The Peace Escalation E-Book

Roy Lilywater

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 373

Beschreibung

During hundreds of millions of years man has evolved from worm to homo sapiens with ever accelerating achievements in science and technology. The accompanying change of human behavior was however not well synchronized with that of the hominid's appearance. The furless ape had become a fearsome killing machine with destructive powers never seen before. Since the beginning of time evolution has always pushed living beings to their outmost limits, with spontaneous mutations that suddenly changes everything. This is how man might become a new species, with new and different abilities. And a new and different attitude towards fellow beings. Not to blindly kill each other and not to fight wars would make these evolved primates a very special species indeed.

Leseprobe

To Raymond

Contents

PART I

Pure Phantasy

I. Karin Werdhem

II. Carl Crassasius

III. The Pariscope

IV. Unconcealment

V. A Child’s Golden Section

VI. The Triple Helix

VII. Ad Medinam

VIII. Intermezzo

IX. Ad Desertum

X. Soft Dune Oasis

XI. Towards the Petroglyphs

XII. CARVINGS IN STONE

XIII. ECCE HOMO HUMILIS

XIV. AD ASTRA VEL NON AD ASTRA

XV. THE RETURN TO AHOGGAR

XVI. COMMUNARDS OF THE CALIPHATE

XVII. THE VIPER

Main Act

I. Morals of Faith

II. The Revelation

III. Fabulous Friends

IV. The Strongest Man on Earth

V. Two Thousand Hiris

VI. Clusters of Holes

VII. Civil Brigades

VIII. The Cassasius-Werdhem Cave

IX. Threepointfourteen Squarekilometers

X. Realm of Clones

XI. Devastatio Telluris

XII. Sahara Miracle

XIII. Off You Go

XIV. GHC1

XV. Touching the Dark

XVI. Love Play

XVII. Weighing Anchor

XVIII. Ecce Terra Nova

XIX. Secrets of Life

Afterplay

I. Glacies Dulcis

II. KSC

III. The Shanghai Plan

IV. An Interplanetarium

V. Welcome to Hiristan

VI. Mars, God of Peace

VII. Space Whisper

VIII. Black Mystery

IX. The Reunion

X. Red Wedding

XI. Ad Martem

XII. De Bello Martico - Pars I

XIII. The Battle of Deimos

XIV. Peace on Mars

XV. The Grartstone Mystery

PART II

The Era of the Hirudineae

I. Vela Solaris

II. To Know Or Not To Know

III. Favus Apis

IV. The Solitude of Space

V. The Gable of the Division Time

VI. Quoando Vadis?

VII. Crustacean

VIII. Pax Hirudineana

IX. Contact

X. The Return to Tellus

XI. The Tropic of Lobster

XII. De Bello Martico - Pars II

XIII. Urbs Eterna

XIV. In the Grip of Darkness

XV. De Bello Martico - Pars III

XVI. Home to Hiristan

XVII. End of Story

In Somnio Veritas

Epilogue

Caput Mundi

PART I

Pure Phantasy

Preamble

I. Karin Werdhem

The children who played in the gravel and rubble of the ruins could not be older than four or five years. They were maybe half a dozen or a few more in number, hard to tell exactly, because they played hide-and-seek and many did not appear in the open. There were both boys in shorts and girls in floral and checkered dresses, but otherwise they were simply children, s-he creatures, neither she nor he and without a pronounced conscious gender. This condition would not last long, so that boys and girls would soon be segregated, despite the fact that they would jointly start in co-educational school. Boys would despise girls and not touch them and not under any circumstances interfere with them. They would sit in their benches only boys with boys and girls with girls, never together. This state of affairs would last for at least another seven years, when the desire for the opposite sex would re-emerge.

