LOOKING BACK THROUGH THE FIREBALL
Copyright Tom Leonard
Edinburgh June 2022
5. TEENS IN ACTION
Following their misadventures on Mainau, Pippa, Slim and Dreyfus swiftly returned to their studies at Laughlin College, in a high-powered Heptagon war canoe. After stopping to talk to the lascivious princesses on Mustique, they breathed sighs of relief when they moored on the Lower Blackway on Nod.
The three pupils were appalled to learn from their kindly ‘Back to the Future’ teacher, a Talking Mahi Mahi of some repute, that Capitalist and war-inficted climate change on Qinsatorix was likely to cause the seriously detrimental evolution of many of the species, and that the gradual melting of the Vikiniland icecap could well cause sudden and catastrophic diversion of the Nino Stream with all sorts of unforeseen consequences. The trio promptly persuaded Headmaster Tredgold to let them study the effects of climate change as a special project.
During November 2712, Pippa was very sad to hear that the Qinxhunters had failed in an attempt, devised by Slim, to rescue Zoe Russlethrush from Foreign Secretary Eradacus’s mansion in Trivoli. Zoe was consequently kept chained to her waterbed in an isolated turret. Bra Quantum, the leader of the Qinxhunters, was inconsolable,.
On Christmas Eve 2712, Dr. Sargant Tredgold discovered his husband Jake Skulltwister's decapitated head within striking distance of the Sir Ronald Fisher Natural Selection Pit. The words 'Galton sadist' were written on a piece of toilet tissue wedged into the victim's right eye-socket. Jake's right leg was hanging over the ledge of the pit, and a bronze horseshoe was lying on the ground nearby. The Galton murderer had struck for the third time, at least.
Tredgold was stricken with grief, but took solace in reading poetry with young Corbyn Blair on the sofa in Abrahall-Frere Tower. Blair particularly enjoyed the poem Touched by a Raving Aardvark.
Dreyfus Dreadnought survived a lengthy interrogation by Nod and Mustique police. The stern-faced D.C.I. from Gayfield Square closely resembled his dour cousin, the Shadow Home Secretary ‘I.D.’ Smith. The D.C.I. believed that the Galton triple murderer was very likely a Janian with strong associations with Laughlin College. Suspicion fell on the creepy Biostatistical Genetics teacher Aylmer Grimster, since he’d served in the Green Beret assassination squads in Paris 273 as a youth, with the scalps of an errant English princess and her lithe-limbed equerry to his name.
Zoe was released from her chains during early December 2712, and forced to complete her indentured marriage rites with Dirk Eradacus, with two sour-faced monks from St. Augustine’s Residential School for Wayward Urchins in attendance. This followed Dirk's discovery that his cruelly enslaved fiancée was pregnant.
On New Year's Eve 2712, Dirk and Zoe held a schmoozefest in their mansion by Lake Akhenaten in Trivoli, City of Lanterns. The brash First Minister strolled over from the Gold House with his dachshunds, but the elderly Emperor and Empress sent their apologies from their tortoise-shaped palace by Lake Nefertiti, since they needed to doggy-sit the corgis.
Zoe became increasingly bored by the toffee-nosed tittle-tattle, but she was fascinated when an elderly, bearded astronomer held forth about the intricacies of the forthcoming double eclipse of the two moons with the Aton Sunstar. This seminal event was due to occur on 3rd. August 2713.
Dirk's gibbon-faced mother butted in, and tactlessly remarked that 3rd. August was Zoe's due date, and wouldn't it be auspicious if her seventh grandson was born during the double eclipse?
Zoe felt embarrassed, and retreated up the metal stairs to her isolated turret. She prayed to the Goddess Asherah that the stroppy maternity doctor would keep to her promise, and not let on to Dirk that she was expecting twins, quite apart from the dreadful rest of it.
Dirk was distracted during a painful conversation with the melodramatic First Minister, when he saw the astronomer plotting deviously in the corner with two decrepit companions. Being a touch paranoid, Dirk told his security guards to encourage the three old dodderers to leave.
Dreyfus Dreadnought was feeling rather pear-shaped when he and his fellow pupils saw in the New Year in the grotty Hyacinth Rolfe-Gotto Dining Hall on Nod. Dreyfus was keeping his little secret to himself, in the belief that it wasn't really true, though he was scared that the other geeks would tease him for looking knocked up.
That Saturday, the farmers of Western Trystonia brought their produce and wares into Trivoli to sell from their stalls on the side-walks of the octagon that surrounded the Planet Capitol building. This was a weekly social event. Bands would play, acrobats perform, and comedians fall about laughing, amidst all the activities on the luscious grass, that stretched between the side-walks and the Capitol building.
Zoe Eradacus set off for the Farmers' Market in mid-morning, arm-in-arm with her gibbon-like husband and her uptight mother-in-law. Platopyruses and quack ducks dived and splashed among the splat leaves on Lake Akhenaten, charorobins and squintfinches played in the palm trees that rose from the fizzy waters, and tiny otters leapt ashore and teased the chimpmunks.
Dirk and his mother strode on, eyes to the front, while Zoe struggled to maintain the connections of her spirit with the feelings of nature, and her sense of the everlasting influence of the pantheistic demi-gods of light and fertility.
