it only the weight of his false lashes? The burden of having always to be taken, of having to swoon, to fall, to endure, to hope, to suffer, to wait, to only be? There must be a secret feminine underground that teaches them how to behave; in the face of their comrades’ derision and savage contempt, in the face of the prospect of gang rape if they’re found alone on the streets after curfew, in the face of the legal necessity to belong—every one of them—to a real-man, somehow they still learn the classic shiver, the slow blink, the knuckle-to-lip pathos. These, too, I think, must be in the blood. But whose? My three friends and I pale beside such magnificence! Four lumpy parcels, of no interest to anyone at all, at all.

Anna, with a mechanical shiver of desire, says that we must go with him.

“Her?” says Jeannine, confused.

“Him!” says Anna in a strained contralto. The half-changed are very punctilious—sometimes about the changeds’ superiority and sometimes about their own genitals. Either way it works out to Him. He’s extraordinarily aware, for a man, of Jeannine’s shrinking and he resents it—as who would not? I myself am respectful of ruined lives and forced choices. On the street once Anna did not fight hard enough against the fourteen-year-old toughs who wanted his twelve-year-old ass; he didn’t go to the extremity of berserk rage, reckoning his life as nothing in defense of his virility; he forestalled—by surrender—the plucking out of an eye, the castration, the throat cut with a broken bottle, the being put out of his twelve-year-old action with a stone or a tire chain. I know a lot about Manlanders’ history. Anna made a modus vivendi, he decided life was worth it on any terms. Everything follows from that.

“Oh, you’re lovely,” says Jeannine, heartfelt. Sisters in misfortune. This really pleases Anna. He shows us a letter of safe-conduct he has from his boss—a real-man, of course—and putting it back in pink-brocaded evening bag, draws around him that fake-feather Thing which floats and wobbles in the least current of air-. It’s a warm evening. To protect his employer, the big boss (they are Men, even in the child-rearing business) has had to give Anna K a little two-way TV camera to wear in his ear; otherwise somebody would break his high heels and leave him dead or half-dead in an alley. Everybody knows that the half-changed are weak and can’t protect themselves; what do you think femininity is all about? Even so Anna probably has a bodyguard waiting at the entrance to The Knife. I’m cynical enough to wonder sometimes if the Manlanders’ mystique isn’t just an excuse to feminize anybody with a pretty face—but look again, they believe it; look under the padding, the paint, the false hair, the corsetry, the skin rinses and the magnificent dresses and you’ll see nothing exceptional, only faces and bodies like any other man’s. Anna bats his eyes at us and wets his lips, taking the women inside the suits to be real-men, taking me to be a real-man (what else can I be if I’m not a changed?), taking the big wide world itself to be—what else?—a Real-Man intent on worshipping Anna’s ass; the world exists to look at Anna; he—or she—is only a real-man turned inside out.

An eerie sisterliness, a smile at Jeannine. All that narcissism! Brains underneath, though.

Remember where their loyalties lie.

(Are they jealous of us? I don’t think they believe we’re women.)

He wets his lips again, the indescribable silliness of that insane mechanism, practiced anywhere and everywhere, on the right people, on the wrong people. But what else is there? It seems that Anna’s boss wants to meet me. (I don’t like that.) But we’ll go; we maintain our outward obedience until the very end, until the beautiful, bloody moment that we fire these stranglers, these murderers, these unnatural and atavistic nature’s bastards, off the face of the earth.

“Dearest sister,” says Anna softly, sweetly, “come with me.”

VIII

I guess Anna’s boss just wanted to see the alien poontang. I don’t know yet what he wants, but I will. His wife clicked in with a tray of drinks—scarlet skin-tights, no underwear, transparent high-heeled sandals like Cinderella’s—she gave us a homey, cute smile (she wears no make-up and is covered with freckles) and stilted out. Man talk. They seldom earn wives before fifty. Art, they say, has had a Renaissance among the Manlander rich, but this one doesn’t look like a patron: jowly, pot-bellied, the fierce redness of an athlete forced into idleness. His heart? High blood pressure? But they all cultivate their muscles and let their health and their minds rot. There is a rather peculiar wholesomeness to the home life of a Manland millionaire; Boss, for example, would not think of letting his wife go anywhere alone—that is, risk the anarchy of the streets—even with a bodyguard. He knows what’s due her. Their “women,” they say, civilize them. For an emotional relationship, turn to a “woman.”

What am I?

I know what I am, but what’s my brand name?

He stares rudely, unable to conceal it: What are they? What do they do? Do they screw each other? What does it feel like? (Try and tell him!) He doesn’t waste a second on the pink crosses in purdah; they’re only “women” anyhow (he thinks); I’m the soldier, I’m the enemy, I’m the other self, the mirror, the master-slave, the rebel, the heretic, the mystery that must be found out at all costs. (Maybe he thinks the three J’s have leprosy.) I don’t like this at all. J-one (Janet, by her gait) is examining the paintings on the wall; J-two and J-three stand hand in hand, Babes in the Wood. Boss finishes his drink, chewing on something in the bottom of it like a large teddy-bear, with comic deliberation: chomp, chomp. He waves grandly toward the other drinks, his wife having abandoned the tray on top of what looks for all the world like a New Orleans, white-enamelled, bordello piano (Whorehouse Baroque is very big in Manland right now).

I shook my head.

He said, “You have any children?” Pregnancy fascinates them. The rank-and-file have forgotten about menstruation; if they remembered, that would fascinate them. I shook my head again.

His face darkened.

“I thought,” said I mildly, “that we were going to talk business. I’d like to do just that. I don’t mean—that is, I don’t want to be unsociable, but time’s passing and I’d rather not discuss my personal life.”

