LOOKING BACK THROUGH THE FIREBALL by Tom Leonard

 

       LOOKING BACK THROUGH THE FIREBALL

Tom Leonard

141 pages 31400 words

Speculative Fict

1. TRIANGLE OF FRIENDS

Pippa Pipette was of in vitro Scottish descent. She was blessed with jet black hair and distinctive blue eyes, and believed that she was made in exactly the way her creator had intended. Humans had long co-existed in the Aton solar system in the Red Trojan universe, with the non-hominid Icarians and the many colourful species of Apollo.

The Apollos had rapidly evolved from hominids, owing to the influences of the Siegfried-Kappa rays that came through the black hole from the Quanta universe. Interspecies marriages of humans with Icarians or Apollos were socially acceptable, though other talking animals were taboo.
All sentient life on Planet Earth in the Milky Way universe had become extinct during the fireball of AD 2593. However, before that humans and golden Icarians had teleported between the sister planets using an elaborate system designed during the Ice Ages by the neutro-ants of the Belt of Orion universe.

Planet Qinsatorix was colonised, and brutalized, by the exploitative British, during the twenty-fifth, and early twenty-sixth, centuries. That led Pippa to wonder how much her psyche had been influenced by the various post-colonialist attitudes that prevailed in the Red Trojan universe during the early twenty-eighth century.

Pippa liked purple ferrets and fluffy cream cats. She lived as a child in the planet capital Trivoli, a mystical ‘City of Lanterns’ located at the source of the Tiber in the western region of Trystonia, the comet-shaped mainland of Qinsatorix.

Trivoli was once the sister city of Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A., and Pippa identified with the Native American Culture of the Post-Barronist era. She grew up in the downtown Isthmus area between the exotic Lakes Nefertiti and Akhenaten, on sacred ground where the indigenous Dakota Sioux were once butchered and scalped by the golden-supremacist militia led by the fickle Crockett Lincoln himself.

Pippa was brought up in a log-cabin by her adoptive Talking Wolf parents, surrounded by a hi tech, industrialised, Icarian-ruled society, and regarded herself as a uniquely talented individual. When she was only nine, she learnt from her Social Economics teacher that fixed term growth creates long-term exponential profit. Pippa therefore wondered why Capitalism did not suddenly implode upon itself.

Pippa was intersex, but self-identified as a girl. Gone were the days when intersex humanoids were burnt at the stake, but the golden-skinned Icarian medics either killed or mutilated Pippa’s kind at birth. However, the Apollo Fox doctor at Lake Wingra Hospital left Pippa unscathed, and she was never told the reason why. Maybe she would be secretly scrutinized throughout her life, she sometimes wondered.

Pippa's loveable, adoptive parents nurtured her as a highly studious pupil at Greenside Primary. They were thrilled when she passed her Pre-Teen Qualifiers, with a score of 100% on the Deary-Burt, golden collar, IQ test. Pippa was permitted to wear a bright blue uniform, and to receive a quality education at Horizon High.

Pippa was a jolly student at high school, good academically and too strong to be bullied, and she blossomed into a trophy-winning, all-accepting teenager. Life could not have been better.

But everything went dreadfully wrong when Pippa was sixteen. Soon after she'd finished her Highers, her eagle-eyed chemistry teacher caught her smoking 'green' behind the changing rooms. When Pippa answered back with the crass insolence of youth, the teacher dragged her into the Social

Re-Alignment Cell, strapped her to a greasy pole, and lashed her with a poisonous snake-tawse. Three hockey forwards ran in to defend Pippa from further grief, and punches were thrown.
The hockey players were carrying Pippa towards safety when, a pig-van turned up, lights flashing and sirens wailing, and Pippa was suddenly left alone on the ground, writhing in agony.

“Section her!” growled the officious teacher, nursing her cracked jaw. “She's one of those unholy beasts!”

The rozzers put Pippa in a stiff neck-hold, dragged her away, and confined her to the Royal Triv, on the bleak, southern shore of Osiris, the Lake of Bones. She spent a few days in a windowless isolation cell, before being dragged into a plush office, and thrown, quivering like a weed in water, onto a plush crimson carpet.

A neuro-dissection consultant with cauliflower jaws took a single look at Pippa, diagnosed her as suffering from Bad Attitude Deficiency Disorder (B.A.D.D.), and prescribed heavy doses of an enzyme-poisoning, atypical anti-psychotic. A massive rugby prop forward from Melrose 7 injected Pippa's first dose, very cruelly in her ribs, and she squealed in agony.

After an anxious wait, Pippa's adoptive parents succeeded in negotiating her release from the Royal Triv, but the awkward neurologist signed a 'rendition order' placing Pippa in the custody of Sir Sargant Tredgold, the Headmaster of Laughlin Penitentiary College on the Isle of Nod.

Dr. Tredgold was a golden Icarian psycho-eugenicist of repute, and a mind-gut-organs specialist of note. His college and lab were financed by the Pioneer Fund, created many centuries previously by Harry Laughlin, the Nazi-esque superintendent of the United States Eugenics Office in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York.

Pippa's adoptive parents were scared that the technicians in Sargant Tredgold's lab might turn her from a cranky teenager into a comet vampire. They went ballistic when they heard that Tredgold was a leading member of the Janians, a sect that used long tubes, during their annual Lancaster Retreat, to give forced rattalin enemas to participants with mental health issues. When the furry creatures learnt that Tredgold had sent a psychotic Talking Koala to die in the Deep Sleep Room in the Dr. Owen David basement of St. Thomas of Trivoli's Hospital, they tried to challenge the rendition order in the High Court of Qinsatorix.

Unfortunately, Pippa's case fell apart when Sir Donald Jackson-Cowdenbeath K.C, F.R.S.E. drank too many brandies on the proceeds, and screwed up the evidence for the defence. So off to the Isle of Nod in the Archipelago of the Lost Multitudes Pippa was sent.

After a tortuously hot voyage, down the Tiber and across Oceania in a rendition coffin deep in the hold of the slave ship Colston, Pippa arrived, at Harry Laughlin College in mid-August 2712, where she was registered to study for four A-levels.

Pippa took solace in the companionship of Slim Quick, a clean-limbed, openly gay, golden-skinned lad with trauma-induced mental health issues. Sometimes the youngsters imagined they were part of each other’s fantasy. They particularly enjoyed landing on the top of Harperbury Hill together, where they sometimes met up with angels of their dreams.

Slim was green-eyed, ginger-haired, and from the mainland naval port of Drumkok. He'd lived on the Isle of Nod ever since he was sent to Laughlin Prep in a bird cage at the tender age of eleven. His appalling experiences in the Pied Piper larder during the canoe trips to the bizarrely fortified islet of Little St. Jules left scars on his mind. They'd doubtlessly been character-forming ever since.

Pippa and Slim befriended an indigenous Apollo Alpha called Dreyfus Dreadnought. He was trans male, an outcast from Angervast, the capital city of the Inner Moon, and he grieved for his look-alike love-buddy, who'd been exiled in chains to die in the copper and arsenic mines on the Outer Moon.

The three friends slept on a huge, unkempt, communal mattress in their third-floor dorm in Bligh Hall, the beds having been removed by the prefects to intimidate the browbeaten Lower Sixth. The building was named after the much decorated, golden-skinned Vice-Admiral Billy Bligh, who exterminated 100,000 hominids during the attack on Asmara 13, and enslaved the indigenous people of Rum.

When Pippa awoke on the second Thursday of September, her pet otter Scatty was sitting on her chest, and Dreyfus was untangling his hooves from his wings. Pippa's grimy bedfellows included eleven diverse Qinsatorans, and a metallic, four-legged Psychlops from Planet Gallium Arsenide. When the Psychlops began to stir, Pippa bounced off the mattress, and rushed to the loo.
Pippa slipped on the urine-sodden asbestos floor, but recovered her balance and sat herself down on the edge of the dirty white, communal lavatory bowl, clutching her cleaning brush. She day-dreamt about her childhood, and a multitude of colourful pictures flashed two inches in front of her right eye.
Pippa was envisioning her furry Auntie Mabel sunbathing on the Isle of Mustique, with the princesses with tiaras and Royal Commandos with big bushy hats, when the breakfast gong clanged inside her head. Pippa opened her left eye and returned to her apparent reality.

A droolworthy, green Drinkon was sitting next to Pippa on the massive toilet bowl. Tempted by the smell of bacon, Pippa leapt to her feet, pulled up her grey jeggings, and scarpered.

Pippa took a bite of rancid bacon and a sip of lukewarm tea in the brinner room, before scurrying across the gravel to her sombre class-space. There followed an hour of irritating co-ordinate geometry, and two heavily retentive hours of Classics.
When the grandfather clock struck noon, Dr. Jake Skulltwister was still teaching from the Odyssey of Agrevius. Upon completing the line, 'So Agrevius to his foul and painful fate did go, and all was sickening woe', the horribly boring Apollo Fish glowered at his students, and growled, “Now vamoose and get lost!”

Pippa packed her satchel, and headed for the Rolfe-Gotto Dining Hall, an insect-ridden place. In the corner lay a fading, golden-painted bust of the, once iconic, Hyacinth Rolfe-Gotto, the editor of the widely-sold text Interplanetary Applications of Negative Eugenics.

When Pippa sat down, she recalled that Dame Rolfe-Gotto's quote, 'Starve the degenerates and improve the species', was highly influential during the liquidation of the highly cultured Visigoths, and long thereafter. That put Pippa off eating in the damned place at all. She put her mouldy, cheese sandwich into her pouch, and headed across the bridge over the Lower Blackway for the beach.

The lush bushes of Eden dominated the view across Tawi Sound to the west, and, beyond Eden, hundreds of tiny islets stretched to the perfectly horizontal horizon. A rookery of albatrosses was flying south over Opihr, while a squabble of jet finches gathered over Sark. To the leeward of Lundy, a school of dolphins were splashing in the white-tops, and the Bald Hermit’s fishing boat came in around the Mewstone, with the basking sharks in tow.

Pippa recalled the good times vacationing with her furry adoptive family in the Archipelago of the Tree of Life, and tears welled into her eyes.

The paddle-steamer Mississippi was moored by the jetty, and Pippa took the opportunity to chat with the ferry lady from Tibermouth. The white-feathered Talking Ostrich was gladly reciting her life story, when Pippa saw her chums Slim and Dreyfus slinking across the pebbles.
Why are they speckled with gold dust? deliberated Pippa, but as they drew closer she realised that they were coated with grime.
“Are you going on a trip?” Slim inquired, limping on his battered right leg.
Pippa took a whiff of Slim’s odour. “Can't,” she blurted. “I don't have any microdots left. What's up with your calf? Did Mr. Ruskin dead-leg you again?”

“Not this week, but Dr. Tredgold threw the fire extinguisher at me for screwing up on my Hygiene homework.”

“That brute’s almost as cruel as his ugly husband,” Pippa angrily replied. “Dr. Jake gave a homo erectus girl in our Classics class a purple spleen scalding, and that was only for spilling her bright green ink.”
“Why don't we chillax under the bull-conker tree?” suggested Dreyfus, relaxing his paws.
“Good idea,” replied Pippa. “Come along, Scatty!”

“Not Scatty again!” moaned Slim, and Pippa’s pet otter was, as per usual, nowhere to be seen.
All three pupils were wearing their regulation, dark grey tunics. Slim's pink, scampi-like eyebrows blended with his sumptuous golden skin. Dreyfus's piercing black eyes distracted attention from his silver hair and bronze wings, and Pippa's light brown freckles contrasted with the nicest red lips on the planet.

The triangle of friends created a bubble-huddle in the shrubbery under the bull-conker tree. Pippa thought the tree's mossy roots radiated energy. They were infested with intelligent, star-shaped insects called festoonettes.

“You look like Silver Beauty when she was about to be shot, Dreyfus,” observed Pippa. “Is Mr. Grimster still sticking needles into your hooves?”

“That newt-skinned throwback can’t find his damned darning kit,” replied the horsey-faced Apollo Alpha, “but he’s just spent an hour teaching us about Fisher-Finney genetic linkages between abnormalities. He believes that our babies should be forcibly aborted whenever their parents are regarded as genetically inferior. He’s as bad as the High Tea Party, and then some.”
Pippa grimaced. “How utterly appalling! And Mr. Ruskin’s teaching us about a statistician called Gini who invented a famous economic index in 1912, but damaged all the native peoples of north-eastern Africa with his ideas on racial superiority.”
Dreyfus pursed his lips. “Professor Corrado Gini was a twentieth century Musso-fascist. He even poured scorn on the original hominids of Eritrea 1. What an ill-informed bigot!”

“Will you be chumming me to the chemistry lab this afternoon, Dreyfus?” asked Slim. “The Talking Dingo teaching assistants are planning the best 'stinky gas' experiment of all time.”

Dreyfus flexed his biceps. “No chance! I'll be cutting class, 'cos I'm playing rugger at Saint Slug’s.”
Slim gave the Apollo Alpha a funny look. “I don't envy you the icy cold shower afterwards.”
Dreyfus balanced a couple of lively festoonettes on his thumb. “That's the fun bit. That's when the peng geeks start admiring me.”
That prospect put Pippa into a tizz. “I’d love to watch you too," she blurted.
Dreyfus grinned, and turned goofy. “I understand your feelings, Pippa,” he murmured, “from the way you smile, and the look in your tender eyes.”

“I love the way you walk,” enjoined Pippa, feeling enraptured. “and even the way you stalk. Please don’t take that away from me.”

Suddenly, and without warning, the fish-faced Classics teacher, Dr. Jake Skulltwister sidled up, and glared inquisitively at the happy trio.

“What the fuck!” exclaimed Slim.

Skulltwister took a group snapshot with a mouse-cam attached to his ear. “I'll wash your mouth out with carbolic!” he retorted.

“That’s an absolutely stupid way of taking pictures,” complained Pippa.

“It's for the Old Laughlinians magazine,” replied the intrusive Apollo Fish. “Your conversation intrigues me by it’s sheer loopy craziness. It would make an excellent script for a cameo hologram on Qinflix.”
When Pippa spurted nonsense, she sometimes didn't understand, or even know, what she was blurting. “I hope you and your malignant wife will attend our all-intriguing First Night, Dr. Jake,” she spieled. “Our cast will also include a po-faced Schweinhund and twelve smelly fish from the evolving hominid museum in Portobello 6.”
Slim spluttered on his cinemuck. “You're as zoned out as my three bipolar sisters!” he exclaimed.
“You're one big bully!” retorted Pippa. “I want to scratch your eyes out.”

Slim smiled. “But we're one big family, darling. Dreyfus and I are your pet siblings.”
“Cut me some slack. I have my own family, in Trivoli, waiting to visit me.”
“Hummmm...I wouldn't bet on that. I was hauled here when I was eleven, and I haven't been allowed to see my family since.”

Skulltwister chuckled. “That's only to be expected after what you did to them.”

Pippa began to shed tears again. “I'm sure I'll see my Mum and big bad Dad, and all my furry brothers and sisters soon. Yes, I'm sure I will!”

“No, you won't,” snarled Skulltwister, with a sadistic grin.

A conundrum of thoughts throbbed through Slim's head. He felt horses' hooves pounding the inside of his skull, and wondered whether he was the Roman Emperor Caligula.

“Mother, Father, Grandmama!” raged Slim, grimacing like a ghoul in Purgatory. “Don't leave ME to die. But are you still alive, Mother? Mother! Where are you, Mother? I DIDN'T kill you, Mummy, or Daddy, or Granny, but where are my lovely little sisters? Maybe I throttled you all too.”
“This could be inter-generational!” shrieked Pippa.
“We should revolt against the entire fucking system,” wailed Dreyfus. “Revolt! Lynch the shysters in their ivory domes! They’re not worth tuppence. Revolt!”
“It’s about time you obnoxious street-urchins saned up,” snapped Skulltwister, heading, in Pippa's perception, for the ferry boat to Eden.

The festoonettes in the mossy roots were fascinated by that noisy encounter, and spread the word to the all-powerful and the divine.

Feeling uptight, Pippa retreated to Rolfe-Gotto Hall, where she polished off a sour-tasting cream bun, only to be disturbed by clicking sounds to her left. To her consternation, two Nazi-esque overseers strode up, flashing their steel spurs and clucking their golden teeth.
“We’re taking you to the psych lab for open brain and gut surgery,” announced the squat one, with a stern blink.“You’re as outrageous as Virginia Whining Wolf, and then some.”

“Dr. Tredgold is waiting with his extra-incisive connectome-confabulator,” added the thin-necked coot, with a curt grin. “Maybe he’ll give your Third Eye the once over.”
Slim emerged from behind a statue of an evil, racist phrenologist of yore. “Don't you dare hurt her!” he howled.
“Don't you worry about her,” retorted the squat geek. “You're next.”

To the north of Laughlin College lay Harperbury Hill, an extinct volcano where pixies and wood fairies once fought and played. The hill had been stripped bare, and surrounded by the Shockley Collider, a daunting steel edifice. Fifty-five imported American-Chinese labourers and black technicians had perished there in AD 2511, while constructing the Galton-Penrose Laboratory way beneath the hill and connecting it to the fearsome collider.

The overseers dragged Pippa past the ridiculously uninhibited Grecian statue of Sir Francis Galton, Sir Lionel Penrose, and Seven Vine Snakes Entwined, and into the lab. She was wearing only a dirty, white towel, and her goose pimples contracted every arrectores pilorum on her skin,

Pippa was met by the head orderly, a remarkably tall, blue, sugary-skinned Trinkon, known only as the ‘Yin'.

“What manner of creature is this?” asked the Yin, disdainfully.

The squat overseer handed the Yin a thick file, and glared. “This one's Scottish, born by centuries-delayed in vitro. Her ancestors were Highlanders who teleported here from Ullapool during the nineteenth century land clearances by the Duke of Sutherland.”

“Now he was a fine homo sapiens!” declared the Yin. “Dr. Tredgold sometimes imagines that he’s a Highlander, but maybe he was the alien monster in Loch Ness.”
“I can see through my Seventh Eye,” spurted Pippa. “It reveals the Ultimate Truth. We're all made of pulsating random waves!”
The Yin narrowed his gaze. “Perhaps we should give her a two-month course of old-fashioned E.C.T.,” he growled.

“Do you mean the neuro-destructive procedure that Jock Scotius pioneered at the Royal Ed in Morningside 2?” inquired the thin-necked overseer, with a leer. “It strikes like lightning.”

“Scotius was struck off for his pretentiousness!” retorted the Yin. “The E.C.T. developed by Professors Heel and Shorten at St. Bonnie’s in Toronto is far superior since it promises brief periods of euphoria. Those feisty Chattering Owls really knew their shit.”

“It'll still destroy ten percent of her neurons, sheer off her frontal lobes, and put her into deep, long-term depression,” added the squat coot, licking his salivating lips.

Pippa went berserk at that outrageous suggestion, and had to be frog-marched the entire length of the Galton-Penrose Lab, much to the consternation of the gunge-beetles and covid-roaches, who fled in dismay.

The lab was a hive of activity. Teams of sugary Trinkette nurses were busily testing and treating their patients, many of whom were attached to curious pieces of neuro-scientific equipment. A paranoid schizophrenic sex-criminal was getting injected with disinfectant on a vibrating sling, and a naked lady with sagging skin was dangling in space, flailing her limbs, her head imbedded in the plasterboard ceiling. To cap that, a wired-up, psychotic convict, with head in a cranium constrictor and a ‘pangolin’s tongue’ down his throat, was reacting to his live action, brain and gut surgery by gyrating head over heels all around his animal cage.

Pippa saw a beautiful young woman lying unconscious on a Prince Charles davenport, a griffin straddling her chest, a horse neighing at her feet.

“Wake up, Cinderella!” cried Pippa, only for an orderly to empty a jug of noxious fluid into her face.

When they reached the end of the corridor, the orderlies paused to pay homage to the towering portrait of Hippocrates of Kos, before tearing off Pippa's towel, and spraying her with bleach.

“Don't you dare!” howled Pippa, only to be grabbed by the nape, and thrown into the M.K.McGill operating tank.

A few seconds later, Pippa peered nervously upwards, only to see Dr. Sarg Tredgold standing there bolt upright, as if in a trance, next to his mahogany desk. The Icarian's ugly dark green eyes were staring blankly into space, and Pippa wondered whether he was a wicked demon from the primaeval swamps.

A huge, platinum-framed, black and white photograph took pride of place on Sargant Tredgold’s desk. It depicted the twelve member Qinsatoran delegation to the highly influential First International Eugenics Congress at the University of London in South Kensington in July 1912. The Qinsatoran leader, the formidable Countess of Madron, was smoking a long cigar.

{According to the August 1912 edition of the Trivoli Onion: The eminent British eugenicist Alfred Tredgold met the Countess of Madron during the conference reception in the Duchess of Marlborough's mansion. The couple retreated to the back garden, and cuddled behind a blueberry bush, where the UCL statistician Karl Pearson was ‘in dilecto flagrante’ with his highly assertive protégé Ronald Aylmer Fisher, recently graduated from Gonville and Caius.

