A Woman's World

By Hilary Jerome

It’s 2142 and Britain, renamed Chriland, is run by women. This is a peaceful world, ordered and crime-free. There are males, certainly, but they are shut away in semenaries for their sperm while neutered manikins are sexual pets for Chriland’s elite women.
It is Fra’s world, and she’s very happy in it until Triss, an escaped male, breaks into her home. With her raw sexual instincts aroused Fra finds herself both physically and emotionally attracted to this hunky male.
But can their love and life among the ‘primmies’ – a small community of dissidents living outside the tranquil world of women and run by men – survive?
The story’s climax, dramatic and unexpected, makes A WOMAN’S WORLD a stirring fable for our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Thorn Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466132535

Book preview

‘Did you hear some males had broken out?’ asked Viv, walking with Fra along the corridor from their offices in the Chriterion. There was a note of nervous excitement in her usually matter-of-fact brisk voice.

‘What, here? From the New Bristol Semenary?’ Fra’s jade-green eyes saucered into fear, her normally vibrant tone subdued.

‘That’s what I heard on the sphere in the Refreshment Centre.’ Viv’s voice was husky with tension. ‘I thought you said you’d meet me there at sixteen hours.’

‘I’d too much on today. I simply couldn’t get away in time.’ Fra straightened her bag, clinched the protector she always kept inside, the sharp metal bruising her fingers as she twisted it the wrong way.

They’d reached the second-floor escalator, hogged it by standing hips touching as though by accident.

‘Seven of them, it seems.’ Viv sounded calm, assured, stepping back to let two young executants overtake them.

‘What were they saying on the sphere?’ Fra’s quite uncharacteristic tremble infuriated her. The tense clearing of her throat wouldn’t have fooled a manikin.

Viv’s slit eyes had a mocking look. ‘Same as the last time: sentinels expected to capture them quite shortly, not to be alarmed, take a Kalmex, put protectors on as soon as possible, see to the securipanels, report anything suspicious.’

‘Of course.’ Fra nodded, feeling irritable. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll get particularly far.’ She was aware that, though the Central Semenary was less than a hundred metres off, the Special Sentinels’ Headquarters was closer, between them and the semenary. But she was also thinking back to the last time some males had broken out from a semenary in the north and what was reported to have happened there: six or seven young executants, together with a manikin, taken hostage in a module and held, terrified, for several hours. Three of the executants were said to have been savagely penetrated.

As the two friends reached the bottom of the second-floor escalator and walked towards the first, Fra felt the lozenge dissolving in her mouth; then, almost as soon as she had swallowed, the tension easing in her chest and her vivacity returning as it did.

‘Actually, I left my protector back at home,’ she lied cheerfully.

‘Me too,’ her friend said. ‘Thank Chri, it hardly ever happens. They can’t really expect us to carry them around all the time just on the off chance.’ A grin. ‘Did you know,’ she turned her small dark eyes on Fra’s, ‘in the World Wars persons were supposed to carry things called gas-masks about with them? Even the children, to and from school.’

‘Gas-masks?’ What had that to do with males?

‘They put them over their faces. Supposed to protect them from a poisonous gas the males had made. They didn’t use it, though; the gas I mean. I think they’d used it in the war before,’ she added in a vague tone of voice. But looking round and back.

‘What war?’

‘You know, the one they called the Great War.’

‘That was a World War.’

‘All right, all right. I know you’re the history expert…’

‘Anyway – crazy.’ Fra tossed her short-cropped, coral-coloured hair. ‘No wonder there were changes.’

Stepping off the first-floor escalator they joined the stream of home-ward bound executants from the seventeen-thirty stagger as well as those leaving the ground-floor offices as – a little less tranquilly than usual, the buzz of their voices more pronounced – they made their way across the spacious foyer to the glass front doors. A few of the women, Fra saw, had already put their protectors on, ostentatiously displaying the hard shiny metal outside their bodysuits.

‘I’m meeting Jule at the jubar on First Diagonal.’ Viv, quite unlike her usual placid self, sounded excited. They’d reached the bottom of the steps outside and walked on to the moving pavement. ‘Actually I think there’s a kaftan he’s got his eye on. Want to join us?’

