The Feminist Queendom Charlie’s War 21 © Beverly Taff

List of Characters.

Charlie Sage Maths and electronics genius.
Shirley Sage Charlies elderly mother
Chloe Charlie’s one time early school friend.
Josephine Flint Surgeon and associate of Chloe’s.
Mrs Jane Anston Director of Anston Aerospace.
Ronnie Garage mechanic at top of lane
Pauline Garage owner, Ronnie’s sister.
Briony Pauline’s teenaged daughter.
Billy Pauline’s middle son.
Abigail (Abby) Pauline’s youngest daughter.
‘Poppy’ Charlie’s little micro-runabout.
‘Doris’ The armoured mobile home.
‘Lady’ Chloe’s Sports Car.
Dawn Charlie’s armoured space ship.
Colonel Wilson Vindictive misanthropist doctor.

Chapter 26.

Lady Anston met the inspector at the hotel where she found a very discontented inspector.

“I’m supposed to escort the two of you.”

“What to meet with mine officials while Colonel Wilson does the field work. We have to know what issues we’re dealing with if we’re considering bidding to supply new transport for the mine.”

“My sources tell me that your seeking to meet a Doctor called Chloe Evans and we all know she’s married to your mad professor.”

“Let’s get this right once and for all Inspector. Chloe Evans is not married to any mad professor. Her husband is a previous employee of ours and we’re looking to speak to Doctor Evans with a view to negotiating a new contract with her husband.

There is no suggestion of meeting face to face with Mr Charlie Sage nor have we any desire to somehow find him and kidnap him. So far we have not even been able to contact him.”

“I’m perfectly familiar with the employment laws in the UQ. Men cannot even sign a binding legal contract with a woman. The woman can void the contract with a single visit to your courts. Chloe Evans is now an Australian citizen and as such she enjoys our protection. By extrapolation, her husband has that right as well.

If you wish to meet with Doctor Evans, you do it with me present and if there is any agreement by Doctor Evans to contact her husband, that contact must be done in the presence of the Australian government. If this employee of yours has come to Australia seeking some sort of Asylum, Australia wants to know about it.”

The inspector pulled out an envelope before continuing.

“This case is no longer a personal issue between Anston Aerospace and Mr Sage. The fact that you have chosen to invoke diplomatic immunity on behalf of the UQ as well as Anston Aerospace now elevates the issue into the realms of diplomacy and United Nations laws of Asylum as interpreted by Australian Courts. If you locate Mr Sage on Australian territory, you must surrender him to the Australian authorities.”

To reinforce her words, the inspector handed the letter to Lady Anston with the warning.

“This is a court notice to the effect of what I have just said. I’ll not have to repeat myself, it’s all in the notice and it’s addressed to the two of you. Now I believe you have business to conduct with the mining company. I’ll be escorting Colonel Wilson to the mine while you meet with the company executives.”

While the inspector and Colonel Wilson flew off, Lady Jane fumed as she tore open the envelope and started to read. To her surprise if gave her a lot more license than she had expected and reading between the lines she realised the Australian government was as eager to locate Charlie as Anston Aerospace. Indeed the last paragraph left her whooping with relief.

She was allowed to find and talk to Doctor Chloe Evans freely, provided the aim was to find Charles Sage and persuade him to the negotiating table.

It was signed by the Prime Minister and countersigned by the Defence minister, the feminised intellectual who Lady Jane had already sensed; carried some resentment concerning her enforced, teenaged feminisation. There was even a private telephone number for Jane to ring the defence minister. Reading between the lines, she sensed something auspicious was afoot.

Uncertain how to proceed, she drove to her appointment at the mining company labs and met with their scientific management. After the usual hospitality palaver, she got right down to business.

“I’m looking for a reliable source of Magnesium,” Jane declared.

“Any particular reasons.”

“Well that’s a commercial confidentiality issue. Basically, I’m looking to buy magnesium metal as pure as possible.”

“We don’t mine it in the Hammersley ranges. We have a sister company that mines the ore in South Australia but they don’t do the smelting. That’s shipped abroad out of Port Pirie.”