Fisher squeezed a mouse to death in celebration, as was his want, before beating a UCL beefeater with a stick for his discourteous attitude towards women.}

Fully eight-hundred years later, the Yin coughed politely, and Dr. Sargant Tredgold stirred himself, only to look as brain-smothered as a utang on lithium.

“Where the Daffy Dickens am I?” mithered Tredgold. “What century am I in? I’m a gentleman of noble lineage, I’ll have you know. My dear ancestor Sir Alfred Tredgold was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, no less. He taught neurology in Bedlam, and tormented children suffering from ADHD with particularly frightening ordeals. That sorted them out for their laziness!”

“You’re so British, Sire,” simpered the Yin, “and yet as golden-skinned as the almighty Janus himself.”

“I’m my own special breed,” purred Tredgold, preening his orange eyebrows.

“You’re full of hyperbolic baloney,” yelped Pippa. angrily.

Tredgold peered at Pippa through his haze of antiquity. “It looks as if we gave Keir a good starmering,” he blustered. “So much for his bag of tricks!”
The Yin chuckled, and handed Tredgold a thick folder. “This isn't Keir, Doctor! It's Pippa Pipette, and she was born of Almighty God’s third gender. Her last consultant thought she had B.B.A.D., but his diagnosis was unusually totally arbitrary.”
Tredgold twitched. “But what happened to Keir?” he moaned.
The Yin paused for reflection. “The ragamuffin’s on a high, following his outstanding treatment, though he's still recovering from his heart surgery and cracked femur. His dark green skin is returning to its natural colour already.”
Tredgold acquired a fresh aura. He looked God-like.

“Excellent! I'm so happy for him,” he said, before flipping through several pages in Pippa's folder, blinking furiously. “So Miss Pipette, that B.B.A.D. diagnosis was way out in left field. How does it feel to be manically infused?”
“What!! protested Pippa. “I'm NOT infused with anything, and what happens on Nod is enough to make anybody manic.”
“Hold your horses! One of your Trinkon overseers noticed you tangentialising onto a ridiculously extraneous topic, something to do with 'twerking' as I understand, and you were heard blurting nonsense on at least three separate occasions. You sound like Chancellor Rishi when he’s trying to balance his Austerity Budget.”
"So what? I'm high functioning and neuro-diverse.”
“Poppycock! My hubby’s has got your measure. It's all too apparent to both of us that you're suffering from hyperkinetic brain damage. Your organs are clearly at fault. So we'll perform multiple, key-hole surgeries to see if you need any transplants.”

“Stop!!...why?”

“Because your entire body is part and parcel of your damaged brain, you fool. Throw her onto the rotating frame, Trinkons! I’ll insert the incisors into her abdomen myself."

“Her neuropsychological readings are way over the top, doctor.” announced an eagle-eyed, sugary-skinned orderly. “According to the state-of-the-art ‘Bayesian Ogre’ statistical simulations, a kidney transplant is vastly preferable to connectome-surgery, or a sliced spleen.”

“The Bayesian Ogre always know best. Rotate the wench to angle minus thirty, Trinks!”
“Mother!” wailed Pippa. “Mother!”

[A Bayesian is a follower of statistical methods based upon Bayes’ Theorem. Some Bayesians are into brain modelling and thought experiments.]

At that very moment, two Apollo Hyenas dragged in Slim, in all his attractive glory, looking as traumatized as a koala escaping through a blazing forest of fire, his eyebrows raised high in consternation.

“Pulverise him, Carstairs 2001-style,” demanded the Yin, and the hyenas dutifully twisted the mesmerised patient's arms behind his back, kicked and walloped him, and made patterns on his glistening skin with their four-toed paws.
"Just look at him,” growled Tredgold. “He's a narcissistic psychopath."
"The red-hot invigilator for his evil sins, Herr Doctor?" suggested the Yin. “We could put him into an induced coma later.”

“I'm not going into a coma for you bastards!” howled Slim.
Tredgold grinned like a Zaragonese pirate. “No problem, darling. It's the DNA-deconfabulating capsule for you.”

“Why??”

“Why not?”

“Why not indeed?” enjoined the Yin, his eyes flaring deep crimson as he twisted a curved, ivory needle into Slim’s abdomen.

“Leave my DNA alone, mind fucks!" wailed Slim, as they hauled him up the steel staircase for his hour of speedy rotations around the Shockley Collider. His screams could even be heard by the wise witches and insightful gnomes in the grassy canyon below the House of the Holy Trinity.

“This could be twentieth century Planet Earth,” opined an Apollo Pixie from Trimontium 2.

“It got infinitely worse when the rainbows vanished,” replied a bronze woman of learning.

Back in the psych lab, the Yin looked fit to grovel. “You appear, at first sight, to have no rhyme or reason, Dr. Tredgold,” he pandered, “and yet you're so Rosalind Crick prize-worthy. They should fill your cup to the brim with silver acorns.”

“Pippa and Slim are part of my Master Plan,” purred the devious knight of the realm. “I will enslave their souls.”

2. STRANGE HAPPENINGS

Late one evening, Pippa was relaxing on a dirty bean-bag in the attic of Bligh Hall, slowly recovering from her painful kidney transplant. She was reading about ‘searching for identity’ and ‘mixed ethnic roots’ in Margaret Atwood's Life before Man, when she heard a scratching sound from outside the wooden frame of the once quarter-paned window.

“Get lost, sneaky vampire bat!” shouted Pippa, only for a bright orange Qinxhunter to crawl in, and stand erect on their pointed rear paws

“Good evening,” said the genderless sub-humanoid, waving their thin, curly trunk. “I'm Bra Quantum, a seriously minded, grass roots revolutionary of note.”

Pippa peered down her nose at the floppy-eared creature.

“You remind me of the 'Warrior of Righteousness' in Star Battle,” she said, with a curt smile, “but where's your spikesaber?”

“Never you mind,” retorted Bra, flexing their front paws. “I know about what really matters. That's all that matters.”

Pippa sighed, whimsically. “Does anything matter any more?”

“Yes, and life is too short to be politically expedient,” replied the sub-humanoid, raising their eyes to the Heavens, “as Qex, the Holy Creator of all genderless freegans, likes to tell us.”

“Your creator? How many of you are there left?

"The Qinxhunters are growing in numbers, and I'm sure we will prevail on some sunny day.”

“Your Marlene Rivera is certainly a Qinxhunter to be reckoned with.”

“Thank you! They helped defend the Trinkons at Brickwall, but then they was ostracised by those plebs, even though it was Marlene who threw the second Bojo-tail when the rozzers attacked.”

“How admirable! Would you care for some of my mucozade?”

“Got to rush! But I come with a message from our Holy Creator. Qex says that your recent surgery was proposed by the Janians, a strange sect that will take you to explore sentient creatures on other planets. As a consequence of your unique situation, Qex has appointed you to their panel of 'Roving Angels'.”

“That's ridiculous! Are you on psychedelics?”

“No chance. Indeed, Qex wishes to explore your very own consciousness on an important matter.”

“I'm not into your sort of unholy junk.”

“You misunderstand me. Mother Earth has been scheduled to regenerate, but Qex is concerned that the beings, that they breed there, may become just as scheming, sociopathic and barbaric as the last lot. As a Roving Angel, you will be expected to advise Qex accordingly.”

“I'm sorry, but I don't believe in Qex, their silly angels, or any of your baloney.”

“It grieves me to hear that. Maybe I’ll ask Qex to pay you a personal visit.”

“Why don’t you tell your ridiculous creator to get knotted?” Pippa blurted, irritably.

“How could you be so mean?” shrieked the colourful creature, vanishing in a puff of yellowy-brown soot.

Pippa experienced a change of heart before she nodded off, and thought that she would play the role of a Roving Angel, for the time being at least.

Dr. Jake Skulltwister didn’t like sub-humanoids, and he usually shot Qinxhunters on sight. During mid-October, he summoned Pippa and Slim to his office in Abrahall-Frere Tower, a historical edifice out of a nightmare movie, that had housed the pupils’ ‘Correction and Rehabilitation Unit’ ever since the Halcyon days when the college was called Bruton-on-Blackway.

Pippa was appalled to see the ancient words,'Where wicked children are turned into fine poets and ferocious generals on pain of the lash' engraved in Latin over the portal, and Slim was glad that he’d padded his shorts with metal gauze. He still hadn't quite recovered from his pummelling in the Galton-Penrose Lab.

When Pippa and Slim ventured entered the long-accursed tower, Jake Skulltwister was thrashing Corbyn Blair with a metal Spartan rod, while encouraging him to recite a bitter-sweet love poem entitled Achilles, Patroclus, and the evil Centaur. Poor Corbyn had been interrupting Skulltwister's classes with awkward questions; his voice became shriller and shriller as the beating progressed.

Slim was appalled when the dark green blood oozed down the purple-cheeked Trinkon's blue, sugary legs, and very distressed when Jake stamped on the wicked fourth-former’s size thirteen foot for whining too much.

When Corbyn lost consciousness, two hefty Gridiron players from Atlanta 17 threw his inert body into a lynx-shaped animal cage in the corner. The headless stuffed skeleton of General Sir Egon Dyer-Pearson (the victor at Jallianwala 2, and a former Laughlin pupil of note) shook and shuddered, and its right arm dropped off.

Jake Skulltwister pointed Pippa and Slim in the direction of the antique Rev. Bartle Abrahall-Frere whipping sofa, and emitted a blood-curdling laugh.

“I inherited Bartle Frere’s genes,” claimed Jake, “and the bad outweigh the good for the betterment of humanoidkind.”

“A few thousand fishy genes have been added to your pool since,” retorted Slim, in indignation.

“You'll pay for that with your ears,” howled Skulltwister, “and your already well-poisoned liver.”

“Your noble ancestors do you credit,” intervened Pippa, with extreme tact. “The Baronets of Harewood 77 were instrumental in colonising the entire county of Herefordshire, and grinding the peasants into the dust.”

“Thank you for saying that, Miss Pipette,” replied Skulltwister, with a curt smile, sliding two application forms onto the table. “My great grandfather, the tenth baronet, was the wealthiest slave owner in Mumbai 253.”

Slim eyed the forms suspiciously. “What are those documents? What’s your little game?”

Skulltwister tried to look sanctimonious.“My darling wife Sarg thought that you might like to sign up and become Junior Janians.”

“W-why?”.

“So that you can learn about all the social good the Society of Janians does for the people of this planet, of course.”

“B-but it says golden Icarians and white humans only,” stammered Slim. “W-why?”

“Because that's what our much revered Prince Felixos Von Attenburg stipulated when he founded the Society in Garmisch-on-Dnieper in AD1681,” explained Skulltwister. “He was the first Living Incarnate of the god Janus. He worshipped the golden Janus and the White Christ.”

“Screw that palace-bagger,” reacted Slim. “He wasn't even a Greek prince, let alone a real one.”

“Of course he was,” replied Skulltwister, with a deft flick of his catzinger. “He was married at a tender age to the Prince of Coburg, the militaristic guardian of our 'mentally deficient' in the murky regions under the White Tower of Mainau.”

“That Charlie wasn’t a prince either and I don’t want to be a Janian,” howled Slim, reeling in pain. “The two-faced Von Attenbergs still believe in shooting Talking Tigers, Apollo Foxes and original hominids, while claiming to protect nature itself.”

“That's to cull the species and protect against climate change, you fool.”

“It's highly discriminatory population control! I'd prefer to be an all-accepting Quaker……. Aaaaaarg!”

The Apollo Fish grinned like an angel-shark. “They’re a collection of jokers, and it's the pulley-beam for you, puppy dog. Prefects! At the double!”

The ape-like rugby props marched up, and hung Slim, head down, over the pulley-beam like a Satanic spider dancer in a spin. When the cat tore into Slim's tendon, both he and Pippa felt encouraged to sign their Junior Janian application forms in haste.

During that night a terrible crime occurred at Laughlin, that within months would become known as 'The First Galton Murder'. In the morning, the mutilated body of the Colonial Economics teacher John Ruskin was discovered, completely unexpectedly, in the college quadrangle, with an antique Dyer-Pearson bayonet thrust through its stomach. The words 'Galton lackey' were scratched into the victim's forehead, and a note asserting 'The true master race rules' was pinned to his insect-ridden left foot.

Wishing to avoid scandal, Headmaster Tredgold told his prefects to throw Ruskin's mangled body into the Sir Ronald Fisher Natural Selection Pit. That accomplished, Tredgold advised Pippa and Slim that he'd be taking them on a ferry trip, that very weekend, to one of the Janians' annual shindigs. It was known as the Helmsley Retreat.

The Mississippi duly arrived from Tibermouth early Saturday, its decks littered with devout Janians and colourful tourists. Sir Sargant Tredgold climbed aboard, and headed to the refreshments cabin to indulge in a large port and lemon with a creepy-crawly crony from the F.D.A.

Tredgold sent Pippa and Slim to the upper deck. When Dreyfus leapt aboard, in an unusually effusive mood, he was consigned to the rear hold to guard the baggage. Since he was neither Icarian nor human, Dreyfus wouldn't be permitted to participate in the Janians' official meetings, but he'd be expected to fetch and carry like a hungry dog for the entire weekend. He felt bitter about that.

Bra Quantum was waiting furtively when Pippa and Slim reached the upper deck. The Orange Qinxhunter (who was travelling to Machonik) wriggled their trunk, and smiled. However, the students were distracted by a filthy-rich-looking, golden-skinned woman, who waved furiously in their direction, and beckoned them over.

“Why hello, my pretty pretties!” purred Lady Jemima Sunkist. “I recognised you from your picture. Why don't you come into our parlour, and tell the Prince Alfred and I all about your fascinating selves? We'd simply love to learn about what makes you tick.”

“What picture?” Pippa dubiously inquired.

“The snapshot that darling Sarg and Jake sent me. You were up to no good, in the foliage under a bull-conker tree, with a strange-looking wastrel with floppy wings. Those outcasts should be left to rot in the gutter!”

Slim wasn't amused by that outrageous suggestion. “I assume you're referring to our buddy Dreyfus Dreadnought. He's a highly intelligent, trans male Apollo Alpha and he's as good as the rest of us.”

Prince Alfred Saxe-Hanover of the Homo Erectus adjusted his war medals, and smiled. “I totally agree with your philosophy of life, my fine fellow,” said the slowly greying sixty-year old. “I'm drinking Death Lust. What's your fancy?”

Slim twitched nervously. “Just a half of Viral Corona Eagle, but diluted with lemon pop, please, Your Highness.”

“Yeesh!...Boy!”

A purple-haired, Cnupian youth slid up with a jar of fizzy shandy, and nervously wriggled his hips. Slim licked off the froth, and grinned. The youth flinched.

“Would you like to spend the night with him?” inquired the prince. “I bought him from a Stalking Gove slave trader, and he's built like an imperial princess.”

“Not bluddy likely,” retorted Slim. “I don't like the smell of his breath.”

“I admire your assertiveness, and your impudent demeanour,” said the prince, with a salacious grin, as his slave wilted into the background.

An appalling image of the prince when he was several years younger flashed traumatically out of the recesses of Slim's mind. Slim emitted a ghoulish, gurgling moan that would have been interpreted by some as a symptom of insanity. Prince Alfred stared at him, with a mixture of curiosity and fright.

“I'm sure we've never met before,” blustered the prince. “I'd remember your curious eyebrows.”

“I remember everything,” blurted Slim, bursting into tears.

Lady Jemima turned her head, gave Pippa the glad eye, and grinned from ear to ear. “My mother was the Princess of Revelations City. Do you have any parents of note?”

The Daily Mail described her mother as the Whore of Babylon 99, recalled Pippa. She glared at the stuck-up aristocrat, snarled, and made good her escape.

The ubiquitous ferry lady cried, “And now for your own special voyage through nature!” and the Mississippi's gigantic wheels worked overtime while she guided the top-heavy paddle steamer across Tawi Sound, in the excellent company of Pippa, Slim, and Bra Quantum, who'd retreated to a bench by the quaint steering cabin.

Pippa enjoyed the lush view of Eden, and the spiralling hills beyond, and realised that there was more to life than dour Laughlin College. Bra much appreciated the company of accepting humanoids and Slim sat there admiring the z-eagles and ocean-gulls as they dived deep for their ever exotic underwater prey. When an eagle captured an octopus, he applauded in delight.

The Talking Ostrich chatted incessantly with Pippa, Slim and Bra while guiding her paddle-steamer through the Gates of Barron,, narrowly averting the rocks that tumbled into the bubbling water from the trembling cliffs above. Then, after negotiating the dark yellow Rapids of Wojtela, the crafty lady let her ship drift past the towering Lighthouse of Hypatia, until they reached the turbulent Montini Flow.

The mackerel, star fish and sea urchins leapt playfully out of the sizzling water, as the sea-wrens flapped their wings overhead, and Slim recalled his fishing trips out of Drumkok with his father when he was a child.

“That’s where I live with my siblings,” said the ostrich, and there, off the port beam, the immortal Isle of Lismore shimmered in the heavenly Haar, as the fantastical purple mountains of Flute towered above the red and orange forest on the Artonish Ridge, and into the bluey-pink sky above.

Quarter hour later, the Mississippi turned in an elliptic arc into Wash Creek, the narrow passage, fully twenty miles long, that separates Lismore from the larger island of Flute. After ten miles or so, Pippa noticed a bevy of ape-swans, with man-sized bodies and swan-like wings, emerging from under a stone bridge, and thought they were transmitting joyful mind waves through her neurotransmitters.

The ancient walled city of Machonik dominated the view to the west. To the east of the creek stood the cream-painted Fragrant Springs Hotel, where the Janians were holding their retreat.

When the Mississippi moored at the hotel jetty, several families of Janians hurried excitedly across the beach, from the charming village of Helmsley, to greet their guests with bowls of fruit, and garlands of roses.

Slim said “Farewell, kamarad,” to Bra, and he and Pippa leapt, easy-breezy, onto a sand dune.

While the Fragrant Springs Hotel was modest and Spartan, Pippa was pleased that her room was en suite. She and Slim drank tea, and devoured strawberry and clotted cream scones, with a gang of Junior Janians from Madron, and, an hour or so later, they all went down to the main conference chamber for the first plenary session.

The Living Clerk of the Helmsley Janians was sitting at the middle desk, surrounded by several circles of packed seats. Everybody was lost in silent contemplation, and various states of consciousness.

The clerk kept his bright red nose buried in The Janian Articles of Faith, according to Prince Felixos von Attenburg, and gripped his prosperous belly, without uttering a word. Then the corpulent fellow suddenly leapt to his feet, and announced, “In the name of our forty-third Living Incarnate, who sends his apologies for his absence.”

There followed twenty full minutes of Janian silence.

Pippa was lost in a vivid fantasy about the former slaves in the Chagos Islands, and the imperialists who brutally displaced them, when a wizened man, with flowers in his hair, rose to his feet. She could scarcely believe her ears at what she heard next.

“Friends, I'd like to hold the Tawns of the Alligator Peninsula in the Light,” spurted the eclectic fellow. “They spend most of their time hunting for food, and some of them can't even afford an occasional night out at the theatre. I've recently sent one of the more deserving ones a donation of two bronze schillings towards her child's medical expenses.'

“Despite all our extreme generosity, an unbearably stupid Qinview presenter had the cheek to complain about the way we, the bourgeoisie, persist in relaxing in our plush armchairs with our blinkers on, while the peasants grovel in the shit. This is horribly perplexing."

After another fifteen minutes of intrusive silence, a middle-aged woman in a chequered suit stood up, and burbled something nonsensical, before collapsing, slightly hysterically, back into her seat.

How sad, thought Pippa, but it was nice of the Janians to welcome her.

After a further, forty-minute, spell of excruciating silence, the Living Clerk stood up and nodded like a pea-brained marionette, whereupon everyone effusively hugged, and shook hands.

The bonhomie was cut short when the Senior Overseer, a stern-looking lady, called for silence. “Thank you, loving friends and forgiving souls,” she procrastinated. “We still have time for a brief announcement. The Living Incarnate is absent this weekend, since he's attending a top secret meeting with the Nineveh Gang in the Galton-Booth Business School on Planet Tiberius Ptolemy.…..”

Pippa wondered why the irritating Incarnate was ploughing his furrow talking to a bunch of neo-colonialist Apollo Penguins on a distant planet, and thought that he might, like other leading Janians, be giving himself a religious aura simply to increase his political clout.

“It's time to spend a few more minutes chilling out in Janian silence,” continued the Senior Overseer. “Whoops! I was supposed to finish with a quote…...”

What a futile meeting, concluded Pippa. Why do they even bother?

Pippa was starving when she and Slim arrived in the grim annexe for lunch, only for Prince Alfred Saxe-Hanover and Lady Jemima Sunkist to strut up, and sit down uninvited. Pippa did not have to wait for long to discover what ulterior motive they had in mind.

The sleazy aristocrats were accompanied by a brawny, green-haired businessman in his mid-thirties. The rugged huckster sported a bedazzling cravat that contrasted with his bullish, golden face. Owing to a post-natal accident with a chainsaw, his nape was coloured bright red and glistened in the sunlight.

