From Wanderlaugh. It’s a merry romp through the irritating.
One of the more unpredictable things about being immortal is the fact that infinity makes house calls. Fox, Reggie and Carruthers stepped out the door at Mimbly and straight off the world they knew. It wasn’t the first time it had happened to them, but they never quite trusted the situations this spontaneous tourism created for them. They found themselves in a wasteland of trenches, a desolate place of filthy and desperate…… underground penthouses with gold tea services. This fact was rather hard to take in. So were the immaculately polished sandbags, with shag carpeting. The brutal, coarse vista of no-man’s-land seemed to have been recently steam cleaned. Pot plants and garden furniture were apparently unavoidable. Apart from a carelessly placed packet of carpet samples, the war zone was a terror of decorum.
Of course, in any war zone, the first thing one does is to heroically check the magazines on the coffee table near the stunning leather settee in the nearest dugout. Reggie and Fox did this while Carruthers recklessly set about making a cup of tea in the rather ornate kitchen. The magazines were extremely informative, just not about anything that made any sense:
“Rumors of premeditated color clashing by enemy agents; thousands flee,” said The Victorious Pastel Weekend Supplement.
“Carpet Samples As Pornography; the cases for and against” explained Oh My Dear I Simply Couldn’t Eat Another Magazine.
“Diddums Squeaky Little Lady Go All Gooey-Poops At Its Dear Little Sale?” asked Shopping For Viviparous Morons Weekly.
Reggie, who’d researched this sort of media-for-idiots-by-idiots, had long been of the opinion that it was the best case for militant feminism he’d ever seen. He tried to imagine what his ferocious sister would do to anyone she found reading such tripe, then decided he’d rather not.
“Flouncing For Spiritual Betterment” turned out to be a hoax, according to the staggeringly unimpressive I Think I’m A Lawnmower Annual. It seemed that flouncing, while mowing a lawn with one’s face, created certain compromises that were irreconcilable with the lawnmower ethos. That was 5000 words well spent.
Crone Sweet Crone Illustrated was a photographic essay into being hideous and enjoying it. The art of ugliness had developed on Earth as it was realized that truly disgustingly ugly people could run support groups and write self help books as well as operate government departments and terrorist organizations. There’s a certain mutual support, ideologically. Later it was discovered that being resplendently incompetent really added to the experience. Some of the mystique wore off when a madly irresponsible frivolous doctor pointed out that genuinely unhealthy people tended to be like that, looking hideous, and being totally mentally inadequate for almost anything, because they were that close to being dead. Crone Sweet Crone Illustrated certainly did nothing to dispel the theory.
Derma Perversions Catalogue sold various skin conditions, with inspiring mottoes for those zit-addicts to whom they mattered. One of the more interesting products was a stick-on pimple that could be trained to eat pineapples and molest vehicles. The breeders claimed it could also mate with its owners, under the right conditions.
Carruthers had now ruthlessly made the tea and was studying the various expressions of horror on his friends’ faces. Reggie, realizing that he hadn’t seen any of the various atrocities, handed him a pamphlet entitled “Improve Your Sex Life With A Warthog” which brought him up to speed and nearly brought his lunch up with it.
“So where is everybody?” asked Fox.
“Perhaps they decided to commit suicide rather than read any more,” theorized Reggie. Fox looked disbelieving. Reggie explained.
“That used to happen, in the old days. Little Miss Suburbia spent most of her life being reminded that she wasn’t a movie star, or the wife of some famous eunuch, and eventually some of them decided that enough was enough. There was also the Anorexia craze, in which children starved themselves into skeletons, to look like people who didn’t look like skeletons. The qualifier was that other people trying to look like them did look like skeletons, so it was all quite normal.”
“Glad I missed it,” said Fox.
Carruthers had browsed a few more of these triumphs of nothingness.
“Nearly all of these seem to be pointed at women. Why is it that anyone felt the need to reduce the mentality of half the species to the sort of ultimate intellectual nadir required to understand this rubbish?”
“It might be to take advantage of the fact that women are the main target consumers, and have better social instincts than men. Women tolerate social conditions, and they group together better. They also don’t habitually kill things that annoy them. In this case tolerance breeds contempt, in the form of media. The male version is equally stupid, but it’s pointed at a niche market, you notice, lawnmower buffs. The weak spot with women is that their social instincts make them easy marks for anything aimed at their group.”
