“Yeah. Your ass has better uses.”
“My mother says Tyler’s broken the social contract,” Erno said.
“Does your mother-” Ty said, still rowing, “-keep your balls under her pillow?”
Sid laughed.
Erno wanted to grab Ty and tell him, I was there. I helped him do it! But he said nothing. He pulled on the machine. His face burned.
After a minute Erno picked up his towel and went to the weight machine. No one paid him any attention. Twenty minutes later he hit the sauna. Sweating in the heat, sullen, resentful. He had been there, had taken a bigger risk than any of these fan-boys.
Coming out of the sauna he saw Sid heading for the sex rooms, where any woman who was interested could find a male partner who was willing. Erno considered posting himself to one of the rooms. But he wasn’t a stud; he was just an anonymous minor male. He had no following. It would be humiliating to sit there waiting for someone, or worse, to be selected by some old bag.
A day later Erno got himself one of the T-shirts. Wearing it didn’t make him feel any better.
It came to him that maybe this was the test Tyler intended: not whether Erno would tell about the Philosopher’s Stone before it happened, but whether he would admit he’d helped set it after he saw the uproar it caused in the colony.
If that was the test, Erno was failing. He thought about calling Tyler’s apartment, but the constables were sure to be monitoring that number. A new rumor had it Tyler had been captured and was being held in protective custody-threats had been made against his life-until the Board of Matrons could decide when and how to impose the invisibility. Erno imagined Tyler in some bare white room, his brain injected with nanoprobes, his neck fitted with a collar.
At biotech, Erno became aware of something he had never noticed before: how the women assumed first pick of the desserts in the cafeteria. Then, later, when he walked by their table, four women burst into laughter. He turned and stared at them, but they never glanced at him.
Another day he was talking with a group of engineers on break: three women, another man, and Erno. Hana from materials told a joke: “What do you have when you have two little balls in your hand?”
The other women grinned. Erno watched the other man. He stood as if on a trapdoor, a tentative smile on his face. The man was getting ready to laugh, because that was what you did when people told jokes, whether or not they were funny. It was part of the social contract-somebody went into joke-telling mode, and you went into joke- listening mode.
“A man’s undivided attention,” Hana said.
The women laughed. The man grinned.
“How can you tell when a man is aroused?” Pearl said. “-He’s breathing.”
“That isn’t funny,” Erno said.
“Really? I think it is,” Hana said.
“It’s objectification. Men are just like women. They have emotions, too.”
“Cool off, Erno,” said Pearl. “This isn’t gender equity class.”
“There is no gender equity here.”
“Someone get Erno a T-shirt.”
“Erno wants to be invisible.”
“We’re already invisible!” Erno said, and stalked off. He left the lab, put on his suit, and took the next bus back to the dome. He quit going to his practicum: he would not let himself be used anymore. He was damned if he would go back there again.
A meeting to discuss what to do about the missing comedian was disrupted by a group of young men marching and chanting outside the meeting room. Constables were stationed in public places, carrying clubs. In online discussion rooms, people openly advocated closing the Men’s Houses for fear conspiracies were being hatched in them.
And Erno received another message. This one was from “Harry Callahan.”
Are you watching, Erno? If you think our gender situation is GROSS, you can change it. Check exposition.
Crimes of Violence
The incidence of crimes of violence among the cousins is vanishingly small. Colony archives record eight murders in sixty years. Five of them were man against man, two man against woman, and one woman against woman.
This does not count -vigilante acts of women against men, but despite the lack of official statistics, such incidents too are rare.
“It’s no trick to be celibate when you don’t like sex.”
“That’s the point,” Erno insisted. “He does like sex. He likes sex fine. But he’s making a sacrifice in order to establish his point: He’s not going to be a prisoner of his dick.”
Erno was sitting out on the ledge of the terrace in front of their apartment, chucking pebbles at the recycling bin at the corner and arguing with his cousin Lena. He had been arguing with a lot of people lately, and not getting anywhere. Every morning he still left as if he were going to biotech, but instead he hung out in the park or gym. It would take some time for his mother to realize he had dropped out.
Lena launched into a tirade, and Erno was suddenly very tired of it all. Before she could gain any momentum, he threw a last pebble that whanged off the bin, got up and, without a word, retreated into the apartment. He could hear Lena’s squawk behind him.
He went to his room and opened a screen on his wall. The latest news was that Tashi Yokiosson had regained consciousness, but that he had suffered neurological damage that might take a year or more to repair. Debate on the situation raged on the net. Erno opened his documents locker and fiddled with a melancholy sonnet he was working on, but he wasn’t in the mood.
He switched back to Tyler’s cryptic message. You can change it. Check exposition. It had something to do with biotech, Erno was pretty sure. He had tried the public databases, but had not come up with anything. There were databases accessible only through the biotech labs, but he would have to return to his practicum to view them, and that would mean he would have to explain his absence. He wasn’t ready for that yet.
On impulse, Erno looked up Tyler in the colony’s genome database. What was the name Debrasdaughter had called him?-Marysson, Thomas Marysson. He found Tyler’s genome. Nothing about it stood out.
Debaters had linked Tyler’s bio to the genome. Marysson had been born thirty-six years ago. His mother was a second-generation cousin; his grandmother had arrived with the third colonization contingent, in 2038. He had received a general education, neither excelling nor failing anything. His mother had died when he was twenty. He had moved out into the dorms, had worked uneventfully in construction and repair for fourteen years, showing no sign of rebelliousness before reinventing himself as Tyler Durden, the Comedian.
Until two years ago, absolutely nothing had distinguished him from any of a thousand male cousins.
Bored, Erno looked up his own genome.
There he lay in rows of base pairs, neat as a tile floor. Over at biotech, some insisted that everything you were was fixed in those sequences in black and white. Erno didn’t buy it. Where was the gene for desire there, or hope, or despair, or frustration? Where was the gene that said he would sit in front of a computer screen at the age of seventeen, boiling with rage?
He called up his mother’s genome. There were her sequences. Some were the same as his. Of course there was no information about his father. To prevent dire social consequences, his father must remain a blank spot in his history, as far as the Society of Cousins was concerned. Maybe some families kept track of such things, but nowhere in the databases were fathers and children linked.
Of course they couldn’t stop him from finding out. He knew others who had done it. His father’s genome was somewhere in the database, for medical purposes If he removed from his own those sequences that belonged to his mother, then what was left-at least the sequences she had not altered when she had planned him-belonged to his father. He could cross check those against the genomes of all the colony’s men.