‘Not tonight.’ Fra put her hand up to shield her eyes, apparently against the sun, as they were borne towards the outer orbitals. Quite apart from Viv’s disturbing news, she’d had a ruffling day. She was desperate to get back home as quickly as she could and have a calm, relaxing time. ‘I feel completely powdered out. And I’ve a script to work on.’ She nodded at the briefcase she was carrying. She didn’t bother to explain that her manikin expected her in half an hour and that there’d be sulkiness and – Sim’s latest weapon – silence if she was late. She thought about him irritably, his doe-eyed look, his lack of strength.

‘Right.’ Viv moved on to the fixed pavement of Second Orbital and paused, her eyes scanning behind Fra. ‘See you tomorrow. Chri speed.’

‘Chri speed.’ Fra watched her normally brisk friend hesitate, looking left to right, then back to front towards the bridge across the orbital.

Fra turned towards the stat. Should she hang around to see if anything exciting was going to happen, or head straight for home?

Home: she had the script to edit. Entering the stat she took a couple of steps past the transparent slider door, then glanced back to check if anything exciting was happening. Nothing that she could see. She drew out her debit disc, lodged it in the nearby registat and put her index finger into the depression in the centre of the disc. Within seconds a small green light showed a match and she tapped in 465, programming the nearest empty orbiter to take her to the stat closest to the module cluster where she lived. She slotted the disc into her belt again and joined the three other women at the exit just as Orbiter 372 halted outside. The first two passengers stepped into it. Moments later it was gliding away.

Looking idly at the floodlit orbital through the transparent panel of the stat, Fra saw one of the special sentinels’ steel-blue craft flash silently past between the circuits. A grunt of satisfaction came from a middle-aged practitioner standing right next to her. Fra’s nostrils widened as she glanced round the stat. She thought she recognised a senior executant from the Chriterion and was about to speak to her and maybe introduce herself when another orbiter drew up and the executant was gone.

Watching her go, Fra noticed two elderlies, their purple cloaks hugged round them, edge over from the registat and sidle up to her, clearly about to ask for support, perhaps intending to ask her to see them back to their modules. She knew it was her duty to help any elderly who approached her, but... Just then her orbiter, the numerals 465 illuminated in green on the panel at the front, turned in from First Diagonal. It halted by her and she boarded, relieved to get away from them, wondering whether Sim had already heard about the males.

*****

TWO

Fra walked quickly, nervously, trying hard to stop the clattering of her heels along the moving pavement. There wasn’t a single other person on the street, just the module clusters, discreet and hushed around her.

Glad to be home, she pressed her boot against the foot-stud at the side of her module door. Since crime in Chriland was virtually unheard of – except on those occasions when males were on the loose –module doors were generally not secured. But now her door remained obstinately closed. Trust Sim, she thought, irritation transferred to feet beating a tattoo on the doormat. He must have heard, the sphere’s on all the time.

She wasn’t carrying her securidisc so had to use the videocom button at the centre of the door.

She’d been waiting for almost a quarter of a minute before a nervous, somewhat high-pitched voice called out: ‘Who is it?’

‘Fra,’ she said tersely, impatient now to get off the street.

‘Fra?’ The treble voice combined suspicion with fear. ‘Then why aren’t you using your securidisc?’

‘If I’d got my securidisc with me, I’d be using it.’ Her tone sounded much too irritable; she breathed deep, tried again. ‘Come on, Sim, for Chri’s sake, you can see it’s me. Open up.’

No click to open the door, nothing to be heard except the high-pitched voice. ‘Are you quite sure there’s no one else there?’

‘There’s hundreds of us.’ She sounded peevish even to herself. ‘Only your trusty Fra,’ she added in a gentler tone. ‘Just press the buzzer. I’m completely powdered out.’

It took several seconds before she heard the securipanel rise and the outer door swing back. A young man in a canary-coloured kaftan stood in the passage-way. He was relatively short. At roughly one and three-quarter metres he was only a little taller than the young woman facing him. He tossed his blond hair and glared at her, flashing blue eyes brightened by silver eye shadow surrounding them. Pale boyish cheeks were tight and smooth while a tiny golden earring dangled, glinting, swaying a little, from his left ear. He wore amethyst rings on the fourth finger of both delicate hands and his fingernails, like the colouring round his eyes, were silver, as were his toenails, glinting beyond his sandal straps.

