Not at Mardygrass

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.

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.

It was simply not possible for two people to be constantly in each other's company. People would talk, and talk would be dangerous. So Noona spent more time with Eppie and Thessa, and as a trio they gravitated to Jorg and, where Jorg was, Karell was likely to be.

If their behaviour changed towards each other, it was that Noona and Karell were less likely to address remarks to each other. They avoided each other's eyes. After a few days, Endis raised the issue directly with Karell.

Have you and Noona fallen out with each other? You always used to be good friends, but now you seem to be avoiding her."

Karell thought quickly.

"Well, she was a bit snappy with me a few days ago, She said I was creepy and I was perving on her. I wasn't doing anything! I suppose it wasn't much, but it put my back up."

"Don't let it get to you. Women are like that sometimes; it doesn't mean anything. I have often noticed that crèche-mates can be a bit petty with each other, a sort of reversion to childhood kind of thing. I am sure that Noona likes you really."

Endis was always the quiet, thoughtful one who noticed a lot, and said little. Karell was disturbed that he had spotted something, however nebulous, even if he had drawn the wrong inference. He would have to be more careful or lives would be in danger.

They tried to act normally – but what was normal? By the time the next Mardygrass came round, their stilted conversation, sidelong looks and hesitant body language were attracting more attention.

Their old housemother, Agate, had remained in frequent contact with the whole group, and with other groups before and since.

She was a warm-hearted, gossipy old biddy, who took the Panglossian view that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." She started to worry about Noona and Karell, and mentioned her concerns to her supervisor at one of her weekly debriefings. The word went up the line to the Guardians Office. Two guardians were given the job of watching for them, using the powerful body recognition software. At first they saw nothing conclusive, but then the Mardygrass came around.

Noona and Karell were hard to spot, and it was hard to be sure they were not part of the trains and daisychains that crowded the flat rooftops and the public squares. What was clear was that they did not couple as a pair at any time. Endis, Jorg, Eppie, Milo and Thessa were each tracked down and eliminated in turn. There they were, engaged in a variety of fairly vanilla sex acts, together and severally throughout the week. Noona and Karell seemed never to come into contact with their crèche-mates. It was significant, but so far it fell short of proof.

Then came the breakthrough the Guardians were looking for. Two figures, sitting alone in the shadow of a rooftop; close to the action but no part of it. The silhouettes were suggestive, but after an hour of sitting hand-in-hand and conversing in low voices, they got up and walked, still hand-in-hand towards the staircase. The figure recognition software took in their posture and characteristics of motion and made its judgement. Noona W113, probability 96.8%; Karell W113 probability 99.0%. Their elaborate fancy-dress costumes were of no avail in the face of this technology.

"Bring them in!"

An hour later, the two delinquents were in separate cells, neither knowing whether or not their partner in crime had been apprehended.

In one cell:

"Noona W113, do you know why you have been brought here?"

"No," she lied. "It it something to do with work?"

"You know it's nothing to do with work. Tell me, During the Mardygrass that finished last weekend, how many sexual partners did you have?"

"Maybe fifty, not less than forty anyway, counting men and women."

"Can you name any of your partners?"

"Not all of them, Quite a lot were strangers. Let's see, Milo, Jorg, Karell, Endis, three or four men from work, then there's Eppie, Three of the girls from work...well there's lots of them."

The Guardian conducting her interrogation struck.

"So, If I get Jorg 113 or Endis 113 in here, they will confirm your story?"

"No! Yes! No! I don't know. They may not remember."

Noona know what was involved in an interrogation. She could not subject her friends to that. It never occurred to her that they were already undergoing interrogation along with Agate, her housemother. They were spilling out all their observations, guesses and suspicions as fast as they could gabble. The real threat that the interrogation could be enhanced, loosened their tongues as it loosened their bowels.

Noona's muffled sobs turned to tears running down her face and dripping off her nose and chin. Her nose began to run in sympathy and watery mucus coated her upper lip. She reached to the box on the table for a tissue. The interrogator moved it away from her, rejecting her silent appeal.

Her resistance collapsed, as the Guardian saw immediately. This was almost predictable. In this fearful place, all her fantasies were exposed as the juvenile daydreams they were. Her feelings for Karell seems fatuously childish. It was all over for her, and all she could do was to try to make it right. She sobbed out her story abjectly. The interrogator was grimly satisfied. It did not often happen, but criminals who remained recalcitrant could not be led out into the arena for punishment. It would be too risky, open defiance would set a bad example.

"They will rape me to death!" she muttered. In her mind, memories of the spreading pools of blood and urine under the limp, broken bodies on the scaffold; the crowds at the public skreenz roaring with laughter as the camera focussed on the man's penis as it stiffened and ejaculated, whilst the cat shredded his back.

"Oh!" she thought. "All my friends will be watching."

The Guardian responded in measured tones.

"No, Noona. You will not be raped to death. You will never be seen again. You and Karell, are not worth punishing. Your sordid crimes do not merit the dignity of public punishment. You are worthless. You are less, far less than the sum of your parts.

You will be pithed and put into store. Do you know what that means? It means that your body will no longer be able to hear what your brain tells it to do.

Machines will make you breathe, machines will feed you and machines will circulate your blood. Your bladder and colon will be diverted into the mains drainage, Some day your corneas will make some worthy person see again. Your heart, liver, kidneys will go to someone who deserves them. Who knows how long your brain will go on functioning? Who knows and who cares?"

Karell resisted for just a little longer. He tried to be strong to protect Noona and his friends, but the power of conditioning is so strong. His interrogator wiped her hands of him, and told him nothing of his fate. He was taken away for disposal.

The guardians walked away, leaving the two to contemplate their fate. As they went, their conversation was the mirror image of Noona and Karell's questions a week or so earlier.

"These freaks seem to be coming our way more and more frequently. What on earth could it all be about? They could have as much good mardying as they can handle, and they turn zonky. I worry about it sometimes."

"Maybe they simply can't help themselves."

"Of course they can help themselves. What has one cock got that another hasn't?

"Exactly", responded her male colleague, "or one cunt, come to that."