"This is Dr. Ket Martingale,” announced Jemima, with aplomb “He's Chief Economics Advisor to the First Minister, and a life-time Janian for good measure."

Martingale took a sip of Gini and It, grabbed the seat immediately opposite Slim, and eyed his prey. Slim twitched nervously.

"Are you from West Bolubia, Slim?" inquired the older man.

"Never heard of the place. I'm from the upper class suburbs of Drumkok, though I’m pretty lower class myself."

"Shame,” replied the redneck. “I thought you might be Antinous of Bolu. Ant's much beloved by everybody. He's such a handsome fellow."

"Haven't never heard of any Ant, let alone that the geek."

"Really? Lady Jemima was wondering whether you would like to come with us to the Hotel de Wash after the Ceilidh."

"Why? What for?"

"I'll explain more later. It's on the other side of Wash Creek. You'd be very welcome to tag along, if only to stretch your delightfully strong legs. Prince Alfred is looking forward to watching the acrobatic fire dancers from Mustique. They're so avant garde."

"I'll m-mull on it," stuttered Slim, with a tremor.

That afternoon, the Janians bill-boarded twelve special interest meetings in the Fragrant Springs. The sessions addressed a variety of niche, burning issues.

Slim attended a meeting of the support group 'Assist and Abet', which helped convicts to rehabilitate upon release. He asked the pugnacious organizer how many convicts he'd actually met.

“One last month, and maybe two next week,” came the self-satisfied reply.

“That sounds like glorified window dressing to me,” asserted Slim, and the blotchy-eyed fellow wilted into his seat.

Come late afternoon, Pippa and Slim dropped in on a session on 'Sex Education in Primary Schools'. They were delighted when the lead speaker defended the interests of LGBTQUIPS+ humanoids everywhere.

Yes, the Janians are an outstanding, socially pro-active organisation after all, concluded Pippa, I feel proud to be a Junior Janian.

Slim dropped in on a session concerning 'The Freedoms of the Indigenous Peoples'. He was outraged by the suppression of the Heptagon. They were aboriginal, bronze Icarians, and he liked and admired them. They were largely confined to to small, economically restricted reservations, though others were abused and mistreated as slaves.

Slim discussed the problem with a wealthy Janian slave trader from Philadelphia 19, who was attending the session with his indigenous serving girl.

The slave trader told Slim that the prominent English eugenicist Sir Francis Galton gave £42000 of his family’s slave and arms trading wealth to his nephew Nick Galton in 1908, to found the, still-influential, pro-slavery Janians for Eugenics movement on Qinsatorix.

Slim was appalled that slavery was still rampant on his planet, and he felt like punching the wealthy Philadelphian in the mouth.

Later that night, Slim, Pippa and Dreyfus attended a Janian ‘All-Accepting Ceilidh for Everyone’ in a huge, disused hangar. Slim was dancing with his Qinxhunter friend Bra Hunter, who'd bussed in from Machonik for the auspicious occasion, when the redneck economic advisor Dr. Ket Martingale walked in, scratching his grizzly, Icarian face. Slim felt an instinctive surge of pleasure throughout his entire body, and he was not quite troubled by what that implied as he might have been.

“I'm away with the nobs to the hostelry on Flute,” said Ket, with a wink and a glimmer of a smile. “Why don't you join us for a late night apéritif?”

“I'm g-game,” stammered Slim, blushing deep silvery-green.

Pippa and Dreyfus retired to the heart-shaped love-seat, and enjoyed an exquisitely wonderful time together.

Slim and Ket caught up with Prince Alfred and Lady Jemima on the bridge to Flute. When a Maglev train screeched, noisily, along the rail overhead, Slim thought it was bisecting his frontal lobes, and separating his left brain from the right, but Ket pulled out his flask and calmed the teen down with a wee dram of Buckflex.
Slim's view of Machonik was disrupted by an antiquated edifice. The Hotel de Wash had been built Visigoth-style several centuries previously, as a railway hotel, but had since gone into decay, and renovated with a broader clientèle in mind. The funding from the Trivoli Triad didn't go amiss, and the hotel had a seedy look about it. The owner regarded the building as a 'social complex', with a range of facilities for diverse tastes, and the New Town Disco was a popular haunt for the teenagers. The building was virtually identical in appearance to the iconic Hotel Washington in Madison, U.S.A., which was destroyed by fire in AD 1996, while the transvestites fled from the upper floors and a homophobic fire-fighter danced outside in glee.

Ket suggested entering the complex via the Club de Wash, where the melancholic punk group, Apologies I Have None was beating its drums, but Jemima preferred to head for the hot and sweaty Café de Palms.

“It will be like looking back through the fireball to the God-forsaken 1980s,” she said.

Slim took a taste of his Neanderthal fillet steak, only for the hotel proprietor to dance in, in a hypermanic spin.

“What a cute number!” exclaimed the dark-haired Sicilian. “Why don't I take you down to Rod's for your initiation on the Metal Frame with the barmen in leather? Judge McCarthy-Cohn noticed you coming in, and a couple of Republican Senators are interested in joining the action.”

“I don't want to be spread-eagled like a pig,” protested Slim. “I'm heading for the New Town Disco, but, before that, I need a very long pee.”

“Why don't I come with you?” suggested Lady Jemima. “Then we can pay a visit to the Celebrity Suite.”

Ket yawned. “I'm tired. I'll be lying in wait for you in the Barber's Closet. It’s a Speakeasy that dates back to the Prohibition.”

After enjoying a whale of a time in the disco, Slim and Jemima climbed three long flights of stairs, only to encounter a worldly Talking Octopus sitting behind a shark-bone desk.

“The prince is in the Celebrity Suite with the obnoxious Apollo Himmler,” whispered the octopus, unfurling his tentacles. “It's a totally different universe in there.”

When Slim and Jemima entered that universe, Prince Alfred was reclining on a chaise-longue, snorting llello with a muscular creature with hairy limbs and a baboon-like face, both wearing only silver mankinis.
The baboon-like Apollo Himmler took a sniff of something refreshing from his asthma inhaler. “I'm the Head Treat Peddler, folk. The delicacies are on their way.”

A few minutes later, five naked hominids were marched in, all with glazed eyes and glistening bodies. Slim wondered how much benzo they'd been jagged with. The skinny albino looked fit to fall over.
The prince eyed up the girl with red-hair, and then the well-hung lad from Dingwall 2, before re-focussing his attention on the curvaceous redhead.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” asked the outrageous prince, flashing his diamond bracelet.

“Zoe, Zoe Russlethrush,” the redhead sullenly replied. “I was a laundry assistant in Midlothian 7 before your scheming procuress brought me to this filthy dive.”

The prince licked his slavering chops. “I didn’t ask for your life story,' he retorted. “Tie her to the trestle, Trinkons!”.

“No, you won't, you greasy SOB,” shrieked Zoe.

“Please leave her alone,” begged Slim.
     “Thanks for trying,” sobbed Zoe, only for Lady Jemima to grab her by the nape and pull her towards the prince.
“I always like to show my girls what pleases His Highness most,” asserted the hard-nosed bitch.
“Won't!” shrieked Zoe. “Won't ever!”
“Give her to Slim then,” conceded the prince, with a token sigh. “I'll take the Neander on the rack. The plump one with buck teeth.”

Slim frowned, and stamped his feet. “Count me out, you creepy bastard," he howled, and the Chattering Vampire-Bats, climbing the poles in the corner, clucked their fangs in anticipation.

“Here's my big brother,” announced the Head Treat Peddler. “Hiya Dirk!”

The vampire-bats leapt to the ground and forced Slim to his knees, whereupon a grisly Apollo Himmler strode up.

“Why, it's sweaty Slim,” exclaimed Dirk, with a saucy wink. “I know all about you. Now kowtow to your Lord and Master!”

When Slim was released, relatively intact, from the Celebrity Suite, he crashed down the stairs, kicked the Sicilian proprietor hard in the gut, and headed into the Barber's Closet.

In the flash of an eyelid, Slim and Ket were crossing the bridge to Lismore together, without uttering ever a word. When they reached the Fragrant Springs, Ket came in for a nightcap. This is my reward for being good, thought Slim.

3. JANIANS AT LARGE

Pippa and Slim were eating a delicious breakfast in the Fragrant Springs Grill the next morning, when Dr. Sargant Tredgold intruded on their space puffing his lithium-pipe. Then he snatched a hard-boiled egg from Slim’s plate, and cracked it with a copper spoon.
What's the ghastly headshrinker up to now? wondered Pippa. We must be in for something nasty.
Tredgold explained that upon conclusion of the Janian meeting on Lismore early that afternoon they would be flying to the Isle of Mainau, where he’d be involved in detailed group political discussions with Lady Jemima’s father, Sir Aristides Sunkist, the forty-third Living Incarnate of Janus, upon Sir Aristides' return from the City of Nineveh on Planet Tiberius Ptolemy. The discussions would take place in the Ape-Swan’s Nest, a white tower where the totally paranoid shipping magnate hung out for his own safety.

Slim objected to having to keep company with any more ‘crazy political creeps’ and Pippa said that she wanted to return to Nod to feed her pet otter Scatty. Tredgold laughed unkindly, and replied that he would instruct the Yin (who was attending the retreat for such purposes) to provide them with special psychiatric assistance.

“A couple of well-placed shots of depixol in your posteriors would curb your silly neuroses,” said Tredgold, polishing off his boiled egg. “My colleague Jock Crichton-Strachan and his buddies used depixol when they went on safari in Andalusia 2, and an entire tribe of rebellious Zetis saned up for a month.”

“This isn't the Lancaster Retreat!” raged Pippa. “You're trying to control us for your own deceitful purposes.”

“I certain am, guys,” responded Tredgold. “So knuckle under!”

“I don’t want to be a rubbery-legged automaton!” wailed Slim.

“Tant pis,” replied Tredgold, with a hint of a snigger.

Later that morning, several Janians and Attenders were still suffering from bladder-busting hangovers, but most of the rest attended a Quarterly Lismore and Flute Regional Business Meeting in a leaky Era Nouveau building in the hotel grounds. The delegates sat on rows of wooden benches while water dripped on their heads from above and festoonettes squirmed at their feet below. Pippa and Slim felt weak in the limbs from the effects of their ghastly injections.

Pippa knew that all decisions at the business meeting would be reached by so-called ‘consensus’, rather than democratic vote, and she wondered, through her psychological haze, how consensus decision-making, also popular among the Anarchists of Barcelona 177, actually worked.

The Living Clerk was sitting on the purple podium on his favourite fluffy kushner. “If there are no objections, I will record the Minutes of our June 2712 business meeting on the Isle of Thrush as read and approved.”

“So moved!” cried a blotchy-faced ogre from Orcus.

“Thank you, Wolfschwein! The Living Incarnate's political assistant, the pretty ape-swan on my left, has agreed to observe this vitally important meeting on his behalf. This is by my special permission, and I invoke our 'flesh-eating bird-animal' regulation of AD 2336. Any objections?”

“Good on you!” shrieked a wild lady with gangrenous eyes.

“The only item on the agenda is The Approval of our Annual Report,” declared the clerk. "I put the Living Elder in the light.”

The Living Elder was a bony octogenarian with a distended, box-like rib-cage that tremored as he spoke. "Our major conclusion should be that 'unadulterated love is what makes the planets go round,” he declared, rubbing his capacious gut.“Love is the essential ingredient of a loving life. When we have love, only love matters. Love, love, love! I so move!”

“Love!” howled an obese septuagenarian with seven untidy pigtails. “I thrive on love. Lust, too.”

“Seconded!” cried a squat neutro-hominid, unfurling her long, black eyelashes.

“The motion is on the table,” declared the clerk, clapping his hands like an intellectually challenged gorilla.

Awhile later, a green-skinned lady wearing a morning suit, and a top hat, leapt up to speak. For reasons best known to himself, the clerk stared rudely at the lady and gave her the thumbs down. She flopped silently back into her seat, furiously biting her lip.

Several quiet minutes later, a gentleman in a pin-striped suit rose to his feet. The clerk gave him a feckless smile.

“The Living Elder succeeded in restating our Articles of Faith of AD 1681, and scant else,” lisped the prim gentleman, tugging his royal blue cravat. “I'm sure that I speak for many of us, when I say that our final report should include a summary of the splendid conclusions that were vaunted during yesterday's niche sessions, if only to enhance their external visibility.”

There was no immediate response. Twenty minutes later, the clerk was about to sum up, when the ape-swan political assistant scurried over and delivered some officious instructions from afar.

The clerk twitched his primeval nose, and gave the curly-haired ape-swan an inappropriate smile. “Many thanks for reminding me, darling. During a top secret enclave last night in the magnificent Celebrity Suite of the Hotel de Wash, several of our worthy members agreed to parley with the bronze Icarians with a view to brokering a Treaty of Peace and Reconciliation between them and Parliament... I'll minute that as a special amendment.”

“They're trying to siphon off the revenues from the Heptagon casinos,” howled a yuppie hipster in ubertight, velvet pants. “Fraud! Corruption! A curse on you schmucks!”

“Security!”

There was another deathly hush, while the Apollo Pigs tossed the obnoxious hipster in the air, and hauled him away, flashing his mankle, like a carcass of sweaty meat.

After a short period of reflection, Prince Alfred of Saxe-Coburg rose pompously to his feet. “This Peace Treaty was debated during our ad hoc meeting in the relaxing Celebrity Suite of the Hotel de Wash late last night. On my dear Jemima's advice, several of us will be stopping off in Heptagon City this very afternoon, on our way to Mainau, to initiate peace negotiations with the Heptagon tribal elders.”

“The motion has been amended accordingly,” declared the clerk.

After another deathly hush, and several minutes of scribbling and crossings-out, the clerk read out a remarkably brief minute, consisting of two confused, incoherent sentences.

A gentleman wearing a bright white toga rose angrily to his feet. “Point of Order! I must insist that you give the socially pro-active projects, including Assist and Abet, that were described yesterday afternoon, a careful mention.”

The clerk looked the dude straight back in the eye. “Insufficient consensus,” growled the red-nosed buffoon. “Request denied!”

Slim leapt furiously to his feet. “What about all those enlightened ideas about the future of the LGBTQ+ community?" he howled.

The Living Clerk grimaced, shook his head, and raised his fuzzy eyes to the Heavens. Thereupon, he nodded, as if in effusive agreement with divine forces from above.

“Request denied! The Living Elder's motion and my amendment, and none other, are the sanctified Word of the Living God, and are therefore approved by Janus himself as divinely-inspired consensus,” the prickly fellow sanctimoniously declared. “This meeting is thereby adjourned.”

So that was that!

If that was consensus decision making, I'd prefer to be ruled by the Tarantulas of Brasilia 13, concluded Pippa.

That afternoon, and while still befrazzled by the idiosyncrasies of the Janian retreat, the teenagers from Nod stuffed their bags full of loot, and set off for the Heathcopter pad, where they were greeted, frosty-eyed, by their eminent travelling companions. Prince Alfred's purple-haired house boy crawled in with the luggage.

A couple of minutes later, an exceedingly long yellow limo ground to a halt in front of the multi-rotor bubblecopter. A hairy-faced, middle-aged Apollo Himmler in a lounge suit stepped out, carrying a red briefcase. It was the Foreign and Alien Secretary of Qinsatorix, and his name was Dirk Eradacus.

Eradacus was accompanied by the curly-haired ape-swan political assistant who'd attended the Janian business meeting that morning, and a forlorn teenager.

Slim was stricken to the core. The teenager was Zoe Russlethrush, the pretty girl who'd so bravely asserted herself in the Celebrity Suite of the Hotel de Wash the night before. Eradacus was the Head Treat Peddler's predatory older brother, and now the evil Foreign Secretary was participating in the Janians' makeshift peace mission!

Slim felt that his and Zoe’ hearts were pulsating in unison. My Icarian heart and her human heart are connected by some mystical force from the Heavens, he thought. Maybe they'll be entwined for ever.

When Dr. Tredgold rushed over to greet the Foreign Secretary, Eradacus peered down his catarrhine nose.

"This is my fiancée Zoe...Zoe Russlethrush, I think,” explained Eradacus. “They have such stupid names in Bilston Glen don't they?”

"Soon to be Dirk's fourth indentured wife," purred the ape-swan. "The first three were sent to Limbos."

When they boarded the Heathcopter, Ket Martingale encouraged Slim to sit by him in an aisle seat, and took an embarrassingly firm grip of the youth’s inner thigh.

Now I feel imprisoned, deliberated Slim. If he comes on any stronger, then I’ll blow a gasket. It did turn me on, what happened between us in the Fragrant Springs last night, but in terms of sensitive feelings that's all there was to it.

The distraught redhead Zoe Russlethrush was sitting across the aisle, next to Pippa. Slim glanced at Zoe, and the poor girl turned her head, and sobbed.

When the copter soared towards the clouds, Pippa imagined that she and Zoe were flying to Heaven together. When the copter dived towards the Flutian Steppes, Pippa thought that she and Zoe were about to be buried without trace.

Slim peered through the transparent floor at the thousands of Z-critters toiling in the fields below. Suddenly, a battle-cruiser zoomed by, and engulfed the critters in clouds of cokokium gas.

"That's to keep them happy," explained Ket. “It makes them wanna eat less, and work harder. The European expansionists did the same thing with raw cocaine, way back on Planet Earth.”

“Fucking bastards!” exclaimed Slim.

Ket squeezed Slim’s flesh harder, until it hurt. "They were to be much admired,” Ket retorted. “We spray the critters with glow-zone when we want to sterilise them."

"What do you do when you want to exterminate them?" inquired Slim, caustically.

"We drench them with Gulp-One, of course."

"I get the idea. You must have read the works of Ploetz and Fischer on racial hygiene."

Ket stroked Slim’s hairless chest with his wandering, right hand. "You're learning! Keep up the good work and we'll finance your university studies, at University College Los Alamos, I think. It's next to the Global Security Complex.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Slim. “That’s exactly what I don’t want.”

“You can thank me later, slave of my dreams,” purred Ket. “Our hotel on Mainau is remarkably well-equipped.”

When the copter circled above the tiny City of Heptagon, Pippa could discern scores of wooden huts and wigwams scattered among the pine trees in the compact reservation below. Several hundred indigenous Icarians were waiting in a lush meadow with bowls of tasty apples and delicious peaches, their bronze skin glistening in the golden sunlight.

Dirk Eradacus and Prince Alfred lead the Janian delegation across the pasture towards the Big Wigwam. The clean-limbed Chieftain of the Heptagon came out, and raised his arms in salutation.

"I'm Sleeping Sparrow," he said. "Welcome to my kingdom.”

The autumnal winds were blowing, and the pine trees giving vent, when the chieftain of the Heptagon, and his elders, took shelter in the Big Wigwam, to meet with the Janian delegation, that included Foreign Secretary Eradacus since he was an Honorary Closet Janian.

Ket advised Slim that the Peace Treaty would be negotiated by the Janians, on behalf of the hi-tech Icarians and their vast business conglomerates. The vain and narcissistic First Minister of Qinsatorix, previously the Lord Mayor of Ottawa 39, was kept 'totally unaware' of the conflicts of interest, and was away in the Gold House in Trivoli with his fawning minions.

Left to their own devices, Pippa and Slim drifted off for a natter under a Jumbo tree, where they discovered a couple of comfy places in the snake-like roots, only for Dreyfus to appear, arm-in-arm with Zoe Russlethrush. The poor girl was still looking sullen and distraught.
“How're you, Zoe?” Pippa gently inquired.
“What a relief to talk to another human,” spurted Zoe, “...homo sapiens, I mean. As for those homo erectus....”

Awhile later Pippa saw a Talking Llama welcoming several tourists into a khaki wigwam next to the first-aid tent. The four teenagers decided to take a nosey.

The llama ushered them in, “Welcome to the Cavern of Chance and Fortune,” she said. “The Heptagon Casino is down that passageway, and through the squeeze. Cash up front, or punch your pin into the friendly croupier's facilitating machine.”
The place was infested with tourists who'd travelled there from their plush hotels on the Isle of Mainau. Pippa and Slim enjoyed rubbing shoulders with so many different people, and Zoe chatted with a very wise Apollo Elk from the University of Berkeley 66 about combinatorial formulae and the probabilities of winning at bridge.

After losing four bucks at Farklejack, Dreyfus Dreadnought saw the ball on the giant roulette wheel bouncing out of the number 16 pocket and into one of the three zero pockets. On the next two spins, ball bounced out of the number 17 pocket and into a zero pocket. Dreyfus therefore felt inside the No 17 pocket, tore away the green velvet, and discovered a strange metal contraption on a spring, that had presumably deflected the ball out of that pocket.

Dreyfus promptly flapped his wings, and landed with a clatter by the statue of Princess Winona of the Dakota Sioux at the middle of the wheel.

