INDULGENT SPIRIT, Chapter 1: Fleeing from Craziness

 

                                                   INDULGENT SPIRIT

                                             A Saga in Space and Time

                                                       Tom Leonard

                                         

THIS IS A PRELIMINARY DRAFT, WHICH WILL BE CONTINUOUSLY REVISED                                                                ON LINE

Words like 'she' and 'her' are, for the moment, intended to represent all genders. It is difficult to find alternatives that sensibly represent the diverse genders of all the species involved. For the moment 'she' and 'her' can, for example, refer to very masculine /alpha-male people or creatures, for example Admiral Nam Nimitz and Captain Karoly Korchov.

                   CHAPTER 1: FLEEING FROM CRAZINESS         

                                   1.1  Brand New Universe

"Now the entire Belt of Orion is pouring shit on us!" howled Admiral Nam Nimitz, adjusting her plastic pince nez as if to defend her formidable eyelids. "The whole universe has gone totally crazy, asinine, stark raving bonkers."

"And the double-beaked albapox of Sol is coming straight for our guts!" yelled the sallow-faced minion. "It's as crazy as fuck! It ate the brain-damaged population of Planet Neptune in twelve mouthfuls. It'll puke all over us!"

"Why don't we give Universe 777 a try?" suggested Lieutenant Iota Iyola, giving her pet pumanid Kim Catworthy a peck on the cheek. "Torus looks like it would be cosy enough. The Big Gap black hole is just beyond Mintaka,"

"It's like a Zazin's backside," snorted Captain Karoly Korchov, a Kyusan alpha-male, throwing her pet koala off her knee. "Let's go!" The koala floundered on the floor looking miffed.

Universe 777 had come into existence with a big bang a billion or so years previously when a dazzling megastar burst through the Vulva wormhole from Universe 776 (also known as the Milky Way Universe), and splintered into tiny pieces.       

Captain Korchov slowed speed as she approached the gaping black hole. As she did, the double-beaked albapox emerged from behind Alnilam and sped into the yawning cavity in front of her.

Korchov seemed to twist the Aldrin wheel for an eternity as she steered the moon-sized, cubic space station Katrina through the fluorescent green folds of gaba-utang flesh that encapsulated the wormhole. Then suddenly the skies lit up and the silvery gold Pi Sun appeared on the larboard bow. Katrina had entered Universe 777 and a totally uncertain, but hopefully saner future.

The two-beaked albapox was lying in wait in the asteroid belt. It blinked its shining orange eyes, opened its massive jaws and closed in for the kill. But a smart-arsed minion rushed to the  missile bay and split the foul creature asunder with a Splunk nuke-rocket, sending the huge drago-bird's bits and pieces into orbit around the third moon of Riemann.

"Veer fifteen degrees to the starboard, Captain," yelped Lieutenant Iyola, giving her pet puminid a glistening love-apple.

Thirty minutes later, Captain Korchov slowed down for the first time since she came through the wormhole. Then, with a wink at her pet koala and a deft twist of the Aldrin wheel, she put the fluorescent red space station into elliptic orbit around the Pi-Sun.

"Planet Torus is now teleportation accessible," announced Lieutenant Iyola, "but beware the dusty planetisimal belts or you could find yourself in a very strange place."

"Don't swallow too much of the noxious gas, or you'll fall through the hole in the donut," joked the smart-arsed minion.

Iota chuckled politely. "No worries, laddie. Torus is spherical nowadays. That's why it maintains a sensible orbit."

"What in Szaszo Szasz's name is that?" howled Nam Nimitz, as a massive female human face the size of Jupiter emerged from behind the Pi Sun, and hurtled towards the fluorescent red space station.

"I'm Snatch, the Ruler of this Empire," howled the fat, spotty face, "and this will cost you three billion gold bars or your tedious lives."

"Planet Destructors!" yelled Karoly Korchov. "At the ready!...Fire!"

Twelve eager minions rushed into the missile bay in bright red uniforms, and Snatch slowly disintegrated into a brand new planetesimal belt.

"What is this new insanity?" raved Nam Nimitz, frothing at the mouth.

"We don't seem to have escaped insanity yet," surmised Kim Catworthy, adjusting her feline ear mufflers. "What will the rest of this universe bring?" 

Admiral Nimitz spat froth on the lenses of her plastic pince nez, and slowly polished them. "Whatever species we find, we will divide it, rule it, have sex with it, and eat it."