He said: “You’re on my turf, you’ll Goddamn well talk about what I Goddamn well talk about.”

Let it pass. Control yourself. Hand them the victory in the Domination Sweepstakes and they usually forget whatever it is they were going to do anyway. He glared and brooded. Munched chips, crackers, saltsticks, what-not. Doesn’t really know what he wants. I waited.

“Personal life!” he muttered.

“It’s not really very interesting,” I volunteered,

“You kids screw each other?”

I said nothing.

He leaned forward. “Don’t get me wrong. I think you have a right to do it. I never bought this stuff about women alone having no sex. It’s not in human nature. Now, do you?”

“No,” I said.

He chuckled. “That’s right, cover up. Mind, I’m not condemning you. It’s only to be expected. Eh! If we’d kept together, men and women, none of this would have happened. Right?”

I put on my doubtful, slightly shamed, sly, well-you-know, all-purpose look. I have never known what it means, but they seem to. He laughed out loud. Another drink.

“Look here,” he said, “I expect you have more intelligence than most of those bitches or you wouldn’t be in this job. Right? Now it’s obvious to anyone that we need each other. Even in separate camps we still have to trade, you still have to have the babies, things haven’t changed that much. Now what I have in mind is an experimental project, a pilot project, you might say, in trying to get the two sides back together. Not all at once—”

“I—” I said. (They don’t hear you.)

“Not all at once,” (he continued, deaf as a post) “but a little bit at a time. We have to make haste deliberately. Right?”

I was silent. He leaned back. “I knew you’d see it,” he said. Then he made a personal remark: “You saw my wife?” I nodded.

“Natalie’s grand,” he said, taking some more chips. “She’s a grand girl. She made these. Deep-fried, I think.” (A weak woman handling a pot of boiling oil.) “Have some.”

To pacify him I took some and held them in my hand. Greasy stuff.

“Now,” he said, “you like the idea, right?”

“What?”

“The aversive therapy, for Chrissakes, the pilot group. Social relations, getting back together. I’m not like some of the mossbacks around here, you know, I don’t go for this inferior-superior business; I believe in equality. If we get back together, it has to be on that basis. Equals.”

“But—” I said, meaning no offense.

“It has to be on the basis of equality! I believe that. And don’t think the man in the street can’t be sold on it, propaganda to the contrary. We’re brought up on this nonsense of woman’s place and woman’s nature when we don’t even have women around to study. What do we know! I’m not any less masculine because I’ve done woman’s work; does it take less intelligence to handle an operation like the nurseries and training camps than it does to figure the logistics of War Games? Hell, no! Not if you do it rationally and efficiently; business is business.”

Let it go. Perhaps it’ll play itself out; they do sometimes. I sat attentively still while he gave me the most moving plea for my own efficiency, my rationality, my status as a human being. He ended by saying anxiously, “Do you think it’ll work?”

“Well—” I began.

“Of course, of course,” (interrupted this damned fool once again) “you’re not a diplomat, but we have to work through the men we have, don’t we? Individual man can accomplish ends where Mass-man fails. Eh?”

I nodded, picturing myself as Individual Man. The “woman’s work” explains it, of course; it makes him dangerously irritable. He had gotten now into the poignant part, the mystifying and moving account of our Sufferings. This is where the tears come in. It helps to be able to classify what they’re going to do, but Lord! it’s depressing, all the same. Always the same. I sit on, perfectly invisible, a chalk sketch of a woman. An idea. A walking ear.

“What we want” (he said, getting into stride) “is a world in which everybody can be himself. Him. Self. Not this insane forcing of temperaments. Freedom. Freedom for all. I admire you. Yes, let me say that I do indeed, and most frankly, admire you. You’ve broken through all that. Of course most women will not be able to do that—in fact, most women—given the choice—will hardly choose to give up domesticity altogether or even” (here he smiled) “even choose to spend much of their lives in the market-place or the factory. Most women will continue to choose the conservative caretaking of childhood, the formation of beautiful human relationships, and the care and service of others. Servants. Of. The. Race. Why should we sneer at that? And if we find there are certain traits connected with sex, like homemaking, like reasoning power, like certain temperamental factors, well of course there will be, but why derogate one sex or the other on that account? People” (braced for the peroration) “people are as they are. If—”

I rose to my feet. “Excuse me,” I said, “but business—”

“Damn your business!” he said in heat, this confused and irritable man. “Your business isn’t worth two cents compared with what I’m talking about!”

“Of course not, of course not,” I said soothingly.

“I should hope so!”

Numb, numb. With boredom. Invisible. Chained.

“That’s the trouble with you women, you can’t see anything in the abstract!”

He wants me to cringe. I really think so. Not the content of what I say but the endless, endless feeding of his vanity, the shaky structure of self. Even the intelligent ones.

“Don’t you appreciate what I’m trying to do for you?”

Kiss-me-I’m-a-goodguy.

“Don’t you have any idea how important this is?”

Sliding down the slippery gulf into invisibility.

“This could make history!”

Even me, with all my training!

“Of course, we have a tradition to uphold.”

It’ll be slow.

“—we’ll have to go slowly. One thing at a time.”

If it’s practical.

“We’ll have to find out what’s practicable. This may be—uh—visionary. It may be in advance of its time.”

Can’t legislate morality.

“We can’t force people against their inclinations and we have generations of conditioning to overcome. Perhaps in a decade—”

Perhaps never.

“—perhaps never. But men of good will—”

Did he hear that?

“—and women, too, of course, you understand that the word ‘men’ includes the word ‘women’; it’s only usage—”

Everyone must have his own abortion.

“—and not really important. You might even say” (he giggles) “‘everyone and his husband’ or ‘everyone will be entitled to his own abortion’ ” (he roars) “but I want you to go back to your people and tell them—”

It’s unofficial.