So far, however, the lust was already in full swing, when five-year-old Calle frantically triedto get his little stiff penis into peer Karin’s little closed slit. The two had sneaked away from the group and taken refuge behind a concrete slab, which had once been part of a wall in a bathroom. They were thus out of sight of the other hide- and-seek playing children. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on from which angle you looked at it, the two were not out of Karin’s mother’s field of view. She came running, shouting and cranking with raised fists, and screamed in anger “what are you doing?” and “stop that right away!” and similar cliché phrases. She abruptly snatched away the little virgin, picked up her daughter’s pale pink panties, and dragged her back to her shabby ruin barracks.

That day Karin’s mom Anna had stayed at home, because she had felt unwell with menstrual pain that stretched over her stomach. On a normal day, Anna would otherwise have been long hours away from home. She was part of a group of “ruin mommies” who had the task of collecting and cleaning up what was left of the bombed-out buildings. Apart from the cleansing, the main task of the ruin mommies was to knock off excess mortar from the bricks they could find. The focus was on bricks that were intact and suitable for recycling in future masonry. These were stacked in pyramid-like piles, ready for transport.

The young ruin mommy Anna Werdhem had received Karin as a farewell gift from the visiting, but now returning home, soldier ensign Malcolm Mc-Shloermatt. McShloermatt had been fascinated by Anna’s long blonde hair and long straight legs. Due to the hardships during the final phase of the war, the lack of food had helped to give Anna an extraordinarily slim fashion model’s figure. Compared to the mostly severely overweight women in his homeland, Anna resembled a bony cloth hanger. In civilian life, McSchloermatt was a tailor to the profession, with his own modelling agency, and he liked the way clothes hung loosely on human cloth hangers. Anna, on the other hand, had been fascinated by Malcolm’s seemingly inexhaustible access to chocolate and cigarettes. In return she had let him do with her whatever he desired. No wonder, she was later heralded with an anglish annunciation.

It was summer and the ruin would have been perceived as an idyllic place, close to the pastorale and as created for a Schäferstündchen. McSchloermatt did not waste any time to go into theorising reasoning, but immediately went into practical attack with his handsome sabre in the highest blow. And so it became a little Karin of this friendly battle, a Karin who grew up without her father, who had returned to his rural parental home outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. During his absence, his tailoring business including his model agency, had been foreclosed on by state authorities due to unpaid taxes, and Malcolm had to relocate, moving in with mom and dad.

There he sat, Karin’s father, wearing rattlesnake boots, under a slack Confederate flag, this sardonic banner of slavery, and gave Karin’s mother no deeper thoughts. In fact, he did not think of her at all, but fantasised about the neighbour’s daughter Elvira and her broad buttocks. The two were engaged and the wedding date was set. However, the marriage had already been pre-consummated, when Elvira had been humped by the war hero. For the first time the very day of ensign McSchloermatt’s homecoming.

Anna Werdhemwould later marry a man named Herman Sczermonski. Mr. Sczermonski, however, was not a gentleman, but a scrap collector with rough hands. As it turned out, he was a brutal abomination. He would force Karin to call him “father” and then violate her, when she was only a delicate six-year-old. When Karin first began to understand what Mr. Sczermonski’s game of AlfaPick was all about, she swore to herself that one day she would kill him. Thankful for her soul, she never had to keep her promise, because Mr. Sczermonski unexpectedly perished when he tried to seize a rusty three hundred kilo bomb and this one finally burst. This iron monster had been lying on the bottom of the ruin for years, without anyone worrying about it. Mr. Sczermonski’s rough hands and lacerated member sat glued to the concrete wall, which had once belonged to a bathroom and given Karin and Calle some secluded privacy.

Some time later, Karin started smiling again, a little shy at first, but then more and more confident. Anna deleted the other half of her last name, the one that came after Werdhem and the hyphen, and promised her daughter and herself never to marry a scrap dealer again.

II. Carl Crassasius

The other of the two little love-making children, Carl “Calle” Crassasius, lived across the street. Calle was never allowed to play with Karin again and she was never seen again among the ruins. In Calle’s memory, the contours of Karin’s so slender body eventually faded away and she became some kind of colourless cloud being. On this side of the street there were fewer piles of rubble, because the house had been almost spared by the air raids. Only one half was blown away. In the remaining part there were still habitable apartments on three floors and Calle lived in the one at the top. There was no elevator in the house and the steep stairs were difficult for his grand parents.

