World Without Men, page 2
There was nothing in the clothing to identify the man, only a few printed papers in a foreign language that neither Gallardia nor Aubretia could identify, and a gold ring on one finger of the corpse bearing the engraved letters. "R. D."
All this, of course, was the news story of the year, perhaps of the century. In a world in which the male sex had been abandoned by nature some five thousand years earlier as an unnecessary extravagance of evolution, the presence of a real man, even a dead one, was an item of profound interest. It was a stark reminder of prehistoric days when womankind existed at the level of the animals in the field, before nature had decided that a change was desirable in the mechanism by which the species could be perpetuated. It brought back the days when there were such things as men, now almost legendary creatures of a bygone mythology.
It was as if, for instance, they had found a Cyclops That’s how real and unreal was the man in the Annex.
Aubretia switched on the videophone and dialled the number of the Department of the Written Word. Then she changed her mind and pressed the cancel button. This was something that would have to be discussed on a person-to-person basis. It was too important, and the videophone was too impersonal.
She put on her purple cloak, pulled the snake chain, and made her way to street level.
"The body will have to be erased without trace," stated the Mistress of Information. Her eyes were expressionless and her long triangular face was swarthy and serpentine. "There is no need to look bewildered, my dear. I am merely reciting government policy. All human remains identified as male are incinerated without delay."
"But why?" asked Aubretia, not understanding. "Surely the discovery of … of a man … is a matter of priority news."
The Mistress of Information shook her head slowly. It was the lethargic motion of a pendulum in the padded vastness of the pastel office. "Please believe me when I say that it has no news value whatever. I am not permitted to explain why. So far as the contemporary world is concerned, the male sex ceased to exist some five thousand years ago."
"I agree. That is recognized. But surely the body of a man has some historic, some scientific value."
"None whatever."
The Mistress of Information stood up and walked idly around the room, making no sound on the thick white pile of the carpet. She moved like a phantom among the slender fragile shapes of the furniture. Occasionally she glanced obliquely at her visitor, but there was no warmth or sympathy in her eyes, only a cold calculating shrewdness.
"There is such a thing," she said quietly, "as the parthenogentic adaptation syndrome. It has been a reality for five thousand years and it determines the pattern of our life, of our existence. We have to recognize its influence and comply with its requirements in terms of social behaviour"
"I’m afraid I don't understand …"
"Then I'll try to explain, in so far as my terms of reference will allow me. Long, long ago the human race was split into two sexes — male and female — just as are the lower animals at the present day. Sex, of course, is a mechanism designed to achieve perpetuation of the species. More than that, it is a mechanism whose purpose is to produce variants in the species. By random admixture of the differing characteristics of individual men and women, children were produced em bodying composites of those characteristics. Sometimes they were mutants, offspring bearing new characteristics which had emerged for the first time. The object of this undisciplined intermarriage of eugenic strains was to produce off spring of differing survival capacities."
"You mean," said Aubretia, "the survival of the fittest."
"Exactly. In other words — evolution. The germ cells of both males and females carried the essential physical and physiological characteristics of the individuals concerned in the genes on the chromosomes in the nuclei of the cells. Marriage produced mixture. The chromosomes and the genes were brought together. New permutations and combinations of human anatomy and physiology arose at each birth. Some were more suited to survival than others. In such a way, by natural selection, nature sought to change the form of man, slowly adapting him to his environment." The Mistress smiled. "You will pardon me in using the word man in the generic sense. I could just as well have said woman."
Aubretia nodded, feeling rather out of her depth. She was beginning to acquire a new respect for her superior, and wondering just how much of what she was saying was factual, and not merely a recital of governmental viewpoint.
"Natural selection, survival of the fittest, is the simple mechanism of evolution, designed to adapt a living animal to its environment, to ensure survival of the species. But what happens when the animal concerned starts adapting the environment to itself?"
Aubretia said nothing: she had nothing to say. "Immediately, the evolutionary process of nature breaks down. Natural selection no longer applies. Survival of the fittest becomes obsolete. In fact, survival becomes the prerogative of those who, by wealth and power, can mould their environment to their own liking."
"All right," Aubretia murmured. "But what has all that to do with men?"
"There comes a time," the Mistress stated portentously, "when nature begins to realize that the methods she employs are no longer suited to the conditions which apply. What is the point of producing variants when the fittest no longer survive, when those who survive are not necessarily the fit test? Variation and natural selection become meaningless. Sex as a variant technique becomes useless. Survival is deter mined by artificial factors: the ability to live in congenial surroundings, to buy the best medical aid, to reduce the labour of life by the acquisition of mechanical labour-saving devices, and so on."
"You talk about nature, but how could nature know?"
