«All I know is that I am unhappy over the whole thing.»
«I know you are, Ben, and I'm sorry. Let's try a hypothetical question. You mentioned a lady named Ruth. Suppose Gillian had not been present; assume that the others were Mike and Ruth — and they offered you the same shared intimacy: Would you have been shocked?»
«Huh? Why, yes. It's a shocking situation.I think so, even though you say it's a matter of taste.»
«How shocking? Nausea? Panic flight?»
Caxton looked sheepish. «Damn you, Jubal. All right, I would just have found an excuse to go out to the kitchen or something … then left as soon as possible.»
«Very well, Ben. You have uncovered your trouble.»
«I have?»
«What element was changed?»
Caxton looked unhappy. At last he said, «You're right, Jubal — it was because it was Jill. Because I love her.»
«Close, Ben. But not dead center.»
«Eh?»
«“Love” is not the emotion that caused you to flee. What is “love”, Ben?»
«What? Oh, come off it! Everybody from Shakespeare to Freud has taken a swing at that; nobody has answered it yet. All I know is, it hurts.»
Jubal shook his head. «I'll give an exact definition. “Love” is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.»
Ben said slowly, «I'll buy that … because that's the way I feel about Jill.»
«Good. Then you are asserting that your stomach turned and you fled in panic because of a need to make Jill happy.»
«Hey, wait a minute! I didn't say — »
«Or was it some other emotion?»
«I simply said — » Caxton stopped. «Okay, I was jealous! But, Jubal, I would have sworn I wasn't. I knew I had lost out, I had accepted it long ago — hell, I didn't like Mike the less for it. Jealousy gets you nowhere.»
«Nowhere one would wish, certainly. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy — in fact, they're almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil — and I grok that was your trouble, Ben. When your jealousy reared its head, you couldn't look it in the eye — so you fled.»
«It was the circumstances, Jubal! This hands-around harem upsets the hell out of me. Don't misunderstand me; I would love Jill if she were a two-peso whore. Which she is not. By her lights, Jill is moral.»
Jubal nodded. «I know. Gillian has an invincible innocence that makes it impossible for her to be immoral.» He frowned. «Ben, I am afraid that you — and I, too — lack the angelic innocence to practice the perfect morality those people live by.»
Ben looked startled. «You think that sort of thing is moral? I meant that Jill doesn't know she is doing wrong — Mike's got her homswoggled — and Mike doesn't know it's wrong, either. He's the Man from Mars; he didn't get a fair start.»
Jubal frowned. «Yes, I think what those people — the entire Nest, not just our kids — are doing is moral. I haven't examined details but — yes, all of it. Bacchanalia, unashamed swapping, communal living and anarchistic code, everything.»
«Jubal, you astound me. If you feel that way, why don't you join them? They want you. They'll hold a jubilee — Dawn is waiting to kiss your feet and serve you; I wasn't exaggerating.»
Jubal sighed. «No. Fifty years ago — But now? Ben my brother, the capacity for such innocence is no longer in me. I have been too long wedded to my own brand of evil and hopelessness to be cleansed in their water of life and become innocent again. If I ever was.»
«Mike thinks you have this “innocence” — he doesn't call it that — in full measure now. Dawn told me, speaking ex officio.»
«Then I would not disillusion him. Mike sees his own reflection — I am, by profession, a mirror.»
«Jubal, you're chicken.»
«Precisely, sir! But my worry is not over their morals but dangers to them from outside.»
«Oh, they're in no trouble that way.»
«You think so? If you dye a monkey pink and shove him into a cage of brown monkeys, they'll tear him to pieces. Those innocents are courting martyrdom.»
«Aren't you being rather melodramatic, Jubal?»
Jubal glared. «If I am, sir, does that make my words less weighty? Saints have burned at stakes ere this — would you dismiss their holy anguish as “melodrama”?»
«I didn't mean to get your back up. I simply meant that they aren't in that sort of danger — after all, this isn't the Dark Ages.»
Jubal blinked. «Really? I hadn't noticed the change. Ben, this pattern has been offered to a naughty world many times — and the world has always crushed it. The Oneida Colony was much like Mike's nest — it lasted a while but out in the country, not many neighbors. Or take the early Christians — anarchy, communism, group marriage, even that kiss of brotherhood — Mike has borrowed a lot from them. Hmm … if he picked up that kiss of brotherhood from them, I would expect men to kiss men.»
Ben looked sheepish. «I held out on you. But it's not a pansy gesture.»
«Nor was it with the early Christians. D'you think I'm a fool?»
«No comment.»
«Thank you. I wouldn't advise anyone to offer the kiss of brotherhood to the pastor of some boulevard church today; primitive Christianity is no more. Over and again it's been the same sad story: a plan for perfect sharing and perfect love, glorious hopes and high ideals — then persecution and failure.» Jubal sighed again. «I've been fretting about Mike; now I'm worried about them all.»
«How do you think I feel? Jubal, I can't accept your sweetness-and-light theory. What they are doing is wrong!»
«It's that last incident that sticks in your craw.»
«Uh… not entirely.»
«Mostly. Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with — in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called “Morals”. Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck.
«You, too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul — and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against the same Judeo-Christian code … so automatically your stomach did flip-flops … and you think that proves you're right and they're wrong.Faugh! I'd as lief use trial by ordeal. All your stomach can reflect is prejudice trained into you before you acquired reason.»
«What about your stomach?»
«Mine is stupid, too — but I don't let it rule my brain. I see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code — monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth — then fiddle with details … even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight!
«But mostly they debate how we can be made to obey this code — ignoring the evidence that most tragedies they see around them are rooted in the code itself rather than in failure to abide by it.
«Now comes the Man from Mars, looks at this sacrosanct code with a fresh viewpoint — and rejects it. I don't know the details of Mike's code, but it clearly violates laws of every major nation and would outrage “right-thinking” people of every major faith — and most agnostics and atheists, too. Yet this poor boy — »
«Jubal, he is not a boy, he's a man.»
«Is he a “man”? This poor ersatz Martian is saying that sex is a way to be happy. Sex should be a means of happiness. Ben, the worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or at least, pleasure.