Heresy Read online

Heresy

  Bryan Murphy

  Copyright 2013 Bryan Murphy

  Dark Future Books

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, places or events is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author’s imagination.

  Thank you for downloading this free e-book. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for your support.

  To discover more work by Bryan Murphy, visit:

  https://www.bryanmurphy.eu

  ******

  Table of Contents

  Heresy

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Goodbye, Padania

  Other books by Bryan Murphy online

  Connect with Bryan Murphy online

  ******

  Heresy

  Dougal does not know that it is the Year of the Cod’s Roe Heresy. He knows that it is the fourth day of the fourth month. He knows that the great event of this day is his own wedding celebration. He knows he is happy. Cod’s roe will not be served. His diet-consciousness is high. For a southerner.

  Dougal has been lonely these past years, cut off from social engagement with men and women of his own age by his insistence on remaining a bachelor. Lonely, but resolved. Determined to get ahead by building a reputation for achievement and conformity in major matters. Now he is cementing that reputation in this area of life, too. He imagines his future: how he will be a good husband, a loving father. That kind of thing.

  The noise of movement reaches Dougal from the back of the hall. His appointed bride must be approaching at last. He glances round to catch the beauty of her white-plastered hair, but instead meets the steady grey eyes of his future mother-in-law. In her impassive face, he reads reproach, yet he cannot fathom why it should be written there. Dougal feels the blood retreat from his face. His knees hesitate. He wants, urgently, to sit down, but it is far too early. A breach of protocol would tarnish his reputation. Better to fake a fit or scream in tongues, some more comprehensible loss of control.

  The moment of panic proves fleeting. Dougal reasserts his self-control. His bride’s entrance is swift, perfect. She halts before him, at the appropriate distance, the flesh he will never renounce.

  There is even a hint of happiness in her mother’s calm voice as she intones the blessing. Chair-legs clatter on the stone floor as the members take their seats. Blood rushes back to Dougal’s face; his cheeks burn, his knees steel. Only he and his bride stand now, facing each other across the width of the Association’s hall. Dougal reads both sympathy and amusement on the faces of guests near him. He concentrates his gaze on the face of his bride, but she is too far away for him to interpret her expression. He wills himself to feel total acceptance of her. Then the Half Minute is over, the newlyweds take their seats and conversation starts everywhere in the hall.

  The sound rises and swirls among the rafters. Dougal, of course, cannot partake. The social words seem to intensify as they drift downwards, to form a dome around him that isolates Dougal within his own thoughts.

  He thinks of his Mama. If only she were here! She had begun to cajole him on his twelfth birthday. How she had wanted him to take a wife, to set about the task of raising the population to the Righteous Level, the number that the Committee for the Congregation of the Faithful determined to be the maximum the community could support. Young though he was, Dougal had decided to do his duty to the diet by social advancement first. His Mama had lamented, begged, threatened, all to no avail. But she had not despaired. When Dougal finally agreed, only when he was ready, he had ascribed this aspect of his adherence to diet duty to his Mama. Now he would show people. In her name and memory, he would raise a great, numerous and righteous family. The population decline was his enemy, too, and he would fight it, with his wife’s help and blessing. How he wished he could thank his long-departed Papa, too! If only his Mama were here at the ceremony today, breathing the life-giving air in the Association Hall instead of in the hospital, unwittingly drawing in though tubes the oxygen needed to keep her own short existence from flickering out.

  Dougal looks at the bride his Mama has procured for him. He has already seen her twice before, alone, as well as during the negotiations. She seems, indeed, all that a wife should be: well into puberty, a graduate of Basic Training with distinctions in home skills and numeracy, certified as never having let meat or blood pass her lips. There can be little doubt of her health and fertility. The Association would have more than twenty diet-sustained years of maternal ripeness upon which to assess their union. Moreover, her respectably large family included a best-selling diet developer. Dougal is sure that his supposed waste of eight years of adolescent virility will soon be forgotten.

  The celebration itself is a success. A history of judicious Association marriages on either side means that food and drink can be served during the Conversation with no offence taken. Probably. Dougal knows from experience that “twixt cup and lip” a family’s reputation can be risked. He remembers terrifying scenes at a former friend’s celebration, when a foreign guest was served a herb added to animal feed in his home region, and the discomfort at the celebration of his own second cousin, when the presence of certain brazen sharpteeths on the bride’s side had rendered eating out of the question. Even a taking of seats could have caused protocol trouble, so the Conversation had been taken walking. As he recalls that dispiriting trudge through the rain, accompanying the newlyweds with words to their bus terminal, Dougal feels elated by the conviviality of his own celebration. His second cousin has since come good: although his wife is slightly older, and vastly richer, than he is, they have already provided two infants to take up the diet that nourished their parents. Dougal has a family tradition to live up to.