Jane Anston knew all this but it was just an excuse to stay around the mining town and approach Doctor Chloe Evans when the opportunity arose. Researching the logistics of ore retrieval and transport was however of interest to Alston Aerospace so Colonel Wilsons researches in the ore deposits was of legitimate commercial interest.

Having completed her brief visit to the mining company’s offices, Lady Anston made her way to the Mining town’s casualty clinic. It was necessarily a ‘walk-in’ facility and Jane surreptitiously injured her finger by ‘slamming the car door on it. The pain was bearable but the bleeding was sufficient to justify the ‘walk-in’.

To her supreme delight, Jane Aston spotted Chloe attending to a patient who was sporting a head injury. She was carefully suturing the nasty scalp wound and chuckling with the giant, simian-like patient who’s build told of a life of heavy manual work. Watching the amusing interplay between doctor and chuckling, muscle-bound patient, it was obvious to Jane that Chloe enjoyed a very easy, informal relationship with her mostly male patients.

From where she sat, Jane could not see the next treatment but eventually the surgery door opened and the man emerged with a broad smile as Jane jokingly cautioned him.

“So don’t go head-butting any more bull-dozers you big lummox and you’d better take the rest of the week off until the wound at least scabs sufficiently. I’ll write you the sick note for work.”

“Thanks Doc. The lads ‘r spot on about you: yer’ a real gamer.”

“Get off with you Eddie and make sure you finish the whole course of those anti-biotics. I don’t want MRSA bugs messing up my clinic.”

As the giant, smiling, labourer lumbered towards his beat-up ute’, Chloe was just about to close her surgery door when Jane stood up and approached her.

It was very unusual to get a woman walking into the mining casualty unit for they invariably went to the town's modest, general - but more ‘female friendly’ hospital, with its better-equipped casualty unit. She was about to advise the newcomer to try the hospital before she turned and recognised Lady Jane Anston.”

“If you’re walking wounded love you’d be best, - good God! Lady Jane Anston!! What on earth d’ you want? Don’t tell me, I can guess.”

“You’re right,” Lady Anston conceded, “do you know where I can find him?”

“I know perfectly well where to find him, the problem is, he doesn’t want to find you.”

“Would you be prepared to give him a message?”

“Oooh; he’s past messages love. I don’t think he’ll ever truck again with anything from your hemisphere for a long, long time, - if ever.”

“Is he really that far gone?”

“Why would you think otherwise?”

“Well, - he never seemed to show discontent or rancour. It was difficult to read his feelings or his moods.”

“No it wasn’t. You can read Charlie like a book; it’s just a different language.

“Well I never picked up on them; his anger or his moods that is. He kept them bloody well hidden!”

“He’s a man; Lady Anston. It’s what men do; or at least those that have the ability and reason to feel wounded as well as angry! The intelligent ones, - that is. The ones you mutilate. The ones who can't find solace in sex alone. They bottle their feelings up.

The ones who are left just become angry and present as violent while the feminista attitude just compounds the issue. Eventually the only solution is to contain those men as best you can by more violence and incarceration until the war becomes a standoff. That’s where the UQ is right now, they castrate the intelligent ones because they can become truly dangerous if made angry then the remaining dumb ones are too dumb to organise effectively.

The day Charlie sage produced his societal equations of genetics to prove you were dumbing down your people through the ‘Y’ chromosome; was the day Charlie Sage ripped away the feminista foundations. Unless you change back to some sort of a natural, Darwinist norm that's worked for hundreds of millions of years, you are bladdered Lady Jane.”

“Yes, we know that now, we just need time to find a suitable route, one that’s safe for women.”

“Hah! Good luck with that love.”

“What do you mean by that.”

“It takes at least a generation or even two generations to change a culture peacefully. The feminista hasn’t got that long.”

“Is that some sort of threat?”

“No, it’s scientific fact. Now; if you don’t mind, I need to get home, I’ve got my children to collect from the creche.”

“What ever happened to the Chloe Evans the kindly geneticist we used to know in the UQ?”

“She grew up, she had children and now she has a son to protect – from feminista interventions. She’s also become much more connected to men in restorative conditions, the men working here in the mines.”

