“Do you ever wonder why all the men are gone?” Mara took a huge bite of her juicy ripe pomegraft, ignoring the dribbles down her chin. She’d asked me to meet her at breakfast early, before anyone else in our learner-cohort was up.
“Ancient history,” I said. “The Great Mutation. 3525.” I hoped Mara would be impressed that I knew the date. I didn’t know much about male people, but I knew they existed until about four hundred years ago. I hadn’t thought about them much.
“Yes, that’s what The Great Charter says. A pretty convenient document if you ask me. The Great Mutation and all that. Y chromosomes supposedly damaged forever. Then The Weavers discover hormone shots for childgrowers in the nick of time, before the human race disappears. Suspicious.”
I sipped my wateroo and gazed into her glowing green eyes. She held my gaze longer than anyone usually looks at anyone else, and I knew something was up.
“Tert. You've got to get this. Our very cells are being rearranged. It happens at lifechoice.” Mara’s radiant red hair trembled from the intensity of her voice.
“What are you talking about?” I thought maybe she’d gone crazy. “And what does that have to do with those ancient males?”
“Listen. The Weavers, who are they really? Their annoying little logo—‘Weaving the Fabric of Life’? I used to think it was a clever slogan. But it’s not good, Tert. They are not good.”
“What are you on about? The Weavers do everything for us. Food for all, beautiful ponds, an organized lifeway. They made everything better. I know what I saw when I timezoned to 3500. It was horrible.”
I sat hard on my hands, thinking of the sad people I’d seen just a month ago when I’d turned 18, and completed my mandatory time travel. A rolling tear had left a track in a little child's dusty face. The child had been holding a dead flower. A woman with blank eyes had leaned limply against a hard wall. I'd seen men—the people with no breasts, tall, some had hair on their face.
“Think, Tert. There’s too much secrecy. Have you ever seen one of the Weavers?”
“Well, no. But what difference does that make? And what do you mean our cells are being rearranged?”
Mara pushed fingers through her beautiful red hair. “Think about Gior! What was she like—what is she like now?”
A month ago, Gior had made her lifechoice—she was now a foodgrower. Which was strange, because her whole childhood she had talked about being an infotech. She had loved the compupods. Gior now moved slowly with a soft violet-eyed smile; her eyes were not blue-black anymore, but deep purple.
“Well, yeah. Different. Slow, and her eyes are purple now. So what? Youngers are hyper, olders slow down. Like The Great Charter says, ‘eyes and personality often change after lifechoice’.” Again, I hoped Mara would notice that I knew an exact quote from The Great Charter.
But it was obvious she couldn’t care less about my knowing the quote. “I don’t believe it just happens,” she said, banging her fist on the table. “The Weavers change us. Epigenetics. They control life. They got rid of the males. It wasn’t a mutation.”
“What?” I felt weird. I was used to Mara saying… unusual things. She’s so smart; she notices things the rest of us don’t. But this was really nuts.
“I’ve had my suspicions for a while, and maybe I should have talked with you about them, my friend. The thing is, now I have proof.” Mara took a small packet out of her overalls.
“These are directions.”
“Directions for what?”
“For making baby boys, Tert. Someone from the underground found healthy Y chromosomes when they timezoned. And now they can make male babies. I got this proof from Palk. Just last week. She’s part of the underground Tert!”
I felt completely confused. Palk was one of our learner-cohorts who had disappeared about a year ago. We’d all assumed she’d gone to another cohort. I’d heard rumors of ‘the underground’ but I never thought it was real.
“I’m not sure I believe in the underground.” I said. Actually, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to believe in the underground.
My lifechoice time was coming up and I wanted to be a childgrower. Before she would be turned over to the childcarers, I imagined showing my future daughter the kittycats. I’d seen them just this morning; a sight you had to wake early to enjoy. A small herd of pink kittycats bounded up and down in the grassy area near my sleeping pod. Kittycats spent most of their days nestled together in small furry clumps under mushrooms at the edges of the forbidden fungi forest. At night they came out and hunted goldfish in the moonlight.
