Life and Times of a Priestess Ch. 18 Pt. 01

Chapter 18 : Conscience

Setting : Dumis, Prancir

Part 1

"Valery, can I talk to you?" asked Danella as they lay together in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

"Of course." It was morning but it seemed that today he was in no hurry to dress and depart to deal with his business interests.

"It's about business and politics."

Valery laughed, "I wondered when you would come round to that. Well fire away but don't forget I am resting this morning."

"You have encouraged me to spread my message of sexual adventure amongst your friends and wider circles," said Danella. "We have done that together and I know you have really enjoyed these times. Together we have been able to make the Prancirians we knew love life and pleasure. They have opened up the defences of Vanmarian mentality and learned to express themselves more naturally. Some have, of their own volition, decided to question Prancir's goals in the war. They have become sympathetic to the Empire of Pirion, and now wish to encourage the government and the people of Prancir to stop the war. Many of them wish to spread the practices of Pirion to Prancir. Some ardently wish to change the structure of Prancir by the power of sexuality. Others would merely wish to stop this foolish war and to borrow some of the sexual freedoms Pirion has to offer. I do not wish to tell Prancirians how they should manage your own country, but I would hope that those who embrace some of Pirion's sexual practices would wish to aid us in whatever small way, in persuading other Prancirians, whether government, people or soldiers to stop the war."

"You Valery are at the vanguard of our group of lovers. You are its leader in confidence as I am by example, and you are our host also. I know you admire our Empire of the Goddess customs and recognise the advantages of our more overtly sexual society. However, I have not heard you to voice much opinion on the war. You have never said you would wish this awful war to end and draw our nations closer together in understanding. I know of course that you are an important man in Prancir. Much of your wealth comes directly from the manufacture of weapons and of the railways which now connect the towns of occupied Pirion and enable the war to continue. I know therefore that you have the financial interest in continuing the war. It is making you richer by the day as have previous wars. I just want to hear from you where you stand in our struggle to end this war and restore real peace between our nations and the exchange of the advantages of our cultures."

"I knew this would come," he said dully, as if they were questions he did not wish to answer or even consider. He had indeed considered them, and knew this moment, when Danella decided she could begin to use her influence to help her own nation, would come. He could not be surprised. Its occurrence was predictable. "Of course I approve of Pirion's sexual practices, although why you need to attach it to a pseudo religion I do not know. I am a sexual beast myself, as you well know. And yes you are correct that I am being enriched by this war. I don't like war. I dislike the thought that people are dying from my bullets and guns. But I cannot stop the war. That is not within my power.

"The Politicians and the Cabinet are the representatives of our democracy who decided that we should not be left of out of the war of colonial expansion. They are elected people. The people of Prancir voted them into power and their actions in waging this war must therefore accord with the wishes of the people. If Prancir chose not to fight in this war we would merely be allowing Vanmandria or the Spalopians the freedom to take Pirion, and we would get nothing. I am sure you must realise that Vanmandria is a far less charitable governor than Prancir. They are the real racists who would mistreat your people. The Prancirians will make you our equals once we have conquered you. Indeed many of you in the occupied territories already enjoy equality with us, as you do yourself. You have a good life here in Dumis. You do realise that don't you?"

"So you think Pirion should just give up and surrender to Prancir for the fear of Vanmandria," said Danella in a dry voice, obviously displeased. "You will conquer us and make us grateful for your equality as if we were not equal before."

"I am not saying Pirion should not fight or that you yourself don't have every right to persuade Prancir to stop attacking," said Valery. "That is an honourable thing to do, but you will not defeat the wealth of the Vanmarian nations combined. You would certainly find Prancir a kinder master than Vanmandria."

"So you think there is no point to our struggle?" she asked quietly, upset by his defeatism.

"The Empire of Pirion cannot beat the inevitable in my opinion. You have been content to live in your traditional ways for too long, while smaller more dynamic nations have been developing and growing rich, learning to produce more efficiently and creating new machines and new technologies. It is unsurprising that you are now being overtaken by military means. You are like a company which is outdated and unprofitable, ripe for take-over. I have taken many such over myself. We buy out the shareholders or offer them new shares in our holding company. After it is done they are usually quite happy that their businesses have been conserved and the jobs of their worker protected. They don't look back and neither will Pirion when it is brought under Vanmarian governments, although I should not like to be an Pirionite living under Vanmandrian control. I am not saying that I want to see the Empire of Pirion taken over. For myself I would say I would prefer it to remain as it was. As you have shown us Pirion has saved and embellished some wonderful traditions of sexual fulfilment and pleasure. I would not see them disappear. But I cannot stop the Prancirian elected government. Even if I could I have no power over the Vanmandrians, and let me tell you many of them actually believe in racial and national superiority and the conquest of colonies wherever they can find them. The Vanmandrians, even alone, could probably defeat Pirion, given time."

"Not if Prancir called an alliance with Pirion and opposed them. They would back down and Pirion could be saved," she commented, from a desire to shake his firm belief that the Empire of Pirion had to fall."

