* * * * *
Bowren moved down a winding lane between exotic blossoms, through air
saturated with the damp scent of night-blooming flowers. He walked
cautiously enough, but in a kind of daze, his mind spinning. The
appearance of those men remained in his mind. When he closed his eyes
for a moment, he could see them.
Perfectly groomed, impeccably dressed, smiling, vital, bronze-skinned,
delicate, yet strong features; the kind of male who might be considered,
Bowren thought, to be able to assert just the right degree of
aggressiveness without being indelicate.
Why, he thought, they've found perfect men, their type of men.
He dodged behind a tree. Here it was again. Same play, same scene
practically, only the players were two other people. A couple standing
arm in arm beside a big pool full of weird darting fish and throwing
upward a subdued bluish light. Music drifted along the warm currents of
air. The couple were silhouetted by the indirect light. The pose is
perfect, he thought. The setting is perfect.
"You're so wonderful, darling," the man was saying, "and I get so lonely
without you. I always see your face, hear your voice, no matter how long
you're away."
"Do you? Do you?"
"Always. Your hair so red, so dark it seems black in certain lights.
Your eyes so slanted, so dark a green they seem black usually too. Your
nose so straight, the nostrils flaring slightly, the least bit too much
sometimes. Your mouth so red and full. Your skin so smooth and dark. And
you're ageless, darling. Being married to you five years, it's one
exciting adventure."
"I love you so," she said. "You're everything any woman could want in a
husband. Simply everything, yet you're so modest with it all. I still
remember how it used to be. Back there ... with the other men I mean?"
"You should forget about _them_, my dear."
"I'm forgetting, slowly though. It may take a long time to forget
completely. Oh, he was such an unpleasant person, so uninteresting after
a while. So inconsiderate, so self-centered. He wasn't romantic at all.
He never said he loved me, and when he kissed me it was mere routine. He
never thought about anything but his work, and when he did come home at
night, he would yell at me about not having ordered the right dinner
from the cafelator. He didn't care whether he used hair remover on his
face in the mornings or not. He was surly and sullen and selfish. But I
could have forgiven everything else if he had only told me every day
that he loved me, that he could never love anyone else. The things that
you do and say, darling."
"I love you," he said. "I love you, I love you. But please, let's not
talk about _him_ anymore. It simply horrifies me!"
Bowren felt the sudden sickening throbbing of his stomach. The
description. Now the slight familiarity of voice. And then he heard the
man say, murmuring, "Lois ... darling Lois...."
Lois! LOIS!
Bowren shivered. His jowls darkened, his mouth pressed thin by the
powerful clamp of his jaws. His body seemed to loosen all over and he
fell into a crouch. Tiredness and torn nerves and long-suppressed
emotion throbbed in him, and all the rage and suppression and
frustration came back in a wave. He yelled. It was more of a sound, a
harsh prolonged animal roar of pain and rage and humiliation.
"Lois ..." He ran forward.
She gasped, sank away as Bowren hit the man, hard. The man sighed and
gyrated swinging his arms, teetering and flipped backward into the pool
among the lights and the weird fish. A spray of cold water struck
Bowren, sobering him a little, sobered his burst of mindless passion
enough that he could hear the shouts of alarm ringing through the trees.
He turned desperately.
Lois cringed. He scarcely remembered her now, he realized. She was
different. He had forgotten everything except an image that had changed
with longing. She hadn't been too impressive anyway, maybe, or maybe she
had. It didn't matter now.
He tried to run, tried to get away. He heard Lois' voice, high and
shrill. Figures closed in around him. He fought, desperately. He put a
few temporarily out of the way with the neurogun, but there were always
more. Men, men everywhere. Hundreds of men where there should be no men
at all. Well-groomed, strong, bronzed, ever-smiling men. It gave him
intense pleasure to crack off a few of the smiles. To hurl the gun,
smash with his fists.
Then the men were swarming all over him, the clean faces, the smiling
fragrant men, and he went down under the weight of men.
He tried to move. A blow fell hard and his head smashed against the
rocks. He tried to rise up, and other blows beat him down and he was
glad about the darkness, not because it relieved the pain, but because
it curtained off the faces of men.
* * * * *
After a time it was as though he was being carried through a dim
half-consciousness, able to think, too tired to move or open his eyes.
He remembered how the men of Earth had rationalized a long time, making
a joke out of it. Laughing when they hadn't wanted to laugh, but to
hate. It had never been humorous. It had been a war between the sexes,
and the women had finally won, destroying the men psychologically, the
race physically. Somehow they had managed to go on with a culture of
their own.
The war between the sexes had never really been a joke. It had been
deadly serious, right from the beginning of the militant feminist
movements, long before the last big war. There had always been basic
psychological and physiological differences. But woman had refused to
admit this, and had tried to be the "equal" if not the better of men.
For so long woman had made it strictly competitive, and in her
subconscious mind she had regarded men as wonderful creatures, capable
of practically anything, and that woman could do nothing better than to
emulate them in every possible way. There was no such thing as a woman's
role unless it had been the same as a man's. That had gone on a long
time. And it hadn't been a joke at all.
How ironic it was, there at the last! All of man's work through the ages
had been aimed at the stars. And the women had assumed the final phase
of conquest!
For a long time women had been revolting against the masculine symbols,
the levers, pistons, bombs, torpedoes and hammers, all manifestations of
man's whole activity of overt, aggressive power.
The big H-bombs of the last great war had seemed to be man's final
symbol, destructive. And after that, the spaceships, puncturing space,
roaring outward, the ultimate masculine symbol of which men had dreamed
for so long, and which women had envied.
And then only the women could stand the acceleration. It was a
physiological fact. Nothing could change it. Nothing but what they had
done to Bowren.
All of man's evolutionary struggle, and the women had assumed the
climax, assumed all the past wrapped up in the end, usurped the effect,
and thereby psychologically assuming also all the thousands of years of
causation.
For being held down, being made neurotic by frustration and the
impossibility of being the "equal" of men, because they were
fundamentally psychologically and physiologically different, women had
taken to space with an age-old vengeance. Personal ego salvation.
But they hadn't stopped there. What had they done? What about the men? A
man for every woman, yet no men from Earth. That much Bowren knew.
Native Martians? What?
He had been transported somewhere in a car of some kind. He didn't
bother to be interested. He couldn't get away. He was held fast. He
refused to open his eyes because he didn't want to see the men who held
him, the men who had replaced him and every other man on Earth. The men
who were destroying the civilization of Earth.
The gimmicks whereby the women had rejected Earth and left it to wither
and die in neglect and bitter, bitter wonderment.
He was tired, very tired. The movement of the car lulled him, and he
drifted into sleep.
He opened his eyes and slowly looked around. Pretty pastel ceiling. A
big room, beautiful and softly furnished, with a marked absence of
metal, of shiny chrome, of harshness or brittle angles. It was something
of an office, too, with a desk that was not at all business-like, but
still a desk. A warm glow suffused the room, and the air was pleasantly
scented with natural smelling perfumes.
A woman stood in the middle of the room studying him with detached
interest. She was beautiful, but in a hard, mature, withdrawn way. She
was dark, her eyes large, liquid black and dominating her rather small
sharply-sculptured face. Her mouth was large, deeply red. She had a
strong mouth.
He looked at her a while. He felt only a deep, bitter resentment. He
felt good though, physically. He had probably been given something, an
injection. He sat up. Then he got to his feet.
She kept on studying him. "A change of clothes, dry detergent, and hair
remover for your face are in there, through that door," she said.