The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

COMING-OF-AGE DAY A. K. JORGENSSON

I was ten and I still had not seen them! You didn’t expect to see a woman’s unless you were lucky, which a very few boys at my school professed to be. But nearly everyone my age knew what a man’s looked like.

But you got some funny answers.

“You’re too young,” said a squit about half my size, and another very big boy nodded agreement.

“We don’t want to do any harm,” the big one said, wisely as it turned out. His voice was already breaking, and I think he was on the change.

“We’re not going to tell you.” There were a number of small knots in the playground that took a secretive line, and whispered with their backs to everybody. I belonged to a loose group of boys who, looking back, I would say were intelligent and sensitive and from better homes. Their interests were academic, or real hobbies. But I was a little contemptuous of their ignorance and softness. And I ended up hanging about behind a group led by a capable boy, or breaking roughly into a fighting gang, having a punch-up and then going to skip with the girls. I tried everything. I was nobody’s buddy. But a few groups could expect to rely on me if they needed an extra hand to defend themselves against a rough bunch or to try a good game. “Go and get Rich Andrews,” someone would say: “he’ll play.”

They got me one day after school for a very secret meeting on the waste plot between the churchyard and the playing fields. Guards were out at the edge of the bushes. We had to enter over the churchyard wall. And we had to crouch to approach the spot, crawling along the bottoms of craters left between bulldozed heaps and tips of earth.

It was a good hide-out behind a solid screen of leaves, deep in the bushes. Churchill was there; so was Edwards and my friend Pete Loss. They had started something, and

I saw it was a bit dubious, because Churchill and Gimble were in a little arbour away from the others, and though I could not see much, they had their trousers down.

“What’s up?” I asked Pete.

“Oh, they’re playing sexy-lovers,” said Pete.

“Why? What’s the idea?”

“D’you know all about it?” he asked. “I don’t s’pose you do. Oh, I did it once. It’s not much. Old Churchill thinks he’s got a better way. It gives him a thrill.”

“I don’t like it,” I said. I was curious and afraid, but hoped I sounded like you should when someone’s trying to get one up on you and you’re not having any.

“Come on,” I urged Pete. “Let’s go.”

“They want to show you,” he said.

“Oh, I know all about that,” I lied. ‘I’m not going to play pansy for that dirty beast Churchill.”

It took more urging, but when I made a move Pete came too. The guards tried to stop us, as though they had designs on me. I shouted, “Stop it! I shall shout! Aw, come on; play the game,” and they let me go. But they persuaded Pete to stay.

I got away and of course kept quiet. And lost another chance to know all about sex. It was the time for sex education, of course, and this gave me a fair technical knowhow, but I didn’t have the practical experience. I hesitated to muck about and the teachers didn’t exactly encourage it: also, my parents were a bit strict. So I left it.

It was after that party in the bushes that controversy arose. Someone said to Churchill:

“You nit. You don’t just play about with it. And you don’t just get hairy all round. You get something put there at the right age. It’s the operation!”

“I don’t care about the operation,” he said. “You can do this—” and he described masturbation openly enough to make me feel hot. Miss Darlington was getting close and I was afraid she’d overhear. She had an A-l pot on her front.

They silenced as she approached, but I heard Elkes say under his breath to Churchill, “Look at their pots! That’s where they keep their sex organs. You get outside ones put on your inside ones. Darlie’s got a big male thing on hers, it sticks out a mile.”

Quite frankly, this horrified me. I had always wondered whether all the hairiness of men came up from the private place and how large the organs grew. But separate adult bathing had come a few years before my first swim, and if they did wear these things on the beach, you couldn’t tell them from pot bellies. It sounded like a book I had read which said how pot bellies grew on adolescents now whereas it used to be only old men and middle-aged women. I wondered what lay behind that expression “pot belly.” It made me feel funny even to think of it. But it also made me feel sad, just as a fuller sexual awareness did later. You never know which gives more satisfaction—the relief of the sexual act, or the retention of that inner virile feeling when you have refrained for a good while. And there is a sort of dimension that is all power and mind and strength, that the physical conditions don’t seem to improve or improve upon.

