A World Between (20 page)

Bara nodded. “Nothing like a little sweetness for dessert,” she said pleasantly. But she wondered, as always, how many of her lovers responded to her superbly honed body and subtle mouth, and how many simply got off with the mission’s Mentor to maintain her good will. Well, she thought philosophically, just as plenty of willing lovers are an inevitable prerogative of power, so uncertainty of their sincerity is an inevitable byproduct. “Would you send Mary Maria in?” she said.

While she waited for the psywar expert, Bara Dorothy punched up the current cell stats on the computer. Each cell was a team of three: one overt Tutor and two coverts. The overt Tutor set up a Femocracy study group as quietly as possible, and all three team members tried to persuade locals to attend the biweekly meetings on an individual basis, with the coverts posing as Pacificans who were already attendees.

This insured that even if only one Pacifican sister attended initial meetings, she would see that at least two of her fellow citizens shared her interest, and it also provided “instant converts” as role-models for the locals. When a cell reached an attendance level of about twenty, the coverts would fission off and start new cells, masquerading as Pacificans who had been entrusted with the assignment by their cell sisters. In the next stage, real Pacifican sisters would be allowed to start new cells, so that by the third stage, further growth was already indigenous and could not be easily traced back to off-worlders. Thus would Femocracy spread in an ever-widening geometric progression, swiftly becoming a truly Pacifican mass movement independent of the off-worlder mission, except for coordination, ideological education, and the supporting media blitz.

The figures that the computer displayed were excellent for this early phase. A third of the functioning cells had fissioned off two secondary cells, and there were already seven tertiary all-Pacifican cells in operation. All of which meant that there were now nearly two thousand sisters at least tentatively interested in the cause. I think we’re ready to begin the media blitz now, Bara Dorothy thought as Mary Maria entered her office.

Mary was a tall, bosomy, red-haired sister, and since she interacted directly with the Pacificans most of the time, she had taken to dressing in Pacifican modes, in this instance,. a billowy green-skirted tunic that bared one brown-nippled breast. It was a style that disturbed Bara on an ideological level, appealing as it did to the atavistic breeder breast-fixation. Mary Maria would have to be watched closely. It was necessary for her to sync into the Pacifican matrix, to some extent, but care must be taken that she didn’t become infected by the role she was called upon to play.

“I think we’re ready to begin our media blitz, Mary,’* Bara said. “What do we have ready for the net channels?” “Quite a bit,” Mary said briskly. “In addition to all the prepared tapes we brought with us, we’ve completed about ten hours of stuff with local actors——including breeders, who seem to be willing to act in
anything
for money.” She grinned. “And a flash of tit.”

Bara scowled. “You’re not to encourage that,” she snapped. “I don’t want any of our sisters perceived as potential sex-objects by these local breeders.”

“It
does
make dealing with them easier,” Mary Maria said. “It’s amazing how muddled their thinking can become with a bare breast staring them in the face. Pathetic, really.”

“I don’t care!” Bara growled. “Sisters are not to allow themselves to become fantasy sex-objects for breeders, whether it make your job any easier or not—”

Mary Maria flushed. “Surely you’re not suggesting that I would—”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Mary,” Bara said more calmly. “I’m merely assuring that no such possibility can arise. From now on, all sisters dealing with the local breeders must wear sexually neutral dress. That’s official doctrine, as of now. While I understand that this may deprive you of a certain useful psychological advantage, we must never forget that pragmatism is no justification for arousing atavistic tendencies, either in the local breeders, or in ourselves. Do you understand what I’m saying?” “Yes, Bara,” Mary Maria said, properly chastened. “But surely you don’t think—”

“No reflection on you at all, Mary,” Bara said sincerely. “You’re not.. .” She paused. You’re not Cynda Elizabeth, she had been about to say. But there was no point in surfacing
that
problem with someone who was subordinate to them both.

She shrugged, and smiled at Mary Maria, brushing the unsavory business aside. “Now then,” she said in a more businesslike tone, “I believe we should open our blitz with the standard sort of anti-faschochauvinist material. ..” “We’d better stick with more subtle stuff at first, though,” Mary Maria said. “Faschochauvinism is very subtle here, what with women almost dominating the political and economic structure.”

