The Cage of Zeus (5 page)

“That’s certainly possible if they realize we’re onto them,” Shirosaki said. “But I’m willing to bet it wasn’t cheap to put a team together and send them out here. Now that the plan’s been set in motion, they won’t give up so easily. There’ll probably only be a few of them, just the necessary manpower to destroy the station’s facilities.”

“Then what we need to do is clear.” Harding looked at the faces around him. “We intercept them at the docking bays and end them there. But we keep the walls between each section lowered in case they’re able to penetrate our defenses. Station some officers at the walls separating the special district from the rest of Jupiter-I for good measure.”

“To think that a group standing up for bioethical principles would resort to bloodshed.” Preda let slip a cynical smile. “Just who is being inhumane here? Those of us conducting medical experiments or the fringe group unashamed to commit acts of terrorism?”

After parting ways with the station staff outside the meeting room, Shirosaki and Arino headed for the quarters assigned to the security team with Harding and Miles.

As they walked down the corridor, Harding said to Shirosaki, “They’re a bunch of fruitloops, right?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“All of them. Preda is a stuck-up government toad, and Kline is infatuated with Round culture. She’s convinced the Rounds are an ideal incarnation of humanity. And the doctor? The doctor isn’t even human.”

“Is something the matter, Commander?”

“You’re not disgusted? You don’t feel anything looking at someone so—ambiguous?”

“I barely know anything about, uh, them to feel
anything
, much less disgust,” Shirosaki said.

“
Them
is fine. Just don’t get caught calling them
him
or
her.
They’ll call you out for using that language.”

Of course gendered pronouns are discriminatory in the bigender world,
Shirosaki thought.
So there are tricky issues of discrimination here just as there are in the planetary cities.
“We’ve been briefed about the special district. We also have some knowledge about the Rounds. But our orders are to protect the special district and the Rounds. As long as those orders stand, our job is to guard them whether they’re human or lab animals.”

Harding stared at Shirosaki with a look of contempt. “Have you ever seen sea hares mating?”

“No.”

“They’re simultaneous hermaphrodites whose male sex organs are exterior, while the posterior holds the female. When the sea hares mate, they form this long link. One puts its male organ in the female organ of the sea hare in front of it, while its own female organ is entered by the male organ of the sea hare from behind. Scientists call that a ‘mating chain.’ Snails mate in a similar way, only they have to face each other to insert the male organ in the other’s female organ. Same goes for the Rounds. With a single act of intercourse, they can love as a man and be loved as a woman at the same time. I’m telling you, that’s not right. A group that doesn’t have any scruples about doing shit like that don’t deserve to call themselves human.”

“You paint a pretty vivid picture,” Shirosaki said. “You didn’t ask to watch, now did you?”

Harding glared. “You stay cooped up here long enough, you start to hear things.”

Shirosaki fell silent.

“They’re not like the intersex people in our society. They’re the same as sea hares and snails, with the ability to inseminate and be inseminated at the same time. And do you want to know what they call us? Monaurals.”

“Meaning what?”

“We’re called Monaurals because each of us can only be one sex. From a bigender perspective, we’re monosexual—Monoaurals. Something’s become fundamentally different about them.”

“But they’re also living beings. In that sense, they’re no different than we are,” Shirosaki said.

“You’re a broad-minded one. I don’t have it in me to be so tolerant.”

“Hey, give it a rest,” Miles said lazily. “Criticizing the Rounds’ existence doesn’t make our job any easier. We should just think of them as our protectees, like Shirosaki said. As strange as this may sound, the Rounds’ existence is why we’re getting paid.”

“Not me.” Harding shook his head. “Just looking at them makes my skin crawl.”

“I can’t say that I don’t know what you’re feeling,” Arino said, sighing. “You can’t disown what you feel.”

“Don’t worry about it so much,” Miles said. “When we finish the job here on Jupiter-I and are back home on Mars, we’ll forget all about the Rounds.”

2

TEI ALLOWED THE
lukewarm water spraying from every direction of the tiny shower room to wash over eir entire body. White foam streamed down, tracing the contours of eir body, and swirled down the drain. The wastewater went to a recycling facility to be treated and reclaimed as nonpotable water. Such was the way Tei existed, within a perfectly cyclic system—vital to living near Jupiter.

