A World Between (34 page)

“Well then, Royce, I trust you understand how... how the buckos of Thule are likely to react to this vicious tactic...

“I have some vague idea,” Royce said sardonically.

“Not that I myself or any of my people would interfere in your domestic politics, of course...

“Oh, of course not, Roger. No more than the Femocrats would. No more than they already have.”

“And under the present circumstances, no less,” Falkenstein said. “After all, I cannot in all conscience attempt to restrain our independent Pacifican supporters from <...aking congruent action. That in itself could be construed as interfering in local politics, couldn’t it?” “For sure,” Royce grunted.

“None of this need affect our agreement, though,” Falkenstein said. “You understand my position?”

“All too well, Roger, all too well.”

“I’m very sorry it’s come to this...

“So am I,” Royce said, unplugging from the circuit....
I think.

“You two boys seem to understand each other very well,” Carlotta said, frowning. “Would you mind letting me in on the inner meaning of your cryptic conversation?” “Isn’t it obvious?” Royce said. “Now the male workers will ‘spontaneously’ counterstrike for retention of the Institute and expulsion of the Femocrats.”

“Oh, fuck,” Carlotta groaned. “Of course.”

“That’s what I meant when I said that knuckling under to the female strikers would solve nothing,” Royce said. “In a few hours, we’ll have the female and male workers on strike together for mutually exclusive goals. Give in to one side, and you just guarantee that the other strike will continue.”

“Great grunting godzillas, what do we do now?” Carlotta said. She looked at Royce pensively, uncertainly. “It
is
‘we’ on this one, isn’t it, Royce? We
are
together on this?”

“On the need to stop both strikes without giving in to either side?” Royce asked carefully. —,

“On the need to stop both strikes quickly, whatever it takes,” Carlotta said. She sighed. “I suppose under the circumstances, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, babes,” Royce said. “Keeping the economy from being chewed to bits has to be number one. I’m with you on that, boss-lady.”

Carlotta smiled at him, pantomimed a kiss. Royce laughed and blew a kiss back. Awful as this situation is, it does have its personal compensations, he thought. At least we’re synced together again in the face of adversity. But
what
adversity!

“Well, any brilliant ideas, bucko?” Carlotta asked grimly.

Royce shrugged. “You could call Cynda Elizabeth and tell her there’s going to be a counterstrike,” he suggested. “Tell her that I can get Falkenstein to call off his if she’ll end hers.”

“Fat chance,” Carlotta said. “Cynda Elizabeth must have known there’d be a counterstrike before this started. I have a feeling that both Transcendental Science and the Femocrats will not be unhappy to have this situation continue to some awful showdown. Shit...he fingered her mouth reflectively.

“There
is
one possibility,” she said. “We have no legal means of ending these strikes, but if we could get away with construing them as civil insurrections...”

“You’ve been reading my mind again, babes,” Royce said.

Carlotta smiled at him. “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?” she said. “As good as anything can feel under these circumstances.”

Royce laughed. Despite the gravity of the crisis, he felt an enormous release of tension. For now, at least, the stress was coming from without, not within. Now they were really working in sync again, at least for the moment, for whatever it might be worth politically.

“You get onto Cynda Elizabeth, I’ll check with the Ministry of Justice,” he said.

“Right babes,” Carlotta said. “Good to have you aboard again.”

“Likewise,” Royce said. “Now all we have to do is figure out some way to keep the boat from sinking.”

A tracking shot on Roger Falkenstein and a squat, darkhaired man in a pseudo-military black tunic as the camera follows them down a long hall in the Institute.

Falkenstein: “....n keeping with our policy of noninterference, we take no position for or against the men striking in Thule...

Man in black: “You won’t even take a position on the Femocrat strike?”

Falkenstein: “That’s different, Mike. The female strike is openly backed by the Femocratic League of Pacifica, an obvious Femocrat front, and they’ve declared open warfare on us. Their strike may be legal, but it is certainly directed against the Institute, and therefore we have no compunction against calling for its swift termination by any means necessary.”

Man in black: “But you still won’t officially support the strike organized by Pacificans for the Institute?”

