The Green Millennium — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Green Millennium
John Stuart Mill · en
As Juno munched her chops and drank her whiskey, she told Phil snatches
of the story of her life. It turned out she was a farm girl who had
come to the city young and suffered the usual disillusionments. "How's
a girl going to get ahead these days," she asked Phil, "especially
a dumb ox like me? Not that I didn't have a swell figure, but even
then I was too big and strong. I scared the men I knew and I didn't
know then the ones who would have liked what I had. So I tried scrub
mothering for a while--you know, birthing babies for wealthy dames
who didn't want to carry them the nine months themselves--but I knew
there was no future in that. Ten years or so and I'd be sweeping up
after some sweeping robot and trying to make throwaway paper dresses
last a month. So I remembered how I could pin nine out of ten boys
back home, and I entered some amateur wrestling contests and pretty
soon they were grooming me for a pro." She shook her head dourly.
"You should have seen my figure; it really was beautiful before they
put me on hormones." She distastefully inspected her big hands, still
white gloved though now gravy stained. "Even used pituitrin on me, the
bastards." She sighed and shrugged. By now she had reduced her chops
to bones and was working on her second whiskey. "So that's the way it
was, Phil. Of course, I had to go and fall in love with a wrestler
and marry the little skunk--most of the girls in the business make
that mistake--but at least I eat rabbit, even beef, and a lot of dopes
respect me."
Phil nodded eagerly. "You've made a place for yourself. Security."
"Are you kidding?" she asked. "Five years and I'll be through, ten at
the outside if I get to be a character." She shook her head and leaned
forward. "Actually it's much worse than that. Male-female's almost
finished. Government's going to crack down."
"They always say that," Phil reassured her with timid cheeriness, "and
it never happens."
She shrugged fatalistically. "This time it will."
"I heard the president talking about something like that tonight," Phil
said, "but he sounded drunk."
She shrugged.
"But Fun Incorporated is supposed to have all sorts of connections with
the government," Phil continued to object.
She smiled oddly. "You're right. The best connections any syndicate
ever had. Just the same, they're finished. Moe's been worried for
weeks, worried bad. I can tell."
"Moe?"
"Moe Brimstine. You saw him for a minute this afternoon."
"Oh, yes," Phil said, getting a vivid memory flash of the door-filling,
dark jowled hulk, and then went on with a little laugh, "You know, it
startled me when his voice was the same as Old Rubberarm's. He seemed
too important a man to be a door-tender."