“Meaning?” Jane Anston frowned.

“These aren’t men forced to exist living in the ‘rookeries’ like the UQ. They’re pretty much free men. They all live out-back and about a quarter of them have partners, female partners. Oh they’re not married of course, but they have property they can call their own and the various work/play/home-life separation equations seem to work for each couple.

I see family groups occasionally here in the town, may only be three or four during a whole weekend, but that’s infinitely more often than it was back in the UQ.”

“Yes. That’s got to change back home.”

“Chloe shrugged and smiled ironically as she spread her hands.”

“Hallelujah! Don’t expect me or Charlie to act as your messiah.”

“Yes. I see that now but could you get a message to him, a sort of peace offering.”

“Any terms you offer, would have to go through the Australian defence ministry. They see a considerable military risk to anybody having the advantage of a full anti-gravity capability. Such an advantage enables easy access to Australian shores with overwhelming numbers of troops.”

“What? Even the UQ? Can you see the UQ attacking Australia.”

“Australia doesn’t see the UQ as much of a democracy these days. In fact we don’t see much democracy anywhere. Feminista culture may be bad enough here, but elsewhere, it’s on the verge of catastrophic We like to keep all the seriously feminista countries at arm’s length. I suggest you speak again to the Australian government.”

Jane Anston had already surmised that the Australian Defence minister having suffered an enforced teenaged feminisation was going to be an impossible hurdle to clear. The minister had already intimated that the only reason she was allowing Lady Jane to look for – and hopefully contact Charlie Sage, was to try and open up some line of communication.

Jane had no intentions of enabling that to happen so she was already considering some strategy to entice Charlie Sage back to within contact. Then somehow through any endeavour to perhaps persuade him to reconsider his decision. Ruefully, she concluded that those endeavours might just include illegal actions.

ooo000ooo

That afternoon she met again with Colonel Wilson then advised the Federal inspector that their searches were complete and they were returning to Canberra. This done they went to ground in Canberra because their six month visa gave them considerable leeway. The only trace they had on Charlie Sage was the occasional encrypted messages between Chloe and Charlie when the wanted to see each other.

Unless they could somehow break the encryptions, there was no way they could determine where and when Chloe and Charlie met.

Besides Jane Anston, the Australian and several other governments were trying to de-crypt the same messages.

For two months Charlie had sufficient supplies onboard his beloved spaceship Dawn and he simply cruised around in space while even occasionally visiting the moon. Not for him the necessity of being tied in orbits and timing gravitational ‘sling-shots to reach various ‘near-earth’ neighbours it was simply ‘point-and-shoot’ then accelerate to a suitable velocity to effect an accurate ‘slide-by’ rendezvous.

Once alongside, he simply matched velocities and if that rendezvous was one of the orbiting bracelet of now several ‘space-stations’, he would tantalise the occupants before turning away and heading off to another destination.

Whilst his unscheduled and uninvited meetings soon proved to be harmless and non-threatening, they consequently became ‘old-hat’ to the various organisations who had launched the different space stations. The manoeuvrability and endurance of the spaceship Dawn was another matter.

Once, Just for devilment he asked Chloe to send him the Arabic writing for a cryptic message advising Muslims to beware of the false prophet. Then he simply scraped out the words on the surface of the moon using the super strong hull of Dawn as a gigantic pen nib. The letters were over a mile long and clearly visible to anybody with a modest astronomy telescope.

Bearing in mind that all news of Dawn’s antics had been suppressed by mutual agreement from all the agencies with interests in space, the sudden revelations writ large on the surface of the moon, soon caused pandemonium. Religious authorities tried desperately to make sense of the words and pacify the more religious fanatics. Identifying the false prophet caused endless speculation.

Eventually, the secular authorities had to come clean about the situation as further messages in other languages followed suit. Sales in astronomy telescopes boomed as trust in governments evaporated.

Charlie had never expected the seeds of his insurrection to grow so rapidly into a forest of discord and fear amongst the less educated. Soon that fear conflagrated into revolution. It had proved unbelievably easy so Charlie left the messages clearly visible as he waited to hear from Chloe about government reactions.

ooo000ooo