by K. W. Jeter
“I am certain it facilitates the process,” was my observation, “but you must admit that there have been at least a few who have managed to become similarly depraved, without the benefit of ample finances.”
“Pooh.” Fusible’s plump hand waved my words away. “Petty criminals and lunatics, or so they are regarded by both the rabble and the authorities, and each as likely to wind up incarcerated behind stone walls. What is illegal for those without funds, becomes merely eccentric or even somewhat charming when it is practiced by the wealthy. Do you doubt me?”
“Of course not.” As yet unsure of what importance the other man might be to my gamey future prospects, I considered it best to not insult him. “If I’m a bit of the agnostic persuasion on the matter, I am certain you can forgive me. Coming from a lesser economic sphere, I don’t have as much experience along these lines as you do.”
“Soon you shall!” The perpetual enthusiasm resident in Fusible’s breast flushed a roseate hue across his wide, wattled face. “And immediately—come, let me introduce you to the exact exemplar of which I speak.”
The dregs slopped from my glass as Fusible tugged me by the arm across the crowded drawing-room. Within moments, I found myself gazing into a fiercely bearded visage, surmounting a muscular, sun-bronzed figure clad only in rudely knotted animal skins. I might well have been face-to-face with one of our primitive ancestors, a cave-dweller from the epochs when great tusked beasts ponderously steered their shaggy bulks around a verdantly primeval landscape, daring lesser creatures armed with sticks and rocks to fall upon them for the sake of a raw cutlet torn from their flanks.
“Viscount Carnomere . . .” A casual and chummy hand was laid upon the gentleman’s bared shoulder, as Fusible directed his attention toward me. “Here’s an interesting fellow, whose acquaintance you should make. May I introduce our renowned friend, Mr. George Dower?”
“Dower, eh?” A disordered, ursine eyebrow rose as Carnomere regarded me with no less mistrust than he seemed to bestow upon the world at large. “You’re the fellow, I take it, who’s supposed to make this whole ungodly lot wealthier than it already is?”
“So I have been led to believe.” By now, I was no longer surprised by every person I met seeming to be well-versed in those allegedly secretive conspiracies into which Stonebrake had recruited me. “Time will tell, if such is to be the case.”
“Not worth fretting about, as far as I’m bloody concerned.” Tangled, unkempt hair framed either side of the dyspeptic Carnomere’s face, the unshorn locks mingling with a beard so similarly primeval as to have actual bits of twigs and other earthen debris embedded in it. “All this grubbing about for money is but a footnote to the history of our dull-witted species’ decline.”
Fusible turned to me with an easy smile. “The viscount holds some amusing notions about modern society. Of which, he is more than capable of informing you.”
“Let no man say I did not warn him.” The scowl darkened behind the matted beard, as storm clouds might have blotted out the sun beyond hillsides fringed with wild brambles. “There’ll be a reckoning soon enough, for the folly of our ways.”
I edged away from the man. The resemblance between him and one of our harshly dispositioned forebears was heightened by the weapon he carried, a rude spear tipped with a stone blade that might have been fashioned by the efforts of his own teeth, so rough and jagged were its edges. Despite the implement’s crudity, I had no desire to have its effectiveness tested upon my hide.
“Tell him, Carnomere.” My host egged on the other. “It’s grand stuff,” he assured me. “Puts the blood back intobloody-minded, that’s the truth.”
“ ’Tis the fault of agriculture; there’s the truth for you.” Viscount Carnomere appeared to require little coaxing for him to launch upon his familiar diatribe. “That is the turning point in the road of Time, at which we went wrong. Educated folk might grumble all they wish, about the ravages that this new-fangled allegiance to Steam and its attendant workings is bestowing upon both English countryside and society—”
“And if they did,” Fusible drily interjected, “they would be criticizing exactly that which has feathered your own nest so handsomely.”
The glare that Carnomere shot him was so ill-tempered, I believed for a moment that it might be accompanied with a thrust of the spear sufficient to skewer his lordship en brochette.
