Captain (35:19)
She remembered with distaste the thick plates and cups, the strictly utilitarian bedspreads, the green garbage bags bulging with donated clothes, some of them none too clean. They'd taken anything they could get and were thankful for it. Now that the house system was official policy. Money was not a problem. Charmaine stood up, steadying herself against her desk, and turned to the full length mirror she'd had them put in her office two years ago after the day she'd walked into the general meeting with her skirt caught up in the back. Hadn't noticed until some of the young girls had started to giggle. Young girls still giggled, young boys still sniggered. They hadn't changed and probably never would. She didn't want to give them any extra excuses to giggle and snigger. However, if she was looking more than usually ridiculous, she wanted to be the first to spot it. She checked herself over, starting with the shoes. Bride of Frankenstein shoes, she called them. Orthopedic to the point of despair. But she was well past breaking her neck for vanity. No laces undone. Too bad about the puffy ankles, but what could you do? What could you expect at 80? Navy skirt where it should be. Long sleeves with ruffles at the knuckles, the little bow at the throat hiding all that uncooked turkey skin. The house seal in silver on a single string of pearls around her neck. She skimmed over her face. It was a good, serviceable face, but worn out by now, of course. Pushed back a few strands of hair. Darned if she'd dye it like that cow first mother Mabel. Hannah read at 79 and straightened up as much as she could today. She was a figurehead and needed to look like one, but they didn't just wheel her out for special occasions. She made the most important decisions, those for which her kind of experience was needed. She picked the brides, for instance. And she'd done yesterday's deal, too, though it hadn't been any pleasure. That Skin Flint hag, First Mother Corinna from Sheltering Wings drove a hard bargain, but Charmaine was no slouch herself. In the old days they'd put her in charge of handling overdraft problems with the banks because she knew how to negotiate. She had prime stock to trade with. Everybody knew it, including First Mother Corinna. Charmaine had calculated that despite her bluffing, Corinna would sacrifice at the financial end to get a guaranteed pure product. And that's what she'd done. Leased House had a pristine reputation. No one from there had ended up in the Free for all for 15 years, the best record of any of the houses. Sheltering Wings prided itself on its own record, which was almost as good as Mother Corinna had emphasized, But Charmaine had countered with the rumor that Wings were still using turkey basters rather than in person, intimate sessions so unnatural, almost profane. Corinna had waffled and denied, but had turned a satisfying shade of red. Caving on the price. Charmaine started walking, which was becoming a major project these days. She made her way, left foot cane, right foot, out the door and along the corridor, pausing to lean against the wall. Here was the door to the guest suite for the visiting officials from other houses. Down the hall, left Foot Cane, was the door to the guest suite nursery, still done in early 21st century Montessori. Charmaine favored antiques. They gave her nostalgia, an emotion she'd brusquely repressed in midlife but now felt free to indulge. She leaned against the guest nursery door, looking in, remembering the glee with which they'd selected the toy blocks, the little red and yellow table and chairs at sale prices, of course, gloating over the bargains. Funny the way the houses had started back then. Shoestring operations, all of them in the less affluent parts of the cities. They didn't take up three or four blocks each the way they did now. Homes for battered wives, some of them had been, or shelters for abused teenage girls. A couple of them had begun as lesbian co ops, all that idealistic stuff with lumpy porridge in instant coffee. One of the true luxuries of life was real coffee. Charmaine insisted on it for herself as her status enabled her to do. It made her cringe thinking about how earnest and to tell the truth, pompous and self righteous they'd been once, her and her fellow mothers. But if it hadn't been for them, where would everyone be now? Even the politicians had come to see that the house way was the only way the human race could make it to the next generation. The old hit or miss courtship rituals, the lax self chosen monogamy just couldn't work anymore. The death rates had become too high. But most people had taken more convincing. Charmaine remembered the newspaper headlines. Schools and offices closed down, whole towns and suburbs sealed off. The forced testing, the breakdown of the health care system, the witch hunts, the civil rights kill cases first won, then lost again and again as rampant fear took over. Then there had been the hospital riots, the patients from the plague wards dragged into the streets by angry mobs, the ringleaders in asbestos