This is a work in progress. I think this webpage contains the first third or so of this story. Content notes: cannibalism, factory farming, sexual slavery, alien culture.
In a dingy windowless kitchen lit by one yellow light over the table, a married couple sit down to eat. There is carrot stew in bowls in front of them. Or at least, they are root vegetables, and they are sort of orange. Let’s go ahead and call them carrots. The two grunt and fart contentedly as they eat. They are a decorous species – very much so, in fact – but the rules governing the sounds of the body mostly pertain to speech. It would shame them if they spoke off-pitch, and they wince instinctively when they hear a wrong note.
The couple are unlike in size. The man is three times the mass of the woman, and sparsely hairy all over. The woman has much thicker fur, so thick it can be combed and oiled. They both have two eyes, which are amber, and two pointed ears, which flick about as they eat. The woman has shining white tusks capped in gold. The man clearly used to have much larger ones, but they have been ground down to domes, also plated with gold.
Their names are sung, but they have given names and surnames, albeit not granted all at once at birth. Let’s go ahead and call the woman Dian Catriona Trescott-Lowry. It should, somewhat, give you some right ideas about her.
And let’s call the man Charlie.
This dinner takes place near the end of their story. On the table is an unopened letter sealed in wax. It is from some old friends. They correspond regularly with those friends, but it has been a long time since they received a letter that looked like this. They have a good idea of what it proposes. Or at least, they have a general sense of how costly it will be to their family to agree.
Charlie goes back for seconds. After all these years he still looks a little furtive and embarrassed when he rises for more food. He does not pile much into his bowl. When he finishes there is no further excuse. The woman, flicking him a glance, reaches for the letter. As she opens it he sees the lines cutting horizontally across the paper, three on every row. Solid, dotted, and doubled lines mark the inflections of their tritone language. Years ago he would have reached for the letter – he needed to show, at every occasion, that he was literate. But he’s slow at reading and finds it aversive. Now, in the privacy of their home, they divide work the way they really prefer. Dian’s eyes dart across the paper, the music fast forwarded in her head.
“Where do they want us to go now?” he rumbles when the woman reaches the end of the letter, gaze lingering on the signatures. “Argentina? China? Or will the revolution begin in Norway this time?” His diction is perfect.
“No. Home.”
He shakes his head, smiles. “We battered ourselves against it half our lives.”
“It still has the largest support base.”
“And a powerful opposition, just as ready to mobilize as the base.” He doesn’t say no, but he wants to.
“They think,” Dian says slowly, “that home has the largest audience, an audience that has context on how we began and is ready to reel at our long, successful partnership here in Greece. Attested to by its witnesses, who are close to adults.”
“Close to,” said the man. “Can’t we wait?”
“There’s a new bill – scheduled for vote this winter.”
They go outside and take a walk in the garden that wraps around their house, with its high high walls covered in thorny ivy. But even with the walls Charlie doesn’t speak. Their estate is isolated, but they still have neighbors who could hear a male voice. The leaves are turning, and a few are falling. When they reach the final corner of their walk, Charlie kneels down to brush them off the three stone slabs. Dian stays behind, looking back towards the house. The graves make her too sad.
Charlie’s story began when there was an embargo on the island country he had been born in. Let’s call it New Zealand. New Zealand was neutral but was still affected by the war, which lasted for three years. Disease swept the farms, and two-thirds of the livestock died. People were not supposed to eat that meat, but it could have been exported as meal in normal times. Since it could not be exported, it was given as meal to the surviving livestock.
Meat normally comprised about one percent of livestock diet, but for those three years it ranged from ten to twenty percent, almost half of what it was for people. “An awful waste,” the farmers lamented. It did not escape their notice that the bulls in that cohort communicated in ditone to each other as their throats developed. This was not welcome. When they walked past the byres, the cacophony was disturbing. The farmers sold a few to the brothels, but Zealander bulls were not bred for sex work and didn’t have the right look, even if they could communicate more.