“Surely there were women who objected to this sort of crap,” protested Fox, indicating The Timid Little Cow’s Crossword Puzzle For Silly Girls Who Don’t Like Big Words.
“Thousands of women objected, violently. But there were millions who didn’t. They were outnumbered, and out-yelled by those with a stake in promoting female impotence/participation in the society, (as if there was a difference) like advertisers, and the Women’s Issues Gravy Train. It deformed the whole feminist argument. Instead of talking about actual atrocities, things got buried under tides of dogma. They called it “The Goddess Who Failed”. More like “The Barmaid Who Got Lazy”. They simply served up more of the same, until liver collapse. Loss of interest through repetition and lack of results. Quite reasonable, really; domestic violence actually went up, deadbeat dads reached plague proportions, and things were noticeably much worse.
As ever with these never-adequately-despised institutions, an important social issue became a circus, and the topics went from domestic violence, human misery, actual carnage and slavery to passing nuisances like billboards and ads in fashion magazines. The equation was that however much the situation worsened, the more irrelevant the issues that were actually raised. It was like you’d see a news item, “Massacre In Cretin Land”, followed by a heartfelt impassioned look at the inherent sexual discrimination in shoe sizes, and a subsequent total lack of information, let alone action, about the massacre.
There was also a healthy supply of real non-issues like the sexual mores of any identifiable demographic and other open-ended babble to throw everyone off the scent of any actual achievements. Of course the creation of an ideology naturally attracted a lot of academic and professional plodders who were able to talk everyone else into the ground when it was dumbed down enough for them to understand it. The result was Social Relevance By Committee. Chaos. Even the press couldn’t stand it after a while.”
“When was that?” asked Fox.
“1980s-2050, roughly. At that time humanity had developed a reliable mechanism for total failure to deal with any social issue, however crucial. Every pretence of social consultation with concerned groups was made. Every effort was also made to ensure that no real objective was ever defined, let alone achieved. It was thought that achieving anything might set an unhealthy precedent. Fortunately for those practicing this delicate art, they were immune to criticism of any sort and were generally able to live rich, rewarding lives of total incompetence without serious interference.”
“Sounds idyllic,” said Carruthers.
“Serene to the point of cannibalism, when they forgot to produce any food. It wasn’t on the agenda for anyone’s meetings that year. They didn’t even notice it until the riots started, because the Communication Revolution produced a group of operators who were so unable to communicate that actual information more or less ceased to exist. News was really a clash of sales pitches for various ideologies/sales campaigns, and the fascinating exploits of the genitalia of celebrity idiots. Facts never got a look in. They never did find out who ate the people of Manchester. All they found were a few antacids and a menu adapted from the local phone book. Legend says it was only one person, too, based on the slightly ambivalent fact that a tomato sauce-stained calorie guide was found in the morgue.”
“That actually makes it sound like these trivial little rags are a sort of escape; useless information you want to see, as distinct from things you’d rather not know about,” said Fox.
“Hm. Hadn’t thought of that. Well, if that’s the escape, the problem must be pretty serious. We are in a somewhat nominal war zone…albeit a very well cleaned one…”
“Have you noticed that we have yet to ask why we’re here, or how we got here?” mentioned Carruthers.
“Would it make any difference if we did? Reality seems fairly happy to chuck us where it feels like it. Why, we have no way of knowing. How, we could guess, some sort of involuntary Traveling, which is obvious, but that tells us nothing. You know how these things work. We could try to go home now, and probably fail, or we can explore.”
They decided to try going home. They attempted to Travel back to Mimbly, using their minds to transport them, and got nowhere. Reggie actually levitated, for the first time in his life, but stayed in the immediate area, floating thoughtfully. When Traveling, the mind is the means of moving the body, which can be a demanding requirement for disoriented minds. If you don’t know where you are, or for that matter where you aren’t, how do you figure out how to get back to your starting point?
“We’ll have to wait until our minds have adjusted to this. It could take a while, Fox,” said Carruthers, who was thinking that poor Fox had never yet Traveled voluntarily; he’d always been hurled about the universe by something, or simply vanished to another universe propelled by a stray thought.
“We can take you back when we can move ourselves,” added Reggie, who was also busily thinking of ways of distracting Fox from the problem as he settled slowly back into his seat.
Carruthers unwittingly assisted in the distraction process.
“You levitated,” he said, wonderingly.
“I wasn’t trying to, but obviously I must have created enough energy to lift myself.”
