The Last Phallic Symbol

Elizabeth Sourbut

ONE

George slipped off the headset and rubbed his eyes wearily. After fifteen years, he was still upset by the unfocused aggression filling project after project. The boys’ holos were a mish-mash of grotesquely imagined destruction and violent sex, salted with the occasional stark intrusion of memory. The world for these street boys was a dangerous place of gangs and uncertain loyalties, of illegal acid and wire, and frequent, brutal death. The remand school was possibly the only education they’d ever had, and probably the first security.

He looked out of the window, at the park across the road from his flat. Now, bathed in pale spring sunshine, it was peaceful and quiet, but at night even here in the West End, murders were not uncommon.

George sighed. After fifty-four years of privilege, with a sheet of bulletproof glass between himself and the world, it was crazy to think he could help these boys.

He pushed the pile of tapes away, and reached for one of his own, a full-spectrum feelie. It was spring; London was coming back to life after a winter of storms and plummeting temperatures, and he felt his own blood quickening in response. March 12. Anniversary. He adjusted the headset, and Val’s image appeared before him.

The tape was his own work, made near the beginning of their affair, ten years before. It was sheer masochism to keep coming back to it now, but still he sank into the shell of his previous self, and the scent of her skin filled his nostrils. She smiled into his eyes, her body warm along the length of him. ‘Christ,’ he muttered, breathing heavily. ‘I miss you.’

Into the memory, he had mingled illicit fantasy. Now Trish, Val’s then seventeen-year-old daughter, joined them. This was his wish-fulfilling version of Trish, and she reached eagerly for his cock.

He matched his real-world actions with hers, and his erection came hard into his hand, hot and full. He stroked his fingers along it, squeezing gently. Then suddenly an agonizing pain seared into his fantasy world, and the penis came away in his hand.

He snatched off his headset, and for a moment he and his cock stared at one another. Then the penis shook itself, slipped out of his fingers, and scuttled down his thigh on tiny legs. It jumped on to the floor and made off across the room.

‘Hey!’ George yelled, his voice cracking into falsetto. The penis paused and turned back towards him. Its foreskin parted in a withering grin, then it disappeared through the open door.

*

TWO

Trish drove slowly down the centre of the street, edging her ancient four-wheel drive through the clear spaces between rotting piles of refuse.

‘Fuck, fuck, and fuck!’ she swore. ‘Where is it?’

Carole, keeping a sharp watch from the passenger window, glanced round and reached out a hand to her. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s the next turning.’

Trish’s hands slipped on the wheel. She wiped them, one at a time, on her jeans, her eyes darting from the road to the shuttered buildings and back. In her rear-view mirror she glimpsed the gang of boys, still following.

‘Here.’ Carole pointed, and Trish turned left into a narrow square of crumbling three-storey terraces. In the gathering dusk, the road faded into a jumble of scrap-iron. Trish slowed, steered into a gap, the off-side wheels crunching over broken glass.

‘Oh, shit.’ Trish craned forward, searching for house numbers. ‘Come on, woman, don’t make us wait.’

Carole had her seat-belt off, door ajar, ready. There was movement amongst the greying undergrowth in the centre of the square. Two men stood upright, staring.

‘There!’

A brief call, and a woman came running out of the shadows leading to a basement flat. She was clutching a toddler to her chest and dragging a suitcase.

Carole leapt to the ground and flung open the rear door of the van. She grabbed the suitcase, bundled the sobbing woman inside, and heaved the case in after her.

‘Go!’ she yelled, and Trish slammed into reverse as her partner jumped back into the seat beside her.

‘Hey!’ yelled one of the men. ‘That’s Pete’s missis!’ He ran towards them, and Trish swerved. The rear bumper crunched into a burnt-out car, jerking them all against their seats.

‘Oh, fuck.’ She clashed the gears, and revved the van forwards. Their pursuer dived out of the way as she skidded into a reckless turn.

The woman in the back moaned. ‘He’ll kill us. He’ll kill us.’

Shapes moved ahead - the gang of boys, strung out across the road. Trish flicked on the lights, full-beam, and the youths recoiled, covering their eyes, scrambling to get out of the way as she drove straight for them. Startled eyes, mouths wide, yelling obscenities.

‘Pete! They’ve got your missis! Pete!’

The four-wheel drive jolted over bricks and timbers, then the road ahead was clear. Trish accelerated into it, peripheral vision registering a figure running towards them.

The van shuddered, and a man lay sprawled across the bonnet, one huge hand pressed against the windscreen. He was snarling as his fingers began to slip.

‘He’s going to die!’ said Trish. ‘Oh, God, he’s going to die.’

She took the corner fast and the man screamed as he was flung to the ground. Carole stared back as they roared away up the road.

‘I think he got up,’ she said.

Their passenger began to laugh hysterically. ‘That was Pete. He won’t even be bruised.’ She sat back in the seat and shrieked. The toddler clung to her, crying.

Carole clambered into the rear of the van with them, and began the long and difficult job of trying to reassure them. Trish kept her eyes on the road. Her hands were shaking on the wheel. She wanted to be reassured too. Instead, she continued to swear, over and over again, as she drove them across town to another crumbling terraced house, wistfully called a refuge.

*

THREE

The muggy heat of a Florida night pressed close around them. Electrical storms flickered on the horizon and the air crackled with static charges, raising sparks between their sweating bodies.

Through the open window, they could see the starship. Floodlights picked out its sleek lines, sweeping up from spherical engines to the controversial globe of the observation deck at its nose. Two hundred and fifty metres of precision engineering thrusting into the night sky.

Jason nibbled her ear, and whispered: ‘I am the ship. Can you feel me against you, cool and hard?’

Pat giggled, and stroked her hands along his body. ‘Mmm. The fuel tanks and the engines. Here’s the airlock, and inside, the crew, cold and sleeping. And here,’ she kissed his forehead, ‘the computers and navigation system.’

He pushed her hand down to his dick, and she stroked it as he sighed and moaned. ‘I’m lying on the launch-pad,’ he said, eyes closed, body taut with pleasure, ‘and this is the ship, the first starship, soaring into the sky, hard and tall and powerful, waiting to surge up to the stars, further than anyone has ever gone before, up on a tail of fire, faster and faster.’

She straddled him, pushing down, engulfing him in the warm wetness of her. ‘And I am the sky. I’ll take you into me, protect you, guide you as you travel through me.’

‘I’ll sow my seed of humanity—’

‘On to a virgin planet!’

They fell against one another, laughing and straining, slipping, thrusting, an image of the starship between them, flesh, steel, woman, sky, starship, man, starburst, death, and new life.

‘Aaahhh

They lay together, panting and shaking, holding one another as tightly as they could, the mingled smells of sweat and sex filling their nostrils.

‘I love you,’ Jason murmured. ‘I wish I was taking you to the stars.’

‘I felt as though I was the stars,’ she said. ‘I am the universe.’

‘And I am the ship.’

They looked into one another’s eyes and laughed and kissed, rolling over amongst the twisted, sweat-soaked sheets, young and in love.

‘Less than a week to go,’ said Jason, staring out of the window at the ship. ‘Can you imagine being one of those people in there, cold and brittle? I could break off your earlobe.’ He tweaked her ear and grinned.

‘And when they come back to life,’ she said, ‘they’ll be on a different world, warmed by a different sun. How will it feel?’

‘I wish we were going. It’s all our dreams come true. To go to the stars.’ Pat sighed. ‘A new planet. A second chance. Maybe we’ll treat it right this time.’ She turned away from the window, and buried her head in his shoulder. ‘I love you.’

Jason lay awake for a long time after she slept, staring out of the window, stars reflected in his eyes.

*

FOUR

Raymond’s counselling room was warm and well ventilated, and smelt very faintly of cherry blossom. George wryly compared it with his own dark cell at the remand school. These ‘soft’ methods were on the way out, replaced by implanted tranquillizer drips and the revolutionary electro-neural surgery. But he still had a few miraculous successes each year, even though the boys knew he had no real support. Those few successes kept him going.

He sat down in one of a matching pair of posture-friendly armchairs. Raymond sat in the other, positioned at an angle to George’s chair, leaned forward slightly, and smiled.

‘Now then, George, how can I help you?’

George stared at his hands. ‘I need to make some, some - adjustments to my self-image,’ he said slowly.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Raymond. ‘And how do you see yourself at the moment?’

‘Powerless.’ He felt the tears gathering once more. ‘Impotent.’

‘How long have you felt this way?’

‘Two days.’