“—that we’re prepared to negotiate. But it can’t be official. You must understand that I face considerable opposition. And most women—not, you, of course; you’re different—well, most women aren’t used to thinking a thing through like this. They can’t do it systematically. Say, you don’t mind my saying that about ‘most women,’ do you?”

I smile, drained of personality.

“That’s right,” (he said) “don’t take it personally. Don’t get feminine on me,” and he winked broadly to show he bore me no ill-will. This is the time for me to steal away, leaving behind half my life’s blood and promises, promises, promises; but you know what? I just can’t do it. It’s happened too often. I have no reserves left. I sat down, smiling brilliantly in sheer anticipation, and the dear man hitched his chair nearer. He looks uneasy and avid. “We’re friends?” he says.

“Sure,” I say, hardly able to speak.

“Good!” he said. “Tell me, do you like my place?”

“Oh yes,” I say.

“Ever see anything like it before?”

“Oh no!” (I live in a chicken-barn and eat shit.)

He laughed delightedly. “The paintings are pretty good. We’re having a kind of Renaissance lately. How’s art among the ladies, huh?”

“So-so,” I said, making a face. The room is beginning to sway with the adrenalin I can pump into my bloodstream when I choose; this is called voluntary hysterical strength and it is very, very useful, yes indeed. First the friendly chat, then the uncontrollably curious grab, and then the hatred comes out. Be prepared.

“I suppose,” he said, “you must’ve been different from the start—from a little girl, eh?—doing a job like this. You’ve got to admit we have one thing up on you—we don’t try to force everybody into the same role. Oh no. We don’t keep a man out of the kitchen if that’s what he really wants.”

“Oh sure,” I said. (Those chemical-surgical castrati)

“Now you do,” he said. “You’re more reactionary than we are. You won’t let women lead the domestic life. You want to make everyone alike. That’s not what I visualize.”

He goes into a long happy rap about motherhood, the joys of the uterus. The emotional nature of Woman. The room is beginning to sway. One gets very reckless in hysterical strength; the first few weeks I trained, I broke several of my own bones but I know how to do it now. I really do. My muscles are not for harming anyone else; they are to keep me from harming myself. That terrible concentration, That feverish brightness. Boss-Idiot has not talked to anyone else about his grand idea; he’s still in First Cliche’ stage and any group discussion, however moronic, would have weeded out the worst of them. His dear Natalie. His gifted wife. Take me, now; he loves me. Yes he does. Not physically, of course. Oh no. Life seeks its mate. Its complement. Romantic rubbish. Its other self. Its joy. He won’t talk business tonight. Will he ask me to stay over?

“Oh, I couldn’t,” says the other Jael. He doesn’t hear it; there’s a gadget in Boss’s ear that screens out female voices. He’s moved closer, bringing his chair with him—some silly flub-dub about not being able to talk the length of the room. Spiritual intimacy. Smiling foolishly he says:

“So you like me a little, huh?”

How terrible, betrayal by lust. No, ignorance. No—pride.

“Hell, go away,” I say.

“Sure you do!” He expects me to act like his Natalie, he bought her, he owns her. What do women do in the daytime? What do they do when they’re alone? Adrenalin is a demanding high; it untunes all your finer controls.

“Get away,” I whisper. He doesn’t hear it. These men play games, play with vanity, hiss, threaten, erect their neck-spines. It sometimes takes ten minutes to get a fight going. I, who am not a reptile but only an assassin, only a murderess, never give warning. They worry about playing fair , about keeping the rules, about giving a good account of themselves. I don’t play. I have no pride. I don’t hesitate. At home I am harmless, but not here.

“Kiss me, you dear little bitch,” he says in an excited voice, mastery and disgust warring with each other in his eyes. Boss has never seen a real cunt, I mean as nature made them. He’ll use words he hasn’t dared to use since he was eighteen and took his first half-changed in the street, mastery and disgust mingling. That slavish apprenticeship at the recreation centers. How can you love anyone who is a castrated You? Real homosexuality would blow Manland to pieces.

“Take your filthy hands off me,” I say clearly, enjoying his enjoyment of my enjoyment of his enjoyment of that cliche’. Has he forgotten the three lepers?

“Send them away,” he mutters in agony, “send them away! Natalie can do them,” forgetting gender in his haste. Or perhaps he really thinks they are my lovers. Women will do what men find too disgusting, too difficult, too demeaning.

“Look,” I say, grinning uncontrollably, “I want to be perfectly clear. I don’t want your revolting lovemaking. I’m here to do business and relay any reasonable message to my superiors. I’m not here to play games. Cut it out."

But when do they ever listen!

“You’re a woman,” he cries, shutting his eyes, “you’re a beautiful woman. You’ve got a hole down there. You’re a beautiful woman. You’ve got real, round tits and you’ve got a beautiful ass. You want me. It doesn’t matter what you say. You’re a woman, aren’t you? This is the crown of your life. This is what God made you for. I’m going to fuck you. I’m going to screw you until you can’t stand up. You want it. You want to be mastered. Natalie wants to be mastered. All you women, you’re all women, you’re sirens, you’re beautiful, you’re waiting for me, waiting for a man, waiting for me to stick it in, waiting for me, me, me.”

Et patati et patata; the mode is a wee bit over-familiar. I told him to open his eyes, that I didn’t want to kill him with his eyes shut, for God’s sake.

He didn’t hear me.

“OPEN YOUR EYES!” I roared, “BEFORE I KILL YOU!” and Boss-man did.

He said, You led me on.

He said, You are a prude. (He was shocked.)

He said, You deceived me.

He said, You are a Bad Lady.