Bara frowned. “I wouldn’t exactly call the posturings of these Pacifican buckos, as they call themselves, subtle,” she said.

Mary laughed. “They certainly have no low opinion of themselves as desirable sex-objects,” she agreed. “Unfortunately, neither do Pacifican women.”

“Well, that’s what we’ll work on initially,” Bara Dorothy said. “Forget economics and politics and concentrate on male sexual dominance.” She allowed herself a small smile. “Our friends from the
Heisenberg
have done an excellent job of pushing these buckos into even more sexually arrogant attitudes than they possess naturally. They’ve synced male faschochauvinism into support for their bloody Institute. Very well. Let’s rub the Pacifican sisters’ noses in it. Falkenstein is polarizing the breeders in support of his own cause, and it’s already tending to polarize the sisters against him, though they have no positive focus. Let’s give it to them. Let’s make Femocracy the leader of the opposition to the Institute on this planet”

Mary Maria pondered that a moment. “Excellent,” she finally said. “The Transcendental Scientists
have
given us a perfect local issue to polarize the sisters around. We’ll build our campaign around that. Til get right to it”

As Mary Maria left, Bara Dorothy swiveled her chair around and regarded the large map of Pacifica. What a prize this planet is! she thought. The center of the Galactic Media Web! Feminize Pacifica, and the ultimate goal of a Femocratic galactic civilization will become achievable in decades, not centuries.

And the situation
is
perfect—a woman is already head of government, and women already have a superficially dominant economic status, so the change will be very subtle when Sisterhood controls the Pacifican Web product. We’ll maintain “News of the Galaxy” and the entertainment exports with the tremendous pool of local talent, only the underlying mythic substructure will change. And the beauty of it is that the Pacifican sisters are so much better at that kind of thing than we are. What a contribution they’ll make to the cause of Sisterhood after liberation!

And that, she thought, is perhaps the greatest strength of Femocracy. The only change we seek is the awakening of full consciousness in sisters everywhere. No imposed political hegemony from outside—just fully conscious sisters on every human planet exercising their rightful dominion in their own ways, liberated from the animalistic breeder faschochauvinism that nearly destroyed the Earth.

Our unity is one of shared consciousness, not of an imposed political order, not the simian territorial aggression that’s the only kind of unity breeders can understand. In Sisterhood, diversity becomes a strength, not a source of weakness and conflict in the endless breeder battle for a total supremacy that no tribe of them can ever achieve. That’s why our victory is inevitable.

Bara Dorothy sighed. Someday, perhaps, we’ll be able to clone ourselves like those damned Transcendental Scientists. Then there will be no further need for breeders at all and the grand dream will become a reality—a galaxy of women, a humanity permanently at peace, a unity of Sisterhood infinite in time and space, enduring for as long as the stars continue to shine.

A very rapidly cut montage of clips from old tapes and ancient Terran films: a prehuman simian smashing the skull of another hairy hominid with an animal bone; a Roman legion pillaging a village of Gauls; mounted Cossacks whipping Jews to their knees from horseback; a Nazi SS squad machine-gunning men, women, and children in a village square; a screaming woman running down a jungle road clutching a napalmed baby while helmeted soldiers look on with professional indifference. Over all this, intermittent quick flashes of nuclear explosions.

Woman’s voiceover: “From the prehuman past to the final Holocaust, history has been the story of man’s inhumanity to man—and to woman.”

The sequence ends with a series of shots of various Terran cities being vaporized by thermonuclear explosions.

Woman’s voiceover: “The final glory of the phallic urge to power—the last war, the one that nearly destroyed the planet that gave us birth. But what could have been humanity’s last sunset became the dawn of a new age...

A series of shots smoothly dissolving into each other: women in animal skins suckling babies around a campfire; the Madonna cradling the Christ child in her arms; a pirouetting ballerina; a female nurse tending the wounded in a field hospital; Russian peasant women scything wheat; women marching down an urban street; Carlotta Madigan addressing the Pacifican Parliament.