firefighting suits, the smell of spilled gasoline and burning flesh. The new class of diseases had made herpes and penicillin resistant, gonorrhea and R strains, syphilis and AIDS look as innocuous as a runny nose. These viruses spread faster, they killed faster. Some mutated so quickly they couldn't even be spotted. By testing, men or women could carry them for years undetected, spreading them everywhere. In the end, after the rubber body stockings and the safety lips for kissing with confidence had been tried and failed to often, after the virginity certificates had proven susceptible to forgery, after the gentleman's chastity society had ended in a total washout, there was only one sure fire defense. If you couldn't control the diseases, you had to avoid contact, any contact at all. That was when the houses began to build walls and invest in barbed wire fences and electric fences and walls topped with broken glass, they also began to expel rule breakers. These houses are sanctuary and this is a state of siege, charmaine had heard herself saying. We must think of the children. Charmaine, wheezing a little, paused again on the skywalk that connected first house and second house within the least house compound. They could have torn down the individual houses and built some glass and steel monstrosity like that sheltering wings, carbuncle over in Parkdale. But Charmaine preferred to have the houses look like real houses. It was homier that way, though the 19th century brick needed a lot of upkeep. The skywalk was one of her favorite vantage points. From here she could see the boys playground to the left where the young boys were being taught the rudiments of war games. To the right, separated from the boys by a high wall, was the girls playground. Charmaine remembered her grandmother's stories about boys and girls playgrounds and how comical she'd once found them. Down in the girls playground the 12 year olds were playing a game of Free for All. Each team represented a house. The playground was marked out like a giant Monopoly board with dollhouse sized houses. Free for all was played like Monopoly too, though the rules had been changed to make it fit present day reality. There were no more hotels. Instead, for each house on a property you got a bride to trade with and for each four brides, a groom. No, grooms were more valuable because as everyone knew each other, it was harder to find pure ones. Among the chance cards were cards representing the various strains of disease. And where the jail square had been, there was now a square marked Free for All. From what Charmaine recalled of Monopoly, you'd been able to get out of the jail square with a special card or several rolls of the dice. But once in Free for All, you were in for good. In real life, as in the game, the girls voices floated up to Charmaine, young, boisterous with high spirits. That moldy, cross eyed failure isn't worth one of my grade A brides. And two houses. I'll give you a grade B and one house. What for that reject? Get real. Charmaine smiled at them a little sadly. They had learned the principles of bargaining somehow. One day. They might be mothers, but they were so innocent. They'd seen the propaganda films and been properly frightened, but they had no conception of how bad the Free for Alls actually were. Each city now had a Free for all, or even two or three, depending on how many were needed. Toronto had two. One was in a large area to the west that had once been a park. The other was to the north in a deserted adventure playground abandoned since the time of the epidemics when people habitually avoided large groups of strangers. Each Free for All had electric fences, searchlights, attack dogs and guard towers. Food was dropped in daily by helicopter. There were drone over flights, but for no reason except keeping count. Fights could break out, murders could take place, but there was no interference from outside. Who knew what horrors went on in the shadows? In the Free for Alls, total sexual license was not only permitted but encouraged, because that way it was thought the inhabitants would finish each other off more quickly. Although it was rumored you could develop immunity or go into remission, surviving for years. The babies, if there were any, were considered doomed. Sometimes people took the fast way out and their bodies could be seen from a distance, floating in a pond, dangling from a tree, hanging from the loop of an unused roller coaster that still, even in its present dilapidated state, appeared to promise some version of frivolous or unfettered pleasure. Freedom, even. You could look at it that way. Charmaine shivered, thinking how swiftly she herself would have been consigned to a free for all once chastity had been out of style. The old nuclear family was disintegrating. Everyone got divorced at least once. Everyone fooled around, or so the pundits declared. When she was twenty she'd listened with smiles of polite disinterest to the horror stories of the time before the pill girls ruined for life shotgun marriages, back street abortions on kitchen