A World Between (45 page)

“I can’t do that, Roger,” she said. “I can’t go back. It’s too late for that.”

“Maria, Maria, come to your senses!” Roger said, his voice plaintive now, but also patronizing. “What do you suppose you’re going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Maria said forlornly. “I really don’t.” Roger’s anger burst through again. “I could force you,” he snapped. “I could declare you mentally unbalanced and place you under protective custody.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Maria said, more in sorrow than anger. “That would be kidnapping or worse under Pacifican law, and I’d go straight to the Ministry of Justice if you tried. You couldn’t afford a scandal like that.”

“Great suns, Maria, you’re talking like one of these bloody Pacificans yourself!” '

“Maybe I am...” Maria muttered. “Maybe I am...” A cold steel shield seemed to come down behind Roger’s eyes. “You’re really serious about this?” he said flatly. “You won’t come back to the
Heisenberg?
And if ... if we should be forced to leave this solar system... ?”

“Oh, come on, Roger,” Maria snapped, “you’re not planning on that and neither am I. Madigan will be defeated, you’ll push your resolution through Parliament, the Institute will be reopened, and...” And nothing will really be changed, she thought. Except what matters most to these people. You’ll win out in the end, Roger. You always do. And that’ll give me the easy way out. She shuddered. She wondered why she felt so trapped, so overcome by self-loathing.

“For once tonight you’re making sense,” Roger said coldly. “This
is
only a temporary withdrawal. If ... if I can’t convince you to listen to reason ... at least will you promise me that... that you’ll keep out of public sight...

“Appearances are more important to you than reality now, aren’t they?” Maria said sadly. “This isn’t my husband speaking now, it’s the Managing Director of the
Heisenberg,
isn’t it?”

“I
see no conflict in those roles even if you do,” Roger snapped. “Will you please—”

“I’ll stay out of sight for now to please you,” Maria said. “It’s the least I can do, isn’t it?” And to please myself, she thought. Truth be told, I’m not very proud of who I am right now.

“It certainly is!” Roger said. “I’ll keep in touch with you from the
Heisenberg.”

“You do that, Roger,” Maria said. I only wish you really meant it in some kind of human sense.

“Goodnight, Maria.”

“So long, Roger,” she muttered, and unplugged from the circuit.

Afterward, she stood for a long time at the window, looking out at the lights of the alien city spread beneath her like a mocking reflection of the distant stars. From this vantage point, both seemed equally far away, equally abstract, equally beyond the reach of her heart. Suspended between the world she had known and the world she had come to love in some cold alienated way like a woman enamored of the image of a man she could never touch, Maria was alone in the Pacifican night, isolated from both worlds, trapped in the desolate reaches between.

18

A PANORAMIC SHOT OF THE INSTITUTE OF TRANSCENDEN
tal Science as seen from the air; a silver disc abandoned and isolated in an endless sea of green like a ruined temple in some primeval Terran jungle.

Female voiceover: “Sisters of Pacifica! The Institute of Transcendental Science now lies empty and abandoned. Only Parliament can reopen it, and if we can prevent such a resolution from passing for thirty days, the faschochauvinist Transcendental Scientists will leave Pacifica forever. Falkenstein has trapped himself by his vainglorious attempt to blackmail our planet into submission.”

Cut to a closeup on Susan Willaway.

Susan Willaway: “But we cannot slack in our determination. If Carlotta Madigan should win this vote of confidence behind her smokescreen of false evenhandedness, there will be new Parliamentary elections, and the dupes of Falkenstein will wage an all-out campaign to seize control of the new Parliament.”

A medium shot on Susan Willaway, her head and shoulders haloed by a large hologram of Pacifica floating in the stellar blackness.

Susan Willaway: “That is
one
reason for consigning Carlotta Madigan to oblivion. But there is another. The Transcendental Scientists have now left Pacifica, so the full weight of Madigan’s determination to ban both Transcendental Science and Femocracy from this planet now falls
on our Terran sisters aloneI
It is now revealed as nothing but an attempt to deny ongoing free media access to interstellar Femocracy! It is treason to both Sisterhood and Pacifica’s own media access laws! The so-called Madigan Plan now stands revealed as the fraud it always was.”