What did happen was that when the Reducetarian League scoured the world for males that could serve as symbols for their propaganda, they found many candidates born near the beginning of the New Zealand embargo. Charlie was six when they bought him and eleven others and took him on a ship, where he threw up a lot. He didn’t talk. The interviewer had almost given up on him when he decided to go along and answer her questions, fluting out his tritonal replies warily.
He and the others came from the largest livestock company in New Zealand, as all the other companies had already liquidated their stock from the embargo cohort. The company was called Langholme Foods, so they were all given the surname Langholme. The expedition leader gave Charlie the name Vernon, although he didn’t learn this until he stepped off the livestock hold in England. He was still called Vernon Langholme when he met Dian, although they changed his name a few times soon after. So close to launch, their PR strategy was in flux.
Dian’s story began when she was humiliated in front of her mother’s friends at her eighth birthday party. Everyone got upset. It is why her name is missing an E.
The problem was that she’s been reading a textbook that talks about DNA. She knew what chromosomes are, and that plants have a lot more of them. It was geared towards students who are already assumed to have been given the obvious context. So it didn’t hedge the way it would to a child when it presents the 38 chromosomes of the male and female species in side-by-side prints, with extensive annotations on shared genetic loci in each.
Di liked to show off. She introduced this information brightly between the entree, which was flank steak, and dessert, which was glazed sweetbread topped with chestnut purée and fruit. The guests politely entertained her chatter when she talked about FOXP2, but an awkward chilly silence descended when she adds the information – which was much the same type of information to her mind – that males and females share 99.9% of their genes. Dian’s mother kicked her shin, claws almost poking through Di’s leather skirt. Di says, “Ow!” and turned indignantly to her.
There was a long awkward silence where Rosamund Trescott-Lowry stared at her daughter, silently saying I don’t want to chastise you in public, and Di stared back, silently saying I don’t know why I’m being chastised in public. Finally Rosamund said, “Di, this is a quite delicate topic and I don’t think we should discuss it here.”
“I just thought it was interesting that the animals this –” Di gestured at the plates – “comes from share so much of our genes.”
Her mom replied, “Yes, that’s why we don’t talk about it,” at the same time Di continued, “I knew they were birthed the same as us, but –”
“Child, you are eight now,” said her least favorite aunt. Her name was Therese and she was only partnered with two of the five other women in the household, and was always trying to make up for this lack of standing by being officious. “You ought to know better than to bring up such a thing at your naming day.”
Di decided to ignore Therese’s rebuke. She said, “If [ACD/CF#E/GAF#] and [DE/BA#/EB] are genetically almost identical, shouldn’t [ACD/CF#E/GAF#] be treated like people too? Since we should expect to diverge from them very little in how our minds and bodies work. And not eaten?”
Di was not trying to provoke. She was merely thinking out loud in public. She already knew she was in trouble but she thought if she kept talking she would be in only slightly worsening amounts of trouble.
Her mother turned her body towards Di all the way, and quickly, a gesture of seriousness that made Di’s fur jump from her hide. “Di. You have, to your embarrassment, repeated an argument promulgated by biologism. Be thankful I think you’re just being foolish, not knowingly repeating a notion invented by monstrous, wretched despicables.”
Tears sprang into Di’s eyes. She was not used to being upbraided so harshly by her mother in public.
Therese said, “She’s just a child, Cecily. She’ll grow to learn better.”
As if this were a passive process that did not involve Cecily as teacher and primary parent. She leveled Therese a very cold look before saying, with poise, “Friends, I apologize for her conduct. I clearly need to have a conversation with her and regret I didn’t already. I’m very embarrassed. Please, dig back into dessert and let’s hear a singing of Reba’s latest poem.”
Di was flushed all under, her face-hairs standing up like a porcupine’s. Her tears matted the fur around her eyes. She had only been saying her thoughts. She knew herself to be a nice, bright girl to others, and took great pleasure in this self image. She had not known before that someone like her could accidentally have thoughts that belonged only to monstrous despicables.