In the old days, I am told, there used to be more explicit sexual bits in the films. But on television these days, as in the theater, they are very cagey. I heard one master from the upper school, who is reputed to be a wild unrestrained type, call this a second Victorian Age. According to him, every time we get a queen reigning to a ripe old age, it’s nearing the end of the century: and people are afraid the millennium will come at the end of 1999. So what with one thing and another, they are fearfully prudish.

Which is ridiculous, because when the naked torso was the fashion they could not have hidden the pot-bellied things they wear these days.

I asked my father one day what happened when people got pot-bellied.

“You know all about that from school, surely, son.”

“Well, no, it’s the one thing they’ve never taught us.”

“Why did you want to know? It’s not always good to know these things.”

“Well, I didn’t—I mean, well, the boys at school talk about it in the playground. I’m getting pretty big now, dad, nearly eleven. I ought to know what they mean by now.”

“I see. I shall have to talk to your head teacher, Rich, I can see that. Anyway, pot bellies are just when people get fat around the lower part of the abdomen. People eat too much these days.”

“Oh . . . Only they said at school it wasn’t that. Gluttony is frowned on now, and drinking too much. But people still have—”

“That is enough, Rich. In a year or two you will be grown up enough to be able to understand. In the meantime you have had at least two years of education in biology, and you know all about the primitive sex processes.”

I knew when to be quiet. Parents were not so strict in the middle of the twentieth century, so the history books say, and it was a bad thing. I wonder if that is why people are ashamed and hide their sexual excesses now. Do as I say and not as I do, etcetera—unwilling hypocrisy, but they can’t help it. But that mention of “primitive” sex, it foxed me, because Edwards asked at school what “primitive” meant, and was told that it referred to an early form before it developed. Well, there are two sorts of development, natural maturation and scientific application, and I do not believe the scientific part has been explained to us yet.

Before I peeped and saw, I had just about worked it out. It was a diffident sort of guess, but I reckon it proves what Socrates said. People may not believe me, but I was on the right lines. It was more than those funny ideas I had as a small boy—that people grew their tails long, or that they carried a little hairy monkey about inside their trousers. I tied it up with the artificial creation of living tissue over twenty years ago. These days they are always coming up with new forms of living tissue: they can give you a new body for an old one in bits or in toto nowadays. And they have perfected their methods so much that the so-called artificial one is better than the natural one. After all, they have eliminated all those subtle differences between the chemical product and the equivalent natural one, which was one major advance in many.

Now if you see people lose a leg, as I did once (rather, it had to be removed later) and a few months later they’ve grown a new one, why not improve on the natural, or primitive, sexual organs? I am beginning to agree with an aunt of mine who, in an episode I won’t relate, told me there was no pleasure in sex; the sensation of pleasure was in the mind, not the organ or nerve. Well, what if you did get a better organ? If you’re not much of a chap anyway, it would do you no good unless it had a psychological improvement on your confidence.

I have more evidence of this point. The only other clue I had before I was thirteen and registered as an adolescent was hearing a conversation between two old men: all they did was complain that the new pot bellies had not solved people’s sexual problems after all.

Except the time when I peeped. It was on the beach one day when the sun was very hot and a lot of people sat perspiring in their many light clothes. All of a sudden a woman began to scream and clutch at the lower part of her body, as if to pull something off. After a while women started gathering round and trying to help. But she was desperate and tore her costume, an enveloping thing, until this sort of huge fleshy roll could be seen clinging to her. It could have been a flabby woman’s breast, or a fantastic roll of fat, but this would be a bit too unlikely, I reckon. The woman pulled at it, and it gave and stretched out like a tentacle and —”Get away! You nasty little boy. How dare you peep! Go away.” After a screech like that I crawled away.

