I woke up at seven the next morning with two beautiful women cuddled up against me. It felt so good, I laid quietly for a few minutes, reveling in the sensation. I would have stayed there another hour, had nature not called. While I was in the bathroom, I scraped off what little beard I had and brushed my teeth with the modern dental care items Coleen procured for me. Cleanliness and personal hygiene were certainly much simpler tasks here in the future.
When I walked out of the bathroom, Sonja almost knocked me down rushing into it, and Helena was hot on her heels.
"Don't ever hog the John first thing in the morning when you live with a bunch of women, Jeremiah," Coleen admonished.
It was advice that I took to heart from that day forward.
We were all dressed and sitting at the kitchen table by eight-thirty. Breakfast consisted of oatmeal with raisins, sweetened with honey. There was no meat or bread, and most horrible of all, no coffee. Except for the chilled orange juice, I would have been no worse off going outside and eating dirt. While we were sitting at the table drinking weak hot tea, the women finally answered all my questions about the men of this time. Here is what they told me as best I can remember their words.
By the year 2425, altered males were firmly established and the positive results of the genetic changes started to bear fruit. Stripped of their base desires and aggressiveness, men worked long and hard to pull the human race back from the brink of extinction. One consequence in the radical change in male behavior was a shift towards a female-centered society as men started moving away from their so called traditional roles. Men, devoted towards the betterment of mankind, moved into the sciences and education. Women took over the responsibility for the practical matters men could not be bothered with. Men began calling themselves Homo Libertad, (Liberated Man). A second consequence of the genetic altering was fewer male births, but longer male life expectancies. One in three children born was male, and men made up forty percent of the population.
The single-mindedness of the men toward science and academics led to the passing of a law that required men to perform some sort of public service for at least sixteen hours a week. The law also mandated social interaction at least two times a week in a non-work related setting. Public service was the reason Isaac and the rest of the Pecos Posse formed their band. Music was not fun for them, but it allowed them to fulfill both obligations at once. Going to the dancehall also had an entirely different meaning for the males there last night than it had for the women. The women were there for fun, the men because they were required to go.
The women did not dispute my observation that their men-folk were in effect monks, withdrawn from society and thinking themselves morally and intellectually superior to women. I was horrified at the picture the women painted. And I was astounded that they were apparently blind to what their manipulation of the basic nature of man had created. Even a backwoods muleskinner could see that their society was doomed to extinction, the very thing they thought they were preventing. Sonja stunned me with her explanation of their acceptance of men's conduct.
"Jeremiah, for the last seventy-five years, men have actively worked at making us extinct or at least to make us not exist as we are now. They are doing that with the full backing of us women. That is the purpose of the time travel research and the reason we needed more Hawkingium. We are sending teams back in time to critical nexuses in history, to nudge it on a path different from the one taken. The creation of the apparatus to take people back is only a first step, and was probably the easiest to accomplish, because it was straight science. The difficult job is identifying critical events and how to change there outcome. Every viable city-state on Earth is involved in the project, yet we seem to be decades away from a solution."
It was an amazing and audacious plan they had devised. As they explained how they thought subtle changes at certain critical junctures could cause the future to be much different, I was surprised that Tonya used an example from the Civil War.
"Suppose that Stonewall Jackson hadn't been killed at Chancellorsville? Can you see how that might have changed the course of the war?"
I saw that immediately, of course, because it had been a sad day for the Confederacy when we lost General Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson. Having him at the Battle of Gettysburg might have changed the outcome of that ghastly defeat, and preserved the Confederacy.
From that point, the conversation became esoteric to the point of giving me a headache, but the gist of it boiled down to what Sonja called the paradox of time. Sonja's explanation caused the hackles on my neck to stand stiff.
"The difficulty we are facing, Jeremiah, is the theory that a small change at one point in history will cause a ripple effect, based on everything that might be related to the person or event we change. For instance, suppose I went back in time and changed an event in history and it had an indirect effect on one of my ancestors. The result of that ripple might be that I was never born. And if I was never born, how could I go back and change anything?"
The conversation made me dizzy with all its convoluted machinations. However, I did understand the enormity of what these future men were attempting, and I gained a new respect for them for their dedication. Still, I could not help but think they were taking the absolutely wrong approach. To my mind, it would be much better if they made the world a utopia by working on the future, instead of the past.
