A World Between (19 page)

The Pacifican hydrofoil had taken them to an anonymous little building on an isolated outlying island of the capital, and there they had been kept under virtual house arrest until this meeting with Carlotta Madigan in her office in the Parliament building. Hydrofoil crew, guards, even the cooks in the building where they were held were all strutting atavistic breeders, machos straight out of the history tapes. The Pacificans seemed to be deliberately isolating them from all contact with the local sisters.

At Cynda’s suggestion, they had spent their confinement monitoring the Pacifican media net. As Bara had expected, the Transcendental Scientists were already campaigning for an Institute, and by the foulest imaginable appeals to the faschochauvinist tendencies present in all breeders. Well, that was excellent! The more those faschochauvinist Fausts worked on the male Pacifican psyche, the more blatant and obvious the macho loathsomeness of the Pacifican breeders would become in the eyes of even these unenlightened sisters. The classic strategy was to polarize the sexes, and then lead the sisters in the struggle to seize their rightful dominion; by polarizing the breeders in support of their Institute, the Transcendental Scientists were only serving as the unwitting allies of Femocracy.

And now Cynda Elizabeth was doing an excellent job of securing the necessary freedom of action from the Pacifican government—you had to give the little breeder-lover
that!
The four of them had been sitting in Madigan’s little office for half an hour now, and Bara had swallowed her distaste and let the official “Leader” do most of the talking for her.

“I suppose it
would
he a bit unreasonable to confine your entire crew to your ship until repairs are completed,” Carlotta Madigan was saying. "Assuming everything is as you say it is.”

“Feel free to inspect the ship if you like,” Cynda said ingenuously. “You’ll find everything as I’ve described it. Two hundred sisters in Deep Sleep. Our ships just aren’t large enough to maintain life-support and living space for so many passengers.”

“And it would be cruel and inhuman not to allow them to wake up and stretch their legs,” Madigan’s breeder said sardonically. The presence of this Royce Lindblad—a particularly loathsome specimen of the male animal—had been the hardest thing for Bara to take thus far. Perhaps it was because she had been instantly attracted to Madigan herself—a proud sister brimming with sexual magnetism and charismatic power, a natural aristocrat in the raw. How Td like to show her what sisters should be to each other! Bara thought.

But it was all too disgustingly obvious that this Lindblad habitually violated Madigan’s flower with his vile piercer. To make matters worse, Madigan allowed her breeder to take part in this discussion as a near-equal, and far from deferring to her obediently, he seemed to regard this untoward privilege as his natural right.

‘Tm glad you agree,” Cynda said, smiling at Lindblad. “We’re not asking for official hospitality. We’ll pay our own way and we’ll stay in ordinary facilities and take care of our own.”

Bara Dorothy shook her head subliminally. Now
that’s
why using a Leader like Cynda Elizabeth is a stroke of genius! she thought. True, she’s loaded with atavistic breeder-loving tendencies and he’s ideologically unreliable, but what
other
kind of sister could adapt to dealing with the locals this smoothly, even to the point of smiling at this arrogant breeder and treating him like an equal? Certainly not me!

“All well and good,” Lindblad snapped with incredible macho insolence. “But what are you doing here in the first place?”

“I told you,” Cynda said benignly, “we were struck by a meteor and—”

“Yeah, but what right did you think you had to come to Pacifica without prior clearance in the first place?”

Bara could tolerate this insolence no longer. “We weren’t on our way to Pacifica,” she snapped. “We were on our way to Alcheron, on a technical assistance mission, when our ship was disabled. This was the nearest solar system and—”

“Alcheron’s a Femocrat planet, isn’t it?” Lindblad said harshly.

“So?” But Bara saw that this damnable breeder had guessed the truth. If they checked with Alcheron, Alcheron would back up the cover story that had been worked out long in advance, before the damage to the ship had been faked. This creature was saying that confirmation from Alcheron would be credible proof of nothing.

Madigan glanced at Lindblad, as if they were confirming some unstated psychic agreement, as if she were consulting him. Lindblad shrugged, and only then did Madigan speak. She had actually looked to him for guidance!

“I suppose we have to take your explanation at face value, then,” Madigan said. “Since we have no charge to hold your people on.”