  The honeymoon, too, is a success.

  They go to Flandria. The weather is unusually cool, such a relief after the heat and humidity of Lewes. The Association’s hotels are all in town centres and uniformly comfortable.

  In the second week, Maggie suggests they venture into the countryside.

  “It is only outside the towns that we will really be anywhere different from home. Can we?”

  “I know what you mean, my love, but unapproved hotels can be awkward. You never know who you might meet there.”

  Dougal’s need to demonstrate his acceptance of his new wife far outweighs his misgivings about strangers, and they go.

  The village is picturesque. The old materials used to construct its buildings are now the height of Continental chic. Most of the houses are scattered around a tall, imposing building, the village’s hotel. The newlyweds are allocated a spacious, well lit room, containing several fittings whose purpose is unclear to them. They make love all afternoon.

  A wave of unease catches his stomach as they come down towards the dining room and absorb the smell. Dougal thinks that his fear for Maggie should be greater than for himself, but as they pass through the swing doors, he realises that it is not.

  Five men and three women sit around two tables next to each other, relishing blood and meat. Dougal is sure that Maggie has never been allowed near such a scene. It is one that he has been trained to avoid. He feels sick. Sick and angry.

  The talk in the dining room lapses. Hard eyes search their faces, their physiques, for an indication of their tendency. A grey-haired woman motions them with pointed chin and broad hand to take seat among them.

  Dougal’s training has not equipped him to deal with a group of carnivores who presume he is one of them. It has not allowed him even to imagine it. But the unimaginable has become real, and the horror of it roots him to the spot.

  Doubt dissolves. Fury seeps into eight f
aces. The nearest to Dougal, a fat, ruddy, man’s face, the epitome of all that he has been taught to classify as unhealthy, moves into the centre of his blurred vision. A drinking beaker is thrust into his hand. It contains pig’s blood, warm and pungent. It gives off the tang of the heavy stimulant mixed into it. It is not an invitation or a question. It is a challenge.

  Dougal is out of his mind, so far out that he contemplates actions that could lead to their being bled, to their families’ reputations being gravely harmed.

  Before this can happen, Maggie steps in front of him, moves quickly to the threatening man’s table, empties her handbag on to it, and selects from the scattered contents her reserve passport, which holds their joint certificate of non-belligerence from the inter-diet police. Her right index finger jabs at the rubber-stamped proof that it is up-to-date and valid.

  The papers protect them. None of the carnivores is willing to precipitate a feud in which international law and protocol will be against them. In such circumstances, it is always wiser to limit your insults to words.

  Maggie forestalls even those. She takes the transparent beaker from Dougal’s hand, raises it to the light and examines it.

  “So rich a colour: deep, full and natural. Beautiful!” She sets it down, looks at it serenely, turns and walks slowly out of the room. In the silence, Dougal gathers up the papers and the rest of Maggie’s belongings, then follows her out. The carnivores let them go. Her gesture has even pleased some of them.

  By the time they reach their room, Dougal has recovered. He orders a meal of real food to be sent up to them.

  Maggie is shame-faced. “I should not have ...”

  “Thank you, my love.”

  Dougal resolves that never again will he allow them into uncharted waters.

  The next morning, they return to Brugge. Then they follow a trail of Association hotels back to their marital home in Lewes. The family sees them radiant, and receives the news of their reproductive harmony with joy. They note with satisfaction the sharpened diet-consciousness of the head of the eating unit that will soon expand and bring them further even-toothed happiness. They deem the honeymoon a great success.

  After the honeymoon, Dougal returns to work. He has already reached the second rung of the clerical ladder in a Civil Service department which has long since solved the social and economic problems entrusted to it, at least to the satisfaction of the public.

  Its real problems are in-house, to do with impartiality. No employees are allowed to wear diet emblems, nor even to carry Association or Alliance cards during working hours. Dietary discussions are forbidden; indeed, initiating one is an accepted reason for dismissal. Like everywhere else, people moan about who gets promotions and senior appointments, and why, but the managers enforce the Civil Service policy of equal distribution of top posts between the major diets. The public prefers this to the previous policy of trying to keep them in harmony with the shifting balance of diet preference in society at large, or to the even older policy of basing them on merit. The public is happier than its servants about this, but hefty salaries and perks stifle these protests and console them.

  Although no mention can be made of it at work, everyone knows their colleagues’ diet. All government buildings are kept free of eating rooms, but people need to eat, and in accordance with their diet. Frequently, they choose to eat near their workplace, so Dougal knows who most of his Association colleagues are. He lunches regularly with a group of them at Maxine’s in Spring Street.

  This is where they argue enthusiastically over Decisions, both before and after their taking. Decisions are usually about finer points of protocol or new lines of argument to put forward, but today is different.