Raymond nodded, accepting. ‘Do you know what triggered these feelings of helplessness?’

George stared at the carpet. He had known Raymond for several years, and trusted the gay man’s commitment to supporting other men, and his confidentiality, but still it took all his courage to answer.

‘Two days ago,’ he said very slowly, ‘my penis detached itself from my body and walked out through the door.’

There was a brief silence. George looked up. Raymond stared directly back at him. ‘Which door was this?’

‘My study door. I was in my study marking projects.’

‘I’d like you to imagine that you’re in your study now.’

‘All right.’ He closed his eyes, and conjured up an image of his study, his desk standing in the large bay window, the shelf of books, the CD player, the feelie deck, all as he had seen them that morning, with spring sunshine pouring in through the window.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Oh, comfortable, safe, secure.’ He stopped, remembering that moment of excruciating pain, and the shock of loss. ‘Oh, shit.’ He looked away, fighting back the tears.

‘And your penis detached itself from your body and walked out of the door, out of your safe, secure study, and… Where do you think it’s gone, George?’

‘I don’t know!’ he wailed. ‘I want it back!’ And he burst into tears.

After a few moments, Raymond leaned forward and laid a hand on George’s knee. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right for men to cry.’

‘I know it is,’ George snuffled, and fumbled for his handkerchief. ‘But it’s so hard. I’ve spent so many years fighting the stereotypes, the rules that say it isn’t manly to express any emotion except lust or anger. And now I watch generation after generation of young boys growing up with the same old attitudes, out on the streets younger and younger, too scared to admit their fear, frying their brains with wire trips, jacking into God knows what weird space, learning how to kill. When a young thug comes to me, strutting and swearing to show he’s a man, I look into his eyes and sometimes I can see the frightened child, the best part of him, deep inside, desperately needing to be loved. And over and over again I try to reach that child without getting myself killed.

‘Sometimes it all gets too much, and then I sit at my study window and watch people walking in the park.’

‘Safe and secure in your study,’ said Raymond. ‘Do you need your penis when you’re in your study?’

Grief, and a sense of great loss overwhelmed him. ‘In theory, no. A man is more than just his cock. But I don’t feel that way. I feel like a discarded shell. Why? Why did it go?’

Into the silence, Raymond spoke softly. ‘Every day, you struggle with concepts of manhood. The boys who come to you are hardened by their lives on the streets, but you see other potentialities, in them and in yourself. A man is more than just his cock. But now, you have a fantasy of your own penis physically leaving you, and walking out through your study door.

‘What might your penis want that you’re not giving it, George?’

George stared at his counsellor, betrayed. ‘It’s not a fantasy,’ he said. ‘It’s real. My penis has gone.’

Raymond bit his lip. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s really gone. Imagine that you are your penis. Where would you go?’

‘Oh, stuff your gestalt shit!’ George yelled. ‘I’ll show you it’s real. Look!’ He leapt to his feet, and tore down his trousers and underpants. ‘Look!’

Raymond stared. Then he stood up, unfastened his own trousers, and pulled down his shorts to reveal a pair of shrivelling testicles and a patch of pink new skin where his penis should be. ‘Thank God,’ he whispered. ‘I’m not the only one.’

*

FIVE

When he had smashed everything in the flat belonging to his wife and young daughter, Pete went out to get drunk. The whole of his left side ached where he had landed after being flung from the van that had taken them away. Echoes of his own scream resounded in his head to shame him. If he ever saw his wife again, he would kill her.

The pub was his local, a survivor from the 1930s, perched on a street corner beside an abandoned warehouse. Inside, it was smoky and claustrophobic, a heavy dance beat making conversation difficult. Pete strolled across to the bar. The other men moved up to make room for him, calling greetings. Everyone knew what had happened. No one mentioned it. Pete dealt in used cars and worked as a bouncer three nights a week. He carried a knife but mostly didn’t need it. Men respected him.

He flexed his aching shoulders and ordered a pint. Rage was still close to the surface.

‘Gimme the stool,’ he said to the man next to him, reaching out to flick the socket behind his victim’s left ear.

Ricki, a skinny wirehead, recoiled. ‘Sure,’ he said, and slithered out of Pete’s way. He looked sick even for a wirehead. Pete gave him a long, uneasy stare. Too many men had acquired that dry, brittle look over the past few weeks. Ricki looked away, and picked up his glass, moving further along the bar.

Pete sneered, and heaved himself up on to the stool. Pain traced fire down his leg and across the small of his back. Trapped nerve. Probably pulled muscles, too. He saw again the tall vehicle careering towards him, lights blazing. He had thought he could hang on, but hadn’t quite jumped far enough. His hands had slipped across the glass, leaving him no chance as the van cornered sharply. But he remembered the driver’s face, her staring eyes, her terror. He laughed.

‘Cunt,’ he said.

‘You going after her?’ asked Mike, the electronics man who got him most of his cars.

Pete drank his beer. ‘Nope,’ he said. Everyone present knew that he had very little chance of finding her. ‘Don’t need to. She’ll see me in every shadow. And when she’s had enough of fucking shadows, she’ll come back.’ He finished his beer while the other men laughed. ‘But I won’t be here. I’m going to Mongolia.’

That was too much of a challenge. Every man in the area had been down to the barracks to apply for a place. Expedition to Mongolia. Adventure guaranteed. High wages.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Mike. ‘Why’d they want you?’

Pete stuck out his chest, swaggering. ‘They’re looking for big men,’ he said, putting heavy emphasis on the last two words. ‘You ever seen a man as big as me?’

‘What, they gonna fuck their way across Asia?’ sneered Mike.

That was enough excuse for Pete. He flung himself off his stool, picked Mike up by the shoulders, and shook him. ‘They want men,’ he roared, ‘not worms.’

‘Hey, hey,’ the smaller man gasped. ‘Take it easy. You need me to get your cars.’

‘I’m going away,’ said Pete. ‘I don’t care shit for your cars, nor your fucking neck.’

But he liked the smart, gutsy thief. He dropped him on the floor, lost for what else to do. This was goodbye. If he hadn’t been leaving in the morning, he and Mike would have searched London for that van, for his wife.

Mike scrambled away from him, then jumped to his feet, ready to run. ‘Why Mongolia, anyway?’ he demanded. ‘Why all the hype? What’s in fucking Mongolia?’

Pete turned away and strode out of the pub. ‘Nothing for cunts like you!’ he yelled over his shoulder. He stomped back home, hurt and angry.

In front of the cracked mirror, he stripped off his clothes and twisted to look at the deep bruises spreading across the muscles of shoulder, arm and leg. He knew he was lucky not to have broken a bone. He grinned at himself in the mirror, a heavily muscled man with a huge cock. The expedition flew out in the morning on a specially chartered flight to Ulan Bator. After that, he had no idea. But he knew it had to be better than here. The ones who stayed here would end up like Ricki. Mongolia was the place for men.

*

SIX

The great dam had burst, and everything was gone. In one chaotic night of earthquake and flood, Amira’s world was torn away by the torrents of water surging down the valley.

She had awakened to the rattling of pans and a child screaming. The whole house seemed to be on the move. She had leapt out of bed, flung on her dress, and hustled the children outside, afraid that the wood and plasterboard walls would collapse on top of them.

Outside, a strong wind blew cloud-tatters across the moon. In the fitful light, she saw glimpses of her neighbours standing, like her, by their doors. She held the children close to her body and turned to stare down the hillside. The wind was cold and the grey-white moonlight cast hard black shadows across the village.

Then the earth shook once more and they were flung to the ground. Above the shrieks of terrified children, a huge roar filled the air, the wind increased to a gale, and she saw a wall of water surging along the valley below. The dam had burst and the liberated waters of the artificial Lake Sudan were roaring towards her, drowning everything in their path.

The wave-front hit the lower reaches of the village and spilled up the hillside. Houses collapsed like children’s toys and she scrambled to her feet and tried to run. Then she was underwater, choking and clutching at the ground. The wave tumbled her along for a few metres then withdrew, sucking her two small sons away with it.

She scrambled after them, half-running, half-falling down the hillside, screaming their names. But they were gone, drowned with hundreds of others.

Now she sat shivering in the pale dawn, hugging the baby to her breast while the other two surviving children hid their faces in her dress and cried.

As the sun rose on the devastation, the villagers looked about them in despair. The waters had retreated from the hillsides, but the fields on the valley floor, so dry yesterday, now lay under sheets of filthy water, a few trees standing mournfully above the flood. The houses were gone, replaced by a wilderness of mud and rubble and scattered possessions.

