It would be pointless to deny my debt to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 I also appropriated a powerful and disturbing theme from Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let me Go. I hope that there is sufficient that is original to justify putting this flimsy story out there.
Thank you Colin the dogg for reading this story and giving support and advice.
Not the Mardygrass. A hedonist utopia has no place for love
Potsherd 22.
Noona was puzzled. Here she was, not much more than three weeks after the Mardygrass, and she was already starting to feel the excitement that comes with its imminent proximity. Odder still, and rather frightening; instead of the familiar generalised feeling of readiness for sex, her growing desire was focussed on just one man.
Whenever they met nowadays, she kept looking at Karell and wondering what it would be like for him to just kiss her, Mardygrass or no Mardygrass. She looked at his strong brown fingers and imagined them burrowing like mice under her tunic.
She had always liked Karell. They had occupied adjacent cots in crèche, so she had known him all her life. She liked his height and bulk. His honey-brown skin seemed somehow beautiful, smooth and close-grained with slabs of hard muscle beneath. She liked the way he always had a smile on his face; the way his laughter seemed always ready to bubble up. She loved the sympathetic intelligence that shone out of his beautiful hazel eyes.
Along with her other crèche-mates, Milo, Thessa, Endis, Jorg, Eppie and the rest, she had of course mated with him in most if not all of the Mardygrasses they had shared since they came of age. But since she would typically have forty or fifty partners, and he almost as many during the week-long coupling, they could not be accused of excessive partiality for each other.
Excessive Partiality was of course illegal, but it also carried the very strongest social stigma. The Guardians watched the streets and squares during mardygrass, using the very latest and most refined techniques of body and motion recognition.
Wear a cloak and a mask and you may well escape the scrutiny of your neighbours, and add to the piquancy of the occasion, but the Guardians would run and re-run the images and notice if any couple mated more than once or twice in the week. The culprits would be shamed in front of their workmates and crèche-mates for a first offence, and if they were foolish enough to repeat the offence they would suffer severe corporal punishment.
According to the stories about the bad old days, women used to spend the weeks after a mardygrass wondering if their wombs would fructify with a baby. Not now, of course, when all conceptions were handled within the large, sterile buildings known as encubators, where males deposited their seed every year, and nubile women had their ova harvested.
Now it was as if the raw materials of life went into the encubators at one end and echelons of red-faced, bawling neo-nates were thrust out of the other into the crèches in which they would be raised, each batch under the care of a Nursery-mother and her assistants.
Now that sex and fruitfulness had been quite severed, the period after a mardygrass had acquired another peculiar and sinister quality. Every mardygrass left behind a number of raped, tortured, maimed and murdered victims. It had been more than fifty years since the last time the perpetrators one of these crimes had gone undetected. Now, on everybody's screens, the newscasts detailed the murders and mutilations, showing the events in grisly clarity, followed by the identification and bloody execution of the criminals.
Philosophers, had there been such a thing, might have speculated on why these outrages continued to take place, when, in every community, a batch of executions, floggings and public tortures followed inexorably the three-monthly cycle of the mardygrass. Inexplicably, the cycle of murders and rapes, the arrests, trials and bloody, brutal, protracted punishments went on occurring just as if sexual horrors, rape, mutilation and horrific murder were programmed ineradicably into the human psyche.
Noona was revolted by the public spectacle, shown on every skreen in every public building, and in public squares, parks and meeting-places. She avoided these skreenz whenever possible, whilst careful not to draw attention to herself by openly revealing her squeamishness. But the news coverage was relentless. Her puzzlement over her persistent feelings of sexual arousal was made greater by her growing disgust at the scenes of orgiastic violence, both on the part of the rapists and the community.
In a private part of her mind, she could not resist making an association between the sanctioned license of the mardygrass and the unsanctioned license of rape and mutilation. They were coming to seem like the two faces of the same Janus-god.
Noona needed to talk to someone, and that someone could only be Karell. She skreened him and arranged to meet at a soccsen close to his apartment.
A minute or two later she left her apartment building and stepped into a bubble, awaiting a passenger at the kerbside a hundred metres away. She waved her wristband towards the little reader on the front panel and gave her destination in a clear voice. The bubble's transparent surface turned mistily opaque and it slid away smoothly. As it moved down the street it linked with other bubbles in a necklace to conserve energy, then peeled neatly away at the next junction.
Karell was standing at the kerbside as her bubble drew alongside and they walked side by side into the soccsen and ordered beverages.
