Regiment of Women (28 page)

The protective device did not work as well as he had anticipated. The blow pushed the cup against his penis, his phallus pressed against his testicles, and the latter were squashed against his thighs. It was hardly better than no guard at all. He clutched himself and bent over.

She said: “You're being silly, Georgie. When I come in with breakfast, I'd like to see you back in your makeup and wig. Good night, dear.” She left the room.

V
IRGINIA
W
OOLF
, 1928

C
ORNELL
WAS
AWAKENED
by the sound of the key in the lock. He was lying, nude below the waist, on his opened skirt; during the writhings of sleep, caused by a dream he could not remember, the waistband closure had burst.

He covered his bare groin with both hands as Aster entered with the breakfast tray, the cup of cocoa and sweet roll. She placed it on the vanity and turned to him. He felt that a guilty effort to close the skirt would be inept and undignified: he had had enough of that sort of thing.

She smiled sympathetically. “Good morning, Georgie. Go right ahead with what you're doing. As it happens, I got to thinking last night that perhaps we hadn't gone back far enough in your therapeutic reprise: perhaps the late teen years were too recent, and we should try early pubescence. Instinctively you had already arrived at that conclusion on your own, taken off your makeup and wig, and now I find you playing with yourself. Excellent!”

Cornell stared at her. “I'm not masturbating.”

“Then what
are
you doing?”

“I'm protecting myself.”

Her smile turned derisive.

“Nobody wants to steal that little thing of yours, believe me.” Now she was candidly sneering. “What would she do with it?”

Cornell leaped up, seized her, and hurled her onto the bed. He ripped at her uniform, but the fabric was too strong for him, and he had to denude her by less passionate means, unbuttoning, unbuckling, and opening the zipper in the standard way. For women's clothes were rape-resistant, unlike the attire of men.

He had stripped her to T-shirt and jockey shorts when it came to his notice for the first time that she was not resisting, indeed had not moved of her own will since being hurled to the bed, had been lifted and shoved like a dummy filled with sand. She was unconscious. She had banged her skull on the bedstead.

He put his ear to the low bulge of her left bosom. Her heart was ticking stanchly away. He rolled up the T-shirt, exposing the broad flat band of canvaslike fabric which depressed her bosoms. He raised the heavy, warm, unconscious trunk and undid the chest-band fasteners in back: they were of the same sort as those on a man's bra, though of a thicker gauge of wire. He peeled off the band.

The size of her naked breasts amazed him. Cornell had never seen any except in pornographic pictures of the sort owned by Charlie. Hers were much larger than his synthetic ones had been, though not as well shaped. In fact, hers had no shape at all, being neither spheres nor cones, but big soft blobs of flesh which flowed into her armpits when she lay flat. However, when he elevated her back, they developed the form of canteloupes carried in a string bag, and sagged almost to her waist.

He took one gently into his palm: so warm, so soft and yet massive, substantial, actual. The lieutenant murmured, and through her living flesh he felt the sound.

He looked up. Her mouth was trembling slightly, though not with what seemed discomfort or disgust. He lowered his head and took her nipple in his lips, like a baby with the feeding tube. He had no conscious memory of his own time as an infant, but at one point during his years with Dr. Prine she had suggested he had some sort of fixation on his birth facility, No. 1183, in Jersey City, and as a therapeutic measure on the following Sunday he had gone over there and taken the guided tour.

From a glass-enclosed balcony he and the other visitors, all male, looked down on the ranks of stainless-steel incubating tanks being tended by white-uniformed attendants. Of course he had no way of recognizing which of the capsules had borne him, if indeed it was still in service after all these years.

A high spot of the tour had been the actual delivery of a baby. A technician checked the dials, threw a lever, opened a glass porthole of the type found on front-loading washers, and slid out a tray containing a newborn child. Then she snipped off the plastic umbilicus that attached it to the tray, knotted the end on the child's belly, held the infant by the ankles, and spanked it into life.

They could hear nothing on their enclosed balcony, but the little upside-down face was contorted as if it were crying. The baby was male. The genitals at birth were already very large relative to the size of the body.

Next they were conducted to a gallery overlooking one of the nurseries, where each rank of infants was separated from the next by a long horizontal cylinder from which feeding hoses ran to the cribs. There he saw babies sucking as he was now.

The tour ended with a visit to the enormous computer that named the new human beings as fast as they were born. It was linked electronically to the master system in Washington, D.C., and could issue every second a first-and-last-name combination which would not duplicate that of any other person born at that facility for a ten-year period. Thus there might now be a Georgie Cornell who was either nineteen or thirty-nine but not another who was twenty-nine in the Mideastern area of the country. That is, if the computer was working properly. One of the technicians ran off a demonstration name for the tour group: the little tag that emerged from the slot read:
Jhon Simth
.

Cornell encircled the breast with his two hands and pushed and worked and kneaded. The nipple grew until it seemed to fill his throat. His eyes were tightly shut, and he made sounds of the sort that issued from the newborn piglets he had once seen, on a school trip years before to the Children's Zoo: they sucked the dugs of an enormous sow. Not too long previously, they had come out of her belly. She was a huge, bristly, snouted thing, with tiny eyes. She was their “mother.” And they were drinking literal “mother's milk.” The children of course snickered, and one naughty boy whispered that word to Cornell, who, not then knowing it was obscene, repeated it to the teacher, who subsequently, back in class, made him write fifty times on the blackboard: “I have a foul mouth.”

The lieutenant's teat was dry. Cornell gave it up at last, took his mouth and hands away, and raised his head. Aster now was looking at him: her eyes were open, anyway, but she seemed to be in a coma.

