XVI
A FATAL INNOCENCE
It was summer in the northern hemisphere of Earth in a year that would once have been called 7583. A group of lovers was travelling in a slowly moving room. Other rooms were moving nearby, also at a leisurely pace. They perambulated before a mountainous geonaut. The geonaut perambulated in the tropics.
Sometimes, one of the lovers would climb down from the room and cross to another room. Seventy rooms clustered round the geonaut. Soon it would replicate.
A man called Trockern was talking, as he liked to do in the afternoons, when the morning’s rethinking session was over. Like the others present, male and female, Trockern wore nothing but a light gauze veil over his head.
He was a lightly built olive-skinned man, with good features and an irrepressible smile which broke forth even when he was speaking seriously.
“If I’ve got the fruits of this morning’s rethink right, then the bizarre peoples who lived in the ages before the nuclear war failed to realise one fact which now seems obvious to us. They had not developed sufficiently to escape from the same sort of territorial possessiveness which still governs birds and animals.”
He was addressing two sisters, Shoyshal and Ermine, who were currently sharing his room with him. The sisters looked much alike; but there was a greater clarity about Shoyshal, and she was the leader of the pair.
“At least part of the old race denounced the evils of landownership,” Ermine said.
“They were regarded as cranks,” Trockern said. “Listen, my theory, which I hope we can explore, is that possession was everything for the old race. Love—for them, even love was a political act.”
“That’s far too sweeping,” Shoyshal said. “Admittedly, over most of the globe in those times one sex dominated the other—”
“Possessed them as slaves.”
“Well, dominated them, you argumentative hunk. But there were also societies where sex became just good clean fun, without any spiritual or possessive connotations, where ‘liberation’ was the watchword, and—”
Trockern shook his head. “Darling, you prove my point. That minority was rebelling against the predominant ethos, so they too treated —were forced to treat—love as a political act. ‘Liberation’ or ‘free love’ was a statement, therefore political.”
“I don’t suppose they thought like that.”
“They didn’t see clearly enough to think like that. Hence their perpetual unease. My belief is that even their wars were welcome as an escape from their personal predicaments…” Seeing that Shoyshal was about to argue, he went on hastily, “Yes, I know war was also linked to territory. That sense of territorially extended from the land to the individual. You were supposed to be proud of your native land and to fight for it, and equally you were supposed to be proud of and fight for your lover. Or wife, as they then called it. Do you imagine I am proud of you or would fight for you?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?” Ermine asked, smiling.
“Look, take an example. This obsession the old race had with ownership. Slavery was a common condition on Earth up to and including the Industrial Revolution. Long after that, in many places. It was just as bad as we witness it on Helliconia. It gave you power to possess another person—an idea now almost past belief to us. It would bring us only misery. But we can see how the slave owner also becomes enslaved.”
As Trockern raised both his left hand and his voice for emphasis, the old man sleeping away the afternoon on a nearby bunk muttered irritably, snorted, and rolled over onto his other side.
“Again, darling, there were plenty of societies without slaves,” Shoyshal said. “And plenty of societies which abhorred the idea.”
“They said they abhorred it, but they kept servants when they could
—possessed them as far as possible. Later they employed androids. Officially nonslave societies went in for multiple possessions instead. Possessions, possessions … It was a form of madness.”
“They were not mad,” Shoyshal said. “Just different from us. They’d probably find us pretty strange. Besides, it was the adolescence of mankind. I’ve listened to your preaching often enough, Trockern, and can’t deny I’ve enjoyed it—more or less. Now listen to what I am going to say.
“We’re here because of astonishing luck. Forget about the Hand of God, about which the Helliconians are always agonising. There’s just luck. I don’t mean only luck that a few humans survived the nuclear winter—though that’s a part of it. I mean by luck the series of Earth’s cosmic accidents. Think of the way plantlike bacteria released oxygen into an otherwise unbreathable atmosphere. Think of the accident of fish developing backbones. Think of the accident of mammals developing placenta—so much cleverer than eggs—though eggs, too, were winners in their day. Think of the accident of the bombardment which altered conditions so sharply that the dinosaurs failed, to give mammals their chance. I could go on.”
“You always could,” said her sister half-admiringly.
“Our old adolescent ancestors feared accident. They feared luck. Hence gods and fences and marriage and nuclear arms and all the rest. Not your possessiveness, but the fear of accident. Which eventually befell them. Perhaps such prophecies are self-fulfilling.”
“Plausible. Yes. I’ll agree, if you will allow that possessiveness itself might have been a symptom of that fear of accidents.”
“Oh, well, Trockern, if you’re going to agree, let’s get back to the subject of sex.” They all laughed. Outside their windows, the mobile city could be seen trundling on its inelegant way, drinking egonicity from the white polyhedrons.
Ermine put an arm about her sister’s shoulder and stroked her hair.
“You talk about one person possessing another- I suppose you would say that the old institution of marriage was like that. Yet marriage still sounds rather romantic to me.”
“Most squalid things are romantic if you get far enough away from them” Shoyshal said. “Anything seen through a haze… But marriage is the supreme example of love as a political act. The love was just a pretence, or at best an illusion.”
“I don’t see what you mean. Men and women did not have to marry, did they?”
“It was voluntary in a way, yes, but there was the pressure of society to marry. Sometimes moral pressure, sometimes economic pressure. The man got someone to work for him and have sex with. The woman got someone to earn money for her. They pooled their cupidities.”
“How awful!”
“All those romantic postures,” continued Shoyshal, enjoying herself. “Those raptures, those love songs, that sticky music, that literature they so prized, the suicide pacts, the tears, the vows—all just social mating displays, the baiting of the trap they couldn’t see they were setting or falling into.”
“You make it sound awful.”
“Oh, it was worse than that, Ermine, I assure you. No wonder so many women chose prostitution. I mean, marriage was another version of the power struggle, with both husband and wife battling for supremacy over the other. The man had the bludgeon of the purse strings, the woman the secret weapon between her legs.”