Even Braver New World State

by Rick K. Reut

  “Okay,” the young man shrugged. “I just wanted to know if there was a place where one could really do it.”

  “Do what?” the old man frowned. “What in the Ford’s name are you blabbering about?”

  “I’m talking about getting away from the bad heredity you mentioned.”

  “O, that!”

  “Yes, that,” said Adam, annoyed at the old man’s slowness. “Does it really exist?”

  “Does what exist?”

  “The place where it’s possible!”

  “What do you mean, does it exist? Of course it does! And Freud, what wouldn’t I give to get back there,” the old man sighed with sorry confidence before turning his automatic wheelchair away from Adam and wheeling to the opposite end of the room.

  “Get back where?” wondered the young man. His question hung in the air like a hangman’s noose, waiting for an answer to strangle.

  Meanwhile, the old man fished a bottle of bourbon from behind a bookcase and poured himself a full glass. Having drained it, he poured another one, and only then turned back to face the young man.

  “More alcohol?!” he shouted from the other end of the room.

  “No, thank you. I don’t drink.”

  “Don’t drink?!” the old man echoed in surprise. “How the Ford do you get around then? There isn’t a gram of soma on the Island as far as I know!”

  “Soda?” wondered the young man.

  “No, not soda, stupid! Soma!” Helmholtz exploded, launching his wheelchair back to the young man’s coach.

  “SO-MA! Haven’t you ever heard of it?” His half-full glass of whiskey was stirring in his left hand while he was steering with his right. “O, right,” he checked himself halfway there. “It was used long before you were decanted!”

  “Decanted?”

  “I mean ‘born’!” the old man cried, twisting his face in anger. “But never mind!”

  He wheeled all the way to the couch and was forced to stop. “Besides, I bet you’ve got plenty of alcohol in the blood that came from your grandfather.”

  “Was he an alcoholic?” Adam asked after a short pause, with candid concern creeping into his voice.

  “No, he was not an alcoholic!” snapped the old man, seeming aggravated for no apparent reason. All of sudden, he turned his wheelchair around and added, ramming every single syllable of recorded time into the empty space before him: “He was an ass!”

  Only the faint whirr of the wheelchair’s electric motor, strangely reminding of spring helicopters, could be heard in the silence that followed the old man as he wheeled towards the window, blinded by reasonless rage. Having reached the window, he pulled a barely visible string, which, in its turn, drew back the blinds, flooding the living room with a wave of dying evening light. The light made the window look like a blank cinema screen paused in a frozen picture frame. The old man took a good glug from the glass and stared at the screen, wincing in disgust.

  Adam watched him closely and a little curiously, waiting for what would happen next. But for a while, nothing did. It was beginning to grow dark and rainy outside, while inside, the young man grew more and more restless. Every second the walls of the living room seemed to draw a little closer to the frayed, dusty couch he sat on, making it hard to breathe. Finally, when Adam thought that the old man had dozed off, he got up to leave, guessing that it would be better to come back some other time. Sensing his impatience, Helmholtz broke the silence with the same words he had built it with.

  “He was an ass alright,” the old man said with conviction, though without any more malice in his words. “But then again,” he went on reflectively, “I guess I wasn’t much wiser back then. In fact, I must have been even dumber, for I came to the Island of my own free will, whereas he was dragged here by force. Now I can see that I was an even bigger ass than he was, thinking that something good might actually come out of this thing. O Ford, Ford, Ford, how wrong I was!” the old man sighed bitterly and buried his faded face in his hands.

  He stayed like that for a while and then all of a sudden dived out again.

  “There can be no happiness in the old world,” he pronounced. “I once thought there could, but I was wrong. I thought I could write like that old Shakespeare sport the Savage had told me about had. And I was right. And I wrote. I even thought that there was happiness in it.”

  He paused pensively.

