The End of This Day's Business

Book 526: Gateway Essentials

by Murray Constantine

Genres: Science Fiction; Alternative History sci-fi; Dystopian

Synopsis

Set more than four thousand years in the future, The End of This Day's Business depicts a truly utopian way of life, a global society in which distinct national cultures are preserved but coexist without competitive nationalism, violence, or war. Women, characterised as the reasonable sex in this society, care for the earth and all it's creatures. Only one price must be paid for this harmony. It is the subjection of men, who, stripped of their history and deprived of any knowledge of women's sacred rights, complacently accept their 'natural' inferiority. The plot turns on the desire of one woman, Grania, an artist and leader, to teacher her son what is forbidden for men to know. Risking both their lives, she tells the story of when men dominated, especially of the twentieth-century rise of fascism, and the subsequent world transformation as life-loving women took over from death-loving men.

Release date: March 30, 2017

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 272

Sample

ON MAY DAY IN THE YEAR 6250, Old Style, a man called Neil, sometimes Big Neil, or, to distinguish him from other Neils, Neil Carlason, was splitting up logs for winter firewood in a little front yard or garden just outside the town of Salisbury. The house behind him was that which he shared with four other men, but none of them were there this very sparkling, white and blue and green May morning. They were not working, as it was a holiday. They had gone off to Salisbury to swim in the Men’s Pool, or play a game, or just lounge about and talk to other men, to have in the evening a drink of wine or beer, perhaps to help light the big bonfires that were ready on the playing field, to dance about, sing, shout and fight. Neil thought he might perhaps go to Salisbury in the evening when it began to get dark, but even of that he was not sure. No May Day, the day the men celebrated as the beginning of summer with childish merriment and often extremes of masculine violence, had ever before found Neil so queer, so dull, so unhappy. Perhaps he had been hoping at odd times in this last year, when his incomprehensible vague discontent had occupied the top of his mind, that next May Day would set him up, cure him forever of his strange glooms. He had hoped that he would feel, as usual, thrilled and excited at the thought of the evening with the leaping flames of the bonfires, and all the singing and shouting and improvised wrestling matches, and jumping valiantly right through the flames as the younger men did (and nobody was braver at that than Neil, or minded the risk of burned feet less) and perhaps getting into a real serious bloody fight. And always there was the chance of a new and temporarily very delightful love affair, for though the women took, of course, no part at all in the May Day celebrations, regarding it with Olympian superiority as an unimportant, noisy, violent and purely male affair, yet some of them who wanted perhaps to look at the many handsome men and boys who gathered there, or perhaps to cast their eyes over some particular man, did come to the edge of the playing field and stroll about, talking to each other in low voices, or laughing now and then, their quiet assured movements and soft voices contrasting naturally and deliciously with the wild movement and deep roaring voices of the throngs of men.

But even this thought of the women did not lighten Neil’s heavy heart, nor make him feel any less strange and dull. He was a successful man in love. From the age of sixteen, when, counted as a man, he had gone to work, and to live in a house with men, he had only received one rebuff. At first shyly, then more boldly, he had pressed his claims to women’s attention, which had been nearly always well received. Neither was it always they who tired of him first. Success made him fickle; several times he had, with less and less nervousness each time, indicated to a woman that he was now in love with someone else. The first time, being very inexperienced, he had been rather frightened, though older men had told him that it didn’t matter, that women did not mind, or take it in any way amiss that a man should be tired of one and take on another. So Neil became quite used to the way his lovers took these changes. First came a rather intent look, then a small smile and a shrug of slim delicate little shoulders, the very shoulders which Neil had found so super-feminine and adorable a short while before. But what lay behind the intent look, Neil never knew. No man knew what women thought. They talked to each other, never to men or boys. But now, since last night, or was it for a year, or was it, thought Neil, flogging his poor, dull, weak brain which had never really learned to think, was it really since he had been about nineteen, that his phenomenal sexual success (and that it was phenomenal he knew from the continual jealousy of other men) had ceased to be that pride and joy he had felt it as a youth? He had enjoyed it always; he thought he would not ever be able to help enjoying it, as he had enjoyed the gradual development of his physique, magnificent among a race of tall, strong men, as he had enjoyed the violent games, the wrestling, the feats of strength, and the single-stick combats when one could chip a man’s head and see the blood run down, or the straightforward savage fist battles when one could, if one could, crack a man’s skull with one terrific ponderous blow. Neil had done that. Afterwards he was both sorry and elated. He was a marked man, dangerous, a little too strong. But no one, for that reason, refused to fight him if insults had passed. Such conduct would be unmanly in the extreme, and a man might as well be dead as a coward.