Unlike little Karin, Calle had not been born with a rusty iron spoon in his mouth. His mother, Mrs. Letitia Crassasius-Levin, had told him that his family was of noble descent. The Crassasiuses were considered quite wealthy, as they could afford to pay rent for their accommodation. The mother claimed that Calle’s father, Hubertus Crassasius, was in direct descent related to Marcus Licinius Crassus. Crassus was also commonly known as Rome’s uncrowned Croesus. This Croesus, however, had not been Roman and lived several hundred years before Crassus. Crassus, in turn, lived - and died - several decades before the birth of Christ. And therefore, Calles mother Letitia argued, the Crassasius family could not be associated with the Christian church and, consequently, would as such not to need to pay any church tax. Letitia, whose family came from the east, had a pronounced thrifty orientation.

As it turned out, however, Crassus had not left even a single as to his late descendants. Consequently, with the facts in hand, the claim of the family’s prosperity must seem unfounded. But, in accordance with his supposedly glorious past, Hubertus had adopted a Latin motto, UT DESINT VIRES TAMEN EST LAUDANDA VOLUPTAS, which in poetic words means even if the potency was lacking, one ought to praise the lust. This quote was a bit extravagant for the rather colourless music curator at the city conservatory. Hubertus had been ambitious at first, but playing the first violin had been denied him. Since then, he had increasingly withdrawn and avoided contact with his colleagues. After all, they only belonged to the plebs. His wife Letitia naturally agreed.

Calle had never adopted his parents’ arrogant and demeaning attitude. His intimate association with ruin-Karin could have been seen as proof of this. But he had simply been horny and then, as a five-year-old, he had no clear ideological view of anything. However, he unknowingly carried within him a perceived philanthropy about the equal value of human beings, just as he felt this love for animals. He loved petting horses, cows and sheep and had also buried a dead sparrow once. On the grave he had placed some of the ruin’s flowers, mostly dandelions, and a small cross made of sticks and strings.

In elementary school, Calle had been a really little wild thing. He lacked respect for the teachers, was cheeky and could not stand any reprimands. During the breaks in the yard, he whipped up the older boys in the senior year courses. These had smacked at his classmates or had mocked them. But this only applied to boys, he had no relations with the girls. And then it was obvious that girls were not beaten. It was cowardly. As cowardly as continuing to hit someone who had given in or kicking someone lying on the ground.

Even though Calle’s wild nature had little in common with Hubertus’ timid nature, he had inherited his father’s love of music. Calle literally lived for the music. He loved listening to contemporary avant-garde artists. He himself abused tenderly his guitar and hammered ecstatically on his home-made drums. Later in life, when he was about twenty years old, the highlight of his life had been the day he played with Amon Düül during “Essen 69”. Essen 69, however, had nothing to do with food, even though the word essen means eat in German. The 69 also had nothing to do with sex. Unimaginative imagination could turn Essen 69 into lobster and champagne with fresh strawberries served on an undressed beautiful couple, lying head to toe, each with their own delicacy in their mouths.

It basically started with a three-day out of house concert in August 1969 near Woodstock, USA, outside of New York. The hip hippie life during the festival attracted a lot of attention from the American tabloid press, as it came completely free of charge over pictures of naked women’s breasts. Paper sales skyrocketed. More naked women’s breasts would later be shown in a several-hour cinema film. Woodstock’s unparalleled fame as the world’s best breast festival was thus a fact.

But just a couple of months later, another threeday musical delicacy was arranged completely independently of the Woodstock Festival. In Essen, a town in the German Ruhr area, the offered artistic presence was colossal with performers such as Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd to name just a few. Other cult bands included East of Eden, Free, Nice, Spooky Tooth, Steamhammer, Tangerine Dream and many, many more.