He tried again and collided with the ceiling. On the slow but interesting way down he remembered that Vixen had taken months to get her flying skills under some sort of voluntary control.
“Aren’t you supposed to land on your feet?” asked Carruthers.
“Or at least build a nest?” added Fox.
“You’ll be singing another tune when I’m fluttering about catching insects.”
“Don’t think you’d like the day shifts, being a bird, what with having to get up every Dawn and do the chorus….”
“My normal sex life, really.”
This incalculably valuable exchange of ideas halted as they heard voices approaching. Sweet, slightly over-buttered, fattened, voices. The sort of voices that made you wish you’d never killed your hairdresser and attached the remains to a kite which you stapled to some art director who had miraculously remained alive after being buried to the neck in cement in a terrarium with a lot of very neurotic locusts, when you could have waited and killed these greasy-voiced swine instead.
You irresolute impulsive wretch, you.
There entered a group of remarkably uninteresting people. Wearing severe, austere, drear, mere, garb, beyond boredom, in some dire sartorial theme that really made cholera look glamorous. So uninteresting were they that the three drop-ins found it difficult to even care that they were there. Eventually Reggie, whose own social instincts were indestructible, said, while trying to stay awake in the presence of these harbingers of tedium,
“Oh, excuse us. We’re new around here…….”
They didn’t react. They kept talking to each other. One of them made a cup of tea, apparently not noticing the evidence of Carruthers’ earlier work.
“They obviously can’t see us,” said Fox.
“I wish we couldn’t see them,” said Carruthers.
“Or hear them,” agreed Reggie, who was desperately trying not to hear their conversation. This may have been because Reggie had some respect for the concept of sentient life and the use of language as something other than a dishcloth. It may also have been because he just didn’t like boring people.
The reader, who has no doubt lain awake all night worrying that there might never be another glitzy shampoo commercial, might feel that life is tough enough. Might feel in view of this terrible stress that some tiny, unsuspected remnant vestige of an author’s decency will shelter them from this hideous dialogue.
Nah.
They grouped about the tea set like substandard rubbish from an exploding organ donor bank blown by an unusually thorough wind into a wedding reception for necrophiles[1]. One of the more rotund and less eloquent members of the collage was holding forth in a nauseating falsetto;
“O how one longs for one’s dear under-garments to be ever so fertile.”
They twitched slightly, grimacing helpfully.
“One remembers the flavor of one’s first schmooze. One has such yearnings for onions and cabbage.”
They did an insufficiently-brief mass flounce in formation. Why was mercifully unclear.
“One considers one’s stucco corset the pinnacle of one’s wardrobe, like unto the carefully plaited armpits of one’s mentor.”
They curtsied while doing a few hoedown steps.
It occurred to Reggie that he wasn’t sure how many of them there were. This was because they were literally cheek by jowl, and he wasn’t sure whose jowls were whose. They seemed to melt together, like zombie cheeses. (You know the sort; you leave them for a while, and they eat the canary. Before you do.)
Some sort of respite occurred as they drank their tea, slurping noisily and vigorously. Fox and Reggie held back Carruthers. The Knight Paladin of the Noble Brew was nearly berserk. Tea was a sacred way of life to Carruthers.
“The swine are smiling while they do that! Heretics! Philistines! Developers!”
Reggie’s love of language had been terribly tempted by the mindless conversation, but he had managed to avoid descending to violence. He felt he had no choice but to raise the Aloof But Concerned Discerning Eyebrow For Grim Hopeful Imperative Justly Kind Legitimate Mindful Necessary Optimal Pointed Questioning Regarding Social Tastes Undergoing Vicissitudinal Wandering Xenoform Yokelisms Zugzwang[2].
Carruthers rebelled. He retaliated with the Urbanely Murderous Wry Smile Used Prior To Slaughtering Simpering Sniveling Scum Seen Swilling Slurping And Direly Deplorably Driveling In The Living Room[3]. Fox, despite his artist’s soul’s revulsion at the conversation, desperately tried to intervene using the Deprecating Expression Indicating An Equally Fond Desire To Slaughter Said Nauseating Effluvium But Not Just Yet If You Don’t Mind Old Chap.
Reggie, remorseful, recognizing the depth of his childhood friend’s feelings, and honest to a fault, gave the unmistakable Look Of Enthusiastically Corrected Erudite Concurrence In Regard To Slaughter Of Abovementioned Scum, which involves looking like a really nice fiend with dental overkill tendencies having a kind thought for a friend. Fox, also reconsidering, happily added The Benign Face Of Man Now Cheerfully About To Fillet Insufferable Malodorous Pigs. They relaxed and started toward the slurping prey.