“I’m sorry you feel you must put it on such a legalistic basis,” Cynda said with amazing glacial calm, still playing the unruffled diplomat.

“We’re a democratic society,” Lindblad said. “We have laws and a Constitution and we abide by them—even when our instincts tell us to do otherwise.”

“Is that why you’ve allowed the Transcendental Scientists to spew their faschochauvinist filth into your media net?” Bara said. Cynda Elizabeth shot her a disapproving look. Couldn’t the little fool see that the breeder had just given them the opening they were waiting for? For a mad moment, Bara almost envied the way Madigan and her breeder seemed to be able to coordinate wordlessly, to speak and think as one.

“That’s precisely why,” Lindblad said, staring her down. Cynda Elizabeth finally picked up on the situation. '‘Then I suppose you won’t mind if we do something similar?” she said rhetorically. “True, we’re here by accident, but we feel it our duty to counteract such faschochauvinist propaganda whenever we encounter it. A free exchange of ideas is the essence of democracy, isn’t it?”

The breeder laughed sardonically.

“I said something funny?”

Madigan smiled ruefully. “Your request wasn’t exactly unanticipated,” she said ironically. “What are you asking for, a full-time net channel?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Cynda said. “We’ll buy time on the regular free market channels as we need it. In return for your cooperation, we’ll be glad to make a donation.”

“A donation?”

“We have a large library of tapes on our ship,” Cynda said. “History, philosophy, cultural material, and so forth. We’d be happy to read them all into your public access-banks—free of charge.”

“Most magnanimous,” Lindblad said.

“We don’t believe in making a profit off knowledge,” Cynda said. “We don’t have a capitalistic economy. Do you agree to these arrangements?”

“As you no doubt know, we have no legal alternative,” Madigan said.

“I’d hoped we could interact in a spirit of friendship,” Cynda said. “Not on the narrow basis of legality.”

“You’ve gotten what you wanted, so spare us any further jellybelly oil!” Lindblad snapped. “We’re not idiots. We know why you’re here, we know you’ve trapped us in our own Constitution, we don’t really believe your ship was forced down by accident, and we don’t like any of it. You’ve been allowed to remain because of our humanitarian instincts, you’ve been granted media access because on Pacifica the rule of law supercedes political expediency and sometimes even plain common sense, though I wouldn’t expect
you
to understand the reasons why.”

Bara Dorothy bolted to her feet, hands balled into fists, and glared at Madigan. “This is intolerable!” she shouted. “Are you going to allow a
breeder
to speak to a fellow sister like that in your presence?”

Madigan looked back at her with eyes of frozen ice. “Royce is the Pacifican Minister of Media,” she said coldly. “He has every right to speak his own mind. Moreover, in this case, he is speaking for my administration.”

“You mean to say that this—”

“Shut up, Bara!” Cynda Elizabeth snapped unexpectedly. She shrugged at Madigan; she actually forced a smile. “You’ll have to excuse my colleague,” she said. “Our ways are not your ways, and she’s experiencing a bit of culture shock.” .

Lindblad smiled a glacial smile. “On Pacifica, even
she
has the right to mouth off as she pleases,” he said. “Perhaps some day you’ll come to see the wisdom of that.”

“Perhaps...” Cynda said in a most peculiar tone of voice. Slowly, Bara’s anger subsided. The little breeder-lover
is
a diplomat, she thought, and I certainly am not. From each according to her abilities...

Madigan rose. “You’ve been granted freedom of the planet and free media access under Pacifican law,” she said formally. “I believe we have nothing further to discuss at this time. This meeting is therefore ended.”

The curt dismissal left Bara Dorothy with highly ambiguous feelings about the outcome. Legally speaking, they had gotten everything they sought to obtain.

But although Bara had expected unyielding hostility from the Pacifican breeders, Carlotta Madigan’s hostility had surprised, disturbed, and confused her. Here was a woman who ruled a whole planet, a paradigm of the sisterly virtues, and she seemed almost as hostile to Femocracy as some macho breeder! A natural Femocrat herself, she had allowed this breeder to control the tone of this meeting like some pre-Holocaust wisp. It didn’t add up, it didn’t make sense, and worst of all, Cynda Elizabeth seemed to sync right into this alien situation.