This we can cure!—as they say about pneumonia. I think the J’s will have sense enough to stay out of it. Boss was muttering something angry about his erection so, angry enough for two, I produced my own—by this I mean that the grafted muscles on my fingers and hands pulled back the loose skin, with that characteristic, itchy tickling, and of course you are wise; you have guessed that I do not have Cancer on my fingers but Claws, talons like a cat’s but bigger, a little more dull than wood brads but good for tearing. And my teeth are a sham over metal. Why are men so afraid of the awful intimacies of hate? Remember, I don’t threaten. I don’t play. I always carry firearms. The truly violent are never without them. I could have drilled him between the eyes, but if I do that, I all but leave my signature on him; it’s freakier and funnier to make it look as if a wolf did it. Better to think his Puli went mad and attacked him. I raked him gaily on the neck and chin and when he embraced me in rage, sank my claws into his back. You have to build up the fingers surgically so they’ll take the strain. A certain squeamishness prevents me from using my teeth in front of witnesses—the best way to silence an enemy is to bite out his larynx. Forgive me! I dug the hardened cuticle into his neck but he sprang away; he tried a kick but I wasn’t there (I told you they rely too much on their strength); he got hold of my arm but I broke the hold and spun him off, adding with my nifty, weighted shoe one another bruise on his limping kidneys. Ha ha! He fell on me (you don’t feel injuries in my state) and I reached around and scored him under the ear, letting him spray urgently into the rug; he will stagger to his feet and fall, he will plunge fountainy to the ground; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down dead. Jael. Clean and satisfied from head to foot. Boss is pumping his life out into the carpet. All very quiet, oddly enough. Three J’s in a terrible state, to judge from their huddling together; I can’t read their hidden faces. Will Natalie come in? Will she faint? Will she say, “I’m glad to be rid of him, the old bastard?” Who will own her now? You get monomaniacal on adrenalin. “Come on, come on!” I whispered to the J’s, herding them toward the door, buzzing and humming, the stuff still singing in my blood. The stupidity of it. The asininity of it. I love it, I love it. “Come on!” I said. Pushing them out the door, into the corridor, out and into the elevator, past the fish swimming in the aquatic wall, evil, svelte manta-rays and groupers six feet long. Poor fish! No business done today, God damn, but once they get that way there’s no doing business with them; you have to kill them anyway, might as well have fun. There’s no standing those non-humans at all, at all. Jeannie is calm. Joanna is ashamed of me. Janet is weeping. But how do you expect me to stand for this all month? How do you expect me to stand it all year? Week after week? For twenty years? Little male voice says: It Was Her Menstrual Period. Perfect explanation! Raging hormonal imbalances. His ghostly voice: “You did it because you had your period. Bad girl.” Oh beware of unclean vessels who have that dirty menstrual period and Who Will Not Play! I shooed the J’s into the Boss-man’s car—Anna had long ago disappeared—skeleton keys out of my invisible suit with its invisible pocket, opened the lock, fired the car, started up. I’ll go on Automatic as soon as we get to the highway; Boss’s I.D. will carry us to the border. No trouble from there.

“You all right?” I asked the J’s, laughing, laughing, laughing. I’m drunk still. They said Yes in varying musical keys. The Strong One’s voice is pitched higher than that of The Weak One (who believes she’s an alto), and The Little One is highest of all. Yes, yes, they said, frightened. Yes, yes, yes.

“Now I did not get that contract signed,” I said, putting on my sham teeth over my steel ones. “God damn, God damn, God damn!” (Don’t drive on adrenalin; you’ll probably have an accident.)

“When does it leave you?” That’s The Strong One: smart girl. “An hour, half an hour,” I said. “When we get home.”

“Home?” (from the back)

“Yes. My home.” Every time I do this I burn up a little life. I shorten my time. I’m at the effusive stage now, so I bit my lip, to keep quiet.

After a long silence—“Was that necessary?” from The Weak One.

Still hurt, still able to be hurt by them! Amazing. You’d think my skin would get thicker, but it doesn’t. We’re all of us still flat on our backs. The boot’s on our neck while we slowly, ever so slowly, gather the power and the money and the resources into our own hands. While they play war games. I put the car on Autom. and sat back, chilly with the reaction. My heartbeat’s quieting. Breath slower.

Was it necessary? (Nobody says this.) You could have turned him off—maybe. You could have sat there all night. You could have nodded and adored him until dawn. You could have let him throw his temper tantrum; you could have lain under him—what difference does it make to you ?—you’d have forgotten it by morning.

You might even have made the poor man happy.

There is a pretense on my own side that we are too refined to care, too compassionate for revenge—this is bullshit, I tell the idealists. “Being with Men,” they say, “has changed you.”

Eating it year in and year out.

“Look, was it necessary?” says one of the J’s, addressing to me the serious urgency of womankind’s eternal quest for love, the ages-long effort to heal the wounds of the sick soul, the infinite, caring compassion of the female saint.

An over-familiar mode! Dawn comes up over the waste land, bringing into existence the boulders and pebbles battered long ago by bombs, dawn gilding with its pale possibilities even the Crazy Womb, the Ball-breaking Bitch, the Fanged Killer Lady.

“I don’t give a damn whether it was necessary or not,” I said.

“I liked it.”

IX

It takes four hours to cross the Atlantic, three to shuttle to a different latitude. Waking up in a Vermont autumn morning, inside the glass cab, while all around us the maples and sugar maples wheel slowly out of the fog. Only this part of the world can produce such color. We whispered at a walking pace through wet fires. Electric vehicles are quiet, too; we heard the drip of water from the leaves. When the house saw us, my old round lollipop-on-a-stick, it lit up from floor to top, and as we came nearer broadcast the Second Brandenburg through the black, wet tree-trunks and the fiery leaves, a delicate attention I allow myself and my guests from time to time. Shouting brilliantly through the wet woods—I prefer the unearthy purity of the electronic scoring. One approaches the house from the side, where it looks almost flat on its central column—only a little convex, really—it doesn’t squat down for you on chicken legs like Baba Yaga’s hut, but lets down from above a great, coiling, metal-mesh road like a tongue (or so it seems; in reality it’s only a winding staircase). Inside you find yourself a corridor away from the main room; no use wasting heat.