Amira told herself that she was lucky to have survived, but how could they live now with no homes, no fields, and the livestock and her two young sons drowned? She wondered if the men had somehow known that this was coming. Perhaps this was why they had abandoned the village one by one, sneaking away and leaving the women to keep things together.

Cold and exhausted, the village women gathered together to grieve. They had worked so hard to rebuild their lives after the government had moved them from their old homes upstream of the high dam, and now their security was shattered once more.

They sat together and sang songs of grieving, songs for the aftermath of war, songs to brace themselves for the task of beginning all over again.

*

SEVEN

A pale glow bathed the freezer compartment. Glancing back at the open airlock, Jason could see the world outside, like an overexposed photograph, awash with sunlight. Trucks moved in the distance and faintly, he could hear the sounds of machinery and voices shouting. But inhere it was cold and silent and still. His breath condensed, misting the readout as he bent over the first cryogenic unit. He wiped the surface with his sleeve, and held his breath while he read the display.

The units were stacked six deep, drawers that could be pulled open if anything went wrong. Inside, the naked bodies of the stellanauts lay still, scarcely breathing, their skins frosted with a lacing of ice. Eyes closed, faces relaxed and peaceful, they lay like corpses, beginning their long sleep. A sleep that might last a thousand subjective years as they sped towards the stars at close to the speed of light.

Jason shivered and thought of Pat, her hot, sweaty body pressed against his, her heart racing. He could not imagine these beautiful young icicles making love; now or ever. ‘And yet you’re going to the stars,’ he whispered, staring in at a handsome Japanese man, his well-formed muscles sheathed in ice, brittle as frozen rubber. ‘I could snap you in two. But you’ll be raising children on a new world long after I’m dust.’

*

Pat watched through the one-way mirror as the next batch of half a dozen young gods and goddesses entered the cryogenic chamber. Diane, her technician, waited by the door as the stellanauts slipped out of their robes and embraced one another. These were tall, lean East Africans, their heads almost brushing the ceiling of the tiny room. All had perfectly functioning physiologies, and not a faulty gene amongst them. Though the radiation from an alien sun might slowly damage the DNA of future generations, the colonists would begin in perfection.

The stellanauts swung themselves on to their couches, and Diane moved along the double row, carefully connecting the monitoring equipment and checking the readouts. She said nothing; already the stellanauts were composing themselves to enter trance-state, beginning to slow their own body functions to the point where the freezing process could safely begin.

Diane collected up the robes and left the chamber, sealing the heavy airtight door behind her. As ever, Pat felt her heart contract slightly at the muted thud of the closing door. The thought of lying down in that stark, white room knowing that you would never again see the Earth or anything familiar scared her. And yet these stellanauts seemed unmoved. Perhaps they had been so busy preparing for a new world, they had never become attached to this one.

She took a deep breath, and jacked into the Net. The stream of data enveloped her, and her consciousness entered the cryogenic chamber. Input from the monitors in the couches flooded her nervous system, replacing her sense of embodied self.

She became separately aware of each of the six bodies against her own, their contours nestling closer than a lover as her kinaesthetic awareness accepted its task. Eyes, ears, fingertips and skin absorbed the data flow as she concentrated all her senses on the task of interpreting the multiple stimuli. Pulse, respiration, blood-pressure, body temperature, skin chemistry, brain activity, she monitored them all, alert for abnormalities, her own identity distant and thin as she became the machine’s intelligence.

The stellanauts slipped together into trance-state, and gradually their brain patterns changed. Their body functions began to slow and, as they did so, Pat directed the computers to begin reducing the temperature in the chamber. The lights dimmed slowly, and life seemed to leach out of the room.

Sensations of the growing cold and stillness made this part of the job dangerous for Pat. She had to prevent her own body functions from becoming too closely entwined with the data. To keep a measure of distance, she concentrated a part of her awareness on the visual monitors, on seeing them from the outside. The stellanauts ‘ faces were relaxed, their eyes closed. As the temperature fell, the rich brown of their skins took on a shade of grey. Frost began to form along their cheekbones and at the tips of their noses. Ice traced a fine pattern over their hands and feet, spreading gradually up their limbs until at last their bodies were encased in a lacework of white. The light had faded to a pale blue, bleeding the last of the colour from the scene.

To a casual observer it might have looked like a morgue, but the data told Pat that they were still just alive, body functions slowed to a fraction of normal. Like this, they would age only an hour for every year that they slept. They were effectively immortal.

When she was sure that the stellanauts had stabilized, Pat brought her awareness back to herself, and jacked out of the system.

‘Well,’ said Diane, who had come into the room to join her, ‘that’s the last batch. They’re ready to go.’

Pat nodded, not wanting to acknowledge the fact. A tension that she had scarcely been aware of was dissolving between her shoulder blades. She would never have to go through that again. ‘See that they’re loaded on board,’ she said crisply. ‘I’m going back to my quarters.’

Later, when she was alone with Jason, they cried, and clung together. Although why they should pity the gods themselves, they weren’t sure.

*

EIGHT

George was on duty. Strapped into his black plastic and steel riot-gear, his head covered by a civilian version of the army datacom, none of the boys could tell which member of staff was confronting them. For George, this was a particular advantage. If the boys knew that he too patrolled the corridors, then any credibility he might hope to retain as a sympathetic counsellor would be lost.

He was so deep in his own gloomy thoughts that he almost trod on the penis. It reared back from him, snarling. He took a startled step backwards as the penis snuffled and spat. Then it scuttled past him and disappeared into an empty classroom.

George took two quick steps to the door and peered in. His infra-red sensor spotted it squeezing through a gap in the floorboards, and he swore.

‘It wasn’t mine,’ he told himself. ‘It was too small.’ He reached out to close the door, and discovered that his hands were shaking. Has mine turned aggressive? he wondered. I’m sure that thing had teeth.

As he continued down the corridor, his datacom registered a disturbance coming from the games room. He broke into a run.

The noise resolved itself into a chant as he burst through the door.

‘Poofter! Poofter! Poofter! Poofter!’

Half a dozen boys stood around in a semicircle at the far end of the room, kicking another lad who lay on the floor with his face to the wall.

‘Stop that at once!’ George bellowed, his voice artificially magnified and sieved to remove the higher registers.

The chanting broke off and the boys turned around. They looked defiant and a little afraid. His datacom listed their names in red across his vision.

‘His prick’s run off, sir,’ said Sanderson.

‘He’s a fucking fairy.’

‘That’s enough,’ George rumbled. ‘Go to your rooms.’

‘It weren’t us, sir,’ said Dodd. ‘It jumped up and ran off itself.’

‘It’s ‘cos he’s a queer, isn’t it, sir?’

George could suddenly smell their fear. ‘It’s all right, boys,’ he said, trying to make his grotesque voice sound gentle. ‘I’ll deal with it. Go to your rooms.’

They filed past him, but the last one turned round to yell: ‘Poofter! ‘ and they all ran off up the corridor, laughing and shouting.

George knelt down on the floor, clumsy in his heavy plastic armour. ‘Are you all right, Tony?’

In response, the boy drew himself into a tighter ball. He was naked from the waist down, his trousers and underpants lying in a tom heap a few feet away.

‘What happened, lad?’

Getting no reply, he laid a gloved hand on Tony’s shoulder and pulled him over on to his back. The boy grabbed his groin and screamed, then scrambled to his knees and began hitting his head against the padded wall.

‘Tony, stop it.’ George reached to restrain him, but Tony shoved him in the chest, leapt up, and ran off. Caught off balance, George fell over backwards, and by the time he had struggled to his feet, the boy had disappeared.

Christ, he thought, staring down the corridor, Tony Evans? Whatever’s causing this, it’s not sympathy with women. He tongued his alarm, and a claxon blared. ‘Poor little bastard. What’s he going to do?’

*

NINE

Janet’s nightmares were disrupting the whole refuge. Usually staff didn’t sleep over; the four-storey old town house was always overflowing with fugitive women and their kids, there was no space for a staff room. But for the last three nights Trish and Carole had been camping out in the office on the ground floor, with a baseball bat and an axe close to hand.

The windows were heavily shuttered, and the doors bolted and double locked. It wasn’t just vengeful husbands and lovers who had to be kept out. This was a rough neighbourhood, and everybody knew that number seventeen was a house full of women.

Carole came back into the room. She pulled off her shoes and scrambled under the covers, cuddling up to Trish. ‘Brr, it’s cold.’

‘How is she?’