Mara snapped her fingers under my nose. “Pay attention. I’m going to tell you something and you can’t tell anyone. I’m going underground. It’s not a story. It’s a real place in the fungi forest. Real, Tert. I’m going in two days. I’m skipping lifechoice. I don’t want to be changed, Tert!”
Mara’s forehead tightened with uncharacteristic tension. I couldn’t think what to say. I looked out of the dining cubicle window at my favorite pond with its floating flower podgarden. Butterflies winked in the sunlight. I didn’t want to believe Mara. My cheeks felt hot. Mara leaving? In two days? Our cells being changed? This was too much.
“And you need to come too, Tert. Only four months until your lifechoice.” Her green eyes brightened even more. “They’re making baby boys there, Tert. It’s going to be a whole new world some day. Without the Weavers controlling every blasted thing.”
“You’re trying to ruin our lives. Our peace and beauty!” I cried.
Her face softened and she grasped my hands gently. “I know this is a lot to take in. And so sudden. Please, though. Please think about it. Let’s meet early for breakfast again tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I didn’t know what to think. I could barely think. Mara often had this effect on me.
“Use your brain. You have one Tert, but you don’t always use it. This is about right and wrong. It’s about freedom.”
I couldn’t focus during educamp. My glance travelled among our seventeen cohort- learners as I pictured them changing like Gior. Bork’s eyes were a deep dark brown. She wouldn’t be the same with some other color. Folo loved to skitter around the ponds and dance. I couldn’t imagine her turning into a slow smiling older. And Mara with her intense green eyes and brilliance, now slumped at her compupod. I couldn’t stand the thought of her becoming slow and, and not her brilliant excitable self.
I thought about the men I’d seen in the year 2500. Were some of the children I’d seen young males? Maybe the sad child I’d seen was a little boy. I gazed outside our own edupod towards the younger groups scattered around the learning meadow. I could see the sixes and sevens dancing in a circle, waving bouquets of violets. I could almost hear them singing “Praise the Weavers, the flower seeders”. That had been fun when I was their age.
After educamp Mara put her arms around me and squeezed tight. “See you early in the morning,” she breathed into my ear.
I was up most of that night, rolling around in my sleeping pod, staring up at the stars, ruminating. My thoughts went all over the place. What about other people whose eyes had changed besides Gior? Jink changed from blue to a pinkish-yellow. Blen from green to yellow. Yali from brown to green. No one had talked about it. Those color changes had seemed normal at the time; lifechoice changes that happened as humans aged. Their personalities had changed too. In subtle ways, but indisputable. Each one becoming calmer and either sadder or eversmiling. Now thinking about it, something felt...off. I was getting older myself, but I didn’t feel different. I didn’t want to feel different.
When I woke up, all seemed pleasant as always, pale blue sky, sugary smelling air. I lay peacefully in my cozy pink sleeping pod, the rose petal pillow soft against my cheek. Then I remembered, and felt sick. Mara! I whushed out the air from my pod, stowed it under my tulip bush, and dashed along the pebble path to the dining cubicle.
Mara was not there. I was plenty early and figured she was running late, maybe busy planning her trip to the underground. But this was not a vacation—what if she really went underground—what if there was such a thing? I sipped my wateroo but couldn’t take one bite of my pomegraft.
Mara had often talked me into mischievous escapades when we were young. Like the time we snuck into a goldfish pond in the middle of the night and went wading and splashing and the goldfish crashed angrily into our legs. We had laughed and laughed and Mara had twirled around in the moonlight, her spectacular hair whirlwinding around her.
But this was not a childish game. It was real, maybe real anyway. I felt like Mara was pulling me out of some kind of foggy numbing haze and into something scary with sharper edges.
She never showed up. There was nothing I could do but attend educamp, hoping she’d be there, but she wasn’t. No girl with radiant red hair and glowing green eyes. She had definitely told me to meet her for breakfast. Had something bad happened to Mara before she got to the underground? Had the Weavers found out what she was planning? I couldn’t talk to anyone about this and I had no idea what to do.
