1.8 Feminine Suzerainty
1.8.1 Alenby Sees Signs of Feminism Rampant
Aboard Air France 004, Approaching Paris
About 5 am Wednesday 2 April 1987
An announcement came over the speakers, indistinct, something about the English Channel. Another, about la Manche. A few seat lights came on.
Alenby stirred, still half asleep. Pas assez fraîs—not cold enough—he half-heard himself complaining.
He became aware of Ada’s voice and of the aromas of her person.
"Oh, Alenby, you must have been dreaming. I was just going through your things."
"Yes, I was dreaming. About a certain sparkling Vouvray...inhaling the bouquet of a thousand exploding bubbles. Too many bubbles, too big, too active, too warm." He waved a plump white hand in a dismissive gesture, and opened his eyes.
"Hum, well, I’m awake now," he announced, and he allowed himself to suppose that, now he was awake, his strange dream of hyperspace must be over. One does not dream of waking from a dream, he reasoned, nor from an hallucination. So he must be back in his own universe, free to indulge his gastronomical appetites to his heart’s content. A slice of Roquefort with a sparkling Vouvray, well chilled, would make an excellent start to the day....
But he knew it was not to be. He was still wedged in his undersized seat—8B instead of the window seat 8A—in the cabin of a toy airplane that offered not only no cheese whatsoever, and little else of interest to the serious gourmet.
And Ada was still leaning close, still going through his things, as she’d phrased it. Though charmed against his will by the bouquet of her breath--fresh-mown hay replacing the previous evening’s ratatouille notes, with hints of burned rubber such as elsewhere found only in the nose of weightier products of Châteauneuf-du-Pape--he managed to raise his voice in a bleat of complaint: "May I object to your unsolicited inspection of my accouterments?"
"Tch, Alenby, how can you be so unkind? After I've admitted you to—" She indicated her locket.
Locket, he thought. Rights and obligations attached thereto. Better call an attorney. But then he recalled that he didn’t have an attorney, meaning that he was living totally without legal protection! The previous evening, that realization had alarmed him, but now to his surprise he felt the agreeable thrill that sometimes accompanies risk-taking. Risk-taking, much as when he’d overridden a sommelier’s objections to his choice of a red wine—a Madiran no less—with steamed perch and chocolate-enhanced veal sauce. His resistance to Ada’s rummaging collapsed.
"Oh, very well, go ahead. I doubt you will find anything of interest."
"On the contrary—in your toilet articles, an antique electrical toy of some kind."
"My shaver—"
"How quaint!" she exclaimed with a laugh. u-People, she explained, had stopped using electric shavers when the low-frequency electromagnetic radiation from them was reported—mistakenly, fortunately—to cause cancer, a disease that had become less and less common since Prohibition.
"Hum, anyway," said Alenby, who had found certain of Ada’s words—cancer, electromagnetic and the like—almost irresistibly soporific, "an hour or so ago, when I attempted to use my antique toy, as you call it, I found that the toilets have no electrical outlets. And no soap either, as a matter of fact. Just as well I brought along my old-fashioned razor and a tube of PeauLisse—that’s a soap as well as an antibiotic mousse for a faster, safer and totally germ-free, hence safer shave." He caressed his freshly-shaven cheek. "Incidentally, lacking soap, how do u-people wash their hands to prevent the spread of deadly disease-causing microbes?"
Ada shrugged, and after a moment's thought: "Washing your hands a lot is not thought a very good idea these days. In fact, the United Nations Security Council is contemplating requiring signs making a firm statement bearing on this matter. The wording is still being developed, but informed sources say that it will be something along the lines of 'employees may or may not wash their hands before returning to work, as they see fit.'" She explained that the ingestion of small amounts of filth boosts the immune system and supplies vitamin B12 everyone needs. Everyone, that is, except substance users. They get plenty of filth in the form of animal exudates and body parts, with their inevitably entrained excrement and other effluvia.
"Yes," Alenby interrupted, "but Ada, surely you use soap!"
"Certainly," she said, "quite frequently--every week or so, in fact--we u-people customarily take a bath or shower, using on those occasions a probacterial soap custom-formulated to conserve the particular beneficial microbes that swarm on our skin and generate our individual bodily odors."