The guests were still rattled when the clock struck midnight and they started singing the name song: “This little girl is growing up. When we last came here, we named her Di, Di of the Trescott-Lowry family group. Time carries her up and out! As she expands, so does her name. We sing it together into her next year. What will she be called next? Di –”
This song went around repeatedly until the group was in consensus, and each time everyone sang a candidate-name softly, trying it out. The first time, Di was supposed to sing the completion she most preferred. But she was too rattled, and there was no consensus. The second time she sang her name but stuttered on the tritone. Everyone pretended not to notice. Because they were embarrassed for her, they sang it a little too in synchrony the next turn, too much in agreement too fast.
But the syllable was mangled, because everyone had misheard it in their own way. Normally a bold girl, Di was too embarrassed to assert her choice. When the group settled on the new tritone to add to her name – let’s call it an – they chose one that was close to a common tritone, but was definitely not the tritone Di had been wanting for herself.
She’d had her whole name played out, all the way into six-tone adult name, and had to scrap it because it couldn’t work with the new second tone. She went to bed in tears.
Dian didn’t think about the party or the subject of male DNA for a few years. Or more accurately, she pushed it quickly out of mind, a flinch-kick: That’s a bad thought. That’s a dirty thought. I’m not going to think about that evening.
When she was thirteen, she left children’s school, where they kept you day-round before sending you home, to a young ladies’ school, which let you off every sixth afternoon for self-development, at one of the many large or small programs there were in the city. Her mother loosened curfew at the same time. So she regularly had almost the whole day free, from noon to midnight.
She usually spent it at library programs. They had easy programs like timing you reading, and the more books you read that you could write a ten paragraph review for, the more points you got in an in-library prize system that you could use for placing holds or jumping queues. But sometimes she went to play tennis, and the courts were across the street from the butcher’s. A truck was pulling in just as she walked by one day. Dian watched as they carried out a leg from a hook inside the truck and hung it on a different hook in the back room of the butcher’s. The torso cuts they carried out next were nearly unrecognizable, but the leg was really obviously a leg, just… hairless and huge, sawed off at the groin and at the ankle.
Dian stared at the leg and tried to fit it onto the context of a larger, whole animal. She had never seen a male in person, only slightly dirty drawings or abstracted diagrams at the butcher’s. Her world did not have the photograph, and the only way one saw a male was for eating or fucking. At schools the worse type of student scrawled on bathroom walls the obscene symbol for males, which was an upside down triangle with a line or a blob for a penis. In more explicit ones it had a head except instead of an oval for the head it was a cup, with a gap where its brain and tritonal throat should be.
There were two things that came out of a woman’s vagina. You might have a normal child, covered with fine, dark, damp fur. If you had the other kind you sold it, usually to the company who had sold you the sperm. The other thing was a patchily haired animal with a penis, which looked like an inverted, bunched-up vagina. It was covered with thin pleated frills that looked like bunched-up fabric, and it was usually scutched for shaved-meat salads, or made into rinds.
The money for selling the male wasn’t bad, and for some women it was adequate consolation for the half-year they lost in getting a child. When the farm got the boar they would raise him to peak slaughtering age if they could, killing him early if he caught ill or went lame. If he were well-shaped and articulate he might go to a brothel, but most didn’t. If he lived to peak age and could speak in a ditone, sometimes the farm would make him a sperm bull.
This was known to Dian, but she knew it with her brain and not her eyes.
Dian, who was at this point really Dian Ca Trescott-Lowry, folded her arms and watched them drive away. They were large and went slowly on the road, and she could follow them on her bike. She knew there were farms outside the city, but she didn’t know where they were exactly. Probably not that far.
She was too young to be let into the brothels where one could talk to boars. But she could see them on a farm, and decide for herself. Did the genes make the person? Were boars people, or not?
“Excuse me, do you ever get delivery after noon?” she asked.
“Every five days, from Redwick farm. We’re their last round.”
She looked at her calendar to see when she would next be free to follow a Redwick truck back. On that day she waited a block away under the high sun, leaning against a lamp-post on her bike. When the truck left, she took off after it.
