Sex Quests: Two Tales of Futures Possible

SEX QUESTS

Two Tales of Futures Possible:

Gene Raid

Natural Woman

Theodore Irvin Silar

Copyright 2017 Theodore Irvin Silar

Published by Theodore Irvin Silar at Smashwords

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Gene Raid

Natural Woman

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GENE RAID

Limitation now; bounty forever: Bounty now; limitation forever.

I read that famous chiasmus and tried to rip away the cobwebs in which time and familiarity had shrouded them.

The Book went on to say how the world my great-great-great grandfather, Erland Josephson, had been born into had been a world of limitless bounty; how it had become a world of boundless limitation, and how meticulousness, self-control, and routine, far from shackling him, had set him free.

For generations, the people of Erlandsland had taken Erland’s word as gospel. The once-vague abstraction, limitation, to us had come to mean something very concrete. It had come to limn the contours of our very lives. An ecologist by trade (eek, not eck, he takes pains to inform us), 200 years ago Erland had led a band of followers to our isolated valley and spent the rest of a long life calculating the ideal blend of people and activities, plants and animals, this place could support: an optimum of 1,377 people, a maximum of one child per person, 2700-2750 caribou, 760-770 moose, 35-55 wolves, the butchering of two wild boar (the pigs they had brought had gone feral soon after their arrival) allotted per family per year, two lambs likewise, one wild egg theft per multi-egg next, this plot for corn and beans and squash, that acreage for yams and greens, this for flax, that for cabbage, so many grapevines to be trained up so many oaks growing on such and such south faces, windbreaks here, alfalfa-corn rotation there, on page 781, a painstakingly methodical calendar of sewing and harvest times, on 124, woodcutting limitations reckoned to the tree branch, on 651, dung collection and apportionment.

We had kept these Limitations religiously and our faith had been rewarded. Erland’s foresight had proven itself time and time again, down to the choosing of the site itself.

Though I’d seen it all my life, every morning when I walked out into the day, Beauty once more would shock me like ice-cold snowmelt in the face. To the west rose a mountain, blue-green with forests of pine and fir and spruce. From out of its flanks spread a watershed, a valley, its slopes clad in deciduous maple, hickory, and oak, beech, birch, and walnut, its floor a stream fed by many rivulets, a stream we called, for some long-lost Erlandian reason I am not privy to, The Nile, a stream that descended and broadened into a floodplain where deer wandered and moose lurked in the oxbows. At its eastern reach, impassable rapids surging through the steep walls of rugged escarpments gave outlet to the floodplains’ waters.

Our home was not inaccessible. Or we would not have been here. But it was hidden. Which was why Erland chose it. Thanks to our isolation, intruders seldom bothered us.

I was surprised to read about Erland’s surprise at the abundance he had found here. It seems that tomatoes the size of one’s head were not common where he had come from. Rich loessal and volcanic soils, freed forever from the permafrost they had been locked in less than a century before his time, coupled with endless summer days, made for such an embarrassment of vegetables it was sometimes easier to feed our cows turnips and spinach than hay.

As Erland had stipulated, most of us lived in caves carved into rock lining either side of the upper valley, and a good idea it was. A little dung fire sufficed for weathering the coldest winter. Some hardy souls made do with less than that.

The Limitations were adamant about our keeping the livestock in caves far distant from human habitation. No one knew why, until the year before the Gene Raid, when one morning the Keeper opened the cavebarn door to see all our chickens lying dead or dying of some mysterious illness. We entombed them in there. Thank the Lord none of us got sick.

The loss of the chickens was not the only change time had wrought on Erlandsland since the time of Erland. Over the years, the musk oxen had moved higher and higher into the mountains until they had disappeared entirely. I barely remembered having seen them once, battling in rut on a snow-patched slope my father had taken me to on one of his many vacations from his duties.

Also, our cows were breeding poorly, while our goats, on the other hand, had got loose and were multiplying on high mountain crags like rabbits.

Such things started me wondering whether honoring the letter of Erland’s word might not be betraying the spirit. Did we need domesticated stock at all, seeing as how our crops were so much more prolific than Erland seemed to have planned for? What with our corn and beans, our yams and greens, our walnuts, our acorns, our chestnuts, our wild game, muscle-building food was hardly in short supply. Though we might have come to miss the cheese, as we had come to miss the eggs. I filed the thought for future maundering.

♦

Concluding my reading in Erland for the day, I closed the book, took my hardanger down from the wall, blew out the candle, and walked out into the bright day. My grandmother was sitting on the front terrace of our cave, rocking away in her rocking chair, blinking away in the summer sunlight, and puffing away at her peace-pipe. I patted her on the head and made for the swinging bridge.