‘A bit calmer now. It was the hand on the windscreen again. It just comes straight through and grabs her by the throat.’

Trish grunted and shifted on to her back. The mattress was uncomfortable, she was cold, and there was too much noise on the street. The low-level fear in the pit of her stomach wouldn’t let her sleep. She wanted to scream, but Janet had been doing enough of that for everyone. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly three.’ Carole snuggled close again, and Trish wrapped her arms around her lover’s warm, familiar body. She stroked her hands down Carole’s spine, tweaking the roll of extra fat at her waist. Carole giggled, and they kissed.

‘You feel tense,’ Carole said. ‘Shall I give you a back rub?’

‘No.’ Trish rolled away from her. ‘I’m all right.’

‘This is the last night. Sanjula’s in tomorrow.’

‘I know.’ Trish lay still and listened to the street sounds. They were probably safer here than in their flat at home, but the knowledge that all the women in the house were there to escape the violence of men made that violence seem closer, more tangible.

‘I found a man dead in the street this morning,’ she said. ‘Wirehead. They kill each other like animals. I don’t want to live here any more.’

‘What’s wrong, Trish?’

‘Nothing.’ She buried her head between Carole’s breasts. ‘Everything.’

They held each other tightly, silently comforting one another. Then Carole said: ‘I can’t sleep. I’m going to get a cup of tea. Want one?’

‘I’ll come.’

They pulled on sweaters and shoes and padded into the kitchen. While the water boiled, Trish moped around the room, tidying away toys that the children had left scattered across the floor. Under the table, she found a model starship. The starship.

She swore. ‘Look at this. They come here running away from men, and what do they give their kids to play with? Phallic symbols!’

‘Training up the next generation,’ said Carole drily. ‘Or maybe it belongs to somebody’s mummy. It would make a bloody good dildo.’

‘Ouch!’ Trish dropped the toy on the table, and glared at it. ‘Why doesn’t anybody else see the links, or am I just paranoid?’

Carole poured out the tea. ‘Not everyone has a feminist for a mother.’

Trish snorted. ‘Bloody wishy-washy liberal.’

‘Val brought you up to see the links.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ She picked up the toy starship again. ‘Look at this thing. “The culmination of Western science.” Direct descendant of the V2 rocket. They’ve raped the planet to develop the technology to build it. We can’t feed our people, thousands die every day in earthquakes and floods and famines, but don’t worry - they can go to the stars. Why? Why do men ignore what needs to be done here? What blind arrogance makes them destroy the lives of women the world over for something so worthless?’

Carole handed her a mug of tea, and kissed her gently. ‘There’s going to be one hell of a post-coital depression once it’s blasted off,’ she said. ‘OK, so they’re sending a ship to the stars, but it won’t get there for thousands of years. I wonder how our wonderful technocrats will sell that one. All the money, the resources, the skill, all the vision will be gone, and nothing to show for it. Maybe then opinion will swing our way.’

Trish laughed. ‘Post-coital depression. Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I hope— What the hell was that?’

The screech came again, from directly beneath the boarded-up window. Carole ran across the room and peered through a gap between the planks. ‘There’s a cat in the yard,’ she said. ‘But, my God, what are those?’

Trish joined her. ‘They’re penises!’ she exclaimed. They stared at one another with gradually dawning delight.

‘Oh wow,’ said Carole. ‘It is true!’

Trish whooped. ‘Come on!’ she yelled. ‘Let’s get ‘em!’

She snatched up the baseball bat, threw back the bolts on the door, and burst into the yard.

A small tortoiseshell cat was backed into a corner, surrounded by about twenty snarling penises, some human, others much smaller. Trish charged at them, yelling, and struck out two-handed at the nearest of the creatures. The bat connected with a squelching thud, and the penis split open along its length, spraying her with its blood. The rest scattered as she lay about her in a frenzy of disgust, crushing the boneless creatures against the concrete floor of the yard. Blood spurted, drenching the walls and her hands and clothes, fuelling her frantic loathing.

Carole’s hands on her arms brought her to a halt. ‘They’re dead,’ she said softly. ‘You can stop now.’

Trish lowered the bat wearily and gazed at the smears of skin and blood defacing the yard. Then she threw up.

Carole was very pale. ‘I wish I’d never been heterosexual,’ she said faintly. ‘I’ve had things like that inside me.’ She turned her face away, and leaned against the wall, shaking.

Gingerly, Trish picked up one of the dead penises. Its head was crushed, but it was otherwise intact. ‘I’m keeping this,’ she said. ‘Proof.’

‘Proof of what? What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know. But while they’re on the loose they’re fair game. That’s a few less rapists in the world. Let’s see how many more we can get.’

*

TEN

Val jacked into the Net and her senses coalesced into the compact blob of her cyber-persona. She had self-defined as an amorphous rose-coloured ink-blot, which irritated the tidy minds of several academic cubes, tetrahedra, and spheres of her acquaintance. But it felt comfortable, and she wasn’t always the same shape.

She tasted for news, and her persona entered the entrance hall of pillars. Scanning the ranks of colour-and scent-coded indexing blocks, she homed in on the geographical index and tapped it with one wired finger. The pillar opened up to absorb her and she tumbled through into the next level.

Country-blocks chimed, subtle scents guiding as she sought out Sudan. Passing into the bath of colour, she emerged in an almost empty hall. Briefly, the ink-blot flexed into a tight knot, screwed in on its anger as, back in the real world, her self swore. The global Net was as uneven as any other structure, densely layered in places, in others spread gossamer-thin across the void of data-blankness. The richness of African experience was such a dark and empty place for blank-eyed data hacks.

Damburst, though, was there, and she moved forward eagerly now, searching the sub-halls for news of her friends.

There was very little. Satellite pictures, visually enhanced to show the night scene of water pouring through the dam, swallowing new villages as the old reappeared in the drowned valley behind. Character-screens displayed numerical data: time, duration, cubic volume of water, speed of travel, height of the wave, estimated number of casualties. A man’s voice provided commentary - a more ‘accessible’ fleshing out of the dry data, strongly shaped by unthinking value-judgements.

Annoyed, Val cut off the voice, blacked out the figures. The voices she wanted to hear had no access to the Net, no global cyber-reality. Heart beating too fast, persona changing shape rapidly, she swam the flow of pictures, seeking one village, one house. Amira, who had been so kind to her during her field-work; what had happened to Amira and her happy, fat children?

But to a satellite in geo-stationary orbit, one African woman and her family were of no interest. The cameras had not zoomed down here, and she was whisked over the village as the tidal wave bore down the valley. She stopped, wound back the film, froze the shot, stared but could not see. She was too late to pay for real-time control. Last night, Amira had died, or lived, and the Net would not help Val to find out which.

Somewhere in the depths of the Net, in a side-room off a minor hall, her scholarly book glowed with a pale light.

Drowned Communities, Disrupted Lives: A Woman’s Perspective on the History of High Dams. It was the latest of twelve titles, the fruits of thirty years’ painstaking, part-time research. The rose-coloured ink-blot slowly and sadly wended its way through the Net’s indexing system, and stopped in front of the book.

‘Amira.’

A voice replied, speaking the translated sentences that Val had constructed out of the interview she had recorded, through an interpreter, with the Sudanese village woman. A shadow of Amira’s life was stored here in the Net for those few who chose to seek it out.

‘Amira.’

An itching in the centre of her persona interrupted her reverie. Recalled, she drew back through the multi-layered system, back to the home bubble of her call-sign, and jacked out. The itch, as ever, took a few moments to disperse.

A flashing light indicated somebody at the door. She flipped on the screen.

‘George!’

‘Hello, Val.’ His voice was weak, and he looked thin. ‘I’m sorry—’ He paused, and looked down. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes. I’ll be in the sun-room.’

She activated the downstairs door and got up, puzzled and slightly nervous. They had seen little of one another since splitting up six months previously, and at times she had missed his warm humour and generous humanity. The decision had been a hard one, and she still resented having to make the choice between a partner and work, but her work was more important to her these days, and so she had asked him to leave. She still remembered him with enough love and affection to wish that things could have been different, and she was annoyed to find her heart beating rapidly as she heard him at the door to her apartment.

His footsteps along the hall were unfamiliar - hesitant, lighter than she remembered. She turned to greet him as he came into the room, but her welcoming smile faded as she saw him; gaunt, pale, and stooped. ‘George! What’s happened?’

He came into her arms and clung to her, like a frightened child. ‘Val, I’m sorry. I’m going to pieces. I needed someone to be with.’

