“But why?”
“Consider: Five thousand years ago the population of the world was half male and half female. A billion men and a billion women. There you have a supreme example of the extravagance of nature.”
“Extravagance?”
“Of course. One man could fertilize a thousand females — ten thousand in the course of a lifetime; yet nature provided an average of one man perwoman. The result of such extravagance was sublimation of unexpended masculine drive in other spheres: war, faster and faster air and ground travel, interplanetary flight. The cosmos itself became a mons Veneris at which mankind as a whole set his cap.”
Aubretia shifted uncomfortably on her chair. The trend of the conversation made her feel uneasy, aroused in her mind the same kind of dormant fear as had been instigated by the visual memory of the man. The whole subject was wrapped in a sinister cocoon of unfathomable mystery.
“I’d never realized,” she said, “that men were so real. What I mean is that men have always been to me — to most women — a kind of legend, a fairy tale, or stories of ghosts and goblins”
“After five thousand years you could hardly expect more.”
“Then why did men disappear so suddenly from the world?”
The Mistress sat down again at her desk, drumming her fingers lightly upon its shining surface. “It wasn’t sudden. It was a slow process. The truth is they were no longer necessary, Evolution had ceased in the human species. Sexual variation was no longer necessary. So nature introduced an economy and eliminated the male sex.”
“But how?”
“By adjusting the ratio of births so that more and more females were born. Eventually there were no male births what ever. And at the same time parthenogenesis developed into a natural function of the female sex.”
“I suppose it’s logical,” Aubretia conceded. “After all, if women can have children without the — the intervention of a male, then there seems to be no point in having two sexes.”
“Exactly. And the beauty of it is this. The female ovum contains twenty-four chromosomes. By parthenogenesis, whether natural or induced, the ovum splits into a normal cell of forty-eight chromosomes: a female cell. It is absolutely impossible to produce a healthy male cell of forty-seven chromosomes by parthenogenesis. Obviously, then, woman is the end product of nature. Man was merely an interim stage incapable of perpetuation other than by heterosexual means. You see, the male gametes were divided into two parts: those with twenty-three chromosomes and those with twenty-four, formed by subdivision of the forty-seven chromosomes in his body cells.”
“I understand now,” said Aubretia. “In order to produce a male child you must have a gamete with twenty-three chromosomes combining with a female ovum of twenty-four. Otherwise the product is always female.”
The Mistress smiled triumphantly. “Exactly. That was the card nature had up her sleeve. The fundamental permanence of the female and the transience of the male.” She stroked her cropped black hair with a long, slender finger. “With the elimination of the male sex the possibility of producing male offspring became nil. Parthenogenesis can only produce females.”
“When did parthenogenesis really start?” Aubretia asked. “That’s difficult to say. There were isolated cases through out the ages. Seven thousand years ago there was a well-authenticated case of a parthenogentic individual called Christ; but towards the end of the twentieth century it in creased immeasurably, and at the same time men died off.” Aubretia considered for a moment, reviewing all that she had learned, “The adaptation you mentioned,” she said. “Where does that fit in?”
The Mistress smiled for the first time, a confident knowledgeable smile. “A sex may disappear according to the dictates of nature, but the endocrine structure of the female body remains the same.”
“Endocrine?”
“The ductless glands — the hormones. They are the basis of emotional feeling. The emotions have not changed, but they have been modified.”
Aubretia pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Emotions I know about, but how have they been modified?”
The Mistress paused for a moment, choosing her words carefully. “Whom do you love?” she enquired.
“An albino woman named Aquilegia,” Aubretia said, with a certain degree of self-consciousness.
“Then it may surprise you to know that there was a time when women needed men, when women loved men.”
“No!” Aubretia gasped incredulously.
“It is true. But during the course of five thousand years an emotional transfer has taken place, from necessity. Now women need and love each other.”
“But surely that is natural. Women are the same; they know about each other.”
The Mistress shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid you remissing the point because you can’t see the point. That is as it should be. An adaptation has taken place, a fundamental reorganization of the emotional architecture of womankind. But perhaps you can appreciate that it would be undesirable, perhaps even dangerous, to introduce a conflicting element. It would be fatal to introduce the idea of man because there is a chance, just the slight chance, that some women might respond to it — those women who have not quite conformed to the emotional pattern of the adaptation syndrome. That is why the male body in the Annex must be destroyed.”
Aubretia remained silent for fully a minute. She was trying to understand things from two independent and divorced points of view. Primarily she was a citizen of a female world, living and existing within a circumscribed pattern of emotional behaviour in accordance with what the Mistress termed the parthenogentic adaptation syndrome; but in addition she was also a woman, and the man still hovered ghost-like in the depth of her mind, hinting at a different level of being beyond her imagination, a level that was simultaneously repulsive and fascinating, that tugged at her imagination and created strange transient sensations in her body that differed in some subtle way from the orgiastic feelings that Aquilegia and her predecessors had aroused.
“I’ll tell you something,” the Mistress continued in confidential tones. “This is not the first man to be discovered. There have been many during the past millennia, hundreds upon hundreds. Some were well preserved, some were mere crumbling skeletons. But they have all been destroyed. The syndrome must be preserved at all costs if the stable basis of modern society is to be preserved.”
The Mistress stood up with an air of finality. “There will be no news release, and I shall make arrangements immediately for the body to be incinerated. As a servant of the government you will, of course, have nothing to say on the subject to anyone. The man is a secret, dead or alive, an obscene secret of ancient history.”
Aubretia bowed understanding, and took her leave.
III
Aquilegia was a woman in high key. She was a vision in pale cream against a background of white. She lived in the top apartment of one of the highest apartment blocks in Lon North and she was lightness itself, like the sky. The rooms of her home were decorated in the palest of pastel hues, and the furniture was mainly of transparent plastic material. In this setting of whiteness and semi-invisibility she was an object of slender fragile beauty, pure in her whiteness and almost intangible in her ethereal albinism.
She was wearing a gossamer gown in spider latex. It was white, in the translucent white of spun glass, but no whiter than the flesh it concealed. Only the nipples were darker under the folds of the garment, smoke-tinted, diminutive, and the body hair was colourless. Her fingernails and toenails were lacquered in silver, and her lips were ivory-white with cosmetic. The pink of her eyes was generously extended by means of suitably matched stain over the entire surface of the cornea, lending her a transcendental air of remote ghostliness. But for all that she was as real and as physical as any woman Aubretia had ever known.