Where are you going? she snarled, as was her wont.

Time for court, I said.

Don’t dawdle when it’s over, she said. I want to talk to you.

Court was held outdoors on a terrace before the spacious cave of Jan Hansson, a man who had been judge since before my father was born. I was one of the first to arrive. I began to play the Come to Court song and pretty soon Hans Janson had joined me on the bagpipes. We were really beginning to smoke when the loudest throat-clearing in all creation, Old Jan’s way of calling court to order, cut our coda short.

There were two defendants this session, repeat offenders if ever there were. The first, Smilla Smithsdaughter, stood sniffling to the side of the bench, a swaddled baby clenched in her arms. A big, round-eyed, red-faced woman, she did not seem to be entirely clear as to what was going on. She had borne four still-extant children, all deficient in mind and body, she had suffered innumerable miscarriages, and now here she was returned again to taunt Limitation with her own limitations.

What are we to do with you, Smilla? the judge asked pointlessly. Smilla lowered her eyes and shook her head.

How on earth do you get pregnant under house arrest?

Chuckles sounded from the back of the crowd. Old Jan cleared his throat menacingly and looked imperious.

I don’t know, I spoke up, and all eyes turned to me, but her jailers might.

Old Jan worked his jaws a while, hesitating long enough to make it seem his idea and not mine.

Fritz Erikson? Carl Erikson? See me after court. The fatuous self-satisfaction of the two brothers flanking Smilla became slack-jawed consternation.

As for you, young lady, even the mercy of this court has its Limitations. The child will be exposed.

Smilla leaped back, her desperate eyes darting like a cornered chipmunk’s.

I walked up to her, making gentling noises, and pulled back the deerskin that shielded her silent baby’s face.

I don’t know, I said, but I don’t think that will be necessary, Judge.

I wondered if the poor deformed thing had ever been alive.

Back home with you, then, Smilla, pronounced Old Jan. After I have a talk with Fritz and Carl here, that is. And somebody try to part her from it before it constitutes a health hazard.

The next defendant, Manfred Friedrichson, stood forth. He was so handsome the torrent of sighs and rude remarks he evoked from the court unleashed a truly stupendous throat-clearing. Manny was a hunter, and, while he was born to his job, he had no concept of Limitation.

14 deer over Limit. Two moose. Two elk. One bear. 25 rabbit. Three boar, two of them female. Do you know how to count, Mr. Friedrichson?

Ho-ho-ho-ho, was Manny’s only reply. Ho-ho-ho-ho was always Manny’s reply. He was the jolliest person in all Erland. I am not sure to this day whether his good nature arose out of wisdom or stupidity. He knew his craft, that was for sure.

The court throws up its hands at you, said Old Jan. We jail you and you break out. A good whipping is in order, but whipping is against Erland. Our only recourse is exile.

A baleful moan rose up from the women assembled, which a stern throat-clearing resolved into a desolate whimpering. Old Jan ruminated, looking sideways at me. I made a bound-wrist gesture.

Back to jail with you then, he concluded. Tie him up tight this time. And put a rock or something in front of the door.

♦

You must do something, said my grandmother. She had halted her furious rocking and blinking and puffing to fix me with her nastiest scowl.

Why me? I asked. There was altogether too much responsibility being laid on my shoulders as it was, it seemed to me.

You are the Ecologist, she said.

But I don’t want to be the Ecologist, I said. It was true, I’d fished with the fishers, counted deer with the deer-keepers, planted crops, pruned trees, hunted boar, cleaned caves, picked tomatoes, midwived babies, grown, processed, spun, and weaved the flax for my own shirt, and I had read my way through all of Erland several times. It is the tradition in our family.

But I didn’t want to be the Ecologist. I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to write deathless musical dramas for the festivals.

What you want doesn’t matter, she said. They follow you.

It was true. Nineteen or not, what I said, they did. Which might have given me airs, if not for my grandmother. They listened to her, too. So did I.

And you know why they follow you. Me.

My grandmother is not a native Erlandslander. She was discovered in a cave one morning 60 years ago drinking cow’s milk from the udder, a dirty little wild girl. She says she is an Ojibway from the South and she remembers all the customs. Personally, I think she makes them up. She certainly looks like an Indian, though, with the long, black hair, and the cheekbones, and the fierceness. On the other hand, I had never seen another Indian, and so she might as well have been one, as far as I knew.

I take after her in looks, though my eyes are blue, like those of my mother, and my hair is a dark blonde that bleaches in the summer. My mother, they tell me, was a hard-working, devoted, generous woman, who, in her time, had simultaneously held the posts of Librarian and Genealogist, positions upon which my sister in