It would be fair to say that had not circumstances intervened the incredibly uninteresting people would have been lucky to continue existing even as smells. Carruthers had just picked up a large table, quite ignored by the babbling denizens, when a pair of instantly recognizable, and instantly hypnotic, magnificent, thighs descended the stairs into the dugout. These were followed by the rest of Madge, which added greatly to the effect. Wearing a crisp military uniform, some frightening percentage of which she was still inside. Madge has been described, inadequately, by some of her victims as “Sex Incarnate”, which is about as accurate a description as anyone is ever likely to get. Her presence was also probably the only thing which could have distracted the three infuriated avenging males.
“Suddenly a humanitarian, Carruthers?” she asked, smiling.
“They slurp tea!” Carruthers was so outraged that it had even penetrated his Madge-fixation, which until recently had made him almost totally inarticulate.
“So I gather,” she said, as a particularly loud slurp thundered past. “Come with me.”
Carruthers was aghast. Madge, condoning, tolerating, tea-slurping? Reality wasn’t what it pretended to be. He threw the table away. It smashed a lot of crockery. The natives prattled on regardless. One slurped again, and it was as though all the world was just a slurp. Madge unselfishly kicked that individual through a distant china hutch. The others didn’t notice.
“Mere disemboweling is far too good for them. Come along, I’ll explain.”
They departed as one of the inhabitants began to sing (presumably) in a slimy non-baritone the praises of A Delightful New Technique For Winching In One’s Ten Kilometre Dried Up Rectum. Madge paused as they reached the exit and brought out of her blouse what appeared to be a very tasteful, well brought up, grenade. She motioned them away, turned a nozzle, and threw it. There was a muted fluffy sound. No voices now came from the dugout.
“Hunter-killer air freshener,” explained Madge. “It feels there’s only one way to really freshen the air, so it strangles people…” A happy nasal cackle was heard. “…and laughs about it afterwards. It’s a scream at parties.”
Trying to fathom the possibilities of Madge wandering eternity magnanimously throwing genteel grenades at things she didn’t like, they walked further down the staggeringly ornate trench. French polish was apparently de rigueur in this world. Tapestries adorned the fire steps, and deep pile carpet enlivened the bottom of the trench. Flower arranging had also not been neglected, and herds of planters full of blooms preened everywhere. Madge dragged Reggie away from these, knowing her gardening-mad nephew would be immovable if allowed to settle. Bolts of silk and dazzling colored cotton lined the sides of the supply trenches. Frenzies of objéts d’art clustered about the ruthlessly clean, and apparently unused, latrines. A hint of orange blossom perfume clung to the air.
Statuary, depicting persons enshrined mid-narcissism, infested the farther trenches. One of them looked as if he needed a chaperone to be in the same room as himself. Most of the others looked as though it was far too late to find chaperones for them. Similar to a film festival, but more tasteful. One of the statues was in a pose so anatomically impossible that none of the new arrivals could quite determine which part was the head. They were equally quite sure that they didn’t want to know, but the question remained.
“It’s called Self Adoration,” said Madge, “and it was cast from a living mould.”
“Oh,” they said, and asked no more.
They arrived at a something apparently called Headquarters, which was a split level palace with a lot of startlingly busy people wearing the same sort of uniform as Madge in it. These people obviously could see them, and saluted Madge as she passed. She entered a large conference-hall-esque room. One of the staff, a rather pretty girl, scurried over, saluting briskly.
“Overlord Madge- They Decorators be a-coming. Even now, herds of them be a-stampeding through that-there cute mall, a-squealing and a-squawking, and a-fondling of their catalogs……”
“Now, now, Festive Rump, we’ve talked about your tendency to rustic double entendres. The report, please, in proper military language.”
“Yes, Overlord. The Decorators have grouped and are…..raiding?….the mall in large numbers, using parts of their bodies to mark the stocks as their property. They are also attempting to breed the items by mating with them. I believe this is the beginning of an offensive behavior.”
This was said with such childish propriety that the new arrivals were unsure whether they should worry or try to find a teddy bear. They looked at Madge, who replied with an expression that could open a bank vault.