“You needn’t remind me of those sins which already weigh upon my conscience.” Carnomere’s growl was so deeply chthonic, it might well have presaged the ground splitting open beneath his bare, blackened feet. “You would be better off searching the grimy pit of your own soul, while there is yet time.”
It struck me that the viscount’s rugged semblance might be due to his being a soi-disant biblical prophet, of the variety that eked out a subsistence on locusts and wild honey, when at home in their bleak desert caves, rather than expounding upon coming dooms to bemused townspeople. In this supposition I proved to be not far wrong, as he expounded further upon his all-encompassing theories.
“What you must see, Dower—” As with many freethinkers, he evidently regarded even the slightest honorifics of address as unseemly affectations. “What all men will see someday—is that all the evils of our present mode of life arise from those fundamental errors made upon the Sumerian river deltas by our deluded ancestors, millennia ago. There was Adam’s fall, when first he ground between his teeth that which would enslave him to the sweating ways of modern husbandry. Foolish bastards, the lot of ’em!”
“Pardon me?” It seemed as if he were inveighing against an army of Adams, munching en masse upon orchards of damning apples. “I’m not quite sure that I see the connection between original sin and steam power—”
“Bother your steam power, man. Hardly worth speaking of, if one is tallying the errors of the human race. This! This is what I’m referring to.” An equally fur-bearing pouch, fashioned from the hide of some smaller animal, hung from a tendon-like strap knotted about Carnomere’s waist; he rummaged in it and extracted an object the size of his fist, which he thrust under my nose. “From this is where all the evils stem, which afflict befuddled Mankind!”
I drew back in order to focus upon the item displayed upon his palm. For a moment, I thought it might be some variety of bath sponge; then I realized that it was a hunk of common bread, stiffened with age and spotted with blue and green mould.
“Really, Carnomere—” From beside me, a note of disgust sounded in Lord Fusible’s voice. “Isn’t it about time you acquired a new prop for your speechifying? That one’s seen better days.”
An odour of powdery decay rose from the bread, such that it might be considered edible only by the most desperate of London’s poor.
“You have my apologies,” I apologized even as the distaste with which I regarded the crumbling hunk was no doubt evident in my gaze. “But I’m not quite following the import of your words—”
“Open your eyes!” The bearded figure thrust the substance in question closer to my face. “It’s bread!”
“Yes, I see that—”
“Wheat! Grain! Agriculture!” His imprecations became even more forceful. “That is the curse laid upon our brow.” Crumbs dispersed in the drawing-room’s scented air as his grasp tightened upon the spotted lump. “Before the introduction of this poisonous concoction, human beings roamed free upon the face of the Earth. They ate their fill of Nature’s bounty, and lived in tranquil equality, with no man the master of another.” A fervent tone heightened Carnomere’s voice; his eyes misted, as though contemplating that vanished realm of communitarian bliss. “Now a polished boot stands upon the throat of the masses, their hollow-eyed children starving for exactly that which enslaves them.”
“Bravo! Go to it!” Fusible clapped his pudgy hands together in delight. “I must confess, I greatly admire the passion with which some of my fellow oligarchs inveigh against those social arrangements that keep them comfortably elevated above the rabble. Seems deucedly sp
orting of them.”
“You mock me, sir.” The viscount turned his fierce and shag-browed glare upon the other. “A day will come when we are all cast down to the level we deserve.”
“Perhaps.” A passing butler had renewed the wineglass in Fusible’s hand. “I await the event with little if any trepidation.”
“But those primitive lives of which you speak—” I attempted to steer the conversation back to safer and less personal territory. “Were they not, as the philosophers state, rather on the nasty, brutish, and short side?”
