Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories. A. R. Morlan
her. My mother was one of the last voluntary lifers. Why she kept re-enlisting I never could figure out, even after reading her censored diary. Black lines, passages, all inked out to protect long-declassified information. What was left was her first weeks in boot, her first carrier term (aborted male EVP-positive), MRE gripes (“Mucus Regurgitated Everyday!”) and her thoughts, about everything else.
Those passages I memorized; there’s little room in a War Bag for your own gear, let alone someone else’s. Also I don’t have to worry about harvesters like Norma going through my bag should I die, and misreading my mother’s words.
My mother came from a real family, something even Norma can’t lay claim to. A mother who eventually had to work once EVP began s’ busting every man on the planet; a father who started out full of male-bonding hope and wound up drippy-eyed and -nosed, curled in a ball in a room he hadn’t left since he found out his wife had been drafted. And whose granddaughter would be born into army-sanctioned servitude, in a society that demanded each member do her duty—be it by serving the Pentagon machine, or by endlessly bearing future cogs for said machine.
Or, as my mother wrote:
I guess being army-doc blasted beats trying to do it on your own, month after month, in the privacy of your home—the latter way means reporting back to the s’bank within a week of withdrawal, empty vial in hand, ready to pee on a strip of treated plastic. In the army, there’s something in the latrine water—once you’re a carrier, you know immediately. As long as you don’t flush prior to rising.
If you prefer being blasted so hard it feels like the tip of the gen-dad probe will burst out of your navel (I swear all medics have balls somewhere on them!) it is surely worth not having to pee on a wand of chemical-treated plastic!
I would’ve liked to have spoken to her. My mother. I’ve an old picture of her. Looked like every ’groaner since the War Protection Act of ’12. Round bare head, squinting eyes from too much combat in the sun, tanned face, and a blur of a smile. Same as me, save for my naturally darker skin. Not much opportunity to tan in Mongolia come winter. It’s always winter after those bomb “tests” over the Ukraines.
Norma—her ears safely hidden in her parka—was rooting around in the fallen ’Gol’s uniform; the rending of fabric brought me back to reluctant reality.
I closed my eyes until I heard her whisper, “Diee. G’eee over here...told you.”
Oh, God, it was true. They were sending men into battle. Some how, some way, the ’Gol’s had a surplus of men, enough to sacrifice new sources of gen-dad. How many? I asked myself. Ten, fifteen percent? I’ve never lived in (never known of, period) a time where men made up more than five to seven percent of the North American population. And most other countries were worse off than the U.S. and Canada.
Norma was about to switch on her laser-knife when I opened my eyes and asked her to wait. Crawling over to the earless ’ner, I peered down at the patch of exposed flesh between Norma’s circling hands.
It was and it wasn’t like a gen-doc: the long thinness was right, but there were two lightly haired bulbs of flesh above. And it was all attached, seamlessly. It was real...and sadly defenseless. Pointing the laser-knife at it, Norma remarked, “Just think...a world’s trouble centered around a little virus getting into such a little organ,” as she used the turned-off knife to lift the s’rod from the rest of the body. The whole thing was so opaque I couldn’t see where the s’ was hidden. Even the bulbs were deflated.
Norma was clucking, moving the dead bits this way and that, while I sat back on my heels, rubbing my face and scalp with my palms, wishing my mother was here, now, with me, Norma, and the dead man.
A few weeks after I was born, she’d written in her diary:
It puzzled me as a child, and it still makes me wonder—when it came to EVP and men, which was the real enemy of womankind (as opposed to humankind)...EVP, or the male organs it attacked? And once the war on man’s ability to reproduce himself (i.e., man) was waged—and all but lost—were we women attacking each other because of what had happened to the men, or because there were no longer any men to attack? Is that why the women’s army (and navy, and marines, and air force, and—) became more stringent, more basic, more butch than the old army, navy, and so on ever were? When men waged war, they took the time to not wage war; time to take R & R for the sake of Rest and Relaxation, not Rest and Recuperation (what yours truly’s doing now: feet up, hair growing in, womb free of gen-docs for at least three months). Do we wage war so vigorously, so joylessly, so grimly, because it’s always been so, or because we must do it better than it was done before? And in our case, must “better” mean...meaner? Shiny-headed killing wombs-on-legs, with little sense of bonding, of comradeship—just one-upmanship and “we’ll show them” attitude, all directed at the unique men we have to both protect and better?
I wonder—are we waging war for the sake of humanity, or to forsake humanity? To prove forever and ever that even if we can lick EVP—not that the female doctors seem as driven to conquer it as their (dwindling) male counterparts seem to have been—we’re still the better “men”? That real men only need exist on any level as gen-doc donors?
Were we women so put down that we need to forever fight to prove how strong, how capable, how indispensable we were all along?
“Well, Diee, make up yer mind—off or on?” Norma’s thumb rested on the knife’s switch—and said knife was resting, “blade” up, under the limp s’rod of the fallen ’Gol. One flick of her thumb and the s’rod would be severed, two more knife flicks and the ’Gol ’ner would be as good as female. Good as us.
“No. Better put a marker by the claim, so’s the docs at the base can check it—him—out later. Might be able to analyze the s’rod, and the bulbs.”
Norma—puffed up with importance over finding the first male ’Gol ’ner in the history of at least this war—waddled out of the bunker, into the drifting snow outside, in search of a red flag marker. Alone in the empty-walled bunker, I started to roll up the ’Gol’s bedroll—until something fell out at my booted feet. A book, filled with carefully printed lines, in phrase-book English, no doubt penned in hope that if he was taken prisoner the ’Gol could prove to us American ’ners that he was ready and willing to learn the American way, to side with us if necessary. I’d seen this sort of thing before: copybooks filled with stilted English phrases, some written over and over, schoolgirl-fashion.
But this ’Gol—this guy—had something different on his mind, aside from learning English:
Morning of each day I sit, wait, as day become noon, noon become night, as I wonder “Why I fight? Why my mother? Why her mother? Must I fight harder, because I man in woman world?” I one of few men, but we grow in number. Women, they try hard next to me, more hard than with other woman. And always, I hide manness, other soldier tell me, “They know you man, they kill you harder.” But they woman too—so, then, my women, they do same to their man, if any? If that so, who is enemy?
I slowly paged through the thin diary, looking for a name, an age, something to identify this man lying behind me. I didn’t want to touch him again, couldn’t violate his War Bag. All I found was “I” and “me.” Perhaps that’s all I needed to find.
For my mother, in her diary, never mentioned who she was, never needed to use her own name. She knew herself, or tried to, considering that she belonged to a generation born to alien roles, and to an alien situation which reversed the roles of the sexes.
Yet my mother knew of this lost past, and took the time to discover pasts lost well before that of her own mother was devoured by an invasive virus:
I remember reading a sociology textbook, how back in the early 1900s, baby boys wore pink, because it was such a healthy, robust color, while girls were dressed in blue, a delicate, gentle hue. It wasn’t until after one of the world wars—I forget which one, they were spaced so far apart then—that the norm switched around, and blue became the “masculine” color. Considering the mess we “pinks” are in, perhaps that older assignment of colors for babies