“This wheel is biased and totally unfair according to the laws of higher mathematics,” announced the precocious Apollo Alpha, to the international tourists from afar. “It's ripping you all off!”.
Eight stroppy guards promptly ran up, hauled Dreyfus and his companions through the chest-crunching squeeze, dragged them up the stone staircase, and threw them onto the sheep and llama dung heap.

An hour or so later, the politicians left their wigwam with impassive expressions on their sombre faces. Lady Jemima emerged furtively from a tin hut, and chased after her colleagues as they hurried to the Heathcopter. The four smelly teenagers emerged from the dung heap, dusted themselves down, and followed the whoremonger from Hell up the silver-plated steps.
During take off, Pippa caught a glimpse of a fleet of golden, ocean freighters, at anchor in Scalpel Flow. During the rapid descent, she saw a tall, shining white, castle emerging from the greenish-blue Lake Spectrum, nestled inside a redstone asteroid crater.
That's must be the Ape-Swan's Nest, where the evil Musso-fascists once hid before they were mushy-face-battered and hung from the roof of the gas station, realised Pippa. It's a bit like the Tower of London, and its connected to Flute by a very deep subterranean canal.
Just when the copter seemed ready to dive head over heels into Lake Spectrum, it abruptly levelled out, as if by animalistic instinct, and headed for the landing pad by the Hotel of the Purple Habsburgs, where the pilot successfully landed it in one piece.

Pippa saw Sleeping Sparrow riding up the beach on a giant camel, cheek by jowl with his non binary partner. They'd travelled at pace from their village on Flute to catch the low tide.

Around that time, the body of the red-nosed Living Clerk of the Janians was discovered in a wheelie-bin behind the Fragrant Springs Hotel in Helmsley. The brash fellow's face had been battered in, and his protrusive nose was no longer visible. The words 'Galton Tory' were scratched into the victim's chest, and a silver horseshoe was rammed down his throat. The rozzers were completely perplexed by this, the Second Galton Murder.

4.THE ISLE OF MAINAU

That evening, Pippa and Slim, looking remarkably spruce and smelling of roses, attended a convivial St. Crispus Eve reception in the hotel drawing room, hosted by the Living Incarnate Sir Aristides Sunkist and his delectable Apollo Alpha fifth wife. The crystal glass chandeliers descended from the lofty ceiling like Orchanusian sex-predators in wait.

Although Dreyfus wasn't invited, he gatecrashed the proceedings, limping slightly after a brief visit to the blacksmith, in the hope of drinking with Pippa.
Zoe left her fiancée hobnobbing on the podium to talk to her buddies, but Pippa was button-holed by a minor official. So Slim and Zoe made their excuses, and retreated, quietly, to the terrace.
Dreyfus crept closer to the podium and hid behind a huge Talking Cyclops, in time to overhear a piece of dialogue that seemed to be of vital importance:
“...and my dear brother King Mark is waiting in Constanţa for the Homo Erectus troops to arrive from around the Land of Qet,” Prince Alfred was saying. “After taking care of the home guard, they'll join forces with the Royal Pelimodes and march on Trivoli, uniting the factions of Apollo revolutionaries as they go. My darling mother will follow with the uranium-powered battle-tanks. She'll blow 'em away.”
“You're doomed to failure,” retorted Sir Aristides Sunkist. “My colleagues will never countenance such an outrageous adventure. You're from an inferior sub-species, the whole damned lot of you!”
“But you promised us your support,” protested the prince, “at the Summer Solstice Weinfest in Garmisch.”
Sir Aristides grimaced. “You stupid fool! I said that totally in jest. Moreover, the Nineveh Boys on Tiberius Ptolemy still blame you for your mass slaughter of their aristocrats during the Zintian wars. You cut off the counts’ ears and put them in a sack! Several eminent Apollo Penguin economists at the Galton-Booth School of Business would like to see you dead, and Stag Kissinger is out for your guts.”
“Now I see your pretty game,” growled the prince. “We will nevertheless proceed at pace, and the Emperor and his sycophantic acolytes will bite the dust.”

Slim and Zoe got on remarkably well on the terrace, and hid behind a Periboea tree for a cuddle.

The Goddess Asherah was surveying the reception on her Mainau-app, from the holy space station Castellos, where she and her long-estranged husband Yahweh lived in different macro-capsules (each the size of a small planet and connected to the enormous, central Creative Evolution Unit by long, concentric corridors). Asherah wondered about the potential import should the delightful couple on the terrace have sex together. The goddess smiled serenely, perched her admirer Mercury on her massive knee, and invited him to drink a wee dram with her.

Dreyfus was taking a bite out of a delectable hors d'oevres when Lady Jemima Sunkist crept up, like a witch in fine clothing, and whispered, “My father deigns to invite you for fun and group frolics in the Bridal Suite.”
Dreyfus flapped his wings in consternation. “What!” he exclaimed, feeling more than a bit itchy.

Asherah and Mercury thought about the implications of that. They wondered whether to interfere via the Aphrodite waves, but decided to let nature take its course.

At that moment in time, there was a concordance of consciousness across the planet. Three wizened old creatures in Ur 573 stirred in their beds, and visited the loo.
“Unto us a Child is given!” wailed the one with the false teeth.
“Looks as if we're going to have to head west again,” slurped the incontinent dribbler, “searching for some stupid heavenly star.”

The morning after the capers of the night before, the senior Janians and repressed youngsters set off from the Hotel of the Purple Habsburgs, and headed, on foot, for the Ape-Swan's Nest, with Sleeping Sparrow and his ever attentive partner in tow. They were followed by Prince Alfred's glazy-eyed, purple-haired toy-boy, who looked if he’d been put through the wringer the night before.

When the party reached the Dealey knoll, a guard of twelve pectishes emerged from a raddle-copter, sawn-off shot guns at the ready. Pectishes sport lower arms with large fists, which they can clench like a vice, and the claws in their feet can take off a head in a blink.

The woodland trail merged into a wider, dung-ridden track. A cylindrical truck roared along it, towards the dense thicket. The visitors and frosty pectishes followed on foot, while having to jump into the nettles, whenever another truck zoomed by. When they emerged, in a fine state, from the other side of the thicket, the trucks were unloading their wares, onto a ledge overhanging a redstone crater.
Pippa peered nervously over the edge, and was awestruck by the bubbling, bluey-green waters of Lake Spectrum, over eight hundred feet below. In the middle of the lake stood a towering, white castle keep. Pippa loved the flowering mango trees on its roof.
Prince Alfred, trying his best to sound endearing, explained to Slim that they'd need to go down on the heavy traction elevator that was riveted to the rock-face. Slim told the prince to take a running jump.
Pippa didn't dare to look sideways when the jam-packed cage went into slow descent. After what seemed an eternity, the exit gate crashed open, and Pippa saw a team of pectishes herding a flock of yellow, woolly sheep, onto an ancient royal barge.
The Janians and their friends piled onto the barge amidst the sheep. The lake was teeming with ape-swans, and broods of tiny ape-cygnets playing in the reeds.

“Beware the Tower of Infamous Iniquity, where Hitler's eagles are afraid to fly!” cried an elderly ape-swan, with emeralds for teeth. “Beware the alt-right-fascists, the misogynistic Taliboo, and the festering race scientists too!”

“The Taliboo cut my tiny sister’s wings to shreds,” shrieked a fluffy-feathered ape-cygnet, “and they’ll do worse to you.”

The portcullis was raised just as the barge reached the water-gate. Dreyfus raised his eyebrows in surprise. There on the crustaceous, stone steps stood the delightful wife of the Living Incarnate, looking most replete.
"Lovely to see you in daylight, darlings,” the Apollo Alpha contentedly declared. “My husband is waiting for you in the chapel with a bottle of vintage Colston Cream.”

After an apéritif in the Chapel of St. Vincula, deep inside the White Tower of Mainau, the teens from Nod were given a bottle of coke-bloat, and told to vamoose to the Qinview room.

The senior Janians and two Heptagons pursued their confabulations around the oval table in front of the altar. To his misfortune, Prince Alfred failed to notice Jemima spiking his drink with Eyedrops. Aristides Sunkist nodded, barely perceptibly, in approval, scratching his wrinkled skin.

“In the name of the First Living Incarnate of the divine Janus, the much revered Prince Felixos von Attenburg!” announced Sir Aristides, rapping the table with his long brass Onassis pipe.

“All praise to Janus and the White Christ!” declared Ket Martingale, rubbing his glistening red neck.

“There are two items on the agenda today,” announced Sir Aristides. “Let’s kick the ball off with our peace or war negotiations with the Heptagon scum...”

Dirk Eradacus’s sideburns bristled like a hedge-fund Talking Porcupine. “I’d prefer,” he interrupted, “to firstly consider how harshly to put down the violent revolution by the homo erectus and their gang of obnoxious rebels in the East.”
“I object!” burbled Prince Alfred, glazy-eyed. “The homo erectus simply seek confirmation of their ancestral rights to control the eastern trade routes. The greedy, macro-microaggressive Icarians grabbed them off us in 2321, and they've been milking our resources ever since.”
Sir Aristides Sunkist straightened his UCLA Alumni tie. “Tough on you, you pompous, traitorous dork,” he roared. “The golden master race rules, and all inferior, grovelling hominids will bow to our wishes.”

“Our Pelimode and Sigmoid allies will put you trumped up colonialists in the shade,” raged the prince. “We'll trample all over you, once and for all. We'll run you out of every archipelago on the planet!”
Sir Aristides bared his silver-plated teeth. “Your own attempts at colonialism are an unmitigated disaster, you blithering fool. But enough of your irresponsible jackernapery! I call upon Ket to address the important issue of the day.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” enjoined Ket Martingale, himself a high bred Icarian. “Those stuck up Erecti should seek solace with the Howling Dingos.”

“Get on with it!”

“Natürlich, mein Doppelführer. The profits in the Heptagon’s highly disreputable casinos are excessive, and in breach of the fair trade laws. Our much fairer roulette wheels have only two zeros, and glean a long-run profit of only a nineteenth of all money bet. It is essential to avoid discrimination against our hard-working fair-traders. The Heptagon should clean up their act!”
Sleeping Sparrow flexed his shiny, bronze muscles. "Our nation faces far deeper problems. We're getting starved like convicts in our tiny reservations, we're freezing to death in North Artica owing to the high price of fuel, our children are receiving scant remedial education, and no free milk or lunch.”

“So what?” retorted Martingale. “The Heptagon are ruining our resources and wasting our space. You're all over the place!”

The Heptagon chieftain lost his cool at that. “It's the land of our bronze forefathers, you've genocided fifty million of us already, and yet you still sterilize our mothers following the births of their first children. Two of your officials even came into my wigwam last month wanting to neuter me with a sharp pair of snipper-snappers! This isn't equitable either!”
Tredgold gritted his teeth. “This raises the question as to whether we should throw all the surviving Heptagon, the entire caboodle of them, into our glacier camps in South Artica. The Pelimodes would be only too glad to ply our bronze inferiors with lentils and rice, while they dig deep for the hubric, and expend themselves according to an actuarially efficient death rate.”
Sleeping Sparrow blew a gasket, and flopped forwards onto the table in dismay.
Eradacus chuckled, and wagged his finger at Dr. Tredgold. “Now now, Sarg! You've been sounding off like the seven-headed goat of Persepolis 88.”
“Genocide them!” reacted Tredgold. “Grind their children to dust!”
Eradacus tried to look as wise as George W. Bush. “Maybe some sort of make-shift compromise with the Heptagon would be preferable.”
“Spoken like a true, pox-ridden gibbon!" howled Prince Alfred. “The homo erectus will never kowtow to indigenous low-life. Strafe the Heptagon with scyon gas, that 's what I say!”

“Debating with you is like playing squash with a dish of scrambled eggs,” raged Eradacus.

“Your blue matter's as scrambled as a two-faced baboon's,” blustered Prince Alfred.
Lady Jemima frowned. “You look a touch drowsy, dear. Why don't you go and relax on the davenport in the Goering Room?”
“No chance. I'm only just getting started.”
The meeting was about to fall apart in disarray, when the ape-swan assistant hurried in from the turret suite. “You should come to the turret quickly, Your Grace,” she articulated. “There's trouble in Constanţa.”
“I'll be right there,” responded Sir Aristides, with a distinctly audible wheeze, and so he was.

When Sir Aristides returned to the meeting in the Chapel, he ensconced his hefty backside on his beautifully embroidered armchair, and smiled. The prince's Cnupian slave peered at him from under the table, and wondered what devious nonsense was afoot.
“What was all that about?” burbled Prince Alfred, stirring himself from his slumbers.
“A mere detail,” answered Sir Aristides, with an imperceptible wink. “A small technicality that needed to be sorted out in Constanţa.”
“I'm surprised you're involved,” blustered the ponderous prince. “My brother Mark is in control there, and as far to the west as the eye can see.”
Aristides chuckled, and performed the Sign of the Skewed Cross. “God's fucked him rotten, and now the old goat will screw you to the rafters!"
That was when the Eyedrops really set in. The prince keeled over sideways and fell to the floor, into a loudly snoring coma. His purple-haired slave smirked and went to fetch a couple of pectishes. They took the prince to the Goering Chamber, and kicked him onto the bed.

The teenagers were watching Big Boom Theory in the Qinview Room, and laughing their heads off at Shellfish getting into yet another twist, when the screen went blank. When the image of an agitated Talking Sea-Lion emerged into view. Dreyfus was gobsmacked at hearing something dead serious.
“Breathtaking news, Breathtaking News!” screeched the sea-lion. “Rebel forces have stormed the Regional Parliament building in Constanţa. Here are the renegade King Mark of the Homo Erectus and the obesely overweight Dowager Queen Maggie waving to the crowds from the balcony of Wellington Palace’

“Troops from the Royal Pelimodes are protecting the forecourt, and putting scores of loyal citizens to the sword’.

“Crown Prince Hoglet of the Homo Erectus is leading an attack on the Qinview Broadcasting Station by the harbour. His élite Apollo Snake bodyguard is meeting scant resistance from the Green Berets, most of whom have been dispersed along the beach. Over to our political analyst, Guth Gungepipe."

“Revolt!” shrieked Dreyfus. “Take the Capitol Building, and let the people decide. Revolt!”
“This is a dire situation indeed,” continued Gungepipe, “If the Homo Erectus take the military base at Cluj, then the entire eastern battle-fleet will be at their disposal, together with eighty uranium-powered battle-tanks. To be frank, the omens do not look good. The regional government has completely lost control. Furthermore, several battalions of the Imperial Pectish Pink Berets have just deserted to the Homo Erectus.”

“This is getting mighty confusing,” objected Zoe. “The pectish are on both sides at once.”

“...The Homo Erectus are in a strong position in political terms. They regard the Land of Qet as encompassing the entire eastern peninsula, and they may well decide to secede from our beloved empire, but they could try to advance upon Trivoli and seize the entire empire for themselves, God forbid it.”
Pippa and Slim rushed into the chapel.
“The Homo Erectus are taking power,” bleated Pippa. “They could destroy all civilisation on this planet for good.”
Sir Aristides chuckled like a geeky narcissus. “Don't worry, kiddies. Everything's under control. I'm the arch-manipulator on this planet!”

Sir Aristides tried to distract his guests from the situation in Constanţa by taking them to the ninth floor to see the Huxley Collection; the exhibits included hundreds of grisly humanoid remains from the Kaiser-Wilhelm Anthropological Institute in Berlin 7. However, Dreyfus opted out. He stayed slouched on a beanbag, only to be distracted, at some point in time, by the sound of the blaring of trumpets.
“Breathtaking Breaking News!” screeched the Qinview presenter. “The homo erectus rebels have stormed our transmission station in Constanţa, God curse them, but we're still receiving sufficient footage. Here's their trumped up king in the Rose Garden, greeting his new subjects. And this must be Crown Prince Hoglet, returning to take the credit for his troops' shameful victory on the beach…...’

“…...but why are those those Pink Beret pectish acting up? They’re deserters from their turncoat Imperial Pectish battalion! What the hell are they doing with those flamethrowers?…...Yeeeeeeeeeeeeesh!”
To Dreyfus's consternation, the 'double turncoat' Pink Beret deserters scorched the homo erectus royal family to excruciatingly painful deaths. Prince Hoglet's eyes burst out of their sockets, as he fried in the cinders, and Dowager Queen Maggie evaporated in a cloud of steam.

Horribly ghastly scenes ensued as the crowds ran towards the harbour to escape the devastating heat. Scores of Pelimodes leapt, burning, over the harbour wall, only to drown, gurgling in the stinking mud. Dozens of homo erectus lay sizzling on the lawn, as the eye-jabbing albatross circled expectantly overhead. A crowd of schoolchildren were caught in the flames, and perished in agony.

It was more than Dreyfus could take. He collapsed in a heap, crying his eyes out.

When they visited the horrendous Huxley Collection, Slim inquired which of the evil Huxleys it was named after.

“Aldous, of course,” replied Sir Aristides, “He was no liberal. He wanted to create his uniquely repressive, brave, new world.”

Sir Aristides took his guests to watch a film about the Musso-fascist genocide on Planet Felix Five, before inviting them up to the ornate roof garden for meagre refreshments. Slim felt hemmed in by the suffocating foliage, and by the sandstone cliffs that towered above him on all sides. What a stupid place to hide, he thought.

Pippa saw Sir Aristides and the ape-swan conversing in sign language.

A few minutes later, Dirk and Ket wandered up.

“Sir Aristides says that the events in Constanţa have been taken care of,” said Dirk, with a fickle grin.
“And now we're ready to take you and Slim down our very own Centre for Rassen-Hygiene on floor minus eleven,” said Ket. “It’s just above the canal from Machonik, where we bring our living specimens in.”

“We'll show you what our research into scientific racism [the study of any empirical evidence that might be used to attempt to falsely justify racism] is about,” said Dirk. “We're funded by the Rockerwell Joyous Life Foundation.”

Ket gave Slim a barely noticeable, Cuomo-esque squeeze. “It's all part of our master plan for your careers, you see. You'll be helping us there during your vacations when you attend university.”
When Pippa and Slim saw the humanoid suffering in that despicable establishment, they shed tears of despair.

Meanwhile, Prince Alfred Saxe-Hanover, a direct descendent of King Ethelbert the Boneless and the seventh Christ, lay in a chemically-induced coma on the davenport in the windowless Goering Chamber, dreaming about seven well-hung hominids and an ill-fated princess with huge golden calves.
"How could you be so horrible!" howled Bra Quantum, the leader of the Qinxhunters, rushing into the prince's dreadful dream.
"It's my birthright," protested a voice. "Some are born to rule. Others to grovel."
"Take this!" howled Bra, throwing the Spear of Destiny at the prince's greasy navel.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg!" howled the voice. "You send me to eternity from my fantastical fantasy."

The prince found himself lying, muggle-headed, on the couch, and, before he could find his bearings, a stroppy pectish with a flame-thrower loomed out of the gloom, flexing the claws in its feet.
"Are you part of my dream?" asked the prince, reaching for his high-powered Earp-pistol.
“Not that one,” chuckled the pectish, pulling his trigger, and the scorching flame burnt a hole through space. When the dust settled, Alfred's faithful slave came in with the hoover. Alfred's burnt guts were all that was left.

That's all four of those dumb Erectus royals disposed of, reflected the crafty Living Incarnate of the Janians. I owe my success to the fickle pectishes, and the way I manipulated and bribed them from afar. The revolution will fail.

Following the 2712 Massacre of Constanţa, all adult homo erectus on Qinsatorix were put to the sword, their cities, towns and villages razed to the ground. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

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.

CHAPTER 6: TO THE PLANETS

Sir Aylmer Grimster F.R.S, F.R.E,S.E., the Deputy Headmaster of Laughlin College, had recently been knighted by the King Emperor of Qinsatorix for organizing the Drug Safety Protocol for the entire Aton Solar System, even though he let dangerous medications abound throughout every single planet. To cap that, Grimster's ivory bust was on proud display at the George St. headquarters of the Royal Eugenics Society of Edinburgh 67 on his home planet, Tiberius Ptolemy.

While Grimster's parents and siblings were golden-skinned Icarians, he was a grey-skinned Qimog, a very rare genetic throwback capable of great feats of intellectual and physical prowess. He put the fear of the Devil in all the pupils in his Biostatistical Genetics class.

Grimster also enjoyed meting out the agony in Abrahall-Frere Tower. One evening, he was whipping a much too subjective Bayesian Statistics teacher from Valencia 6 on her spotty posterior for her a priori misdemeanours, when Slim and Pippa walked in expecting high tea. Slim fled into the Iron Maiden of Mogadishu in fright.

Pippa gritted her teeth when Grimster produced his specially sharpened platinum comb. “That's what the colonialist C.S. Foresters do to the Talking Pelicans of the Dnieper basin,” she agonized.

Grimster gave Pippa's freckled calves a couple of token swipes with a cat o’nine tails, and explained that he'd been appointed Chief Scientific Advisor for the forthcoming peace mission to Planets Canine Six and Gallium Arsenide. Moreover, the Foreign Secretary wished him to take Pippa and Slim along as unpaid, special assistants.

