The Cage of Zeus by Sayuri Ueda, Takami Nieda Read Free Book Online

a bunch of fruitloops, right?”
    “Who are you talking about?”
    “All of them. Preda is a stuck-up government toad, and Kline is infatuated with Round culture. She’s convinced the Rounds are an ideal incarnation of humanity. And the doctor? The doctor isn’t even human.”
    “Is something the matter, Commander?”
    “You’re not disgusted? You don’t feel anything looking at someone so—ambiguous?”
    “I barely know anything about, uh, them to feel anything , much less disgust,” Shirosaki said.
    “ Them is fine. Just don’t get caught calling them him or her. They’ll call you out for using that language.”
    Of course gendered pronouns are discriminatory in the bigender world, Shirosaki thought. So there are tricky issues of discrimination here just as there are in the planetary cities. “We’ve been briefed about the special district. We also have some knowledge about the Rounds. But our orders are to protect the special district and the Rounds. As long as those orders stand, our job is to guard them whether they’re human or lab animals.”
    Harding stared at Shirosaki with a look of contempt. “Have you ever seen sea hares mating?”
    “No.”
    “They’re simultaneous hermaphrodites whose male sex organs are exterior, while the posterior holds the female. When the sea hares mate, they form this long link. One puts its male organ in the female organ of the sea hare in front of it, while its own female organ is entered by the male organ of the sea hare from behind. Scientists call that a ‘mating chain.’ Snails mate in a similar way, only they have to face each other to insert the male organ in the other’s female organ. Same goes for the Rounds. With a single act of intercourse, they can love as a man and be loved as a woman at the same time. I’m telling you, that’s not right. A group that doesn’t have any scruples about doing shit like that don’t deserve to call themselves human.”
    “You paint a pretty vivid picture,” Shirosaki said. “You didn’t ask to watch, now did you?”
    Harding glared. “You stay cooped up here long enough, you start to hear things.”
    Shirosaki fell silent.
    “They’re not like the intersex people in our society. They’re the same as sea hares and snails, with the ability to inseminate and be inseminated at the same time. And do you want to know what they call us? Monaurals.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “We’re called Monaurals because each of us can only be one sex. From a bigender perspective, we’re monosexual—Monoaurals. Something’s become fundamentally different about them.”
    “But they’re also living beings. In that sense, they’re no different than we are,” Shirosaki said.
    “You’re a broad-minded one. I don’t have it in me to be so tolerant.”
    “Hey, give it a rest,” Miles said lazily. “Criticizing the Rounds’ existence doesn’t make our job any easier. We should just think of them as our protectees, like Shirosaki said. As strange as this may sound, the Rounds’ existence is why we’re getting paid.”
    “Not me.” Harding shook his head. “Just looking at them makes my skin crawl.”
    “I can’t say that I don’t know what you’re feeling,” Arino said, sighing. “You can’t disown what you feel.”
    “Don’t worry about it so much,” Miles said. “When we finish the job here on Jupiter-I and are back home on Mars, we’ll forget all about the Rounds.”
    2
    TEI ALLOWED THE lukewarm water spraying from every direction of the tiny shower room to wash over eir entire body. White foam streamed down, tracing the contours of eir body, and swirled down the drain. The wastewater went to a recycling facility to be treated and reclaimed as nonpotable water. Such was the way Tei existed, within a perfectly cyclic system—vital to living near Jupiter.
    In order for humans to embark on a long-term journey outside of the solar system, better recycling facilities were needed. Traveling for decades and