Davy was there. The most beautiful man in the world. Our approach had given him time to make drinks for us—which the J’s took from his tray, staring at him but he wasn’t embarrassed—curled up most unwaiterlike at my feet with his hands around his knees and proceeded to laugh at the right places in the conversation (he takes his cues from my face).

The main room is panelled in yellow wood with a carpet you can sleep on (brown) and a long, glassed-in porch from which we watch the blizzards sweep by five months out of the year. I like purely visual weather. It’s warm enough for Davy to go around naked most of the time, my ice lad in a cloud of gold hair and nudity, never so much a part of my home as when he sits on the rug with his back against a russet or vermilion chair (we mimic autumn here), his drowned blue eyes fixed on the winter sunset outside, his hair” turned to ash, the muscles of his back and thighs stirring a little. The house hangs oddments from the ceiling; found objects, mobiles, can openers, red balls, bunches of wild grass, and Davy plays with them.

I showed the Js around: the books, the microfilm viewer in the library in touch with our regional library miles away, the storage spaces in the walls, the various staircases, the bathrooms molded of glass fiber and put together from two pieces, the mattresses stored in the walls of the guest rooms, and the conservatory (near the central core, to make use of the heat) where Davy comes and mimics wonder, watching the lights shine on my orchids, my palmettos, my bougainvillea, my whole little mess of tropical plants. I even have a glassed-in space for cacti. There are outside plantings where in season you can find mountain laurel, a tangled maze of rhododendron, scattered irises that look like an expensive and antique cross between insects and lingerie—but these are under snow now. I even have an electrified fence, inherited from my predecessor, that encloses the whole estate to keep out the deer and occasionally kills trees which take the mild climate around the house a little too much for granted.

I let the J’s peep into the kitchen, which is an armchair with controls like a 707’s, but not the place where I store my tools and from which I have access to the central core when House has indigestion. That’s dirty and you need to know what you’re doing. I showed them Screen, which keeps me in touch with my neighbors, the nearest of whom is ten miles away, Telephone, who is my long-distance backup line, and Phonograph, where I store my music.

Jeannine said she didn’t like her drink; it wasn’t sweet enough. So I had Davy dial her another.

Do you want dinner? (She blushed.)

My palace and gardens (said I) I acquired late in life when I became rich and influential; before that I lived in one of the underground cities among the damnedest passel of neighbors you ever saw, sentimental Arcadian communes—underground, mind you!—whose voices would travel up the sewer pipes at all the wrong times of day and night, shrill sacrifices to love and joy when you want to sleep, ostentatious shuddering whenever I appeared in the corridor, wincing and dashing back inside to huddle together like kittens, conscious of their own innocence, and raise their pure young voices in the blessedness of community song. You know the kind: “But we were having fun!” in a soft, wondering, highly reproachful voice while she closes the door gently but firmly on your thumb. They thought I was Ultimate Evil. They let me know it. They are the kind who want to win the men over by Love. There’s a game called Pussycat that’s great fun for the player; it goes like this: Meeow, I’m dead (lying on your back, all four paws engagingly held in the air, playing helpless); there’s another called Saint George and the Dragon with You Know Who playing You Know What; and when you can no longer tolerate either, you do as I did: come home in a hobgoblin-head of a disguise, howling and chasing your neighbors down the hall while they scream in genuine terror (well, sort of).

Then I moved.

That was my first job, impersonating one of the Manlanders’ police (for ten minutes). By “job” I don’t mean what I was sent to do last night, that was open and legitimate, but a “job” is a little bit under the table. It took me years to throw off the last of my Pussy-fetters, to stop being (however brutalized) vestigially Pussy-cat-ified, but at last I did and now I am the rosy, wholesome, single-minded assassin you see before you today.

I come and go as I please. I do only what I want. I have wrestled myself through to an independence of mind that has ended by bringing all of you here today. In short, I am a grown woman.

I was an old-fashioned girl, born forty-two years ago in the last years before the war, in one of the few mixed towns still left. It amazes me sometimes to think of what my life would have been like without the war, but I ended up in a refugee camp with my mother. Maddened Lesbians did not put cigarette butts out on her breasts, propaganda to the contrary; in fact she got a lot more self-confident and whacked me when I tore to pieces (out of pure curiosity) a paper doily that decorated the top of the communal radio—this departure from previous practice secretly gratified me and I decided I rather liked the place. We were re-settled and I was sent to school once the war cooled off; by ’52 our territories had shrunk to pretty much what they are today, and we’ve grown too wise since to think we can gain anything by merely annexing land. I was trained for years—we deplore what we must nonetheless use!—and began my slow drift away from the community, that specialization (they say) that brings you closer to the apes, though I don’t see how such an exceedingly skilled and artificial practice can be anything but quintessentially human.

At twelve I artlessly told one of my teachers that I was very glad I was being brought up to be a man-woman, and that I looked down on those girls who were only brought up to be woman-women. I’ll never forget her face. She did not thrash me but let an older girl-girl do it—I told you I was old-fashioned. Gradually this sort of thing wears off; not everything with claws and teeth is a Pussycat. On the contrary!