In order for humans to embark on a long-term journey outside of the solar system, better recycling facilities were needed. Traveling for decades and centuries in an environment without solar energy was no easy feat. Space was an endlessly unforgiving place.

But every time Tei thought about it, ey felt something like intoxication welling up from within. What lay beyond the solar system? Just how far could we go?
How many generations will it be before we’re able to see the countless galaxies and black holes firsthand, as we see Jupiter today?
There were times Tei desperately wished for immortality. Rather than entrust the dream to someone else, Tei wanted to see everything with eir own eyes. Tei wanted to see and appreciate galaxies colliding, the birth of stars, hot Jupiters expelling bright gases near the stars from a distance close enough to touch. It was because of this desire that Tei could bear living here.

Tei continued to shower, caressing eir body with both hands. The roundness of eir breasts, though not glamorous by Monaural standards. The smooth and supple skin. The subtle curve of eir waist. The visibly bony figure. The firmness of eir joints. The tautness of eir muscles. Tei’s fingers slid from the swell of eir breasts down past the torso to between eir legs where both genitalia were tucked away. Ey fondled the soft flesh.

A moist slit and a copulatory organ protected by a thin sensitive skin. A Round possessed both sexual organs similar to those that female and male Monaurals had. Tei was no different. The twenty-third chromosome pair of Rounds like Tei, known as the sex chromosome, was neither XX nor XY, but a synthetic chromosome, double-I—a pair of I chromosomes resembling two sticks. The remaining twenty-two chromosome pairs contained the genetic sequencing making the Rounds perfect hermaphrodites and produced peptides that sent commands to the subcerebral lobe, an organ unique to Rounds located next to the pituitary gland.

Back when Tei still spent the majority of eir time in the special district, ey had no doubts about the way eir body was formed. They had been told that all of the Rounds in the special district were built the same way, though different from the humans that lived outside the special district. Tei had entered adolescence suspecting nothing. When ey had tried to make love with another Round—more as a way of communicating than for the purpose of procreating—ey had realized that ey was built a bit differently from the others.

It was a trivial distinction, posing no problem to engaging in the sex act itself. Rounds were capable of impregnating and being impregnated at the same time. Tei possessed the reproductive organs to do just that. There was, however, one difference. This distinction alone had saddled Tei with a deep feeling of alienation.

The Rounds were a special existence to those living outside the special district. Tei was an even more special case among the Rounds. Naïve as Tei was in her adolescence, ey had been assailed with unbearable doubt and feelings of inferiority.

Why am I different from the others?

I am not a Monaural. But I’m also not a Round.

Then what am I?

Tei had rushed to the infirmary, where the station’s supervisor, Kline, gently informed em that such things happened all the time. Dr. Wagi, the chief of medicine, pulled up piles of data to logically explain to Tei how ey had come to be this way.

Dr. Wagi’s explanation had been a persuasive one. He had ended by telling Tei that a simple operation would solve the problem.

But Tei had refused. Tei didn’t want to think of eir own body as so peculiar that ey required surgery. Doing so would have denied how ey had lived up until now. Doing so would also mean condemning the children who would come into this world built like Tei. Deformed. That was unacceptable to Tei.

Tei simply learned to accept that ey was different from the other Rounds and resolved to live an exemplary life that would blaze a trail for the next generation.

That was when Kline had asked Tei to serve as an intermediary. “If you focus on a job with responsibilities, you’ll forget your problems,” she told Tei. “Fortia and Album are in charge of the special district now and their tenures won’t end for a while. If you want to do something comparable, the ambassadorship will be perfect for you.”

Tei had accepted the offer immediately.

Ey didn’t want to go on wallowing in self-isolation over something so trivial as a physical aberration.

Tei also aspired to be on equal footing with the Monaurals. The feeling of inferiority that surfaced among the Rounds when they encountered people from outside the special district, despite being the newer generation of human, had always troubled Tei.

Tei resolved to be equal. To live on equal terms with the Monaurals.

Having been born on Jupiter-I, Tei had no concept of racial discrimination, and such antiquated feelings were similarly alien to the supervisors of the space station.

Tei got along with the station staff immediately. Owing to eir burgeoning medical knowledge and skill, Tei earned the trust and honest respect of the staff with each achievement.

