Flesh (27 page)

“Because of that girl,” Churchill said. “Stagg might want to take her with us.”

“Why don’t we just put her in the tank, too,” Yastzhembski said. “After all, it’s rather delicate hairsplitting, isn’t it? Being sensitive about her feelings and yet kidnaping dozens of babies and women?”

“We don’t know them. And we’re doing the babies, and the Pants-Elf women a favor by getting them out of this savage world. But we do know her, and we know that she and Stagg were going to get married. We’ll wait and see what Stagg has to say about it.”

Morning came at last. The men ate breakfast and did various chores until Calthorp summoned them.

“Time,” he said. He filled a hypodermic syringe, plunged it into Stagg’s huge biceps, swabbed the invisible break, and then stood back.

Churchill had gone to Mary Casey and told her that Stagg would awaken very soon. It was a measure of her love for Stagg that she had the courage to enter the ship. She did not look around her as she was led through the corridors filled with what to her must have been weird and evil-looking devices. She looked straight ahead, at Churchill’s broad back.

Then she was at Stagg’s side, weeping.

Stagg mumbled something. His eyelids fluttered, became still again.

His deep breathing resumed.

Calthorp said loudly, “Wake up, Pete!”

He lightly slapped his captain’s cheek.

Stagg’s eyes opened. He looked around at them, at Calthorp, Churchill, Steinborg, Al-Masyuni, Lin, Yastzhembski, Chandra, and looked puzzled. When he saw Mary Casey, he was startled.

“What the hell happened?” he said, trying to roar but succeeding only in croaking. “Did I black out? Are we on Earth? We must be! Otherwise, that woman wouldn’t be on board. Unless you Don Juans had her stowed away all this time.”

It was Churchill who first grasped what had happened to

Stagg.

“Captain,” he said, “what’s the last thing you remember?”

“Remember? Why, you know what I ordered just before I blacked out! Land on Earth, of course!”

Mary Casey became hysterical. Churchill and Calthorp took her out of the room and Calthorp gave her a sedative. She fell asleep in two minutes. Then Calthorp and the first mate went into the control room.

“It’s too early to tell for certain,” Calthorp said, “but I don’t think he’s suffered any loss of I.Q. He’s no idiot; but that part of his brain which contained the memory of the last five and a half months was destroyed. It’s been repaired, so it’s as good as ever, but the memory content is gone. To him, we’ve just returned from Vixa, and we’re preparing to descend to Earth.”

“I thought so,” Churchill said. “Now, what are we going to do with Mary Casey?”

“Tell her the situation and allow her to decide for herself. She may want to try to make him fall in love with her.”

“We’ll have to tell her about Virginia. And Robin. She may not like the idea.”

“No time like the present,” Calthorp said. “I’ll have to give her a shot to bring her out of her sleep. Then I’ll tell her. She can make up her mind now. We’ve no time to dillydally.”

He left.

Churchill sat thinking in the pilot’s seat. He wondered what the future held. Certainly events wouldn’t be boring. He would have troubles enough of his own, but he would not be in Stagg’s shoes for anything. To have fathered hundreds of children in the wildest and most extended orgy a man could dream of, yet be innocent of any knowledge of it! To go to Vega II and there be presented with two babies by different women, and perhaps a third if Mary Casey came along. To be told what had happened—and yet be absolutely unable to visualize it, perhaps not to believe it even when a dozen witnesses swore it was true! To have incidents of which he had no remembrance at all hurled at him during the inevitable marital quarrels.

No, thought Churchill, he would not care to be Stagg. He was content to be Churchill, though that was going to be bad enough when Robin awakened.

He looked up. Calthorp had returned.

“What’s the verdict?” Churchill said.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Calthorp said. “Mary is coming with us.”

Thunder, lightning, and rain.

A small tavern in a neutral area on the border of Deecee and Caseyland. Three women sitting at a table in a private room in the rear of the tavern. Their heavy hooded robes hanging from pegs on the walls. All three wearing tall black conical hats.