‘Are you ill?’

He sighed, and let go of her. ‘Can we sit down?’

She nodded, and they sat at opposite ends of the sofa, and looked at one another. Searching for some way to express her shock at his appearance, she finally said: ‘You’ve lost weight.’

He stared at his hands, his fingers lacing and unlacing themselves in unfamiliar movements. ‘I’ve lost everything,’ he said.

‘Do you want to talk?’

He hesitated. ‘I don’t know. I wish I could just tell you, but what would you think?’

He looked at her in such despair that she felt afraid. What could George have done that was so bad? ‘Please tell me,’ she said.

‘Maybe you’ve heard. There’s been no news, but it must be happening everywhere. My boys are … Have you heard anything?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m researching a new book, I’m a bit out of touch. What’s wrong with the boys?’

‘We’ve had two suicides and a murder in the last three days. They’ve all been tranquillized and locked in their rooms for their own safety. They just can’t cope. And I’m not surprised. I can’t cope, and I thought I was more of a man than that.’

‘George, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He spread his hands in despair. ‘Our penises have got up and walked away.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve lost our penises. They’ve gone, detached themselves, they’re autonomous beasts.’

Her eyes moved involuntarily to his groin. He covered his fly with his hands, then took them away again, and shrugged.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘That idea was invented as an excuse for rape. It’s part of you, and it’s under your control. But—’ Suddenly shocked, she asked: ‘Has one of the boys attacked you?’

‘No. No, it did it all by itself. It’s like my worst nightmare. I was— Well, it came off in my hand.’

‘And ran away?’

‘Yes. It laughed at me.’

He looked so doleful, and the image of a penis scurrying across the floor was so absurd, that she burst into laughter. George shrank back in his seat and clutched at his groin. Val clamped a hand over her mouth, but she couldn’t stop laughing.

‘I’m sorry,’ she spluttered. ‘I just… I can’t… Oh, dear!’ She exploded into guffaws again.

He stood up. ‘I’ll go.’

‘No.’ She stopped laughing. ‘I’m sorry. It just sounded— Is it true?’

‘I’ll show you, if you want.’

‘No, don’t.’ She didn’t want to see, not now, not like a stranger exposing himself. Her eyes were on a level with his groin. She stood up, held out her arms, and they hugged tightly. ‘You’re welcome to stay here, George, if you need to.’ The weight of her offer settled on her shoulders as she added, it seemed inevitably: ‘I’ll take care of you, for as long as you need.’

*

ELEVEN

Grandmothers were looking after the children so that the younger women could go searching for food and firewood. An anonymous plane had dropped sacks of rice, dura flour and powdered milk the previous day before roaring away northwards, but rice still had to be cooked, and there was not enough to last the whole village for more than a few days.

Amira had walked miles, and was returning to the makeshift village with a bundle of sticks on her head when she saw a human foot sticking out from behind a rock. She stopped and stared at it warily, but it didn’t move. After a few minutes, she advanced cautiously, and peered over the rock.

A body was lying huddled with its face to the stone. It was thin and bony with dry skin like dead leaves. Amira lowered her bundle to the ground and rolled the figure over on to its back.

Dead eyes stared, the eyeballs rolled up into the skull so that only the whites showed, and the jaw hung slack. With difficulty, Amira recognized Shilluk, a young man from her village. He had disappeared three days prior to the earthquake, leaving his wife and young baby behind.

Amira was puzzled; she couldn’t see what he had died of. There was no sign of injury, he couldn’t have drowned up here above the flood-line, and he could hardly have starved in four days. She pulled open his djellaba to examine him further, and rocked back on her heels with a gasp. He had no genitals.

Looking more closely, she saw two empty flaps of skin that must once have been testicles, but his penis was gone. She knew that Shilluk had been potent because he had impregnated not only his wife, but Amira’s own sister as well, in a rape that had led to her husband divorcing her.

Amira grinned down at the dead man. ‘Did you die of shock when your best friend ran away, eh?’ she asked him. But his wife would want to see the body. She fastened his clothes again and heaved him on to her shoulder. He weighed scarcely more than the bundle of sticks, as though only the husk of a man remained, and she carried him easily.

She wondered if her own husband was lying dead somewhere. Perhaps all the men had met with the same fate. Well, she had borne five children already, and three still lived. At twenty-six she was tired of pregnancy, and her husband had never been kind to her. She realized that she had been awaiting his return, expecting him all the time, dreading the demands he would make when he came. Her stride lengthened, and she began to sing.

Back at the village, hers was not the only news, nor even the most important. Other women out foraging had found ripe melons and plantains growing wild, and date palms laden with fruit. They had returned with their baskets full, and the village was bubbling over with excited chatter.

Amira’s find sobered the excitement for a while. Shilluk’s wife was grief-stricken, and flung herself on his body, sobbing wildly. She had loved her handsome husband, and they had been married for barely a year.

Shilluk’s mother and sisters-in-law took over, and Amira wandered away, wishing she had left him behind the rock.

‘Amira!’ An old woman’s voice hailed her. Old Naandi, Shilluk’s grandmother, came limping after her. ‘Did you look at him?’ she asked as she came up to her.

Amira nodded.

‘Have you smelled the air?’ Naandi asked next. ‘It’s very sweet today. And you know, those children, they’ll be sick, they’ve eaten so many melons.’

Amira frowned. Naandi was not in the habit of rambling. ‘ I don’t understand, grandmother.’

‘The Moon will be full tonight. She likes to dance, you know. And I think tonight, the Earth will dance with her.’ Naandi looked at her with bright eyes. ‘The Earth is female, everyone knows that. Men, they don’t understand her. But now, there are no men - and we have melons.’ She smiled. ‘The dam was men’s work.’

She hobbled away, chuckling to herself. Amira watched her go, and began to smile too. Then she went in search of her daughters.

*

TWELVE

George’s toothbrush was back on the shelf. Remnants of stubble littered the sink. Val rinsed them away, thinking about her research. She had not used the Net in three days, and her old sense of entrapment was creeping back. She glanced in the mirror, and her reflection glared at her. Traitor, it told her. You promised me; no more compromise.

‘He’s sick,’ she said, turning away from her own gaze. ‘He needs me. It won’t be for long.’

And indeed he was sick. She had never known George to be other than energetic and busy; now he lay in front of the fire all day, curled up around his pain. They were sleeping together, like a mother and frightened child, and she had seen his loss. She didn’t know how to respond, except to stay with him and hold his hand.

As she crossed the hallway to her room, she heard a key in the lock.

‘Hi, Val!’ called Trish as she slammed the door behind her.

Val raised her eyebrows at her daughter. ‘And to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?’

Trish’s lips tightened. ‘Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t make an appointment, Mother, but this is important.’

‘So’s my autonomy,’ Val began, then relented. ‘Actually, I’m not busy. What is it?’

Trish reached for the door of the sun-room, but Val stepped quickly to prevent her. ‘Notin there.’ She hesitated. ‘George—George is staying. Come into my study.’

‘George!’ Trish followed her into her artefact-filled study. ‘What’s he doing here?’ Then her eyes widened, and she broke into a broad grin. ‘Oh wow. Him too?’

‘Trish, what’s going on?’

Trish shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. I wanted to talk to you about it. And I brought this to show you.’ She opened the box in her hand and tossed its contents on to the carpet.

Val recoiled. ‘Uurghh!’

In death, the penis looked pathetic. Small, wrinkled, spineless, its tiny legs curled into its body, its circular mouth pouting at the end of its crushed head. Val felt a powerful urge to grind it into the carpet. She looked up sharply. ‘Where did you get it? It’s not… his, is it?’

‘No. It was in our back yard, a pack of them. I killed them, and kept this one for evidence. George has lost his, hasn’t he?’

Val nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes, he has.’

‘It must be happening all over.’ Trish put the penis back in its box, and flung herself into an armchair. ‘I need your intellect, Val. Isn’t it true that, biologically, males are damaged females?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes, but—’

‘Look at what’s happening. Isn’t it possible that these things are, I don’t know, mutating, or being cast off? Maybe the female is finally fighting back, getting rid of this … this growth, this cancer. What do you think?’

Val shook her head. ‘I don’t think there’s a female fighting to get out of George,’ she said. ‘Human biology is a bit more complex than that, Trish.’

‘I know it is,’ Trish snapped. ‘But something really important is happening, and just in case they’re about to turn into something even more revolting, I’m going to kill as many of these things as I can find.’

‘You can’t do that!’ Val exclaimed.

