"Of course we're friends," said Jael Reasoner patiently. "Of course we are.
That's why I don't want to talk to you tonight. Hell, I don't want to get you in trouble. See those crosses? One jab, one little rip or tear, and those girls will start an epidemic you won't be able to stop for a month. Do you want to be mixed up in that? Now you know we women are into plague research; well, these are some of the experiments. I'm taking them across Manland to another part of our own place; it's a short-cut. I wouldn't take them through here except I have some business to do here tonight. We're developing a faster immunization process. I'd tell all your friends to stay away from this table, too, if I were you-not that we can't take care of ourselves and / don't worry; I'm immune to this particular strain-but I don't want to see you take the rap for it. You've done a lot for me in the past and I'm grateful. I'm very grateful. You'd get it in the neck, you know. And you might get plague, too, there's always that.
Okay?"
Astonishing how each of them has to be reassured of my loyalty! says Jael Reasoner. Even more astonishing that they believe me. They're not very bright, are they? But these are the little fish. Besides, they've been separated from real women so long that they don't know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like. The specifications we send them every year grow wilder and wilder and there isn't a murmur of protest. I think they like it. As moths to the flame, so men to the social patterns of the Army, that womanless world haunted by the ghosts of millions of dead women, that discarnate femininity that hovers over everybody and can turn the toughest real-man into one of Them, that dark force they always feel at the backs of their own minds! Would I, do you think, force slavishness and deformity on two-sevenths of my own kind? Of course not! I think these men are not human. No, no, that's wrong-/ decided long ago that they weren't human. Work is power, but they farm out everything to us without the slightest protest-Hell, they get lazier and lazier. They let us do their thinking for them. They even let us do their feeling for them. They are riddled with duality and the fear of duality.
And the fear of themselves.1 think it's in their blood. What human being would -sweating with fear and rage-mark out two equally revolting paths and insist that her fellow-creatures tread one or the other?
Ah, the rivalries of cosmic he-men and the worlds they must conquer and the terrors they must face and the rivals they must challenge and overcome!
"You are being a little obvious," says Janet pedantically from inside her suit, "and I doubt that the power of the blood-"
Hsst! Here comes my contact.
Our contact was a half-changed, for Manlanders believe that child care is woman's business; so they delegate to the changed and the half-changed the business of haggling for babies and taking care of children during those all-important, first five years-they want to fix their babies' sexual preferences early. This means, practically speaking, that the children are raised in brothels. Now some Manlander real-men do not like the idea of the whole business being in the hands of the feminized and the effeminate but there's not much they can do about it (see Proposition One, about child care, above)-although the more masculine look forward to a time when no Manlander will fall away from the ranks of the he-men, and with an obstinacy I consider perverse, refuse to decide who will be the sexual objects when the changed and the half-changed are no more. Perhaps they think sex beneath them. Or above them? (Around the shrine of each gowned and sequinned hostess in The Knife are at least three real-men; how many can a hostess take on in one night?) I suspect we real women still figure, however grotesquely, in Manland's deepest dreams; perhaps on that morning of Total Masculinity they will all invade Womanland, rape everyone in sight (if they still remember how) and then kill them, and after that commit suicide upon a pyramid of their victims' panties. The official ideology has it that women are poor substitutes for the changed. I certainly hope so. (Little girls, crept out of their crшche at last, touching those heroic dead with curious, wee fingers. Nudging them with their patent leather Mary Janes. Bringing their baby brothers out to a party on the green, all flutes and oats and pastoral fun until the food gives out and the tiny heroines must decide: Whom shall we eat? The waving limbs of our starfish siblings, our dead mothers, or those strange, huge, hairy bodies already beginning to swell in the sun?) I flashed that damned pass-again!-this time at a half-changed in a pink chiffon gown, with gloves up to his shoulder, a monument of irrelevancy on high heels, a pretty girl with too much of the right curves and a bobbing, springing, pink feather boa. Where oh where is the shop that makes those long rhinestone earrings, objects of fetishism and nostalgia, worn only by the half-changed (and usually not by them unless they're rich), hand-made from museum copies, of no use or interest to fully six-sevenths of the adult human race? Somewhere stones are put together by antiquarians, somewhere petroleum is transformed into fabric that can't burn without polluting the air, and won't rot, and won't erode, so that strands of plastic have turned up in the bodies of diatoms at the bottom of the Pacific Trench-such a vision was he, so much he wore, such folds and frills and ribbons and buttons and feathers, trimmed like a Christmas tree. Like Garbo playing Anna Karenina, decorated all over. His green eyes shrewdly narrowed.
This one has intelligence. Or is it only the weight of his false lashes? The burden of having always to be taken, of having to swoon, to fall, to endure, to hope, to suffer, to wait, to only be? There must be a secret feminine underground that teaches them how to behave; in the face of their comrades' derision and savage contempt, in the face of the prospect of gang rape if they're found alone on the streets after curfew, in the face of the legal necessity to belong-every one of them-to a real-man, somehow they still learn the classic shiver, the slow blink, the knuckle-to-lip pathos. These, too, I think, must be in the blood. But whose? My three friends and I pale beside such magnificence! Four lumpy parcels, of no interest to anyone at all, at all.
Anna, with a mechanical shiver of desire, says that we must go with him.
"Her?" says Jeannine, confused.
"Him!" says Anna in a strained contralto. The half-changed are very punctilious-sometimes about the changeds' superiority and sometimes about their own genitals. Either way it works out to Him. He's extraordinarily aware, for a man, of Jeannine's shrinking and he resents it-as who would not? I myself am respectful of ruined lives and forced choices. On the street once Anna did not fight hard enough against the fourteen-year-old toughs who wanted his twelve-year-old ass; he didn't go to the extremity of berserk rage, reckoning his life as nothing in defense of his virility; he forestalled-by surrender-the plucking out of an eye, the castration, the throat cut with a broken bottle, the being put out of his twelve-year-old action with a stone or a tire chain. I know a lot about Manlanders' history. Anna made a modus vivendi, he decided life was worth it on any terms. Everything follows from that.
"Oh, you're lovely," says Jeannine, heartfelt. Sisters in misfortune. This really pleases Anna. He shows us a letter of safe-conduct he has from his boss-a real-man, of course-and putting it back in pink-brocaded evening bag, draws around him that fake-feather Thing which floats and wobbles in the least current of air-. It's a warm evening. To protect his employer, the big boss (they are Men, even in the child-rearing business) has had to give Anna K a little two-way TV camera to wear in his ear; otherwise somebody would break his high heels and leave him dead or half-dead in an alley. Everybody knows that the half-changed are weak and can't protect themselves; what do you think femininity is all about? Even so Anna probably has a bodyguard waiting at the entrance to The Knife. I'm cynical enough to wonder sometimes if the Manlanders' mystique isn't just an excuse to feminize anybody with a pretty face-but look again, they believe it; look under the padding, the paint, the false hair, the corsetry, the skin rinses and the magnificent dresses and you'll see nothing exceptional, only faces and bodies like any other man's. Anna bats his eyes at us and wets his lips, taking the women inside the suits to be real-men, taking me to be a real-man (what else can I be if I'm not a changed?), taking the big wide world itself to be-what else?-a Real-Man intent on worshipping Anna's ass; the world exists to look at Anna; he-or she-is only a real-man turned inside out.