A long shot of male Institute students trooping into helicopters, taken from Falkenstein’s own footage.

Susan Willaway’s voiceover: “The student body leaving the Institute of Transcendental Science, That’s right, sisters, all male,
buckos
, one hundred percent! Even
after
Madigan announced that our own Ministry of Science would control admissions, the Institute was
still
allowed to function as a faschochauvinist brainwashing academy
with the active and knowing collaboration of the Madigan administration!
In secret! After she lied to us in order to break our strike!”

Cut a closeup on Susan Willaway, smiling sardonically.

Susan Willaway: “If Falkenstein’s stupid macho arrogance hadn’t led him to close the Institute as a blackmail threat, we might never have learned of this perfidy on the part of Carlotta Madigan until a faschochauvinist scientific elite, brainwashed and controlled by Transcendental Science, was unleashed to rule our planet by superior military force!”

A series of shots of Femocratic League of Pacifica demonstrations and rallies and newschannel footage of the Femocratic Thule strikers.

Susan Willaway’s voiceover: “But let’s not give Falkenstein or Madigan
too
much credit for their stupidity. For it was the strength of Sisterhood which
forced
Falkenstein to take his desperate gamble and reveal the true treasonous nature of the Madigan Flan. And it will be Sisterhood which finally puts an end to the career of this traitor to her sex and her planet! Remember this treason on election day! Remember that only Sisterhood has saved Pacifica from becoming a Transcendental Science puppet-state! Down with faschochauvinism! Down with treason!
Down with Carlotta Madigan!

Wearing a short yellow dress bought in a large Gotham boutique, Cynda Elizabeth wandered incognito through the tense and sullen streets of the city. Ever since her confrontation with Bara Dorothy, she had spent much of her time aimlessly walking the streets of the capital, as much to fill her empty days as anything else.

Refusing to front for a policy with which she had registered her official opposition, she had been barred from all strategy sessions and command decisions, and her sisters, fearing ideological contamination, avoided her like a plague-carrier. She had taken her stand, and now she was very much alone, both at the Sirius Hotel and out here among the Pacificans.

At first, she had fantasized about meeting another Eric, satisfying her perverted desires one more time before the mission failed and was expelled to an Earth where the only men were pallid breeders, pale shadows of Pacifican buckohood. At times, she toyed with the idea of defecting, of finding her own destiny here among men and women who openly shared in ease and pride what she must hide forever within her soul.

But this notion always evaporated like morning mist in the clear hard light of day. She was what she was, and though these Pacificans might be a happier breed, Eric had taught her that she could never be truly one of them. And truth be told, what she now saw in the streets made her wonder whether what she had perceived as the harmonious Pacifican psychosexual balance had ever really existed outside her own perverted wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Every park seemed to have its own impromptu orator hectoring a sexually polarized audience, condemning either Femocracy or Bucko Power, but always, so it seemed, Carlotta Madigan. In most cafes and restaurants, women sat with women and men with men, and the occasional mixed couple stood out like some atavistic anomaly. Every day, there was at least one Femocratic and one Bucko Power rally somewhere in the city. On the streets, men and women eyed each other in passing with suspicion and hostility. The Pacifica that had been now seemed like a thin veneer of harmony that once had masked this bottomless reservoir of contending faschochauvinisms. Perhaps it had only maintained itself by self-consciously ignoring the genetic flaw in the human species itself.

Which
we
and the Transcendental Scientists have now brought bubbling up from the racial tarpits of the past, Cynda thought as she turned off onto a little side street lined with small sidewalk cafes. And that alone gave direction and a strangely altered sense of duty to the newborn confusion of her life.

For what she had seen on Pacifica had taught her that the true enemy was
faschochauvinism itself,
both the male half of the equation which Femocracy had vanquished on Earth and the female half which had destroyed the manhood of the Terran breeders and made love between men and women a perverted and impossible dream. If this mission failed, it would fail because the Pacificans, for all that had been directed against them, clung successfully to that narrow and fragile path between.