Neil picked up his largest wedge, settled it in the top of the short log he wanted to split with a couple of heavy short-armed taps, then heaved up his huge hammer and brought it down with all his force. The log rent with a loud noise and fell apart. Neil had driven the sharp wedge clean through it. But his prowess only seemed to increase his discontent. He tossed the hammer aside with a sulky frown, and sitting down on an unsplit log he tried by pressing his palms on his forehead to think harder and to more purpose.

What really was the matter with him? He had gone out last night, May Eve, and up on to the old lumps and humps and banks of an ancient place, the ruin of an old, old town, far older than the oldest part of Salisbury, that had been called, so his mother’s sister had told him, when as a very small boy he had first rolled down its green banks, Old Sarum. The day remained in his mind. He had been very happy. And some association of happiness and the queer old place remained always with him, so that last night when, amazingly, he couldn’t sleep at all, he had got up and dressed and gone up in the moonlight to Old Sarum, and there he had thrown himself face downwards on the short sweet down-grass, and had astonishingly wept. He had cried his heart out, and when he came to think of the reason, he could find none. He had not cried since he was a boy, and then his tears, as he remembered them, had been nearly always tears of rage, except on those very rare occasions when his Mother, whom he in common with all males adored in a half-terrified way, had been seriously annoyed with him. Ah, he could remember crying then, as if the sun had gone and the earth was dark forever. But the joy, when she had forgiven him, and was tender, and the sun shone again, that seemed to make up for those bitter childish lamentations. This shadow, since he could not discover what caused it, seemed as if it never might lift. For he was not ill. People hardly ever were ill, and then as a rule only as the result of an accident. He was not old. Sometimes he had thought it would be rather terrible to be old, and weak, and stiff. Unable to rival men in sports, or beat them in fights, or attract women. For of course women didn’t care about old, worn-out men, naturally. But Neil was only twenty-four. Last night he had been twenty-three, and this May Day morning he was twenty-four. He had at least thirty more years of the fullest vigor. And even after that his decline would be very gradual, and it would be another twenty before he was like old Andreas, who was past work and didn’t care any longer for May Day bonfires, and spent all his time sleeping or pottering about in his little garden, or talking, or at any rate listening, to Neil’s eccentric but famous aunt, the same who had first taken him up to Old Sarum.

Then he liked his work. It was all out of doors and laborious, something that used his strength. As a boy, when he had been confronted with the variety of jobs open to men, unskilled or semiskilled, for of course a man had to do what his strong muscles and weak mind and masculine nature fitted him for, he had rejected the indoors factory jobs as stuffy, working on ships or in docks because he didn’t want to leave Salisbury and rarely be able to see his Mother, tree-felling in the forests for the same reason, as he would have to go away to Savernake or somewhere, and had decided to be a laborer in the big gardens where the vegetable stuff and fruit were grown. The women who ran the gardens were silent and just, they admired his strength and willingness to use it; he was indeed rather a pet among the under-gardeners.

Then his Mother was still alive, and was not very often away, like his eccentric aunt, Grania, who was an artist and might be anywhere in the world at any moment. His mother was an engineer in the Salisbury power station, and so she couldn’t go away so much. And she was always the same, tender to him, and delighted when he won prizes in the sports. Neil felt her to be proud of her son, proud of his manly vigor and beauty, and his popularity.

So there was nothing in his present life to account for his discontent, and when he looked back at his childhood it seemed exactly like any other boy’s, and just as happy. To the age of eight he had lived with his Mother, playing with other very small boys in the Nursery while she was at work. At eight, as boys did, he had gone to a day-school. Carla, his sister, two years older, had already been two years at her girls’ boarding school, and when she came back from her first term she was rather haughty and wouldn’t play with him, much. But he didn’t mind. There were plenty of boys in the Nursery. And plenty of boys at the day-school. Then at fourteen, as boys had to, he left his Mother and lived with other fourteen to sixteen year olds in a boarding school, where he must learn to live a man’s life. For he would never live with women again. Men never lived with women, only boys and very young girls. The women lived in their houses, perhaps two or three together, or one alone by herself if she had young children, and the men lived in groups of five or six. Some old men lived by themselves. Andreas did. But the young men, never. They would feel cold and lonely by themselves, miss the quarrelling and the violent fun, both. Then he had become a man (but with no sort of ceremony or initiation, such as the girls went through at seventeen, in the utterly mysterious and forbidden hearts of the Women’s Houses), and had begun to work, and to live with men, and to make love to women. Not ever to girls, because that was not allowed. If a young woman had a little narrow metal circlet keeping her long hair off her face then she was a woman, through her initiation. But if she had none she was a girl, sacred and quite out of reach. It was hardly possible to be attracted to girls, so cold and forbidding an atmosphere surrounded them. But women were different. They were not always cold, though they were always reserved. Women were in some ways less frightening than the girls, but in some ways more so. More assured, quieter, more proud and certain of themselves. But nicer, anyway, thought Neil. Women, Grania, and all the ones I have loved have been nicer to me than Carla ever was as a girl. He hardly thought of his Mother as a woman. Not in this connection. She was just his Mother.