Whatever the flaw in Cynda that made this possible, it was clearly necessary and useful, at least for the moment, as long as the psychological tendency did not translate itself into loathsome deed. With the deliberate exception of Cynda Elizabeth, the entire staff of this mission had had unusually rigorous depth-screening to weed out sisters with potential deviant tendencies. Nevertheless, Bara realized that on Pacifica, ideological discipline was going to have to be even more tightly maintained than she had supposed. The planet reeked of perversion, and of a peculiarly subtle and insidious kind. The place seemed almost deliberately designed to bring about the worst in the best of sisters.

In a strange and sinister way, the example of a Carlotta Madigan, sexually perverted, but politically potent, was more dangerous than any male faschochauvinist could be.

9

T
HE MISSION HAD RENTED THE THIRD FLOOR OF THE
S
IRIUS,
a modest hotel on one of the bigger islands in the heart of downtown Gotham. Most of the rooms had been converted into dormitories for the staff who remained in Gotham by the simple process of jamming them with cots, and the others were converted into office space by installing the necessary net consoles, files, desks, and computers among the original furnishings of the suites. Bara Dorothy had insisted upon doing it this way—not only were Fem-ocracy’s galactic credit reserves slimmer than it was politic to reveal, but it made good sense to keep the central operation as inconspicuous as possible, at least during the current phase.

While Cynda made the grand tour of Pacifica, Bara remained in Gotham, coordinating the campaign and planning the media blitz with Mary Maria, the psywar expert, who dealt with the local Pacifican production companies and the Ministry of Media.

The opening phase of the campaign was two-pronged. Cynda traveled from place to place in a rented liner with an entourage of about twenty Tutors. At each stop, she was met by a few other Tutors who traveled singly on public transportation. When Cynda’s party traveled on, a local cell was left to function; with such complex comings and goings it would be difficult for the Pacifican authorities to realize that a planetwide network was being set up.

Meanwhile, the media campaign was run from Gotham Central, the local Tutors set up cells within the city, some subtle lobbying of female Delegates was begun, and Bara Dorothy coordinated the total effort from her office in the Sirius, avoiding all contact with the locals. She had enough insight to realize that she simply couldn’t interact diplomatically with the Pacificans, nor did she have the stomach to try.

So here I sit, she thought, isolated in this office almost as if I were back on the B-31, functioning entirely through subordinates. Her office had been the largest and perhaps most garishly furnished suite on the floor—burgundy walls, a tented white ceiling, a huge gilded oval bed, a large holo-mural of a mountain scene that cycled from sunrise to sunset to a surreally bright night to sunrise again in sync with local Gotham time, ornate bongowood tables, a brown velvet couch, and a magnifying mirror over the bed. The original Pacifican furnishings were still in place—she even slept in the obscene bed—but the boudoir effect had been mercifully destroyed by the functional additions: a plain gray net console, a small computer, a cheap no-nonsense desk, three tape-files, and a big demographic map of Pacifica.

Bara studied the map with growing satisfaction. Areas of densest female population—Gotham, the Island Continent, the antarctic city of Valhalla—were in pale red. The eastern third of Columbia was an intermediate yellow, the Wastes and the jungles of the barely habitable Horn were neutral white except for the small yellow dot of Hollywood, and the Cords were a sinister deep blue. Silver pins indicated Tutor cells already in place and green pins indicated planned locations. The pins were clustered heavily around Gotham, throughout the towns of the Island Continent and Valhalla, and sprinkled along the length of the Big Blue River. There was one pin at Hollywood and none at all in the cords. About two-thirds of the pins were already silver.

Wanda Claudine entered the office through the permanently open door, a slim little blond who had gotten off twice with Bara since they had landed on Pacifica. She smiled at Bara, twitching her trim little backside as she went to the map, took out a green pin along the northeastern shore, and replaced it with a silver one. Bara felt a twinge of desire.

“Eat a little honey tonight, Wanda?” she asked.

Wanda beamed at her—perhaps, Bara thought, a little falsely. “Always a pleasure and an honor, Bara,” she said. “After dinner?”