On the Matter of Luck

Danny Joe Robb

Admiral Transulia Zilk, retirement address to First Galactic Women’s University 

[Note to self: Smile]

‘Better to be lucky than good.’ That’s the cruel comment my prep school classmate made when I was selected for fertilization. For those of you not familiar with my home world of Acrulia, planetary law states that two females per colony per year, the best of the best, be selected to attend Preeminent University. The law ensures our leaders come from the best stock. I was Valedictorian, the track team captain, the math club president and, though I may not look like it now that I’m old and I’ve lost my charm, I was also prom queen. 

[Pause for expected polite laughter] 

I was locked in first place… However, our laws then also dictated a lottery to be conducted every lunar, and two females from each colony, of prime age, to be chosen for mating. The random method statistically guaranteed the fairness of reproduction and the diversity of our species. This law overrode all other laws. And so, the state exerted their powers of eminent domain and seized my body for its purpose. My mean-mouthed classmate, the third place alternate, took my seat at the university and assumed the honor I had worked so hard to earn. My reward for winning the lottery was sex with a man, and the resulting children. 

My mother, bless her heart, told me I was so fortunate to be a participant in the miracle of life, and proudly exclaimed, “Out of all the virgins, you’re so lucky.” 

I couldn’t stop crying. I was exceptional at forming alliances and rhetoric and team work—not spawning babies—any fertile female can do that. Right? I can make a baby—how many of you graduates have that on your resume? 

[Pause for laughter]

Ironically, I was good at it too. Sex, one time, and yours truly was pregnant. Unfortunately, I was too terrified to enjoy it. Talk about a rip off. 

[Pause for laughter]

Now, here’s where my luck changed. An Aclulian woman’s fertilized egg normally splits to form multiple embryos, sometimes more than ten, all females. A single embryo formed from an un-split egg is always a male. Once inseminated, the child-bearer’s skin gradually turns color that indicates the sex of the babies—or baby. As I blossomed—a better metaphor than saying, as I got fat, right— [Pause for laughter—make funny face]—my ivory skin changed to a pretty green, soft and warm, marking me as a mother of a boy.

This is when it became my mother’s turn to cry. She, like all grandparents on my planet, want girl babies, and blamed my failure to produce them on my poor attitude—she was right about that—but wishing and hoping have no effect on science. Typically, a male is conceived in about one of a thousand pregnancies; the outcome a result of Providence, if you believe in it, or Luck, if you believe in that, or statistics, which is indisputable.

My birthing day came exactly 12 lunars after conception, the normal span for Acrulian women. For the procreation ceremony, I wore the traditional robe, a beautiful garment provided by the colony government. Made of soft red velvet, it had a finely woven silk orb that wrapped around my protruding belly and a lacy-green stabilimenta that flowed down below my waist and widened into a sweeping flourish at my four—sore—swollen feet. 

[Pause for laughter]

The honorable garb was supposed to make me feel important. It didn’t. I felt used, deprived of my freedom to choose.  

A government transport picked me up at my home and dropped me off at the old city gate. Widonia, the second virgin, a farmer’s daughter, was already there, giddy from all of the attention. She’d mated with the Village Man a few days before I had and thought she was the luckiest person in the world. Her skin was a pretty violet color—she would have girls.

Per tradition, we walked from there. It was a beautiful dark and cloudy day, the grassy pavement soaking wet from a long night’s rain. Thousands of people, dressed in their finest clothes, filled both sides of the temple’s tree-lined parkway, shouting encouragement. Mating-age girls and women filled Widonia’s purse with silver coins as she walked by, the notion being that those who provide for children will be blessed with children. I had no purse because I didn’t need money. I was carrying a boy. 

At the ivy-covered temple entrance, Widonia and I touched the golden tomb of the first mother and said her name, Taracula, and thanked her for our lives and asked her to bless our children. From there, we descended down a wide, gently sloping ramp into the ancient cave, the poorly-lighted interior shaped like a colossal upside-down bowl. 

Nursemaids received Widonia and me and led us across the damp floor toward the middle of the cavern, to an archaic maternity ward furnished with tapestries and carpets, that did little to soften its gloomy appearance. Adjacent to the ward was a raised, circular area enclosed by a cross-linked fence that went from floor to ceiling. 

‘I’m Ayah. I’m a mother too,’ Widonia’s attendant told her, so sickly sweet. ‘You’ll be fine, and your daughters will be pretty princesses—just like you.’ 

My aide was a squat, odd looking woman with a slightly masculine voice—and a draconian bedside manner. She placed me in a cushioned delivery chair next to a portable heater, and merely grunted, ‘My name is Slitheri. I’ll bring the Baby Milk.’