“Stuff and nonsense, man.” Small creatures seemed to be evicted from Viscount Carnomere’s tangled locks as he decisively shook his head. “Rhetoric from those who would keep our species shackled to the processes of the farming combines and their masters. Who are, I would have you know, mere parvenus in the course of human history, recently arrived to work their iniquities. Even the most learned biblical scholars concede that post-lapsarian Mankind existed in the Earth’s nourishing plains and gardens for millennia before the Mesopotamian basin was bound up and given over to the planting and harvesting of these wicked grains.” He returned the mouldy lump of bread to his pouch, the better to focus my attention by laying a prophetic hand upon my shirtfront. “Even as we speak, men of the greatest learning are examining the bones that have been dug up from our ancestors’ stone-laden graves. And what do they find?”
“I have no idea.”
“Exactly this, Dower: that our forebears were of sturdier frame and longer lives, free of the debilitating infirmities that have reduced the representatives of our modern civilization to such a rank and puny condition. Go to the streets, man, and observe your fellow creatures!” One bare, dirt- streaked hand pointed to the townhouse’s night-filled windows. “Witness their degenerate state! Can you really credit that these bantam cockneys and their pale, fragile offspring are the zenith of human evolution? Tenacious and feisty they might very well be—and given the harsh, scrabbling conditions they endure, ’tis little wonder that they are so—but their matchstick bones can be snapped between one’s thumb and forefinger, as though they were but kindling. And of course, this febrile phenomenon is not limited to the British Empire; one might find our natives’ scrawny cousins in every land in which the demon Agriculture has taken root.”
I entertained no desire to debate the contention with him. “Am I correct in assuming that there is some remedy that you propose?”
“Remedy, you say? Rather more than that, you may rest assured. What is needed is more than some slight and ultimately ineffectual remediation.”
“You’ll love this,” noted Fusible as he plucked another glass from the silver tray passing near him.
Viscount Carnomere pressed forward, in the full vigour of those primeval virtues he embodied in himself. “It’s Revolution that is required.” His crusted hand thrust with greater firmness against my chest, staggering me backward a step. “Nothing less than a complete renovation and restoration of those dietary practices which once ennobled our species.”
“No more than that?” I confess to have felt a little disappointment at his pronouncement. Despite the ferocity of his primitive appearance, he seemed suddenly diminished in my regard. Were all his shouts and seething, teeth-clenched condemnations nothing more than an over-enthused variation on the fastidious sermons of those cranks pushing forward their brothy cures for Mankind’s ills? “I take it that you would have us eat no more bread. Please refrain from bringing out that example you showed before. What would you have us consume in its place?”
“I would forbid you not just bread—that filthy stuff!—but all grains of any sort; in truth, any product of human cultivation.” To my concern, Carnomere reached again into the crudely fashioned pouch and extracted a darker and seemingly more fibrous object. He raised it to his mouth, his impressively white and sturdy teeth sinking into its mass, and I recognized it as some sort of dried animal flesh, such as the tribes of distant lands render for their sustenance. Chewing with evident relish, he offered the gobbet to me. I declined with a politely raised hand. “You do yourself a disservice,” he said as he took another bite for himself. “This is what you need, to restore yourself to the full flush of radiant health. Meat! That’s the prescription for all Mankind—meat, I say!”
“Very well—”
“It is what our forefathers ate, and upon which they flourished!” His eyes widened with fervour. “Even now, there are tribes in farflung corners of the globe, who have not fallen under those delusions that compel their civilized brethren to grub rows and trenches in the hard, stubborn soil, all for compelling grasses to spring up and be ground between our molars, as though we were cows rather than free and heroic human beings. And we are informed by our own adventurers and travelers, when they come upon such peoples, either in the frozen north or the more temperate lands about the Equator, that they are not only possessed of more robust health than ourselves, but of more innate happiness as well. For the economic strictures required by agricultural practices have not forced them to divide into masters and peasants—pharaohs with whips and flails in their hands, sneering at the masses toiling in the riparian muck, all to fill the granaries upon which so much self-glorifying magnificence is based. Rather, our so-called primitive cousins have no call to lord it over one another, being content as they are to catch one of the running beasts of the wild, rend its flesh from the bones, and share it amongst themselves.”