Sixteen, Dian Catri headed inwards into the city with a new brothel pass, and chose the best one, as any other choice might embarrass her family. She had waited four months to not seem over-eager. At sixteen one’s hormones ran as high as they were ever going to be. She would have to do her business with the male supervised by a brothel staff member until she was an adult, at twenty four.
Dian did want sex, but mostly with other girls her age. As many girls did, she found sex with males, actual sex with males rather than a curse or a joke, a strange concept. They were so big, unkempt-looking, and even on weakening diets, strong. Their tusks were knocked out and filed as soon as they grew in, but they still have their teeth. They were known to snap every now and then and kill their bedmate. But it was a common enough fetish to find their bigness good, and it was very common to like the penis, although most women preferred to use tools with each other or alone. The tools left out the frills, usually. They were abstracted cylinders, easy to clean.
She looked around in the lobby, waiting as women came up and down the stairs holding the shock-leashes to the males, checking them in or out. The males wore long gray cloaks that wrapped all around their body from the neck down. She saw that when the males were done they were showered, because they came in and out of the same room with their shabby fur clinging to their skin. Despite this the lobby had a strong farm-smell, just without the manure.
When the lively-looking one she had noticed twice in a row was checked back in and emerged clean, she went into the display room to get him. She said, “What’s your name?”
“Cobey,” said the male.
“Come with me.”
She checked in with the front desk, pulling her brothel pass and bills out of her wallet. They sat together in the waiting area, waiting for the staff member to accompany them to the room she had booked for an hour. He stared at his hands and did not speak. She wondered what to say. He was so tall sitting across her with that big black cloth pulled over all of his body but his head. And feet. Huh. He had feet.
Dian said, “Where were you before this brothel?”
“A farm on the other side of the city,” said Cobey without look at her. He used ditone, and it was halting. And hard to make out, if you wanted to say anything complicated, because it became harder to fill in what the unsung third tone should be saying. But males didn’t say complicated things, so that was fine.
“How old were you when you came here?”
“Six.” Male sexual maturity age. Females reached it at twice that.
“Wait, how old are you now?”
“Sixteen.”
“Oh. Me too.”
He gave her a quick look with blank eyes and said nothing.
She said, “What was the farm like?”
She had spent dozens of days watching farms from the outside. Once of twice she’d gone in, too, chatting with some bored farmhand.
“It was nice,” said Cobey without changing expression. She was watching him carefully and sensed he knew it. His shoulders had gone up an inch or two since their conversation began. “We spent a lot of time outside, chatting and looking at the sky.”
She propped her chin up on her hand and fiddled with her tusks, which were just starting to come in. “But isn’t it uncomfortable when the rain is cold or the sun is hot?” She knew perfectly well it was.
“Well, we’re so big, you know, it doesn’t really bother us.”
“But it’s your skin that has the nerve endings. The parts that hurt aren’t, like, buried deep. I don’t see why you shouldn’t –” Dian was saying, when the brothel staff member assigned to supervise her arrived.
Dian thought about it and didn’t see a reason she shouldn’t keep talking as they walked to their room. “You speak ditone but that’s unusual, right? How did you learn ditone if most of the other boars don’t speak it?” She had been wondering about this. Boars mostly spoke to each other, in those cut-off one-voice songs. She found it hard to understand. It was almost its own stunted language.
The chaperone was frowning at her but didn’t say anything.
“We…” Cobey looked at the chaperone, and seeing no guidance there, obeyed his client. “We hear it plenty from people. There’s always chatter when they load or unload the pens, or bring in feed or take manure away.”
“But often the boars themselves do that work,” Dian said.
“Only in small farm operations, where they know all the boars’ personalities and know which ones can be trusted with chores,” said Cobey. He gave the chaperone another look. “I came from a bigger operation.”
“What’s the name of the operation?”
“That,” said the chaperone, “is quite enough of being an aimless busybody from you, miss. Keep the chatter sexual.”
“Er,” said Dian. “What sex acts do you enjoy?”
“The main one.”
“Other than the main one.”
“The main one is the only sex act sold to under-24s by the brothel,” said the chaperone.
“My question was actually about what sex acts Cobey enjoys, which has no necessary bearing on what I’m going to do with him in the hour I bought him.”