The teenagers suspected that Grimster was the Galton murderer, and therefore felt unable to object.

In late March 2713, Dirk Eradacus, Ket Martingale, and their colleagues left on their 'dirty tricks' peace mission, for Planet Canine Six.

The golden flying saucer Peacemaker was leaving its second orbit of Qinsatorix, when two huge Imperial battle-cruisers flew past, and escorted the space-ship towards the planetesimal belt. Pippa wondered when the four dozen cannon would start firing.

Pippa and Slim sat, within touching distance, on a circular satin sofa in the passenger cabin. Dirk and Ket sat opposite the teenagers, flanked by Sir Aylmer Grimster and a plump Icarian aide. Pippa was enjoying the view of the asteroid layer, when the prosperous aide started talking.

“My grandparents live in a tiny village in the outback of Canine Six,” explained the aide. “They're forced to subsist on white rice, even though they have Diabetes Type 2.”

“My cousin works as an overseer in a munitions factory outside Carthage,” added Grimster, with a gnarled smile. “He has to thrash the living daylights out of any of our kin who fall short of their quota.”

“Poor fellow!” exclaimed Dirk. “But we should introduce similar policies in our arms factory in Thales. The lazy Trinkons get let off too easily. They only get their toes crushed.”

Ket put away his pipe, and lit up his Harold Wilson cigar. “The golden ones are a cut above those creepy Trinks, even on Canine Six. We're all descended from St. Croesus Branson, when all's said and done.”

Dirk smirked. “We'll offer the Grottzonkers lower tariffs on their wheat and cotton exports, in return for full citizenship for all the golden Icarians on their confounded planet. They can lose the indigenous Icarians down the zinc mines, for all I care.”

When Peacemaker entered the stratosphere of Canine Six, the battle-cruisers broke ranks and headed for the planet surface. Pippa was wondering what it was about, when she saw a myriad of flashing red lights criss-crossing the green landmass below. Then, when Peacemaker was in sight of Carthage, the flying saucer was overtaken by a coven of silver owl-eagles out on the roost.

Magnificent! thought Pippa, only for the owl-eagles to thresh their wings in anguish, and fall writhing, in a twisted mish-mash, to the ground, as if struck by a divine force from above.

“I hope we didn't have anything to do with that,” yelped Pippa, in dismay.

The plump aide patted his replete belly. “The stupid birds lost their sense of direction,” he chortled.

“I'm not surprised,” explained Grimster.“The chemicals that our battle cruisers are spraying around the planet surface will have the short term effect of separating out the humanoid bits of the ghastly Grottzonkers from the mechanical bits. The effects on the resident Icarians will be absolutely minimal.”

When Peacemaker landed at Carthage Space-Port, the Imperial deputation were greeted by a group of applauding Grottzonkers. The highly intelligent, humanoid-created creatures were known for their oblong faces and flat chests that contrasted with their brass arms, four steel legs, and the copper plating that enclosed their pegasus-like bodies.

The various politicians proceeded to the Best Radziwill hotel, where they successfully negotiated a broad-ranging Peace and Reconciliation Treaty.

As the Imperial delegation was about the leave, it was reported by Canine News that the humanoid faces of hundreds of local Grottzonkers had separated from their mechanical bodies. Pippa and Slim were glad to get out of there alive.

During the voyage to Gallium Arsenide, Slim peered inquisitively at Grimster, and asked which gas the battlecruisers would be spreading around the planet surface upon arrival.

Grimster coughed phlegm, picked his chisel-shaped nose, and ate it. “Our odourless pandoravirus-peridoxil concoction will turn the Psychlops into rusty crustaceans,” replied the ugly Qimog. “and they'll be totally extinct within fifteen years.”

When Peacemaker landed on the tarmac outside Antioch, the capital of Gallium Arsenide, a group of well-dressed golden Icarians were lying in wait, accompanied by several, huge Psychlops military officers, with death-masks for faces.

A sombre Icarian stepped forwards. “I am the Head Eunuch Slave of this planet, and I regret that none of the Twelve Psychlops sultans are present to greet you. Nowadays, it is I and my fellow ten thousand Icarian eunuch slaves, who effectively rule this planet.”

“Thank goodness for that,” exclaimed Pippa, out of turn. “You'll be able to give your indigenous people full civil rights. It's been a long time coming.”

“The child is joking! We keep the inferior species firmly under the thumb of our highly compliant, Psychlops military. The troops are on estrogen of course."

Eradacus smiled grimly. “We're here to negotiate a fair trade treaty in return for full citizenship for all golden Icarians on this planet.”

The Head Eunuch pursed his lips. "But they already have full citizenship.”

“What sort of full citizenship?” asked Eradacus.

“Full enough. It's essential, in economic terms, to treat them like trash, just like the rest of the proles."

Ket wasn't that bothered. “Sounds as all-accepting as the Ottoman Empire when they ran it from the Dolmabahçe Palace. Let's go ahead with our fair trade negotiations without further ado.”

A new trade treaty was subsequently agreed in a meeting with the Council of State. An 'enhanced citizenship' bill was approved whereby all golden proles were guaranteed regular food rations and basic level medical treatment, on condition they worked at least sixty hours a week. Golden Icarian 'breeders' received an extra loaf of bread a week for their first child, though not for subsequent children.

Soon after Peacemaker left for home, eight of the Psychlops sultans fell apart at the seams, and hundreds of the Icarian eunuchs died from an outbreak of the pandoravirus pandemic. And then the urban and rural populations began to suffer.

Slim woke during the voyage home, and gave Pippa a poke. The polar icecap of Qinsatorix was visible above the asteroid belt, with the Outer Moon hovering above it, and the horned, red devils appeared around the circumference of the grey, distant moon, and danced.

Thereupon, a baby angel with silver antenna, and a rosy-red face appeared above the icecap, grinned, and disappeared slowly from view. Slim hugged Pippa, and smiled.

7. TO THE CONVENT

Dreyfus became ever more perplexed as the months rolled by. Come June 2713, the trans male Apollo Alpha felt the pounding of tiny feet in his belly. What a big surprise! Thereupon, Dreyfus confided to Pippa and Slim that he was expecting his very first baby.

The father was, Dreyfus thought, the golden-skinned Living Incarnate of the Janians. Dreyfus had gatecrashed Sir Aristides Sunkist's élite reception on St. Crispus Eve 2712, only for the wicked Jemima to entice him upstairs to the bridal suite for a complicated four-way.
Pippa was most perturbed, particularly since she and Dreyfus had enjoyed some sensitive time together following the Janian Ceilidh the evening before the reception. Slim recalled his tryst with Zoe on St. Crispus Eve, and blushed deep silver.

While Dirk Eradacus was, as yet, unaware that Zoe was expecting twins, he decided, in early July, to send her away to relax in a maternity home. She chose the Convent of the Sacred Crown on the mysterious Isle of Nod, so she'd be close to her soul-mates Pippa and Slim.

Headmaster Tredgold told a pair of his sternest prefects to haul Dreyfus up to his office in Ploetz Tower, and, when they frog-marched Dreyfus onto the blood-absorbent carpet, he was shaking in his muddy plim-trainers.
“I've been hearing funny rumours about you, Dreadnought,” griped Tredgold. “Out with it, or I'll shred you with my favourite pulveriser!”

“There's nothing funny about them, Sir,” answered Dreyfus, as politely as he felt able. “People like me give birth to children from time to time, and this should be regarded as totally socially acceptable."
Tredgold's eyes shrunk into their sockets. "It's intolerable! Who in the name of the eleven Holy Alephs is the father?”

“It's Sir Aristides Sunkist, Sir,” stammered Dreyfus, in sheer embarrassment. “and I'm expecting his baby in the Fall.”

“You must be joking!”

“Unfortunately not. The old goat jumped on me while the two ladies held me down.”
After a period of icy silence, Tredgold enunciated, “We must find a maternity home that is prepared to take care of the Living Incarnate's baby. Now go and take a salt bath. You smell like an aardvark."
Next day, Dreyfus was sent on a three-mile trek across the gnat-ridden marshes to the Convent of the Sacred Crown, where the Qestorian Sisters of Mercy lodged him in an outhouse across a field. He took solace in counting the sheep.

Dreyfus was totally unaware that the three wise counts from Ur were sailing around the Archipelago of the Lost Multitudes, on the yacht Leviticus, with a dozen Klutian dancing girls aboard bearing baskets of fruit. On the last day of July 2713, the counts turned into Tawi Sound, and headed for Cantabridge University on the Isle of Livermore.
When Leviticus dropped anchor by the lower jetty, all the undergraduates were enjoying lunch in Heart of Rhodesia Hall, apart from a dozen or so chavs, who were lounging on the harbour wall devouring their gourmet Byron burgers.

The dancing girls ran eagerly forward with their baskets of fruit, and distributed peaches and pears to the geeks on the quayside. Consequently, a huge throng of hungry students had gathered by the time the counts mounted the Holy Steps, ready to speak. But not before a shrill rendering of 'How great though art' from a plump, detached-looking girl, who was dreaming a dream.
When the applause for the dream-like song died down, Balthazar held his hands aloft, and predicted that Christ would be born again, in the Archipelago of the Lost Multitudes, during the following double eclipse. The announcement was not well received, and several chavs hissed, booed, and spat out their gum.

Melchior tried to quell the furore by explaining that Christ would inspire the deprived and vulnerable to rise up against the oligarchs, but the count was cut abruptly short when an uptight professor of moral philosophy wearing a bronze earphone, a silver pince-nez, and a green deerstalker, set loose his massive Talking Rottweiler. The massive creature took a single leap at Melchior and ripped a hole in his satin breeches. Caspar tried to intervene, only for the Rottweiler to roar, “Return to Ur and die, you silly old windbag,” and spit in his face.

Jonny Mack, the leader of the far right Scarlet Order clucked happily as the dithering old counts fled, in panic and disarray, to Leviticus.

“Go track em in the war canoe,” commanded the homely Apollo Raven, “and take three other minions with you.”
“Yes, Master,” squeaked an obsequious raven with staring green eyes. “I'll put the battle-axes in the bilge.”
“And my knife!”

That conversation was reported to the Cantabridge Chairperson of Applied Anthropology. “The things my students get up to!” she exclaimed, stroking her beak.

The sisters of the Convent of the Sacred Crown on Nod adhered to the Qestorian Christian faith, as did their High Pontiff and his followers in the Castle of St. Sanctus on nearby. Like the ancient Nestorian monks who teleported to Qinsatorix during the ninth century AD (with a barrel of Chinese silk worms from Chang’An), the Qestorians believed in an ever eternal Messiah who periodically manifested himself in physical form.

{Nine physical manifestations of the Messiah were recorded before the twenty-eighth century among the diverse humanoids of the Red Trojan universe. These included the human of colour Jesus Christ, who ascended from Earth to Qinsatorix in about AD 30, before retiring to Planet Freya in the Quanta universe.}
Pippa and Slim arrived at the convent on the first day of August, planning to stay in the draughty guest dorm until the births of the babies. Zoe was housed in an expensive, ground level suite, with a pictureskew view of the Foss, and the extra-large Manger of St. Clotilde of Paris 273 took pride of place by her queen-sized bed.

When the teens visited Zoe for the first time, the nuns brought in the pregnant Dreyfus on a wheelchair from his stable-like quarters close to the Foss.
Zoe confided to her chums that she was expecting twins. When Zoe expressed concern as to how long her hubby would allow her to keep her babies, Pippa inquired whether Dirk Eradacus knew there'd be two little bundles of joy. Zoe said that he didn't, but she was embarrassed when Pippa asked her why she hadn't told him. Pippa decided not to delve deeper.
The soul-mates were relaxing over mugs of hot goats' milk, when Pippa noticed Dreyfus looking lovingly in her direction. That reminded the trans girl of their enjoyable romp on Lismore. A feeling of dread filled her psyche.

What if?...No that'd be impossible!...We were only fooling around. O.K., I suppose it'd be theoretically possible, but it'd be extremely unlikely, statistically speaking. I can forget about it.

The teenagers were munching their toffee crunches, when the mother superior came in with a pretty Apollo Raven novice nun whose curiously curved, orange beak contrasted with her long, sharp claws.
Pippa didn't like the shape of that raven's face.

Next morning, Zoe breakfasted on Gentle Flakes while watching the sheep and giant voles playing in the lush green and orange pastures, as the mugsparrows and coal-tits twittered in heavenly harmony in the cherry blossom trees, and a bronze eagle flew towards her from out of the mauve sunrise with a golden fox in its claws.

How wonderful is God's nature, thought Zoe, and all made by Big Data, only for two officious women in tweed trouser-suits to march in.

"We're Q.G.B. agents, Mrs. Eradacus,” announced the glassy-eyed one. “Your husband has sent us here because of a Q.I.A. alert regarding covert activities by the Apollo Ravens and their Scarlet Order. Much of the order's twitter-twatter activity is focused on this island, we're therefore here to protect you as part of a safety net of experienced security personnel. There's a particularly aggressive raven around called Jonny Mack, but we'll clip his stupid wings.”

“Not the scarlet ravens!”exclaimed Zoe, in fright.

The silver-nosed agent scratched her smelly armpit. “There's absolutely no need to get uptight, Mrs. Eradacus. At the first sign of trouble, we'll whisk you and your baby along a secret subterranean passage to a mysterious, but extremely safe, rocky islet. We may need to leave everybody else for dead, of course.”
I wouldn't want to bump into these hard-boiled bissoms of on a frosty night, deliberated Zoe.

One evening, St. Gabriel appeared to Dreyfus, in the outhouse, during a psychedelics-induced day dream. The homely archangel was holding the holy sword Caliburn aloft in his metallic claw.

“I bring good tidings, comrade!” declared the noble Gabriel, spreading his straggly wings, “A son will be born to you during the Double Eclipse, and he will be called Jed.”
“I hope to prove worthy of my son,” said a voice. “I will represent downtrodden and vulnerable people everywhere, and seek to save us from the evil forces that threaten sentient beings, and nature itself."
“You surely will. The thrice-blessed Caliburn will be given unto you, to lead the fight.”

“But will I be forgiven my terrible, almost unpardonable, sins of the past?”asked the voice.

Gabriel scratched his chin, and pondered.“I’d forgive you, though thousands wouldn’t. It’s up to Christ himself, my son, when He comes to take His loved ones to the stars.”

Come the immortal third day of August 2713, the Sunstar rose in the mottled, bright maroon west at 6 a.m. Trivoli mean-time, as the colourful Inner Moon proudly traversed the sky, and the ghost-like, whitish-yellow Outer Moon arrived limply from below.

By mid-morning, the crowds were gathering in the lantern-decked streets and the medieval town squares, and partying on the granite hilltops, in anticipation of the confluence of the heavenly bodies, due over Nod at 12.34 p.m.
Such were the combined gravitational forces of the moons that both Zoe and Dreyfus went into labour soon after 7 a.m. Two Apollo Angels hurried to Dreyfus's bedside, with an All Bran poultice, and a flagon of Guinness.
Three experienced Talking Griffins and the shifty Apollo Raven novice nun cared for Zoe in the convent. Pippa and Slim spent the morning criss-crossing the field, between the convent and the outhouse, to comfort their pregnant friends, while dodging the sheep and the occasional goat.

Alerted by a cloud of silver particles in the northern skies, the three wise counts sailed south along the magical eastern coasts of Flute and Lismore. When they reached Tawi Sound, Melchior ignored the salacious Isle of Mustique, and peered straight ahead through his telescope, at Nod.

Meanwhile, eight members of the alt-right Scarlet Order were sweating away in their canoe, about ten miles south-east of Nod, tracked by a frigate out of the naval base at Drumkok. They were led by Jonny Mack, the notorious Apollo Raven and gifted Cantabridge sophomore in Applied Anthropology. Mack was receiving secret instructions from a corrupt N.S.A. official on the bridge of the warship.

At 12.25 p.m., a tiny baby popped, head-first, out of Zoe's womb.
“It's a girl!” announced a hawk-eyed nun, in glee.
“She's my daughter!” Slim proudly declared.
“There's a green streak on her spine,” interrupted the slinky-eyed Apollo Raven nun, with a sly grin. “So she's half-Apollo Himmler. She can't be your daughter.”
“I should hope not too,” concurred a gaunt nun, giving Slim the evil eye.

The grumpy Q.G.B. agents gave Slim severe looks since they realised he may have been cuckolding Foreign Secretary Dirk Eradacus,

The cloudless, blue sky faded as Ishmael's greyish-white Outer Moon rolled in front of the Sunstar, leaving, for a brief moment, a circle of blazing golden light that illuminated the circumference of Outer Moon like a crown of eternal glory. Then Asherah's now murky Inner Moon moved, in virtual synchronicity, across the entire face of the Outer Moon. Much of Trystonia, and many of the archipelagos, fell into darkness.

The people of Nod lit their torches and lanterns, and stared. Only the iconic 'carrot-devils' atop the Sunstar remained visible behind the moons.

Several seconds later, the Silver Cometron of Lilith zoomed downwards from the stratosphere, traversing the dark sky in a cascade of white light, At that historical moment in time, an Apollo Alpha called Dreyfus Dreadnought gave birth to a perfectly delivered boy in an outhouse by the Foss.
“Just look at that funny little thing!” exclaimed a cherubic nun known as the 'Sister of Aphrodite'. “The baby must be half-human.”
"In that case, I am the proud father," declared Pippa, besides herself in delight. "Dreyfus and I spent such a wonderful time together during our last night on Lismore."

“I'm sure you did,” said the cherubic nun, with an encouraging smile.
The baby boy opened his eyes. They were bright blue, just like Pippa's. Dreyfus hugged his new born son to his chest, and beamed the broad smiles of his childhood. The Cometron focused its rays on the convent, and the gardens and fields around it, whereupon Dreyfus's room was filled with holy white light, and the spirit of the gods.

The Heavens opened, and an image of the Goddess Asherah said, “The Christ Child Jed born today on Nod is a reincarnation of the divine Messiah whose spirit resides on Castellos. I am delighted, and bless the Holy Parents Pippa and Dreyfus accordingly. Yahweh has been informed.”

Upon turning into the Foss at Fulford, the wise counts saw where the rays of holy light were shining. They disembarked at a jetty, close to the outhouse where Dreyfus and his love-child lay, but proceeded straight across the sheep-field to the convent, where six Virgins of the Cross greeted them, and invited them inside.

Zoe gave birth to a second baby daughter, who came, feet first and with an almighty struggle, out of her mother's womb.
“It's another girl,” announced the mother superior, “but she's half-Icarian.”

Slim couldn't stop jumping for joy.
“You're a Lothario!” shrieked the fulsome Q.G.B. agent. “That's a criminal offence, and it's punishable by painful death in the Grassmarket.”
The agents seized hold of Slim. They were about to cuff him, when the wise counts stalked in, carrying bags of cheap gifts.

“We come to greet the Christ Child,” announced Balthazar, “and to anoint his parents with the Holy Oil of Rheims.”
What a welcome distraction! Slim broke free from his captors, and escaped through the window. The fulsome agent pulled out a six shooter and fired a couple of token shots at Slim; one bullet grazed his eyebrow, and the other hit a silver goat, but then the athletic youth disappeared into the shadowy woods.
When the dust settled, Melchior was looking as thick as three planks.

“But there are two babies in the blessed Manger of St. Clotilde,” he observed.”Which one is the Christ Child?”
“Heaven knows!” replied Balthazar, mighty perplexed. “What do you think, Caspar?”
“I'm clueless,” answered the doddering fool.
“Neither of them, you idiots,” raged the mother superior, throwing her candle at the ceiling. “They're both girls. The Christ Child, if humanoid, is always a boy. Our gods are ridiculously bigoted, but maybe they'll improve with age.”
“Yeesh!” exclaimed Balthazar. “I'm sorry, folk. We've come to the wrong place.”
The Apollo Raven novice nun laughed out loud. “Why don't you try the cabin down by the Foss for a lark?”

“Thank you,” replied Balthazar, regaining some of his dignity. “We'll drop by there, on our way back to Leviticus.”
“Hold your horses, guys!” demanded senile, old Caspar. “The holy light from the Cometron accords divine status of Holy Madeleine on each of these baby girls. It's incumbent upon us to anoint them as such.”
Melchior blinked. “I can vouch for that, Caspar. Let's name them Martho and Marie.”
And Martho and Marie Madeleine were anointed with frankincense, and bathed in holy oil.

When the counts arrived at the outhouse by the river, they discovered Dreyfus's new-born son lying in a Moses basket.
“All hail, Messiah of Qinsatorix!” cried Balthazar, falling to his knees.
“All hail to Josiah, the Christ Child, Son of the living God, conceived by a virgin!” cried Melchior, collapsing to the floor.
“Here's the loot!” wailed Caspar, handing Dreyfus three bags of cheap presents.

“He's not called Josiah,” protested Dreyfus. “His name is Jed.”

“Please yourself,” cried Balthazar. “These are irreligious times.”
The shepherds and goat-herds came in from the fields, the fishermen came from the river, and the nuns served free eggnog for one and all.