Every week or so, Alenby thought, that ablutionary schedule would account for that intriguing burned-rubber note. "Ah, your bouquet," he said, inhaling. "Very nice, very complex."
She accepted the compliment with a gracious inclination.
"Another thing I noticed in the toilet," he resumed, "was the urinal. Odd, that, having a urinal on an airplane. And a urinal, if I may say so, of a rather peculiar shape, seemingly designed to accommodate the angles of projection characteristic of both the male and female anatomies."
"But surely U-people have urinals?"
"For men only. Urinals for women never caught on. By all accounts it proved inconvenient to use them while at the same time grappling with such feminine undergarments as pantyhose and so on and so forth."
"Oh, that used to be a problem in u also," said Ada, "the lines outside the ladies' room during intermissions at the Metropolitan Opera used to be simply horrendous! The situation was intolerable. But that's all in the past."
She related how in the sixties, under the leadership if President Eleanor Roosevelt and with the overwhelming support of the MA'AM party in Congress, the United States mounted a determined and ultimately successful response.
"It was called Project Sappho, a colossal high-tech effort—"
At that word, effort, Alenby grimaced as if he had struck grit in an otherwise perfectly adequate moules à la crème. He disapproved of effort in any form, and the very word was enough to derail his his comprehension of its context. "And this effort, he said, "culminated in what—a man on the moon?" He laughed sardonically.
Ada laughed too, but her laugh had a cheerful gurgling sound to it, like a sprightly Sancerre tumbling into thin-walled chimney glass. "A man on the moon—how fanciful!
"No," she went on, "Project Sappho was perfectly sane and practical. It was sorely needed, and thanks be to Gaea, it succeeded."
She went on to explain that the undergarments Alenby had referred to are nowadays fitted with a feminine fly, or f’fly as it's called, a battery-powered micro-mechanical device operating on the wavelength-division principle—the whole thing being machine-washable, by the way—which, activated by buttons in the waistband of the garment, rolls open a crotch panel, or rolls it back into a closed configuration as required.
"I see," Alenby interrupted. "It rolls open like the lid of a sardine can."
"Alenby, you say the strangest things! A sardine is a fish of some sort, isn’t it? What in the universe does a fish have to do with a can?"
Shocked, he failed to respond. A sardine is a fish of some sort--that had hit a nerve! The woman didn't seem to appreciate that the sardine, especially the sort of sardine taken from the Mediterranean off the coast near Banyules, can be of substantial culinary interest. Particularly if grilled rapidly to the crispy skin stage, and served under overlapping thin slices of lemon....
He allowed her to ramble on about the f'fly's ingenious anti-splash technology, and something about the saving of valuable time when a gentleman signals amorous intentions by pressing the Open button of a lady's f'fly, the one on the left side--until his growing resentment erupted in a sharp question:
"And what else did you find among my trappings?"
"Your passport, though originating in U, seems to have all the right words and the right picture, though in a rather odd format. When we get to Passport Control, we’ll get in line to a male inspector. Then you can leave everything to me—I’ll handle him."
"What about my credit cards?"
"Useless, I'm afraid. Through exposure to the extreme field gradients in hyperspace, their coding will have been irretrievably muddled."
"My money?"
"Obviously wrong in u—that dreadful shade of green, utterly worthless. But don’t worry about money. We can use mine. We’ll swap, okay?"
Alenby made a sign of agreement. He was ready to agree to anything, because he didn’t care one way or another. In this petty, female dominated universe--Eleanor Roosevelt, President?--where nobody seemed to care about health or hygiene and grilled sardine and everything else he cared about was wrong or stupid, nothing mattered any more. Even his intestinal serpent seemed to share his torpor, for it had scaled down its torments to a mere red-hot needle-stabbing of rectal itch. He sank into apathy.
"We’ll swap, okay?" Ada repeated. "Alenby, for Gaea’s sake wake up, will you. You’re going to need money! Here—" Upon his eventual, grudging response, she took a wallet out of one of the capacious pockets of her skirt and withdrew a few dozen dark green hundred-dollar bills. With a shrug, Alenby in turn produced his wallet and a similar number of pale green notes, and the fateful deal was done.
The sound system advised of their imminent arrival at Simone de Beauvoir Airport, Paris.