We walked out of the apartment building at fifteen minutes before nine in the morning. Our destination was the building in which we had arrived from my time. Was that only yesterday? While we were walking, Sonja was carrying on some sort of cryptic conversation on the small device they called a vid-com. Sonja's end of the conversation was mostly a series of yes or no answers, interspersed with an occasional, "I understand." Finally, she flipped the device shut and filled us all in.
"The Pleiad has invoked the 'exception of 72' so they can avoid announcing Jeremiah's presence for a couple of days. They need time to figure out how he might best help us before telling everyone he's here," she said somberly.
The other women stopped and looked at her in surprise. Me? Why I wore my usual expression of total bafflement. Sonja saw my confusion and gave me a smile.
"The 'exception of 72' is a clause in our Constitution that allows the Pleiad to keep something secret from the public for three days. When they announce whatever they've been concealing and the reason they hid it, the citizens vote whether to keep the councilors or dismiss them. The 'exception of 72' has only been invoked twice in our history."
I asked what I thought was an obvious question.
"Why are they doing that? I mean at least twenty or thirty people know I'm here, so how can they keep it a secret?"
Coleen had the answer to that.
"Everyone working on the time project is required to keep silent until the Pleiad makes an announcement. That's the way the project was set up at its inception, and it has been that way for fifty years."
Mention of the project raised yet another question.
"So if the Pleiad has to reveal everything to the public, why isn't the fact that you all left to visit my time common knowledge?" I asked.
I was stunned buy Helena's answer.
"Because we were only gone less than a nano-second in our time, Honey. Time on the up-stream side does not move, no matter how long you are gone. That's why we had to leave your time exactly when we did. Our departure time and location had to be precisely calibrated in order to return us right back to when and where we started. Working out the formula for computing synchronization times and locations is what took fifty years to accomplish. Building the actual apparatus only took a few months.
"The Pleiad's exception order includes everything that happened from 1030 hours yesterday through 1029 hours day after tomorrow."
Wouldn't you know that after all the talk about the idiosyncrasies of the future man, my first appointment of the day was with Isaac from the Pecos Posse. Isaac managed to get my goat in fewer than thirty seconds when he said, "It would be best if you called me Doctor Feldman, Jeremiah, so that we can establish the proper doctor/patient relationship."
"Fine by me Doctor Feldman, as long as you remember I am Mister Brock," I replied icily.
Doctor Feldman did not make me better disposed towards him when he gave me some written tests that took me almost three hours to complete. The first test of one hundred questions asked things of a nature that you would answer in school. I have to admit that test was sort of fun. The second, and much longer test, asked basically the same dozen questions asked about a thousand different ways. I might have been a backwoods muleskinner, but it was still clear to me what the test measured, to whit: how a person would react to some unpleasant situations. After the first series of the questions, I started marking the answer exactly opposite of how I actually felt. That made the whole exercise almost better.
Old Isaac ... I mean Doctor Feldman ... collected the tests from me and passed them on to one of his student flunkies for grading. When the serious looking young man had departed, Feldman started asking me questions about my life and my family. Feldman seemed fascinated about my recollects, and asked me some extremely personal questions. I took a page from the book of JC Colbert, and told him some outrageous hogwash. Feldman was as disappointed as I was relieved, when Tonya came in and collected me for lunch.
"We'll finish our discussion tomorrow, Mister Brock, and go over your test results," Feldman gushed.
I grunted noncommittally, pigs would take to the air in flight before I came into that room again under my own power.
Tonya escorted me to a community dining room, where Sonja, Coleen, Helena and Sarah Hunnicut, the doctor from yesterday, were sitting at a table large enough for ten or twelve people. As we walked towards the table, Tonya whispered in my ear.
"Coleen wants you to pay plenty of attention to Sarah during lunch. She wants you to sit next to her and casually touch her as often as you can without being obvious about it."
I shrugged in reply, "Okay, I guess."