Jonny Mack and his Scarlet Order cronies moored at the jetty by the Foss, and headed straight for the convent, whereupon a dour Apollo Raven seized a Virgin of the Cross and, with a knife at her throat, demanded to know where the Christ Child lay.

Pippa was watching through the French windows, and warned Zoe to depart in haste with her babies. This Zoe immediately did, with the help of the tough-minded Q.G.B. agents, and within the hour they were all safe and secure in the papal Castle of St. Sanctus, high on the rocky Isle of Iona.

But the spiteful Apollo Raven nun rushed out of Zoe's room to snitch to Jonny Mack. “The baby's in that log-cabin,” she shrieked.“His mother's got wings, and two hooves to match.”
Pippa sprinted towards the outhouse to warn Dreyfus, but Jonny Mack caught up with Pippa and knocked her out cold, with a blow to the head from the flat blade of his battle-axe.

Moments later, Dreyfus heard a terrifying banging on the door of his log-cabin.
“Bring out the Child!” roared Mack. “Bring out his mother!”

“The Christ Child must die for the good of the Alt-Right,” demanded a raven from the Galton-Booth Business school in Nineveh. “The socialist misfits must not be allowed to prevail under his leadership.”
“Death to the Christ Child,” howled the ravens, in unison. “Death to all first-born males! Death to his mother! Death! Death! Death!”

Terrified out of her mind, the Sister of Aphrodite snatched Jed from his basket, and escaped through the back door with the child in her arms. When the Apollo Raven burst in, five heroic nuns ran to Dreyfus's defence, only to be hacked to pieces by the vicious alt-right thugs.

Meanwhile, Jonny Mack ran through the back door, where he saw the Sister of Aphrodite throwing Jed into her fishing coracle on the Foss. When she saw Mack coming, the cherubic nun jumped into the water and pushed the coracle into the fast flowing current, but Mack leapt into the Foss and sliced off her beautiful head. Mack lost his balance during the struggle, and Jed escaped way downstream, wailing his head off, in the coracle.

Jonny Mack was feeling vengeful when he returned to the cabin. He blinded the Holy Mother Dreyfus's right eye with a single thrust, and cut off his left ear with a pen-knife, whereupon the other ravens severed Dreyfus's arms and left leg, with blows from their axes, and pierced his stomach with a steel lance.
The Holy Mother was left writhing in bewildered agony on the sandstone floor, heading for Purgatory.

And the Virgins of the Cross came out of the Convent and choked the despicable Apollo Raven turncoat to death.

8. TO FRESH PASTURES

A year and a bit later, during late August 2014, Granny Vera Redfoot was lying on her much-treasured verandah in the village of Puslinch 3 on the Inner Moon, watching the dolphins at play on Loch Noss and staring at the effervescent, comet-shaped land-mass on Qinsatorix in the eastern sky. On the Inner Moon itself, the City of Angervast was subsumed by the industrial haze to the south, and Mount Harry Truman was spewing red ash into the ozone layer in the heavily agrarian lunar north.

There was a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder, and yet another forest fire was ignited on the distant horizon. Vera rushed inside and turned on Moonview, only to hear that the Archipelago of the Titans had sunk without trace.

“All sentient life on the coral reefs will have been destroyed,” she agonized,

“Yet another effect of global warming,” warned the weather man. “Let's hope that the underground geo-systems don't became destabilised by their interactions with the regions of intense heat on the ocean floors above. The pandoravirus pandemic may kill us all before then anyway. It's already spread from Portsmouth 77 to Novgorod 2.'

Granny Redfoot was wondering whether that was fake news, when there was a gentle rustle in her spare room. Moments later, a severely incapacitated Apollo Alpha came into the tiny living room on his chip-powered moving chair. Granny Redfoot stood up on all four legs, and hugged the two-legged youth with her furry arms.

“How're you feeling today, darling?” inquired the loveable Apollo Wolf.

Dreyfus Dreadnought adjusted his hearing aid, a strange contraption, and peered through his tubular eye. “Pretty good thanks, Granny, though the pain in my gut is still killing me,” he replied. “My arms are beginning to work a bit better, and I'm getting more feeling in my left leg.”

“Wonderful! And have you heard back from your parents in Angervast yet?”

“They’re still ignoring me. A curse on their Wee Free fundamentalist values.”

“But you're such a nice lad, and you wouldn't even hurt a fly.”

“I wouldn't count on it, Granny. Maybe I'm suffering for all my unpardonable sins.”

“Aren't we all? But what have you been doing today?”

“I've exchanged im-mail messages with Pippa.”

“Pippa? Does she have news of your son?”

“She says that Jed was rescued from drowning in the Foss by a fisherman with a kindly Apollo Deer wife, and that my lovely baby's now living safely in the papal castle on Iona. He's quite the lively toddler.”

“How absolutely wonderful!”

“Let’s see. Pippa also says that a gang of her Qinxhunter friends are looking for somewhere to camp here near Angervast, She's already messaged their leader Bra Quantum, suggesting that they contact me to seek my advice.”

“Not them again! Well, I suppose that you could suggest my turnip field. It's next to Farmer O'Brien 's orchard. At least they'd be able to scavenge for food.”

Revolutions can develop from an evolution of ideas and a confluence of conspiracies, without necessarily adhering to the norms of revolutions of the past. With such concepts in mind, Sleeping Sparrow, the leader of the indigenous bronze Heptagon on Qinsatorix, decided to parley with his mentor Wise Eagle about possible uprisings against the tyrannical governments in Trivoli and Angervast.

Sleeping Sparrow and his non binary partner therefore flew in a cargo ship from Machonik to the Inner Moon. After landing at Plymouth 101, they travelled across the equatorial volcanic belt in an overnight Greyhound, and headed for the northern Heptagon reservation in the Fox River valley.

The sacred and iconic Wise Eagle was waiting in his wicker nest on the reservation, as the fish lay dead in the poisoned lake in front of him, and the northern range of red volcanoes spewed brimstone behind him.

When his bronze-skinned guests from Qinsatorix arrived, Wise Eagle invited them to smoke the Pipe of Peace with him in the Tranquil Glen

“The new top-dog in Trivoli is stirring trouble among the bronze ones, Holy One,” said Sleeping Sparrow, “He believes himself to be the leader of the golden master race.”

“I've heard about Ket Martingale and his hedonistic attitudes,” replied Wise Eagle, stroking his light brown feathers, “Whatever happened to the one with the dove-like eyes?

Sleeping Sparrow's partner shook their head. “That criminal was mushy-face-battered and heart-pierced by a crowd of concerned citizens out on the rampage. He’d sent his nephew to negotiate with the Isis government on Planet Xenakis, and they ended up exchanging high powered Hassletine laser-copters for thousands of sex slaves, would you believe?”

“Judgement is not always swift, my child, but when it comes, it can be merciless.”

“That is all too true,” agreed Sleeping Sparrow, “and Martingale doesn't give a fig about indigenous people. The redneck's already replaced your weak-kneed Trinkon governor in Angervast by a hard-line golden supremacist.”

“The bronze Icarians of Sauk wish to rise up against Martingale and all oppressors like him,” added the non binary Heptagon. “There are whisperings in many of our reservations. The tide of opinion will soon be for war.”

Wise Eagle rubbed his nose. “We are peacemakers, my children, and we only rise in revolution at times of absolute necessity. You should go to Wise Wolf, and ask her further about these matters,”

“Where does Wise Wolf live, Mighty One?” asked Sleeping Sparrow.

“Too far to the south for me to fly with my weary wings. She is to be found on her maize and vegetable farm in Puslinch-on-Noss.”

Pippa and Slim were very keen to seek fresh pastures. They left Laughlin College in early September 2714 to commence their undergraduate studies on the adjacent Isles of Livermore and Los Alamos, funded by Dirk Eradacus and Ket Martingale from the revenues of their Nazi-esque research centre on Mainau.

Dirk instructed Pippa in a brief memo to study Psychology and Genetics at the University of Cantabridge on Livermore. Pippa was annoyed by Dirk's presumptuous attitude, but was not in a position to protest.

During a late night rendezvous on the Imperial yacht Qintania, Ket Martingale put Slim in a firm neck lock, and told him to study Business and Jurisprudence at University College Los Alamos (UCLA), and to work as a part-time janitor in the nearby Global Security Complex. Slim protested furiously, only for the repulsive First Minister to force him to sign an 'indentured marriage' certificate in return for his college fees.

“It's frilly nightwear and a pillow case for you, dearest,” said the cruel redneck. “I'll fulfill my vows once a month and I won’t even need to look at your angry face.”

Headmaster Tredgold cited Pippa's and Slim's criminal records and continuing supposedly psychotic behaviour, while assigning their 'local duty of care' to the UCLA Professor of Forensic Neuro-Psychiatry, a hard-boiled head-and-body shrinker with a fearsome reputation. Pippa's and Slim's fortnightly visits to the clinic in the basement of the Galton-Pearson Building were much feared and dreaded.

During mid-September 2714, Dreyfus set up a Zoom meeting with Pippa in her spartan quarters in Wadham College, Cantabridge. He was very sad to see his ex-partner in a depressed state, and close to tears.

“What's the matter, Pippa?” inquired Dreyfus. “I'd hoped you'd be happy when you escaped from the evil renegades at Laughlin.”

Pippa smashed her drinking glass on the floor. “It's enough to make you paranoid! The frog-faced Warden of Wadham holds endless late night student parties in his quarters, and what he's into is totally abhorent. It's almost as bad as Yorkworth College, where the Bayesian Provost forces the frosh to participate in Satanic orgies in the St. Bibiana Crypt.”

“How frightening!” exclaimed Dreyfus. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes there is, Dreyfus. Last night, I went for a drink with my Evolutionary Genetics professor. He's a long-tailed evolving hominid, and his speciality is Epigenetics.”

Dreyfus blinked. “That's about studying speedy changes in living organisms. What's the problem?”

“My professor told me that if a parent takes neuroleptic medications then this can greatly increase the risk of the child developing chronic diseases and nasty behavioural disorders. I'm very scared for Jed, Dreyfus. What can we do to protect our son?”

Dreyfus felt somewhat alarmed, though he suspected that the professor was making things up. “Have you visited Jed recently, my darling?”

“Yes,” replied Pippa. “I paid him a Zoom visit on Iona last week, He's a quite active and excitable lad. Marie Madeleine is quiet and withdrawn, and that may be because of the medications that Slim and Zoe were forced to take,”

“We can only hope and pray, Pippa,. There's a great deal of horses' feathers about Epigenetics on Moonview at the moment. Alex Darwin Mendel even claims that environmental factors, like climate change, speed up the evolutionary process. Maybe your genetics professor has got it wrong too.”

“I do hope so, Dreyfus. I really hope so. We wouldn't want to all turn into enormous blue preying mantises.”

Dreyfus was depressed by all that, but perked up when Granny Redfoot and her burly nephew took him out in a wheelchair. They pushed him along the tow-path by Loch Noss, as far as Meavy Splash. He liked it when the chipmunks leapt onto his lap.

The massive oak tree overlooking the Splash had stood there for two thousands years, and there was enough room inside the bark to serve three customers hot lunch, but Dreyfus and his furry friends headed straight into the medieval Meavy Inn. They were greeted by the sallow-faced Apollo Cat proprietor, who pointed them in the direction of the murky back bar. Dreyfus thought that the sleazy cat looked like a corrupt presidential aide from Kiev 13, the capital of Planet Aotromus.

The windows of the back bar overlooked the proprietor's home farm, where talking piglets, hyperactive headless chicken, and giant guinea pigs were awaiting their slaughter. A giant ox was peering into the room, and glancing inquisitively at the wooden stools and the polished oval table.

Sleeping Sparrow and his Heptagon spouse were sitting at the far end of the table.

“Greetings, Dreyfus,” exclaimed Sleeping Sparrow, adjusting his headdress. “We last met on Mainau. Pippa Pipette messaged me to say that you'd be attending this meeting.”

“I don't remember,” replied Dreyfus, wincing with pain. “Please excuse me if I take a back seat.”

“Is Wise Wolf on her way?” inquired Sleeping Sparrow's partner, taking a sip of a superb ale brewed on the wood.

“That's me,” replied Granny Redpath, straightening her home-knit shawl.

A Talking Dove waitress came in with two pitchers of thirst-quenching Buckfastleigh scrumpy. She was followed by Bra Quantum and the orange Qinxhunter's two sturdy offspring. The proprietor put the room into security lock-down, and the eight customers discussed the feasibility of a revolt against the governments in Angervast and Trivoli.

It was agreed that they should start with the storming of Angervast, since there were enough armaments there to be able to defend the city from rocket attack from Qinsatorix. A variety of strategies were proposed whereby the rebels could take control of, and potentially defend the entire Inner Moon, before helping their allies on Qinsatorix to topple the government in Trivoli.

Granny Redfoot said that the Talking Animals of the Rhein Valley, the Pelimodes of Precocia, and the Dakota-Sioux of Lake Pepin would be keen to join the revolution. She invited Bra to compose a list of any of the Apollo tribes who might be interested. Bra said that many transgender humans and Apollos were keen to fight alongside the Qinxhunters.

Granny Redfoot's nephew pulled the Sword of Caliburn from its scabbard, and handed it to Dreyfus, in acknowledgement of his moral leadership of the cause.

“May Christ defend the right,” declared the Holy Virgin Mother, his aching hand on Caliburn's bejewelled brand, “and may truth triumph over hypocrisy across our lands.”

The Archangel Gabriel paid a visit to the Isle of Iona on Qinsatorix, where he consulted with the Qestorian High Pontiff in the Castle of St. Sanctus.

The pontiff, a delightful Icarian of colour, confirmed that he was protecting Jed, the tenth humanoid Christ Child, in the castle, together with Slim Quick's daughter Marie Magdalene. The toddlers were being well cared for by Marie's mother Zoe Eradacus, and Zoe’s trans Qolish girlfriend from Wyalusing.

Sister Zoe had taken up Holy Orders to avoid painful execution in the Grassmarket, after she was divorced by Foreign Secretary Dirk Eradacus for her adultery with Slim. However, Dirk had taken away his and Zoe’s daughter Martho Magdalene, to live with him in his austere mansion by Lake Akhenaten in Trivoli.

At St. Gabriel's suggestion, Pippa, Slim, and Dreyfus visited Iona by Zoom, early in October 2714. The teens were keen to attend Jed's and Marie's baptisms into the Qestorian Christian faith. The service was conducted by the High Pontiff in St. Basil's Chapel, with the Archangel Antinous of Bolu and the twelve black Angels of Iona in attendance. Hailing from Ababa, the pontiff resembled a lithe Qinlympian gymnast, and his dynamism was all consuming. Antinous could have been his kid brother. Both Jed and Marie felt encouraged to behave impeccably.

During Holy Communion. there was a sudden flash of white light, when the Holy Messiah hacked into the Zoom system from his residence in Micro-Capsule 7 on the space station Castellos. The good Lord promptly transcended to St. Basil's. His face resembled His image on the Holy Shroud of Madron.

“You should be more pro-active, you fools!” howled the Messiah, wielding the Whip of the Third Temple. “Don't just give lip service. You're not Tory QMPs!”

“We try to be pro-active,” replied Antinous, in dismay, “but our numbers are few.”

“We'll take our flying saucer Guanshiyan out of mothballs,” responded the black High Pontiff. “She'll help us to observe the sounds and cries of our world.”

“Go for broke!” cried the Messiah cracking His whip, and when His head rose into the air and separated from His body, tiny Jed flapped his wings in agitation, and Marie felt most bewildered and confused.

That night, the Creator appeared before Pippa in a dream, in the form of a giant, green cockroach.

“Hail to my Roving Angel!” proclaimed the roach. “I have it in mind to re-energize the dormant planet Qinsagamond, and maybe even Earth, if I can cool them down a bit, but what seeds should I sow? What manner of intelligence should I permit to evolve there?”

“L-let's see,” stammered a voice. “M-maybe the new creatures should be more placid than humanoids, and not given to feelings of jealousy or superiority.”

“The words of a cowardly pacifist! Nothing should be left to chance; my mysterious Epigenetic process needs to be planned well in advance, since the genes coagulate as evolution progresses. How would your docile creatures manage to live?”

“Ideally, they'd prefer to live in self-supportive communes that barter with each other, rather than corrupting themselves with money. They'd nurture each other according to the teachings of the Messiah himself.”

“Not him again!” raged the roach. “I believe in survival of the fittest. You're no longer my Roving Angel.”

“Go drown yourself!” howled the voice, and the roach was immersed in a blob of brown gunge.

9. ACTION IN THE ARCHIPELAGO

University College Los Alamos was created by the British colonialists in AD 2433, as part of the efforts by University College London to expand its influence from the extremities of Planet Earth to the Aton solar system.. The Dons of Cantabridge were aghast at this preposterous development, and the Straits of Gremfire, that separated the Isles of Livermore and Los Alamos, served as a safety barrier between the academic factions. The tug-of-war on the stone causeway, that separated the islands and blocked the southern end of the Straits, was an eagerly anticipated annual event.

On the second Tuesday of October 2714, Slim Quick, now a fresher in Business and Jurisprudence, attended an appointment in the UCLA Neuro-Psychiatry Clinic in the basement of the Galton-Pearson Building,

When Slim entered the much celebrated Bentham quadrangle, he was impressed by the imposing dome of University College Library, that towered before him, and by the exquisite exhibits from the Department of Fine Arts that littered the lawn to the left.

And there stood the awesome Galton-Pearson building that housed the UCLA Department of Applied Statistics and Eugenics on its main floors.

After dodging past the Talking Gorilla beefeaters, Slim ran up the granite steps across the mosaic floor, past a statue of Sir Ronald Fisher crushing two man-sized lab rats, and down a shoddy staircase straight ahead.

When Slim reached the basement, he entered the notorious Neuro-Psychiatry Clinic, where convicts once bled, only to be confronted by an Apollo Lion beefeater, who promptly threw him, gulping for breath, into a windowless isolation cell.

A good half-hour later, a forensic statistics student, visiting for work experience from the den of vice on the second floor, took Slim into the Orchard-Redwood Lab, and inserted him into a Gartnavel multi-clamp. Slim shrieked from the searing pain in his groin. The student grinned, and gave Slim an ungainly prod in his gut.

“My big brother's the Tory Shadow Minister of Health,” announced the ghoulish forensic statistician. “Now please excuse me while I leave you to fester.”

Slim felt scared out of his mind. The laboratory was derelict and devoid of activity, a relic of a bygone era when the mathematical evolutionists conducted their bizarre experiments there, and turned sentient beings into tiny monsters.

The student returned fifteen minutes later with the UCLA Professor of Forensic Neuro-Psychiatry, a strange-looking hominid with a white moustache that stuck out sideways, three inches in each direction. A descendent of Jim Crichton-Browne F.R.S.E., the professor explained that he wasn't 'one of those miserable Crichtons of Edinburgh 67', and wasn’t related to any damned Kennedy or Wee Free, but that he was the son of a much more worthy phrenologist from Dumfries 2. He spoke with a feigned Scottish accent.

“Have you seen any colourful pictures of unreality recently?” asked the neuro-psychiatrist, scraping Slim's skull with a medieval trepanner.

“No more than usual,” replied Slim, with a nervous blink.

The top-notch consultant tightened the mini-clamp. “I find that hard to believe. Anyway, we've received an encouraging report from your academic tutor. So the good news is that we'll be tapering you off your psychiatric medications.”

“What's the less good news?”

“That depends upon how you interpret it. I plan to discover, by fair means or foul, exactly what happened when you murdered your parents, granny, and sisters in Drumkok seven years ago, at which time you were doubtlessly as nasty a piece of work as you've been ever since.”

“Why?” wailed Slim. “Haven't I suffered enough already?”

“To sort out your psychoses once and for all, and because a secret crime syndicate may have been involved.”

“I don't know whether I killed my loved ones,” howled Slim. “I really don't.”

“Wire him to the sockets, Matt!”

“Can I pull the switch, Professor?” asked the rat-like student, with a hopeful grimace.

“Sure, but only when I say.”

“The red wire should do the trick,” concluded the student. “I don't know about the other five.”

“Well done! This should work even better than the Sunak's Breath medication they injected him with back in 2707.”

“I see a face from the past” shrieked Slim. “It’s the face of a middle-aged, golden-skinned man, with a square jaw and piercing red eyes. Please tell him to go away.”

“Who is he?” asked the professor, as his homely assistant flicked the switch.

Slim shuddered and shook all over. “I think that he was a member of a Merchant's Guild in Tibermouth. My father was an Admiralty official in Drumkok.”

“So what?” asked the student, tightening the steel clamp of St. Michael.

Slim gasped for air. “Who cares? Something to do with food supplies for the Imperial Navy, maybe.”

“Activate the orange and green wire, Matt,” demanded the professor.

“Aaaaaaaaaarg!” whined Slim. “I don't remember anything else. Please don't!”

“How unfortunate. I may be late for supper.”

