End of Women: Part Four

The Island

White sand met a lapping shoreline of deep blue a few feet from where Degan made his morning walk. A trail of sandal-prints in sand lay behind him, curving along the beach, and a half-mile ahead were the prints he made when he set out an hour ago. 

Degan wiped the sweat from his brow and looked upward. There were absolutely no clouds. The sun was rising behind him and a seaborne breeze woke up his skin. He dug a sharpened stick into the sand and dug a fist into his pocket, fishing out an untraceable TabPhone.

ZERO INTERFERENCE

No signals. Good, he thought, and exhaled his relief the same way he had these past few weeks. 

The beach was just a narrow strip. Beyond that was what most of the islands in the archipelago had, the same dense tropical forests that covered everything up to what he had come to call the Lookout, a rocky hilltop that was just about the only notable landmark on the island. The forest had what he needed; food, wood and a patch of just-about-arable land that, when time came, he would have to find a way to farm. 

Degan re-paced the steps he had made that morning before coming upon the cave by the sea. At the foot of a rocky pillar he had made a loosely-fixed pontoon onto which the speedboat was still parked, mercifully, despite the storms. It was out of fuel, and would be forever unless Degan found some way to turn coconut oil into gasoline. 

The sound of the sea turned to stony echoes of a rush when he climbed up the planks into the cave. A rope-sheet made a sort of door into the chamber behind, and there the only light was coming in through two natural cracks in the cliff. On a stone bed covered with rushes of palm leaves, Millie slept on her side, and behind her head was a roughly-hewn cot where Kindra was doing the same.

Degan unloaded his satchel filled with coconuts, berries, scraps of timber and a few shipwreck items he had managed to salvage and placed them in the cupboard he had completed two days before. Then, hoping for a few minutes peace, he took a rest on the floor.

Kindra looked peaceful enough. The kid snored constantly, which Millie found annoying, but Degan thought it the most incredible thing he had ever heard. Kindra was hardly even a baby any more, and soon the wooden bars of his cot would not contain him. He would be walking, finding his way, and before long looking for an explanation as to where he was, and why. Degan had better have a good answer for him by then, but at that moment, none really occurred to him.

Not that he had taken Millie on a whim. He understood exactly what he had done. For the second time in his short career as a Bluenorth man, he had directly defied the wishes of its President to be with Millie. First it had been for vengeance against the man who, still to this day, it felt as though had stolen Natalya from him. This time it was for the love of his child. Not for the first time, Degan wondered how many other men had, since the passing of the Female Control Act, mourned the loss of a mother to their sons.

All of them, he thought solemnly. If he had been stubborn enough to actually steal a man-killing feminist - probably the most guilty in history - to make sure Kindra knew his mother, then in all likelihood any ordinary man must want to do the same. Even with exclusivity, even with home visits for mothers, even with the Compounds being only a few miles from anywhere important, the change had been colossal. 

Men must learn fatherhood all over again, or the Republic will fall.

The wind picked up and whistled through the creases in the cliff. The sound roused Millie and she turned over, eyes slowly opening. On seeing Degan she blinked a few times and pulled herself up.

She had chosen for herself a few meagre bits of clothing, fashioned out of the pelt of an island deer and a few bigger rats Degan had hunted. With these furry tanned pelts slung over her breasts and hips she looked a lot like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C, just with darker hair. While Degan had been tanned to tough leather himself, her skin was still white. Millie barely left the cave.