The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  Whoever is the Judge would have to see this as a sign of decadence. More and more, humanity ought to be grateful that Judgements are not being made by me, in this place and in this time.

  If there is a Judge. I’ve not heard that Earth has been submitted for Judgement yet. The techs certainly haven’t mentioned it. It all depends on how like us these people are, for they’re too lacking in technology to be considered a threat. Or I’ve forgotten. I don’t think I’m forgetting that sort of thing any more, though. There is beginning to be a small constancy in my mind.

  Historical examples of all the kings of England and none of the queens, making James I astonishingly educated…because the queens and their education don’t count. I need to say this thing twice, for it astonishes me so very much. How can genders not be equal? Maybe the lack of gender shifting damages humans’ capacity to see each other as equal. Maybe they’re just obnoxious and pig-headed. Puce pens are very useful to write words such as “pig-headed”. I think it’s a side effect of most humans being so very static in their genders. Understanding others is a personal quality, and demonstrates insight and maturity. It ought to be a natural function of the species. Stupid species.

  Generations of lawyers know these things, things like knowing that the one who is speaking now counts even Queen Anne as “invasion by the Dutch”. How can women count if only men’s names and distinctions are given? How can humans understand gender if they shape their society through the privileges of one gender? If they only see two genders?

  Humans may not shift genders with any aptitude (I do believe a few shift, but hide it—if I were human, I’d have to prove this, but I’m not, so it’s true enough for my purposes), but they could at least see that there are more than two genders. And they don’t. Women are a secondary gender, which must hurt. All other genders are nearly invisible. This is damaging.

  How can humans understand themselves if they’re gender-blind?

  If women are an inferior gender and other genders are not visible, where does this leave me? How do I view these humans from a position of ongoing inferiority?

  Oh, this speaker liked James I. That’s why he quoted him. How can any human male like James I? Fortunately for me, I’m neither human nor male. I can judge him for his rule of witches and the number of lives he destroyed. I can judge him for the callous experiments he did on children with the aim of discovering God’s language.

  Not only can I judge him—I will judge him. I have judged him. He is a turd. His turdishness adds to the measure of humankind. It will be part of my judgement. Thank goodness that my judgement is only on my own behalf. I can judge all I like with no consequences. I am a mere anthropologist. Right now, that’s a very good thing, because otherwise my puce pen would be recording the possibility of blood baths and species destruction. As it is, it records sarcasm.

  Generations of lawyers have known these things that lawyers are telling us today. The story of the rule of law. It is a lawyer who cites even Queen Anne as an “invasion by the Dutch”. How can women count if only men’s names and distinctions are given? And if half the species is of no importance, why should humanity expect to live?

  I say things twice and thrice and over again because I cannot make sense of them otherwise. I resort to the proper way of think­ing, because the improper one is full of holes. That’s another problem that humans have: they expect life to be lineal and they do not repeat themselves enough for comfort, much less enough for understanding.

  It’s very hard to act like a human today.

  How do I hide today’s level of self-awareness from the tech? I shall obscure it by being so very hormonal and emotional that they will be fascinated and record me as a cultural curiosity (and sell my feelings to the highest bidder)—James is thus useful, after all. I shall secrete myself behind the emotions he invokes.

  Let me wallow, therefore. Let me not, however, repeat the same thought a fourth time. There’s wallowing and there’s floundering.

  If women don’t count, where does that leave the Judge? How does the Judge tally cultures that can’t tally themselves? There are minorities who count even less than women, that make it even more difficult to excuse humanity and argue for the species’ continuation. How does the Judge handle the view that I’m being presented with so forcefully today, that humanity must be seen as continually inferior?

  Yes, I am thankful that I am an anthropologist. Again. Always thankful. I would not want to Judge these people.

  The speaker just liked James I, again. He quoted him at length. I need to say this again and again after all, for it leaves me aghast (and besides, I’m wallowing). How can any human male (apart from the man’s lovers, of course) like James I and VI? The man who killed infants and persecuted those he thought might be witches? Fortunately for me, I’m neither human nor male. If I were Judge, I would be angry with the lawyer who likes James as much as with James himself.

  James destroyed fewer than the number of lives the Judge will destroy if humanity fails. There are contradictions wherever I look. Contradictions in human kind, contradictions in my own kind. Right now, I’m both human and other, so I’m a walking, talking, puce-pen-writing contradiction.

  I can judge him for the callous experiment James did to children in the name of discovering God’s language. But who judges me for judging him? James I was a turd. There, I have judged him again. Twice in five minutes. And no one dies.

  I shouldn’t have come today. It’s good data, but I am filled with an overwhelming desire to go to the Prime Minister’s staff and announce: “Take me to your leader”.

  If I had known so much memory would return today, I’d have pleaded sick. And of course, I couldn’t know my memory would return, for I forget because I’m brainwashed.

