CHECKMATE

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1980.

Their chemistry was all wrong. They were college classmates, but that was their only bond. She was an ox-eyed Juno, he a bromide grind.

Bonnie Oakley recognized the difference if Vernon Gardner did not. When Vernon ventured to inform her that he loved her, something she took for granted, and when he compounded that by propositioning her, she did not say, “Get lost, you creep.” But that was the burden of her response. Because she did say, could not resist saying, “Maybe if you were the last man on earth…”

Vernon got lost, in a sense. He buried himself deeper in his pre-med studies, so that Bonnie stopped seeing him around campus and indeed quite soon quite forgot he had ever existed. She heard of him once again, during their last year, when there was some strain over a missing or mislabeled batch of bacillus, but Vernon dropped out and spared everyone the embarrassment of his presence.

Next time his name popped up in Bonnie’s hearing was a full ten years later, when the class politician instigated a class reunion. Vernon was among those who had the grace not to show up. Someone brought up his name and Bonnie spilled her drink laughing. It was surprise more than anything. She hadn’t thought of him once in all those years. Someone else mentioned having seen Vernon only lately, in, of all places, Chemrem, the proprietary drug firm, where Vernon seemed to be, of all things, the laboratory janitor; the speaker had done Vernon the politeness of not openly recognizing him.

That was the first and last class reunion. That fall marked the end of all reunions and the beginning of a wholly altered world. In this new world the survivors dared not wallow in nostalgia; nostalgia was too much like self-pity. The commemorators had hardly scattered to their homes when Checkmate struck.

“Checkmate,” some headline-writer called the plague, and the name stuck. The disease spread with Concorde speed. It was no localized Egyptian plague. It left no spot on Earth untouched. Human males of all ages, climes, and persuasions dropped like sprayed flies.

Terrible. But everything always happens to other people, so it did not really come home to a benumbed Bonnie, even after she had served her turn on burial details, till her own lover died.

Lyle Pressmar was one of the last to go, so she had hoped against hope. But Lyle, like all the others, came down with what at first seemed only a cold. Then he sank into a coma and died.

At least it was a painless death. For Lyle. Not for Bonnie. She took it hard.

No use railing against fate, though. Like her sisters she had to face the new reality and struggle to keep the lessened organic whole going.

A ranking biochemist, ranking even higher with the competition more than halved, Bonnie understood the implications better than most. She wondered if the world of women could apply parthenogenesis and cloning before the line ran out.

If so, could parthenogenesis and cloning ever truly replace the lost joy and sorrow of heterosex? Meanwhile, for non-lesbians, there was only one hope.

The glad whisper went around that the world was not wholly manless. Somewhere a man lived. One human male in his potent thirties, somehow immune to the Checkmate virus, survived.

Bonnie took this drop of honey with a grain of salt. It was only natural that such a myth should spring up. The world needed a dream figure. It would not be long before this mythical male began to take on superhuman attributes. Everyone’s father figure, brother figure, son figure, lover figure, he would have to be larger than life, better than life, truer than life, intenser than life. Bonnie smiled wistfully. If there were such a man, the poor fellow would have a lot to live up to.

But then the myth picked up a name. Unless the whisper garbled it in transmission, the name was Vernon Gardner.

A bell rang, of course, but it took Bonnie a while to unblock her mind and realize that the Vernon Gardner was her Vernon Gardner.

And it took her a while longer to see that the Checkmate catastrophe had not been a chance mutation of a virus, one of evolution’s grimmer jokes. It was manmade. Done unto man by man. She lay awake thinking.

She had caused it. Hadn’t she told the creep, “Maybe if you were the last man on earth…“?

Vernon had taken her at her word. It was all just too pat to be coincidental.

Bonnie swelled with fury. She was unlikely ever to swell with child. Even sperm deposited in sperm banks had, upon withdrawal, succumbed to Checkmate. Thinking of that, she froze herself into a cold rage.

Bonnie directed the icicle at Vernon. He was a monster, the greatest monster in human history, out-Hitlering Hitler. And out-Caining Cain. Cain, way back there at the beginning, had after all killed only one-fourth of the human race. That might once have been one for the Genesis book of records, but Vernon had broken the record: he had murdered half.

He had murdered Lyle.

Bonnie had the Chemrem lead. She would hunt Vernon down.

With even essential services curtailed, every workwoman counted. Slackers drew scowls and, if that did not work, short rations. Bonnie’s current assignment was to keep a sewage-treatment plant going. She hadn’t taken a day off in months. She told herself she was entitled. She called in sick.

Sometimes it paid not to think ahead. Bonnie kept her mind blank as she dressed. She looked in the mirror before going out. She frowned on finding that she had without thinking pinned a butterfly pin to her jacket. And she on a grim mission! But she left it on and made up for it by deepening her frown. The pin could serve as a weapon. Not that she needed a weapon; she was a black belt. She felt sure she could take Vernon if he was no more formidable than the creepy Vernon of old.

