Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

Paul could only assume this was something he might feel differently about, someday. After all, his father had been happy with his mother once, although that of course was before Paul was born, before his father began his work on the Breeders Project. The first generations of geneslaves had been developed a century earlier on Earth. Originally they had been designed to toil in the lunar colonies and on Earth’s vast hydrofarms. But the reactionary gender policies of the current Ascendant administration suggested that there were other uses to which the geneslaves might be put.

Fritz Pathori had been a brilliant geneticist, with impressive ties to the present administration. Below, he had developed the prototype for the argala, a gormless creature that the Ascendants hoped would make human prostitution obsolete—though it was not the act itself the Ascendants objected to, so much as the active involvement of women. And at first the women had welcomed the argalæ. But that was before the femicides; before the success of the argalæ led Fritz Pathori to develop the first Breeders.

He had been an ethical man, once. Even now, Paul knew that it was the pressures of conscience that drove his father to the neural sauna. Because now, of course, his father could not stop the course of his research. He had tried, years before. That was how they had ended up exiled to Teichman Station, where Pathori and his staff had for many years lived in a state of house arrest, part of the dismal constellation of space stations drifting through the heavens and falling wearily and irretrievably into madness and decay.

A shaft of light flicked through the dormitory and settled upon Paul’s head. The boy dove beneath the covers, shoving the pamphlet into the crack between bedstand and mattress.

“Paul.” Father Dorothy’s whispered voice was surprised, shaming without being angry. The boy let his breath out and peered up at his tutor, clad in an elegant grey kimono, his long iron-colored hair unbound and falling to his shoulders. “What are you doing? What do you have there—”

His hand went unerringly to where Paul had hidden the pamphlet. The shaft of light danced across the yellowed pages, and the pamphlet disappeared into a kimono pocket.

“Mmm.” His tutor sounded upset. “Tomorrow I want to see you before class. Don’t forget.”

His face burning, Paul listened as the man’s footsteps padded away again. A minute later he gave a muffled cry as someone jumped on top of him.

“You idiot! Now he knows —”

And much of the rest of the night was given over to the plebeian torments of Claude.

He knew he looked terrible the next morning, when, still rubbing his eyes, he shuffled into Father Dorothy’s chamber.

“Oh dear.” The tutor shook his head and smiled ruefully. “Not much sleep, I would imagine. Claude?”

Paul nodded.

“Would you like some coffee?”

Paul started to refuse politely, then saw that Father Dorothy had what looked like real coffee, in a small metal tin stamped with Arabic letters in gold and brown. “Yes, please,” he nodded, and watched entranced as the tutor scooped it into a silver salver and poured boiling water over it.

“Now then,” Father Dorothy said a few minutes later. He indicated a chair, its cushions ballooning over its metal arms, and Paul sank gratefully into it, cupping his bowl of coffee. “This is all about the argala, isn’t it?”

Paul sighed. “Yes.”

“I thought so.” Father Dorothy sipped his coffee and glanced at the gravure of Father Sofia, founder of the Mysteries, staring myopically from the curved wall. “I imagine your mother is rather distressed—?”

“I guess so. I mean, she seems angry, but she always seems angry.”

Father Dorothy sighed. “This exile is particularly difficult for a person as brilliant as your mother. And this—” he pointed delicately at the pamphlet, sitting like an uninvited guest on a chair of its own. “This argala must be very hard for KlausMaria to take. I find it disturbing and rather sad, but considering your father’s part in developing these—things—my guess would be that your mother finds it, um, repellent —?”

Paul was still staring at the pamphlet; it lay open at one of the pages he hadn’t yet gotten to the night before. “Uh—um, oh yes, yes, she’s pretty mad,” he mumbled hastily, when he saw Father Dorothy staring at him.

The tutor swallowed the rest of his coffee. Then he stood and paced to the chair where the pamphlet lay, picked it up and thumbed through it dismissively, though not without a certain curiosity.

“You know it’s not a real woman, right? That’s part of what’s wrong with it, Paul—not what’s wrong with the thing itself, but with the act, with—well, everything. It’s a geneslave, it can’t enter into any sort of—relations—with anyone of its own free will. It’s a—well, it’s like a machine, except of course it’s alive. But it has ho thoughts of its own. They’re like children, you see, only incapable of thought, or language. Although of course we have no idea what other things they can do—strangle us in our sleep or drive us mad. They’re incapable of ever learning, or loving. They can’t suffer or feel pain or, well, anything —”

Father Dorothy’s face had grown red, not from embarrassment, as Paul first thought, but from anger—real fury, the boy saw, and he sank back into his chair, a little afraid himself now.

“—institutionalized rape, it’s exactly what Sofia said would happen, why she said we should start to protect ourselves—”

Paul shook his head. “But—wouldn’t it, I mean wouldn’t it be easier? For women: if they used the geneslaves, then they’d leave the women alone…”

Father Dorothy held the pamphlet open, to a picture showing an argala with its head thrown back. His face as he turned to Paul was still angry, but disappointed now as well. And Paul realized there was something he had missed, some lesson he had failed to learn during all these years of Father Dorothy’s tutelage.

“That’s right,” his tutor said softly. He looked down at the pamphlet between his fingers, the slightly soiled image with its gasping mouth and huge, empty eyes. He looked sad, and Paul’s eyes flickered down from Father Dorothy’s face to that of the argala in the picture. It looked very little like the one he had seen, really; but suddenly he was flooded with yearning, an overwhelming desire to see it again, to touch it and breathe again that warm scent, that smell of blue water and real sand and warm flesh pressed against cool cotton. The thought of seeing it excited him, and even though he knew Father Dorothy couldn’t see anything (Paul was wearing one of his father’s old robes, much too too big for him), Father Dorothy must have understood, because in the next instant the pamphlet was out of sight, squirrelled into a cubbyhole of his ancient steel desk.

“That’s enough, then,” he said roughly. And gazing at his tormented face Paul thought of what the man had done, to become an initiate into the Mysteries; and he knew then that he would never be able to understand anything his tutor wanted him to learn.

“It’s in there now, with your father! I saw it go in—”

Ira’s face was flushed, his hair tangled from running. Claude and Paul sat together on Claude’s bunk poring over another pamphlet, a temporary truce having been effected by this new shared interest.

“My father?” Paul said stupidly. He felt flushed, and cross at Ira for interrupting his reverie.

“The argala! It’s in there with him now. If we go we can listen at the door—everyone else is still at dinner.”

Claude closed the pamphlet and slipped it beneath his pillow. He nodded, slowly, then reached out and touched Ira’s curls. “Let’s go, then,” he said.