A World Between (30 page)

He turned to face her, his expression cold and distant.

“What were you thinking about when we were getting it off?”

He frowned and looked away over the dark waters. “You don’t want to know...

“But I think I
do
know...

He looked at her again, his mouth twisted into a sneer. “Oh, really?” he said sardonically.

“Bucko Power...” Cynda Elizabeth blurted.

He raised his eyebrows. “I can imagine what
you
think of bucko power...”

“Can you?” Cynda said ingenuously. “Then maybe you’d like to tell me, because I’m feeling very confused.”

“What is this?” Eric snapped. “Are you finally trying to trap me into an ideological argument so you can push your Femocrat jellybelly oil down my throat? I thought we agreed—”

“But do you really believe in this... this...” “Faschochauvinist crap?” Eric said angrily. “Do you believe in
your
faschochauvinist crap?”

I’m not so sure anymore, Cynda wanted to say. “That’s different,” she said lamely instead. “Women aren’t out in the streets yelling for flower power...”

“Oh aren’t they?” Eric said. “Then suppose
you
tell
me
the difference between Bucko Power and Femocracy?” “Why... why... they’re as different as any two things can be!”

Eric sighed. He stared out at the approaching lights of the city, mirrored now in the shimmering water. He spoke more softly.

“Look, Cynda, Earth had a long history of male domination—okay, I admit it—so Femocracy was the natural outcome of women grabbing for power after a lousy war on a planet where they had none. But here women have always had things their own way and men have fooled themselves into believing they were equals because their wongs made them kings of the bedroom. So on Earth, it took a terrible war to get women to seize power from men who had fucked things up, and here it took you effing Femocrats to wake up the men of this planet by making our women flex their political muscles to keep us down where we’ve always been. I’m a man, so I’ve got a self-interest in Bucko Power. You’re a woman, so you’ve got a self-interest in turning buckos into effing breeders. Power against power, the rest is just jellybelly oil.”

“The law of the jungle...ynda muttered. “Evolutionary warfare between the sexes that goes on forever?” Eric grinned at her cruelly. “Not forever,” he said. “Like the Transcendental Scientists say, there are intrinsic differences between the sexes. We’re bigger and stronger. We ruled for millions of years—even you Femocrats talk about the male will to power, don’t you? If we weren’t the natural leaders, would we have been on top for most of human history? When it’s power against power, biology determines the winner, and we both know who that will be, don’t we?”

Cynda shivered as if an unseen wind had blown in off the sea. “You really believe that?” she said. “You really believe in ... in ... in male
supremacy?”

“Don’t you?” Eric said slyly. “Here you are, the leader of the effing Femocrat mission, getting it off with me, even with all that Femocrat garbage pounded into your head. Why? Because every woman wants a
real man
on top of her—deep down, in her body, in her effing
genes
, no matter what kind of jellybelly oil her head is filled with. Look at the way we’re built, Cynda: men big and strong, women small and weak. My wong, built to thrust inside your body, and you built to take it. Doesn’t your own body tell you all you really need to know about Bucko Power?” “But... but that’s just
sex,
Eric,” Cynda said uncertainly.

Eric snorted. He looked out at the city again, the buildings, islands, and bridges now clearly outlined by their own lights. “Yeah, that’s what we used to think on Pacifica,” he said. “Democracy. Equality. All that high-sounding crap. Until
you
came along and convinced our women that we’re faschochauvinist beasts who have to be controlled for our own good. Well, if we have to be either
breeders
or faschochauvinists, there’s no real choice, is there? Now that we’ve got the name, we have to play the game—to win.”

He looked her full in the face. He smiled. “You know,” he said, “it’s almost as if Bucko Power is what our women really wanted all along, deep down. I mean, they’ve sure gone out of their way to provoke it, haven’t they? Haven’t
you?”