“If I'd lived in olden times, then maybe I'd have been a green witch,” Zoe said, out loud, but neither of her guardians took notice.
They entered the Old City through the Bootham Bar and continued along High Fleancegate, until they reached the lofty Cathedral of St. Basil of Caesarea. When they turned sharp right, the Capitol Dome loomed high above them, and they found themselves struggling through swarms of sentient creatures as they entered the Capitol Octagon.
While Zoe's mother-in-law was purchasing a small packet of Rosemary at a herb stall operated by a bearded Qolish gentleman, Zoe got into a conversation with the Qole’s dewy eyed trans daughter about mysterious trans women in the rainforests of Wyalusing watching for UFOs in the skies
The Qolish girl resented the ways that Society frequently viewed trans people. She'd recently got very depressed when she'd been lead to doubt that she was a real woman. “It's a matter of life and death!” she declared.
“Let's keep in touch,” said Zoe. “It would be good if you could help me to raise my children.”
“I'll drop by your mansion,” replied the girl, with a delightful smile, and so she would.
Just then, a cat-like parliamentary whipper-snapper bounded up, and told Dirk that the First Minister wanted a chat, on the Capitol steps.
“Not that old-school neo-liberal again!” muttered Dirk.
“He’s such a reactionary twerp,” said the whipper-snapper.
“What confounded cheek!” responded Dirk.
“The Wilmington Bidens are full of cheek, Sir,” replied the feline creature, gleefully wagging his tail.
When Eradacus greeted the illustrious Head of State, the dude wiped the snot out of his nose with an unlaundered handkerchief.
“Hummings and I are disturbed,” blethered the First Minister, “at the way our high class, golden brethren on Canine Six and Gallium Arsenide are being enslaved and mistreated by the stupid Grottzonkers and inane Psychlops. They seem to think that we're the inferior species. I do believe they're practising Fisherian-Pearsonian eugenics in reverse! They're treating our kith and kin like the way we bully the Illiterati.”
“Totes,” replied Dirk, with due courtesy. “The C.I. boffins on Tiberius Ptolemy created both those ghastly species a few centuries back by rewiring their primeval antecedents. That may be why both species have developed exaggerated senses of their own superiority.”
“They're social murderers, that's what I say… Social murder? Now that's a neat expression. I'll use it in my speeches.”
“Do you think we should send in the Q.I.A. extermination squads?”
The First Minister scratched his chin for several seconds. “The Daily Mail might even catch on to that! Why don't we try to split their alliance, and spark off a conflagration that would kill off the whole bluddy lot of them?”
Dirk tilted his head, a touch mechanically. “Diplomacy is a possible alternative,” he responded. “We could offer the unholy monsters better trade deals, in return for fully restoring the civil rights of all Icarians on their planets.”
“What a wonderful conception!” backtracked the scatterbrained jackanape. “I wouldn’t have thought of that in a month of Sundays.”
“I’m glad you think so. I’ll take a ‘dirty tricks’ peace mission to the two planets. Ket Martingale will have a field day.”
Zoe's restrained herself from giving the First Minister a piece of her mind. When the pompous upstart retired to his heavily guarded suite in the Gold House, he jangled his bell, and his favourite minions came in and behaved like jackasses.
At noon, the crowds thronging the Octagon directed their gaze towards the Palatine steps, where the frog-like Archbishop of Madron introduced them to the Three Wise Men of Ur. Dirk immediately recognised the eccentric trio. They were three elderly individuals he’d had thrown out of his mansion on New Year’s Eve.
When Balthazar rose to speak, he was greeted by a clutch of rude catcalls from the yobs. He fluttered his hands in forgiveness, and spoke with a Gaelic lilt.
“Unto you a child called Josiah will be born,” enunciated Balthazar. “He will be the tenth humanoid manifestation of our blessed ever eternal Messiah, who is travelling through the Lionel Penrose wormhole on the space station Castellos at this very moment in time. Josiah will be born on this planet during the next double lunar eclipse, in a building on which the Silver Cometron of Lilith focuses its rays.”
The fool's trying to predict that Zoe will give birth to a Christ Child, surmised Dirk Eradacus. My verbal-diarrhoeic mother should have kept her mouth shut. She shouldn't have let on about Zoe's due date.
“The Messiah's fake news!” shrieked a surly Apollo Komodo. “God-damned Trotskyists!”
“Why does it have to be a boy?” yelled a lady in a tight purple dress. “The first nine humanoid Messiahs were men. This is gender discrimination!”
“Such is the word of the Creator in all his primaeval glory,” retorted Balthazar, with a dark frown, “and he gets mighty ancy when he's frustrated.”
A moon-faced hooligan reacted to that piece of verbiage by hurling three pebbles in Balthazar's direction. As if by divine providence, the second one hit the old fool smack on his nose, and the third flew straight into his gaping mouth.
“Sexist!” howled the hooligan, as the blood poured from the count's face. “Sexist! Death to the Sexist! Death to the heretics!”
“Death to the sexists!” roared the crowds, in unison, and the wise counts staggered into the Capitol building, in fear of their lives.
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