As ey became more used to eir duties, Tei also grew to enjoy having sex with other Rounds as a means of social interaction.

Adolescence was short for the Rounds, who matured three times faster than Monaurals.

Tei quickly became an adult and was approaching middle age.

Having lost the tendency to dwell on eir differences as ey did when ey was younger, Tei became a doctor and also a counselor to the younger generation.

And yet, there were times Tei still felt a void.

A feeling that something was missing.

That the universe was incomplete.

A nagging matter that no one could empathize with.

Tei, closing eir eyes, tilted eir head upward into the shower stream and rubbed eir face with both hands.

Ey recalled the meeting when ey was mistaken for a woman by the new security team member.

A smile escaped eir lips.

The security team members that came to Jupiter-I were always only able to recognize Tei as having one sex. The male officers mistook Tei for female. The female officers mistook Tei for male. To Tei, nothing was as inconvenient or as baffling as the Monaural concept of gender. The Monaurals were callow beings held captive by outdated values.

On the other hand, at times Tei found emself envying them. That they operated under a gender binary system seemed to intensify their romantic feelings. The passion with which Monaurals lusted after what they lacked was a quality that a sexually uniform race like the Rounds did not have.

Of course, love was ultimately an interpersonal fantasy and so wasn’t something that blossomed exclusively between two sexes. In that sense, Rounds and Monaurals were no different.

Even so…

Tei was amazed by the Monaurals’ unflagging fixation with sex. In certain cases, they couldn’t help violating the objects of their affection. Just how were they driven to such madness?

Tei yearned to know with the same curiosity that sparked eir desire to gaze at the end of the universe.

III

1

SHIROSAKI DECIDED TO
get a lay of the land in the two weeks before the first cargo vessel arrived at Jupiter-I. After ordering the security team members to familiarize themselves with every inch of the station, he inspected each of the facilities himself with Kline.

First they visited the residential district for the station staff and the administrative facilities.

The area was further subdivided into smaller sections and looked much like a floor in an ordinary office building. Because the walls of the corridors obstructed his view at fixed intervals as Shirosaki walked, he hardly noticed the curved contours of the cylindrical station.

The inside of the administrative facilities was pleasant enough to make Shirosaki forget that outside its confines was the Jovian system.

Located in this section were the control rooms for each of the station’s systems, the research facilities, food factories, health and wellness facilities, storehouse, mess, recreation center, infirmary, the control center, meeting room, and the staff quarters.

Upon entering each department, Shirosaki and Kline were greeted courteously by the staff.

The staff was racially diverse. Shirosaki had also imagined the staff at the front lines of Jovian space to be emboldened with an intrepid frontier mentality, but they were nothing if not composed. They went about their daily duties as if they were on the planets.

Inside the observation room, an omnidirectional screen displayed images from outside the station: Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, as well as Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the Sun. Images from Saturn and beyond the solar system.

Shirosaki felt Jupiter bearing down on him and shuddered. “Do people come here often?”

Kline nodded. “After all, we can’t go out there to see Jupiter for ourselves.”

“I know it’s just an image, but I feel as if I’m about to be crushed.”

“Perhaps you’d like to sit down. You’ll feel better.”

In the center of the room were tables surrounded by a sofa on each side. The sofas, arranged back-to-back, faced the tables and the screen.

Kline tapped her wearable, and the entire floor became a screen displaying a million stars at Shirosaki’s feet.

Suddenly, Shirosaki felt as if he were plummeting through space and had to keep himself from shouting. “I’m sorry, but would you mind turning off the floor screen?”

“Don’t members of the security team receive any space training?”

“Yes, but most of my duties keep me on the planets.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. This must be disorienting for you.”

Kline turned off the floor screen.

Shirosaki let out a sigh of relief. “You aren’t bothered by it?”

“When you’ve lived here for over twenty years you get used to it.”

“I didn’t realize you’ve been stationed here so long.”

“I was one of the first staff to come here.” Kline then asked, “Do you know why the special district was created on Jupiter-I?”

“Yes, I read about it in the report. Though as an outsider, I may not have an accurate understanding of many things.”

“What did you think of Dr. Tei?”

“I found em appealing,” said Shirosaki, using the gender-neutral pronouns he’d learned after his conversation with Harding.