  “But there was no happiness in it. Like in anything else in the old world. There was only pain, and sorrow, and suffering – ekhe-ekhe – sorrow and – ekhe-ekhe” – suddenly he was caught in a strong coughing bout, but still carried on despite it, like a man breaking through a tempest, or through a stone wall, or through – “pain, and sorrow, and suffering, and nothing else. Nothing at all! And now I’m sitting here, a stupid withered old man no plump pneumatic girl will ever even look at, and I know that Mond was right. MOND – WAS – RIGHT!” he repeated, with regret, and repentance, and dire despair in his no longer recognizable, hollow voice that seemed to be coming from a freshly dug grave.

  Then he fell silent again, staring at the window’s blank screen and sorrowing over the time that could now never be returned.

  “Who was Mond?” Adam asked, after another string of seconds slowly slipped into silence.

  “You want to know who Mond was?” The old man turned his wan, withered face, heaving a sad sigh. “All right, I’ll tell you who he was. I’ll tell you everything.”

  And so he did. Having turned back to the blank screen, the old man told Adam all he knew as if watching it unwind in the window before him, like the plot of an old black and white film. “Beginning at the very beginning,” as one of the previous Directors of the London Hatcheries and Conditioning Center had been in the habit of saying.

  First of all, he told him about the Brave New World he had lived in before he idiotically, as he himself admitted, decided to leave this paradise on earth, first choosing the Falkland Islands and then changing his mind in favor of the Isle of Man to back up his mentally broken friend Bernard who was bound to be banished there.

  Then he told him about the first months of imaginary freedom on the island, where he thought that he had finally found his home. The Isle of Man did seem like a place where he truly belonged at first, for there he could do whatever he wanted, which was mostly and mainly writing. What he didn’t know was that the euphoric feeling of freedom he had during those first few months in the reservation wasn’t going to be there forever, but only as long as it was new, a new kind of experience of a heretofore unseen product, totally different from everything else he had ever encountered.

  Helmholtz was completely conquered by this new product, which was actually nothing more than his own old self seen in a new suit, new surroundings and new circumstances. And they all seem new at first. That is, till they finally reveal their fatal flaw. They grow old and die with time. And the older they grow, the more tired of them one becomes. Helmholtz’s life on the island, sometimes in solitude, and sometimes in society of other self-proclaimed rebels, was as intoxicatingly vibrant and liberating as the first plump pneumatic girl he had had. The more he had her, however, the less liberating and vibrant she tended to become.

  Thus, one grey rainy day, about a year after coming to the island, he realized, to his own horror and dismay, that the old world had nothing new left to offer him in addition to what he already had. And what he already had he no longer wanted.

  Having written his first and, so far, only book, he got fed up with writing and wished to do something else for a change. But this change, which it would have been so easy to find on the mainland, simply wasn’t available. Shocking as it was, but there were no community services on the island, no orgy-porgy, no plump pneumatic girls to fool around with... Well, there were women, of course. But they all were so uncivilized, neurotic and physically underdeveloped, that it was hard to call them women at all. Their cold, frigid bodies and minds fostered by the old world’s tradition of monogamous greed, couldn’t strik
e one spark of sexual desire even in the hungriest of hearts. All they sparked in him personally was scorn, pity or pure boredom, which almost always gave way to deep brooding gloom. It was this deep gloom of sexual deprivation that he would wallow and, in the end, drown in. A dark forest swamp of despair where snakes of sorrow and self-pity stung him with ruthless regret every time he remembered his happy life on the mainland, which he had lost all hope of returning to.

  It was true that antisocial individuals in the New World State were treated rather humanely. Instead of being imprisoned, tortured and killed, like during the times of some of the most barbaric political regimes of the never completely past continuous tense of human history, they were simply sent off to the Isolated Islands in the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean, where they themselves thought they would be much better off. Those, whose reputations had once been stained, however, were never allowed to return to the society’s Alma Mater in order to prevent her honey milk from being soured by these unsavory subjects together with their mind-poisoning thoughts and ideas.