And when that happened, Bara and her ilk would be tarnished by that failure, her own position would be vindicated, and the sisters of Earth might be ready for some small voice of change. So she couldn’t risk throwing that possibility away by destroying her credibility by being caught in a liaison with a Pacifican man. She had been lucky with Eric, but she dared not trust to such luck again. It was her duty—to herself, to her species, and in some elusive way to Sisterhood itself. Even, ironically, to those secret sisters who might long to dare what she had done.

If only Carlotta Madigan hadn’t ruined everything by her incomprehensible blunder, Cynda thought more wanly. Men and women had been coming together again here until that disastrous Parliamentary vote. Now things were flying apart again and
no
conceivable outcome seemed inevitable or even possible...

Yet somehow, walking down this back street, Cynda once more had the illogical conviction that these people would in the end manage to preserve their own complex identity. Here, in these small cafes secluded from the clamor of the main boulevards, she saw that men and women still gathered together in couples, and above the cafes were three and four floors of apartments, where surely much private life must go on as it always did.

In the end, were not the Madigans and the Parliaments, the demonstrations, the propaganda, and the politics, only the quicksilver surface of a people’s reality? Was not the real Pacifica
right here
on this quiet back street, multiplied by a thousand, by a million—the millions of interlocking private lives and personal realities that were the true essence of any society, basically unchanging, like the subconscious underpinnings of surface human thought itself?

Like this tall, gray-haired older woman wandering up the street toward her. How could any off-worlder really know what was going on behind those haunted-looking eyes? A Bara Dorothy or even a Carlotta Madigan might take that expression as symbolic of the deep political conflict enveloping the planet, but couldn’t she just as well be pining for a lost lover or worrying about a sickly daughter or even her job? Who knew what—

The woman paused as their paths intersected. Her eyes lit up with an ironic flicker, and as they did, Cynda Elizabeth recognized that face. She had seen it on the net dozens of times; only this strange context had masked the woman’s identity.

“You’re Maria Falkenstein!”

“And you’re Cynda Elizabeth!”

They stood there in awkward silence for a moment. What does she see? Cynda wondered. The face of the enemy? What do I see, a Transcendental Scientist? How strange! she thought. We’ve beeg_,jfighting each other for months, and yet there’s been no human contact. And here we are, suddenly face to face in a back street in an alien city, and it’s the
human
reality that seems unreal.

“I... I thought you people had all gone back to the
Heisenberg ”
Cynda finally stammered.

“Everyone but me,” Maria Falkenstein said. She shrugged with a strange diffidence. “I suppose my little secret will be all over the net by morning...”

“No...” something made Cynda say. “I’m... I’m out of all that now ... I ... if you can understand...

Maria Falkenstein smiled a strange little smile at her. “I’m probably the only person on this planet who could,” she said.

“You, too, eh?” Cynda blurted. You, too,
what?
she wondered. Unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, she suddenly felt a strange bond to this enemy of all she had believed in, a communion that went beyond words or understanding. For some unfathomable reason, there seemed to be an instant spark of sisterhood between them that had nothing to do with either shared ideology or sexual attraction.

“This
is
peculiar, isn’t it?” Maria Falkenstein said. “We should be at each other’s throats, shouldn’t we?” She laughed. “What would your people say if they saw us standing here like this? What would
Roger
say?”

“I hardly know what to say myself...

“Well, then may I make a highly improper suggestion, one enemy to another, Cynda?” Maria Falkenstein said. “Let’s sit down and have some wine together. This is too outre an opportunity to miss, don’t you think?”

“All right,” Cynda said woodenly. “Why not?” They found an outside table at the nearest cafe. Maria ordered a bottle of floatfruit wine, poured two glasses, and then they sat there staring silently at each other for long moments. “Well...?”

“Well...

“Why aren’t you on the
Heisenberg?”
Cynda finally said.