“He thought you might need one. It’s ready to implement. It uses strats and interest groups to divide the Cousin population into two hundred and twenty voting groups, which will each elect a representative to a temporary Assembly, which will then draft a new permanent constitution.”
These words hardly reached any ears as the thunder of astonishment churned the House. Perhaps, reader, you would enjoy guessing which Senators are clients of Madame’s and which free. Review the photographs: where confusion washes like Death’s white mask over a Senator, there the nun’s rough figure is as alien as a centaur’s; on the other hand, where shock mingles with blush, or where faces hide behind hands, these perhaps have laid lustful eyes on Sister Helo?se before.
“Order!” The Presiding Speaker rose now, Jin Im-Jin, a tiny, white-haired Korean Brillist old enough to remember four Emperors, and to frown down from the hard-earned Speaker’s seat at whippersnappers like Faust and Papadelias. “Order! Order! Chair Kosala, you will answer for this interruption. Who is this … person?”
“I can answer for myself!” Helo?se faced the Speaker, curtseying a quick apology. “Madam Speaker”—the Speaker grimaced at the title—“my name is Helo?se D’Arouet. I am Tribune Jehovah Mason’s bash’mate and fiancée. Before the doctors put Him under, the Tribune appointed me his Proxy In Extremis.” Gasps rose anew as Helo?se produced from the folds of her scandalous habit the Tribunary sash of gold-edged gray which Tribune Mason wore when filling his Graylaw office here the Senate. “The Tribune is determined not to let this assassination interfere with duties which have been trusted to Him, either in His office as a Tribune, or as an Executive of the Cousins’ Chief Council’s Office.”
The tiny Speaker took a long and thoughtful breath. “There is good precedent for selecting a bash’mate as Proxy In Extremis, but why did the Tribune involve you in drafting the constitution? You say that was last night, before the assassination attempt, yes?”
‘Attempt’ already, reader; how quickly mankind hastens to erase the miracle; the assassination succeeded.
“He had me help because I grew up with gender.”
All other faces were pure shock, but on the Speaker’s face shock mixed with a Brillist’s delight at human bizarreness. “What do you mean by that?”
“The Tribune and I both grew up with gender, so we can see and talk about the Cousins clearly, where no one else can.”
“What do you mean?”
“Being a Cousin is all about gender. Specifically about the feminine. I don’t mean anything biological, I mean the old cultural construction. All the eclectic things we associate with Cousins—nurturing, helping, healing, child rearing, tenderness, charity, welcoming the lonely, comforting the sick, tempering the violent—they’re all things that, in olden days, were associated with the feminine. That’s what all the Cousinly activities have in common, but because we’re scared to say the words no one knows how to articulate it anymore. None of you can articulate what the Cousins are about, can you? Not without gender.” She turned to the benches, inviting answers, but remember, reader, how hard it is at the best of times to interrupt a nun. “The old concepts of masculine and feminine were huge,” she continued, “complicated, centuries in the making, and deeply rooted in people, consciously and unconsciously. They facilitated bigotry and oppression, yes, but they had a lot of other social functions too. People who identified as feminine were caretakers, peacemakers, hostesses, consciences to balance the aggressive masculine. In the last centuries of the Exponential Age gender began to be liberated from biology, but that process wasn’t nearly finished when the Church War came. The worst cults in the war were also associated with gender oppression, so after the war the nascent Hives tried to purge all gender differences so abruptly that there was no time to come up with substitutes for all the other social functions gender used to have. Imagine if an ancient surgeon, on seeing penicillin work for the first time, had renounced his scalpel, calling on all fellow surgeons to vow never again to cut into a patient when pills could cure without wounds, totally ignoring the fact that there were countless illnesses for which surgery, perfected over centuries, was still a more effective treatment than nascent pharmacy. That’s what happened when we suddenly silenced gender. The broad, vague, cultural concepts of masculine and feminine had served a lot of social functions beyond oppression. Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that. Since masculine was the empowered gender, the rushed transition encouraged everyone to act masculine, and all at once humanity went from a race of half peacemakers to a race where those with instincts toward the feminine felt ashamed of the label, or ended up sheltering in its only acceptable modern form.”
“The Cousins?” Speaker Im-Jin guessed, Brillist eyes bright with delight at this unique new specimen, and at the equally unique shock on the faces of the many members of the gawking Senate.
“Exactly, Member Speaker,” Helo?se continued. “The Cousins are our feminine. They’re where the people who felt drawn to feminine concepts gathered in the wake of the Great Renunciation. That’s the heart of the Hive, but the words are taboo so no one dares admit it, and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it’s teetering! The Masons would teeter if we banned the word ‘Empire’ and Gordian if we banned the word ‘psyche.’ How could the CFB’s computer sorting figure out what the Hive really wants when the words we need to express it are forbidden? Motherly affection, sisterly devotion, uxorial duty, filial piety. Those concepts are the real heart of the Cousins, and we need them now more than ever, with violence and talk of war looming before us. To let the Cousins be themselves we have to undo the silence of the Church War and accept the fact that gendered thoughts are still in us, not innately, but because our ancestors chopped down the tree without killing the roots, so new shoots have sprung up. Gender has changed since three hundred years ago, having less to do with sex and bodies, but it still affects our thoughts. We teach it unconsciously, just as our ancestors did, in stereotypes, associations, pre-modern stories, subtle differences in how we treat children we see as ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ We can’t stop passing it on, or even study how we pass it on, when we won’t admit that it’s happening. We stopped the conversation too quickly. After the shock of the Church War, the survivors declared that equality and feminism had won when we had only slapped a patch over the surface. We need to admit that gendered concepts are still affecting how we think, and let the Cousins voice them, now. Think of the Set-Set Riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn’t even be discussed!