Woman’s voiceover: “For the history of humanity has also been the unsung story of woman. Woman, the giver of life; woman, the inventor of love; woman, the guardian of home; woman, the healer of broken bodies and spirits; and now, at last, woman, the bringer of peace.”

A medium shot on a hollow-eyed man dressed in rags, squatting on a heap of rubble. Two tall bright-eyed women in shorts and tunics stand flanking him as the camera moves in for a tighter shot on the man’s psychically ravaged face.

Man (speaking directly into the camera): “What can I say? For millions of years, we ruled the Earth and fought for glory and the final result was...
this.
We believed in peace, too; we believed in it so strongly that we fought ten thousand wars and piled up a mountain range of corpses to achieve it.” He shrugs. “We tried. We failed. We saw no other way. Now we are few and tired and destroyed by our own hand. Now there is nothing for us to do but listen to our wives and daughters and mothers and sisters whose counsel we never sought and hope that
they
can find the path that has eluded us since we came down from the trees to become killers of the plain. We give up. We hand on the torch to cleaner hands...”

The young women help him, tottering, to his feet. Cut to a series of shots of the broken cities of Earth, new buildings beginning to rise from the rubble, bright-eyed women bustling about everywhere—ending with a long zoom down the shattered skyscraper canyons of New York which becomes a shot of the Statue of Liberty, eerily still intact, the noble lady holding her torch aloft haloed by a rising sun...

Man’s voiceover: “And now, Transchauvinist Science brings you the latest wong-throbbing episode of
‘Soldiers of Midnight *
Hang on to your whackers, buckos!”

A full shot of a languid harem scene, all gauzy draperies and rose-colored light. A man reclines on a couch—barechested, with bright red nipples, wearing only filmy blue pantaloons, and dreamily sniffing a yellow flower. He starts at an off-camera commotion.

A moment later, two similarly dressed men stumble backwards into the frame, pursued by three huge women dressed in skintight black with enormous rubbery red dildoes sprouting from their crotches, over four feet long and thick as a man’s arm. The women grip these gigantic dildoes with both hands and use them as exceedingly awkward clubs with which to batter the retreating men, buffetting them about the face and buttocks to the sound of much shrieking.

But the dildoes are so long, rubbery, and heavy that the women bumble and stumble about as they slap at the men with the things, crazily off-balance. Two of the women accidentally bump into each other and react angrily. They begin to fence with each other, battering their rubber cocks against each other in a gross parody of a swordfight. The third woman, still chasing the men, lets go of her dildo for a moment as she turns to look. The rubbery appendage droops, its head drags on the floor, and the woman, looking the wrong way, trips over it, and goes flying head over heels into her battling sisters. They all fall to the floor in a tangle of bodies, where they belabor each other with the dildoes like pillowfighting children while the man on the couch continues to sniff his flower with a superior attitude...

Suji Corwin glanced out the window in boredom. Arching over the low skyline of residential Valhalla, the perma-glaze dome loomed grayly, keeping out the biting cold of Thule, but not the everlasting somber twilight that hovered over the antarctic continent like a perpetual fog of gloom. Inside the little rented room, twelve women sat in a circle delivering their pallid opinions on the state of the universe, which today seemed to revolve around the new programming that Femocracy was pumping into the net. It seemed to Suji that most of them were as bored by all this as she was.

I wonder why
they're
dabbling in Femocracy? she thought. Are their buckos acting strangely lately, like Ron? Are they offended by much of the Transcendental Science programming like “
Soldiers of Midnight"?
Or are they just curious about what it’s like for women to sit around together without buckos and form their own silly little secret society?
Or is everyone just a media critic these days?

“Did you catch ‘
Soldiers of Midnight'?*
⁹
“Yeah, I laughed my guts out.”

. “So did Bill.”

“Your bucko thought it was funny?”

“Uh-huh. He was surprised that Femocrats had a sense of humor.”

“I’m surprised that there’s a man who can laugh at his wong,” said Marta, a big heavy-set woman whose remarks usually seemed more pointed than those of the others.