The Mistress raised an admonishing finger. "Nature is all wise. Towards the end of the twentieth century, when the development of unlimited atomic power completely negated the process of natural evolution, nature finally came to terms with the human race. Reproduction was still necessary, but variation was a waste of time and uneconomic."
"But why?"
"Consider: Five thousand years ago the population of the world was half male and half female. A billion men and a billion women. There you have a supreme example of the extravagance of nature."
"Extravagance?"
"Of course. One man could fertilize a thousand females — ten thousand in the course of a lifetime; yet nature provided an average of one man per woman. The result of such extravagance was sublimation of unexpended masculine drive in other spheres: war, faster and faster air and ground travel, interplanetary flight. The cosmos itself became a mons Veneris at which mankind as a whole set his cap."
Aubretia shifted uncomfortably on her chair. The trend of the conversation made her feel uneasy, aroused in her mind the same kind of dormant fear as had been instigated by the visual memory of the man. The whole subject was wrapped in a sinister cocoon of unfathomable mystery.
"I’d never realized," she said, "that men were so real. What I mean is that men have always been to me — to most women — a kind of legend, a fairy tale, or stories of ghosts and goblins"
"After five thousand years you could hardly expect more."
"Then why did men disappear so suddenly from the world?"
The Mistress sat down again at her desk, drumming her fingers lightly upon its shining surface. "It wasn’t sudden. It was a slow process. The truth is they were no longer necessary, Evolution had ceased in the human species. Sexual variation was no longer necessary. So nature introduced an economy and eliminated the male sex."
"But how?"
"By adjusting the ratio of births so that more and more females were born. Eventually there were no male births what ever. And at the same time parthenogenesis developed into a natural function of the female sex."
"I suppose it’s logical," Aubretia conceded. "After all, if women can have children without the — the intervention of a male, then there seems to be no point in having two sexes."
"Exactly. And the beauty of it is this. The female ovum contains twenty-four chromosomes. By parthenogenesis, whether natural or induced, the ovum splits into a normal cell of forty-eight chromosomes: a female cell. It is absolutely impossible to produce a healthy male cell of forty-seven chromosomes by parthenogenesis. Obviously, then, woman is the end product of nature. Man was merely an interim stage incapable of perpetuation other than by heterosexual means. You see, the male gametes were divided into two parts: those with twenty-three chromosomes and those with twenty-four, formed by subdivision of the forty-seven chromosomes in his body cells."
"I understand now," said Aubretia. "In order to produce a male child you must have a gamete with twenty-three chromosomes combining with a female ovum of twenty-four. Otherwise the product is always female."
The Mistress smiled triumphantly. "Exactly. That was the card nature had up her sleeve. The fundamental permanence of the female and the transience of the male." She stroked her cropped black hair with a long, slender finger. "With the elimination of the male sex the possibility of producing male offspring became nil. Parthenogenesis can only produce females."
“When did parthenogenesis really start?" Aubretia asked. ‘That’s difficult to say. There were isolated cases through out the ages. Seven thousand years ago there was a well-authenticated case of a parthenogentic individual called Christ; but towards the end of the twentieth century it in creased immeasurably, and at the same time men died off." Aubretia considered for a moment, reviewing all that she had learned, "The adaptation you mentioned," she said. "Where does that fit in?"
The Mistress smiled for the first time, a confident knowledgeable smile. "A sex may disappear according to the dictates of nature, but the endocrine structure of the female body remains the same."
"Endocrine?"
"The ductless glands — the hormones. They are the basis of emotional feeling. The emotions have not changed, but they have been modified."
Aubretia pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Emotions I know about, but how have they been modified?"
The Mistress paused for a moment, choosing her words carefully. "Whom do you love?" she enquired.
"An albino woman named Aquilegia," Aubretia said, with a certain degree of self-consciousness.
"Then it may surprise you to know that there was a time when women needed men, when women loved men."
"No!" Aubretia gasped incredulously.
"It is true. But during the course of five thousand years an emotional transfer has taken place, from necessity. Now women need and love each other."
"But surely that is natural. Women are the same; they know about each other."
The Mistress shook her head sadly. "I’m afraid you re missing the point because you can’t see the point. That is as it should be. An adaptation has taken place, a fundamental reorganization of the emotional architecture of womankind. But perhaps you can appreciate that it would be undesirable, perhaps even dangerous, to introduce a conflicting element. It would be fatal to introduce the idea of man because there is a chance, just the slight chance, that some women might respond to it — those women who have not quite conformed to the emotional pattern of the adaptation syndrome. That is why the male body in the Annex must be destroyed." Aubretia remained silent for fully a minute. She was trying to understand things from two independent and divorced points of view. Primarily she was a citizen of a female world, living and existing within a circumscribed pattern of emotional behaviour in accordance with what the Mistress termed the parthenogentic adaptation syndrome; but in addition she was also a woman, and the man still hovered ghost-like in the depth of her mind, hinting at a different level of being beyond her imagination, a level that was simultaneously repulsive and fascinating, that tugged at her imagination and created strange transient sensations in her body that differed in some subtle way from the orgiastic feelings that Aquilegia and her predecessors had aroused.