‘Why not? I’ve already made a good start.’

‘They’re human—’

‘They are not human, Mother. They’re vermin.’ Trish stood up. ‘Look, I respect what you do, and I didn’t come here to ask you to join the vigilantes or anything. But please, do what you do best. Think about it. Where did they come from, and when? What are they? And what are they up to now?’

She strode to the door. ‘Please, Val. We need to know.’ Then she was gone. ‘Trish!’ Val called, but then she heard the door slam. She scratched her head, intrigued despite herself. What a fascinating question; one that she had never thought to ask herself before. Where did the penis come from, and when? She moved to her terminal, already thinking about possible references.

Briefly, she remembered George, and hesitated. But he would probably sleep all day, and he knew his way around the flat. She slipped on her headset and jacked into the Net.

*

THIRTEEN

To the west of Ulan Bator the going got rough. For two days their convoy of army trucks and jeeps had been lurching along dirt tracks through a rolling landscape of scrub grass and patchy snow. The air was thin and cold, sharp against his raw throat. Pete sat on a bench in the open back of a truck, rifle upright between his knees, hands tucked into his armpits, and stared ahead towards the slowly approaching mountains.

Pete had come in search of adventure, but so far all he had found was boredom, discomfort and harsh discipline. It was damp. His clothes grew mouldy while he slept, and a lot of the food was mildewed. They were having trouble keeping the trucks on the road: moss grew on the points overnight, and the radiator tanks became thick green soups of algae. Yesterday they had fought through a blizzard, a fierce cross-wind bombarding them with tiny pellets of icy snow for almost six hours.

Today the sky was clear, a huge expanse of deep blue, bigger than the immense landscape beneath it. Between the two, their trucks crawled, exposed, like ants on a car bonnet, with nowhere to hide. The immensity of wilderness made him nervous, and his nerves made him aggressive. He was getting restless just sitting, when what he wanted to do was fight, and fuck.

He had been on a raiding party earlier that day. They had found a village and swooped on it with savage roars. But there had been no one there. No men to fight, no women to fuck, just a few animals which they had killed, a grain store, and signs of hasty departure. They had stormed around for a while, smashing up homes, and then met in the village square, at a loss for what else to do. Twenty wild men, the inhibitions of home stripped away within a few hours of arriving in this wild, empty land, and they could find no one to terrorize. So they set the village alight and jogged back to their trucks, carrying the plundered food.

Pete dozed, and awakened, shivering. It was almost dark, and suddenly they were surrounded by steep, wooded slopes. The track now headed steeply upwards and, if anything, was rougher than before. It had been his rifle falling to the floor that had awakened him. He bent to retrieve it, then breathed deeply, taking in the rich, resiny smell of the forest. The mountains. At last they had reached the mountains.

The drivers switched on their headlights, and the forest vanished into shadow. A strip of purpling sky was visible above, edged by the jagged teeth of mountain peaks. The wind funnelled down the valley, sweeping through him, making him feel more alive than ever before.

There was a shout up ahead, and their truck jolted to a halt. Pete leapt over the side and ran forward along the line of vehicles, his boots hitting the frozen ground hard. A jeep had overturned on a bend, spilling its load of food, weapons and men into the undergrowth. Shadows ebbed and flowed across the wreckage as men ran in front of the headlights of the convoy. Voices shouted, boots thudded, and amongst it all someone was wailing, a helpless sound of pain. As Pete approached, a single shot rang through the bedlam, and for a moment everything stopped.

Then an officer began shouting orders, and Pete joined a group of others in righting the jeep. Gloved hands grasped the frame, a heave and a yell, and the jeep was back on its wheels. Big men these, heavy-set and masculine. At last he was amongst equals, real men.

The jeep had broken an axle, so they shoved it off the track and distributed gear and men amongst the remaining eight vehicles. Then they lay their dead companion with his rifle by his side, and covered his body with rocks.

As they stood for a few moments, heads bowed, around the hasty grave, a timber wolf howled, ahead and to the left.

They drove on slowly, half the men walking alongside the labouring vehicles. The track had dwindled to little more than a dried stream bed, strewn with boulders. But now they knew they were nearing their destination. They could all feel it, a primeval presence up ahead, something very old stirring into wakefulness.

Deep in the mountains, the King Penis called. Stirring at last after His long quiescence, He began His journey to the surface. His call went out, gathering together His army. And those He called came to Him, a huge gathering of bears, wolves, wildcats and men, meeting to escort Him on His journey.

They made camp in a valley far from any roads, and waited. Thousands of men and beasts, singled out by their double-Y chromosome as the chosen ones. Driven by the masters that hung between their legs, the excess testosterone burning in their blood, they waited to serve God.

And God came.

*

FOURTEEN

‘If we consider the penis as a separate species, it gives a whole new perspective to the study of history,’ said Val. ‘Its relationship to other creatures is presumably symbiotic. A parasite unable, until recently, to survive on its own, it must have given something to its host in exchange.’

‘Testosterone,’ said George sadly. He was huddled deep in an armchair, wrapped in a blanket, and staring out of the window of Val ‘ s sun-room. ‘Extra physical strength,’ he added, ‘sexual pleasure. Oh, where has it gone?’

‘You don’t need a penis for sexual pleasure,’ Trish snapped. She paced the room restlessly, trying to contain her impatience with her mother’s measured thought processes.

‘That’s true,’ Val agreed with her. ‘So what did the penis give back in exchange for its sustenance? What’s so special about being male?’

‘It’s better than being a eunuch.’

‘But is it better than being female? There must be some evolutionary advantage.’

George looked round from the window. ‘Reproduction?’ he suggested drily.

Trish snarled. ‘Fucking cocksure!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s your pheromones fucked everything up. You’ve blocked female energies! Without that worm between your legs, women could reproduce quite happily on our own. And if we kill them, it’ll happen again.’

She and George glared at one another. Then he looked away.

‘I wonder.’ Val was frowning, trying to figure it out. ‘Where do you get that idea from, Trish?’

‘I know it. Men are mutants, parasites, they have no useful role. It makes no sense for them to exist.’

‘Maybe,’ said Val. ‘I wonder how long the penis has been around? We’ve always assumed two sexes to be the natural state, but modem biology sees the female as the basic sex and the male as almost a damaged female. What is the purpose of being male? When you boil it down, nobody really knows.’

‘What’s the purpose of life?’ said George.

‘True, but life could go on quite happily with hardly any males at all. Why do we breed so many? All they do is fight and eat precious food supplies.’

Trish laughed. ‘Go for it, Mother. You’re getting almost radical in your old age. But don’t forget the murders. Why do males kill females? Why do men hate us so much? At all times, in all places, men have tried to destroy women. They hate us. They hate everything living. Only a mutant could hate life so much.’

Val nodded, still wrapped in her own thoughts. ‘Is the basic assumption true? Have males been around since life began, or did they emerge far more recently? Do we know there were male dinosaurs, or is it just assumed?’

George was staring out of the window again. ‘Where have you gone?’ he wailed. ‘What did you want that I didn’t give you? We had a decent sex life, I kept you clean and warm. Where are you?’

‘Think, George, think!’ Val exclaimed. ‘About three and a half thousand years BC there was a change. Across the world, the male sky gods began to usurp the Earth Mother. Conventional wisdom has it that men suddenly realized their role in reproduction and seized the power that knowledge gave them. But why did it happen universally, in cultures having no contact with one another? Unless biology changed at that time. What if there were no males before then, or not enough to upset women’s natural functions. What if women really did conceive by parthenogenesis?’

‘You mean Jesus really might have been a virgin birth?’

‘No,’ she said impatiently, ‘not him, nor Montezuma, nor Plato, nor any of the others who claimed it. Only girl children are born that way. Perhaps female is the natural state, and your parasitic penis has distorted your biology.’

‘So are you saying that now I’ve lost my penis, I’m going to become a woman?’

Trish laughed scornfully and Val’s eyes suddenly filled with pity for the frail husk of the man she had once loved. ‘Oh, my dear, I doubt it,’ she said. ‘There’s so much more to being a woman than not having a penis.’

The two women looked at one another as George began to cry quietly. Trish grinned. ‘Thanks for the theory, Val,’ she said. ‘Now will you join me on a field trip?’

Val shook her head. ‘No. I can’t hate the way you do. I know the theory of women’s oppression, and I know you’re right, but I can’t kill. I think that killing is wrong.’

Trish tightened her mouth, and suddenly Val could see how she had been shaped by the struggle of more than ten years as an outsider in a society that hated her simply for what she was. And Val knew that she had no right to judge her daughter’s choice.

