Women are the ruling class, the Populite. Men the underclass, live and work together. Relations between men and women are forbidden, punishable by death. London is in the grip of the Republican Activists, a male anarchist group trying to wrestle local power from the Populite. Their hunger for equality has led to increased acts of terror and random violence.Morda, a political dissident, is a man trying desperately to fight off his heterosexual urges. Rocassa Milo, his employer and the subject of his fantasies, is a woman blighted by the discovery that she is not like other women, and cannot bear children. She has consequently not been subjected to the unsexing of the national sterilization process, and has become aware of unnatural urges that she must somehow control and remove, before she is discovered, reported and ultimately executed.