Cynda shuddered as Eric steered the boat toward its quiet secluded mooring. She found that she had no easy answers anymore, that her compulsion to talk had been replaced by a welcoming of the dark quiet of the night. Could he be right? she wondered. Could there be atavistic genes in
women
as well as men? Could millions of years of male faschochauvinism, of macho domination, have been the result not merely of a male genetic predisposition to power, violence, and dominion, but of a genetic flaw in the human species as a whole? A
female
genetic predisposition to
reinforce
macho faschochauvinism against .the’best interests of Sisterhood and the race as a whole? Biological coding in both men and women that synced together to form a racial tendency toward...
Bucko Power?

How could you explain why it took millions of years for Sisterhood to finally arise without it?

Eric tied the boat up at the dock and automatically helped her ashore. Cynda took his hand just as automatically—now, however, very much awjare of the unconscious mechanical response.
Can it be true?
Is what we have to fight this strong and deep in all of us?
In sisters
,
too?

“Shall we meet again, Eric?” she asked. “Or can there be nothing but war between us now?”

He kissed her on the lips with ironic tenderness. “Why not let the game go on a little longer?” he said. He laughed harshly. “And may the best man win.”

Skimming low over the endless green jungle, then skirting around the southern periphery of Hollywood to avoid a massive twelve-godzilla fight scene being shot in a mock-up of ancient Venice—lumbering monsters smashing bridges, swamping elegant gondolas, crunching the Doge’s palace—Royce Lindblad brought the
Davy Jones down in the midst of the cluster of environment domes at the edge of town where the whackers actually lived.

Sweating profusely in the skin-rotting wet heat, he made his way down the bare earthen main street as quickly as possible, past rows of electronically immobilized godzillas standing like hideous statues of themselves, to the air-cooled sanctuary of Hollywood Central.

Here, under the largest dome in Hollywood, were the editing rooms and interior soundstages, the technical facilities and the producers’ offices, an untidy jumble of makeshift huts, warehouses, and bungalows in a constant state of flux like the fungoid growths under the green canopy of the Godzillaland jungle.

Lauren Bates, longtime number-one producer of godzilla epics and unofficial Mayor of Hollywood, met him just inside the main gate, surrounded by a gaggle of whackers, male and female, wearing only the ubiquitous Godzillaland shorts. Lauren, with his thinning gray hair and incipient paunch, was getting a little long in the tooth for this costume, Royce thought, as Bates gave him the glad hand and ushered him through the crowd of whackers to the privacy and relative sanity of his own bungalow.

Still the same lunatic asylum, Royce thought as he sat down gingerly in a chair made from the foot of some * monstrosity too gigantic to even contemplate. No sign at all of Institute influence here, or for that matter of the political storm that was raging over the rest of the planet. Godzillaland, as always, seemed a world unto itself. But still, it paid to check with Lauren before descending upon Falkenstein—Bates always knew the smallest detail of everything that went on here.

Bates’s office was furnished with standard desks, chairs, and loungers, but also with barbaric items made of bits and pieces of the local godzillas. Hideous still-shots from a hundred godzilla epics papered the walls, and piles of scripts and shooting schedules were everywhere. Bates himself paced restlessly as he talked, fingering scripts, clipboards, bits and pieces of bric-a-brac and clutter.

“Now, I know you’re here about this Institute flarf, Royce,” he said. “The net is full of that slok, but I’ve got something of far greater cosmic impact to talk to you about. As a matter of fact, those Institute jockos were the source of my inspiration.
Godzillas in SpaceI

Think of it, Royce! We build a half-scale mock-up of the
Heisenberg
in orbit and eight—no, make it an even dozen—of the biggest godzillas we have
utterly demolish
it, while gonzos in Transcendental Science suits are powerless to stop them, with all their superweapons! Totally the ultimate! And maybe with this one, we even pick up the Femocrat market—”

“Lauren, for—”

“I know, I know,” Bates said, holding up his hand. “Cheap it won’t be, what with the boosting costs. But godzillas in
zero-gee,
Royce! I
guarantee
it’ll earn out, my word—”

“Lauren, I didn’t come here to discuss Ministry subsidies!” Royce snapped. “Don’t you have any ideas of what’s happening outside this bonker bin? Don’t you realize there’s a political crisis going on?”