When we arrived at the table, the other women stood up and I gave them all, including a surprised Sarah, a big hug. While we were up, we all fell in line at a long shiny steel counter. At the start of the counter, we picked up trays that we pushed along a small ledge in the counter. Spaced along the ledge were bowls and plates of food. The food items were labeled so I grabbed a few items I was comfortable with. I ended up with a salad, a bowl of navy bean soup, a plate of something called chicken in wine sauce and an apple. Oh yeah, and I grabbed a couple of flat breads slightly thicker than Mexican tortillas. I was hungry, so I sat down and dug right in.
It turned out to be extremely easy for me to pay attention to Sarah, because the food was so tasteless, it did not offer even the slightest distraction. The only part of the meal I enjoyed even a little was the bean soup, and that was because I put about a half a bottle of pepper sauce on it. The chicken dish was bland and rubbery. I took a couple of bites and pushed my plate away.
"This chicken does not do anything for me. I have a hankering for some dead mammal meat of the bovine persuasion, Ladies, so what say I take you all out for a steak tonight?" I said.
What I thought was an excellent suggestion was met with silence and shrugged shoulders. Coleen answered for the bunch of them.
"We don't eat meat of any type, Jeremiah. Raising animals for their flesh is a waste of resources. Why go to the trouble and expense, when we can replicate the flavor so easily, using tofu and soybean mash as a base? Even though we live in a fertile valley with plenty of water, raising enough of a variety of foods is a real challenge for us. And now that the outlands are unsettled, trade in food stuffs has dwindled down to practically nothing.
"Of course the health aspect of diet also plays a large role in our eating habits. A diet high in protein from red meats is very unhealthy. Today, for instance, your soup has twice the protein of an equal weight of meat, yet the beans are free of fat."
I stared at Coleen for a few seconds, hoping she was joking. I mean, if she thought that the tasteless white clumps were a good imitation of chicken, she would pass out eating the real thing. I have to assume she was not joshing me, because she cracked nary a smile. The future, already suspect to me because of the chemical gelding of men, looked even bleaker when I considered life without beef and pork in it. But, wonder of wonders, the apple was juicy, crisp and delicious.
So, as I was saying, the food did not distract me from doing Coleen's bidding and paying some attention to her friend Sarah. I figured that Coleen probably didn't want Sarah to feel uncomfortable at the closeness we all shared. I did not know that Sarah was wearing a device designed to measure changes in her body while we dined together. It wasn't as if being nice to Sarah was a chore or anything like that, anyway, because she was very pretty with her luculent brown eyes and bee-stung ruby lips. It also did not hurt that she was exceedingly well padded, yet wasp waisted.
What I immediately noticed was that Sarah was over the bout of shyness she'd exhibited just the day before. I do not mean that she suddenly tried to be the center of attention or anything like that; instead, she just seemed more comfortable in my presence. Half way through the meal, we were holding hands under the table, and she had one of her very large, very firm breasts pressed against my forearm as she leaned across me to speak with Coleen. Now even hillbilly muleskinners know that a woman does not accidentally do that, so I flexed my arm and nudged the substantial orb. Sarah leaned against me harder and kept talking.
From the messhall, the women led me upstairs to a large, dimly lit room filled with strange pieces of machinery. Until I walked into that room, my being in the future had not really registered with me, because almost everything about the place was familiar to me. I mean the buildings, the way people dressed and even the 'trolley' were close enough to something I had experienced in my time not to shock me. The strangest thing so far to me had been the gelded men and the equality of the women.
The contents of that room and my experiences there changed all that with a vengeance. The place made me uneasy as soon as I walked through the door, because there was not a solitary thing in the room that I could identify. The place seemed a bedlam of eerily glowing panels, whisper-like whirring noises and blinking red, yellow and green lights. In the center of the room was a raised platform about the size of a coffin. Some sort of metal contraption arched over it from rails set in the floor. The platform was surrounded on three sides by desks with rows of the glowing panels and blinking lights. In front of each desk was a tall-backed leather chair on wheels.
I stopped short two steps into the room and looked around warily. I blushed when I caught myself reaching for the pistol that normally rested on my hip. I stopped so quickly that Tonya sprang past me, the large stunner in her hand. Coleen and Sarah had preceded me into the room, and they turned around at Tonya's sudden movement. By now, all five women were in the room and looking at me quizzically.
