Five to Twelve Read Free

numerical imbalance between the sexes, marriage—as a social institution—fell apart. It became socially acceptable for women to live with men as and when they wished. It became socially acceptable for women to have babies without declaring or involving the father. Promiscuity was no longer a social crime: carried to excess, it was merely regarded as slightly vulgar—rather more acceptable than gluttony and infinitely more acceptable than prudery.
    Female prostitution vanished. Male prostitution began to grow. Marriage became, for the old and the rich, a status symbol For the lonely, it was just a temporary refuge—a sort of friendship with the fringe benefit of instant sex.
    As the twenty-first century progressed another kind of pill came on the scene. It was a longevity pill; and thoughit did, in fact, slow down the ageing process, it also had some peculiar side-effects—such as a tendency to induce satyriasis, nymphomania or infantile regression in certain types of individual or in anyone who over-indulged.
    The longevity pill—under-researched and oversold—was a costly failure resulting, during its brief exploitation, in the damage or destruction of hundreds of thousands of individuals of both sexes. Compared to spare-part surgery—which had progressed to such a degree that practically anything except the brain and the endocrine system could be replaced—it was no more than a dangerous experiment.
    It did, however, trigger off a great international effort to extend human life by artificial means. The most successful system developed consisted of a complex programme of enzyme stimulation, in turn triggered by an equally complex pattern of injections which varied according to the body chemistry of the individual. The drawbacks to the system were that it was expensive and that it had to be aligned with the psychosomatic history of each person undergoing treatment.
    Inevitably, after a brief and disastrous period of exploitation by private enterprise, it passed under state control—thus providing the government with a convenient means of increasing revenue while at the same time maintaining comprehensive records of individuals. Whoever desired and could afford the longevity treatments—or time shots, as they came to be known—was at the mercy of the state. If you observed the basic rules of society and if you had an income of five thousand lions a year or more (the devalued pounds, marks and francs had long since been superseded by the European lion) your expectation of life could be extended to more than one hundred and fifty years. If you were politically or socially undesirable, or ifyou were just plain poor, you would be denied time shots; and your expectation would be no more than ninety-five years at the most.
    It was into this woman-dominated world of change that, in 2025, Dion Quern was born. He was the son of an infra—one of the steadily dwindling minority of regressive women who had no talent for anything but loving and child-bearing—and a wild Irishman who had no talent for anything but alcoholism and drank himself to death a month before Dion was born.
    In a society already controlled by dominas, the new type of super-women who had already demonstrated their ability to triumph against masculine opposition, Dion’s mother could only earn enough money to keep him out of a state orphanage by becoming a brood mare.
    So she sent him to a private nursery and retired to one of the numerous baby farms patronized by the more prosperous doms and their squires. It had become fashionable for dominas to have babies by proxy. Dion’s mother became a professional proxy. It earned her two thousand lions a pregnancy and enabled her to pay for her son’s progress from nursery to public school.
    While he was a baby, she went to visit him regularly. When he was at public school, he went to visit her regularly. They got on well together; and despite an unhealthy real-mother—real-son relationship, they had a