The chaperone audibly took a breath and said, “Fair,” with a forced smile. “Well, Cobey?”
“I like to be licked on the pizzle,” Cobey said.
The chaperone turned around and lashed Cobey across the face with her tawse. He made a choked bleat and fell back against the wall. Dian made a sound of alarm and started forward. “What was that for?”
“What a foul answer, Cobey!” the chaperone said. “That is not brothel etiquette!”
“There was nothing wrong with his answer! He answered my question!” Dian’s indignation was a little feigned; everything relating to sex with boars was rude, but what Cobey had said was especially obscene. “I want a different staff member to supervise me.”
They were now outside the room door, which was locked. “Wait here, then,” said the supervisor, glaring at them. “I’ll get someone else.”
Cobey’s tears ran down his face before eventually being soaked up by the fuzz on his face.
“Did the slap hurt so much?” she said, turning towards him.
“No, miss, I just hate being in trouble.”
“Do you get into trouble often?”
“Never, miss. This time I couldn’t tell if I’d get in trouble if I lied or if I told the truth. I chose wrong, I guess.”
Dian stopped asking, abashed. When the replacement chaperone came, unlocked the door, and flipped the hourglass on the lintel above the bed, she was not in the mood at all. Cobey wasn’t looking at her. He undid the latch at his throat and the fabric fell open about his big pale body. The flaps on his sex organ were ruched tightly, which Dian was pretty sure meant he wasn’t aroused at all. She undid her belted skirt and sat on the bed. They stared at each other.
The chaperone, clearly alerted by the previous one, watched them beadily. She said, “If you want an injection for him, I have one ready here.”
“No need,” said Dian. “Come here, Cobey.”
He did.
“Straddle me.”
He did.
She touched the frills on his organ very hesitantly. She was inadvertently thinking of cracklings or steak shavings as she reached out, and was shocked by how soft living frills were. They were velvety flaps, like his penis was an elongated rose. And at that rose’s center was a denser curtain of flaps. She could push them back and see where the sperm-hole was –
Cobey winced.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, still peering. She loosened her grip. “I’ve just never seen one before… can I lick it?”
“Against brothel policy,” said the chaperone.
“Oh, is it? Sorry,” said Dian, pretending she was hearing this for the first time. “Well, I won’t lick it. But nothing wrong about getting real up close, to take a look, right? It’s educational.”
“Sure,” said the woman, dubiously.
“Lie on the bed, Cobey.”
He did.
Now she was straddling him, with her face leaned up against the organ. “Hey,” the chaperone said sharply when her nose brushed up against it.
“Sorry, I was just sniffing it.”
The chaperone muttered something. Cobey’s penis was hardening under Dian’s hands. She stroked slowly, more with the hand that wasn’t as visible to the chaperone. She breathed on the organ; it stretched and danced up against her mouth. It wanted in. Cobey was breathing a little deeply, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
“Why don’t you get started now,” the chaperone said curtly.
“Okay,” said Dian, and mounted him carefully. She was very wet. She followed her instincts, rocking back and forth until the rhythm knocked a scream out of her. Then another one. Orgasms with a male came so easily, compared to doing it with an implement. She swore the frills helped – she couldn’t feel them distinctly but they added squish and mass in some way that seemed to improve the fucking.
But mostly, somehow, it was the rest of the body attached to the sex implement that made it good – the big patchy mass of him, with his mouth pressed tightly together, drool running around the stubs of his tusks, fists glued to the bunched fabric of the bed.
She stopped when the hourglass had nearly run out and lay down, panting. The chaperone murmured something about teenagers. Cobey’s penis was almost almost clotted over with her vaginal fluids, the flaps glued to each other. The chaperone wrapped a wet cloth around it immediately – so it wouldn’t dry out before he could hit the shower, she realized.
“I liked that a lot,” she said to the air, a little unhappy about this. She did not want to become a brothel regular. It was a little embarrassing to be one.
“You’re very welcome,” said the chaperone.
