I nodded. “We all are.”
“You mean, everyone in the school?”
“Everyone on the planet…” I replied, and then a thought hit me. “Well, except...”
Aisha slid slowly down the tree to sit with er arms wrapped around er legs, murmuring something in Arabic. I waited. “I’ve never met a hermaphrodite before,” e said, weakly.
“I’ve never met a—girl,” I replied, after a moment’s thought.
A suspicious stare. “How come you know what the word means?”
I shrugged. “Old films and novels. Besides, we call our sports teams girls and boys—no one wants to wear uniforms, so the ones with the shirts are girls. I don’t know why; it’s probably something that used to mean something once, like giving out gold and silver medals, or talking about ‘going the whole nine yards’ ”—I glanced at the outline of Aisha’s breasts, and suddenly guessed the origin of the custom. The feeling of knowing, discovering, that was more of a buzz, a jolt, than anything I could remember ever learning in class.
The game ended, and kids started drifting back into the classroom. I stood there silently, not wanting to leave Aisha.
When everyone else had disappeared, Aisha looked up, er golden face even more pale than usual. “This is too—” e looked around. “Do you think the toilets would be empty now?”
“Huh? I mean, yeah, sure.”
“Great.” I offered my hand, to help er up, but e ignored it and struggled to er feet without my help. We walked to the doorway, and Aisha stopped, until I offered to go inside and make sure there was no one else there.
“Can you tell the teacher that I’ll be back tomorrow, initially?” Aisha said, when e emerged.
“Sure,” I said. “Will you be?”
Aisha hesitated, and then shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my father.”
I nodded. It had never occurred to me before that monosexes had fathers, though it probably would have if I’d thought about it for a few seconds. “See you,” I said, wondering if I’d ever see Aisha again, and knowing I had to.
I spent most of the afternoon accessing the library, to find out what I could about monosexes. There was a lot of stuff I’d never imagined, like needing separate pronouns for each gender—“he” and “him” and “his” for males, “she” and “her” and “hers” for females. They seemed sort of redundant, but Amerish thrives on redundancy, and the female pronouns sounded exotic enough that I practiced using them whenever I thought of Aisha.
Monos were extremely rare away from Earth, except in some religious enclaves where no one had maf chromosomes: otherwise, it required major surgery, which almost no one bothered with. The first human mafs were born a few years post-contact, but the chromosomes were discovered by humans, not Stigrosc: Stigs don’t believe in genetic engineering. Mafs remained a minority on Earth for more than a century, but many of them—us—traveled to habitable solstice worlds, where there was unrestricted birthright. Others became crew on the Stigrosc ships, or emigrated to the neutral worlds; Stigs can’t tell one human from another, and the Nerifar say we all taste the same, but Chuh’hom and Tatsu find it much easier and safer to communicate with mafs. Meanwhile, on Earth, as gene surgery became easier and cheaper and more countries adopted “one couple—one child” laws, mafs were seen by many governments as a way of avoiding serious gender imbalances in the population, and various incentives were offered to prospective parents—cheap health insurance, exemptions from combat service, places in the schools or the civil service or diplomatic corps reserved for mafs, that sort of thing. According to the library (which was at least seven years out of date), mafs made up 68 percent of the population of Earth—and more than 99 percent of the permanent populations of Marlowe and Avalon, where the al-Goharans would also have to stop en route.
There was nothing in the library—at least, nothing I could access—about how monosexes made love. I was wondering about that when school closed, and I guess I still looked preoccupied when I went home: my mother, who is normally very careful not to invade our privacy, asked me what was on my mind.
“There was a new kid in class, today,” I replied. “Off the Arakne. Her name’s Aisha.”
“Is that the one who’s pregnant?” asked Rene, without jacking out of er eternal Vaster than Empires game. Sometimes I think that unrestricted birthrights are overrated; I get on okay with Kris, but I think Mum and Dad should have stopped when they’d had one kid each. “She’s not pregnant,” I snapped. “She’s…”
“She?” asked Kris.
Okay, sometimes we get on okay. “It’s old English,” Mum explained. “I didn’t think the al-Goharans brought their kids with them...”
“They never have before,” Dad agreed, without looking away from the holo. “How long is the trip? Two or three years each way? Hell of a time for a kid that age to be traveling—how old is e?”
That was Dad all over, making a judgment before e had any of the facts. “I don’t know; she’s tall, and her Amerish isn’t too good, and she dresses like… I think she’s about twenty-five or twenty-six,” Kris stared, and almost dropped er book. “In al-Goharan years, which is—” My ram converted that into thirteen to thirteen point five standard. “Nine, roughly, so she’ll be about twelve when she gets to Mecca.”
“Great,” said Dad. “Three years of er life wasted going to see a crater.”
“Mecca’s not a crater any more,” I informed er. “Well, it is, sort of, but the radiation’s down to a safe level, and they’ve built a new mosque and stuff. There was a load of new data for the library on the Arakne—stuff about Earth and a lot of other worlds, and only a few years old.”
“Anything about how to get rid of razorvine?” e asked, sourly.
“Not that I noticed.” As far as the library was concerned, razorvine was unique to daVinci (lucky us). It was probably a mutant strain of our terraforming fauna; it grew at about the same rate (much faster than the cyberfarms could process it into anything useful), and in everything from deserts to rivers, but was much harder to kill. Anything buried beneath it might be lost forever: it blocked infrared and radar, and thrived on spotlights and X-rays. And it wasn’t even attractive—the same monotonous tarnish color as the solamat we use for major roads, with inedible seeds that you couldn’t pick without the risk of losing a few fingers. Dad’s a builder, so e regards it as a personal enemy, but most kids play hide-and-seek among the thickets at least once—or as often as we can without our parents catching us—and there are the usual stories about secret tobacco farms hidden within razorvine jungles. “There are some new games and shows, from Musashi,” I added, and Rene and Kris grinned, “and I don’t know what else.”
Dad grunted, and watched the holo for a few more minutes, then stretched. “Want to shoot a few hoops before dinner?”
“Sure, Mum,” said Kris, heading outside. Mum glanced at me, then folded er book. I was the last one outside. As usual.
“A Muslim monosex,” Dad muttered, as e collapsed onto the bed. My parents’ room was well sound-proofed, of course, but easy to bug on the rare occasions that I wanted to listen in. “Okay, e’s nearly an adult, e’s got er implants, you’d expect er to have crushes and fool around a little, but there are dozens of kids er own age here, why—”
“E’ll only be here a year,” replied Mum. “Besides, it may be good for Alex to get to know some off-worlders. You know e’s good at xenology; e might even be a diplomat.”
“Not if it needs math,” said Dad.