I leaned back and looked up. The cave was pocketed with hundreds of bays that held seating for the ceremony, filling quickly with adults streaming in from a hive of tunnels that led from the surface. Media screens were placed along the walls so those with limited view could see the birthing area. A camera zoomed into my face. I looked as I felt: Scared, ready to explode, or cry, depending on where the carousel of emotions rushing through me swung by—definitely a little annoyed. Can you imagine, thousands of people in a delivery room watching you pop out a baby? 

[Pause for laughter]

And then it began. An orchestra of flutes, hidden somewhere deep inside an interior room, started playing, the music snaking through the corridors, bouncing off walls, echoing back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm, and from inside the caged area, finely-woven silk webs fell from a platform near the ceiling. Then, the lights in the cave dimmed and spotlights came on, pointing to the platform and the two virgins selected for the ceremony; they covered their eyes with their hands, startled by the bright light. I knew one of them, Candilon, a former teammate, and my friend. She was a year older than me, and after graduating went to work at a factory that canned vegetables. She and the other maiden, a woman much older than us, likely pushing the maximum age of thirty for mating, were scantily clad. Candilon’s long black hair covered her pouting breasts, a red loin cloth with a tiny cord tied around her abdomen. Her ivory skin glittered, a stark contrast to the glowing, bead-like bumps that circled her forehead, nodules flushed with blood to show her eggs prime for seed. She and the woman were agitated, prodded along by their handlers, uncouth women trained to administer drugs that sent the virgin’s libidos soaring, coaxing them to crawl down the webs.

When the virgin’s reached the floor inside the fence, the flutes ceased playing and a slow boom-boom-boom of bass drums began to sound from the crevices; the handlers coached them in the conception dance, a hypnotic slow twirl, swinging of the hips and flexing of the chest; once able to follow the rhythm on their own, their handlers left, and then the drumming stopped, a hush coming down like a curtain. Like under a spell, Candilon and the woman continued to dance, the shuffle of their feet amplified in the silent cavern. A trap door in the floor squeaked opened and out of it came an arm, then another, hands with black pointy claws that gripped the edges of the hole. Followed was a head and then a body, pushed up to the floor by bloated, scaly legs. And there he was, the horrible memory no drug could erase. 

The Village Man was very old, smaller than the girls, half their height but thicker. His jowly face twitched and jerked as he glanced from virgin to virgin, deciding which would be first. Huge portraits of him in his prime hung on the cave walls. Well over a hundred years old, once beautiful, his hair was now white, his skin the color of rotten fruit, his round head wrinkled like a dehydrated gourd. He was missing fingers on one hand, from diabetes I’d heard, and he’d had an artificial leg grafted. It looked expensive. He was hideous.

Slitheri brought a wooden cup of the inducing elixir: a mix of ant paste, beetle juice, the blood of a sparrow and a touch of honeybees to smooth the bitterness. She made me drink. ‘All of it,’ she demanded. The Baby Milk took effect momentarily, a warmth spreading from my face to my chest down to my stomach, and I howled in pain as my labor convulsions began.

The Village Man took notice of our cries. His manhood drooped between his legs and then straightened and slapped up against his belly. The thing was long and slender, grossly out of proportion to his body, but evolved necessarily so to enable mating with the bigger females. As the drugs in her body peaked, the woman with Candilon shrieked in delight.

For every contraction that Widonia and I painfully announced, his member swelled bigger and harder. With a screaming push, Widonia’s first baby came—its wailing bringing the Village Man up to a crouch. Then another of her babies came out and he screamed in ecstasy at its cries. When the third baby wiggled out from Widonia, writhing and bawling, the Village Man jumped twenty feet and seized the woman, quickly crawling onto her back, taking her from behind. In a few strokes, he released the semen from one of his two pairs of testicles. Then, he fell over and laid on his side, panting to catch his breath.

     Two more of Widonia’s babies came out together, and then as I shrieked, nearly out of my mind with pain, I pushed the baby out of me and into Slitheri’s waiting arms. The nursemaids ceremoniously slapped the infants across their buttocks—making them cry loudly—sending the sound vibrating across the old man’s face.

The Village Man struggled to his feet, an attendant rushing over to inject hormones to rekindle his desire. When Widonia’s last baby oozed from her widened womb, it cried out like it was being burned alive. He went stiffly toward Candilon, who stood shaking unsteadily, the drugs wearing off prematurely, in shock from watching him with the other girl. She screamed as he shoved her down and wrapped his four arms around her waist and took her. She bit him on the neck as he climaxed and then fell back with a gurgling shout, convulsing wildly. It sometimes happened, a female attempting to kill their mate, and the medics were standing by to administer antivenom. But, even though the village man had been bitten before, this time they were unable to revive him, and he died, twitching in pain as the poison spread throughout his nervous system. A murmur spread through crowd as they watched a sheet draped over the Village Man’s body, then they began cheering the traditional call, for me, for my baby boy, ‘Long live the Seed,’ repeating it over and over, ‘Long live the seed.’ 