“Even after you found out ey’s a Round?”

“My impression of bigenders was that they would look more synthetic—like they were entirely different beings. I had no idea they would be so much like us.”

“The doctor may be similar to us because ey works with humans outside the special district as an intermediary.”

“Are the Rounds in the special district different?” Shirosaki asked.

“Their sensibilities are gradually deviating from ours, since their contact with the staff has decreased of late. They have an air about them that’s uniquely their own.”

“Do you encounter any difference of opinions as a result of their bigender state?”

“The Rounds are a branch of the human evolutionary tree—one possibility of humanity’s progression. We should regard them as partners and must not pressure them with any undue expectations. We must think of them neither as an ideal form of humanity nor a new breed of human reigning over us, but as a new subspecies coexisting with us. Although I realize this is difficult to understand for outsiders.”

Harding had said that Kline believed the Rounds to be an ideal incarnation of humanity, but apparently that wasn’t exactly the case.

“I’d like to hear more about the Rounds. Things I won’t find in the files.”

“That might take a while.”

“That’s all right. I consider it a part of the job.”

Kline nodded and began slowly. “How much does your generation study about sexology?”

“Just that human sexuality is comprised of three elements: physical sex, psychological sex, and sexual orientation.”

“Then you know the difference between gender and sexuality?”

“Gender is a socially constructed concept that defines femininity and masculinity,” Shirosaki said. “People’s ideas of what it means to be feminine and masculine differ according to the social environment in which they live. Even within a single society, those ideas change along with the changing times. Sexuality is a term used to consider biological differences between the sexes as well as one’s sexual preference.”

“That’s the correct textbook answer. Has your department ever encountered any issues with regard to gender and sexuality?”

“Nothing that’s been made public at least.”

“Not even employment discrimination?”

“I wouldn’t know, as I’m not involved with the hiring process and practices.”

Kline smiled. “Sexual minorities have been an issue in Earthian society since the latter half of the twentieth century. While the term
sexual minority
may be recognized as a pejorative now, it was still commonly used during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. True to their name, there were few sexual minorities back then. For example, the homosexual population numbered only ten percent of Earth’s total population. There were fewer lesbians than gay men and even fewer bisexuals. These so-called sexual minorities experienced great difficulty combating the prejudices of the majority.”

In the field of sexology, human sexuality encompassed three components: biological sex, psychological sex, and sexual orientation.

Biological sex was the vector of gender biology—male, female, intersex, including those with chromosomal and genital anomalies.

Psychological sex or gender identity was a matter of individual identification—the cisgenders identified with their biological sex and transgenders identified with some sex other than their biological sex. It was a matter of which gender you identified with and whether or not that was consistent with your biological sex.

Sexual orientation was the vector of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. Sexual orientation had to do with the sex you were attracted to. All three of these components were not at all static but extremely fluid, forming more potential combinations than there were names for them.

“Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. These groups were treated as mentally ill. They were criminalized and marginalized by society until they began to form their own communities and began to demand recognition and rights. By the end of the twentieth century, homosexuality was removed from the list of psychological disorders. Although the majority’s prejudicial attitudes remained, in the process of changing the laws as a result of hard-won court battles, sexual minorities forced the majority to recognize that they were not sick, that being a member of a minority was nothing more than a part of one’s identity, and that biological sex, psychological sex, and sexual orientation were not to be forced upon anyone but rather practiced freely by the individual.

“The end of the twentieth century also saw advances in life manipulation technology such as in genetic diagnosis, gene therapy, prenatal diagnosis, organ transplantation, and artificial organ manufacturing. Sexual minorities were inevitably affected.

“By the end of the twentieth century, sex reassignment surgery was recognized as a way to treat gender identity disorder. At the start of the twenty-first, scientists made breakthroughs in manufacturing artificial organs using stem cells. Fierce debates raged over the ethics of their actual use, but in the end, stem cells were allowed for treatment purposes. This decision paved the way to making possible the manufacture of reproductive organs, which had been perhaps the greatest obstacle standing before sexual minorities. Do you understand why this was so significant?”

“It became possible to transplant artificial reproductive organs that weren’t merely cosmetic but actually functioned,” Shirosaki said.