When he arrived back at his flat in Malet Street, the eminent professor spent twenty minutes drooling over a portrait of a look-alike ancestor who'd given expert witness testimony in London in AD 2019 to the celebrated Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL. The insightful ancestor had extolled the virtues of the statistical eugenicists Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson to the Commission, while downplaying their horrific ableism, racism and sexism.

Almost seven centuries later, the reprehensible descendent stared adoringly in the mirror, and jacked himself off at pace.

[University College London nevertheless decided, in January 2021, to remove the names of Galton and Pearson from their lecture theatres and buildings and to attempt to eradicate all evidence that these evil racists ever existed. For reasons best known to themselves, they declined to condemn their evil second Professor of Eugenics, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher.].

Slim was promoted from the janitorial staff to work as part-time trainee technician in the Department of Rocket Science in the Global Security Complex on Los Alamos. His boss was the Director of Global Security, a Bayesian statistician and reliability theorist of note.

A few days after his totally humiliating first visit to the Galton-Pearson building, Slim was walking along the Straights of Gremfire to the security complex, when he happened to bump into his long-lost cousin, a lieutenant who'd just disembarked from the H.M.S. Beagle.

“They treated me so badly when I was eleven, after they said I killed my loved ones,” agonised Slim, “and I'm still totally confused.”

The lieutenant nodded sympathetically, his face glistening eerily in the sunlight. “The forensic bastards jagged you full of a medication called Sunak's Breath, Slim. I very much doubt that you hurt your family at all. The drug would have caused all sorts of hallucinations and imaginings of guilt.”

“That's a relief, but are you part of one of my fantasies, Roslin? Please assure me that you're real.”

The lieutenant chuckled. “Of course I'm real, Slim, and I know your innermost thoughts down to a tee.”

Where did my dear cousin go? wondered Slim, as he ascended the lofty Oppenheimer cliffs to the Global Security Complex in the Wernher von Braun cable car, then up a further five hundred feet in the bright pink Dwight Capsule, to the Department of Rocket Science.

Three rows of leading spaces scientists were working at

their modum-tops in the Huntsville Room. The Director of Global Security, a diminutive fellow, remained perched on a tall, swivelling 'umpire's chair' overlooking the stage, munching a succession of scrunchy Bison burgers. The modems were connected to two huge, live-wire screens behind the stage.

On the first screen, there was a live, billion-pixel picture of the highly colourful Inner Moon, when viewed from Cape Kennedy in Northern Trystonia. There was a picture of similar quality of the Inner Moon on the second screen, but this was transmitted from the remotely operated Cape Clinton, on the largely uninhabited Outer Moon, and therefore depicted the Inner Moon from a totally different angle.

The Director took a bite from his burger, and glowered. “'The previous ex-janitor is self-isolating from the green pox, Mr. Quick. So please sit on the stool behind the control panels on the stage, and familiarise yourself with the six buttons.”

“What for?” asked Slim, acting dumb.

“So that we can start our trial run, of course. Please wait until the cargo ships from Gallium Arsenide appear on the giant screens.”

Slim found the two control panels, marked KENNEDY and CLINTON easy to understand. They both accommodated three buttons, labelled FIRE, ABORT, and DIVERT. Slim felt most uneasy about what might be about to happen to the interplanetary cargo-fleet.

At least I'll be able to warn Dreyfus about rockets unexpectedly activated at Cape Clinton, thought Slim. If the revolution on the Inner Moon succeeds then that will help him to defend Angervast against devious counter-attack.

“We'll fire a Trident from Cape Kennedy and a Pershing from Cape Clinton at the first cargo-ship,” declared the Director, when seven yellow blobs appeared on both screens. Activate both missiles, Head Scientist!”

“Both missiles ready to fire!” announced the Head Scientist, fifteen seconds later.

“Fire both, Mr. Quick!” howled the Director.

Slim pressed both FIRE buttons, on impulse, and the silver trajectories of a Trident and a Pershing missile appeared, menacingly, on both screens.

“The first cargo-ship is packed with bronze slaves,” said the Director, with a cunning smile, “and the fireball will melt a few crazy Psychlops too.”

“Evil, racist murderers!” howled Slim, pressing both DIVERT buttons, and the predatory missiles spun off, harmlessly, into space.

The Director set the A.I. Robot onto Slim for that. Slim didn't see it coming, and it made a mess of his face.

Slim was given the opportunity to retaliate against the evil Establishment on Halloween Day, when Antinous of Bolu invited him and Pippa to accompany him and the Black Angels of Iona on a trip to the notorious island of Little St. Jules.

The High Head One of the Calvinist Church of Trystonia was feeling particularly buoyant on that sunny afternoon. The rugged mountaineer was drinking gin and vermouth with his chums outside the Destination Hell bar on that dreadful Virgin Island, boasting about the hundreds of Munros he’s conquered in Caledonia 13, when a bevy of fat-cats spilt out of the glitzy Dire Island Hotel, wrapped their white towels around their prosperous waists, and descended into the Lucifer Lingers sex sauna. A baboon-like fellow came hurtling out of the sauna, and fell, bleeding and towel-less, into the sludge.

“Here’s a neat trick for me!” exclaimed a Lord of the Realm from the Borders.

The High Head One smiled contently. “Thirty cute fishermen from my home parish of Gaza-on-Galilee are planning to attend our festivities tonight. My senior elders flew them to North Sands in four Heathcopters this morning, after dosing them up with fixifixol. They'll all be rubbery in the legs, and stumbling all over the place.”

“They sound like jolly good geese for the gander,” replied the Lord of the Realm, salivating through his teeth. “I’ll be game for a three-way, with Brother Cyrilius maybe.”

“Maybe the Hittite High Priest will sacrifice a couple of the straggly ones for supper instead of the raving bull,” added the green-haired, chump-like QMP for Tibermouth, licking his chops.

“Thank goodness you're a Calvinist too, Zach,” chuckled the High Head One. “We're all predestined for Heaven.”

The Lord of the Realm blinked. “I'll ask the Holy Treat Peddler to contribute a round dozen of his wares to keep the Shadow Cabinet happy, and a couple more for the Lib Dems.”

Fifteen minutes earlier, having set off in the flying saucer Guanshiyan from the Castle of St. Sanctus, Antinous of Bolu and the Angels of Iona had taken Pippa and Slim aboard in the skull-ridden quadrangle of Gonville and Caius College on Livermore.

The Holy Saucer landed on a blood-stained hillock on the accursed Little St. Jules, just as the QMP for Tibermouth was emerging from the Dire Island Hotel, with a selection of cute 'treats'.

A brave Angel of Iona took a flying leap onto the ground, chased after the chump and blinded him with two squirts of concentrated sulphuric acid.

The Archangel Antinous took hold of the ancient Spikesaber of Saladin, and marched forwards to confront the evil High Head One.

“How dare you assume the mantle of a spiritual being?” raged the leading Calvinist. “You're just a yob from the back-streets of Bolu.”

“Very easily,” replied Antinous, burning a hole in the holy clerics' throat.

The Lord of the Realm chuckled at that. “It's time to go,” opined the evil fellow. “'I'm away in my Heathcopter to the fair City of Lanterns.”

Antinous burnt a hole in the back of that sex criminal's neck.

Slim knew what he was about, from previous experiences with the Holy Treat Peddler. The crafty eighteen-year-old crept into the lobby of the Dire Island Hotel, and stabbed the leering creep to death with the Holy Dagger of Ravenna.

All the fat-cats in sight fled into Destination Hell in fright. The jubilant fishermen were safely airlifted in the Heathcopters, and the Angels of Iona fumigated the remaining fat-cats in their lairs with cyanide gas. The evil creepy-crawlies choked in their vomit.

At that very moment, Corbyn Boris Blair was climbing the stairs of Ploetz Tower on the Laughlin Campus on Nod and hearing gruesome noises. Corbyn was waiting outside his headmaster's office, shaking in fright, when a crazy-eyed, blue-skinned Trinkon burst out through the door, his white coat drenched with silver Icarian blood, his eyes flaring bright crimson.

“Another success for the Trinkons!” shrieked the Yin, the head orderly in the Galton-Penrose Lab. “We will rule the Red Trojan universe, and I'll remain our supreme leader until eternity.”

When Corbyn Blair entered that loathsome office, pieces of Sir Sargant Tredgold's dismembered body were strewn all over the place. The words 'Galton minion' were scratched into the dead knight's forehead.

The rozzers shot the Yin, the Galton murderer, through the neck, awhile later, while the blue, sugary-skinned supremacist was trying to swim to Mustique. Sir Aylmer Grimster was appointed Headmaster of Laughlin College the very next day. He took Corbyn Boris Blair under his wing and gave him a sound training in the politics of eugenics.

“You should study the works of Tobias Jung, you silly poodle,” suggested Sir Aylmer, as they cuddled together on the blood-soaked sofa. “The best time to kill off people with disabilities is during a pandemic, and you can even come across as virtuous while you're pulling the rug on them.”

10. UNREST AND REVOLUTION

Slim received a generous stipend at UCLA from his formidable husband Ket Martingale, the First Minister in Trivoli. Early in November 2714, Slim used part of the loot to take Pippa to the Inner Moon to party with Dreyfus for a long weekend.

By the time Pippa and Slim landed in their passenger ship from Los Alamos on that fateful Friday afternoon, the student unrest had spread from the City Centre as far as the Angervast Space Station. Initially a struggle between trans students and TERFs, the unrest had broadened into a fight between the Slotzkyists and the alt-right High Tea Party. Horrific police violence ensued.

While Slim and Pippa were loading their luggage onto their eco-tram, a yowling Chattering Baboon ran up, kicked Slim in his shin, and howled “Trans fucker!” in his face. Pippa promptly kicked the creature in his crotch, and she and Slim escaped into the back seat.

When the eco-tram stopped on Time Square, a huge crowd of concerned citizens were demonstrating in front of the Governor's Palace in support of the trans students and Slotzkyists. A collection of TERFs were pelting the crowd with rocks, and the police were wielding their spiked batons and bicycle chains without mercy, and driving their pig-cars into the leftists.

Pippa and Slim realised that they would need to change out of their party dresses at the double.

When Pippa and Slim arrived by bus in Puslinch-on-Noss, fifty Qinxhunters were camping in pop-up tents in the uncultivated field on Granny Redfoot's farm, while surviving on Farmer O'Brien's fruit, and creating havoc among the sheep, goats, and domesticated aardvarks. A further three thousand further rebels were lying in wait in the foliage in Rosslyn Glen, two miles to the north, nearby the towering statue of the mighty Bronze Comyn, who'd defeated the golden Icarians there in battle in AD 1303.

Pippa much appreciated Granny Redfoot's hospitality, and took an immediately liking to both her and her strapping nephew, particularly because Pippa's adoptive family were also Talking Wolves.

Later that evening, Dreyfus turned on Moonview, just in time to see the verbal diarrhoeic Governor Dafyd Vance-Owen holding forth. Previously a mind-gut-organ neurologist of repute, Vance-Owen poured scorn on the trans students and Neo-Marxists for their rebellious attitudes, and said that left-wing demonstrators risked being lacerated and put into induced comas, apart, of course, from those who hadn't been shot in the head on sight.

And then Sir Dugdale Amory, the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, threatened closure of the food banks in the deprived, working class areas of Angervast, unless the public stopped supporting the Slotzyists, and said that all registered trans people would thenceforth be forced to eat refuse from the wheelie-bins, and to live in the gutter.

When Slim looked at the screen, he recoiled in horror. Sir Dugdale was a squared-jawed golden Icarian with flashing red eyes. Slim recognised him immediately. Dugdale was the representative of the Food Merchants' Guild who'd visited his father several times in his home in Drumkok over seven years previously.

During his recent course of treatment in the UCLA Neuro-Psychiatric Clinic, Slim had developed a theory, while being hydrochloric-boarded by two fox-like students, that people from Dugdale's guild had visited his father, an Admiralty official, by night, and that they’d been responsible for the murders of Slim's six loved ones. But Slim kept his mouth shut even when a student turned on the nitric.

Slim discussed these issues with Dreyfus in considerable detail. Dreyfus was extremely concerned, and said that he'd investigate Sir Dugdale Amory further.

During an emergency meeting of thirty rebel leaders in the back room of the Meavy Inn, it was decided, in the light of the growing civil unrest, to accelerate the plans for a people’s revolution.

“Tomorrow we'll storm Parliament and the Moonview station, and take control of the Space-Port,” said Vera Redfoot. “The people will take care of the rest.”

“This sounds like a knee-jerk, anarchist revolt,” complained an Apollo Locust commander who'd only just arrived from virus-stricken Novgorod on the far side of the moon. “This isn't Catalonia 73 or a Zintian Spring. We need to change the entire political system before a Sorbian Winter sets in, or we'll all end up getting thrown into the bromine and sulphur craters on Sorrentino.”

“Thank you, but everything is already in hand,” Dreyfus confidently replied. “We have half-a-million comrades waiting in the provinces, armed to the teeth, and ready to join the fray.”

After twenty minutes of detailed discussion, Vera Redfoot thumped the table with her paw-like fists.

“We’ve reached a consensus,” she asserted,”and now to war! I announce a Call-to-Arms!”

Pippa and Slim, who were there as observers, were thrilled to bits when Dreyfus was appointed interim president of the 'people's government' of the Inner Moon. Dreyfus sat up in his moving chair, and smiled.

That afternoon, Pippa and Slim accompanied twelve Qinxhunters on a raid of the Baraboo Munitions Plant to replenish their supplies. It seemed all to easy. The Qinxhunters exploded a hole in the fence, and broke down the door of the gun-house. When two Kushner Cat guards came out, wielding chain-saws, the Qinxhunters slew the vicious creatures with their spikesabers, whereupon the rebels rushed in for the loot.

Seeing that the Qinxhunters were loading the brenner-guns onto the farm-trekkers, another Kushner Cat came out through the hole in the fence, crazily waving a scimitar about its head. Pippa calmly raised her rifle to her shoulder, and when the stupid cat tried to decapitate Bra Quantum, she pressed the trigger and the bullet separated the feline creature's head from its neck.

That night, a company of Pelimodes and a platoon of trans gender students raided the Double Decker Remote Control Centre in the northern suburbs of Angervast. They forced the feisty Apollo Penguin operators to send a hundred open-deck buses to Rosslyn Glen, and two to Puslinch-on-Noss, and then to flick all 102 buses into 'manual operation' mode. That task completed, the trans people locked the belligerent penguins in the basement, and turned on the laughing gas.

Come Sunday morning, over ninety open-deck buses packed with rebels left Rosslyn Glen, and headed southwards towards Angervast. Outside Granny Redfoot's farm, twenty Qinxhunters readied themselves on the upper deck of the No. 62 bus, and Pippa and Slim joined twenty Qinxhunters and twenty Talking Wolves on the 63.

Little did they know that a tribe of Screaming Wasps, a brand new species, with extra-hard, white exoskeletons and very long zap-stingers, was lying in wait in the leafy boughs of the Meavy Oak

The two buses set off from the stop outside Granny Redfoot's cottage, But, when the 62 reached the zebra crossing, two score Screaming Wasps fell upon the unfortunate creatures on the upper deck, and unleashed their zap-stingers.

Pippa took careful aim with her rifle from the upper deck of the 63, and shot E. Digby Baltzell, the leader of the wasps, through between his bulbous eyes, only to see Bra Quantum falling off the 62 and cracking their skull to smithereens on the ground. The Qinxhunters came pouring out of the lower deck of the 63, and a ferocious battle ensued.

The rebels won a Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Puslinch-on-Noss. The wasps were exterminated, with the exception of tiny Digby Baltzell Junior, who survived, in grief, to fight another day, but only eight of the Qinxhunters and six of the Talking Wolves were left in the land of the living.

Despite their inexorably deep feelings of anguish, the survivors decided to press forwards in the No.63 bus in the hope of taking part in the Angervast Rising. Ten minutes later they attached themselves to the convoy of rebel vehicles from Rosslyn Glen that was heading along the Autobahn towards the centre of the metropolis..

When they crossed the Thames, many of the buildings were burning, and the corpses were strewn along along Pall Mall. Time Square reminded Pippa of a death-ridden concentration camp, and, in Parliament Square, the Cristus Dei guard was in desperate pitched battle with the indigenous rebels, as the hordes swarmed towards the Capitol Dome.

Pippa, Slim, and the six Talking Wolves disembarked from the bus, and attached themselves to a company of bronze Icarians who were heading for the St. Bliar Chapel. A band of green Talking Beanstalks broke the chapel door in with hefty mallets, and Pippa and Slim were propelled by a mass of humanoid and sub-humanoid flesh through that sacred space and into the St. Nix the Confessor Chamber itself, where the House of Lunar Representatives was in emergency session.

Pippa and Slim arrived just in time to see Governor Vance-Owen and most of his cabinet press their 'Abort' buttons, and vanish through their seats into the ‘safe chamber’.

Sleeping Sparrow struck down the Speaker with his machète, and the Heptagon chief's ever faithful partner seized the mace, whereupon the massive leader of the King Charlesian Bears grabbed the microphone from Sir Dugdale Amory IMMP, and pushed him to the floor.

“This House is dissolved in the name of the diverse, indigenous creatures of Asherah's Moon, and hard-working families everywhere,” declared the pompous bear, “and by divine instruction from the Messiah on Castellos himself.”

The rebels ran amok around the chamber, and slashed over a hundred IMMPs to pieces. The Deputy Governor, an obdurate fellow, was taken outside and hung from a makeshift scaffold while the crowds spat venom.

Slim confronted the square-jawed Minister of Agriculture, as he was being hauled from the floor by two Apollo Shaman from Wilmington.

“I remember you, from Drumkok in 2707,” raged Slim, waving a dagger at the minister's throat. “You killed my father and family in cold blood, and you are cursed to Eternity for your heinous crimes.”

“Dr. Slim Quick deserved to die,” howled Sir Dugdale Amory, “and so do you. You battered your entire family to death while I watched.”

“Liar!” shrieked Slim. “Liar! Liar! Liar!”

“Come away, Slim,” yelped Pippa.”You'll never get the truth out of him.”

The rebels took control of the Angervast Space Centre and the Moonview Station, and interim President Dreyfus Dreadnought moved into the White House, where he formed a new lunar government.

Pippa and Slim took the last bullet train to Plymouth 101, and caught the next planet-bound passenger ship out of Roborough Airport. They were surprised to see the deposed governor, Dr. Dafyd Vance-Owen sharing the same flight, with the three surviving members of his cabinet. The politicians were planning to create a government-in-exile in Trivoli.

Several days later, Sleeping Sparrow lead a vast rebel force of over 50,000 indigenous creatures over the top of Dartmoor, and down towards Plymouth 101, the main seaport on the Sea of Plenty. The second largest city on the Inner Moon quickly capitulated, and the rebels took control of the tin and copper mines at Mary Tavy, and the whole of Dumnonia and Lyonnesse.

Meanwhile, the Apollo Locusts and Talking Animals captured the major cities in the northern lunar hemisphere, though they faced stern resistance in Novosibirsk 17. Within a few weeks, the rebels controlled the entire continent of Asheria, for the moment at least.

Several groups of rebels on the planet surface had similar hopes of success, but their hopes were quickly dashed when the Imperial High Admiral fully activated his battle-fleet. The convicts in the Southern Swamps were drenched in sulphuric acid, the Children of Precocia were scorched into the soil, and the Heptagon in the Urals were gassed with flexstrogen. Thereupon First Minister Ket Martingale was left in firm control of Qinsatorix, while Dreyfus Dreadnought’s Slotzkyist government in Angervast sought to survive in isolation.

A week or so later, an aggressive, ape-like judge, formerly a notable Director of Prosecutions, held court in the fortress on Terezin Heights by Plymouth Sound, when they tried Sir Dugdale Amory on behalf of the Slotzkyist regime. Pippa and Slim watched the last day of the trial on Zoom, feeling a mixture of fright, foreboding and delight.

“Dugdale Thatcher Amory,” began the judge, with a terrifying grin. “You have been sentenced to painful extermination for the heinous crime of starving over 200,000 of our working class civilians to death. The purpose of this hearing is to decide the nature of your execution. It might be of some benefit to you if you would kindly tell us everything you know about the murders of Dr. Slim Quick and five family members in Drumkok, Western Trystonia, in March 2707. Staple the defendant's nose, and snip his ears Officers!”

The former Minister of Agriculture moaned and groaned. “I was a representative of the local food merchant's guild at the time, and we'd been supplying the Imperial Navy in Drumkok for many years. However, the Admiralty cancelled our contract in early 2707, and gave it to our unscrupulous rivals in Tibermouth. So I went to Dr. Quick's house, with several colleagues, to remonstrate. He refused to listen, and threw us out, and that was that.”

“Really?” exclaimed Sir Jeffrey. “I put it you that you and your colleagues foully murdered Dr. Quick, and his five loved ones, while Slim Junior was upstairs in his bed.”

“No!” shrieked Amory. “It wasn't anything like that.”