Going to the sexiatrist was the call-up day for coming-of-age even more than one’s initiation into the forces came through the medical examination. It was with mixed feelings that I faced the ceremony, having had an enjoyable childhood with no great attraction urging me into manhood. I reported at the Center, and a nurse took my particulars. I signed an agreement that I was prepared to undertake the responsibilities of adulthood; all rather vague, as it was a matter of contracting out to avoid the consequences rather than contracting in. Had I refused, I should have had twenty forms to sign and dozens of conditions written in in fine print. Either that, I had heard, or I ended up in a harsh institution for the backward.

First a doctor checked my family doctor’s assessment of my sexual age. He examined me with that frankness and propriety that scientific control over sexual phenomena demanded, took blood samples and a tiny piece of my skin, looked into my eyes and checked my height, coloring and so on. Most of the time I was modestly allowed to keep my pants on, even though I was stripped of all else, including my watch.

After going through the mass radiography room, the cancer-heat-test room and other places, and receiving various boosters against the various plagues, I was sent home, walking out with a curious sense of illness-at-ease, ordinariness and anticlimax.

It took me by surprise to get another Ministry postcard two weeks later, requesting my presence once more at the Sexual Health Center. This time it was in the afternoon, and the nurse ushered me into the doctor’s other surgery with a little more respect. There was a tiny holding of the breath and it made me more expectant.

“Good afternoon, Andrews. Nice to see you again. Still feeling in good health?”

“Yes, sir, thank you.” One never admits that one has never felt quite the same since being pumped with inoculatives.

“Ready to have a consex fitted! Now, Andrews, this is a most private matter which I think will explain itself. We are not afraid to be scientific about sex as a subject, but I trust you will keep this to yourself. If you are not completely satisfied—for any reason whatsoever—tell no one but come and see me. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“I am a sexiatrist, actually, not a doctor. Now come and look in this glass container.”

I looked. As I believe it usually does to others, it struck me with a sort of horror to see this thing alive, a collapsed sort of dumpling with ordinary human skin, sitting in its case like a part of a corpse that had been cut off.

“Get used to it,” he said. “It’s only ordinary flesh. It has a tiny pulse with a primitive sort of heart, and blood and muscle. And fat. It’s just flesh. Alive, of course, but perfectly harmless.”

He lifted the lid and touched it. It gave, then formed round his finger. He moulded it like dough or plasticine and it gave way, though it tended to roll back to a certain shapelessness.

“Touch it.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Go on.”

He was firm and I obeyed. It had a touch like skin and was warm. It might have been part of someone’s fat stomach. I pushed my finger in, and the thing squeezed the finger gently with muscular contractions.

“It’s yours,” he announced.

I nearly fainted with horror. It strikes everyone that way until they realize how simple, harmless and useful free living tissue can be, and its many healing purposes. It embarrassed me to guess where the “consex” was to be located on my body, and my intuition was uncertain with equally embarrassing ignorance. But one only has to wear a consex a short while to realize how utterly natural it is, and how delightfully pleasant when in active use. It is a boon to lone explorers, astronauts, occupants of remote weather and defense stations, and so on.

“Don’t worry,” said the specialist as I drew back in disgust. “It’s no more horrible than the way you came into the world, or the parts each of your parents played in starting the process. In fact, it’s cleaner, more foolproof, and efficient, and far more satisfying than a woman. Thank heaven, without them we’d be overrun.”

I feared to do anything. He said,

“I’ll show you how it works. Don’t take it off for at least a week, not for any reason. See me at once if there is any discomfort. Later on, you may remove it for athletics, though you can do most things with it on—swimming, for instance. In the toilet it rolls up easily enough. But don’t disturb the suction or play around. It clings well if you leave it alone, and it’s very comfortable.”

He took me into a private cubicle, where I undressed and lay under a soft blanket. Then he brought the thing in on his hand and pulled the blanket back.

I held my breath. It was the worst moment of my life for fear, though not for pain.

“I’ve stimulated it a bit,” he said. “It’ll take over for you this time, but every time after that it’s up to you to make the first move, or nothing will happen. It’s very responsive. Now you must lie here half an hour until I let you go.”