Well, close, thought Madge. I’m not sure how I’d put it myself, trying to describe the interaction of decorators and shopping malls. I suppose “breeding” covers it.
She dismissed the girl, noting that her male companions seemed to be trying to discover the reason for her name. Reggie started the questions.
“Overlord?”
“Well, what else would you call me?”
Carruthers choked discreetly. Fox grinned. Reggie said, straight-faced,
“Dear Delightful Doddering Old Auntie.”
“How absurd. I’m not Dear, Delightful I admit, I don’t dodder except with people I really like[4], and I can’t be Old. Auntie, I also admit, but only because I enjoy being your mother’s sister. You left out “Adorable”, too. Now, pay attention, you relative pest, while I try to explain this world to you.”
She produced a map, which depicted two large continents. One was large, bowl shaped, and the other, smaller dumbbell shaped, continent appeared to have a large peninsula in the middle, jutting into the bowl.
“The name of this world is Compromise. These continents are called ….. I know I shouldn’t say this…..the Dueling….ah….Abdomens. Apparently that was all they could think of, for some reason. We’re on the…receptive……continent.”
She looked at her friends, who were separately wondering why they couldn’t think of another name for them, either. She continued, trying to head off the obvious sexual themes.
“As far as I can discover, that’s all the people on this world do think about, usually. At the moment, however, the inhabitants of the….donor continent…., the Decorators, whom you’ve met, have decided to invade. They do this regularly, whenever there’s a plague population of them.”
Three looks of complete incomprehension lurched from the three faces. Why do I assume any of this can make sense, when I know perfectly well I don’t really want to understand it myself? thought Madge.
“It seems that centuries ago there was a society devoted to the aesthetics of sex. They were the ancestors of these people, who call themselves the Joys. The culture became very conscious of its environment, and it was decided to develop a type of being who would devote their lives to meeting the requirements of a completely sex-oriented civilization. These beings were people bred for their inability to do anything but design décor. An entire caste of single purpose entities.
They were separated from the Joys on the other land mass. Their designs were manufactured by the local artificial intelligence, about which I’ll explain later. The Decorators normally do nothing else. You saw back there that they cannot be distracted from their subject. Even their weapons are based on deco-ephemera. There are tranquilizer clocks, brain-neutralizer display cabinets, neurosis-causing objéts d’art, disorienting carpets, super-irritating lounge suites, carnivorous underwear, and so on…. Reggie?”
“What about the Joys? What was their function?”
“Sex. They are a species obsessed with beauty. They also consider beauty a practical thing, a verb, not just a concept. They had a high technology, so advanced that it would invent and repair itself, and provide food, housing, entertainment, whatever they wanted. They explored the galaxy with it, and conquered quite a respectable part of it, and didn’t even notice. They were too busy for those few thousand years.”
“This is part of our universe, then?” asked Carruthers.
“Oh yes. Even the same galaxy.”
“How did you get involved with all this?” asked Reggie.
“Oh, I just thought I’d drop in…….”
The choice between incomprehension and skepticism is often a hard one. The three males decided it was safer to be uncomprehending on the subject of Madge “just dropping in” anywhere, because skepticism invites proof, and more worrying still, a rationale. Carruthers wisely changed the subject back to what they were supposed to be discussing.
“So why are the Decorators invading? Why are they mating with shopping malls? Why are they living in elegant trenches and usually not there?”
“They feel that everything must be decorated, instinctively. They have now expanded that idea to include everyone, as well. Since this is their raison d’etre, they have found it impossible to distinguish between procreating themselves, and creating new décor. A sort of crusade begins when there are too many of them to be usefully occupied on their home continent. That happens about every ten years, and they have to be driven back. Fortunately some of them die of artistic self-recognition, but it gets worse each time.
The trenches are a sort of surrogate home and place to store the weapons. It seems they also felt that it was more warlike than staying at hotels while they were invading. However, because of the extreme deprivation of amenities in the trenches they try not to be there as often as they can. Their weapons, by the way, aren’t dangerous to us, but they can be rather inconvenient. Imagine being suddenly ambushed and wallpapered for a few thousand years… With blue daisies.”
“The obvious question: why are we here?” asked Fox.
“I’m afraid that’s my fault. I brought you here. I needed some reliable people whose minds occasionally stray from thinking about nothing but sex. As you can see…. this lot don’t qualify…..”