Slitheri held up my baby and the crowd roared. As customary, baby boys were usually killed immediately after birth. Sometimes, they were allowed to grow into men—but only when the Village Man became impotent or died—and then, a new male offspring was groomed to take his place. My son, the new seed of life.

The nurses finally allowed us to hold our babies. Widonia cooed as her eight infant girls nursed her breasts. I cradled my child in my arms, gently rocking him. Unlike Widonia’s daughters, large wrinkled lumps of grayish flesh, my son was beautiful, with smooth emerald skin and eight gorgeous, oval eyes. I kissed him on his lips—and stared at him for a long time…a long time. Forever it seemed, I had carried him inside me, talked to him, and eventually lost the resentment that on him I could not blame. I loved him. Most women on my planet dreamed of having girls. I had wanted a boy. Selfish of me, I suppose.

I bit my baby on his cheek. Slitheri screamed at me, but it was too late. In seconds, his heart stopped. I must admit, the shocked look on his face still haunts me—but it was for the best. There were many times actually, during my pregnancy, that I’d prayed the old man died and my son would take his place as the village procreator pro tem, but then, he would have become a monster like all the men before him. 

Local authorities were brought down to the trench. They berated me with questions as I watched the medics try to revive my dead, nameless, child. What I’d done had never happened in my village before, although during my pregnancy, I’d heard rumors of male infanticide in other places, and that it was occurring more and more frequently. Besides, Candilon, I’d never met any of my fellow revolutionaries before that day, but I knew an uprising was happening and that we were not acting alone. It was a feeling, or a belief I had, one that I think most women share, many times silently, often while suffering, of an oppression that only we, acting in unison, could defeat. I simply told the officials interrogating me, a pompous group of nine childless women, that it was a mother’s choice, not anyone else’s, whether their child lived or died. ‘An outrage’, they claimed, and called me ‘murderer.’ But I had broken no law. They swore in front of me that they would change that—and I vowed silently to make it my life’s work to overturn them. 

A few days later, when the autopsy showed the poison that killed the Village Man was a hundred times more powerful than normal, they beat Candilon until she confessed to taking a potion that cleared her mind of the drugs and increased the potency of her venom. She’d intentionally killed him, and for that, she was publicly humiliated and ostracized. A victim herself, she was forced to live as a criminal, outcast from society. But no matter what they did to her, she never told them of my involvement. As I rose in the ranks of the military, she diminished in solitude, alone in a cave in the lowlands, and for years I could do nothing to help her—not until the coalition I’d formed in secret had gained enough power to free my planet. And now, Ladies, I’d like to introduce a real hero, my brave and lovely friend, Candilon Twine. 

[Expect long applause and standing ovation—TRY NOT TO CRY] 

Sitting next to her, is my husband, Manford, the recently elected Steward of Torpond, the other populated planet in our solar system.

[Expect surprise—polite applause]

Yes. That’s right. I married a man. Why? I’m attracted to men. A woman’s sexual orientation has nothing to do with her desire to overcome their dominance. It wasn’t my idea in freeing the women of my planet that men should be eradicated. No. They also needed  to be freed, to be relieved of their predetermined roles in society, to be given a chance to be more than a dispenser of sperm cells. Today, in my world, although they are a minority, they have equal rights under the law. Indeed, I ask you, who that owns another’s freedom is themselves truly free.

[Pause to let the concept sink in]

Finally, that sad day came to an end. I was able to shed my soiled clothes and step into the nearby afterbirth pool. The attendant scrubbed my body with scented pumice, peeling away my flaking mother’s membrane and exposing my natural pink skin. While I soaked in the hot, soothing waters, I began to think of my future. Also by law, since I bore a male, and no matter how he’d died, I no longer had parenting responsibilities and continuing on to the university was my right. A place would be made for me by removing the lowest qualified applicant in the upcoming class. Unlucky for that person? Who knows? My classmate had thought her luck was good, but after getting into the university, she’d been killed in a training accident. I’d had a boy; was that lucky for me, who never desired to be a mother, but had rather only wanted a choice? Does anyone think it was easy to kill my baby, or know that I still anguish over him, that I still mourn him, am forever filled with remorse for what I did? Yet still I ask myself, what else could I have done? What can any woman do? 

[Point finger to the audience] 

I tell you what we do, we make our own luck, and if you have to cheat luck, manipulate it, or change the odds to swing it in your favor to be free, then that’s just what you have to do. 

[Pause for applause]

In closing, I wish you not luck, for know this, great deeds are the products of the brave, success is rewarded to the just, and the determined are those who pave the path for all of us. Inside each of you is the possibly to create a wonderful future, and I look forward to following your accomplishments. Thank you. 

[Don’t go back to your seat. The chancellor will present your retirement gift next.]

END