The “Daughters” worked in the nurseries, the factories, the offices, the arts, and military of this place where no men were mentioned or seen. Some young girls who pulled Cypress aside to ask her about the other world where men had been present were severely reprimanded; Cypress was instructed by the female guards to watch that she didn’t contaminate the young minds with the filth of the past. Immediately after the girls had been scolded, some other brown figure in yellow took her through a passage that became smaller and smaller, until finally Cypress and this woman, Gisa, had to crawl on their stomachs. Eventually, Cypress heard groans, heavy breathings, and screams she recognized as coming from women in labor. Gisa said, “Yes, these are the bearers, our real mothers.”

Cypress wanted to stop her, to say, “No. My mother is in Carolina,” but she knew her companion wouldn’t understand. The “bearers” were in a great black hole that went on for the distance of a football stadium. Cypress thought, “There’s no need to put them in a womb; we are the womb,” but such a thought was impossible, here. Gisa explained.

“In order to become a bearer, a woman must do something bad: not follow rules; steal; behave strangely.”

Cypress couldn’t believe it. “You mean giving birth is like a punishment?”

“Yes . . . why else would anyone do it?”

Cypress thought of the fertility pills, the test-tube babies implanted in women’s wombs, the invention of surrogate mothers, all the things people of her time did in order to have a baby. Yet, why else would you do it was beyond Gisa’s comprehension.

“You know what else they do?” Gisa asked Cypress, who shook her head no. “They murder most of the boy babies. They haven’t figured out how to stop that from happening; plus, they don’t capture enough men from the outside to keep our population stable, so the boy babies they don’t murder, they keep down here and feed them so they can make sperms. Isn’t that what you call it, sperms?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But once they make the sperms, the Mothers have it frozen, so no one has to worry about touching them,” Gisa reassured Cypress, who was longing to touch Leroy, to feel his skin and sinew so this place wouldn’t be true.

“But where are they?”

“Why in the gaol, naturally.” Gisa smiled, so safe. “Want to go see them? We have to be very careful, ’cause it’s against the law . . . if they find us we’ll be made bearers.”