One, Virginia, the younger sister of the woman on the
Terra.
Now, like her older sister when Stagg came to Washington, maiden priestess of the holy city. Tall, beautiful, hair like honey, eyes so deep blue, nose curved like a delicate hawk’s, lips like a wound, exposed breasts full and upthrusting.

One, the abbess of a great sisterhood of Caseyland. Thirty-five years old, graying hair, heavy-breasted, protruding stomach, and, under the robe, broken veins on the legs, tokens of childbirth, though she is sworn to chastity. In public, she prays to Columbus the Father, and the Son, and the Mother. In private, she prays to Columbia, the Goddess, the Great White Mother.

One, Alba, white-haired, toothless, withered hag, successor to the Alba slain by Stagg.

They drink from tall glasses filled with red wine.
Or is it wine?

Virginia, the maiden, asks if they have lost. The starmen have escaped them and taken with them the Sunhero and her dear sister, heavy with his child.

The gray-haired matron replies that they never lose. Did she think that her sister would allow the thought of the Goddess to die in her child’s mind? Never!

But Stagg, the maiden protests, has also taken with him a devout maiden of Caseyland, a worshiper of the Father.

Alba, the old hag, cackles and says, Even if he takes the religion of the Caseys as his, young and beautiful but ignorant girl, do you not know that the Goddess has already won in Caseyland? The people pay thin-blooded homage to the Father and the Son on their Sabbath, but it is to the Mother they pray most fervently. It is Her statues that fill the land, She who fills their thoughts. What does it matter whether the Goddess is called Columbia or some other name? If She cannot enter the front door, She enters the back.

But Stagg has escaped us, the maiden protests.

No, the matron replies, he did not escape us or the Great Route. He was born in the south and went north, and he met Alba and was killed. It does not matter that he slew a human being called Alba, since Alba lives today in this old flesh that sits with us. And he was killed, and buried, and he rose again, as it was told. And he is like a new-born baby, for I have heard that he has no memory of the life he spent on the Great Route.

Pay attention to what Alba says about the Goddess always winning even when She loses! It will not matter if he rejects Virginia and chooses Mary. He is ours. Mother Earth goes with him to the stars.

They talk of other things and make their plans. Then, though the thunder and lightning rage, and the rain falls, they leave the tavern. Now their faces are shadowed by hoods so no man will know who they are. They pause for a moment before the parting of the ways, one south, one north, one to remain halfway between them.

The maiden says, When shall we three meet again?

The matron replies, When man is born and dies and is born.

The hag replies, When the battle is lost and won.

Flesh
is an evocative title. Depending on the reader it can be either an innocuous title or a provocative one, bringing to mind images of perhaps raw meat, or of bare, naked flesh. For those of a more religious bent the title may bring to mind certain biblical passages such as Mark 14:38, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” or perhaps from John 1:14, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

While both biblical passages are certainly applicable to the novel, the latter is perhaps most apt. John refers to the incarnation, of God as taking on flesh to become his own son, Jesus Christ. By doing so God created an integral part of the Trinity, which consists of The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit. The Trinity is of course one of the basic tenets of Christian faith.

It may seem strange to start with a religious digression but although
Flesh
is a tale of a post-apocalyptic future, like Walter Miller’s
A Canticle for Leibowitz,
it is also a religious novel. Miller’s novel portrayed the Roman Catholic Church as an enduring institution that survives through post-apocalyptic barbarity to the dawn of a new nuclear age. Through civilization’s fall and rise the Catholic Church is cast as the guardian of knowledge for a human race that has yet to learn from its own stupidity.

Although
A Canticle for Leibowitz
has a religious background it is not quite as religious as
Flesh
because there is an undercurrent of cynicism that runs through the book. The figure at the center of the novel, St. Leibowitz, was a Jewish atomic scientist who became a monk after the apocalypse in order to preserve his own life and also to help preserve scientific knowledge from neo-Luddites determined to eradicate the learning that they believe led to the destruction of civilization. As such, the religious theme takes on a tone of pragmatism that makes it seem weaker than the religious tone in
Flesh.