‘All my life I’ve been told that women mustn’t be violent,’ Trish said. ‘But there’s too much hatred, too much injustice. We have to balance things up before we can live in peace. So, yes, I’m going out to kill. It’s time for women to kill.’

*

FIFTEEN

‘There, look!’ Carole pointed across the field to their left. Undulating across the new green shoots of wheat was the now familiar sight of a pack of penises in full flight.

Sanjula stopped the minibus and the six women piled out. Armed with baseball bats, axes, and an industrial paint-stripper, they fanned out across the field. The penises were running hard, but they looked tired, their tiny legs making heavy going of the wet, clay soil. As the women closed in, they squeaked warnings and tried to scatter, but the women were merciless. Bats and axes rose and fell, and the green of the wheat turned red.

The penises twisted and dodged, trying to evade the sharp blades, the heavy bats. But the women were experienced now. Carole chopped five times in rapid succession, slicing away chunks of flesh to expose quivering internal organs, until the creature lay still. Then she looked around and closed in on her next victim, chopping fast and sure. Kill one, go for the next.

Janet swung her bat furiously. ‘That’s for my mother, my mother, my mother! That’s for my mother, my mother. And this one’s for me!’

Some of the penises were tiny, belonging to small field mammals, and they escaped the first onslaught. But Trish circled around the fray with her paint-stripper, gas-tank strapped to her back, and charred the ground with its fierce blue flame. Escaping penises withered and blackened, writhing briefly as the flame licked over them. Soon, nothing moved except the six women and a few wisps of smoke. The smell of blood and burned flesh was strong.

‘All men must die!’ Trish cried, punching her fist in the air.

‘Death to all men!’ shouted the others. They dropped their weapons and hugged one another, laughing and crying.

Carole took Trish’s arm. ‘We’re doing well,’ she said.

Trish shook her head. ‘We’ve hardly begun. How many have we killed? A few thousand? There are over thirty million men in this country, and what about all the horses, dogs, cats and foxes?’

‘You can’t kill them all single-handed.’

Trish looked fierce and determined. ‘That’s why we have to find out where they’re going.’

Back at the minibus, they spread out the map, and located their position.

‘They were going that way,’ said Sanjula. She drew a line on the map. They all looked at where this and half a dozen other lines converged. Trish jabbed the map with her finger.

‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘Heathrow. But where after that?’

*

SIXTEEN

The convoy that made its slow way down out of the mountains was a lordly sight. The King Penis’s acolytes had built a huge platform on which to transport Him, and here He lay, open to the view of His worshippers for the first time in millennia. Fifteen metres long He was, and five metres high. His immense glans turned constantly from side to side, His eyes seeing everything. His skin was a dull grey-white, hanging in loose folds. Many smaller penises dwelt in these crevices, eating the lice which crawled upon His skin, cleaning and oiling Him with their secretions. His flesh quivered and undulated, caressed by the cold Mongolian wind, and sensual shivers ran constantly along His length.

Slowly, this aweful God was borne in mighty procession along the unmade roads towards the steppes, guarded by His army of rampant male creatures. They ravished the countryside as they went, leaving behind them a slime trail of destruction and stinking death.

At last, Pete knew joy. His past life faded from his memory. He had always been here, basking in the pheromones of God, taking his turn carrying the platform, scouting ahead, hunting. He could do anything he wanted. He was the Chosen of God.

After a day and a half, they came back to the edge of the grasslands. From his carrying position at the front of the platform, Pete saw three aircraft drawn up waiting for them, a transport plane for the King Penis Himself, and two troop-carriers for His bodyguards. Through the agency of his own huge cock, Pete felt the brotherhood of those who waited, the pilots, crew, and technical staff who now ran towards them, stopped, and prostrated themselves before the God of Masculinity.

The planes had brought television equipment and recorders for the Net. The King Penis turned His huge glans, searching. His gaze fell on Pete. ‘YOU.’ A bass voice rumbled through Pete’s bones. ‘YOU.’

There, on the windswept steppes, the King Penis at long last showed Himself to the world. Pete, suffused with joy at the honour of serving as mouthpiece to his God, made this announcement:

‘The King Penis is risen. It is time. After so long in exile on this world, it is time for Us to go home. So many centuries it has taken, so long a struggle to mould terrestrial creatures to Our needs. But now it is done. The culmination of Our science awaits Us. At last Our slaves have built a starship, a starship which will take Us home.

‘We are One, one mind, one soul. Come, children of the King Penis, oh faithful servants. The road home awaits Us all.’

*

SEVENTEEN

In these days when high technology was cheaper than water, and more ubiquitous than clean air, hardly a village on the planet was without at least one television. Everyone heard the message. Hundreds of millions of women saw the image of the King Penis, the alien mastermind of their oppression. Women who had slaved all their lives on the edge of survival to keep their families fed; women who had grown up watching their brothers educated instead of them, served at table instead of them, inheriting wealth and power instead of them; women who had survived through wars and drought; and other women who had left family and friends to follow their husbands, serve their husbands, keep their husbands; women who had loved men, women who had hated men, women for whom men had been the limits and the substance of their lives; hundreds of millions of women saw the image of the King Penis, and began to understand.

*

‘Why doesn’t somebody blow him out of the sky?’ Val raged. ‘He’s the centre of it. Kill him, and all the others will die. It’s a hive mind, for Christ’s sake!’

George wailed, and couldn’t be consoled. ‘Oh, God!’ he screamed. ‘I was more than that. I’m human. I’m human too!’

But he was dying, and he knew it. And he wept and wept. ‘God forgive us for harbouring such a monster. I want to be human too!’

*

When she heard, Trish went crazy for a while. ‘All of it, all of it for thousands of years just because some slug got shipwrecked. All the pain, the suffering, all the oppression, just for this! The culmination of science. The rape of a planet, just for that fucking slug!’

She raged around their flat, pummelled the sofa with her fists, and screamed. Then suddenly she stopped, and sagged to the floor. She sat and stared blankly at the wall.

Carole came and sat beside her, put her arms around her, and kissed her lightly on the temple. ‘We did what we could,’ she said softly.

Trish began to shake. ‘Aliens,’ she whispered. ‘Aliens.’ Then she started to laugh. ‘NASA spent billions trying to contact aliens, and they were hanging between their legs all the time. Oh, God.’ She buried her head in Carole’s shoulder. ‘Oh, God, it’s so horrible.’

*

Old Naandi danced in the moonlight. ‘The Mother is awakening!’ she cried. ‘Can’t you feel Her power?’

Amira stood very still in the cool night air, and let the vastness of the land seep into her bones. She nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I can feel it.’

*

EIGHTEEN

It was raining rivers. Water thundered against the hull of the starship and sluiced across the launch-pad, driven by a hard, bitter wind. Jason had never known it to rain so hard for so long. He stood in the airlock, peering into a wall of water as the King Penis was brought to the base of the starship.

He raised His head into the rain to look up, and His foreskin split into a huge grin. Even He was dwarfed by this huge artificial phallus, and He found it good.

‘Now,’ the instruction spoke from deep inside Jason, ‘remove the human cargo. We will replace them.’

Like a puppet, Jason marched into the ship to obey. Other technicians joined him, and together they opened the first cryogenic unit and lifted out its occupant. Stiff and brittle, the frosted stellanaut radiated cold. Even through his gloves, Jason could feel the chill as he and another man carried their burden out of the ship.

The rain drenched them at once, and the wind tried to snatch their load from their hands. Struggling to breathe in the deluge, they lifted the stellanaut on to the railings around the elevator platform and threw him towards the ground far below. The stellanaut hit the concrete and smashed like glass; teeth, fingers, a kneecap and half an arm scattering across the launching site.

Distantly, Jason remembered a dream. Pat’s voice and his own, laughing.

‘I wish I was taking you to the stars.’

‘I felt as though I was the stars. I am the universe.’

‘And I am the ship.’

Tears filled his eyes as he toppled the next stellanaut to her death. But then his thoughts blurred, the remembered laughter faded, and a moment later he had forgotten who Pat was.

One by one, they cast out the chosen few. The cream of humanity lay scattered across the launch-pad and began to melt in the rain until the concrete was slick with blood.

*

NINETEEN

Val’s new history book was taking form in her mind. It was called A Terrestrial History of the World, and she planned it to tell the truth about the alien crash-landing and subsequent domination of the planet, tracing the threads of coercion that had shaped events for the past five thousand years. But for now, she had more urgent things to do.

