Other than his sudden inability to comprehend complex ideas that had been familiar concepts for years, Howard couldn’t see how the loss of verbal skills affected him. He wasn’t distressed about his inability to remember how things worked or the schoolbook reasons why the world was the way it was. He was too comfortable to think about difficult subjects like engineering or philosophy. On the rare occasions when he made the effort, the attempt proved so taxing that he fell asleep almost immediately. It didn’t matter to him if he couldn’t talk, he didn’t feel like there was anything worthwhile for him to say. It wasn’t as if he had to present an engineering report on his desires. All it took was a loud bawl and all the women within earshot would come running to his side to see what he needed. It was enough. The week passed and then another as he drifted in the timeless contentment of babyhood.

Chapter Eight Old Endings and New Beginnings

If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: Not a man, but a cloud in trousers!

Vladimir Mayakovski (b. 1893 – d. 1930) Cloud in Trousers (1915)

On Friday morning Anita drove to work with Bri-Bri securely strapped into the baby seat in the backseat of the Suburban. It hadn’t taken any time at all for her to get used to driving the van. The leather-wrapped steering wheel fit comfortably in her hands while the Suburban’s power steering made it easy to control the huge vehicle. She eased her back luxuriantly into the Australian sheepskin seatcover that Howard had bought for the driver’s seat of “his” Suburban. He had said at the time that it would help keep his suits neater and drier than sitting on the leather upholstery. The wooly sheepskin was supposed to “breathe” or some such nonsense. He had been right about that. She had noticed over the past few months while driving the Suburban that the sheepskin kept her back and derriere warm when the weather was cool and cool in warmer weather. She was a bit miffed that he had never bought a sheepskin seatcover for the passenger side of the van. Apparently, he hadn’t thought that she might enjoy the same luxuries that he had bought for himself.

Anita sighed to herself mentally and told herself that she shouldn’t have expected him to be sensitive to her needs. He was a man. When all was said and done, that defined the problem. Men were incapable of truly understanding another person’s needs. They thought that merely being in the same room constituted companionship and giving extravagant gifts was the ultimate symbol of love. They had no idea of what it was to give of themselves until there was nothing left, then reach into the depths of their souls and find the strength and understanding to give more. They were concerned with things, not feelings. Feelings for men were avoidable nuisances at best and psychotic delusions at their worse. Wives and families were only external symbols of their success in life, not a reality to be cherished and savored. It wasn’t that they were cold, they just had a different perspective on reality. Men were destined by their genes to be hunters not gatherers or raisers of children. For them life was a constant battle to survive on an individual basis. Women were involved in the tribe. They constituted its only hope for survival as a unit. Men won battles, women continued the human race. Women sacrificed themselves for other’s survival, men sent others to their deaths to ensure that their own lives continued without interruption.

Neither was wrong or evil, it was just that men and women were diametrically opposed in their interpretation of how life should be lived. In the Dawn of Humankind, when game was plentiful throughout the spring and summer, men’s hunting was an important contribution to the protein needs of the tribe. When the weather became dark and cold with the onset of winter, women’s gifts of gathering allowed the tribe to get through the lean period with no game. Unfortunately, the rules of the game had changed. Men achieved ascendance when they had learned to sow crops and raise animals for slaughter. The role of women as gatherers had changed into the job of being full-time servants. Society evolved to meet the demands of the environment. The Goddesses of Fertility were swept away by the new beliefs in the various Sun Gods who nurtured the plants with their rays. Even the nomadic tribes who depended on the green grasses where taken in by the new thinking. Once men saw that reproduction was a biological process rather than a holy miracle, the damage had been done. The grasses fed the people as well as the animals. Rice and wheat became staple crops in the Old World while maize filled the breach in the New World. Only government benefited by the change. Tax collectors did not exist before the introduction of a starch-based economy. To be fair, it must be pointed out that some cultures did their level best to insure that all the people got a balanced diet for their subsistence. The empire of Egypt was the sole example of equitable food distribution in the Ancient world.

Christianity was only an affirmation of a process that had already been going on for centuries. The Judges of the Old Testament like Deborah were swept away by the power of the Hebrew Kings. Women were out and men were in. The first thing the power structure did was solidify its base by eliminating the competition. Women were raped, dunked, tortured, burned as heretics, beaten and brutalized until they accepted the legitimacy of man’s tyranny. For almost five thousand years since the first watershed empire along the Indus river, men had ruled. While five aeons is a blink of an eye for a planet, it had been a long time for man’s racial memory.

The world was changing again and man had been one of the prime mover’s of the change. The game was almost gone, crops were failing, only a sense of community would help humankind survive. Individual needs must be put aside for the need of the many. Men were functionally incapable of decisions like that on their own. The sacrifices must be willing or not at all. Only women could make the decisions necessary in the coming world. Like it or no, women would have to be the stewards of humankind’s future. Anita’s informal discussions with the company sociologist had convinced her that changes to human society weren’t just a necessity, they were an inevitability.