The islanders called themselves The 'People of the Womb' because they were born of flesh and blood. As opposed to the 'People of the Tube', born of a test tube, who lived in the city of Urbe, and watched TV all day.
Or for short, they called themselves the 'Naturals', and disdainfully referred to the tube people as the 'Plasticos'. The Plasticos had invaded the isle not long ago, and built the city of Urbe, right in its center.
The Naturals, who mostly lived in towns and villages around the isle, were at war with the Plasticos ever since.
~ ~ ~
Tomek heard people speak ominously about ‘the Border’, and the ongoing war there. Islanders had built a wall of ramparts around the city of Urbe, as a line of demarcation to hold the cancer back. This was ‘the Border’.
These Plasticos, the 'People of the Tube', all had TV antennas inserted in their heads, like rabbit ears, so they could keep abreast of the latest shows and fashions, even when they slept. They were surgically inserted in their brains in childhood.
The city of Urbe was full of skyscrapers, with fancy apartments of the elite rich, who held ‘cock-tail’ parties where they snorted smuggled semen. Their own semen was infertile, so they had to smuggle it in across enemy lines. Semen bought from the ‘People of the Womb’, the islanders, who were as fertile as can be. For this they paid a pretty penny.
Tomek, The Prospector......
Tomek had worked as a prospector. He hadn't gotten rich, but he loved the freedom. He'd left the skycrapers of the university and corporate world, — to head for the hills. The hills and mountains of the Fatherland. With his pickaxe in hand, to try his luck in prospecting.
For gold. For jewels, — for precious stones, gems, and jewles of any kind. Digging through the mountianous morass.
Truth to say, after a lot of digging on the Fatherland and other isles, he hadn't found much.
But this land, this isle, the Motherland, — seemed quite different. He could feel it in his bones.
Could feel it in his bone. There are real jewels, real gems, deep under the covers of the Motherland.
And he aimed to dig it up.
☼ ☼ ☼
The Professor and his Family
In his ramblings and talkings, Tomek met a learned professor, who invited him home. The man, Sir Alfred, lived in a nice rustic cabin, much like everyone elses here. Laughing, jumping kids greeted them at the door, and his wife, a mid-aged, rather attractive woman, smiled. On the walls were ‘objets d’art’, moss and dried flowers, valued imports of distant lands and eras,... and favorite panties.
Around the wood table as they ate by candlefire and fireplace light, they spoke. They spoke of this land, and what has happened since the People of the Tube came.
The People of the Tube were so named, not just because the TV tube was a part of their brain, but also because they were all born in test tubes. Large skyscrapers with rows and rows of mass production, giant test tubes where human eggoids were potentiated, and fed on a drip cycle. Until birth and implantation of TV antennas.
Problem was, that society had long since lost their fertility. Their scientists, who could create almost anything, could still not make the human egg and tadpole. So they had come to the Motherland, as this island was called, because it is famous from afar for its fecundity. Here they stole, or bought, woman-eggs and man-seed, wherever they could. But most of all, they had stolen the Goddess Urn.
The Goddess Urn was the emblem of this land and its people. Since the beginning of time, it had set in the temple of the Goddess, on the mound in the very center of the isle. The Temple of the Goddess. The Temple of Demeter. Of fertility.
Since the ages people have come to give their respects, and the folk here, guardians of the temple, welcome them. But the tube types came to rape.
“Gone are the forests. The virgin wood. They cut and pillage.” said Alfred.
“The waters are turning foul and gray”, said his wife.
“It stinks! Peeyuuh!” said their little girl.
~
They ate azuki beans and arugula and fish of the sea. They ate from one huge bowl, digging fingers and chopsticks in together. They had two little kids, and a grown son there, with his visiting gal. Tomek saw the sheen on the mother’s face in the candlelight. The sheen of semen lotion, that meant that she too had received the ‘sacred anointment’ from her man, not so long ago.
That night they all slept in one large bed. A mattress that filled a room from wall to wall. You had to remove your shoes to enter the ‘room of dreams’.
Early in the night Tomek woke to sounds of lovemaking floating in from the open window. A neighboring cottage. Distant, faint, sounds, but unmistakable. Moans that stopped for a while, then began again. Now, for a man who hadn’t seen a woman in three years, he wasn’t going to just roll over and sleep again. He lived and breathed and waited for those moans. They haunted him.
In some time, a closer cottage joined in. Soon the air was filled with the chorus and music of love. It wasn’t long before he felt the grown son and his gal, to the left of him, stir and mount. And by and by, Sir Alfred and his lady were going at it too.
The small children awoke now and began to giggle and laugh, holding one hand over their mouths and pointing with the other. No one paid them any mind.
Soon, all the sounds of the night ebbed, the dying embers of the fireplace ebbed, and dreams took over.
☼ ☼ ☼
Tomek stayed some days with them. He told them that he had come to the isle to seek a rare fabled plant. A “Rose which grows within a Lotus”. He’d seen it in a vision. And he was directed to find it, for this plant, along with talismans from each of the seven chakras, would bring him to the next level of spiritual enlightenment. For three years he had sat and meditated in an eagle’s nest on top of a rocky spire, and this is what he’d seen.
“From whence do you come?”, the good professor asked.
“I come from a skyscraper people myself. People living on top of one another. Defecating on the one below, clawing at the one above. I was an accountant.
“It sounds awful!", said Maribelle, the professor's wife.
“I jumped ship. I sailed my own, and ended up as a hermit living in the eagle’s nest on a isle they call the Fatherland. Did some mining. I meditated. I sought the Gods. I sought wisdom.”
He showed them the wand and the spear he’d fashioned there, each with a huge, pointed, quartz crystal at its tip. Thick as a woman’s wrist. The Fatherland was covered with these crystals. They ooed and awed, for the Motherland has naught of these.
Alfred said he hadn’t heard of the plant he sought. But he said if there was such a rare, enchanted, flower, it probably grew in the tropics, in the jungle, several weeks journey to the south. This island was like a continent, with every landform.
“Some people live in that jungle. But it's dense and hard to travel in. The People of the Tube want to cut it down. Shave her bare. But the spirits of the isle live there. Somewhere in there is a hidden, forbidden valley. A “no-mans land”, a sacred gorge that is reserved for the Gods and Goddesses alone. Legend has it that it is full of jewels and flowers.
☼ ☼ ☼
Tomek told them that another reason he came here was for its reputation as a land of enchantment. Of rich soil, fruit, flowers, and fecundity. He wanted to be an organic farmer. He wanted to put down his root. If the Motherland was willing.
“This is a good land”, said Maribelle. “Treat it right, love it, and it can be as welcoming as a woman”.
The little girl came in crying because she had fallen and scraped her knees. The parents each took turns licking her wounds extensively. They knew that saliva, the sacred nectar of the mouth, is far better than the chemical antiseptics of the TV-people. Its proteins contained an antiseptic par excellence, and they were not going to compromise their child’s health with a store bought imitation . Perhaps some people feel it’s childish to kiss a wound to make it feel better, but a wet sloppy kiss can be healing for a wound.