Free I Live With You by Carol Emshwiller

of. They never stick to any rules.
    “If the answer is no, we’ll not have anymore boy babies. You can come down and copulate all you want but there’ll be no boys. We’ll kill them.”
    “You wouldn’t. You couldn’t. Not you, Una.”
    “Have you noticed how there are fewer and fewer boys? Many have already done it.”
    But I’m in too much pain and dizzy from the leaves she gave me, to think clearly. She sees that. She sits beside me, takes my hand. “Just rest,” she says. How can I rest with such ideas in my head? “But the rules.”
    “Hush. Women don’t care about rules. You know that.”
    “Come back with me.” I pull her down against me. This time she lets me. How good it feels to have us chest to chest, my arms around her. “I have a secret place. It’s not a hard climb to get there.”
    She pulls back. “Colonel, sir!”
    “Please don’t call me that.”
    Then I say… what we’re not allowed to say or even think. It’s a mother/child thing, not to be said between a man and a woman. I say, “I love you.”
    She leans back and looks at me. Then wipes at my chin. “Try not to bite your lip like that.”
    “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
    “It does to me.”
    “I liked…. I like….” I already used the other word, why not yet again. “I love copulation day only when with you.”
    I wonder if she feels the same about me. I wish I dared ask her. I wonder if my son…. Is Hob hers and mine together? I’ve always hoped he was. She’s made no gesture towards him. She hasn’t even looked at him any more than any other boy. This would have been his first copulation day had the women not built their wall.
    “Rest,” she says. “We’ll discuss later.”
    “Is it just us? Or are you saying the same thing to the enemy? They could win the war like that. It would be your fault.”
    “Stop thinking.”
    “What if no more boys on either side, ever?”
    “What if?”
    She gives me more of those leaves to chew. They’re bitter. I was in too much pain to notice that the first time. I feel even sleepier right away.
    I dream I’m the last of all the boys. Ever. I have to get somewhere in a hurry, but there’s a wall so high I’ll never get over it. Beside, my legs are not there at all. I’m nothing but a torso. Women watch me. Women, off across the valley floor as far as I can see and none will help. There’s nothing to do but lie there and give the war cry.
    I wake shouting and with Una holding me down. Hob is there, helping her. Other boys are in the doorway looking worried.
    I’ve thrown the blanket and the pillow to the floor and now I seem to be trying to throw myself out of bed. Una has a long scratch across her cheek. I must have done that.
    “Sorry. Sorry.”
    I’m still as if in a dream. I pull Una down against me. Hold her hard and then I reach out for Hob, too. My poor ugly boy. I ask the unaskable. “Tell me, is Hob mine and yours together?”
    Hob looks shocked that I would ask such a thing, as well he should. Una pulls away and gets up. She answers as if she was one of the boys. “Colonel, sir, how can you, of all people, ask a thing like that.” Then she throws my own words back at me. “This is how it’s always been.”
    “Sorry. Sorry.”
    “Oh, for Heaven’s sake stop being so
sorry!”
    She shoos the boys from the doorway but she lets Hob stay. Together they rearrange the bed. Together she and Hob make broth for me and food for themselves. Hob seems at home here. It’s true, I’m sure. This is our son.
    But I suppose all this yearning, all this wondering, is due to the leaves Una had me chew. It’s not the real me. I’ll not pay any attention to myself.
    But there’s something else. I didn’t get a good look at my leg yet, but it feels like a serious wound. If I can’t climb up to our stronghold, I’ll not ever be able to go home. I shouldn’t, even so, and though my career is in a shambles…. I shouldn’t let myself be lured into staying here as a