My first job (as I told you) was impersonating one of the Manlander police; my most recent one was taking the place of a Manlander diplomat for eighteen months in a primitive patriarchy on an alternate Earth. Oh yes, the Men also have probability-travel, or rather they have it through us; we run the routine operations for them. So far has corruption progressed! With my silver hair, my silver eyes, and my skin artificially darkened to make me look even stranger to the savages, I was presented as a Prince of Faery, and in that character I lived in a dank stone castle with ghastly sanitary arrangements and worse beds for a year and a half. A place that would make your hair stand on end. Jeannine must stop looking so skeptical—please reflect that some societies stylize their adult roles to such a degree that a giraffe could pass for a man, especially with seventy-seven layers of clothes on, and a barbarian prudery that keeps you from ever taking them off. They were impossible people. I used to make up stories about the Faery women; once I killed a man because he said something obscene about the Faery women. Think of that! You must imagine me as the quiet, serene Christian among the pagans, the courteous magician among the blunt men-o’-war, the overcivilized stranger (possibly a Demon because he was understood to have no beard) who spoke softly and never accepted challenges, but who was not afraid of anything under Heaven and who had a grip of steel. And so on. Oh, those cold baths! And the endless joking about how they weren’t queer, by God! And the bellicosity, the continual joshing that catches in your skin like thorns and exasperates you almost to murder, and the constant fingering of sex and womankind with its tragic, pitiable bafflement and its even worse bragging; and last of all the perpetual losing battle with fear, the constant unloading of anxious weaknesses on to others (and their consequent enraged fury) as if fear and weakness were not the best guides we human beings ever had! Oh, it was rich! When they found that not a knight in the Men’s House could lay a hand on me, they begged for instruction; I had half the warriors of the mead-hall doing elementary ballet under the mistaken impression that they were learning ju-jitsu. They may be doing it still. It made them sweat enough and it’s my signature, plain as day, to the whole bloody universe and any Manlander who turns up there again.

A barbarian woman fell in love with me. It’s terrible to see that slavishness in someone else’s eyes, feel that halo she puts around you, and know from your own person the nature of that eager deference men so often perceive as admiration. Validate me! she cried. Justify me! Raise me up! Save me from the others! ("I am his wife,” she says, turning the mystic ring round and round on her finger, “I am his wife.") So somewhere I have a kind of widow. I used to talk to her sensibly, as no man ever had before, I think. I tried to take her back with me, but couldn’t get authorization for her. Somewhere out there is a murderess as rosy and single-minded as I, if we could only get to her.

May She save us all!

I saved the King’s life once by pinning to the festive Kingly board a pretty little hamadryad somebody had imported from the Southern lands to kill His Majesty. This helped me a good deal. Those primitive warriors are brave men—that is, they are slaves to the fear of fear—but there are some things they believe every man is entitled to run from in abject terror, viz . snakes, ghosts, earthquakes, disease, demons, magic, childbirth, menstruation, witches, afreets, incubi, succubi, solar eclipses, reading, writing, good manners, syllogistic reasoning, and what we might generally call the less reliable phenomena of life. The fact that I was not afraid to pin a poisonous snake to a wooden table with a fork (a piece of Faery handicraft I had brought with me to eat meat with) raised my prestige immensely. Oh yes, if it had bitten me, I would have been dead. But they don’t move that fast. Think of me in quilting and crinolines—not like a Victorian lady, like a player in Kabuki—holding up that poor little broken-backed dinkus amid general hurrahs. Think of me astride a coal-black charger, my black-and-silver cloak streaming in the wind under a heraldic banner comprising crossed forks on a field of reptile eggs. Think of anything you please. Think, if you will, how hard it is to remain calm under constant insults, and of the genuine charm of playing bullfight with a big, beautiful, nasty blond who goes hartyhar every chance he gets, and whom you can reel in and spin out again as if you knew all his control buttons, as indeed you do. Think of giving the King bad advice week after week: modestly, deliberately, and successfully. Think of placing your ladylike foot on the large, dead neck of a human dinosaur who has bothered you for months and has finally tried to kill you; there he lies, this big, carnal flower gathered at last by Chaos and Old Night, torn and broken in the dust, a big limpid Nada, a nothing, a thing, an animal, a creature brought down at last out of his pride to the truth of his organic being—and you did it.

I keep one precious souvenir of that time: the look on the face of my most loyal feudal retainer when I revealed my sex to him. This was a man I had all-but-seduced without his knowing it—little touches on the arm, the shoulder, the knee, a quiet manner, a certain look in the eyes—nothing so gross that he thought it to be me; he assumed it was all himself. I loved that part. His first impulse, of course, was to hate me, fight me, drive me off—but I wasn’t doing anything, was I? I had made no advances to him, had I? What sort of mind did he have? A pitiable confusion! So I got even nicer. He got madder and guiltier, of course, and loathed the very sight of me because I made him doubt his own reason; finally he challenged me and I turned him into a faithful dog by beating him right into the ground; I kicked that man so bloody hard that I couldn’t stand it myself and had to explain to him that what he believed were unnatural lusts were really a species of religious reverence; he just wanted to lie peacefully on the ground and kiss my boot.

The day that I left I went out into the hills with a few friends for the Faery “ceremony” that was to take me away, and when the Bureau people radio’d me they were ready, I sent the others away, and I told him the truth. I divested myself of my knightly attire (no mean trick, considering what those idiots wear) and showed him the marks of Eve; for a moment I could see that stinking bastard’s whole world crumble. For a moment he knew . Then, by God, his eyes got even more moist and slavish, he sank to his knees and piously elevating his gaze, exclaimed in a rapture of feudal enthusiasm—Humanity mending its fences —

If the women of Faery are like this, just think what the MEN must be!

One of Her little jokes. Oh Lord, one of Her hardest jokes.

If you want to be an assassin, remember that you must decline all challenges. Showing off is not your job.