I forced myself to eat some beanalopes for dinner and then took a bridge to one of the podgardens in my favorite pond. Bork was there smelling the flowers. “Mara must have changed to another cohort,” she said. “She’s so smart, maybe that’s why.”
“Yeah, probably,” I said weakly, and we bathed our feet in the aqua-blue cool water. But I didn’t feel refreshed and retired early to my sleeping pod, where I lay awake, tears leaking from my eyes.
Much later, I heard a faint rustling and thought maybe it was the kittycats, but a shadowy human figure was creeping along the grass. Palk! A finger to her lips, she motioned me to follow her. She was silent and I was afraid to talk, but I knew her appearance had something to do with Mara. I had to follow her.
We crept silently to the edge of the fungi forest, where she plunged between the beige stalks of two thick mushrooms. I had never been inside the forbidden forest before. I’d heard the mushrooms were poisonous even to the touch, but I followed without even thinking about that. The forest was so thick with stalks we had to squeeze through single file, making it difficult to talk. We came to a dirt hole just big enough to fit in a person. “I know this is scary,” Palk whispered. “But it’s okay. It really is. You’ll see. Mara is with us already. Please. You must come. Okay?” She slid into the hole.
“Wait! Palk!” I cried. “What if...” But she’d disappeared.
I sat on the edge of the hole. The mushroom stalks blotted out the starry sky. It smelled damp and earthy there. Not a bad smell, but not the sweet air I was used to. I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed myself down in with my hands. Down, down for a long way I glided on a smooth curving ramp and was finally deposited in a large area lit brightly by globes of shimmering fireflies.
The walls, which were about two people high, consisted of hardpacked earth and were interrupted by several arched openings which looked like they led to tunnels or other areas.
Above us—more hardpacked dirt. I had learned about the roof concept in our history lessons but it felt so strange not to see the sky.
And there, sitting on a mushroom, was Mara, appraising me with those green eyes. She must have seen me before I saw her. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. Mara had a way of always knowing what I was going to do, before I knew.
Why didn’t you come to breakfast? You just disappeared. I thought those words but said nothing. I stared into those familiar intelligent eyes.
“So. You made it.” she said, like it was any old day in our usual world.
“Here I am,” I said.
“I waited for you.”
“What do you mean? You weren’t at breakfast, were you?” As usual Mara was confusing me.
“You don’t think the babies are born way down here...” And Mara smiled mysteriously, annoyingly.
Luckily Palk chimed in at this point. “Mara, stop being so puzzling. You’re aggravating your friend. See those archways, Tert? They lead to a maze of tunnels. And the tunnels lead upwards to a village. A secret growing village hidden deep inside the fungi forest. Only a few know how to navigate the maze. I have come to lead you, if you are willing. If not, I will help you return to Weaver Land, as we call it.
I looked at Mara, who entreated me with those expressive eyes.
“What if we want to return. You know, later. To… um... Weaver Land.” I said. I realized that my whole body was shaking uncontrollably.
Mara always seemed so sure of herself, but I could see her arm quaking as well, and I believed it was not only due to excitement, but that she felt nervous too.
“That could probably be arranged,” was the less than reassuring answer. “In any case, you’ll be blindfolded during the way.” Palk smiled. “But don’t worry. I don’t think you’ll want to leave. It’s wonderful with the children, with all of us.”
“Let’s go,” Mara said.
“Yes, we should get going. Tert?” Palk took two long strips of blue cloth from her overall pocket.
And so we went. It was quiet and cool in the tunnels, only the soft slap slap of our sandals on the smooth packed earth. Palk was an excellent leader. I never stumbled or bumped into anything, though she said very little. I think we walked for a good hour. Eventually I sensed the ground slanting upwards. And then. I heard the piercing cry of a baby, and something inside me shifted.
Joan Slatoff’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bangalore Review, Bookends Review, Consequence, Does It Have Pockets, Exposition Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Isele, Sequestrum, and elsewhere.