She walked home even though it was a long way, not knowing what to think. The thing she couldn’t get out of his mind was the way he’d said I just hate being in trouble, in that ditone, like a young girl who was so upset she lost control of the third tone. After glancing around to make sure she was the only one on the street, she repeated his sentence, tensing her third larynx so it came out the way his voice did, an awkwardly sawed-off, mumbled sentence, with a whole third implied. He had to choose words that weren’t ambiguous. The words that had collisions when a whole third of it was eliminated were barred to him.
Checking the street even more furtively, she repeated to herself, “I like to be licked on the pizzle,” again in that childish ditone. She thought of those silky, delicate folds all gummed up with her juices. Funny that they felt things like that about their organ if you didn’t cut it off. Funny that they liked to have it licked.
Dian Catrio was twenty two, and she was in Brazil, nominally on a vacation. She found herself having coffee on some grass across the entrance of a kill factory near her rented apartment. When she wanted personal time, she idled there, watching the hot trucks go in with live animals and cold trucks go out with dead ones. It felt freeing to be abroad. At home she had to keep her obsession quiet. She did not know how to explain it to her mother or aunts.
After some time it became apparent she was not the only one watching this. There was an older woman with a notebook. They did not acknowledge each other for a few days but when it became apparent they had the same strange hobby, Dian approached her. She said, “Why are you here?”
“AgroCarne is the largest livestock processing company in this country. I am a citizen auditor making sure important aspects of this business are close to reported figures.”
“I don’t think this quite answers my question.”
“I’m counting trucks.”
“What is the ultimate figure derived from the truck count?”
The woman said, “I will answer this if you tell me why you are here.”
Dian said, “I – I haven’t made up my mind on whether they are people.”
The woman’s brows lifted. “The… steers?”
“Right.”
“Most people are not confused on this aspect.”
“Brothel boars are almost people. If you really ask them a lot of questions they start getting talkative, and it’s pretty clear they have their own view on things, their secret thoughts. And on the other end, the theoretical end, we’re almost genetically identical. Unless you think sapience lives on that one chromosome that’s sawed off in the males.”
“Ah, a proponent of biologism? In this day and age?” The woman’s voice was genteel, amused, a little mocking.
“I don’t count myself as a member the tribe of biologism, to bristle when the word is applied pejoratively or stand proud if it’s praised. But I don’t see either why you think it’s fine to dismiss my thought because others, whom you have disliked, have had the same thought I did. Is the thought itself wrong? That is the question.”
“It seems wrong that genes are the full story. Males and females are so different it’s laughably blind to say, yes, but the thirty seven chromosomes! We must be the same!”
“Clearly we are not the same,” said Dian slowly. “We seem to differ by more than one in thirty eight parts. But is it one of the thirty seven chromosomes we have in common that govern our response to pain, or neglect, or insult – or that crucial thirty eighth?”
Now there was no humor in the other woman’s face. “I have a scenario for you.”
“Go on.”
“Say that the every-other-birth of boars to human women is actually due to a parasite which inserts its own DNA into the embryo. Boars are actually built on a genetic blueprint entirely unlike ours, but the parasitic genes specify that it should somewhat resemble us in shape, so that we don’t react the way we would if we gave birth to a scorpion. When boar DNA is sent to a woman so she could reproduce, the parasitic function successfully dominates half the time. This accounts for –”
“This is clearly not true,” Dian said, no longer able to hold her peace. “If so, when women successfully birth babies to rear, those babies should be clones, and clearly they aren’t.”
“Oh, it’s clearly not true. But sort of smudge over all the ways it couldn’t possibly be true, because all of this has been leading up to a question: if you find that boars don’t share most of their DNA with us, and they look and act so different because they are very different all the way up to their genes, do you pack up and go home and stop wondering whether they’re people?”
Dian shook her head, smiling. She couldn’t help the smile. It was just a ridiculous notion to her, and she didn’t expect the woman to understand. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re curious. The other day there was a truck malfunction on the road for a minute, just short of this destination – and their heads all poked out to see what was happening. They wanted to know what caused the stop. And I think they wanted to know if the halt signified that perhaps they wouldn’t die.”
