The Typist will Appreciate . . .

the typist will appreciate...

I. SPLIT PERSONALITY

The voyage is two thirds through. The Blue Moon Navigator sails across the Space-Between-Moons; implacably, the rocket sails from Glassworld to Baseworld. The sentient crew members -- Jacqui [ship's captain], hair in a ponytail, and Rufus T Firefly [ship's cat], tail in a spin -- live by the maxim that action and inaction should be apparently random (things) (time): yes, there are always things to do and yes, apparently, endless time in which to do them... to be listless, half awake, doze... to engage in a flurry of activity. [Pick up Order 4 Messages. Send reports to Glassworld. Catch mice.]

The Angels sleep, six in number, in dreams of the Angelic Missions, with interference (which always crackles through the forest of information space).

And the ship's Ushers shunt and grunt through the endless business of reshuffling storecubes in warehouses where dust crawls in moonbeams.

Our ghastly crew.

Order or chaos? It's just a spaceship. One third to go. It's a balancing act.

Jacqui amuses herself by playing SPLIT PERSONALITY. She kisses her hubby goodbye, see you later darling, and walks to the marketplace, heart thumping, clouds gathering, thunder grumbling. She finds a pair of red stiletto heels in a thrift store, and takes them to the changing room to try them on. Behind the curtain, she takes off her blue baseball boots and slips off her white panties, thrusting them all into her bag. She puts on the red stilettos, which luckily fit, and which she pays for at the counter, and walks out into a torrential rainstorm. She rushes over to meet her chosen daemon, her lover Jacques, a greengrocer with lovely silky black hair.

Jaques is pleased to see her: she can see that his cock is growing inside his tight jeans, and her heart beats faster still. He leads her to the wall behind his stall, and caresses her in the torrential rain, kissing her passionately, gently biting her lip and tongue, reaching upwards underneath her top and stroking her belly, fingering her navel. Then he reaches up under her skirt, and finding her naked there, probes her with his fingers, pushing them up between her warm yet shivering legs and into her wet vagina, as she yanks his jeans and trunks down and frees his hard cock so that it can go into her, until at last he lifts up her skirt and fucks her against the wall behind his stall, rain streaming down the brickwork of her, rain lashing across the tarpaulin of her hair, raindrops becoming golden leeches sucking diamonds of blood through the opaque glass of her skin. She cums again and again, waves of ecstasy surging violently through her body; she shimmers and is complete.

Jacqui leaves the thought:play, and goes to the galley to make some grayflower tea. Rufus lopes in purring, rubbing his ribs against the furniture. She activates his implant.

'The weather will be fine today in Baseworld 10,' says the cat predictably. 'It is morning, and the heat will soar toward midday, when a fine rain will fall. It will remain hot 'til evening. As dusk falls...'

Give the poor thing some water, and a bowl of nutrient gel. I've been eating that myself mostly -- can't be bothered to cook for one.

-- What about me, Jacqui?

-- Shut up Jaques. If I eat for both of us I'll be fat and sick.

'What will the weather be like when we get to Baseworld, Rufus?'

'Hot and cold by turns. Filthy and stifling. Wet.'

'A bitter wind, then, then unbearable heat. And lots of sexy rain. All the fun of the foul and fair.'

'Exactly -- but why should you care? You'd die on contact with the atmosphere. You'll stay holed up in here til it's time to return, if I know my captain.'

'Don't be catty. Eat your nutrient gel.'

'I'd throw up. I'm going to go catch a mouse.'

'If there are any left, which I doubt. Still, try as you will.' The cat goes.

Curiously Jaques seems to want to linger... and shadows her footsteps along the access tunnels and into the Order 4 Communications Room, and she begins to sense that there may be more to her autolover than lovely hair and a way with weather.........

He gets up from her and walks across the room towards the wall where a screen is showing poster of slowly rotating snowflake, climbs an invisible ladder to the screen and, once inside, turns and flattens himself into a scroll, and Jacqui waits for the message to unfold.

DEAR ANGELS,

We Glassworldians are an ancient people; we are from a distant planet, Ulderth; we travelled to this our Stepmother Earth centuries before space travel began. What enabled us to do this happened centuries after us, under an obscurely powerful network, a global oligarchy of competing yet common-purposed business leaders and enormously wealthy private individuals. This network, using unimaginably powerful machines ostensibly built to test the efficacy of drugs, but actually capable of destroying cities, hatched a plot to exterminate nine-tenths of Ulderth's human and animal populations, leaving themselves among the few survivors. In a deliberately synchronised operation, the exterminationists wiped out the world's major cities and forests.

At the same time however, they inadvertently created a time-space fragmentation. The machines didn't exactly destroy life, what they did was to slow life down almost to the point where it looked frozen in time and space. The unaffected, or we should say only partially affected, parts of the world proceeded in 'normal' time-space. The affected parts slowed down to the point where they did not appear to proceed at all. They proceeded in time and space so slowly that to an outside observer they looked like they had stalled completely, freeze-framed.

But to them they might have been carrying on normally, except that they might perceive that they were proceeding through time and space faster or slower than those around them! But there were other side effects: time and space both fragmented in weird and unpredictable ways. Time-space tunnels opened up that connected Ulderth to a lunar system halfway across the galaxy, for example. Ours. If you look at those threatening our planet, our people, right now, you will see the logic in such an opening. It eventually enabled the children of the global oligarchy to escape the boiling, burning, drowning planet they and their immediate forebears had created. The time-space tunnels needed no spaceship, you could crawl into one and it would slip you through to the other side. But here's the really weird bit -- because of a malfunction in the machine, the time-space tunnels were simultaneously backdated to the eighteenth century, so that our forebears had a means to escape the repression of the original forebears of the global oligarchy itself!!

Most Truly Yours

Qwalil and Estransil.

Jacqui stares absently at the screen as the message comes to an end and snowflake returns, while Jaques fragments into pink petals, or pink flakes of plaster from a dying building, which float down to the floor. I will have to wake them soon, she thinks.