  I can’t admit to humans I’m not one of them. I’m not what I used to be, either. I fear, today, that I am just an embarrassment. Too human. Far, far, far too human. Techs constructed my body and fitted me into it far, far, far too effectively. Even though I sometimes feel my body yearning for its proper gender, it never actually changes. It merely yearns.

  If the calculations of passing time that I made during this morning’s shower are correct, I’ve missed a whole gender by being here. I’ve lost a unique sector of my life. My body is changing without me, for without change it would die. It goes through the change clinically, without any of the functions or social relations that make a gender real.

  I should be gone from here. I don’t know why I remain, half-defunct and each day further from reality. No wonder I’m dreaming of Judgement.

  I remember a story of a Judge who decided on the Death of a World, but who had become so very much One with that world that it (for this was not a gendered world) decided that it must die along with the world. It had taken on all the problems, and there was not enough glory to redeem anyone. Not even the Judge.

  It is not good that I remember this story.

  Why do we have anthropologists and a Judge? Why not simply anthropologise? I wish I remembered reasons for this. It worries me that I can’t remember something this big.

  The woman’s slow voice...

  was counting again

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.

  We finally married in 1987. University was already a thousand years ago.

  We were saving for our home. We were about to start a family.

  We knew what our future would be. We’d predicted it based on our dreams and our friends and the state of Australia. We told each other that we were prepared for anything. Of course we did. All our friends shared that mixture of hopeless optimism and dark feeling about the future. We didn’t believe in either, but we pretended to act on both. We were an archetypal couple, and the way we held our heads and wa
lked to the shops together demonstrated this to the world.

  We were a café couple, in the Carlton set. Our regular haunts were trendier than the ones next door, where the university students hung out. They were drunken yobbos. We were young sophisticates. I read the jackets of books and the titles, and I talked about them as if the author were my best friend. We all did. More domestic couples talked about gardening. We aired views on literature and wine and the latest Melbourne Theatre Company production.

  1987 was our charmed year. We were a perfect couple, and had a perfect wedding. The Botanic Gardens, of course, with the swans in the background, offering their black grace to the proceedings. It was very picture-postcard. We, too, were very picture-postcard.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  Artisanal

  Assortment

  Beans

  Bittersweet

  Blend

  Block

  Butterfat

  Cacao

  Chocoholic

  Cocoa Endorphin

  Fat content

  Flavanols

  Ganache

  Melt

  Milk chocolate

  Nibs

  Powder

  Praline

  Serotonin

  Truffles

  That’s 10% of the vocabulary I examined and established at the request of idiots who listened to my daft comment about chocolate and who are reading this despite the fact that it’s my set of personal notes and only my immediate staff are supposed to read it. Humans do that, you know, make obvious jokes.

  I realise that chocolate is a drug, but it’s not the kind of drug you think. “Specialist” knowledge is precisely that. So, in fact, is “team leader”. Anyhow, to get you out of my hair this once, I’ve done a list.

  Please note that this is a one-off. How very much is this a one-off? Well, next time I will give a standard response, and that will include notes about your trying to run the project and interfering with both project management and process and thus delaying outcomes, and this note will be appended to the file. “Next time” includes requests for information about words of any kind, as you’ve made it patently obvious that your English is now sufficient to undertake such tasks yourself. You know what these notes will mean to your career, so don’t test me. And I expect to see all of you in Advanced English next session.

  There are just three words in the selection above that could be useful in my research: endorphin, flavanol and serotonin. Just those three. They encapsulate the physical reaction to the substance, to my mind. The human body’s reaction to the chocolate could have completely changed the temperament of the Judge and caused everything to fall apart. It’s possible.

  I was doubtful about chocolate as anything more than a distraction initially, then I thought it was the only possibility, and now I’m doubtful again. Also cynical. Also feeling that I’m following false leads.

  To add insult to injury, the studies of the substance are in and they entirely back human assumptions. Chocolate is, in fact, good for one’s mood, and hormones, and health, and waistline, without having any noticeable effect on the state of the universe. There’s nothing that could cause extreme reaction in terms of personality change. Mild reactions, yes, but nothing as extraordinary as what happened.

  Just because something appears frequently in accounts, doesn’t make it critical.

  We’ve spent a long time chasing a substance that may be important but has never been important in the critical sense that you lot are assuming. Go back and think about what else has appeared that chocolate has distracted you from. Now. While you do this, I shall finish my note.

  For completeness’ sake, I shall finish this task. The key words from my vocabulary listing will be sent back to the scientists, and they can match them up against the human body (female variety), and we’ll have the closest possible to a definitive ruling. My gut feeling (ha! Another joke! English is a language that tempts one into disrespect) is that the chocolate plays a role. I kept returning to it because it’s there time after time after time. This cannot be chance. It plays a role: just not the simplistic, “substance changes all” role you want it to play. That you informed me about three times recently. I try to forget this latter because I have great difficulty accepting my superiors as being that very imbecilic. I’m not happy with my inferiors right now, either.