"Do you realise how many people have an interest in seeing the war continued? Prancir does not want to oppose Vanmandria. Wars with Vanmandria are costly and dangerous, awful in their destruction, and sometimes we lose them. Once they reached Dumis and forced a territorial settlement in which they took over some of our Eastern provinces. We prefer not to fight the Vanmandrians. We would rather take on a weaker nation. The politicians want successes in war to satisfy the demands of the electorate and to ensure they will be reelected. They also may wish to divert attention away from their failures in other spheres. When the currency is overvalued by them they are accused of creating unemployment and recession. When taxes are too high they are accused of wastefulness. The electorate are rarely completely happy with them and governments usually change with each election. If, however, they can fight a successful war and create new colonies for our businessmen to operate in they will become popular again. The General and higher officers of the army like wars because they can make a name for themselves. They all want to be famous and successful like the old Generals or to advance their careers.

"The people like successful wars because they are entertained by them. They are made to feel superior to the defeated and have something to be proud of. They do not like a war in which their sons are killed but if only a few are killed they accept it. The workers like wars if it means more jobs. My factories are producing at capacity at the moment and I have expanded production at new factories. My workers are happy because they are employed and wages have risen. Many unemployed men have joined the army, others have been drafted. They have an opportunity to prove themselves, for adventure and to travel. As you well know many of them will have opportunities for sexual adventures they would not have at home. So how could I or any of us stop this war. It is quite impossible. The surprise is that the Vanmarian nations did not begin this war many years before."

On another occasion they talked deeply about Vanmarian culture and morality. Danella hoped she might elicit understanding and social conscience from her wealthy lover by approaching the subject of morality from a different starting point. He listened but was resistant.

"You confuse sexual pleasure too much with morality, Danella. I feel that if pleasure is moral it loses a good part of its appeal," said Valery.

"Why?" she asked with surprise. "I don't understand. So if because you identify moral principles with deprivation and coercion? But what if moral principles oblige you to take advantage of life? The idea of morality repels you because you confuse it with the idea of sexual prohibition. To you, moral conduct means you shall not be impure in body or mind. You will desire the act of the flesh only in marriage or at least relationship. Don't let that false interpretation discredit the honourable word morality."

"In Vanmar morality has long been used as a pretext for condemning sexual behaviour. That old argument is an excuse for condemning the good things which emanate from sexual behaviour. Sexual taboos gained admission fraudulently into morality and subjugated sex to unjust laws. They had no place in it by natural justice. In fact the nature and purpose of those sexual taboos are immoral, since they originally sprang from pragmatic and self serving motives - to assure the head of the family of the ownership and control of wives and of children, who were instruments of production and outer signs of wealth. Children could be used for marriages of alliance with other families, clans, tribes, nations or businesses. Sometimes they could be exchanged for dowries and money. Wives could be kept as adverts of success and importance or as workers for the home. Exploitation by the husband landholder is the original source of your 'moral' principles and sexual taboos."

She leaped up and walked to a shelf in Valery's lounge laden with books, in the deep semidarkness, and returned holding a volume. She read from an ancient text of the civilisation from which Vanmar grew and which in ancient times also dominated the Empire of Pirion as those lands have since been known.

"You shall not covet your neighbour's house, nor your neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbours.' There, it was clearly stated. 'Woman, know the place that God has assigned you - between the barn and the livestock, with the rest of the labourers.'

"It is sometimes said that the 'middle ages' of Vanmar were the age of romance and love. The fact is that the 'middle ages' nearly destroyed love. In giving us the poisoned gift of his 'morality' the feudal cleric thought he was cutting off our desire for sexual pleasure for ever. Look at what is left of his plots and contrivances today. The chastity belts that the lords of the lands fastened onto their wives and their daughters are now falling into rusty fragments. Let us put them away in museums. But let us proclaim the end of that so called morality. Let us hope that real morality will be what survives after time has dealt with false morality as it deserves in Vanmar."

Valery was thoughtful. It seemed senseless to waste time building a new morality on the ruins of the old one. Couldn't he simply make love as he pleased, freely, without having to think hard to draw up a new code and to announce it from the housetops. Was it really necessary to give himself moral laws. There was no morality anywhere, not even a sexually permissive one.

"You can't triumph over bad laws by selfish anarchy," he returned. "The idea is not to return to the jungle but to recognise that some of man's powers which society in Vanmar now represses and condemns, are good and that they give our race the means of happiness."

"The new morality of Pirion, and I hope for Vanmar in the future, simply proclaims that it is beautiful and good to make love freely," said Danella. "Virginity is not a virtue, but a sad crime in an adult, two lovers are not the limit to sexual enjoyment; marriage should not be a prison. Pleasure does matter and we must constantly offer ourselves, give ourselves, unite our bodies with others, making more of our short lives."

"But," said Valery, "if the taboos of Vanmarian morality have an economic origin, there will have to be a real revolution before your new morality can be put into effect. It requires something much more important and much more radical than a revolution in your government, a mutation or evolution."

"The new man will be more adult, further advanced on the scale of social evaluation," suggested Danella. "The day is coming when, just as surely as artistic values separated men from beasts, the values of the new freedom will separate the comfortable man from the ashamed man who takes refuge in the moral rules of Vanmarian society, hiding his nakedness and denying his sex. Poor Vanmarians are humans still bogged down with the mud of ancient swamps. You are dominated by your inhibitions, and your crude sufferings, struggling with your blindness and all your evangelical brute strength against the currents of hope that try to draw you out of childhood."

"But what makes you think that those currents will win, that your morality will eventually triumph over the morality that's protected by customs and law? What if the opposite were to happen and your new morality is ignored by Vanmarians?" said Valery.

"I can't believe that man has come from so far only to stop here and suddenly give up moving forward in Vanmar," said Danella. "He and she will go on. Groping their way forward and resisting sometimes, but without ever turning back."