He let it rest between my thighs, and it covered all those parts you never see on pictures of nudes except those in classical religious paintings. It was comfortable. It felt pleasant. This first time when the sexiatrist goes out and leaves one alone with one’s body and one’s consex and one’s private thoughts is the crucial one.

It was only pleasant sensation; I had not been given any warning. So I tolerated it. But at the same time I was disgusted at the smallness of sophisticated adult behavior. Hell, I thought, they take a lot for granted. But my curiosity overcame my dignity, and I did not rebel.

It was hardly over when I heard a conversation which startled me.

“Do you have a letter from your parents?” the sexiatrist was asking someone.

“No.”

“But you still refuse to have an appliance fitted?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I agree it is not compulsory. But you’ll have to give a very good reason for refusing. And without a letter from a doctor or parent or guardian we may not accept your reasons.”

“I’m a conscientious objector.”

“On what grounds? Do you realize what you’re letting yourself in for by refusing to wear a consex?”

“I don’t believe all the claims made for it,” he said, but feebly.

“You don’t even know them,” said the sexiatrist, condescendingly. “I’m quite sure of that. But surely you want to know what it’s all about first? Surely the subject fascinates you so that you are interested enough to desire the experience for a while?”

“No, sir. In principle.”

“In principle! What do you know about it? Tell me. What do you know about so vast a subject?”

“I don’t believe in the principles the welfare authorities base it on.”

“You don’t believe in them! You don’t believe them despite the fact that the government authorizes me to fit every boy and girl with an appropriate consex as soon as he or she reaches puberty. Every boy and girl in this population of over eighty million wears one—”

“Not every boy and girl.”

“All but one or two in a million, and those are mostly for health or mixed-sex reasons. They are approved by the R. M. A. and every major health, legal and educational authority in the country. Virtually all religious denominations have welcomed them. But you refuse.”

“Welcomed, sir? I don’t believe any of them.”

“I see. You don’t believe that this country is heavily overpopulated? You don’t believe that before consexes came out the years of adolescence were years of miserable misfits trying to adjust to a half-baked situation? And that boys slept promiscuously in spurious natural sexual relations, that girls had illegitimate babies sometimes from the earliest years it is possible to conceive, and that mere children contracted serious venereal diseases from these methods.

“You think you can do without all this. And what sort of substitute will you have? Tearing about on a rocket-scooter or getting drunk! Raping a woman or just stealing her handbag! And if and when you grow up . . .

“Did you know that there are ten million bachelors and the same number of spinsters in this country who have never been married nor had a so-called love affair but are sexually wholly satisfied and consummated? Did you?”

“It may have been in the papers, sir.”

“Tell me.” He spoke kindly and coaxingly for a moment. “Is it because you’ve picked up some little bad habit? It’s very common, nothing to be ashamed of. This thing will help you.”

“No, sir.”

“Come on now, man of principles. Square with me. Haven’t you? Are you sure you’ve never committed . . . well, self-abuse?”

“What, sir? I—I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Come off it, lad. No one has ever never done anything wrong.”

“But I haven’t, sir.”

“Do your parents approve of your attitude?”

“I think so, sir.”

“You think so? That’s not good enough. Now come on. Be a good chap and let us fit you a consex. It’s much nicer than natural sex or any of that. You don’t want to be the odd man out, do you?”

“No, sir—”

“Good. All right, then. Nurse, he’s accepted after all. Get it out, will you.”

“No, I haven’t, sir. No!”

“I am an authority on this, lad. You mean to say you still haven’t accepted that the government knows what is best for the nation after all I’ve told you?”

“I haven’t, sir, no. It’s not the government—”

“You haven’t? But I thought just now you said you had.”

“I didn’t want to be the odd man out; but I can’t wear one of these.”

“Then you will be the odd man out, won’t you? What d’you mean, you can’t? Come into the laboratory and let me show you.”