Her face unfroze at the first feeling of spring in the air. Good to get out in the open. A three blocks’ walk brought her to the thruway.

She thumbed a ride on a rig hauling melons to market. Happy to have someone spell her at the wheel, the driver asked no probing questions. Everyone had a sad story; no need to hear a variant.

The trucker brought up the myth. “Say, did you know there’s still a guy somewheres around? Boy, would I like to get him to myself for even a one-night stand. Keep your eyes peeled, sister. Last I heard, he’s up where we’re headed.”

“You don’t say.”

“It doesn’t give you a lift? You’re a cool one.” The trucker fell silent and shot glances at Bonnie.

They listened to CB chatter as the rig ate up the miles. For the moment, women feared no enemies foreign or domestic. Sisterhood reigned. With the standing down of what was left of standing armies, the demobs had taken over policing, mostly a matter of traffic control. Maybe later a few macho women would come to the fore and start the territorial business all over again, the having and holding of turf, but for now the only worry was to keep goods moving smoothly. The trucker nodded knowingly as they crossed into Virginia. She told Bonnie that a hardnosed ex-colonel ran this sector, that along this stretch Mama Bear had a heavy paw. Sure enough, the CB warned, and the rig breezed innocently at legal speed past a radar trap. The trucker hummed in triumph and as soon as it was safe picked up speed. The rig hummed a monotonously rapid hum of its own.

Feeling full, with an unsatisfying fullness, Bonnie stowed melon rind in a plastic bag for later disposal at a recycling point. She ached with the wish that the men could have been here to see how clean the women kept the place.

She made ready to spell the trucker again but the sister shook her head.

“Thanks to you I’m running way ahead of schedule. If you like we can pull up at the next motel and sign in.”

Bonnie knew it was foolish to be so uptight. Maybe in time she would get over feeling uncomfortable whenever she found herself on the receiving end of a pass. But the time was not yet. She twitched a smile.

“Thanks, but I have to keep going.”

The trucker shrugged. “It was just a thought.”

They traveled in convoy for a while and the CB banter took the chill off. Sisterhood solidarity. Then someone touched on the myth of the surviving male. Lusty lying blued the air. But soon the CB chatter faded as though lured into silence by memory. They drove into night.

The trucker was first to spot a sister walking a male Great Dane along the shoulder. The trucker grinned, slowed the rig, and leaned out of the cab to shout. “There are laws against that.” The sister slackened the leash to cut a hand into an elbow. The rig picked up speed again, the trucker chuckling. The chuckling died and a sullen silence grew.

Further along, a neon sign—The Tomcat—caught Bonnie’s eye; the trucker caught that and nodded toward the place.

“A hook-joint where they all dress up real butch. If you swing that way I can drop you off.”

“No, thanks.”

All the same the rig rolled to a stop. Bonnie slid her hand to her butterfly pin. The trucker avoided Bonnie’s eyes.

“I been hearing rattling noises. I better check him.” Funny how all modes of transport, even ships, were now “he.” The trucker’s voice roughened. “You got some kind of deadline up ahead so you’d do better not to wait on me. You can easy hitch another ride from here.”

“Right. Thanks for the lift.”

“My pleasure.”

“So long, sister.”

“So long, sister.”

The Chemrem plant for the most part was operating at half capacity. No need now for men’s toiletries and such. And the sisters had more pressing wants than nail polish, rouge, and eye shadow. To say nothing of The Pill. But the plant still turned out the same amount of uppers and downers, the sisters having doubled their consumption.

Even with controlled substances on the premises, there seemed small call to fret about ripoffs. Sisterhood.

Behaving as if she belonged, Bonnie followed arrows straight to the unmanned—unmanned!—personnel office. The files would show where Vernon Gardner lived at the time of his employment here. She entered and the fluorescents switched on.

Sitting down to retrieve his card from the revolving file, she gave in to weariness and slumped blankly a moment. Hitching rides had not been all that easy. She had run into a wildcat strike of truckers protesting the two speed limits—the 55-mph one and the 30-mg. one. The sisters had resolved it, but only after the roads had been tied up for all of eight hours.

She punched up the Gs and riffled through the cards. She failed to turn up his name. She went through the file twice more, card by card, before giving up on personnel. Vernon Gardner’s card was missing.

Another moment’s yielding to weariness, then Bonnie got up and followed arrows to accounting. She found no one there to challenge her access to the computer. She worked it, again in vain. As far as the Chemrem payroll was concerned, Vernon Gardner was an unperson.

Had she misheard her classmate at the class reunion? That was in another country, another world, another state of being. But that was her only lead, all she had to go on. She had to believe she remembered right.

She walked out onto the floor. The vast maze of the production line was almost entirely automated. She spotted just three workers among the rolling pills and marching bottles. Down among the capping and sealing machines she braced the first.

