Mum sighed. “E’s better at languages than we ever were, and e enjoys them. I wouldn’t be surprised if e learnt Arabic before this friend of ers flies away.”
“What good will that be?”
“How many mathematicians do we need on a world this size? Biologists, builders, designers, artists, yes, but mathematicians? And what if e wants to go off-world?”
“Why would e?” retorted Dad. “What the Hell can e get off-world that e can’t have here?”
Aisha arrived in class a few minutes later than the rest of us, clad in the same loose grey hooded robe or another exactly like it. Her dark eyes were slightly clouded, and I guessed she was having trouble adjusting to the shorter days. I thought of pointing out that she’d get more praying done this way, but I wasn’t sure how she’d take it, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Our teacher for the day was Jai, an old fossil with a murmuring voice and an inexplicable enthusiasm for economics, both of which e used to try to explain the half-million years of human history pre-Contact. Most of us were already confused long before e came to the impact of third wave tech, and when e admitted that the whole thing had collapsed soon after the Stigrosc arrived anyway, most of us became irritated as well.
“This is irrelevant, isn’t it?” asked Teri, while a few of us chuckled.
Jai bit er hp. “I rather hope so. You see, history is a wonderful labor-saving device; it saves us reinventing and rediscovering so much. True, all these economic theories were based on the idea that resources were scarce and humans needed to work to survive. By the first century pre-Contact, of course, the scarcities were usually manufactured for commercial or political reasons—so that the rich could stay rich, or nations could control their populace by denying them food—and the work ethic had become a cancer. Many people worked at jobs they hated because they’d been convinced that there was no other way to survive; by the time the Stigrosc came to Earth, it would have been cheaper to simply feed, house, educate, and entertain most of these people—but that would have violated the work ethic and destroyed the illusion of scarce resources. In this regard, capitalism and communism were almost indistinguishable—and when the Stigrosc arrived, and gave us cyberfacs and habitable planets, asking only for those ideas and data that were free to every human, both systems became, as you say, irrelevant. Our new economic system is, to a large degree, another gift from the Stigrosc—but, unlike all previous human economic systems, it is founded on the idea that human demand will never outstrip resource availability. If this happy state of affairs should change, then we will need a new system—and those of you who’ve been paying attention will have some idea which ones not to try.” E drew a deep breath, and then—apparently for the first time—noticed Aisha. E glanced at the book open on er desk, and asked, “I gather things are the same on al-Gohara?” She was silent. “The cyberfacs and robots provide what is needed, and no one is compelled to do work that they hate?”
Aisha shook her head violently. “No, of course not,” she lied.
“Of course, there are some people who cling to the old ways,” Jai continued, “simply because they are human ways—or, more importantly to many of them, not Stigrosc ways. Most of these people are still on Earth, because they regard Earth as a human world, or because they own parts of Earth in a way they can never own part of any other world. What good this ownership does them now, I leave to you to imagine; if any of you succeed, please explain it to me. Aisha, it’s nearly noon; do you want to go and pray? Now, are there any other questions?”
“Tell me about your world.”
We were sitting under the old cedars by the basketball court again. Aisha glanced at me, and shrugged. “Why?” she asked. “You don’t want to go there, do you?”
If all the girls there are like you, I thought, I might, but I didn’t say that. “I won’t know until you tell me,” I replied.
She smiled shghtly, beautifully. “It’s warm, and much drier than it is here, and the sun’s not quite as bright—”
“I know all that. Tell me about the people.”
“People are people.” She looked warily at me, daring me to challenge her.
“How much difference does having two sexes make?” I asked.
She looked even more wary. “I’m not going to discuss sex with—well, you’re a boy.”
“I’m also just as much a girl as you are,” I replied, mildly.
She looked thunderstruck at that, then shook her head violently. “There’s more to it than having a—besides, you don’t have…” She looked puzzled for a moment.
“If you want to know what I do have—” I began.
“I don’t—”
“You can access the library.”
Aisha blinked, and then laughed. I waited until she’d finished, and added, “That’s how I know what you’ve got. Sort of. I mean, I… unless you…” I sat there, trying to find the words.
“Have I been circumcised?” she asked, at last. “No. That was a primitive custom, much older than Islam and explicitly condemned in the Qur’an—you have heard of the Qur’an?—and while some Muslims on Earth did it, so did some Christians. By the time the Stigrosc arrived, it had been stamped out nearly everywhere, like foot-binding or breast implants. But there’s more to being a woman than just the body.”
“We can all get pregnant, if that’s what you mean.”
“No!” she said, shaking her head again. “More than that!”
“What, then?” I asked, but she stood and walked away. I tried following her, but she kept walking faster, and her legs were much longer than mine. I walked faster, and she began running. Finally, she ran out of the school and down the razorvine-edged road to Startown, and I didn’t follow her.
The next day was Saturday, and I’d resigned myself to not seeing Aisha. Kris had slipped out early to play basketball and get out of gardening, which we both hated. Mum always maintained that if we did it often enough, we’d come to enjoy it as e and Dad did, but e let me go after an hour of cauterizing the razorvine that was beginning to encroach on the watermelons. I spent the rest of the morning with a portrait program, trying to see if I could produce a fair likeness of Aisha, and maybe slot both of us into an old movie, a pre-Contact one with monosex characters: The Princess Bride, maybe, or War for the Oaks. That way, I could just superimpose her face on a female body, rather than have to try to imagine hers. Unfortunately, nearly all of the female bodies in the art history catalogue were of women from Earth gravity, while the few from the Martian Republic were too tall and slender. I’d always known that ideals of beauty varied between eras and ethnic groups, but seeing the demonstration flash before my eyes was startling. I’d never imagined that there were so many ways to mutilate living bodies.
I managed to devote three or four hours to Aisha’s face, and another two to her figure, before succumbing to the temptation to access some pictures of female genitals. They looked incomplete, even deformed, with just this little bump where the penis should be, but apart from that, they looked just like mine or Morgan’s. Males, I discovered, had external testes where the vulva should be, in what looked like an uncomfortable, if not hideously hazardous, position.
After forming a recognizable template of Aisha, I scanned us into Forbidden Planet; the eyelines gave me a little trouble, but once I’d fixed that, it looked wonderful, and it even made sense.
On Sunday, I made the mistake of reading a love poem by Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”—Had we but world enough, and time—and became determined to see Aisha again, or at least to try. The library told me that Sunday wasn’t a religious holiday for Muslims—their Sabbath started Friday and finished Saturday—and there was nothing to stop me walking up Tranquillity Road to Startown; Aisha, a lightworlder, did it every day. Mum let me go with nothing more than the usual caution to be home before nightfall (razorvine is attracted by light, and can supposedly move fast enough to engulf anyone walking with a lantern), and I slipped out before Dad could object.