As you have seen in the novel, (that is unless you are reading the afterword first—if so, I strongly suggest you read the novel first) the reader is flung full on into the religious world of
Flesh
. Even before the main characters are introduced, we are allowed to partake, vicariously, in one of the important rites of this new world. In fact, when we are introduced to the main protagonist of the novel, he is simply portrayed as a participant in this rite, rather than as one of the novel’s central characters. We quickly learn within a few paragraphs that the ceremony takes place in Washington, D.C., that the religion worships a Great White Mother, that the rituals are violent and often fatal to the participants, that the society seems to be matriarchal, and that names and figures from American history and legend are symbolic to this new religion.

In the first chapter, we have learned through inference rather than direct knowledge that the Sunhero, a man named Stagg, was part of a crew from a spaceship that landed in Deecee. The second chapter goes into more specifics about the ship and crew. The ship,
Terra
, was an interstellar exploration craft which had left the Earth eight hundred years prior to the start of the novel. The crew had been kept young through the combination of cryonics and relativistic travel. They returned to a devastated world where civilization was barely at an Iron Age level, where society was run by a matriarchy, and where the main religion was a fertility-based pantheon.

The religion was a syncretic religion comprised of ancient elements combined with borrowing from a distantly remembered American culture. Because the religious rites were so alien to what the spacemen were used to, and because the religion contained elements that seemed, to them at least, ludicrous, they had a hard time taking the religion, and its adherents, seriously.

The ancient part of the religion was based on worship of the Triple Goddess, a religion which some believe antedated patriarchal religions. In short, the supreme deity is the Earth mother, The Great White Goddess, a goddess of fertility who manifests in three physical incarnations representing her stages in life: the Nymph or Virgin, the Matron, and the Crone. They also represent the three stages of life: youth, maturity, and old age. The male aspects of these are incarnated in a singular individual, the Sunhero or Sacred King, who is both the son and husband of the Great Goddess.

The Sunhero personally undergoes within a fixed time period, which varies from culture to culture, the aspects of youth, mature man, and elder. In the case of the religion of
Flesh
he is born at the Winter Solstice and dies at the Summer Solstice. As seen in the novel, his birth and descent into decrepitude are done in a combination of rite and medical procedure. During his rebirth he undergoes a ritual birth and has the Sunhero’s antler grafted onto his skull; during his last rite he is blinded, scalped, and castrated.

Although I can not say with absolute certainty, since Mr. Farmer is unfortunately no longer with us to confirm my argument, it seems quite likely that
Flesh’s
Triple Goddess religion was inspired by the works of Sir James George Frazer, Robert Graves, and Joseph Campbell.

Campbell’s contribution to
Flesh
was in how Farmer framed the plotline of his main protagonist, Peter Stagg, having him literally undergo what Campbell called the Road of Trials, in which the Hero must make a journey filled with perils in order to reap his rewards. Farmer ritualized this journey by making Deecee’s Sunhero travel the Great Route from Deecee to Albany which mythologically symbolized the journey from birth to death. Ordinarily the Sunhero merely traveled the route and participated in the planting rites of the various towns along the way; however, since Peter Stagg was the Hero of the novel, Farmer had to insert both internal and external conflicts to plague him along the way.

Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
was the work that theorized about the mythic archetype of the Sacred King and discussed the importance of his role as both progenitor and regenerator. As the fleshly husband to the Sacred Goddess, he progenerated offspring and his sacrifice of blood and flesh was used to regenerate the earth; thus, he fertilized Mother Earth in death and in life.

The Golden Bough
inspired Robert Graves, who was a renowned classicist as well as a poet. Graves used both of these disciplines to expand on Frazer’s concepts and uncover what he perceived as the hidden truth behind myth. His researches culminated in his theory about a prehistoric religion based on the Triple Goddess which permeated throughout Europe. He theorized that eventually the kings balked at being sacrificed and began using substitutes to keep their lives and power. As the kings remained in power longer, they created dynastic reigns which led to the matriarchal religions being supplanted by patriarchal religions.