Alien Sex полностью

“They have their own language, their own rituals. Those might differ from group to group, but the worst of it is, there are always two. Two separate classes, if you like. They’ve created certain differences… certain, consistent differences. Two types of language, two types of ritual. One group of children uses one, and one is for the other. No crossover allowed. You can’t change the group you belong to, once you’ve picked it… or once it’s picked you. I can’t quite work out how the division is determined, or how early it is established, but somehow they all seem to know. A two-year-old going to nursery for the first time—it’s settled before a word is spoken. They all know which group she belongs to, and there’s no mistake possible, no appeal allowed. Almost as if they can see signs we can’t—as if it were established at birth, the way sex used to be.” Rufinella looked at me steadily, yet somehow desperately. She was pleading, I realized; hoping that I would have some advice, some wisdom from the age before hers.

“You think they’re reinventing gender.”

She nodded.

“What do they say about it? Have you asked them?”

“They can’t explain it. They say that’s just how things are. They invent new languages, they create differences, but they talk about it as if they can’t help it. As if these are discoveries, not inventions.”

“Maybe—”

“Don’t say it! You mean that we’ve been blind for thirty-four years and now our children can see?”

I felt such longing, and such hope. I wished I were younger. I wanted another chance; I had always wanted another chance. I didn’t understand the despair on Rufinella’s face unless it was because she, too, knew she wouldn’t be a part of the coming age. I said, “Maybe they’ll get it right this time.”

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.”

Yes, I have been successful! I have dared to try, and managed to bring life to what to others has ever been only a dream: another race of beings, a partner-species, to end our long loneliness by being our planetary companions. Enough like us that we can communicate; yet different, so that each will have something worth communicating, bringing different visions, different experiences, to enrich the relationship of true equals.

Perhaps I shall have cause to regret my deed, but I do not think so. I think my name will go down in history as a positive example of how science can make the world a better place. I have not acted out of pride or ignorance, not for personal gain or ambition. Nor do I believe that anything that can be done should be; that scientific achievement is a valuable end in itself. No, I have thought long and hard about what I meant to do. I have considered the dangers carefully and established certain limits. And all along I have felt myself to be not an individual pursuing personal goals, but rather the representative of all womankind, acting for the greater good.

Not, of course, that everyone agrees with what I have done. Many do not see the necessity. Why create a new species? Why bring another life-form into existence? Isn’t that playing god? Yes, I say, and why not? Don’t we do that already, every day, as we struggle to change the world for the better? Why should we suffer the lack of something we can create? But, of course, some do not believe there was any such lack. Some do not even believe in the yearning that has driven me to this. Because they have never felt it, they say it is imaginary. Solid materialists, they refuse to accept the possibility that one might desire something that does not exist. Something—I hasten to qualify—that does not yet exist. For I believe that these unnamed longings are expressions of memory—a racial memory, if you will, whether of past or future hardly matters. Desire is timeless, but it does not deal in the imaginary. If it seems that what we want does not exist, that is true only of this time. You may be certain that you had what you desire in the past, or you may have it in the future.

I have been driven by the desire to know someone else, another being, who is not like me. Not my lover, not my child, not my mother, not any friend or stranger on this earth. And so I have created it.

What is this new creation? I thought of calling it “man” for the obvious, mythohistorical reasons. But the emotions connected to that word are mixed; and there are aspects of history better buried… not forgotten, but certainly not re-created. I have been careful to ensure that my “man” should not be like any man who lived before, not like any previous companion women have known. To signal this, I have given him a name that represents what many women want; I have named this, our hearts’ desire, “husband.”