“We have evidence, Sir Dugdale, of the presence of scalpertix in Slim Junior's bloodstream,” enjoined the Inquisitor, straightening her dirty blonde hair.. “I put it to you, that you injected Slim Junior full of the stuff, and that he consequently murdered his family while sleep-walking in an induced psycho-Jungian coma.”

Sir Dugdale gnashed his teeth, and tried, in vain, to break free from his manacles. “I plead the Eleventh!” he screamed. “I refuse to answer.”

“Enough is enough!” declared the black-capped judge. “I sentence you to die by repeated thrusts of the red-hot Gaddafi dagger. Go ahead, Officers!”

“I'm so glad I invented that clever mode of execution,” purred the Inquisitor. “It put an end to the Arab Spring.”

11.THE SUPREMACISTS STRIKE BACK

Two months later, the Director of Global Security at Los Alamos sat with his space scientists in the Huntsville Room in the Global Security Complex, viewing the live-wire pictures of the Inner and Outer Moons on the large screens behind the stage.

A cloud of green specks, appearing on the screen to the left. moved swiftly towards the Inner Moon.

The Director took a swig of his coke. “They're the Janian cargo-ships from the Isle of Mainau. They contain enough Gulp-One to asphyxiate a few hundred million of the insidious blighters.”

The General of the Imperial Armed Forces was said by his Emperor-worshipping soldiers to spew a mixture of spunk and brimstone. He flexed his enormous muscles, and grinned like Caesar at the Siege of Alesia.

“We used Gulp-One when we invaded Planet Feline Five,” reported the formidable general. “It took care of the majority of the stupid cats, and most of the frigging pelicans.”

“The Trident is ready to fire from Cape Kennedy,” came a voice.

“At the ready!” yelped the Director.

A boy in blue hyperventilated in delight. “Ready, boss!” he screeched.

“Fire!” screamed the Director.

The boy pressed the purple button, and a Trident missile flashed across the screen to the left, and headed for Angervast.

“The Pershing is ready to fire from Cape Clinton,” called a voice.

“Fire!” roared the Director. “For the United States of Qinsatorix, Planet of the Free!”

“Qinsatorix First!” yelled the boy in blue, gleefully pressing the green button, and a Pershing missile headed from the Outer Moon, across the screen on the right, for beleaguered Angervast.

Fifteen minutes later, the cloud of green gas-drones was drawing close to the Inner Moon, when the gnarled, toothless face of the Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Battle-fleet suddenly flashed onto the screen.

“The battle-fleet's clear of Edwards Space Station,” declared the Admiral, with a hideous grin. “Next stop, Plymouth Hoe.”

Meanwhile, the gas-drones approaching the Inner Moon turned a deep shade of blue, and began spewing their poison, but, a few seconds later, several clouds of red warrior-drones emerged from the suburbs of Angervast, and the drones were destroyed in a frenzied mish-mash of A.I. hyperactivity.

“But now for the Trident,” yelped the Director, and the rocket turned silvery-gold, as it descended on Angervast, like a wolf on the fold.

Two land-to-air missiles sailed out of Angervast, only to bounce off the Trident's deflector shields, but a magno-sphere came spinning out of Monterey, and struck the Trident in its mid-rift. The Trident flipped off course, spiralled into Mount Harry Truman, and blew the volcano top to pieces.

Back on Los Alamos, the General of the Imperial Armed Forces flipped his lid, and the boy in blue turned a shade of green.

The Pershing missile approached Angervast from a totally different direction, from Cape Clinton on the Outer Moon.

“That'll scorch their Bronze Watch to a man!” shrieked the boy in blue, brandishing a ceremonial cutlass. “Remember Nouveau Orleans!”

But several magno-spheres left the surface of the Inner Moon, as if they'd been lying in wait, and tore the Pershing to shreds at 400,000 feet.

“I'll have you flayed alive in the Grassmarket.” roared the spunky general, brandishing his fists, as the fall-out from the nuclear cataclysm spread in a large plume into the lunar sky.

“They must have known about our secret Pershing missile base on the Outer Moon!” howled the Director. “We have a traitor in our midst.”

Little did the Director realise that it was Slim who'd tipped off the administration in Angervast. That was soon after the A.I. robot battered Slim's face for pulling the plug during the earlier practice run.

The screens switched to ZZTV footage from the Imperial flagship Princess Natasha. The population of Qinsatorix watched on Qinview, as the flagship approached the Inner Moon, before veering south-west, away from the nuclear waste, and towards Plymouth 101.

The argumentative Good Evening Qinsatorix commentator shrieked in excitement. “There’s hope for us yet!” he cried, as the Princess Natasha approached Plymouth Sound from over the Eddystone Light.

The Imperial flagship fired off two Raleigh rockets; they blew away Smeaton's Tower and the citadel that dominated Plymouth Hoe. Then, as the battle-fleet approached the Breakwater, the concrete jungle beyond the Hoe and Mountbatten Castle by the Cattewater were destroyed by a bedazzling crescendo of Grenville missiles.

Upon ejecting from the battlecruiser Prince Hamlet, the Golden Praetorian parachutists landed in Central Park, and butchered the civilians through Pennycomequick, and beyond. However, the bulk of the battle-fleet landed on the Moors five miles to the north of the doomed city, on the archaic airstrip by Yelverton Rock. Several battalions of the Imperial Guard swiftly landed, and marched southwards through Roborough towards historic Plymouth, putting the sheep, ponies, and humanoid population to the sword as they went.

In Plymouth, the Elizabethan houses and gin distillery by the Barbican burned, as the blood flowed, and the entire city was scorched, leaving only the historic Guildhall intact.

The Holy Children Jed and Marie were playing with Sister Zoe and her Qolish trans girlfriend in the Castle of St. Sanctus on Iona, when Zoe saw crimson lights flashing across Lake Tawi. She sent the toddlers hurriedly to bed.

Jed and Marie didn't hear the horrific screaming and barely knew what was happening when the vengeful Apollo Ravens came to Iona that night, and they didn't see the Qestorian High Pontiff’s horrific death throes before the Altar of Christ.

When all was lost, Zoe and the trans girl hurried into the children's room, and took them to the landing pad on a high turret, where they boarded the flying saucer Guanshiyan. The black Archangel Antinous was at the helm, blood pouring from his face, and the five survivors transcended instantaneously to Planet Freya in the Quanta universe.

“Where are my favourite angels?” asked Jed, when he awoke in the lush Fields of Fólksvangr, and Zoe turned deathly white.

Following the fall of Plymouth 101, the Imperial Armed Forces re-conquered vast swathes of the Inner Moon. President Dreyfus Dreadnought therefore proposed a Treaty of Peace, and this was signed and sealed in June 2715. The mainland on the Inner Moon was divided into two sovereign territories, Dixieland and Crystania, respectively administered by Dr Vance- Owen in Plymouth 101 and Dreyfus in Angervast.

Following the horrific effects of the terribly damaging warfare, the natural environments deteriorated at pace, as the malevolent politicians in Plymouth and Trivoli relentlessly focussed on short term profit for the wealthy élite, while Dreyfus struggled to establish a fairer Slotskyist society in Crystania.

12. ANNO DOMINI 2725

During the ten years that followed, climate change, geological instability, and global warming took huge tolls on Qinsatorix and the Inner Moon. Entire archipelagos sunk without trace in the unevenly rising sea water, the ocean floors heaved in anguished, and much of the northern lunar hemisphere was transformed to desert.

The icecaps of Qinsatorix evaporated, and vast swathes of the Trystonia were flooded, or scorched by forest fires ignited by the erupting volcanoes. The underground geo-systems were well nigh kaput. The storm clouds looked like expressions of wrath from the multi-fanged, underworld demon, Bolsonaro the Tenth, himself.

By AD 2725, the toxic malaise was rampant throughout the entire Aton solar system, and all the planets were suffering, while the global protection scientists struggled to find practical solutions. The attempts to pump extra oxygen into the atmospheres, and to refreeze polar icecaps, blatantly failed, the ozone layers on at least three of the failing planets were poisoned by cyanide gas and floxi-fluid, and the birds lay dead on the beaches.

On Qinsatorix, the ruling politicians were bad as ever. The top dogs delegated their duties to abrasive underlings, and retreated to the peninsulas to play golf. Many of the élite quickly forgot the terrible events on Little St. Jules, while making mayhem in the brothels and orphanages, and meeting up with their favourite fat-cat sponsors on Lesser St. James. Meanwhile, Trystonia was sinking, comet-shaped, into the planet's crust, at an alarming rate.

Despite the catastrophes that occurred so frequently around him. Slim Quick matured over the years into a moderately well-balanced man, after seeking the advice of a neuro-plastician, who said that people's brains can gradually become normal, if nurtured in locally rational environments well away from the shrinks.

Slim nevertheless became ever more confused as to whether he'd murdered his family when he was eleven. He therefore didn't think that he could ever regard himself as a moral and completely altogether person.

As of the Summer Solstice of AD 2725, Slim is a tenured Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at Cantabridge. His estranged husband Ket, the erstwhile First Minister, now Lord Martingale of Rakewood, sits in the Upper House in Trivoli. Slim contents himself by relaxing in the jacuzzi with his extremely cute love-buddies, two sub-aqua divers of colour. The attractive male duo are identical 'original hominids', their ancestors having teleported out of Eritrea 1.

Dirk Eradacus still resides in his mansion in Trivoli, with his enslaved and browbeaten daughter Martho. The ruthless Apollo Himmler has risen in rank to President for Life, and rules Qinsatorix with an iron fist.

Pippa Pipette-Dawkins is now a full Professor of Humanoid Genetics at Cantabridge. She has published a graduate text with her husband, a distinguished professor of Evolutionary Genetics and Epigenetics and the first evolving cat-like hominid to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Qinsatorix.

During July 2725, the Director of Global Security on Los Alamos contacted his counterpart on Planet Vetorinsectorix in the Belt of Orion universe. The courteous Neander-Insect said that he'd just returned through the Turing wormhole from a mission to the Milky Way universe

The Neander-Insect and his fellow Argonauts had discovered that Earth was in a far better state than anticipated. The extinct planet had cooled more than a thousand degrees, and was starting to precess around its equinoxes again. The cloud cover was beginning to return, and the previously burnt and barren surface was now protected by light blue vegetation, criss-crossed with several long, purple streaks.

A neutro-ant whiz-kid came up with a possible reason for this remarkable regeneration. Several enormous Waker comets had recently visited the Sol solar system, at speeds that exponentiated the speed of light, where they performed numerous ultra-rapid orbits around Earth.

Maybe the Wakers were programmed by a massive Big Data process, thought the whiz-kid, for the purpose of restoring extinct planets.

The Director at Los Alamos contemplated the possibility of repopulating Earth from the failing planets in the Red Trojan universe, and instructed a team of two hundred leading space scientists in the basement of his security complex to investigate the issue further.

During September 2725, Trystonia sank at an even faster pace, and several of the major cities were destroyed by earthquakes. The authorities found it impossible to prevent the starvation and mass suicides or to subdue the civil unrest, and the soldiers and police deserted en masse.

President Eradacus got the wind up when his mansion crashed into Lake Akhenaten. After consulting with his QMPs, he moved them, and his seat of government, to Balliol College on the Isle of Livermore.

Pippa was glad to meet up with Zoe’s daughter long-lost Martho, but yearned for her own son Jed, who was living, contentedly, with Zoe and Marie, in the Quanta universe. But at least, Pippa thought, Jed and Marie are in safe keeping.

Trystonia eventually sunk into oblivion, leaving only three archipelagos on the planet relatively intact. One evening, fierce, satanic storm clouds gathered over Livermore and Los Alamos. During the night, several thunderbolts and two fiery pitchforks hit the twin islands, and the Galton-Pearson Building and Gonville and Caius College were obliterated without trace.

A fortnight later, the illustrious planet Tiberius Ptolemy was hit by multiple volcanic eruptions and frightening earthquakes. Nineveh, known affectionately as 'Windy City' was ripped apart, and the Galton-Booth Business School on the University of Nineveh campus by Lake Wichigan was destroyed.

Stagler Kissinger, a pre-eminent Professor of the History of Statistics and Economics, was shot through his beak by an irate police officer, while he was fleeing along Dorchester Avenue towards a black ghetto, and the Noblesse-Prize-winning vital statistician George Stigler died flapping his wings while trying to save an indigenous Chilean Elk from drowning in the lake.

It's all part of the same old story, thought Slim. Climate change is likely to overheat both the atmosphere and the ocean beds, and this will potentially lead to severe reactions beneath the planet's crust,. The turmoil within the planet will in turn affect the weather patterns, causing the temperatures to soar. The external heat will cause even worse internal geological reactions; a never ending loop.

The intense and destabilizing geological activity caused Tiberius Ptolemy to flip off its axis of spin. The planet was consequently thrown off orbit, and gyrated haphazardly through space.

A few days later. Slim was amazed to hear that Tiberius Ptolemy had crashed into the dormant Planet Qinsagamond, causing both heavenly bodies to disintegrate into thousands of planetesimals, some of which crashed into each other and disintegrated into zillions of asteroids. The planetesimals and asteroids caused havoc around the Aton solar system.

Following a series of natural disasters in the Archipelago of the Lost Multitudes, the Vice-Chancellor of Cantabridge decided to send an advanced party of students and faculty to the Isle of Flute, with a view to relocating the remnants of his university in the derelict technical college buildings in the suburbs of Machonik.

President Eradacus insisted that he'd stay to rule the planet from Livermore, and that his mistreated daughter should remain at Balliol College with him. Martho kept a dagger in her bed and prayed for divine deliverance.

One Saturday morning, 160 professors, students, and smartly-dressed children loaded their luggage into six laser-powered Vikini long-ships, moored on the Straits of Gremfire, with destination Machonik in mind.

Slim boarded the flagship Draken with Pippa and her cat-like husband. The golden-skinned Adonis took a last glance at the white-tiled, Global Security Complex, high on the Oppenheimer Cliffs, as the long-boats headed upstream, through the dead birds and otters, the bracken, and the sludge.

Slim wondered why the scientists were hurling rocks and tiles onto the promenade below, and didn't realise they'd gone stark raving bonkers. A humanoid-sized Talking Hornet, out for a stroll, flew into a radge, and several of her buddies joined in. They all went manic, and started waving their cat-stingers at the pigs.

The green fog slowly dissolved into pink mist as the Vikini long-ships headed northwards across Tawi Sound. They continued to Peugeot Bay, at which juncture the grown-ups decided to stop and drop anchor, to collect their thoughts and tend to the children.

At some indeterminate point in time, the emaciated animals were howling hysterically in the trees, as the dolphins, seals, and swordfish leapt from the bubbling waves onto the death-ridden beach.

When Pippa awoke from her slumbers, she saw a mind-blowing, cataclysmic event in the Heavens. The tiny planet Feline Five had collided into, and indeed straight through, Gallium Arsenide, turning the larger planet into a crushed doughnut-shaped torus.

To Pippa's horror, Feline Five's crust disintegrated into millions of tiny pieces, and the lava from beneath its geological layers spewed sludge across the sky, whereupon Gallium Arsenide splintered into fragments that zigzagged around the Cosmos.

Then, out of the pink cloud cover above Little St. Jules, there emerged a spinning open saucer, flashing silver and gold. Having transcended from Planet Freya in the Quanta University, the spaceship Guanshiyan circled around Tawi Sound before setting course for Lesser St. James. As it did, a fireball arose in the East, and bedazzled the skies.

Pippa realised that she was watching the Inner Moon in its death throes, and she was grief-stricken to the core.

“I hope you escaped, my darling Dreyfus!” she shrieked.

Meanwhile, the Holy Virgin Mother had boarded the escape capsule Ship of Aeneus on the melting tarmac in Angervast, and was now hurtling through the planetesimals, with twelve bronze Heptagon aboard.

“Where are you, my son?” howled Dreyfus. “Please return to this universe and save your kith and kin!”

But Christ was not there to forgive his mother, and Dreyfus entered his Kingdom of Heaven in disarray.

Dreyfus's and Pippa's son Jed was aboard the Guanshiyan when it landed in the blood-soaked Chevenix trench on Lesser St. James, the Archangel Ant of Bolu as ever at the controls. The Holy children Jed and Marie were dressed in white samite, with golden halos hovering above their radiant heads.

Hundreds of VIPs emerged, partly dressed, from the decadent establishments, and Sir Aristides and Lady Jemima Sunkist appeared like poltergeists from out of the festering gloom.

Jed and Marie took time out to counsel the fat-cats, and to help them come to terms with their grievous sins. There was much reflection, and gnashing of teeth.

But then, it was time to leave.

“Peace be unto you, my children,” murmured the Christ Child. “Our relatives are getting anxious in Fólksvangr.”

A purple-haired, Cnupian slave boy of note came hurtling bare-arsed out of the glitzy hotel. “Please save me from the monster on the stairs!” he begged. “It'll be the death of me.”

“Jump aboard, Achilles,” cried the angelic Ant. “We'll find you a new home on Freya, next to the basketball court, perhaps.”

A fast-evolving, man-sized, blue preying mantis emerged from the sordid hotel, and scared Achilles to bits. But it was Lord Ket Martingale who it stung to death.

The Guanshiyan soared upwards, and over Tawi Sound in the direction of Peugeot Bay. The fog re-descended and turned into thick globules of gruel, whereupon the gentlefolk and exploitative royal princesses left puffing and panting on Lesser St. James heard strange buzzing sounds from above.

Thereupon, swarms of genetically-modified fire-gnats descended on them, and bit the guilty ones to pieces. Then several thunderbolts descended from a mighty height, and blew all the criminals, and the perfectly innocent, to shreds.

What bizarre effects of climate change, thought Marie, rubbing her brow.

The spinning saucer from Freya came down in the waves a short distance from the Vikini long-ships, and Pippa felt renewed with fresh life. Her half-Apollo Alpha son was growing into the divine entity she had wanted him to be.

Jed vanished down a hatch, but speedily re-emerged, holding a crumpled atlas, upon which the Holy children teleported, in their glittering raiment, to the quarterdeck of Draken.

“Greetings, Father,” said Jed. “Congratulations on your marriage to a knight of the realm. He is like a second father to me.”

Pippa was taken with the way she was addressed by the Christ Child.

“Thank you, my son,” she replied, from the middle-deck, “but did you have to judge the people on Lesser St. James so harshly? It's wise to be measured, but not as vengeful as Solomon.”

“But that wasn't me, Father! Neither Yahweh or I had anything to do with the fire-gnats or thunderbolts at all. They were flukes of nature, haphazard events that are sent to test sentient beings, on a regular basis.”

“I have a question to ask,” spurted Slim, tears welling in his eyes. “It's about me and my loved ones, about what happened to me when I was around your age...”

“Later perhaps, Uncle Slim,” interrupted Jed. “Since time is pressing, it's much more important for us to give you and my father this atlas of Great Britain that was compiled in AD 2521. You will find a street plan of Berwick-upon-Tweed on page 57.”

“This must be part of some grand scheme,” exclaimed Pippa.

“It certainly is,” agreed Jed. “Your long-ships will arrive on what remains of Earth in approximately twenty-two minutes. If we can get our multi-task transcendension machine working, that is.”

“I'll see if I can find the spanner in our tool-kit,” stuttered Pippa's husband, his cat-like tail twisting into the air in agitation.

“Thank you, Father,” replied Jed. “If you reach Earth, you will land on a purple canal that will take you westwards through the light blue pastures to the escarpment where Berwick once stood. If you can survive for several months there, you may decide to explore the lands north of the Valley of the Tweed. You may even find the three extinct volcanoes of Loth.”

“This sounds hopeful,” said Pippa, “but when will the other people from Qinsatorix arrive?”

“Animals will come, all sorts of animals,” answered Marie Madeleine, looking abject and crestfallen. “They will come along the canal path from the East. In time, people will follow, but you will not know who they are. They will not be of this universe. There are only 160 of you left. Not to forget Achilles, of course.”

“No!!! Not true! You're wrong! Some people must still be alive on Livermore and Los Alamos.”

Marie's eyes glazed over. “I'm afraid not. The Talking Hornets went crazy, and turned on the bourgeoisie and the impoverished workers. Balliol College slid down a fiery fissure, while the Dons were asleep. President Eradacus and my beloved sister Martho perished with them. The President was in agony from a gaping injury to his gut.”

“I'm so sorry, Marie,” commiserated Slim.

“My dear mother Zoe is grieving on Freya, for Martho and for the people of Tibermouth, who were devoured by man-sized rats that came out of the sewers.”

“Are there no other survivors left on this planet?” asked Pippa, in anguish.

“Not in your entire solar system, or the Red Trojan universe.”

Jed looked at his watch, and glanced at Pippa.

“I'm so sorry, Father,” he murmured, “but it's time to go.”

Jed and Marie returned to the flying saucer with the spanner, and the 160 survivors stayed transfixed, in expectant silence.

“The transcendence machine is working!” howled Ant, flapping his wings.

“Flick the switch then, big bruv!” yelled Jed, going into a spin.

Slim embraced his identical, original hominid love-buddies Adam and Caleb, with tendresse.

“Did I kill my lovely....” yelled Slim, but those were the last words heard on that planet.