As they took seats at the end of a long table, Noona looked up at the giant skreen on the wall and saw that a blood-splattering public flogging was taking place. Some man, she assumed who had used unacceptable violence in a Mardygrass coupling. It offered an opening for a preliminary feeling-out conversation.
"Mind if I move places so I'm not staring at the skreen, Karry? Sometimes I just get tired of the blood and screams."
"Know what you mean. Nooie. Still, though, you must admit it serves the reptiles right. There's no need to get violent when you can have more willing partners as you could possibly want."
"Maybe they simply can't help themselves."
"Of course they can help themselves. What's the need to be violent, let alone going zonky and cutting off men's cocks, like that woman last year?"
"Come on Karry, you know that for every female sex-killer there are twenty men at least."
"Yes. Ok. Still it churns me up to see and hear women mutilated and killed in full three-dimensional colour. Even worse, when crowds of people in places like this cheer the executioners on."
As they looked around the soccsen they noticed that the other visitors were staring avidly at the skreen, gasping in unison as each swing of the cat drew spurts of blood. If she didn't know better, Karell might have thought that the crowd were sexually aroused. He and Noona were in danger of drawing attention if they continued to ignore the salutary spectacle. Noona looked at Karell and pointedly looked at the time and drained her beaker. He did the same and they rose to leave.
Without discussion they disregarded the bubbles standing waiting by the side of the road and turned their feet towards New Life Square. Here among the thousands who gathered each evening to watch the forty-metre square giant skreenz and catch the ongoing news stories and chat programmes where larger than life celebrities strutted and postured, acting out their narcissm on larger-than-life skreenz.
As they walked, Karell let his mind drift back to the last mardygrass, when he and Endis, and another, older man they did not know had mardied Noona in all apertures whilst Eppie looked on. They had all enjoyed it, and, an hour later they went on to give Eppie the same treatment to her evident delight. Now, thinking about it, he realised that, despite all the physical pleasure, he had resented the presence of the other men. What he had really wanted was to have Noona to himself. 'How queer is that?' he wondered.
He would have liked to talk about his feelings with Noona, but the utter impropriety of these feelings made him hesitate, after all, he reasoned, these were very like the feelings of Excessive Partiality that led so many into criminal behaviour and disgrace. The fact that he was indulging these improper longings now, rather than at the Mardygrass, made it even odder and even more deplorable.
Trying for small talk to ease the situation, he asked, "How are things at work these days?"
Noona had a full-time job, fifteen hours a week, assembling the new miniature skreenz that people had taken to wearing on their wrists.
"No different," she replied. "Still not enough work to keep us busy. Yesterday I ran out of chips just after the start of the shift and they did not courier any to us until an hour before we finished for the day. Eppie and I just quality checked each other's work for something to do."
"Pretty much the same for me", Karell agreed. About one day a week we have enough to do, but the rest of the time we take our time and pretend to be busy. I sometimes wonder if they'll dock our wages for the time we waste, but no one seems to be bothered. We haven't even had a supervisor since Burra got killed three Mardygrasses ago."
"I have heard that there used not to be enough jobs to go around, and people had to beg on the streets, but now it's more like there isn't enough work to go around."
By then they were coming into New Life Square. The dance troupe were just coming to the end of their routine, getting a ripple of applause from the largely indifferent crowd, who were even now turning away to gaze up at the huge skreenz mounted on the sides of the two huge monolithic buildings that housed the Guardians and the Censors.
Mercifully, there were no executions or whippings this evening, and the topic was the ongoing war with New Russia. Films of tank lines advancing, all guns blazing, rocket launchers sending sheets of slanting orange streaks into the night sky and waves of bombers dropping clusters of high explosive and incendiaries were intercut with film of captured soldiers and civilians being hanged from makeshift gallows and electrical pylons. Ragged cheers rose up from the crowds as the hanged men, women and children kicked their lives away.
Noona shuddered, and could not repress her disgust.
"Yes, its horrible," Karell agreed softly into her ear. "I wish we could have a life free from these horrors. Sometimes I wish we could just be alone together somewhere. You know, like on a desert island; just the two of us."
This was a dangerous thing to say and Noona knew she should not let him take silence for acquiescence to his dangerous ideas. The trouble was, that every word warmed her heart. These were her own secret thoughts. Silently she reached under the table and squeezed his hand. He looked at her and nodded in complete understanding.