  Jenkins breaks the news. Thompson gives him the cue.

  “I wonder when the next Decision is due.”

  “Damned soon.”

  “Any idea what it is about?”

  Jenkins makes the swimming gesture that calls people to silence. He lets it hang in the air to add impact to his words.

  Some in the group usually know more than the old man about Decisions, but they enjoy watching his attempts to raise his prestige.

  “Thursday evening, next week. Quarter past eight. Cod’s roe.”

  This is news to Maclaren.

  “What do you mean, cod’s roe? What the blood has that got to do with anything?”

  A deliberate pained expression crosses Jenkins’ weary face.

  “I should have thought it was obvious. Whether we can eat it or not. I should have thought it was obvious.”

  His expression slides into one of satisfaction as he reads his colleagues’ faces.

  “But that is heresy!”

  “Maybe not. You cannot say that it is alive.”

  The thought of fishfood makes Dougal sick to his bones. He shuts his ears to the arguments that rise and intensify around him, and concentrates on taking in and savouring the pure food on the plate in front of him.

  It is a release when it is time to return to the office and to the mindless impartiality of work.

  Dougal takes Maggie to the Association hall early on the evening of the Decision. He wants to avoid meeting any of his lunch companions there before the matter is settled. He hopes there will be enough time for his face muscles to relax before his in-laws arrive.

  They are late, but the long wait fuels his unease, and he forgets to congratulate Maggie on taking part in her first Decision, which is the first thing his new family does when at last they join the young couple.

  For the first time in his experience, the Association’s normal, carefully-trained atmosphere of brotherly certainty is absent. The opening formalities are repeated. Then the Secretary sets out the matter, in bland terms, before calling on learned ideologues to present arguments both for and against admitting cod’s roe as an authorised occasional supplement to the diet.

  To Dougal’s surprise, the arguments merely play with the conventional themes of life and growth, and of animal status. It is hard to believe they see no more in it. Are they under orders from the Standing Committee? The thought that the highest officers may be worried enough to act causes Dougal deep anguish.

  The floor speakers echo the ideologues’ words. Dougal stops listening. He knows full well how cod’s roe has come to be a matter for Decision in his region. The issue sprang up in Flandria, not far from where he and Maggie took their honeymoon. It thrived in its region of origin. Decisions in its favour sent it further, to territories where orthodoxy dampened its fire, where almost all further Decisions went against it. It seemed to have spluttered out. Dougal does not believe the rumours that people in those Flandrian towns have refused to wait for the final Association Decision and have taken to eating the filth. Yet now, on this side of the water, it has found good, righteous eventooths to speak for it. Dougal cannot countenance such a division of opinion: it threatens the vital solidarity of the Association.

  Dougal describes his political views to friends as wishy-washy liberal. His Mama’s are different, but they have never argued over anything so trivial. When it comes to the basics of life, to matters of diet, they are both deeply conservative. Diet orthodoxy is life, and diet innovation is against life. Four weeks ago, Dougal had risked his job, and with it his marriage, by using contacts in other Civil Service departments to get access to classified documents on births across the Union. Those contacts included carnivores. Today, Dougal knows the impetus for a movement to include a legendary fertility-booster in the diet. The age at which eventooth mothers produce their last child has fallen again.

  Dougal’s attention returns to the words in the hall. The same words. What a cover-up! What deceit! Why do they have to bury the real issue and avoid it like this? He knows he ought to lay his evidence before them, and force them to bring out the real arguments for and against. But boldness is unorthodox, and Dougal is determined that orthodoxy, not truth, shall control his actions.

  The Hallmaster calls the discussion to an end. It is the momen
t of Decision. Dougal is calm. It will be all right, as it has always been all right in this hall. Dougal scans the tight faces of his new family and the glowing face of his initiate wife. In all of them, he reads certainty.

  The quick raising of hands shows that this Decision will not be unanimous. They will go beyond arithmetical democracy. Dougal leans across to Maggie and lovingly helps her set her gloves on securely without tangling the wires. Then he slips on the pair by his own seat and steadies himself to concentrate all his thoughts and feelings into rejection.

  Above the Secretary’s dais at the end of the hall, the blobs begin to appear on the screenwall. The bright yellow of approval and the deep purple of rejection slowly expand toward each other. Their edges meet. The mass of purple ebbs and flows against the mass of yellow. When the image stabilises, only a corner of the screen shines yellow.

  Dougal’s branch of the Association has rejected the innovation. Overwhelmingly. People relax, take their gloves off, hang them up. On the way out, Dougal exchanges words of greeting and diet-solidarity with men and women he recognises. As he and his wife walk home against the warm winter wind, Dougal once more feels no misgivings about the future.

  ###

  About the author: