Madame and D’Jevier were shocked into silence. Not so Onsofruct, who cried, “Well, if you think we females are going to make a partner for it, forget it! I for one, am not going to do it. Let us have another Miscalculation. Let the world blow itself to Kingdom Come. I don’t care.”
59—Into The Fauxi-Dizalonz
Following Onsofruct’s outburst, the people on the ledge regrouped themselves in a mood of general discontent and befuddlement, the Hags and Madame taking refuge behind several large rocks at the western end of the ledge, the two men finding refuge at the eastern end. They could look upward and see movement among the standing stones, where the young people had gone to talk, or downward, where the tunneler levees were so solidly implanted they might as well have been made of stone.
At the female end of the ledge, Onsofruct said for the tenth time, “I won’t do it.”
“You expected Mouche to do it,” snapped D’Jevier.
“He is younger than we,” said Onsofruct. “He is more adaptable. If he won’t do, let the off-planet girl do it. That dancer. Let Questioner do it. She’s female.”
“If I were less bionic and more fleshy,” said Questioner, from a midpoint on the ledge, “I would leap at the chance for such an experience. Oh, yes, I would go with you.”
“You mistake me,” grated Onsofruct. “I refuse to go at all.”
“You are female. We need females. Why would you shirk your duty to your people?”
“I have never shirked my duty to my people.”
“Your duty at times must have been unpleasant,” said Questioner in a tone of barely repressed annoyance. “Keeping things as they are.”
Silence stretched. None of the three asked what she meant.
She continued, “When Mouche told us of our mistake, I castigated myself for stupidity. Then I wondered what else about your world I might have missed, and of course, once I started looking for it, I saw the mold, the pattern, which should have shouted to me from the beginning.”
“And what pattern is that?” asked D’Jevier.
Questioner came nearer, leaning against one of the stones. “I never have enough time, I seldom have skilled help, but I always have a surfeit of data. I know all that there is to know about life here and there, including on Old Earth. There, historically, various hierarchies were preoccupied with Cura Mulierum, the care of women. Of course, in order to care for women, it is first necessary to make both men and women believe that women cannot care for themselves.”
“True,” said Madame. “So I have read.”
Questioner went on: “The care of women has always presented a problem for government or religion, for there were always leftover women who could not be conveniently disposed of.”
“Widows, I suppose,” said D’Jevier tonelessly. “Or women no one wants to marry. Or women who don’t want to marry.”
“Oh, all of those, yes,” said Questioner. “Plus women who do marry and can’t bear it, or prostitutes, or girls who have babies with no way to support them, or single mothers with large families, and wrinkled old crones hobbling about, muttering imprecations and getting in the way.”
“Handling surplus population is a perpetual challenge,” said Onsofruct. “Has it not been written that the poor are always with us?”
Questioner shook her head. “Handling surplus men isn’t that difficult. Just start a lively war or find some new frontier—there’s always dangerous work that needs doing. If that fails, one can create lethal rites of passage to kill off batches at a time. One needn’t pretend, not with men. The gang chief or general simply talks them into a fury and sends them into battle, and then gives them a medal after they’re maimed or dead. Or, the employer gets them to use up their lives in a factory and then tosses them aside with a memento and an inadequate pension. Team spirit does the rest.”
“The same would apply to women,” said Madame.
“Women are not such good team players, so society has to enforce its control by pretending it’s for women’s own good. Then, too, women do produce babies, which multiplies the problem.”