He was not ashamed, even though he had stripped her to her shorts and himself below the waist, baring her breasts and his penis, because there could be no connection between those mutually exclusive organs, and it had never been his intention to kill her, and he had at no time so much as touched her genital region, and for a moment he was actually thinking that maybe he could get out of it somehow, dress her again, and resume the therapy as if nothing had happened. Because he was really at heart a good boy, and he had had a lot of troubles, and he wasn't criminal or crazy, and his phallus was limp, and she had always been understanding and generous.

But the blow on the head, or his piggishness at her paps, or both, had worked some awful change on her. She did not respond with voice or even a focus of eye. He had heard that people could be made idiotic by skull damage. He
knew
that women were killed by complete rape, and suspected they could be driven mad by an attempt—regardless of the lieutenant's newfangled theories: indeed, look where they had got her, stripped, helpless, supine, non compos mentis.

He climbed into her trousers, which were so tight in the waist that he could not close the fastener, but ran the zipper up as far as he could and hid the opening with the belt buckle. The legs were too short, the hips and seat too ample, but he was covered. Owing to the stoutness of her trunk, the shirt could be managed, though the cuffs came scarcely below mid-forearm. He rolled up the sleeves, and tried to remember how to knot the necktie. He was wearing no underwear. He retained the teenager anklets and penny loafers. He combed his hair female-style, with a part, and was ready to leave.

But what if Aster were suffering some damage which, if treated promptly, was reparable? Left alone and unreported, in this isolated place, she might remain interminably in a vegetable state. He went to her. She was still gazing at nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed, lifted her neck, and explored her scalp. It was wrong that she should have suffered for her liberalism. Never had he raised a hand against tyrannical Dr. Prine. He felt terribly tender towards poor Aster, lying there with bared breasts and in her jockey shorts, and he rubbed her neat pate. She wore a modified crewcut, but her hair was too silken to stand up. With his little finger he traced the convolutions of her delicately modeled ear, penetrating the shell-pink aperture….

Aster jerked her head away and next her trunk, reared up on the far elbow, and said, in an objective kind of voice: “I guess it didn't work. I bit off more than I could chew.”

Her melon breasts had dropped into their alternative position, the left one hanging very near his forearm.

“How do they get so big when they are bound all your life?” There was a certain resentment in his question.

She got off the bed and stood on the far side, hands on hips, without shame, in all her rounded softness.

She said levelly: “Now, Georgie, you stand up and take off my clothes.”

“I guess if they weren't bound they would grow even bigger.”

She lifted one hand and twitched the index finger.

“Come on.”

He cleared his head of the distracting wonderment and asked: “Are you O.K.?”

She continued to twitch her finger.

“I didn't intend to hurt you. I don't think I did, anyway.” He frowned. “Or maybe I did. Anyway, I
hope
I didn't. I mean both: I hope I didn't want to hurt you, and I hope I didn't hurt you.” Was he talking gibberish?

“I'm giving you a direct order,” said Aster. She had definitely changed.

He looked at her awhile. “If you're O.K., then it doesn't matter what I meant, I guess.”

She straightened her finger and pointed it at him like a weapon. “Let me tell you this, Georgie. Only I stand between you and emasculation. I've had enough of your nonsense. Now you drop those trousers and bend over.” She seized the rat-tailed hairbrush from the vanity table and held it by the bristle-end.

Cornell stared at the long, tapered handle. He shook his head, saying ironically, without fear: “I thought you belonged to the new school.”

He had struck home. She colored and turned the brush around. “I'm just going to spank your fanny. You've been a bad boy.”

But she had lost it by now and soon threw the brush down. “Just give me back my uniform, please. It doesn't fit you anyway. We'll forget what happened. This type of therapy is still in the formative stages. Obviously there are many bugs to iron out. That doesn't mean it won't work. We simply have to try harder. We must put accidents of this sort to a positive use.”

“You're scared,” he said, “and you're talking shit.” The ugly word seemed appropriate to his attire. “I stripped these clothes off you and I'm keeping them—unless you're big enough to take them back. It's as simple as that. If you're cold, put on the stuff I took off. I'm keeping the uniform, not because I prefer female clothes, which I've only worn when in some kind of crisis, but because I'm going to get out of here—out of this cell, out of the hospital, out of the camp.”

He raised a fist. “Don't try to stop me. If you are thinking of kicking or grabbing my balls, just remember your breasts are vulnerable too, and besides, they're naked.”

She crossed her arms on her bosom.

“Where will you go, Georgie? You're only running away from yourself.”

“I'm going to get away from women.”

“Where would that be? We are everywhere.” She made a mocking mouth. “There are supposed to be a few savage tribes, in remote spots like the South American jungles and New Guinea, where men are dominant, but women are still
there.”

“I don't want to be a boss,” Cornell shouted. “Can't you understand? I just don't want to be bossed. Is that crazy?”

“It's unrealistic. The human condition is such that, of two sexes, one will dominate. Men held power for centuries—”

“That's true?” shouted Cornell.

“—and lost it,” Aster said.

“That's not the history I was taught in school.”

“Naturally not. You don't dare tell that to children. They would be confused about authority. They wouldn't know what to believe.”

“But I haven't heard it since growing up, except from perverts and revolutionaries.”

“Well,” Aster said, still hugging herself, “it's simpler just to let it go unsaid. What harm does it do? And even many adult males might get the wrong idea if they knew. History is the bunk anyway. Life is lived
now.”

He asked: “You weren't unconscious at any time, there on the bed, were you? But you didn't resist, either. Why?”

“I was trying to understand.”

“Did you feel anything when I was sucking your breasts?”

She nodded vigorously. “You know I'm sincerely interested in curing you, Georgie. I'm paying most of the expenses out of my own pocket. But the whole experiment will go out the window if you run away. I'll be seriously embarrassed.”

“I don't mean that,” said Cornell. “I mean, did you feel anything
personal?”