  Thus, despite his constant attempts to come back, each one of his official requests was respectfully declined by the secretariat of the Chief Caretaking Continent Controllers’ Council, which alone could make decisions in such serious cases. He lamented, pleaded, supplicated, even tried to threaten them once or twice, vowing to join the Island’s Rebel Alliance and take part in all sorts of subversive operations against the New World State’s order in case his demands weren’t met. But alas, all his hysterical attempts to find a way back to his first and only true home were futile.

  In the end, Helmholtz Watson Esquire, as he’d been politely addressed by the Council’s secretariat in course of their correspondence, was left with no other choice but to bow down to his fate. He took up drinking and, being too much of a coward to take his own life, retired to drag out the rest of his miserable existence in the government-provided lodgings on the brink of utmost despair. Deep down in the dark and dreadfully dreary den of death and decay.

  By the time he finished his life story, the night had drowned the living room in darkness. Only the drowsy drumming of the rain on the dirt-black window screen outside disturbed the dead silence within. The whole living room looked dead, a dark, dusty tomb where the young and the old man were buried alive to the dirge-like drumming of the rain.

  Soon the rain stopped and the silence became almost absolute. Adam could barely hear the old man breathe the stifling air of the dead living room. And then he seemed to stop, too. Was he dead as well? Appalled at the thought, Adam held his own breath and listened. The sudden whirr of the wheelchair’s electric engine spurting out of the tense silence startled him. The chair clattered in the dark like a restless rattlesnake and died there.

  In a flash, a sharp ray of light carved a small, moon-shaped hole in the corner. Through the hole, the young man caught sight of the old man’s withered hand pulling away from a switched-on lamp on an otherwise empty writing desk. The old man’s eyes were tight shut as he turned his face away from the light, lingered a little and then, slowly lifted the heavy eyelids, piercing Adam with a pointed steel stare.

  He stared at him for so long that the young man could no longer conceal his uneasiness, starting to wriggle on the edge of the coach like a worm on a fishing hook. Suddenly, the stare slid off Adam, and, to his great relief, switched to the writing desk’s set of drawers. The next second, Helmholtz was already bending forward to open the bottom one. Having done so, he paused, panting over it, and finally retrieved a flat, rectangular-shaped object he then placed on top of the table with a heavy groan. Sitting back straight, he covered the object with his right hand and held it there, totally out of breath, while wordlessly waving his arm at Adam to approach.

  Driven not so much by this gesture as by his own growing curiosity, Adam rose to his feet and followed the waving arm. When he was close enough to tell the abhorrent liver spots on the old man’s wrinkly hand, he saw that it was lying on a thread-bound manuscript titled:

  “BRAVE NEW WORLD”

  Without looking in Adam’s direction, the old man picked the manuscript up from the writing desk and held it out to him.

  “Here, take it,” he said, panting between the phrases, “It’s the first and… I believe the last book I’ve ever written.”

  Adam took the book from the old man’s shaking hand and studied the title page.

  “Never published, of course,” continued Helmholtz, still panting, “though I did think of a penname for it… as far as you can see.”

  Under the title, typed in bold capital letters, there was a slightly smaller line that read:

  “by Aldous Huxley”

  The old man’s panting subsided to a series of spasmodic wheezes, with which he told Adam to take the book home and read it there from cover to cover.

  “It says everything about how your grandfather and I got into this mess,” he wheezed. “And tomorrow, when you return, and if I’m still breathing, I’ll tell you the rest of the truth about the place we come from.”

  Helmholtz paused, pondering, and then – “Now go!” – he exploded. “I am too tired to continue this conversation. I need my sleep! Henrietta – that disgrace of a woman assigned to spy on me as a nurse – will probably show you out. But even if she doesn’t, there’s hardly a chance the front door has changed its whereabouts that much.”

  With these words, the wilted shadow of the man that had once been blooming Helmholtz Watson wheeled out of the dead-looking living room into a even deader-looking bedroom.

  For some time, the young man stood still and totally at a loss, listening to the chair’s electric drone die down in the dusty depths of the domicile. The whole house went dead-still. Not a sound. Only a couple of floor boards creaked under his barely visible feet heading for the front door.

