He was right on both counts. “Though the ship section he was in consisted mostly of engines of whose function he had no notion, there were also three other staterooms. Two of these were deserted, but the third turned out to contain a battered member of his own staff, by name Robin One.
The young man was not yet conscious and 12-Up]‘ohn regarded him with a faint touch of despair. Robin One was perhaps the last man in space that the Consort of State would have chosen to be shipwrecked with.
That he was utterly expendable almost went without say-ing; he was, after all, a drone. When the perfection of sperm electrophoresis had enabled parents for the first time to predetermine the sex of their children, the predictable result had been an enormous glut of maleswhich was directly accountable for the present regime 6n Earth. By the time the people and the lawmakers, thoroughly frightened by the crazy years of fashion upheavals, “beefcake,” poly-andry, male prostitution, and all the rest, had come to their senses, the Matriarchy was in to stay; a weak electric current had overturned civilized society as drastically as the steel knife had demoralized the Eskimos.
Though the tide of excess males had since receded some-what, it had left behind a wrack, of which Robin One was a bubble. He was a drone, and hence superfluous by defini-tionfit only to be sent colonizing, on diplomatic missions or otherwise thrown away.
Superfluity alone, of course, could hardly account for his presence on 12-Upjohn’s staff. Officially, Robin One was an interpreter; actuallysince nobody could know the language the Consort of State might be called upon to understand on this missionhe was a poet, a class of unattached males with special privileges in the Matriarchy, particularly if what they wrote was of the middling-difficult or Hillyer Society sort. Robin One was an eminently typical member of this class, distractible, sulky, jealous, easily wounded, homo-sexual, lazy except when writing, and probably (to give him the benefit of the doubt, for 12-Upjohn had no ear whatever for poetry) the second-worst poet of his generation.