The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

In the old days, I am told, there used to be more explicit sexual bits in the films. But on television these days, as in the theater, they are very cagey. I heard one master from the upper school, who is reputed to be a wild unrestrained type, call this a second Victorian Age. According to him, every time we get a queen reigning to a ripe old age, it’s nearing the end of the century: and people are afraid the millennium will come at the end of 1999. So what with one thing and another, they are fearfully prudish.

Which is ridiculous, because when the naked torso was the fashion they could not have hidden the pot-bellied things they wear these days.

I asked my father one day what happened when people got pot-bellied.

“You know all about that from school, surely, son.”

“Well, no, it’s the one thing they’ve never taught us.”

“Why did you want to know? It’s not always good to know these things.”

“Well, I didn’t—I mean, well, the boys at school talk about it in the playground. I’m getting pretty big now, dad, nearly eleven. I ought to know what they mean by now.”

“I see. I shall have to talk to your head teacher, Rich, I can see that. Anyway, pot bellies are just when people get fat around the lower part of the abdomen. People eat too much these days.”

“Oh . . . Only they said at school it wasn’t that. Gluttony is frowned on now, and drinking too much. But people still have—”

“That is enough, Rich. In a year or two you will be grown up enough to be able to understand. In the meantime you have had at least two years of education in biology, and you know all about the primitive sex processes.”

I knew when to be quiet. Parents were not so strict in the middle of the twentieth century, so the history books say, and it was a bad thing. I wonder if that is why people are ashamed and hide their sexual excesses now. Do as I say and not as I do, etcetera—unwilling hypocrisy, but they can’t help it. But that mention of “primitive” sex, it foxed me, because Edwards asked at school what “primitive” meant, and was told that it referred to an early form before it developed. Well, there are two sorts of development, natural maturation and scientific application, and I do not believe the scientific part has been explained to us yet.

Before I peeped and saw, I had just about worked it out. It was a diffident sort of guess, but I reckon it proves what Socrates said. People may not believe me, but I was on the right lines. It was more than those funny ideas I had as a small boy—that people grew their tails long, or that they carried a little hairy monkey about inside their trousers. I tied it up with the artificial creation of living tissue over twenty years ago. These days they are always coming up with new forms of living tissue: they can give you a new body for an old one in bits or in toto nowadays. And they have perfected their methods so much that the so-called artificial one is better than the natural one. After all, they have eliminated all those subtle differences between the chemical product and the equivalent natural one, which was one major advance in many.

Now if you see people lose a leg, as I did once (rather, it had to be removed later) and a few months later they’ve grown a new one, why not improve on the natural, or primitive, sexual organs? I am beginning to agree with an aunt of mine who, in an episode I won’t relate, told me there was no pleasure in sex; the sensation of pleasure was in the mind, not the organ or nerve. Well, what if you did get a better organ? If you’re not much of a chap anyway, it would do you no good unless it had a psychological improvement on your confidence.

I have more evidence of this point. The only other clue I had before I was thirteen and registered as an adolescent was hearing a conversation between two old men: all they did was complain that the new pot bellies had not solved people’s sexual problems after all.

Except the time when I peeped. It was on the beach one day when the sun was very hot and a lot of people sat perspiring in their many light clothes. All of a sudden a woman began to scream and clutch at the lower part of her body, as if to pull something off. After a while women started gathering round and trying to help. But she was desperate and tore her costume, an enveloping thing, until this sort of huge fleshy roll could be seen clinging to her. It could have been a flabby woman’s breast, or a fantastic roll of fat, but this would be a bit too unlikely, I reckon. The woman pulled at it, and it gave and stretched out like a tentacle and —”Get away! You nasty little boy. How dare you peep! Go away.” After a screech like that I crawled away.

Going to the sexiatrist was the call-up day for coming-of-age even more than one’s initiation into the forces came through the medical examination. It was with mixed feelings that I faced the ceremony, having had an enjoyable childhood with no great attraction urging me into manhood. I reported at the Center, and a nurse took my particulars. I signed an agreement that I was prepared to undertake the responsibilities of adulthood; all rather vague, as it was a matter of contracting out to avoid the consequences rather than contracting in. Had I refused, I should have had twenty forms to sign and dozens of conditions written in in fine print. Either that, I had heard, or I ended up in a harsh institution for the backward.

First a doctor checked my family doctor’s assessment of my sexual age. He examined me with that frankness and propriety that scientific control over sexual phenomena demanded, took blood samples and a tiny piece of my skin, looked into my eyes and checked my height, coloring and so on. Most of the time I was modestly allowed to keep my pants on, even though I was stripped of all else, including my watch.

After going through the mass radiography room, the cancer-heat-test room and other places, and receiving various boosters against the various plagues, I was sent home, walking out with a curious sense of illness-at-ease, ordinariness and anticlimax.

It took me by surprise to get another Ministry postcard two weeks later, requesting my presence once more at the Sexual Health Center. This time it was in the afternoon, and the nurse ushered me into the doctor’s other surgery with a little more respect. There was a tiny holding of the breath and it made me more expectant.

“Good afternoon, Andrews. Nice to see you again. Still feeling in good health?”

“Yes, sir, thank you.” One never admits that one has never felt quite the same since being pumped with inoculatives.

“Ready to have a consex fitted! Now, Andrews, this is a most private matter which I think will explain itself. We are not afraid to be scientific about sex as a subject, but I trust you will keep this to yourself. If you are not completely satisfied— for any reason whatsoever —tell no one but come and see me. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“I am a sexiatrist, actually, not a doctor. Now come and look in this glass container.”

I looked. As I believe it usually does to others, it struck me with a sort of horror to see this thing alive, a collapsed sort of dumpling with ordinary human skin, sitting in its case like a part of a corpse that had been cut off.

“Get used to it,” he said. “It’s only ordinary flesh. It has a tiny pulse with a primitive sort of heart, and blood and muscle. And fat. It’s just flesh. Alive, of course, but perfectly harmless.”

He lifted the lid and touched it. It gave, then formed round his finger. He moulded it like dough or plasticine and it gave way, though it tended to roll back to a certain shapelessness.

“Touch it.”

“I couldn’t.”