  Just like the old man had said, the door hadn’t moved. Neither, for that matter, had Henrietta. Hiding in the darkness of the anteroom, she gnashed her sharp yellow teeth, hissing like a hungry snake at the sight of a mouse.

  Hurriedly, clutching the copy of the manuscript to his chest, Adam slipped by the snake’s spectral silhouette and, just as she seemed set to strike, shut the front door behind his own erased shadow.

  Chapter Three

  Once the officially timed orgy was over, the double doors of the fertilizing room burst open and out came first the flushed-up but clearly satisfied Director, and then the whole tail-like train of transsexual students, some still striving to slip into their shadow-grey, skin-tight, silicotton suits while walking.

  Outside in the garden it was still playtime, also known as Tiny Trans Time. It was set up specifically for small members of the community. Unlike its full-grown members, who sometimes had to work for the sake of the trans-human world, the smaller members were free to play as long as they wanted. Sometimes all the time – with breaks only for sleep, nutrition and correct conditioning – till they reached the age of full maturity. In the seventy-seventh summer of the Second Coming, with the aid of growth-stimulating hormones, it was officially pronounced to be fourteen years of age. It was also known as the age of Fording. The age of Freuding, on the other hand, was only four or five years and was frequently referred to as an age suitable for first sexual encounters.

  Thus, naked in the hot summer sun, six or seven hundred little lady-boys were running around with almost the same shrill yells over almost the same lawns, playing almost the same ball games or squatting silently in almost the same twos and threes among almost the same flowering shrubs that ordinary little boys and girls had been used to running around with, playing or squatting among in the time of the First Coming.

  As for the rest, the roses were in even bigger bloom than before, while experimental models of nightingales and cuckoos, crossbred into nightincuckoos and cuckoogales, and, of course, the latest achievement of post-gender gene-engineering production in form of the fantastical nightincuckoogale, were soliloquizing in tune in slightly bigger boscage among much tall
er and leafier lime trees.

  The air was humid, hot and horny with the hum of helicopters and hundreds of turned-on T-shaped toy vibrators.

  The Director and the students stood still for some time, watching the same game they themselves had just been playing. It was called “Tranny Train” and went on like this: twenty to thirty little transsexuals were grouped together in a circle, standing or squatting behind each other, with everyone holding a toy dildo or vibrator oiled with lube and trying to stick it into the anal orifice of the person in front of them before doing the same thing with their erected penises, thus training to become one totally united transsexual being.

  The game was played at almost all adult Trans Times as well as other community services. The number of participants varied from ten to as many as one could imagine. The latest official New World State record had been set exactly eleven years before that, in the sixty-sixth summer of the Second Coming in Rio de Janeiro in course of one of the annual Sex Parades, when one million two hundred and thirty-four thousand five hundred and sixty-seven people had been united in an almost perfectly round and constantly coiling coital circle. The next attempt to beat this record was scheduled for the fourteenth of August either in San Paulo or San Francisco that same summer. The grand rehearsal was planned to take place on the twenty-fifth of July. The final choice between the two cities was to be made at the upcoming Annual Summit of the New World State’s Chief Caretaking Continent Controllers’ Council in New York City.

  “Strange,” mused the Director as they turned, slowly moving away from the scene, “strange to think that even during the days of Our FordorFreud’s First Coming such games were purely physically not possible to be played. Unless of course only by men. But then such men were branded and bedeviled by the bigoted majority who believed that these playful practices were either against so-called Nature or so-called God as Nature’s Constructor and Conditioner, aka “Creator,” the Director marked the word in the air with the index and middle fingers of both hands, symbolizing inverted commas. “As if human nature was not polymorphously perverted in its essence, as we all now know. And as if there was some other Nature’s Constructor, Conditioner or “Creator” – the finger commas once again highlighted the airy word, – “but Scientific Reason prophesied by Our FordorFreud.”