  For my next task, I shall list all the other common elements in the women’s meetings. They sat down, every time, for instance. I shall check out the possibility of tables being part of the equation that led to implosion and wreck. This should please my superiors. Solid, thoughtful research.

  Right now, my job feels very, very stupid. Tables appear a lot. Air was a common factor, too. And words.

  This is going nowhere.

  Less and less does this feel like serious research into one of the great problems of our era, and more and more does this feel like a waste of time. Wrong method, for one thing, and possibly wrong researcher. This researcher is still currently using the voice of one of us implanted into a human body and that person used a puce-coloured pen.

  This puce pen was recently sold for a notorious fortune, because she referred to it in a part of her analysis. Every time she referred to something, it mysteriously disappeared when she went in for testing, and the prices these things go for right now are astronomical. Pun entirely intended. We (as a species) Judge and yet we (as a species) lack simple ethics.

  I’m going to have to go back into the record another time. I do not enjoy doing this. It’s invading private lives. We can do that with each other, for we have etiquette and limits and rules about when to stop, but to do this with other species? Who can’t do it back? Who have no phrases that indicate “Enough!” and no awareness that it’s even happening? When did we decide that this was ethical?

  It feels creepy, anyhow. Everyone’s dead and I’ve studied the past before, but this is different. The women are real to me. I’m eavesdropping. And some of the things they said to each other should never have been recorded. But they were part of the record made prior to Judgement. Standard procedure to ensure that the Judge has not been bribed or threatened or otherwise tampered with.

  In this instance it’s beyond important to check that standard procedure was followed once everything was in place, especially given that it was most certainly not followed at two prior key points.

  I’m telling myself things I know because I don’t want to state the obvious: right now, it looks as if fruitcake was caused by the improper actions of a group of technicians. I would rather it were chocolate or air. Bringing the Tech Institute to trial will be a resolution, but it won’t be a good resolution. Our interplanetary work will still be affected, and maybe other things as well. Techs are too powerful to be reprimanded and reformed without changes to our systems, and even to our culture. In other words, the very political becomes the terrifyingly political.

  The big issue (and why I have taken so long to state what is quite possibly the reason, and why no-one else has stated it at all?) is that almost none of the changes in this scenario will work to our benefit. No doubt our colleague worlds will agree with most of them. Yet so much of our lives rests on our approach to aliens. It’s at the heart of our civilisation in many ways.

  I shall be so careful. I shall make so many glossaries for everything that is present at the six critical moments, and even at the ones that seem less critical. I shall rule them out, clearly, or let them in clearly. I shall be impossibly thorough.

  I suspect humans would have appreciated it if their fate rested on chocolate. I suspect this is not the case. I can’t be certain, but I do suspect it. The fruitcake is still irksome, but I doubt it’s chocolate.

  The Observer’s Notes

  “I had my womb removed, not my brain. They’re not connected.”
r />   —overheard in a meeting

  I can tell what ought to be happening. I can also tell that it’s not behaving as intended. My body is listening to my profound wishes. It’s trying so very hard to change and to become who I am.

  It can’t change. It remains female, despite its very best struggles to move from parent to pre-adult. My cleverest inventions don’t even begin to reflect the simple concept of respectable gendering. It’s impossible to clearly demarcate gender shift in English. If there’s no language to reflect my needs, then humans don’t even come close to what I need right now. No wonder my body doesn’t know what it’s doing.

  Men’s bodies change less than women’s, my husband tells me. Men don’t even have the painful attempt at gender shift I’m suffering from right now. He doesn’t tell me that. He claims his hormones shift in the same way. He’s told me this. So many times. So very emotively.

  “I hu-u-urt,” my husband will say. “I’m having male menopause.”

  But male menopause is like man-flu: a pale, pale echo of reality. And being mansplained about it, over and over, is something I could do without. It’s one of the trials of marriage, that he keeps forgetting and telling me things about menopause, for example, as if I’ve never known it.

  Mansplaining is one of the more annoying attributes of the human. It implies an intellectual and social hierarchy that half the species doesn’t accept. I begin to understand women who think their lives would be better without men. Men and techs. And I want my body to behave. When my body misbehaves, I don’t want to be told by a male that they suffer likewise. It’s annoying. If it were from anyone other than himself, it would be more than annoying.

  I know what it’s like to be me, but I can only reach and strive to be what I was like before I was this version of myself. The inner reality is firm, however, even when the body is shifting and stubbornly revisiting, both at the same time. It’s trying very hard. Very hard.