“You mean that Pink and Blue War slok?” Lauren said. “The rest of the planet is foaming at the mouth over the most boring jellybelly oil imaginable, and they call
us
whackers? We
make
godzilla epics, we don’t
star
in them. We
control
godzillas, we don’t act like them. But of course everyone knows
wefre
crazy.”

“You have a point,” Royce admitted sourly. “You mean none of it has affected the people here, even with the Institute right next door?”

Bates shrugged. “We leave them alone, and they leave us alone,” he said. “Oh, a few of their staff people drift in once in a while to watch the shooting, but if they start whonking at us, they suddenly find themselves conversing with a sixty-meter godzilla doing a tapdance. We’ve got those gonzos conditioned to keep their yawps shut around here. Live and let live, bucko!”

“And the Pacifican students? What do they seem like?” “Zilcho, jocko!” Bates said. “Never seen a one. All studious, hard-working lads, I guess. Either that, or the Transcendental gonzos have them all wired for control like godzillas. Hmmm .. . bet the Femocrats never thought of
that
one...”

Despite himself, Royce smiled. Somehow, under the present circumstances, the very up-front weirdness of this place was a fresh breath of sanity. The whackers might be crazy in their own way, obsessive even, but they didn’t take any of it
seriously,
not the way the rest of the planet was becoming humoriessly and pathologically obsessed. A pity there aren’t enough of them to form a real political base, he thought “Well, I guess I’d better go check out the Institute and get it over with,” Royce said, rising. .

“Yeah, sure, but what about
Godzillas in Space?
I tell you, the export market will—”

“Too expensive, Lauren, you’re out of your mind,” Royce said genially. He grinned. “Tell you what, though, if I don’t like what I see up at the Institute, I’ll give you the place to play with. Take
twenty
effing godzillas and
really
demolish it. I’m not sure about the export market, but I have a feeling it’d be a big hit on Pacifica.”

“No, no,” Bates said excitedly, “the Femocrat planets will eat it up, we can crack the market at last! Flasho, Roycel
Revenge of the Godzillas,
we can call it.” He peered at Royce owlishly. “Are you serious?” he aske

Nervously, somberly, Roger Falkenstein found himself trailing Lindblad around the Institute like a junior officer tagging along behind some auditor from the Council. He had known from the net announcements that this was going to happen, but he had not known when, and Lindblad had simply dropped in from nowhere, announced in no uncertain terms that he was going to inspect the place starting now, and that even the slightest hint of noncooperation would be taken as proof of the Femocrat charges.

Lindblad stuck his nose in everywhere and asked questions that seemed both sharply pointed and crafted to establish an almost paramilitary authority. In the records office, he had compared the student rosters to some documents he had brought which might have been the list the Femocrats had had. In the pharmacy, he demanded an explanation of the brain-eptifiers and their effects on human consciousness. When Blatski responded with a technical explanation obviously far over Lindblad’s head, he had peremptorily ordered a complete report sent to the Ministry of Science within ten hours.

Lindblad sat in on classes in psychesomics and psychohistory without venturing a word in response. He cornered random students and asked them disconnected cryptic questions. Who is your Delegate? What’s your love-life been like? What are your favorite entertainment programs? Why did you apply for admission?

Clearly this is no political cosmetic job, Falkenstein thought as he followed Lindblad into one of the viewing balconies. He’s really serious about this, he’s really sharp, and if he finds out the real truth, we’re in deep trouble. Although Lindblad had never gone quite so far as to support the Institute, he had more or less openly opposed those who sought to impede its operation, including, perhaps, Carlotta Madigan herself. Moreover, he does seem to have a basic sympathy with our ultimate goals, and I do believe he wants to be with us in spirit. An overtly negative report from Lindblad would be a political disaster.

Now Lindblad was approaching Anne Marshak, a psy-chomolder from the
Heisenberg
masquerading as one of the female students. Falkenstein’s stomach sank. If she doesn’t convince him that she’s a Pacifican...

“Hello, I’m—”

“I know, you’re Royce Lindblad, and you’re inspecting the Institute,” Anne said ingenuously. “How can I help you?”

“Just a few simple questions,” Lindblad said. “What’s your name and where are you from?”