‘I gather you’ve heard.’ Fra strode past him to her study. A moment later she heard the securipanel click smoothly shut behind her back. She grinned.

‘It was on the sphere at sixteen hours,’ the manikin babbled, relief splattering through in tumbled words. He followed as she walked into the study and put her briefcase on her desk. ‘They only discovered it at roll-call. Seven of them. Fancy – they didn’t find out until morning. So they’ve had hours to go wherever they want.’ He paused briefly, then jabbered shrilly on. ‘You’d think those special sentinels would have it worked out by now.’ Pouting lips pursed disapproval. ‘I thought they’d increased the security measures since that last episode. So careless, and seven of them got away…’

Fra flicked a nod and crossed the passage to the sleeproom. ‘So Viv said.’

‘I can’t imagine,’ Sim was padding after her, ‘why they’re not more careful about the semenaries. Why have one on the Fulcrum anyway, right in the midst of things?’

‘Because it is in the midst of things.’ Fra clacked her heels on the inlaid floor as though the reason was self-evident. She clattered to the bed below the window. ‘The whole point is, if some of them do break out, they’ve very little chance of getting away.’ She flopped on to the bed, her tone triumphant, dominant. ‘I’ve told you over and over again, there’s nothing to be upset about, it scarcely ever happens.’ She was aware of echoing Viv.

‘I should think not.’ Sim, standing on the threshold, frowned at her legs. ‘Why can’t you take your boots off by the door?’ His voice, testy and high, squeaked across to her.

‘Because it’s so much easier if you do it here.’ She raised a booted leg.

‘Well, it isn’t very nice, you know.’ He minced in and stood, lips forming the tight rosebud she’d found so entrancing only a few short weeks ago.

I’m not a robot, Fra recited to herself, shaking her head as though agreeing with the manikin, her leg still raised.

‘I’m not a robot,’ he recited, petulant. ‘And look at all the dirt it makes.’ The frown lines on his forehead were etching deep. ‘It’s not you who does the cleaning.’

There wasn’t that much cleaning to be done. The central vacuum removed dust very efficiently, and the robot cleaned the floors. ‘Sorry.’ Fra watched him come nearer, thinking about the editing she had to finish tonight. She hardly noticed him gingerly pull at one long white imitation-leather boot.

‘I’m all on my own here during the day,’ he went on, grimacing while huffing the boot off, ‘I think it’s stupid having semenaries at all. You must remember what happened last time, when a manikin was maimed.’

‘He was practically untouched, Sim. Hardly even had a scratch on him. The people who really suffered were the executants. They were the ones who were assaulted – well, penetrated.’ She trembled with an odd sense of excitement, then felt the wetness start as she stared at the fussing Sim. ‘They do have to get the seed from somewhere, you know.’

‘So they could get it from the seedbanks.’ The manikin, drawing off the second boot, examined his pink smooth palms. ‘Now look at me.’ Distaste welled into annoyance. He turned towards a long low vanity table with a mirror curving all along the back and a small curved basin in the middle.

‘I’ve told you dozens of times,’ Fra stood to peel off her bodysuit, ‘the seedbanks could be destroyed in some catastrophe. It’s our duty to preserve variety in our species. That’s why we can never know precisely just when the seed-producers will be needed.’

Sim, stooped over the basin, frowned and shrugged, as though the price of conservation was too high. ‘There’s far too many of them as it is.’

‘Species or males?’

His eyes sparked venom. ‘You know perfectly well I mean males. Nasty, brutish things.’ He straightened up, towelled his hands and examined his fingernails.

‘Genetic diversity,’ Fra intoned, lips sucked into her sanctimonious tone. ‘Same thing applies to the seedbanks: we have a duty to make sure a number of them survive, whatever happens to the rest.’