                                         1.2. Life goes on  

The thirty-year old, toothless and disabled veteran of three campaigns on Planet Kipling was cadging drinks in the Kit Kat bar in the Eighth Corner of Katrina. The gaunt, once drop-dead cute, hominid spoke dispassionately and without any sense of guilt. "When we entered the villages, the dead, the injured citizens and their children would be lying strewn on the ground. I drove my tank through them and over them. I had the responsibility to protect the lives of my comrades, and get the job done. That's what the sergeants taught me to do in the Territorials when I was sixteen. They trained us with live missiles, flame throwers and booby traps, and to admire all of our past presidents"

"And what do you do with your life nowadays?" asked a kindly Tavar.

"Not much. I see my father sometimes in the wastes on the second moon of Lauder, though it's difficult travelling across the bumpy ground in my cart."

"This round's on me," declared the alt right Eaglid. "A toast to our brave hero!"

"I'll be at our next victory parade!" declared the maimed veteran.

"Victory?" queried the Tavar. "I thought you lost when the Salidan took over and killed the women."

"You're no hero," protested the child with the withered arm. "You are the timeless monster and the ghost."

The middle aged homo erectus in the palace kitchens skewered the highly intelligent Neander girl through her intestines and up through her throat. Then the frogthwarts cut off the wretched creature's arms and pinkie toes and spiced her pimply buttocks with fasafoetida.

The minotaur cuisine chef added a dollop of mango chutney and grinned from ear to ear. "Throw her into the deep fry cauldron! Our High Pontiff will be well fed tonight."

"But she's still twitching," observed the Spectre. "Let me scrape off her face with my granite chisel before we sizzle her."

Katrina was like a home planet for tens of millions of sentient creatures, including purple-skinned Zazins, highly spiritual Tavars, the industrious Atums, militant and not-so-militant homo humans, and a kaleidoscope of talking animals. Many of the Atums thought that their ancestors had lived in the moon-sized space station since the beginning of time, and indeed that time itself had begun in Katrina. 

Little did the Atums know that records concealed in the space station's Omnicore confirmed that Katrina was the very first spaceship containing amoeba and neuro-worms to come  through the Genesis wormhole from Universe Zero into Universe One. Since then, Katrina had progressed through all the next 775 universes, periodically regenerating herself from energy that poured out of the tiny 'rebirth hole' in the Omnicore. The epicentre of the rebirth hole was thought by the Captain's ageless pet koala to be a 'singularity in space and time' where all times meet.

The Atums vaguely resembled the humans, but with elongated heads, broader shoulders, chests as flat as billboards and sleeker hips. Apart from their outcast non-trinarys, every Atum was of one of three officially designated genders. These genders were determined at birth by expertly trained midfolk.

Kyle, Drew, and Jordan Rainbow were an officially encouraged Atum ‘love triple’, with respective designated genders u-male, v-male and z-male, though they all self-identified as u-male. 

Kyle, the butchest of the triple, thought of her masculine self as an 'alpha-male u-male'. Her fantasy ambition was to be a lumberjack in a pine forest, Drew wanted power and influence , and well-hung Jordan hoped to make a fortune out of designing holo-ghost-games. They all hated the ruling Zazins for their indifference to the feelings of others, and for their prescriptive policies which deterred the different species on Katrina from fully exploring their aspirations, their genders, and their orientations.  

The Rainbows were Information Technology (I.T.) specialists in the space station's Time and Motion (T and M) department, and lived and worked together in their sparsely furnished, single-roomed unit in the T and M mini-cube with their pet parrot, who sorted the p-mail. They found their work to be tediously repetitious and effectively useless. 

While they were permitted to visit their department's social club twice a week and attend the occasional picnic in Garden City, the Rainbows' existence was monotonous to a high degree. But they couldn't remember anything different. Their childhoods with their boring triples of parents (two biological fathers and a mother each) had been similarly boring.

The Rainbows were playing a tediously long game of three-dimensional Death Monopoly together during the Fall of AD 300,021, when they were disturbed by an ear-piercing bleep. A split second later, they heard sonic sounds coming through a vent in the ceiling. It was the voice of the Chief Automaton.

“The Grand Council have it in mind,” announced the automaton, “to send ten thousand Atum babies to Planet Torus during the mass migration program next year. You are one of our optimally selected triple of potential parents, having been selected by the Enhanced Evolution Algorithm. Would your v-males please therefore self-administer a pregnancy test in seven days time? If her egg is golden by then, and please be sure that it is, you will receive a generous e-book voucher and, space permitting, a free weekend for three in the utterly delightful Rude and Nasty resort on Lake Tampon."

"I hate to think what would happen to us if Drew's egg remained unfertilised," said Kyle, brightening up a bit. "Maybe the Walrusians would take it out on us."

