Proudly Inerrant — Chapter 4

Preamble: This the fourth chapter of a serialized science-fiction novellette concerning failures of fidelity in the transmission of culture. (Previously: Chapter 1, and Chapter 2, and Chapter 3)

PROUDLY INERRANT
by Cheeseburger Brown

PART I, Chapter 4.

I was sended for.

All morning I was expecting a sweaty queer to run up the path with a response song but instead a whole platoon showed up bearing an empty litter. The most senior queer kneeled at my feet, a handkerchief clutched over his mouth and nose.

I bidded him to sing and he did. A catchy little number about panic and horror.

The mayor of mayors wanted me where he was, like in person, as part of an emergency circle jerk of advisors to advise him on managing the star-fall crisis. I, an untouchable person, jerking with the mayor of mayors in his leet circle! As you can no doubt well tink I nearly puked from such a startling. Me?

So I packed up a kit of essential douchey items and climbed board the litter by stepping on the backs of queers. "I guess I'm ready," I told them after tying down my stuff. And off we goed.

We passed the moon-curse shacks. I waved. The shocked faces in the windows did not smile. Their red curtains sweeped closed.

The mayor of mayors had instructed his litter-bearers tinkfully. Instead of parading me through the middle of town we took the traders's route around the edge. So the umbrella I'd bringed along for fending off attacks of old vegetables wasn't even used for anything. To avoid waste I prayed for rain.

It was a hot day. There was no rain. Rain was like months away.

When we comed over the eastern hills past town I got my first look at what happens to a place when a star falls on it: way way devastation. Every farmhouse had falled and breaked apart. The trees had falled, too. Even a night and half a day later the air was heavy with dust, the sunlight weakened into something feeble and orange. The litter-bearers coughed through their handkerchiefs.

A huge tree of smoke grew out from the middle of it all, its mighty, big-ass head casting the area into a pall. The smoke tree's roots were fed by a few fingers of forest that had grown through the farmland along the waterways. The waterways were now just muddy ditches. The grass was black. The fields were ash. Here and there among the ash were glistening folds of cooked meat: beef, veal, mutton, man.

A great scar had been torn open in the Earth itself, and at the head of the smoking gouge was a bunch of breaked up pieces of something. Not a farmhouse. Not a tree. But something quite weird got shattered, the pieces splayed around like pieces of cracked up pottery. Verily like a giant vase had busted.

Crews of queers were being forced to advance through the field of weird debris, masters on horseback pressing spears into their criss-crossed backs.

My litter jogged into a tent and I stepped down. The mayor of mayors meeted me. He put on a glove to take my hand. "Yo, douche. How was the trip? Come on, the other members of the circle are meeting now in the jerkery. Hurry with me."

"Mayor-mayor, my liege, I hesitate only cause of how they'll prolly hate on me."


"The others? Our best men and women. Any of them wise enough to remember that this is bigger than caste. Let's go, douche. We can broker no delay. Shit is way fucked up. The scale -- epic."

I nodded seriously. "I'm embarrassed to have my head inside myself. Of course, mayor-mayor, let's hastefully book."

We passed briefly outside and then into another tent, its entrance flanked by fierce guards with angry fire penises tattooed across their cheeks. The air of the second tent was a haze of perfume and incense. The best men and women in the country sitted cross-legged in a neat circle and passed around the jerk for a chance to say. Everyone scooched over to make room for the mayor of mayors, and therefore also sort of for me.

"As chief barber-surgeon of the mayoralty I have examined the survivors with all the wiles of my craft applicable to patients sealed inside impenetrable tubes, and, well, some of them look okay but some of them are prolly already dead. There was a lot of blood in most of them, obscuring the little window I was trying to peek through."

"Can these apparent survivors get bepuked from their entrapping tubes?" asked the mayor of mayors.

"We're not sure that's morally appropriate," observed a bishop in a very tall hat. "There is no cause to assume they are stuff for the tampering of peeps. Things from the sky belong to the sky, as wetness and fish and shit belong to the sea. So found the founders."

"Plus we don't hack how to," admitted the mayor's senior civil engineer. "The tubes are made out of some kind of polished stone that's harder than our hardest tools. The tubes can neither be smashed nor burned."

"Such materials are tunk in legend," sayed the mayor of mayors, turning toward me. "Isn't that autocorrect, noble douche?"

I blushed and feeled derpy. "Yes, your magical highness," I managed to say; "that is true, the pre-founderites boasted of materials called nano who could tink and feel and respond to wishes."

Several renowned experts snorted loudly or made fart noises with their armpits. The mayor of mayors didn't heed them. Still looking at me he sayed, "If these tubes factually are made from nano, what could we use to affect them?"

"Lightnings," I sayed. "There are many stories of the pre-founderites making use of mega-tiny amounts of entrapped lightnings to enchant nano."

"O douche, please lay it on me: can you entrap lightnings for us?"

I swallowed heavily and looked around, trying not to let all the face-pulling get to me. I turned back to the mayor of mayors. "My books say all sorts of secrets about lightnings," I telled him and telled the room. "We can do it, mayor-mayor. Yes sir."

"Are we seriously contemplating heeding the advice of this dirty cunt?"

"There's a sexlessness to everything the douche says. You can hear it. It's contagious. We all need to have our ear canals cleaned at the earliest opportunity. I demand she be expelled from the circle!"

"I humbly submit, mayor-mayor, that my esteemed colleague is autocorrect. We cannot afford to have the purity of this circle-jerk compromised up by a mouthy untouchable with no lipstick and covered-up tits."

"Seconded."

The mayor of mayors bounced to his feet and walked to the middle of the circle, turning slowly so that the anger in his eyes could be pointed individually at every jerker. They bristled but quieted. At long last the mayor speeched.

"Balance is precious to Causation Prime," he membered them. "Even the very founders themselves tunk well this, and included in their findings the provision for douche-bags to pass on pre-founderite hacking to their douchey young without fear of getting branded blasphemers."

Even the bishop was forced to nod assent to this. The mayor of mayors goed on:

"They didn't do that for no-reason. They did it for yes-reason. And the yes-reason is that pre-founderite tinkery has miracles all up in it. Just as the founders tunk well that an anti-founderite world would die in its own lies, like the chaos of the banishment, they also tunk well that a world with no anti-founderism at all was like beast, or like babby -- helpless for even basic hacks.

"Over the calendars I have many times taked the advice of this very douche, and she has never steered me wrong. I value her contribution to this circle and so should all of youse. She will not be dismissed out of hand. She will not be scoffed at or snotted upon.

"If she says we need lightnings to groove with the tubes, then we will make it our priority to try. We are living through a way special historicological event, and people that faith well history are a key voice right now in our decisioning circle-jerk. Is that tink youse? Is that tink youse hard?"

Nobody sayed it wasn't. My eyes was on my feet. I was burning with shame. It was so hard to hack how to feel.

One thing I did feel was badly for the mayor of mayors, standing up for me like that. Cause he'd be fired for sure and possibly even burned alive.

Once my cats runned out of food back home they would starve. I feeled bad about that, too.