She was naked now: a well-made, well-covered young woman. Slim haunches and thighs, belly smooth and flat. Her hands, though not as delicate as Sim’s, were long-fingered, her breasts and nipples small, her shoulders spare, even muscular. The bodysuit danced lazily, hanging from her index finger and about to be propelled towards the wardrobe.

‘Don’t,’ Sim snarled, smooth legs scissoring across the room, right arm stretched out. ‘You’re absolutely impossible.’ Breath short and fast now. ‘You can’t expect me to go round…’

‘I don’t.’

‘…constantly picking up the things you scatter everywhere.’

I have got other things to do, Fra muttered to herself, the bodysuit still dangling as she watched him, right eyebrow raised.

‘I have got other things to do.’ The manikin snatched the bodysuit, padded over to the wardrobe, touched a button and a door slid silently open. ‘Anyway, it is rather frightening.’ He slowly, carefully, hung up the suit then turned round, lips upward-curved, eyes alert, assessing. There was no answering look; Fra had moved away. He smoothed the bodysuit, tucking it in beside the many others. ‘You can’t expect me not to worry.’ A trace of tears meandered down his cheek.

‘What’s frightening now?’ Fra, idly examining her breasts, moved her body sideways.

The blond curls tossed an invitation to be cuddled. ‘What I said, about the semenaries. Really, I find it quite unsettling.’

‘For Chri’s sake, Sim. Take a Kalmex. Take two.’

His eyes settled back, empty. ‘It’s not that straightforward. I’ve already taken three. They didn’t work.’

‘Then we could have a quick relaxative instead.’ Fra’s voice edged sideways, soft and inviting as he started back, his maroon-coloured kaftan in his hand.

His jaw widened, dropped as his feet tangled in surprise. Balance regained, he grunted, flared nostrils, stared. ‘Again?’

‘I have had a rather ruffling day.’

‘You’re not the only one.’ A deep crimson crept from neck to cheeks as he danced away from her. ‘I haven’t put my feet up once since breakfast. Shopping, cleaning, preparing your supper…’

‘All the more reason for having a relaxative,’ Fra interrupted and wrestled the kaftan from him. She made no move to put it on.

‘Must we?’ His feet shuffled backwards. ‘I don’t really feel like it.’

‘You don’t really have to.’ She dropped the kaftan on to the bed, held out her arms. ‘Just lie there. You don’t have to judder if you don’t feel up to it.’

Sim sniffed, eyes mesmerised by the kaftan as it slid slowly to the velvaturf. ‘You know it can be rather tiring even if one doesn’t.’ Voice flat, the listless pathetic look drowning his pretty face. ‘You’ve had one almost every day this week.’

‘It’s only Thursday. And I’ve told you time and again: it’s all the work. You know I’ve got these Chri anniversary progs to see to.’

Indifference shunted his eyes low into their sockets.

‘Well, they are quite important and that sort of job is quite a strain. I thought you’d understand by now.’

‘So take a Kalmex.’ He grinned at her, squaring his shoulders, triumphant.

‘I have.’ Fra’s naked body glinted soft tints. ‘You know they’re not nearly as good as a relaxative. Can’t be as tiring as you make out, you’re not exactly in your dotage. You should be the one asking for them.’ Her eyes slit as she very deliberately looked him over. ‘Viv’s always boasting about her and Jule. She told me she sometimes has a dozen relaxatives a week; and Jule judders every time.’

She was exaggerating: Viv had only told her that Jule sometimes juddered every other time, if she was lucky.

‘There are manikins and manikins,’ Sim pronounced, voluptuous lips pursed in the way Fra used to find so fetching. ‘And if you’re really so dissatisfied…’

‘You know I’m not.’ Fra, her body tense and limbs roaming the bed, found herself wondering again whether, quite possibly, she was. Sim’s constant nags, restraints and general negativity began to stir irritation, then anger. She’d never have picked him if she’d known he’d turn into such a dreadful fret.

‘…I can always apply for a transfer in the pool.’

‘Oh, keep your kaftan on, Sim.’ Then giggled as she realised that was exactly what he was doing.

‘So I’m just a source of amusement to you now, that it?’

‘There’s no need to…’

‘What about supper?’