"What is this place?" I asked, my voice tightly controlled.
Coleen put her hand on my arm and gave me a smile.
"Relax, Jeremiah. This is only a Mediscan Unit. It uses electricity, light energy and magnet pulsations to diagnose and correct injuries and health problems."
I nodded my understanding, but her explanation did not do much to reassure me. The room had an aura to it that grated on my nerves like fingernails on a slate board.
"Fine, now I have seen it, so let's go somewhere else," I said.
The smile on Coleen's pretty face faded into a slight frown.
"There is no other place for us today, Love. You are scheduled here for the afternoon to complete the medical exam that was cut short by the excitement yesterday. The procedure is totally painless; in fact, you'll sleep through the whole boring thing."
It did not set well on my stomach, but I acquiesced so as not to appear a total coward. Before I could say Jack Sprat, I was naked as a jaybird, lying on the strangely warm and soft platform, the arch humming softly over my feet. The platform molded to my body even better than the amazing mattress on the bed in my room. Coleen, standing behind one of the desks looking over the top of what she called the 'data console', asked me if I was ready.
I exhaled and drew in another big calming breath.
"Ready as I will ever be, I reckon," I replied.
Coleen smiled and leaned down for a second. When she looked back up, her image was shimmery around the edges.
"I activated a containment field around the scanner, Jeremiah, so things might look slightly distorted to you. All you have to do is breathe deeply and count backwards from one hundred, and this will be over before you know it."
I did as she said, but I lost my concentration at ninety-five. I nodded off into that place where you are almost asleep, but you are still aware of what is going on around you. I would learn later that I should have been totally unconscious for what followed.
When I stopped counting, I felt the table firm up around my right hand and then a pin prick on the index finger of the same hand. A few seconds later, this disembodied flat voice echoed around me.
"DNA match confirms subject as neo-citizen, Brock, Jeremiah E. Omnicard number not assigned, medipay guaranteed by order of the Pleiad. Limited records exist for, Brock, Jeremiah E. Existing blood analysis contains unresolved anomalies."
Coleen's voice replaced the disembodied one.
"Start scan. Confirm blood anomalies during scan," she directed.
The hum coming from the arch at my feet changed pitch, and fewer than fifteen seconds later, the flat voice returned.
"Poorly resolved fracture, left foot, third metatarsal ... correct or ignore?"
Coleen said, "Correct." The arch made a beeping noise and my left middle toe that a mule had stepped on not two months ago started tingling.
The scanning process continued in that manner up both legs. The scan voice stopped once at my right knee that sometimes ached when it rained. The tingling sensation in that knee lasted longer than the pause at my toe. I think if I were fully awake, I would have been scared witless at what was happening to me, but in this dream-like place, I just marveled at how good places the machine lingered at felt when it moved on. I remember actually feeling pretty smug that the scan only found two small problems between my feet and my hips. The smugness evaporated on the next beep.
"Precancerous mass on dorsal surface of left testicle ... correct or ignore?"
And if that wasn't bad enough, next was, "strangulated blood vessel has decreased erectile function by fifteen percent ... correct or ignore?"
"Correct," whooped five women in unison.
And so it went. I did not have any concept of passing time, so caught up was I in the procedure of cataloging my body's faults. The amazing machine could not repair everything it discovered. A few items required courses of medication or lifestyle and dietary changes. There were also a couple of items that Coleen vetoed changing, they came up during the wrap up analysis of my blood.
"Subject is genetically outside acceptable parameters and subject is capable of spontaneous erection ... correct or ignore?"
The procedure ended up taking more than six hours. I could barely walk when it was over, and all the women were tired also. It embarrassed me when I found out that the annual full scan on an average citizen lasted fewer than thirty minutes. My plans for returning to Pecos Pete's went out the window when we finally dragged ourselves back to the apartment. I managed to eat a couple of slices of leftover pizza before crawling into bed around eight. I slept for twelve solid hours.
When I woke up in the morning, I was alone in the bed. I stood and stretched, feeling too good for it not to be a sin. My vision was sharper and my hearing, which had deteriorated because of the war, was much improved. To top it off, my little soldier was bigger and harder than I could remember him ever being. I grinned and strutted to the indoor facilities.