If you are insulted, smile meekly. Don’t break your cover.

Be afraid. This is information about the world.

You are valuable. Push yourself.

Take the easiest way out whenever possible. Resist curiosity, pride, and the temptation to defy limits. You are not your own woman and must be built to last.

Indulge hatred. Action comes from the heart.

Pray often. How else can you quarrel with God?

Does this strike you as painfully austere? If not, you are like me; you can turn yourself inside out, you can live for days upside down, the most biddable, unblushing servant of the Lady since the Huns sacked Rome, just for fun. Anything pursued to its logical end is revelation; as Blake says, The path of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, to that place where all things converge but up high, up unbearably high, that mental success which leads you into yourself, under the aspect of eternity, where you are limber and nice, where you act eternally under the aspect of Everything and where—by doing the One Genuine Thing—you cannot do anything untruly or half-way.

To put it simply: those are the times that I am most myself.

Sometimes I am a little remorseful; I grow sorry that the exercise of my art entails such unpleasant consequences for other people, but really! Hate is a material like any other. If you want me to do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is. Sometimes I go into one of our cities and have little sprees in the local museums; I look at pictures, I get a hotel room and take long hot baths, I drink lots of lemonade. But the record of my life is the record of work, slow, steady, responsible work. I tied my first sparring partner in enraged knots, as Brynhild tied up her husband in her girdle and hung him on the wall, but aside from that I have never hurt a fellow Womanlander; when I wanted to practice deadly strategies, I did it on the school robot. Nor do I have love-affairs with other women; in some things, as I told you, I am a very old-fashioned girl.

The art, you see, is really the head, however you train the body.

What does all this mean? That I am your hostess, your friend, your ally. That we are in the same boat. That I am the grand-daughter of Madam Cause; my great-aunts are Mistress Doasyouwouldbedoneby and her slower sister, Mistress Bedonebyasyoudid. As for my mother, she was an ordinary woman—that is to say, very helpless—and as my father was pure appearance (and hence nothing at all), we needn’t trouble about him.

Everything I do, I do by Cause, that is to say Because , that is to say out of necessity, will-I, nill-I, ineluctably, because of the geas laid on me by my grandmother Causality.

And now—since hysterical strength affects me the way staying up all night affects you—I’m going to sleep.

X

In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.

It was the secret guilt of disease, of failure, of ugliness (much worse things than murder); it was an attribute of my being like the greenness of the grass. It was in me. It was on me. If it had been the result of anything I had done, I would have been less guilty.

In my dream I was eleven years old.

Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them was what it means to be convicted of rape—I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people’s minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance—which was not chance—had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested itself in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this:

She was Cunt.

She had “lost” something.

Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick—but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had “gotten away with” something (possibly what she had “lost").

And there I was, listening at eleven years of age:

She was out late at night.

She was in the wrong part of town.

Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.

She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.

I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a gray, geometric plane—or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.

I was dirty.

I was crying.

I demanded comfort.

I was being inconvenient.

I did not disappear into thin air.

And if that isn’t guilt, what is? I was very lucid in my nightmare. I knew it was not wrong to be a girl because Mommy said so; cunts were all right if they were neutralized, one by one, by being hooked on to a man, but this orthodox arrangement only partly redeems them and every biological possessor of one knows in her bones that radical inferiority which is only another name for Original Sin.

Pregnancy, for example (says the box), take pregnancy now, it’s a disaster, but we’re too enlightened to blame the woman for her perfectly natural behavior, aren’t we? Only keep it secret and keep it going—and I’ll give you three guesses as to which partner the pregnancy is in.

When you grow up as an old-fashioned girl, you always remember that cozy comfort: Daddy getting angry a lot but Mummy just sighs. When Daddy says, “For God’s sake, can’t you women ever remember anything without being told?” he isn’t asking a real question any more than he’d ask a real question of a lamp or a wastebasket. I blinked my silver eyes inside my box. If you stumble over a lamp and you curse that lamp and then you become aware that inside that lamp (or that wooden box or that pretty girl or that piece of bric-a-brac) is a pair of eyes watching you and that pair of eyes is not amused—what then?

Mommy never shouted, “I hate your bloody guts!” She controlled herself to avoid a scene. That was her job.

I’ve been doing it for her ever since.

Now here the idiot reader is likely to hit upon a fascinating speculation (maybe a little late), that my guilt is blood-guilt for having killed so many men. I suppose there is nothing to be done about this. Anybody who believes I feel guilty for the murders I did is a Damned Fool in the full Biblical sense of those two words; you might as well kill yourself right now and save me the trouble, especially if you’re male. I am not guilty because I murdered.

I murdered because I was guilty.

Murder is my one way out.

For every drop of blood shed there is restitution made; with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul; with every gasp of horrified comprehension I come a little more into the light. See? It’s me!

I am the force that is ripping out your guts; I, I, I, the hatred twisting your arm; I, I, I, the fury who has just put a bullet into your side. It is I who cause this pain, not you. It is I who am doing it to you, not you. It is I who will be alive tomorrow, not you. Do you know? Can you guess? Are you catching on? It is I, who you will not admit exists.

Look! Do you see me?

I, I, I. Repeat it like magic. That is not me. I am not that. Luther crying out in the choir like one possessed: NON SUM, NON SUM, NON SUM!

This is the underside of my world.

Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job, and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.

XI

I don’t like didactic nightmares. They make me sweat. It takes me fifteen minutes to stop being a wooden box with a soul and to come back to myself in ordinary human bondage.