“You think they understand they’ll die?”
“Well, I think they certainly understand that sometimes unexpected developments mean they can get food when normally they wouldn’t, or they get to go outdoors when they normally wouldn’t. They anticipate good or bad things happening to them. When the landscape of that anticipation changes, they want to know more.”
“That’s why you think they might be people?”
“Well, and they talk to each other constantly, the way we do.”
“Oh? But their throats don’t work…”
“Most of them have only the one tone so they improvise. The vocabulary’s different. It’s obvious if you listen for a long time. The farmers know, too. They say, ah, they’re warning each other we’re coming, or ah, they’re complaining about the cold But they’ll never say, the boars are talking, even though they must be talking for the farmer’s observations to be true.”
“You’re saying you understand the monotonal pidgin?”
“Well, not in Brazil. The language is different here.”
The woman looked at her some more and seemed to come to a decision. “My name is Beatriz. I’m counting trucks because I suspect the inbound ones were on the road longer than their legal maximum duration. You can tell because if the trucks are on the road too long, a significant fraction of the animals arrive dead and aren’t represented in the out-truck count.”
“And you’re doing this because…”
“Because my organization is getting ready to sue the shit out of AgroCarne for abusive animal transport and I’m gathering information.”
“What organization?”
“I don’t want to tell you the name. But if you want, you can come to one of our meetings next week. Don’t bring any friends.”
Dian Catriona had two adulthood parties – the one with her family and friends, where they sung the final syllable of her name into reality, and the one she had with her friends at the Reducetarian League.
There were layers to the Reducetarian League. Most of the members didn’t think males felt the way people did – they just didn’t think the cruelty was worth it when one could thrive on half the meat that modern women ate. The radicals, like Dian, thought the boars were fully people. No one said they were of biologism – that was still too dirty a word. But the biologist sentiment lay thickly with them, because the observation that males were genetically very similar to females tended to drive people to reducetarian conclusions. The conclusion that what they were doing was –
“Never use the word cannibalism,” said Beatriz. “People get very angry. They say you’re accusing eating flank steak of being as bad as the crash of ‘32. I think it’s a losing move to compare something to anything, personally. Happy birthday, by the way.”
They were sharing a cigarette on the roof.
“I’m an adult now,” said Dian. “You can tell me all the classified League stuff that children can’t know about.”
“Hah. The French branch found its treasurer was defrauding them and the ad hoc committee is having drama because the organizer quit in a rage. Are you adult enough to read through the transcripts and see if she’s in violation of her vow?”
Dian thought about joking, hah, no, not that mature, but instead she said the truth. “Yes, why not? Does it need doing? Send them over.”
Beatriz gave her a look. “I might just, then.”
A long, amiable silence passed. Beatriz said, “Your family is wealthy.”
It wasn’t hard to find out. There weren’t a lot of Dians around. “Yes.”
“You have a lot to lose if you’re caught in something messy.”
“They’ll land on their feet.”
“Glib.”
Glib – and un-adult? Dian felt a flash of insecurity. She worshipped Beatriz. “No, I mean it. It will be difficult for them – but it’ll pass. Because they don’t care. They’ll disavow everything I do, and it won’t… it won’t catch on their soul.”
“What do you mean?”
“The real mess would come if someone asked them about something I’d done, and it would hurt them to say the right thing, because they didn’t think it was the right thing. And if they say the right thing, it hurts them inside, and if they hesitate, or say the thing that seems true to them, it hurts them outside. None of my mothers or crechemates have that about livestock. So they’ll get out of it. There’s nothing for the accusations about me to catch on, in them.”
“Ah,” said Beatriz. She paused for a long time. “Well, as it happens, there is a classified project that we want to bring you into, where your knowledge of the upper crust would be valuable.”
“How so?”
“For one thing, we are training someone to good manners. Impeccable manners. They should be able to sit down with the Prime Minister and behave flawlessly.”
“Who is she?”
“The name is Vernon. And if I like your work on the French committee transcripts, I’ll take you down for a meeting next month.”