The Start of Eternity/11

After the play was over they walked back home. Karsa was very enthusiastically singing praises for Ormansow, "He's a genius! There is no question about it. The whole story is completely true, but amplified by the very fiction of the story line!"

Stan was shocked. First he had been shocked by the play then by the audience reaction and now by the way Karsa was expressing herself and how her father just chuckled and grinned. Stan started to say, "How can you-" Jillia put a hand over his mouth and pulled him towards the rest rooms. She called to the rest of the group, "Stan will walk me home. See you all later!"

Jillia took Stan right into the men's room and said, "Don't get into an argument over this. Let the little twit enjoy herself? This was her birthday celebration tonight. Let it go!"

Stan sputtered, "How can you listen to her spouting nonsense. 'The story is completely true!' That's crap! The whole play was crap, just like Nora said...horrid."

Jillia said, "Shut up! You don't know what you're talking about."

Stan would not let it go. "Why were all the robots male and all the other characters female? It's like some kind of sick perversion of reality."

Jullia gestured to the restroom. "Look around you, Stan. Open your eyes? Can't you see our reality?"

Stan had no idea what she meant. "What?"

"The reality of Uvadekoto is that in my generation females outnumber males eight to one. Look around! There are no men!"

Stan had noticed that the audience for the play was mostly women. He had assumed that men just were not interested in a play about robots having sex with women. He could not believe what Jillia was telling him. He asked, "How can that be?"

Jillia took his arm and led him out of the restroom and out of the play house and towards home. Along the way she explained, "Uvadekoto is ahead of the rest of the planet in all kinds of technologies. This community has been performing genetic engineering for a couple of centuries. At first the goal was to establish two-way communications with the Huaoshy, then the goal was to build Uvadekoto, this spaceship we live in. This place is built according to an alien design, but we slowly learned another secret."

Jillia was silent for a long time. Stan tried to imagine a secret so terrible that who could not speak of it. Finally she said, "I still do not understand it, but...well, we are aliens."

Stan looked at her in horror. Stan managed to stutter out, "Y-you? Nora? Ev-everyone in this -this place?"

Jillia shook her head. "No, Stan, that's not it. That's not it at all. How could we keep that secret? No, it is far deeper than that. Everyone is alien. At least, alien...manufactured."

Stan could not imagine what she was trying to say. "What do you mean? Manufacturing people like manufacturing robots?"

Jillia explained it as best she could, "I'm not a biologist, but the biologists say it is clear. The aliens created our species, designed us. They were here, millions of years ago. They made us in their image."

Stan was flabbergasted. "How can that be? Where did these mysterious aliens go? Why did they do this to us...make us? How do you know this is true? It sounds like bad science fiction!"

Jillia patted his hand, "You just do not want to believe it. None of us wanted to believe it. How do we know? The Huaoshy told us. Their hieric communications are full of it...they call us "our children". And the messages tell us about our biology. How could that be if they had not been here and seen us?"

Stan pulled his hand away from her. "I don't know. None of this makes sense. You're not making sense. This sounds like some kind of crazy rationalization for that...the deranged rantings of Ormansow."

Jillia continued, "For a while it looked like this community would die out. The women stopped having children and all became scientists, studying the alien message and figuring out how to make the fantastic machines and devices the aliens told us about. One of the first big advances that was made with alien help was in the area of genetic engineering. So we promptly made things worse. Women are smarter than men."

Stan had heard that. It was thought to be due to the distribution of genes on the sex chromosomes. The brains of women were different than those of men. Jillian was still talking, "The aliens, of course, knew all about this. They told us the genes that are responsible and it was trivial to amplify those genes and make women even more intelligent. And people started trying to avoid giving birth to boys. Who wants a stupid boy when you can have a clever girl?"

Stan commented, "That's why there is a Global Mandate against sex selection."

Jillia nodded, "Yes, but that goes back to the days before genetics, back when there were still nation states. Back then some cultures were very patriarchal and female babies were sometimes killed. People wanted male heirs. What I'm talking about turns that on its head. And our genetic engineers again made things worse. It was almost trivial to alter our genes and give women the ability to reproduce clonally."

Stan's feet froze. "Clones?" Another couple looked at Stan and Jillia took hold of his arm and pulled him along the walkway.

Jillia explained, "And the genetic engineers turned back the clock for reproductive maturation. You were shocked to hear Karsa calling herself an adult, but here it is the literal truth. Almost every woman in Uvadekoto can reproduce by age 12 or so."

Stan objected, "But Karsa is just a little girl! She's a foot shorter than you and even you should not be functionally adult if you're only 18. This is madness."

Jillia continues, "It is survival. You probably know the statistics for the whole planet. Males typically start producing gametes at about age 20. Women at about age 24. But here, it is half that for women. It was accomplished with a single genetic change, a simple hormonal switch. But biology wasn't the whole answer to our survival. Women did not just need more time to be reproductively active. Our women still found other thing to do besides having children. So a surrogate mother program was started and that worked. For a while."

Stan asked, "You mean paying women from outside Uvadekoto to carry the babies to term?"

Jillia nodded, "Yes, but this was before the second message from the Huaoshy. Uvadekoto was not even imagined back then. But then more changes came. Robots and the skewed male/female ratio developed together. Women started deciding...well, why put up with some stupid guy when you can just clone yourself. And of course, women figured out how to have babies together, sexually, by artificially combining their two female gametes to make an embryo. So that is where we are now."

Stan asked, "So that play...that is the reality of Uvadekoto?"

Jillian giggled. "It is a farcical future history, if you like. It is where we might one day end up at the rate we are going. Of course, the most powerful and desirable women can still sometimes get a husband. Most women just give up and establish a household with one or two other women. And the number of male babies just keeps going down. The entire population is going down again. So we build robots and bring in outsiders just to meet our labor demands. We're a failing culture that cannot replace its losses to old age."