Falkenstein (somewhat impishly): “That would be
illegal,
Mike. Of course, we totally support your
goals
. But we believe that the buckos of Pacifica are men enough to determine their own destiny without our advice or endorsement. However
... we do
think it appropriate to show the people of Pacifica what this planet stands to lose if the Femocratic League of Pacifica succeeds in using economic blackmail to drive us from this planet...

Cut to an exterior shot just outside the Institute building. Six male Pacificans are operating a control console connected to a mesh of thin wire fifty meters in diameter on thin wooden poles over a large heap of earth.

Falkenstein’s voiceover: “A form of matter-transformer used in instantaneous construction. Matrix patterns of various constructs are stored in a computer memory. The desired construct is chosen and the transformer assembles it electronically out of an equivalent mass of raw matter...

A silvery field of force envelops the area under the mesh. When it clears a moment later, a replica of the Institute building, forty meters in diameter, has appeared, seemingly from nowhere.

Falkenstein’s voiceover:...uilding... or a hover...

The field of force appears again, and when it clears this time, the model building has been replaced by a sleek blue hovercraft.

Falkenstein’s voiceover:...r even a piece of heroic statuary...

The force field transforms the hovercraft into a piece of monumental sculpture: four Pacifican buckos in realistic full color looking upward as a stylized Transcendental Scientist hewn in black obsidian raises an open palm toward a hologram of the galactic starstream which floats magically overhead.

Falkenstein’s voiceover: “I rather like that, don’t you? I think we’ll keep it.” ,

Cut to an interior shot in a small infirmary. An old man lies in a bed surrounded by life-support machinery. Three Pacificans in white smocks hover over him, reading his life-signs, administering injections.

Falkenstein’s voiceover: “Here Pacifican students are learning the many complex techniques involved in rejuvenation. The result might justly be called an indefinite lifespan and perpetual youthful vigor. However, for all Pacificans to benefit from these techniques, we will not only have to train people in all the necessary sciences, but we will have to train
teachers
in all these areas in a
permanent
Institute, so that your planet can eventually develop the corps of thousands of Transcendental Scientists that will be needed.”

Cut to a small darkened room where a Pacifican student lies on a couch under the watchful eye of a Transcendental Scientist. An electrode band around his brow is wired to a small console. In the middle of the room is a small-scale and quite fuzzy holoprojection of a Gotham street scene: ethereal buildings, vague crowds, tiny dots that might be hovercrart or hydrofoils skimming over the nearby shimmering waters.

Falkenstein’s voiceover: “This is frontier technology, even for us. The subject’s brain is synced into a computer which operates a holoprojector, thereby transforming thoughts into visible images. The technology is not quite perfected, and the training necessary to operate the device successfully is quite arduous. But the possibilities are staggering—new forms of psychotherapy, new artforms and media technologies, ultimately perhaps an electronically augmented form of direct mind-to-mind communication.”

Cut back to the tracking shot on Falkenstein and the man in black as they walk down the seemingly endless corridor, past a long series of open doorways through which a myriad arcane activities are briefly visible.

Falkenstein: “One of the charges against us is that we’re creating a scientific elite, and to that I must plead emphatically guilty. What, after all,
is
an elite but an ever-growing community of enlightened, idealistic, and dedicated men leading their people onward toward infinity?”

Cut to an exterior shot of the statue grouping outside— the stylized Transcendental Scientist leading the Pacifican buckos onward to the stars—from a low angle, emphasizing the upward thrust of the piece’s lines.

Falkenstein’s voiceover: “As we now pass this torch of knowledge to Pacifican Institute graduates, so will those graduates become an elite passing the torch on to their entire people. This is the great upward sweeping spiral of human evolution—upward and onward, time without end, worlds without limit. If this be Faustian faschochauvinism, let us make the most of it!”

Bara Dorothy smiled across her desk at Cynda Elizabeth. The little breeder-loving fool drummed her fingers nervously on the desktop, apparently still unable to grasp how perfectly the strategy was working. But then she had been against calling the strike in the first place, Bara thought. She seemed to have lost her clear sense of the true purpose of the mission long ago.