There was silence then for nearly half an hour. Now I know what one of those laboratories looks like, I can imagine the sexiatrist taking him round, telling him to peer into a microscope and see tiny microbes swiveling about in plasma, showing him charts of the amino acids, the blood-types, the cell-types, the skin-types, etcetera, pulling out samples for quick-fire experiments, and showing him a few easily digested examples of living tissues artificially made for various purposes. Then the door opened and in they came.

“Well, what did you think of it?”

“Very interesting, sir.”

“Impressive, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now what do you say? It’s up to you. You have some idea how it works now, and you’re not afraid any longer, I hope.”

“No, sir.”

“You’ll consider it.”

“I am considering it, sir.”

“Oh, good. Do you think you’ll be able to decide now?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Good. I’ll call the nurse then, shall I?”

No answer. He rang the desk bell.

“You won’t refuse us after all that, now, will you?”

“Well. . . Please, sir . . .”

“I’m going to ring your parents.”

The nurse came in, dropped my clothes on the bed, and shut the door. I heard the phone click as I slid out of bed, then click again.

“I’ll give you one more chance,” said the sexiatrist. “In case you’re ashamed or anything. Nurse, tell me, do you wear a consex?”

“Yes, doctor, I do.”

“A male consex?”

“Yes.”

“And you like it? It’s comfortable, not unhealthy? You can do what you like? You don’t feel guilty about it?”

“I love it,” she said. “I’ve never had difficulty with it. It always responds to my lead and never disobeys.”

“Thank you. Now, boy, are you satisfied?”

“What happened the first time?” the boy asked the nurse with a mixture of sheepishness and daring.

The nurse said nothing. I wondered if she blushed. The boy said: “My father called it an artificial prostitute.”

“Nonsense, lad. You don’t know what you’re talking about. They say worse things about holy matrimony, so-called.”

“I have religious objections,” said the boy. “I can control myself without all this.”

“All what? Without all what?” the doctor asked sharply.

“This . . . appliance.”

“It’s only living flesh,” he said. “Look, here’s one. See? I touch it. If God hadn’t meant this stuff to exist, it wouldn’t exist, would it? Now you touch it. Don’t your parents wear one?”

“No, sir, they don’t.”

“Ah! Well, you’re quite free to do as you please. Don’t be afraid to go against them. As I told you, the authorities have called you up for the purpose of giving you one, and you are protected by the law. We shall support you to the hilt. Your parents don’t object to fluoridation, do they? Or antismog in the air?”

“Yes, sir, they do.”

“Hmmm.”

I heard a muttered “Nut cases” outside my door, and the nurse opened it for the sexiatrist. He strode through, booming.

“Andrews, ah, Andrews, you’re a sensible lad. Now you’ve just become a man and learned all about it. How d’you like it?”

“All right, sir.”

“Feels okay, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “very nice,” though sneakingly I sympathized with the boy out there. I knew the voice of all the temporal powers was speaking through the sexiatrist, and all the pressures were being brought to bear, but I admired him for resisting.

The sexiatrist knelt and held me.

“Now, sir,” he said, “now, Mr. Andrews, would you mind very much if we showed our friend here how nicely the little consex fits? We have to show you how it feeds, too, because it’s going to grow and mature right along with you. That’s why it’s important this lad Topolski has his fitted now.”

I detected the tiny note of disdain at the boy’s foreign name, and half inclined to retort at the sexiatrist for the one he had used all along.

“He doesn’t have to, does he?”

“Now don’t you start,” said the doctor, and he drew me forward, levering off my pants at the same time.

“What’s wrong with that?” asked the sexiatrist, showing the consex fitting like a fig leaf and looking as innocuous as a fold of skin. “I’ve even thought,” he went on, half to himself, half to the young nurse, “that they’re far more aesthetic than the bare uni-sex, and this return to clothing oneself at all times and in all places is quite unnecessary. The time will come when things will turn full circle, and we shan’t be afraid to go completely nude again.”

I saw the point. I began almost to like my consex, even though the sensation it could give was disturbingly overwhelming. But the boy turned away after a cursory examination. He said nothing.

