Sometimes the story I'm reading is a little lengthier than usual, and sometimes I have different demands on my attention over the course of the week: I think both may have been at play here as I have just one 1999 tale to discuss below. It appears in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection. The entry's title certainly got my attention...
PHALLICIDE by Charles Sheffield
The setting here is Utah in more or less the present era. A young woman who appears to be something of a scientific genius is performing some kind of advanced research at a private facility in a hush-hush project. Then she realizes she has just lost a week of time for which she cannot account...she was supposed to be visiting her family. Then her "handler", a high official in a renegade offshoot of the Mormon church...renegade because it still illegally practices polygymy and early teenage marriage...interrogates her and she recovers the lost memory. The project is centered around coming up with effective drugs to enable the church elders to maintain their sexual potency in far advanced age. But our scientist has had enough of all this, having experienced for herself the worst of this kind of child abuse. And then...well, read that title and then read on to the story's end. And that ending: what exactly was she dreaming up in her head that made her smile?
Next week: more from 1999...
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