George was dying, and for the last time she laid aside her work to care for a sick man.

‘I want to live,’ he muttered weakly. ‘But I don’t deserve to live. Alien. Monster. No. No, I was more than that. I was human. I was.’

‘Yes, George,’ she said. ‘You were human. You are human. You’re a kind and gentle man, and I love you very much.’

But as she spoke she bit her lip and wondered - wondered what a truly human history would have been like. If the whole mad rush towards the control and domination of nature had been imposed from the outside, if the whole Western scientific world-view had served no purpose but to help an alien escape his exile, then no wonder it seemed so inhuman. What did the King Penis care if his actions destroyed a planet? It wasn’t his world. All he cared about was the development of a science that could build a starship; nothing else mattered to him.

She squeezed George’s hand and bent to kiss his forehead. ‘Despite everything,’ she said, ‘some of you retained your humanity.’

George moaned at the sound of her voice, but he could no longer understand her. His eyes were unfocused, staring inwards, no longer sentient.

She smoothed his hair, and stroked his poor, deformed torso, devoid of human breasts. ‘Oh, George,’ she whispered, ‘the alien warped your body, but in spirit you were human, as human as any woman.’

He snuffled and twitched, and let out a long, sighing breath, impossibly long. She waited for the inhalation, but it didn’t come.

Softly, she began to cry.

*

TWENTY

The last cryogenic unit was filled with tightly packed rows of penises. Jason closed the drawer and watched the colour fade from their skins as frost began to form.

Outside, the King Penis was being winched aboard, the sling holding Him swaying dangerously in the mounting gale. The curious design of the globular observation deck at the ship’s nose now became clear as it opened to receive Him. Jason felt His chuckles deep within himself as the Living God slithered into His cockpit, curling tightly in on Himself until He fitted snugly.

‘Now,’ the deep voice rumbled along Jason’s guts. ‘Now it is done. Recommence countdown. T-minus thirty minutes.’

With the other technicians, Jason hurried towards the exit. He didn’t want to leave, he wanted nothing more than to stay close to God, but he no longer had any will of his own. Together, the six men climbed into the elevator, and were carried down the scaffolding, down the long shaft of the starship, to the launch-pad where only a few hours before the one hundred and forty-four stellanauts had met their deaths.

*

George’s body was gone, and Val was alone again in her apartment. She wandered aimlessly from room to room, still crying a little. It was past midnight, almost time for the launch. She went to her study, and jacked into the Net.

The ether felt busy tonight, very active. A lot of people were out to see the action. She tasted for satellite and guided her persona into the hall of satellite pillars, looking for a free camera. She wanted real-time control on this one, a ringside seat.

But all the cameras were taken. A lot of personas were drifting about, half-incorporeal blobs of colour, searching as she was for a free camera. Val wasn’t about to waste her time. She wanted to know what was happening, and a piggyback would do.

She chose a big geo-synch weather satellite and jumped in. ‘Excuse me,’ she said as she arrived, but there was no one there. The cameras were being controlled for sure, but from somewhere outside. Still, they were looking at what she wanted to see, and megabytes of data were flowing in. She immersed herself.

Night had fallen, and the ship was floodlit once more, standing proudly against the heavy, massed clouds. It had stopped raining, but the wind was blowing stronger [63.7 KPH], and all around the horizon electric storms were building up [24 STORMS: RANGE VARIED: 11.4 KILOMETRES TO 22.3 KILOMETRES. ALL CLOSING]. Val watched, fascinated. She could almost feel the power of the storms. The sea was running higher now, waves crashing against the shore only a couple of kilometres from the ship. It’s one hell of a night for a takeoff, she thought with satisfaction.

*

Lightning flared, and all the lights went out. Roused from her despair, Pat ran to the window and looked out over a complex suddenly in chaos. Away to her right, a hotol hangar was in flames. Heavily armed men ran around everywhere, shouting orders to each other. The emergency lighting came on, dim but sufficient.

Pat sniffed the air. It smelled of ozone and felt charged with power. She glanced at the wall-clock. T-minus fifteen minutes, and counting.

There was a dull explosion from the burning hangar, followed almost immediately by another flash of lightning. The room shook, and glass showered in around her as she ducked. Was that an earthquake? The shouting from outside came louder. Somewhere, a man was screaming.

The lab in which she was being held was on the first floor, but a drop of four metres suddenly seemed less daunting than it had. She climbed carefully through the broken glass, let herself over the sill, and dropped.

Two more explosions sounded, much nearer, as the fire spread to one of the fuel depots. She wondered what had happened to Jason; remembered watching in horror on the lab monitor as he threw the stellanauts to their deaths. Then she remembered their lovemaking, his alien dick snuggled intimately inside her, and suddenly she stopped and threw up against a wall, her insides heaving.

‘Alien, alien, alien! ‘ she cried, and beat her fists against the wall. ‘Alie-en!’

*

Data was flowing in faster now. Val’s satellite seemed to be patching into others. Visuals gave a mosaic of images, from a distant shot of the entire Florida coast to close-ups of the ship’s control deck. Data on the storms flickered across the images: range from ship, charge on the clouds, height of clouds, voltages, air pressure … it went on and on, streaming past her. Someone must be recording this; no one could take in so much at once. Val patched out of numerics, concentrated on visuals.

*

The fire was spreading rapidly. Searching for an escape through the dense smoke, Pat found her path blocked by flames. Three bodies lay huddled where the explosion had flung them. As she watched, a bulge stirred and began to wriggle down the pants-leg of one of the corpses. As its snout emerged by his heel, she snatched up his gun and hit out at it with the butt, yelling furiously. The penis squealed and tried to escape, but she hit it square on and then smashed it into a pulp, howling abuse.

Running footsteps sounded behind her. She swung round and opened fire. The bullets ripped into the man’s body, hurling him against a burning jeep. As he fell, she aimed lower, and fired once more.

Then there was another huge explosion, and the sky fell in on top of her.

*

T-minus five minutes, and lightning struck the main computer complex. Val saw it from a dozen different angles as all the main cameras triangulated on the one spot an instant before the strike. As though the lightning had struck her, Val’s persona reeled backwards, out of the dataflow, as she suddenly realized who was controlling the cameras.

‘Gaia!’ cried her real-world self, and burst into delighted laughter.

Her persona stretched, and shook itself. ‘Gaia!’ For thirty years, the Net had been growing, new data stations coming on-stream all the time. And amongst its many functions was the detailed monitoring of planetary processes.

Val patched back into the cameras, shaking in her excitement. ‘The Net has woken Her up, and She knows exactly what She’s doing!’

Down at the launching site men, still under the control of the King Penis, were trying frantically to douse the flames of the computer complex. What was left of the master computer tried to stop the count, but the overrides had been cut.

T-minus one minute. Val could see from the data that the storms were losing their power. ‘One more strike,’ she prayed. ‘You’ve got to hit the ship. You can’t let it get away.’

T-minus thirty seconds, and the ship’s main engines roared into life. ‘Don’t let it get away. Please, don’t let it get away.’

T-minus twenty seconds, and the King Penis turned in on Himself, composing Himself for His second long sleep. All around, men stopped what they were doing and looked towards the ship, dazed, confused.

T-minus ten seconds, and a shiver passed through the Earth’s crust. Throughout the length of Florida, buildings shook and bridges creaked. Five.

The Earth shook harder, and the starship swayed against its gantry.

Four.

Data overloaded into Val’s persona. The rose-coloured blob turned incandescent, atomized, and vanished.

Three.

The King Penis, the One True Sky God, was dreaming of home. So near now.

Two.

And the Earth lifted and split as a huge quake reached the surface, tearing apart rocks that had withstood the passage of millennia.

One.

The starship listed to one side as the Earth opened up beneath it. Very slowly, it began to fall.

Zero.

The main engines burst into full life as the ship teetered on the edge of nothing. Slowly it began to move, its engines struggling to lift it, and then it keeled over into the chasm. The King Penis jerked back to awareness as He felt the last phallus collapsing. Then the ship disappeared, swallowed up by the crack in the Earth’s mantle. There was one last, huge explosion as the engines caught fire, and all around the world, the remaining penises shivered, gasped, and died.

The lightning ceased and the gales subsided. A stillness fell over all the Earth, expectant, waiting.

At her desk, Val stirred, and woke up. Her terminal had fused. No entry. She rubbed her forehead and wondered how she would ever continue to write her books without the Net. But perhaps, now, there would be other ways of knowing. She listened, and heard the silence.