This was obviously England after a nuclear holocaust. Cypress figured that it must be 2014, at least. Nothing within her view was familiar; the grey was implacable, flat, disrupted only by scurrying women in bright tunics. Some had papers in their hands like secretaries at the stock exchange, others with angular contraptions Cypress felt must be weapons. She was alone in this place, alone in the sense that she didn’t “belong,” like the rest, to whatever manner of civilization she’d come upon. An impulse to tuck her skirt under her legs—or to throw it off, and far away—came over her body whenever the women with weapons came near. There was something wrong with her appearance, her attitude, though she wasn’t sure how or what. She hid in the tubes of shadow along the sides of tunnel after tunnel, curving and never-ending, watching the white, brown, and golden women in this world.

Someone found her. Another woman in a red tunic took her to an official place inside the grey world, where she was introduced as a survivor. The leader, the queen, the reigning glory of this community was a tall woman with red hair who welcomed Cypress and kept saying she would be safe. Cypress asked safe from what, thinking that the world might still be at war, but that was only partially the case. After the bombs laid waste to the planet, somehow the men and women of the earth had been separated. “Of course,” Cypress thought, “of course.” In a war the women are left behind, and the men go away to fight and kill, so when the devastation began and ended, women were left to contend with the fruitlessness of the soils, the weight of the skies. Now each breath meant poison. At any rate, all the women left on the planet had ended up in this cove off Britain; that was many years ago, they said. The men lived somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, plotting and determined to take back their rights to pillage and wreak havoc, but so far the female colony had defended itself against the attackers; violence they claimed was only for self-defense.

Cypress was initiated into the new world—not quite as herself. All vestiges of male-dominated culture were to be “rehabilitated” out of her psyche; the true matriarch, who is the woman-powerful, was to be nurtured. The population wanted for nothing: food, clothing, shelter, or art. These were a woman’s work, even in the old world. But here there were no patriarchs, ordering and demanding. Here there were only Mothers and Daughters. “Mothers” were supreme; there was no higher honor than to be deemed “Mother,” yet this had nothing to do with biological offspring. Women who had no children were of a higher caste than the “bearers,” as they were called. The “bearers” were never seen in public assemblies, nor were they allowed to wear bright colors, because they might bear sons.