Tactics to divert, to show how valuable he was. ‘Supper? Supper can wait.’ Fra pulled at his sleeve, aroused, unable even to think of food. What did he take her for? Some sort of practitioner?

He adjusted his kaftan, lifted it up to, but not beyond, his groin, edged on to the bed and lay full stretch against her side.

Fra knelt across his thighs and, while he lay quite still and staring up, pulled his kaftan clear of his groin. A smooth pink groin, quite without hair and indifferent still, although there was a flicker of a stir as Fra leaned over him. He had a small, flaccid penis; small, that is, except for the opening from the urethra – a blind wide eye, staring like the manikin himself.

Fra took her clitoris between her thumb and index finger; a large clitoris, a sort of small hooded penis, engorging now. And, lowering herself, she inserted it in the blind eye of Sim’s soft gland. With a moan of pleasure and relief she slid gently, smoothly, back and forth.

She found this pleasurable, certainly, but it annoyed her that the manikin lay unmoving and apparently uncaring beneath her, and that his penis, though no longer limp, was not by any means erect. It was much more fun to feel herself go soft when he was hard. He used to be keen enough, even if he didn’t always judder. He might at least look as though he’s interested, she thought and closed her eyes so that she wasn’t able to see, but she could sense, the distant and indifferent look in his. She started fantasizing about some other manikin. Not quite the same as Viv’s but not unlike him, her imagination painted for her. Pretty as Sim but not as timid. Eager, responsive to her, firm and even inventive. Excited now, she felt the pleasure in her movements grow, spread rippling and more rapidly through her body till, exquisitely, a glorious juddering began, throbbing, contracting and at last releasing her to lapse, still tingling but at ease.

Almost at once the manikin withdrew from her. ‘I’ll get the supper now.’ He slid off the bed, lowering his kaftan, sniffing as though the scent of sex was distasteful.

She didn’t move. Her pleasure had been spoilt. Perhaps she should put him on the transfer list, not wait for him to do it. The thought itself sent waves of relief through her mind, her limbs. Why wait for Sim to make the move?

*****

THREE

Sim served supper in the leisure room, the biggest of the module’s rooms, with a window which looked out towards the Fulcrum, to the south. The centre was taken up by a large circular bar where Sim prepared and served the meals. In fact, there was little preparation to be done: most food was either freeze-dried or powdered, the expression powdered out being derived from this. Sim needed to do very little more than add liquid, gently heat, shape and serve the resultant paste, or pâté as he insisted on calling it, with a variety of zests or piquants he could buy but which he insisted on making himself.

They always ate Roman style, lounging on recliners beside a low narrow table set between the window and the bar.

Preoccupied with the script, Fra toyed with her food, spreading it to the side of the plate then to the centre, trying out various shapes to minimise her rejection. She nodded, a half-smile plastered on her face, while Sim prattled nearby, happy now that the domestic scene was back to normal.

At last, putting down her spoon, she pushed her plate aside.

The patter stopped. ‘You’re not leaving that, are you?’ There was no mistaking the dismayed tone, the lines showing on Sim’s forehead. He stared, unblinking, at a small but scarcely touched piquant-laden mound of protein globules near the centre of Fra’s plate.

‘I don’t really feel like it.’ Her coral locks waved farewell to the food while her mind flitted in and out of memories, maliciously aware that she was echoing what Sim had said when she’d suggested a relaxative.

‘You might have said so earlier on.’ All of him tense, aggrieved.

‘Naturally I would have if I’d known.’ Fra leapt from the recliner, spilling a glass of water on the white velvaturf.

The manikin padded to the kitchen, picked up a blotter cloth, set to work. ‘I took an awful lot of trouble with the piquant,’ he panted, out of breath at the slightest exertion. ‘If you realised the time it took…’

‘I do. You shouldn’t bother. You could buy it all made up.’

‘But you know it’s not the same.’

She closed her eyes, allowed the flush of fury to subside. ‘It’s much more convenient. I’ve told you a hundred times. It wouldn’t worry me.’

‘There are others.’ He stared at his reflection in the stainless steel countertop, eyed the sodden cloth, sniffed. ‘Besides,’ he held the cloth aloft like