Thus he wandered through his life and saw it as a very ordinary, happy boy’s and man’s life, indeed hardly to be improved upon unless he had been a famous athlete or dancer. They were the favored among men, while they kept their youth and suppleness. But they were worse off than ordinary men when they grew old, because they had been so admired and applauded, and they missed it, and sometimes fell into deep miseries, and even had been known to kill themselves. There was another thought for Neil. He pressed his hands still harder on his forehead. It was not only old athletes or old dancers who killed themselves. There had been men, not that he knew any, but he had heard of them, who were weak, for some reason, puny, ugly, unattractive, and could neither hold up their end with men, nor have any women to love them, who gradually sank deeper and deeper into despondency, and so to suicide. And men crippled in accidents were of course allowed to kill themselves by custom and convention, and everything was made easy for them. But what had cripples, weak men, or old athletes to do with Neil? He had a man’s life and would have it for many many years yet. Or, he thought, with a horrible start of fear and woe, he would not have it. For what could be the end of such fits of dreadful, miserable weeping as he had experienced last night in the moonlight on Old Sarum, and his gloom of today, which was even worse because he felt no inclination to express it, but, in the end, suicide? If he had stopped enjoying a man’s life, what other life was there for him? Would death be better? But he could not think of death. It meant leaving so much, things he really did enjoy, must enjoy. Or, he thought, terribly bewildered now, have I never really enjoyed any of it? Even women? Even those marvelous moments of power and rightness when a man fulfilled his purpose, and became, for a brief time, a sweet time, one with, equal to a woman? If he could not, if his gloom finally robbed him of that enjoyment, then he was lost. For of course there must be women, and there must be men, God had willed it, and that they should be quite different, and lead entirely different lives, because the women were the Mothers, and in all but physical strength, naturally superior. There was nothing to worry about in that. A dog might as well worry because it was not a cat, as a man that he was not a woman.

But, Neil thought, how can I bear any more wakings up like this morning? He had come home from Old Sarum sleepy and somehow peaceful after his outburst, and had undressed and gone to bed, sure that now all would be well. All had not been well. He had waked to a wretchedness unparalleled in his experience except for the homesickness of the first few days in his boarding school, after he had left his Mother. Yes, it had been even worse than that. And when Magnus and the others asked him what he meant to do with the early part of his May Day, he had said in fierce sullenness that he meant to split logs and told them to go away and leave him alone. Now he was alone, and no better.

He began to notice himself, a thing he was not accustomed to do. He took his hands away from his forehead, and looked at his hairy, muscular right arm. It was a useful member. It had done much work. It had killed a man. It had embraced women. It was handsome, in a male way. But quite suddenly he felt as if he didn’t really like it, nor his pillars of legs, in the baggy modest breeches men wore, nor his great hands with their blunt-ended fingers. He revolted against his own flesh, and the sensation was terrible. Shyly, with a glance round first, for men were naturally modest, and would not bare more than their arms, legs and heads in a public place, he opened his shirt and glanced at his muscular male chest. He hated it. But if he hated his body, then he hated himself, for it was part of himself. Neil hated Neil. If anyone else hated Neil, Neil would beat him, that is, if he showed his hatred insultingly, but if Neil hated Neil, what could be done? And what was Neil, that he had suddenly begun to hate himself? This could not be grasped. He began again drearily to consider what would become of him, and from that he switched back to what had become of him. Was it possible, he wondered, for a man to be unhappy somewhere very deep inside, and for it suddenly to come up to the top? That must be nonsense, surely. A man thought things, and did things; the deeds followed from thoughts and the thoughts from other thoughts, quite plain in the head. Could there be any other think-place—in the stomach, perhaps? On Old Sarum, last night, his waves of grief had seemed to start in his stomach and roll up to his mouth and eyes, to come out in great sobs and groans and pouring tears. But perhaps there were more waves behind those waves, started in his stomach, long years ago. But that must be nonsense. A man thought things, and did things. But then again, behind his going up to Old Sarum there had been no plain thought. Behind his sullenness with the other men this morning there had been no plain thought. There evidently were times when a man did things without knowing why.

He passed his hand over his dark close-cropped hair, and then stroked his short black beard. He began to wonder what it would be like to have long hair like a woman. It would be a terrible nuisance in fights and wrestling. But at ordinary times would it feel nice, or only tickly and uncomfortable? Of course he could remember what it felt like to have no beard. And he could remember his joy when it first began to come through, because all men had beards, and if his beard was coming he would soon be a man, and live with men, not boys. Some men had very weak, scanty beards, sources of mockery. Neil’s was strong and close. But as he stroked it he liked it no better than his arms and legs and chest. It was part of Neil, that Neil hated. He began again to think of w. . .