Behold the planet Haemos. It is a fortunate place. There’s plenty of high-protein grain to make bread, plenty of dairy animals for milk, butter, and cheese, and many herds of cattle for meat. The food available can sustain twice or three times the population without any rationing. All the resources necessary or desirable for thriving cultures and a becomingly rational life are plentiful: wood, metals, stone, natural fuels, and a wide variety of other items gathered from the earth and the sea. Moreover, the people have the tools they need to best make use of these things. There is no urgent need or fear that might drive them mad.
And yet mad they are—quite mad.
They have grown dull and bored with the natural. So they have taken up blood. They define themselves hematologically, not by the blood coursing through their veins, which is part of the dull and boring nature they reject, but by the kind of blood they shed, how they shed it, and what they do with it afterwards.
They have blood parades, with people coated in stage-blood, sticky-sweet, so that dogs come up to lick their ankles. Some of the marchers, though, shed real blood before the cheering crowds, getting one of their fellows with a scalpel to open a vein in the arm or to slice the scalp open so that blood would run down their faces. Occasionally, somebody claims to be of non-ferrous blood, and their liquid, colored artificially, will be green if they are cuprous, tawny yellow if they are sulfurous, blue if they are cobaltic, and red-orange if they are mercuric, while the mercurial changes colors with the seasons on a whim.
Since blood, they say, is the seat of life, nor can we take one breath or think one thought without blood, they like to see blood in action. Adults can go to a hemo-shop, to watch videos of heart operations, with long, languorous shots of the heart going thump-a-thump or of people beating each other to a bloody pulp and then embracing in bloody ecstasy. They have contact sports, too, with players strapping razors to their limbs, so that tackling is a bloody affair, and jets of blood spurt from the pile at midfield to the roar of the crowds.
The death toll is not unreasonably high. They take precautions. They know how to salve a wound with antiseptics and antibiotics, which everyone keeps on hand all the time, in their wallet or their purse. They throw a coming-out party when a child is old enough to shed his first blood for fun, dosing him with penicillin beforehand and showing him techniques that combine pleasure with a modicum of safety. This hematological education, obviously, must begin early and is undertaken by the state since some parents cannot always be relied upon. Some of the parents, a despised minority, earn the scorn of all forward-thinking people because they hold that blood is meant to run strictly inside your veins and arteries and not outside. But, say the progressives, since boys and girls will be nipping at each other with nails, scissors, jackknives, needles, and hooks, the main thing is to make sure that they don’t get septicemia while they are at it. Love demands antibiotics.
You might expect that intellectuals, like their tribe everywhere, would pretend to take the lead in the hemato-political, the hemato-literary, and the hemato-philosophical, while following tamely along in the universal social fad. You would be right. Whole disciplines, exciting and new, have taken the cruise on the blood boat. Some old-fashioned essentialists still hold that blood is made up of plasma and hemoglobin and so forth, but bolder thinkers say it is only one among a larger set of fluids they call ichor, to include sap, pith, lymph, spit, sweat, and tears, and still others draw a distinction between blood, which they acknowledge as a natural but trivial phenomenon, and sanguis, the way blood acts in the psycho-physical nature of an individual person. Sanguis, they say, is a purely social construct. Entire college programs are thus sanguinary, though, as is again typical of the tribe, the professors will faint dead away if you handle their notions with the least roughness. For professors, especially the more delicate females, bruise easily.
Do not suppose that such people are cruel and immoral. Not at all. They believe that consent makes everything right. If Jack chokes Jill till her eyeballs are bloodshot and then releases her, or Jill does the like to Jack with a leather strap, the question is not whether this is the sort of thing that ought to be done to the throat and the blood in the eyeballs, or that ought to be an expression of love, or that conduces to the common good. It is solely whether Jack and Jill consent to it. The most consistent of their thinkers take the premises to their inevitable conclusion, which is that good and evil do not exist, and to their ultimate application in the not yet wholly approved case of dueling. Duelists, after all, most carefully and formally do consent.
Has the preoccupation with blood made the planet a paradise of mirth and glee? Alas, no. All kinds of resentment have spread over the lands like smog. The people of Haemos have not yet figured out how to make bloodshed in an ordinary case quite painless. Their boredom with the natural has led, faster than anyone had supposed, to boredom with the unnatural. Their politicians have less to do with water—under bridges, in canals, in pipes—than with blood; that is, less to do with things needed to secure the common good and to promote health, intellectual and artistic enterprise, and peace than with blood and all the recriminations that follow in the wake of what has become promiscuous and pointless. Yet they cannot retrace their steps. They are blue-bloods in a bog. All the “best people” are for blood, blood liberty, blood positivity, blood equity, blood diversity, and blood every gauzy abstraction under the sun. It is the right side of history—the bloody side.
They do have sister planets. On Hebrides, people gauge success by how many times a week they play golf; all their films are about golf or have heady golf scenes in them, with edgy saves from a sand trap or a man and woman gazing into one another’s eyes and whispering about balls and dimples; yet the inhabitants are growing bored with old-fashioned golf, so they devise new ways of scoring, new clubs, holes in the wall to pitch into, and so on. Turf wars are common: zoysia or bentgrass? But on Trimalchia, it’s all about food—not necessarily to eat it, because the Trimalchians are a spindly lot—but to wear it in your hair, smear it on your face, stick corncobs in the ear, or pile up meat in an arena to burn it before the crowds; and then there are food diversitarians, who eat dirt, gnaw steel, or fight off vultures for road kill.
Of course, this is all a bad dream. Of course.