"At least they've cleaned up the smelly sewerage on that dreadful lake," moaned Jordan, while Kyle smiled enticingly at Drew. When Jordan dismantled the cubic  Death Monopoly set, Drew found an e-book entitled Atum Motherhood on the interstellarnet, poured herself a fizzy tonic, chucked in a slice of juicy lemon, and began to read. The parrot leapt onto her shoulder, and chirped whenever Drew clicked to the next page. 

The third chapter of Drew's e-book was titled 'Child Psychology'. When she got to the bit about mental blocks, she sort of suspected that she'd been blocking some nasty, potentially harmful secret in the recesses of her mind ever since she was a child. But she couldn't, for the life of her, remember what it was, maybe, she wondered, because she was in denial and didn't want to own up to it, even to herself. At some point in time she must have shoved the extremely dire secret to the back of her head.

Next morning, Drew cooked three soft-boiled ostrich eggs for breakfast.

Kyle cracked her egg at the small end. "It was fun what we did last night," she said, munching her toast. "We should do it more often. I liked the juicy sensation in my J-spot when Jordan's and my conkheads banged together in the middle and spurted their jism."

"I prefer stuffing your throat in sixty-nine," countered Jordan, cracking her egg at the big end. "Your orc and my cleva can reach eachother's hypertoxals."

"Why don't you go and and flaunt your spotty arse to a hairy human bloke?" retorted Drew, cracking her egg in the middle. "I'd bet ten katos that she'd turn you into a grovelling bottom and a snivelling lapdog."  

Meanwhile, the Nonsense Club continued to meet every evening in the basement of the Gormy Goon complex. The proceedings were remarkably dearth of spontaneous laughter, and the official 'guffaw automaton' seldom synchronized its sound effects with the members' attempted jokes.

When Jordan next visited the club, she cracked a rather amusing joke (about a fire fighter who mistook a Sivatherium' s tail for her hosepipe) only to be pelted with smelly trainers by the 'Not funny' machine. 

Jordan was rescued by the hairy homo sapiens activist Rick Stent, who seized her by her cleva and dragged her to the snogging area behind the fruit machine.  

Following doses of aridly dry humour from a Torxoid modern studies teacher, a Zebrid with a lisp, and a Cyclops with an irritating blink , an astute Tavar said, thoughtfully, "What a shame we don't have more cultural interactions between the species. If they were sensible then we could unite in political terms and socially integrate."

"You can't be serious!" joked the Cyclops, and everybody laughed.

The totally insane grass roots activist Rick Stent waited outside afterwards, and smashed the irritatingly petite bourgoisie Cyclops' skull into splinters with a brick. The wretched victim's eye detached itself from its socket and pursued Stent through the sludge.

                            1.3 The Control Complex

The control complex of Katrina seemed to Lieutenant Iota Iyola to be a world of its own, a far cry from Planet Tycho Brahe in the Milky Way (from where her high functioning children and alcoholic ex-husband occasionally visited her on inter-universe Zoom). Iota lived in the complex with her hundred or so fellow 'Officers of the Flight Bridge', all Kyusan like herself, and with her very inquisitive, pet pumanid Kim Catworthy who hailed from Planet Feline in the Wolf galaxy, where she'd studied for a Masters in Big Cat Theory at UCL Tigertown. Kim fancied Kyusians with droopy breasts and sprightly tits, and she engaged in ferociously carnal encounters with Iota after Church on Tenth Day afternoons (on Katrina, each Kepler Year consists of fifty ten-day weeks)

At some point in time after Katrina's arrival in Universe 777, Iota was focussing her attention on a pair of stray asteroids to the larboard when a voice summoned her to the command room for a mini-conference. Others attending the meeting included Iota’s boss Captain Karoly Korchov and retired Admiral Nam Nimisch, who was a hero of the Andromeda Galaxy wars and the chief superintendent of the Katrinian special police. Nimisch and all of her police officers were Novogrian to the core. Descendants of the primeval Novriks, they were much more centre-brained than most other humanoids, with bull-like heads and large pineal glands. Their powers of perception were phenomenal.

While Iota was away, Kim stayed on the bridge admiring distant, distinctly-shaped galaxies and a green cat-like comet that was hurtling through the Pi solar system in pursuit of a space-mouse from Planet Rat. 

Suddenly, a huge, hairy human head the size of Sirius emerged from behind Rat, gnashing its bright yellow teeth. Kim was afraid that the massive head would descend on Katrina, but it instead bellowed, "Get  right out of my space or I'll call the Astro-enforcers and they'll put you in clink," turned turtle and retreated at pace.

Captain Korchov and Admiral Nimisch were in mid-conversation when Lieutenant Iyola entered the command room. The captain gave her a kindly, welcoming smile.