“That’s right. As news of successful transplants of artificial livers and kidneys made from stem cells spread, the thinking that the transsexual issue could be solved medically began to take root. This marked a big shift in values. With sexual reassignment surgery technology still nascent, complications weren’t all that rare. Failed surgeries plagued patients with chronic pain; even with successful surgeries, they had to continue to take hormone pills to maintain their new bodies. Long-term drug use also caused problems with the liver and other parts of the body. As a result, many people elected not to have sexual reassignment surgery altogether rather than risk their lives to maintain their sex. Intersex surgeries were also far from perfect.”

An intersex person was someone born with both male and female reproductive organs. Since being intersex was thought to be a deformity at the time, it wasn’t uncommon for the reproductive organs of one sex to be removed from the child. With the surgery not yet perfected, sometimes the chosen sexual organs did not function when the child entered puberty. Other times, in cases where the parents had decided their intersex child’s sex based on their outward appearance alone without telling that child, the child flew into a panic when the other sexual organs developed during puberty.

I thought I was a man, but they told me I have ovaries and a uterus. Does that make me a woman? Do I have to dress like a woman from now on and marry a man and have kids of my own?

I thought I was a woman, but they told me I have testicles. Does that make me a man? Do I have to dress like a man from now on and marry a woman and make babies with her?

“Toward the end of the twentieth century, intersex people started to protest that parents and doctors were selecting and surgically assigning the sex of their intersex child without the child’s consent,” Kline explained. “Many people came to believe that only the intersex children themselves had the right to determine their sex and that they should be recognized as a third gender that was neither male or female until they were ready to decide for themselves. At the same time, people began to advocate for the right to not choose either sex at adulthood and to remain intersex.

“But once synthetic sex hormones became possible, the thinking that transgender people should automatically ‘fix’ their problem surgically began to spread among the majority, while those who did not were thought to be abnormal. Because of these medical advances, people’s once diversified concept of gender at the end of the twentieth century began to revert to the gender binary classification with a clear delineation between male and female.”

“Something like a shift back to traditional values? I wonder if they began to feel nostalgic for the old days as a reaction to the sexual diversity they perceived had gone too far,” Shirosaki said.

“Perhaps. One segment of the population strongly resisted. For those that viewed male and female on a spectrum without drawing sexual and gender lines, such twentieth century binary thinking had become impossible to accept. Artificial organ transplantation techniques furthered progressive thinking. Single-sex people began to want intersex bodies.

“At the time, organ transplantation was thought to be an answer for the transgender population. A solution to the problem of how to reconcile one’s biological sex with one’s psychological sex. But once the technology was perfected, another trend emerged. Some people expressed a desire to have the reproductive organs of both sexes and began to claim that right. Such thinking was inevitable once we diversified our concept of gender. The thinking that you can only be male or female went out with the twentieth century. Since bigenderism exists as a choice, it’s hardly a surprise that someone had the idea to integrate both sexes into one body. When you sit down and think about it, there’s no reason why humans have to go on being one sex or the other.”

“But as perfect as the artificial organs are, do the organs of both sexes function together inside the same body?” Shirosaki asked. “Aren’t hormones responsible for initiating the reproductive functions? The body requires male sex hormones to produce sperm and an abundance of female sex hormones to nurture an ovum in the uterus. It’s hard to believe that both sex hormones can act upon the same body.”

“Yes, that posed the biggest problem. Our endocrine system can’t stimulate the organs of both sexes to function despite having them transplanted in our body. Both men and women have gonadotropin-releasing hormones that stimulate the secretion of both female and male sex hormones. Even so, it isn’t easy to stimulate the growth and maturation of both sex organs. With regard to the reproductive organs, one has to dominate the other,” Kline said. “One person can be biologically intersex, be psychologically male or female, be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual with regard to sexual preference, and either have male or female sexual functions—the variations only increased. Far from restoring our concept of gender to the old gender binary, medical technology served to complicate it, and so too our choices. After all, this technology enables humans who are biologically and psychologically male to give birth.”

“Is that something men even wanted?”

“At times, yes. That notion has existed since the twentieth century. By implanting the fertilized egg in the abdominal cavity, men can also become pregnant. It’s basically the male variation of an ectopic pregnancy. Male pregnancies aren’t rare in the natural world. Seahorses, for example.”