“Well?” asked the big man, and I realized all of a sudden the mental pressure, the semi-mesmeric force of it that I had allowed to ride me, and that this small dark twelve-year-old was bucking. “You don’t want a black mark on your book, do you?”

I wondered, What book? I did not know, then, that the State’s records kept its finger on this one more aspect of a man’s “suitability.”

“I do a lot of sport,” he said weakly, almost visibly wilting, and looking for somewhere to hide. He must have felt awful, foolish and mixed-up.

“Ah, so that’s what it is! Well now. Dearson, the world champion marathon runner, actually wears his running! And all the other athletes have them. They simply take them off and wrap them in a little blanket—like this one— while they’re participating. No trouble at all. Now come on, be a good chap. We’ll just take your measurements—most of them are compulsory—and leave it to you to come back later and collect your consex. How about that?”

“All right,” he said. I saw him stiffening his resistance again to the paternal air, and felt fairly sure the internalized authority would not be strong enough in him to bring him to accepting the consex. But he would have to submit to the tests as required. The sexiatrist would ring his parents later, then he would have to return and sign the many forms, by one of which he would delegate to the Minister of Health responsibility for his sexual welfare—a condition mentally as unacceptable to him and his parents as the consex was physically unacceptable.

I was dressed and dismissed, yet I lingered at the specialist’s door waiting vaguely for something. Then the boy gave his address. It was just round the corner from mine.

The fact that we were neighbors does not seem important, perhaps. But it’s going to be. I am going round when I have a chance, to ask Topolski the real reason why he refused to put on the “appliance.”

ONE WORD ON TV STARTS UPROAR IN COMMONS: “/ would have used it in similar conversation with any group of grown-up people.” (Kenneth Tynan on the BBC)

WILL THE PILL AFFECT AMERICA’S MORAL STANDARDS? ... A growing number of mothers are asking gynecologists to prescribe birth-control pills for their daughters—particularly daughters leaving home for colleges. “It doesn’t happen too often,” says Dr. Gardiner of Indianapolis, “but when it happens once a week, it seems as if it’s every day.”

GINZBURG SPEAKS FOR “SEXUAL HONESTY” . . . Ginzburg is on his way to jail to serve a five-year prison term on obscenity charges upheld last week by the Supreme Court. The Court held in a five-to-four decision that advertisements for Eros magazine and two other Ginzburg publications pandered to prurient appetites...

RELIGION TAKES A LOOK AT PLAYBOY “PHILOSOPHY” ... The Church, says the Christian Advocate, must stop ignoring what it calls “playboyism”—because it represents a “new religious alternative” ...

Six years ago, a slim volume called New Maps of Hell put science fiction on the literary map. The author, a gifted comic novelist taking a fling at literary criticism, was a staunch supporter of the Virile Virgin, or “Look, Ma, no hands,” social-mural school of s-f. The genre, he contended, was suited only to abstract, or wide-screen, ideas. For instance: “The role of sex in science fiction seems bound to remain secondary.” And: “What will certainly not do ... is any notion of turning out a science fiction love story.”

Nor was Mr. Amis alone in his views; most editors in the field agreed with him at the time.

“Coming-of-Age Day”—particularly since it found print as a first story by an unknown—is evidence enough of what has happened in the few years since. (It is true that the British magazines—like British radio—have abandoned Puritan restraints more eagerly than the American; but for exhibit B, try William Tenn’s “The Masculinist Revolt,” or Willard Marsh’s “The Sin of Edna Schuster,” both from F&SF.) As for the science-fiction love story, there never was any question about it—not since del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (1938); nor, for a moment, while Sturgeon was writing; and not with stories like Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” (9th Annual), or Leo P. Kelley’s “O’Grady’s Girl,” in F&SF last year.

I don’t think there is any serious doubt now about the tolerance of the field for the whole range of human interests and human behavior. What is at issue in the new work is not topic, but treatment. Today it is symbolism and surrealism the Old Guard is fighting.

Josephine Saxton here gives us a love story in the new vein— and another “First.”