I told Coleen about my experiences on the platform as we were eating our porridge that next morning. She was clearly amazed and more than a little concerned.
"We used enough anesthesia on you to tranquilize one of your mules, Honey. We had no base line measurements of your tolerance, so we gave you almost double what we usually administer to a male. Because males have a much lower threshold for tolerating pain, you were administered three times what a female receives. Was the procedure painful to you?"
She looked relieved when I said I had felt tingling and heat occasionally, but none of it was actually painful. She nodded, then launched into another topic.
"The results of the scan and our measurements of Sarah's response to you show some amazing adaptations that we have never seen or even heard of. For instance, the size of your adrenal glands is twice our norm, and your lean muscle mass is twenty-five percent higher than ours. Tonya says that she can put you on a cardio workout program to reduce your body fat content to our norm and it would be closer to forty percent. Also, as I suspected, you produce pheromones that our males don't. Women of our time are very sensitive to those pheromones in a positive way. The opposite is true with our males; they are repelled instead of attracted."
I had figured out the part about me attracting women and repelling men, based on my experiences here so far. Coleen simply gave it a name. The physical improvement remarks, though, were unexpected and actually stung my feelings.
"I don't think I am that fat, my Ma said I was just big boned," I said defensively.
Well after some reassurances from the women that I wasn't really that fat, I asked Tonya about these exercises Coleen mentioned. Tonya pointed out the window where some men and women were running along at a seriously fast clip. The men were wearing short pants and no shirts. She told me most people 'jogged' for five to ten miles every other day, but she would start me out with a shorter distance. Tonya actually seemed excited about the idea of us running around as if we had lost our minds. For the life of me, I could not understand that concept at all. I mean, if you weren't going anywhere in particular, why run? I grunted noncommittally in reply.
I was in the process of showing my butt over going to visit Doctor Feldman again, when Sonja's vidcom chirped. It was the Pleiad headman, and he took me off the hook with Feldman, because the council wanted to see me as soon as possible.
The women made a big fuss about me showering twice, wearing this goop under my arms and smearing some sort of pomade in my hair. Then they powdered my body with some talcum. Once I was dressed in my modern clothes, the women all stood around me and sniffed me as if we were dogs making new friends. Coleen pulled out a pair of tight rubber gloves, helped me stretch them over my paws so my bare skin didn't touch the chairman's, and off we went.
When we arrived at the nicely appointed, but not over decorated Pleiad Chamber, the women sat me as far down the table as they could get away with. That, added to Coleen's precautions, seemed to have an effect, as my meeting with the council was much less antagonistic than my meetings with any other future men. The Council Chairman greeted me kindly and officially welcomed me to Paradise Valley. We jawed for a couple of minutes about this and that, until he cleared his throat and explained the unscheduled meeting.
"Mister Brock, some time during the night last night, a gang of Outland scum attacked an experimental farm that is on the lower fringe of the valley. The farm had recently successfully mutated some grain and tuber plants to grow rapidly in our climate. The Outlanders stole all the seed stock and destroyed the remainder. That project was ten years in the making, and we had high hopes of harvesting crops from their seeds later this year. Two men were killed in the attack and five women are missing. The attackers used energy pulse weapons, in violation of our society's most sacred law.
"I am not sure what you could do to help us, but I thought we had nothing to lose from asking your opinion. I have received very conflicting reports about you. Doctors Mendez and Feldman think you are a savage, and should be returned immediately to your time and kind, while Ms Ferren, my most trusted aide, and Doctor O'Neil say you are completely trustworthy and competent. I am willing to suspend any judgment on the matter and let you prove yourself if you want. Any ideas about how we can defend ourselves?"
The big cheese stopped talking and gave me this benign look as if he were doing me a favor. I knew that look, I had seen it on many a politician (officers were the worst politicians of all) when they thought they had you hornswoggled. I was prepared for him to ask something like that, but defense was not my specialty. I shrugged and answered him anyway.
"I need an arrest warrant for this woman who calls herself Queen Elizabeth, two horses or mules with tack, a map of these outlands and my weapons. The best way to kill a snake is cut off its head."
The Chairman blanched at my analogy, but nodded his head in agreement.
"Done and done," he said.