The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“I hear, if they catch him, the council’s not going to stop at invisibility,” Erno said. “They’ll kick him out.”

“Invisibility won’t slow Tyler down,” Ty said. “Would you obey the decree?” he asked Sid.

“Me? I’m too beautiful to let myself get booted. If Tyler Durden likes masculinists so much, let him go to one of the other colonies, or to Earth. I’m getting laid too often.”

Erno’s gut tightened. “They will kick him out. My mother would vote for it in a second.”

“Let ’em try,” Ty grunted, still rowing.

“Is that why you’re working out so much lately, Ty?” Sid said. “Planning to move to Earth?”

“No. I’m just planning to bust your ass.”

“I suspect it’s not busting you want to do to my ass.”

“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.

EIGHT

“It’s no trick to be celibate when you don’t like sex.”