"I'll tell you something," the Mistress continued in confidential tones. "This is not the first man to be discovered. There have been many during the past millennia, hundreds upon hundreds. Some were well preserved, some were mere crumbling skeletons. But they have all been destroyed. The syndrome must be preserved at all costs if the stable basis of modern society is to be preserved."
The Mistress stood up with an air of finality. "There will be no news release, and I shall make arrangements immediately for the body to be incinerated. As a servant of the government you will, of course, have nothing to say on the subject to anyone. The man is a secret, dead or alive, an obscene secret of ancient history."
Aubretia bowed understanding^ and took her leave.
III
Aquilegia was a woman in high key. She was a vision in pale cream against a background of white. She lived in the top apartment of one of the highest apartment blocks in Lon North and she was lightness itself, like the sky. The rooms of her home were decorated in the palest of pastel hues, and the furniture was mainly of transparent plastic material. In this setting of whiteness and semi-invisibility she was an object of slender fragile beauty, pure in her whiteness and al most intangible in her ethereal albinism.
She was wearing a gossamer gown in spider latex. It was white, in the translucent white of spun glass, but no whiter than the flesh it concealed. Only the nipples were darker under the folds of the garment, smoke-tinted, diminutive, and the body hair was colourless. Her fingernails and toenails were lacquered in silver, and her lips were ivory-white with cosmetic. The pink of her eyes was generously extended by means of suitably matched stain over the entire surface of the cornea, lending her a transcendental air of remote ghostliness. But for all that she was as real and as physical as any woman Aubretia had ever known.
"I don’t know, Quilly. The lab assistants say she left with the mortic people who removed the body."
"And why are you worried about her?"
Aubretia hesitated. The blue gin was beginning to seep into her brain and coherent thought was becoming difficult. "I think it was the way the Mistress of Information talked, about the need for secrecy, and so on. You know what Gallardia is like; she couldn’t keep a secret for more than ten seconds."
Aquilegia smiled without moving her lips. "I don’t think you need worry about her," she said quietly. "You will not see her again, but she will be well and safe."
Aubretia regarded her companion questioningly, noting subconsciously the unexpected manifestation of hard poise beneath the sweetness of her form and colouring.
"The Department of the Written Word is closely associated with the Department of Social Stability. They have a common policy on matters that affect the P.A.S.," Aquilegia added. "P.A.S.?"
"parthenogentic Adaptation Syndrome."
"What has that to do with Gallardia?"
Aquilegia spread out her hands non-committally. "Very little, really. She has certain information that could, conceivably, conflict with the syndrome if it were spread around. The information must be erased." A pause while she sipped her drink, watching Aubretia with expressionless pink eyes. "Don’t be alarmed, darling. Gallardia will come to no harm. It is a mere matter of what we might call hypnotic technique, a slight remodelling of the cerebral memory tracks by induced suggestion. Afterwards she will remember nothing of the man. She will almost certainly be transferred to another laboratory in a remote part of the country."
Aubretia stood up slowly, holding her glass, and leaned against the low railing of the verandah. The cavernous streets of the city yawned eighteen storeys below, but her eyes were on her friend, and there was a certain quality of constraint in her poise which defied the creeping flaccidity of her limbs as the gin permeated her blood.
"You seem to know a great deal about departmental policy and procedure, Quilly. I never realized you had any contact with the government — not to that extent."
The other woman’s smile seemed warm and genuine enough. "Don’t get worried, darling. I know a great deal that perhaps I shouldn’t know. I’ve got an inquiring mind."
"What else do you know?"
"That you’re a beautiful and desirable woman. There, does that make you feel better?"
"Should it?"
Again the enigmatic gloss in the pale pink eyes. A faint sense of alarm clutched icily at Aubretia’s heart. She returned to her seat and finished her drink, then touched Aguilegia's arm with nervous fingers.
"Quilly, you’re not getting fed up with me, are you?"
"Of course not, darling. I’m teasing you, really. Tell me, when the Mistress of Information talked about the syndrome, did you understand her?"
"Vaguely. It had to do with evolution. How women had adapted themselves to parthenogentic existence without men. Then she said something about modifying the emotions." Aquilegia nodded soberly. "Do you feel that your emotions have been modified?"