Madge had paused, sidestepping to allow one of the males to sail past through the air towards a young lady, who grabbed him in mid air and threw him onto the floor. Reggie raised A Rather Interested But Tactfully Bemused Eyebrow. Carruthers reacted to this with a Considerate Closure Of The Eyes Denoting Tolerant Disbelief. Fox grinned, stared, and tried to figure out what he thought of it all. He didn’t know. The appearance of bustling organization had dissolved into a free-for-all orgy while Madge was speaking.
“Ah well. They do try to be efficient and military, but they don’t seem to be able to stay that way,” she said, philosophically noting that she hadn’t realized windows were so useful for things like that.
“So what happens now?” asked Reggie, ducking as a woman fired a stream of water at her laughing female target.
“This time, when I arrived, I met Festive Rump, who’s a very nice girl, and extremely intelligent when not…..busy. She told me that their highly advanced technology had actually interrupted the whole species one day to inform them that it was getting rather sick of the whole thing, and that it would leave the Decorators and the Joys to fend for themselves if they didn’t stop destroying the place every ten years. Apparently the Joys got the message, but not the Decorators. Point being that they have no hope of survival, either of them, if it happens again.”
“Isn’t that a bit contradictory? Surely if the machinery is supplying the materials that attract all these Decorators, all it has to do is stop supplying them? Or make them a bigger continent, or something, just get them to go decorating somewhere else, like on another planet?”
“There’s a bit of a paradox in the supply situation. The technology was created to provide for their needs, but their needs are playing merry havoc with the supply. It has to supply, because that’s how it’s programmed. That said, it’s not an idiot. It knows that all this destruction isn’t something it’s supposed to be supporting. It can’t argue with its own software. So it thought that it would give them an ultimatum.
It was worth a try, to keep the peace. Both species are so used to luxury that they simply can’t do without the technology. The Joys are incapable of doing anything but living in palaces and inventing new forms of sex. To them (sidestep) this is a period of extreme (duck) abstinence. The Decorators think they’re roughing it in under the most (fend, grunt) extreme, uncompromising, hardship, living in those trenches. Neither group (block with chair) has any idea how to get food, (evades flying cream) for example, without simply going to a machine and asking for it.
The technology (considers raspberry jam in new light) is designed to provide for their every whim, quite literally. Apparently (leaps to avoid couple rolling by) it almost had a nervous breakdown when it discovered that it was supplying the cause of its problems. These invasions are a contradiction of its purpose, but so is the idea of not providing more ammunition for them. The technology realized that it had no alternatives. It can’t operate against its own design specifications, so it’s threatened to cease local operation and confine itself to conquering the rest of the galaxy. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing for the galaxy, but it would wipe out the Joys and the Decorators. (Grabs sliding lady general in passing and slides her back to source down conference table).
I gather the technology has also decided that (becomes aware of people stuck to walls by their friends, jots down in small notepad) it’s too dangerous to allow the Decorators out into space. That’s probably right, too, given that even the trees are decorated to the point of collapse over there. They actually need supports to take the weight of the décor. I’d never seen a full ensuite lilac bathroom, with spa, in a willow before. They paint the petals on flowers with tiny pictures of furniture and kitchen appliances over there.”
“Obscene as it sounds, it’s still their culture, and they were designed to be like that. Is it really any of our business?”
“It is if we let them die out and do nothing. I have a secret weapon arriving soon. You, Carruthers, will be required…..Horizon Breasts, can you and Epic Horn move slightly……..you, Reggie and Fox will be required to assist. You’ll only have to go to the other continent and subdue it.”
“Subdue it? I’ve never subdued anything……” said Reggie.
“That’s not what I heard,” said Madge. “Did you, or did you not, talk your poor grandfather into the ground on the subject of The Higher Ideals of English Gardening last week, knowing perfectly well that the only thing an English gardener would do with a Higher Ideal is take cuttings of it?”
“No.”
“Might have been next week.” (Immortals aren’t stuck in one time frame).
“True. Well, I’ll have to, now, won’t I?”
“So….You were saying?”
“You’re an unethical person, Madge.”
“Heredity, nephew, heredity.”
[1] Of course I could be guessing.
[2] Zugzwang is a chess term used for positions where a player is obliged to make a move, even if to the player’s detriment.
[3]“Room” is pronounced with the “oom” part foreshortened and tarted up a bit. As if you needed to be told.
[4] Carruthers had to be counseled after figuring out the meaning of this remark about doddering. Vixen hit him with an intelligent, helpful, young crocodile she happened to have with her.