tables. She and her friends had done more or less whatever and whoever they felt like, taking care to avoid anyone who looked like a loser or a maniac. There had been a certain amount of talk about committed relationships, but sex was casual, not something to get too emotional about. In high school they'd had to study Romeo and Juliet, and it had seemed like something from another planet. She could still hear the boys in the halls between classes and teasing each other in falsetto voices. Romeo, Romeo, wherefore fart thou Romeo? They banned that play from their own house curriculum years ago. It gave the young people dangerous ideas. Charmaine peered at her big digit watch. She had to stop wool gathering or one of the others. Someone hankering to be first. Mother would start spreading gossip about dementia on wedding days. Now as then, lateness on the part of the groom was not appreciated. The ceremony was in an hour and a half and she still had to collect poor Tom and his escort of best men and get them to the assembly hall. They liked to do the weddings as soon as possible, after the deals had been done, to avoid second thoughts and preempt cold feet. The groom would be 20 told, not asked. One day he'd be playing war games with his pals, the next he'd be married and in a different place altogether. First Mother Corinna would be there on the dot, accompanying Odette, who was sheltering Wing's side of the bargain, their contribution to the future of the human race. She was a hefty girl with a case of puppy acne, somewhat foul mouthed and too rambunctious, as a lot of them were these days. Days, during the interviews she'd asked a lot of questions about height and eye color and other things that were none of her business. That's the concern of the first mothers, charmaine had finally told her. We do the genetic planning around here. He's a good, clean boy, that's all you need to know. Maybe a little temperamental, but just go easy with him at first and you'll do just fine. She would have been coached in etiquette. No disparaging remarks about genitalia, no expressions of disgust. But who knows whether she'd followed the instructions. Left foot cane, right foot paws. It was the next corridor, or was it the one after that? Then there were some stepsonly three up, but even that was getting to be too much. She skipped over the steps in her head and went on to the groom's room, where they always had the party the night before with the senior married men of Least House getting the groom drunk and telling him jokes about women to defuse the terror. Staying with him all night to make sure he wouldn't try to run away. Not that there was anywhere to run, though. One unfortunate boy had been found hiding in a laundry hamper later on, when she herself was no longer alive. Perhaps the diseases would be extinct, starved out, gone like smallpox for lack of carriers. The free for alls would be empty. Then maybe none of these constraints and fears would be necessary. The houses themselves believed all social behavior was learned, and she hoped the men of those times would be allowed to have some independence, some self respect. Maybe this hope was just nostalgia, her secret vice. She knew it was weakness, but nevertheless she felt sorry for the grooms and sad about trading the boys of Leased House away to another house. And this boy, Tom, was a favorite of hers. She wondered if she should tell him what a great deal she'd been able to make for the Leased House because of him. Though better not. It might give him a swelled head and he'd need to keep his wits and a low profile during his time at Sheltering Wings. There'd been several husband battering cases there in recent years. Dismissed, of course, because you couldn't disrupt the system, but still, there was probably something to it. Just two children, she'd tell him. All you need to generate is two. That's what's in the contract. After you've completed that duty, you'll have a choice. You can stay on at Sheltering Wings and assist in one of their businesses and work your way up to Senior Husband. It's not without perks. Or you can ask to be traded to another house and try potluck with another bride if you've decided that sex is not so terrifying as you'd imagined. Or you can elect celibacy and the war games. It will depend on what you feel like at the time. But you need to do the two children first. She wouldn't tell him the truth about war games, such a useful way of eliminating many overly aggressive and problematic males who might otherwise pose a challenge to the rule of the first mothers. After all, he was only 16. Time enough for the hard truths later. She'd pat his arm, pinch his cheek, cheer him up, tell him how good he looked. They liked that. She's a nice girl, she'd say. Wide hips, not a germ in sight. Hardly even a pimple. No point in granular accuracy. He'd make his own discoveries soon enough. Then she'd arrange the veil over his face. Navy blue for boys, though still white for the girls. It went with the orange blossoms. Veils were obligatory these days. They covered a multitude of sins.
