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subsided, she flashed on the bizarre idea of having a child and felt profoundly grateful for the contraceptive implant that preserved her from becoming a complete animal.

A Word from your Grandfather
Let me interject one word here, and then I promise you I will keep out of my story, apart form Forewords and Endwords where you can see me coming.
One biographer has written that Mariammo and Mesfun talked about language and gender, too, under the forsythia bush. But that must be nonsense. Mariammo was to go through many more experiences before she rediscovered the old words, the "he" and "she," "his" and "hers" of old Terra, which are being used to tell this story. It does no service to our understanding of the woman who did this to suggest that she was more of a prodigy than she was, that it was all in her head at nineteen. The biographies of Mariammo are full of such strange tales, or as people often say, such myths, by which they mean untruths. But if truth be told Mariammo's real, unadorned life was quite mythic enough, and since by definition there is nothing more true than a myth, I'll stick to the facts.
No one in the Collectivity in two thousand years had used "he" and "she." For two millennia they had used the butchered plural, that ungendered abomination which some pseudofeminist political committee had invented in its cups: by crossing out the "t" of "they," "their," "them," etc., they came up with "hey," "heir," and "hem." Awkward. Ridiculous. But if you are brought up to it: perfectly easy and natural. Try reading this story with 'hey' every time I write 'he' or 'she' - because that is how it actually was.
Certainly the lovers under the forsythia did not feel the lack of "he" and "she"; for them it was only "I" and "you." And that was revolution enough.

Around dawn the first blackbird of the new day pierced their cave with its bright call. The two lovers fell silent as the damp valley cold seeped into their embrace. Soon all the birds of field and copse were lightening the day with cheerful clamor. The sound was as buoyant as the chatter of the farm community, sixty strong, at breakfast in the refectory. They took their arms from around each other, crawled out of the bush and clambered stiffly to their feet. Chilled by the relentlessly friendly birds, they trudged home through the pale mists and dripping grasses without so much as touching.
Mariammo and Mesfun crept up toward the sprawl of farm buildings from the valley behind a long hawthorn hedge, which since its planting centuries ago had been invaded by ash, holly, sweet-smelling elder, and brambles, stripped not long since of their heavy blackberries. They circled around through the orchard to reach the farmhouse. Mariammo stood on tiptoe to push open the downstairs bathroom window, which was never locked. It would not open. She pushed harder.
"It is locked, as it should be," said a voice she recognized well. Chen, the seniormost of the village elders, who did not even live on the farm but must have been summoned from the village in the night, had come out from the piggery behind them. They had been betrayed.

arousal, or his: arousal reeked of the bland, meaningless, hearty sex they had known since puberty and the op. She didn't know what to do. She wanted him, but she wanted to be merged with him on some other plane, not with the usual wet and sloppy muscles and tumescences. Every night noise scared her: a deer huffing, the heavy feet of a cow scratching its flank against the yew hedge. If his stick was stiff her hole wouldn't open, and vice versa. But how horrible to use those words: she needed other words, words for the coming together of two - what? Two souls. "You're a good soul," an old woman, Pao, who lived on the next farm, had told her: the only person she knew who used that word.
They gave up several times and lay back and whispered. She told him what the voice in her head had said: the bizarre idea of having a child, so primitive, weird, disgusting. He said he'd heard a girl from the Tay Valley had run into the hills and never been found, and someone said her implant had out-and-out failed, and she had become pregnant, like a cow or pig. She shuddered. He found by feel the tiny scar of her op on her belly, and kissed it.
"So why did she run? It would only be a small operation, probably, to have it out."
"I don't know. That's what Pao told me."
"When did you see Pao?" Mariammo thought of the old woman as her particular friend, and was surprised Mesfun would even talk with her.
"I dream of Pao sometimes as if she were, I don't know, like a cat to its kittens, and we're the kittens."
"But I do too!" She wished she could see him better. She felt she had never seen him properly before, or that she would see him quite differently now.
"Mother," said the voice in her head, "that's called a Mother."
"Oh, there it is again!" she wailed and buried her face in his chest. He held her head against him. "It's a voice in my head. Am I going nuts?" But he held her and told her it was just the nervousness of breaking the rules, or of leaving home, and not to worry.
During the course of the night they said things to each other that neither had told any living being, only the computerized therapist called MAN. He told her about fantasizing that Pao was his mother. She told him about how when she was a child she ran the wrong way for help the day Gaia, the cow, was gored by a tusker (this everyone knew), and how she had blamed herself ever after that Gaia and her unborn calf died (the guilt had been hers alone).
And every time they lay back, defeated by their recalcitrant bodies, their hands soon found each other again, and stroked, and she nuzzled her face into his neck, and it began again.
It was around dawn that she was finally with him and able to respond, and he finally inside her, and they actually came to climax together and she did after all feel merged on the soul plane as well as the softroom plane as she suspected no two people had ever been in all the life of Planet Arable. As they