Naked Earth
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
6/28/95
In this dream, there are parallel Earths due to a dimensional split, somehow related to the 1945 A-bombs. This dream is about a story about two of these Earths, neither of which is ours.
On one of these Earths, Stalin died shortly after the war. His eastern European conquests were taken over by faceless bureaucrats and technocrats who believed in controlling the human passions and emotions that they felt led to the war, smothering them under a “rational” system of industrial growth, scientific and athletic achievement, modest prosperity for all, and moderation to excess. This dictatorship of civil engineers becomes so powerful it doesn’t fear religion or parlaimentary democracy, and as such becomes a model for postwar governments throughout the world. By the 1990s, scattered tribal and radical rebellions aside, this Earth is a “decent” but decidedly dull and repressed place to live. Its crowning achievement: a dimensional gateway to another Earth, which two duty-bound scientists bravely cross.
This other Earth was the oyster, immediately after the war, of the American soldiers who became enamored of looser Euro sexual attitudes and collectively decided to bring those attitudes home. The women they left behind had discovereda new level of self-esteem and self-sufficiency working in factories and other man-deprived workplaces, and were only too happy to take up a more sexually liberated role at home as long as it was under their terms. This battle of the sexes worked itself out slowly over the ’50s. This Earth didn’t have the postwar housewife role blared into it by governments and developers and advertisers; the women wanted nothing to do with it, or with lonely suburbs. As you might expect, this new promiscuity led to a rash of STDs. But there was no sexual stigma attached to the patients, and the initial waves of these diseases were wiped out by the early postwar drugs like penicillin. By the ’90s, a Brave New Worldish “everyone belongs to everyone else” philosophy ruled. Public nudity in warm weather or indoors is a given option. Friends (of different or the same genders) greet one another by lifting their shirts before hugging. Only old people and self-conscious early adolescents attend the suit-required hours at public swimming pools. None of this sexual liberation is considered “dropping out” or “in opposition to the dominant culture.” By now, it is the dominant culture. Sexual happiness is believed to be important to being a successful worker and an emotionally balanced family member. Families are defined by the sharing of households, not by sexual exclusivity.
By the time the pioneers from the dull Earth arrive at the sexy Earth, not only are there massive cultural differences, even the languages are different enough to make communication difficult, especially in the scientific and technical terms that make up most of the dull-Earth people’s vocabulary. There are indeed a few aspects of the dull-Earth people’s messages and promises that tempt some of the sexy-Earth people — the promise of a more rational political system, of a more efficient life with less wasted effort, of certain medical and engineering breakthroughs, of a world ruled more from the head and less from raw lusts. And, needless to say, the dull-Earth people find plenty to tempt them. Because the gateway is entirely controlled from the dull Earth, even if the dull-Earth scientists drop out and disappear among the sexy-Earth people, more dull-Earth expeditions will follow. It’s only a matter of time and influence before one Earth assimilates the other. But which will win this war of competing loves?