He stopped for breath, creating a hiatus enduring long enough for me to hazard an enquiry. “And these wild tribespeople of which you speak—are they entirely carnivorous, by nature or inclining habit?”
“For the most part.” Carnomere shrugged. “They might throw in the odd bit of fruit on occasion, and whatever other vegetation is capable of being consumed in its raw state, with no necessity of cooking or otherwise moderating the toxins that make so many other plants unfit for the human digestion. But the blood that courses through the veins of such fortunate people is infused with the strength that comes from animate creatures. Of all forms and sizes, you must bear in mind; a wren is hardly the smallest fluttering bit to make its way into their grateful stomachs. There is a good deal of nutrition to be found in insects and those other creatures that we ignorantly describe as worthless vermin.”
“I will try to remember that.”
“You should.” Carnomere’s temper had ebbed to a more affable state. “For if you do, you will be in excellent company. The enthusiasm for a healthily primitive mode of existence is sweeping through all levels of society; it is hardly limited to those such as myself, with the financial wherewithal to indulge in practices that the unenlightened might regard as dangerously perverse, rather than merely eccentric.”
A singular vision appeared in my mind’s eye. “Do they all . . .” I searched for a polite manner of framing my enquiry. “Garb themselves as you do? That is . . . the furs and such-like.”
“Much depends upon the weather,” allowed Carnomere. “Our ancestors were a sturdier breed, and could turn their faces toward degrees of inclement weather at which we, their weaker progeny, would quail. I confess that as comfortable as these rugged furs might be while standing in a well-heated drawing-room, during the winter months I have been known to supplement them with a full overcoat and a pair of waterproof Indian rubber boots, at least when out of doors.”
“Very wise, I’m sure.”
“Yes, given my age,” conceded the viscount, “and the late stage in life in which I discovered the manifest virtues of primitive manners and a carnivorous diet. But I have hopes for the generations to come. Especially those of the lower classes, as we characterize their position in the social order. Accustomed as they are, both male and female, to hardships of which we the elite generally know little, the return to ancestral ways is more easily accomplished by them, and with a deal less grumbling and whining every time the sky clouds over. I am greatly heartened by the advent of these meatpunks, as they are sometimes described.”
“Pardon me? ‘Meatpunks’—did I hear that aright?”
“Amusing, isn’t it?” From behind his effulgent beard, Carnomere bestowed upon me a smile more suited to an Afric savage. “The coinage might be ill-educated—I would have preferred something derived from one of the classical tongues—but evidences a certain rude cleverness. As did the person from whom I first heard it, who assured me similar formulations will soon be an essential element of the Queen’s English—combining as they do an obvious prefix with the syllable I have been given to understand connotes a somewhat raucous enthusiasm for that upon which the greater society still looks askance.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “there are reasons for such a negative regard.”
“Mere prejudice; that is all.” Carnomere thumped the less lethal end of his spear upon the floor. “And an unthinking faith in the over- vaunted Future, which continually entices us with its promises, then cruelly disappoints as it shambles into reality as the dull, threadbare Present we must endure. The meatpunks, by contrast, hurl themselves headlong into a glorious, blood-reddened Past. If, in their ragged fancies, they get a few details wrong . . .” He shrugged. “Such seems an error easily overlooked.”
Another vision rolled through my inward perception, as though the curve of bone behind my brow were the fluttering panel upon which a magic lantern show was displayed. For a moment, I did not see the glittering, affable assemblage in a fashionable room all about me, but instead the dark London streets, the night barely interrupted by feebly guttering lamps. The shadows that wavered across the locked and boarded storefronts were cast by the flaring torches held aloft by a gleeful laughing mob, all clad as Carnomere was, in ragged furs and tribal paraphernalia, their tangled, matted locks streaming behind them as they ran; their faces shone with the bright grease of recent feasting, the bloodied heads of the aristocracy’s lapdogs and housecats swaying as pendants, gnawed rib bones strung and clattering upon these new savages’ bared chests. The shrieks and cries of the resurgent ages swept over me, ocean-like, until I could hear nothing else. . . .