“I still don’t see why you’re so pleased,” Cynda whined. “The strike strategy has been a dismal failure. The Institute is still open, Falkenstein has countered with a male strike, and now the government
can't
close down the Institute without a direct confrontation with the breeders.”

Bara Dorothy shook her head impatiently. “What is the purpose of this mission?” she asked, as if quizzing a dull little girl.

Cynda Elizabeth stared at her blankly.

“Not to close the Institute,” Bara Dorothy continued, “but to unite the sisters of Pacifica in Femocratic consciousness so that they will seize power and establish a Femocratic government on this planet! Great Mother, Cynda, have you forgotten that?”

Cynda opened her mouth, then nibbled her lower lip as if she had been about to say something, and then thought better of it “Therefore,” Bara said, “the present situation is ideal. The strikes have drawn the line between sisters and breeders with utter clarity. Everything that Falkenstein does now to mobilize this loathsome Bucko Power movement behind him will also mobilize the Sisterhood behind
us.
As the strikes begin to wreck the Pacifican economy, even that traitor to her sex, Carlotta Madigan, will no longer be able to equivocate. There will be a victor and a vanquished—and
soon.”

“But how can you be so sure that the
breeders
won’t win?” Cynda said. “They’re half the population, and they’re in a position of rough equality.”

“Democratic politics!”
Bara snorted. “You’ve become infected with the local ideology, Cynda! You think this issue will be decided by
votes?”

“But that’s the way they do things here...” Cynda said fatuously.

“That’s the way they
did
things here!” Bara replied triumphantly. “But the fate of this planet will now be decided by
power,
and power here, as everywhere, is in the hands of Sisterhood! The breeders of this planet may now unite against us, but they’re still
macho breeders,
which means that the Pacifican sisters are their
sex objects.
Whereas fully conscious sisters have no sexual need for breeders. So when the final confrontation comes, the breeders’ own contemptible piercers will force them into capitulation.”

“But... but most Pacifican women are heterosexual,” Cynda said. “They want men as much as men want them.” For the moment, you little fool, for the moment, Bara thought. “Unfortunately, that’s quite true,” she said. “Therefore, it’s time to raise Pacifican Sisterhood to full consciousness, to erase their atavistic craving for the local breeders. Then they will be truly united in total Femocracy; then they will fully come into their own rightful power and make that power felt—
decisively!
Mary Maria is already preparing material for the media campaign.”

Cynda Elizabeth frowned. A sickly look came into her eyes. The filthy little breeder-lover! “What’s the matter now, Cynda?” Bara Dorothy said slyly, twisting the knife a little deeper, daring the little pervert to reveal her true atavistic feelings. “Do you feel
sorry
for the stinking macho swine? Do you lack the will to fight through to final victory? Are you a secret
breeder-lover
at heart?” Emotions flashed across Cynda Elizabeth’s face: a flush of anger, a tremor of fear, a white-skinned effort at control. You’re such a transparent little fool, Bara thought “If ... if those are official charges, bring them officially,” Cynda stammered. “Otherwise... otherwise keep your innuendos to yourself!”

“That’s the spirit,” Bara said sardonically. “Come on, cheer up, I’m not bringing any charges.” Not yet, she thought. She laughed almost gaily. “Come on, sister, let’s enjoy this moment together. At last we can unfurl our true banner openly and unite proudly with our Pacifican sisters behind it. Doesn’t that thrill you? Don’t you want to stand up and cheer?”

She laughed long and loud in the face of the dirty little pervert’s hollow-eyed silence.

14

A
STOCK
HISTORICAL
SHOT
OF
ANCIENT
TERRAN
NAZIS
;
phalanxes of male troops in black uniforms goose-stepping across the screen to the thunder of steel-soled jackboots on concrete, arms outstretched in phallic salute. A slow dissolve to an exactly similar shot on a Bucko Power demonstration marching to the same beat, emphasized by the continued jackboot thunder from the Nazi soundtrack. The chant of “Bucko Power! Bucko Power!” fades in on the soundtrack to the marching rhythm, and as it does huge surreal wongs sprout from the crotches of the Bucko Power marchers in hideous parody of the Nazi salute, their glans replaced by clenched fists.