The sister popped her gum thoughtfully. “Vernon Gardner? Ain’t that the name of the guy that’s still alive? What would he be doing here? Hell no, I ain’t seen him.”

“I heard he worked here once—Before.”

“Well, he don’t work here now. Believe you me, I would’ve noticed him.”

The second and third, though the second had attained to foreperson Before and was now plant supervisor, were no more able to play dea ex machina.

Bonnie dragged herself toward an exit. Dead end. Not quite: if there was an executive in the executive suite… She turned back.

She encountered no guardian secretaries. Here too the plant ran itself. She opened doors, found dark offices…till she came to the last and highest.

Light edged the not-quite-to door of the president’s office. The door gave silently to her touch. A king-size chair showed its back and overflow bits of a dozing figure. Softly she stepped into the room. Carpeting muffled her footfalls but not her heartbeat.

She coughed.

The chair swiveled suddenly and swiftly unswallowed a cleaning person who made to move a vacuum nozzle over the carpet. The cleaning person looked so outlandishly and garishly female—bewigged, beplatform-soled, and beflounced in-between—that Bonnie first thought herself to be face-to-face with a Screwloose, one of those who had convinced themselves Checkmate never happened and the men were merely lying low. Then Bonnie saw through the guise.

Under the makeup and the getup it was Vernon Gardner.

He let fall the nozzle, then recovered himself.

“Hello, Bonnie.” He spoke calmly and smiled, but his eyes kept shifting and his voice stayed hushed.

For a heart-stopping moment she believed she had been dreadfully wrong about him.

He seemed to sense this and rushed, in a deeper tone, to set her straight.

“Don’t let this outfit fool you. I have to dress in drag to stay alive. They’d tear me apart trying to get their hands on me. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through.” He looked her up and down. “You haven’t changed.”

“You have.” It was true. Bonnie’s awareness of what Vernon had done somehow vested creepy Vernon with a strange dignity despite the drag.

At the same time she horrified itself. What was wrong with her? Why was she making small talk? Where was her rage over Lyle’s death? Where was her outrage at all the other deaths?

She had only to shout to the sisters in the plant, “Come quick! He’s here!”

And then what?

No. She alone had to deal with him. She herself had to have it out with him.

But first there was something she wanted to find out. She felt almost shy asking.

“Why didn’t you look me up?”

He gestured. “You remember how things were. The world was upside down. In all that turmoil I just didn’t know how to get in touch. And then when things settled down and I started searching I got made as a man and snatched by a roaming bevy of ex-marines.” His eyes grew dreamy. “I learned to play one against another. But I couldn’t stand captivity. I let one think I was willing to slip away with her. Once I got free I made a run for it. And here I am. Till I can come out of the closet on my own terms I’ve made myself scarce.” He listened to the inner echo of what he had just said. “That’s a good one, isn’t it? ‘I made myself scarce.’ In more ways than one I made myself scarce.”

There. He had all but said it.

But she had to ask him outright.

“You did it? You caused Checkmate?”

He looked surprised. “Of course.”

“You feel no guilt?”

He lifted high his head. “Why should I? Survival of the fittest. That’s the name of the game, isn’t it?”

“But your male friends, your male relatives.”

“What friends?” He dismissed friends with a wave. “Tell you the truth, I hated my old man and my younger brother.” Another wave. “But that’s all bygone.” His eyes lit up. “I guess you want to know how I did it. I was janitor Before in this very plant just so I could use the facilities. Every night for years I sneaked into the lab to perfect the virus. Of course, I made sure to immunize myself before I let it loose.”

And he had done this monstrous, this fabulous thing, for her. Of all the sisters she was the one. The thought gave her a dizzy feeling. I’d be happy only my mind keeps butting in. Mind, mind your own business. The ghost of Lyle grew fainter. But was it fair for the murderer to enjoy the fruits of his crime? Still, evolution cared nothing for fairness. And done was done.

Guilt’s shadow brushed her. Sisterhood. Who of her sisters would believe, want to believe, or care, that Vernon had done it for her? What mattered was that she knew the truth of it. Vernon had lavished on her the greatest flattery that ever a man had lavished on a woman. Poor second-best Cain had killed Abel not over a woman’s favor but over God’s. Her heart swelled. Blind to the drag, she looked at Vernon and in a flash her mind retrieved something from her freshman chemistry. The greater the electronegativity difference between two atoms, the more polar the bond between them.

He was mad, of course, but gloriously mad. No, it was not all madness. Above all, it was love. If that was madness she was mad too.

“You did it all for me?” She wanted to hear him say it.

And he did. Readily. “Of course it’s all because of you, Bonnie.”

“Then take me.”

Almost at once emptiness filled her.

Vernon gazed through her as though seeing all the world’s lonely lovely women.

“Things have changed, Bonnie.”

She stood stunned, her head in a roar.

Slowly he focused on her and gave her a half smile.

“Maybe if you were the last woman in the world…”

After the shock of that passed, Bonnie looked thoughtful.