Davy sleeps nearby. You’ve heard about blue-eyed blonds, haven’t you? I passed into his room barefoot and watched him curled in sleep, unconscious, the golden veils of his eyelashes shadowing his cheeks, one arm thrown out into the streak of light falling on him from the hall. It takes a lot to wake him (you can almost mount Davy in his sleep) but I was too shaken to start right away and only squatted down by the mattress he sleeps on, tracing with my fingertips the patterns the hair made on his chest: broad high up, over the muscles, then narrowing toward his delicate belly (which rose and fell with his breathing), the line of hair to below the navel, and then that suddenly stiff blossoming of the pubic hair in which his relaxed genitals nestled gently, like a rosebud.

I told you I was an old-fashioned girl.

I caressed his dry, velvety-skinned organ until it stirred in my hand, then ran my fingernails lightly down his sides to wake him up; I did the same—though very lightly—to the insides of his arms.

He opened his eyes and smiled starrily at me.

It’s very pleasant to follow Davy’s hairline around his neck with your tongue or nuzzle all the hollows of his long-muscled, swimmer’s body: inside the elbows, the forearms, the place where the back tapers inward under the ribs, the backs of the knees. A naked man is a cross, the juncture elaborated vulnerable and delicate flesh like the blossom on a banana tree, that place that’s given me so much pleasure.

I nudged him gently and he shivered a little, bringing his legs together and spreading his arms flat; with my forefinger I made a transient white line on his neck. Little Davy was half-filled by now, which is a sign that Davy wants to be knelt over. I obliged, sitting across his thighs, and bending over him without touching his body, kissed him again and again on the mouth, the neck, the face, the shoulders. He is very, very exciting. He’s very beautiful, my classic mesomorphic monster-pet. Putting one arm under his shoulders to lift him up, I rubbed my nipples over his mouth, first one and then the other, which is nice for us both, and as he held on to my upper arms and let his head fall back, I pulled him to me, kneading his back muscles, kneading his buttocks, sliding down to the mattress with him. Little Davy is entirely filled out now.

So lovely: Davy with his head thrown to one side, eyes closed, his strong fingers clenching and unclenching. He began to arch his back, as his sleepiness made him a little too quick for me, so I pressed Small Davy between thumb and forefinger just enough to slow him down and then—when I felt like it—playfully started to mount him, rubbing the tip of him, nipping him a little on the neck. His breathing in my ear, fingers convulsively closing on mine.

I played with him a little more, tantalizing him, then swallowed him whole like a watermelon seed—so fine inside! with Davy moaning, his tongue inside my mouth, his blue gaze shattered, his whole body uncontrollably arched, all his sensation concentrated in the place where I held him.

I don’t do this often, but that time I made him come by slipping a finger up his anus: convulsions, fires, crying in no words as the sensation was pulled out of him. If I had let him take more time, I would have climaxed with him, but he’s stiff for quite a while after he comes and I prefer that; I like the after-tremors and the after-hardness, slipperier and more pliable than before; Davy has an eerie malleability at those times. I grasped him internally, I pressed down on him, enjoying in the one act his muscular throat, the hair under his arms, his knees, the strength of his back and buttocks, his beautiful face, the fine skin on the inside of his thighs. Kneaded and bruised him, hiccoughing inside with all my architecture: little buried rod, swollen lips and grabby sphincter, the flexing half-moon under the pubic bone. And everything else in the vicinity, no doubt. I’d had him. Davy was mine. Sprawled blissfully over him—I was discharged down to my fingertips but still quietly throbbing—it had really been a good one. His body so warm and wet under me and inside me.

XII

And looked up to see—

XIII

—the three J’s—

XIV

“Good Lord! Is that all?” said Janet to Joanna.

XV

Something pierces the sweetest solitude.

I got up, tickled him with the edge of my claw, joined them at the door. Closing it. “Stay, Davy.” This is one of the key words that the house “understands"; the central computer will transmit a pattern of signals to the implants in his brain and he will stretch out obediently on his mattress; when I say to the main computer “Sleep,” Davy will sleep. You have already seen what else happens. He’s a lovely limb of the house. The original germ-plasm was chimpanzee, I think, but none of the behavior is organically controlled any more. True, he does have his minimal actions which he pursues without me—he eats, eliminates, sleeps, and climbs in and out of his exercise box—but even these are caused by a standing computer pattern. And I take precedence, of course. It is theoretically possible that Davy has (tucked away in some nook of his cerebrum) consciousness of a kind that may never even touch his active life—is Davy a poet in his own peculiar way?—but I prefer to believe not. His consciousness—such as it is and I am willing to grant it for the sake of argument—is nothing but the permanent possibility of sensation, a mere intellectual abstraction, a nothing, a picturesque collocation of words. It is experientially quite empty, and above all, it is nothing that need concern you and me. Davy’s soul lies somewhere else; it’s an outside soul. Davy’s soul is Davy’s beauty; and Beauty is always empty, always on the outside. Isn’t it?

“Leucotomized,” I said (to the J’s). “Lobotomized. Kidnapped in childhood. Do you believe me?”

They did.

“Don’t,” I said. Jeannine doesn’t understand what we’re talking about; Joanna does and is appalled; Janet is thinking. I shooed them into the main room and told them who he was.

Alas! those who were shocked at my making love that way to a man are now shocked at my making love to a machine; you can’t win.

“Well?” said the Swedish Miss.

“Well,” said I, “this is what we want. We want bases on your worlds; we want raw materials if you’ve got them. We want places to recuperate and places to hide an army; we want places to store our machines. Above all, we want places to move from—bases that the other side doesn’t know about. Janet is obviously acting as an unofficial ambassador, so I can talk to her, that’s fine. You two might object that you are persons of no standing, but whom do you expect me to ask, your governments? Also, we need someone who can show us the local ropes. You’ll do fine for me. You are the authorities, as far as I’m concerned.

“Well?

“Is it yes or no?

“Do we do business?”