“I understand that the Atum babies and their Tavar adoptive parents won’t be migrating to Torus until late next year,” Nimisch was saying. “In the meantime, we’ll make every attempt to confine the homo sapiens cissies to their confounded Sappy Sphere, just in case they manage to infiltrate the planet surface and try to start a revolution.

“I suppose that sounds reasonable,” conceded Korchov, after a cautious pause. “Our cargo ships have already landed thousands of Atums and similar numbers of homo sornicus slaves and Walrusian overseers in the Central Migration Region. If any 'Sappies' get in on the act then they could stir up a modicum of unrest among the 'Sornies'."

"That's putting it lightly," replied Nimisch, "but the Walrusians would be able to exterminate the Sornies in the blink of a heterotheriam's eyelid. They've helped the Novogrians conquer several planets in the Vlad galaxy, and we have every respect for their military abilities."

"The Sornies are sentient creatures too!" shrieked the captain's loveable koala, getting on her high horse. "Even humans deserve our respect."

Korchov's complexion turned turtle green. "Would you believe that the Walrusians are forcing the Sornies to scatter themselves around the countryside and to build bog-standard tin huts to survive in? The poor buggars have to swill the pigsties and snappit cages at crack of dawn, and plough vast tracts of land before nightfall. The Walrusians eat in style on the spiced ham and the juicy snappit stew, while the Sornies are expected to survive on whatever large insects and verminous ape-sized rats they find in the hedges. What a miserable existence!”

“But those Baal worshippers bring their squalor on themselves,” mansplained Nimisch. “They’re an inferior species when all said and done. They originated on Venus, of course. The atmosphere there is still streaked with H2S04. We should inject them full of caustic soda!”

The teenage Zoom girl, who was struggling with the sound system, took exception to Nimisch's patronising manner and totally inappropriate attitude.

“Y-you sound as if you're into s-scientific r-racism and even Rassenhygiene," she stammered. “We homo sapiens would never talk about other species like that. ”

"Sure they would," retorted Nimisch, "and you sound like a holier than thou Slotskyist. You could even be one of those outrageous human terrorists. Any more of your insolence and I'll put you in the clink and separate your frontal lobes from your pineal gland...”

(The pineal glands or 'third eyes' of the well-evolved homo sapiens of that era were situated immediately behind their frontal lobes, with a variety of potentially beneficial effects on their group psychologies.)

“Excuse me for side-tracking, Captain,” interrupted Lieutenant Iyola, as the unfortunate technician escaped to the relative safety of the washroom, “but the Living Incarnate used the term ‘time compression’  during last week’s Grand Council meeting. Does that mean that we’ll be able to time-travel? I’d certainly like to get the fuck out of here at this very moment.”

“I don’t know, Iota,” temporized Korchov, with a deep sigh. “There’s rumoured to be an old Kalman-Bucy time machine hidden somewhere in this space station but we’ve never been able to find it. However, our revered Living Incarnate insists that our Creator Spirit is able to compress time as part of some sort of natural process.”

“Sunny's nuts!” asserted Nimisch. “crazy, imbecilic, as insane as the Spectre herself...!”

“E-Excuse me for s-side-tracking too, Admiral,” stuttered a youthful, red-and-white-striped CNN reporter, “but you might be interested to hear that the homo sapiens activist Rick Stent was arrested twenty minutes ago on suspicion of terrorism. She is being held in an Ionised Convulsifier by Central Mind Control.”

“Thank you, laddie,” responded Nimisch, with a jovial smile. "We’ll take what’s left of that insidious bloke to the next meeting of the Grand Council, for sentencing by the crazy Incarnate. She'll probably send her to the body putrefiers without batting a single one of her eyelids.”

“No way!” shrieked the bipedalistic Zebrid, bursting into tears, and Nimisch laughed.

While still chuckling away like a deranged sex criminal, the admiral proceeded to the washroom with his razor sharp metal comb at the ready. There was a piercing scream, and the teenage Zoom girl emerged, knickerless, with blood flowing from the gaping wound in her rectum.

"Bull's eye, Sappy bitch!" howled Nimisch, in glee.

                                    TIME COMPRESSION

Author's Note: In Chapter 2, I will refer further to 'time compression'. This isn't the condensation of all time and space into a single moment or singularity that is pivotal to the video-game Final Fantasy V111 (written by Kazushige Nojima), but rather a simple special case of time/space compression, as first articulated by David Harvey (The Condition of Post Modernity, 1989). It refers to any phenomenon that alters the qualities of, and relationship between, space and time. Under the assumptions considered, it is possible to travel forwards in time.

CHAPTER 2: THE ZAZINS RULE THE ROOST