As for example a, back then, completely unknown gang from England. Their international debut was an indescribable success. When Yes started playing, people got up from their camps of blankets and pillows and stood up, danced, roared and clapped their hands. On stage stood a graceful figure in a long black caftan. Everyone wanted to see the girlish angel with the long black hair and who sang so sweetly. I see you got the neck hair to stand up and people got really wild. That night Yes was born and would live a long time. Everyone wanted to buy their record, but at the festival their first album was handed out for free! Their live version of end of the night was their final. That song made Essen’s Gruga Hall rock like an eighth magnitude earthquake on the well-known, but equally misunderstood, Richter scale.

But for Calle, the greatest experience was Amon Düül. Not because the music was of any remarkably elevated quality, but because of the enormous sense of freedom and human community that their performance art entailed. It turned into an outstanding jam, where people from the audience stepped up on stage and sang and danced. It was all dreamy and Calle was like in a trance, went up to the happy-go-lucky party, found an abandoned drum set in the back of the stage podium and started playing. Whether it was good or bad or in-between we should leave unsaid, but he felt enchanted like another Ginger Baker and bathed in an indescribable rush of happiness.

Then he awoke disappointed, when the alarm clock rang in a new day, filled with new, neverending obligations.

III. The Pariscope

Karin and Calle were reunited in adulthood. This happened completely randomly and they did not know about each other. They met at the Pariscope, a place that made an effort to provide elements of Frenchness with details such as signs that said Bistro, Pernod, Steak Parisien, Escargots, Grenouilles and the like, as well as various price indications. Drinks and snacks cost different on different days of the week. On Monday to Wednesday it cost more than on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The reason was that, compared to the weekend, there were fewer guests during the first days of the week. The owner of this “frenchised” establishment wanted to keep the cash flow lively and constant at all times. On Thursdays it was closed and then of course it cost nothing at all.

The Pariscope was built like a submarine, long and narrow. When the guests arrived, typically after one o’clock at night, it quickly became very, very crowded, which was completely according to plan. The enormous congestion meant that people were rubbing against each other. Boys against girls, girls against boys, boys against boys and girls against girls. The degree of rubbing was determined by personal taste and sexual orientation. Every now and then a masculine hand could find its way to Calle’s stern, a circumstance he, however, sharply disliked. But for the most part, a friendly reprimand was enough to remain spared from repeated rubbing and patting attempts.

On the black-painted walls shone in intense selfluminous coloured shapes and figures that let you think of Joan Mir´o. Large projections of oil drops in various colors between two glass plates changed shape continuously. On the dance floor in the submarine’s bow, the music thundered and the stroboscopic flickering of the white dazzling light made the dancers appear in magical slow motion.

The deep bass tones were felt throughout the body and the vibrations in the stomach gave the dancers a rush of happiness on the verge of pain. The jungle drums of Iron Butterfly’s In A Gadda Da Vida reinforced this dreamlike experience. The poor grades at school, the stressful labours of the workplace, the eternally gnawing worries of money, and the stinging pain of a broken heart were far, far away, totally absent from this blissful moment.

Calle queued at the bar, when his gaze fixed on a wonderful creature with long curly hair and large round eyes a few meters away. The wonderful creature had noticed Calle’s unhidden stare. A wonderful smile came in response, while the wonderful creature tried to mate up to him. “Hi, my name is Sofia. When you stop staring at my breasts, you can tell me what your name is. Then we can have a pilsner together. What do you say?”

Calle did not intend to stop staring at her lovely breasts. Not right now. His answer had to wait. Then he mumbled “Calle to my friends. Enchanté, beautiful lady”. Finally he tore his eyes from the garnish, looked up and added “A pilsner would not be bad. Not bad at all. My treat.” Sofia’s answer came swirling fast like a bumerang “okay, the next one is on me.”

A light, almost imperceptible, rubbing made Calle’s trousers tighten at the front. He responded to this somewhat frivolous approach on Sofia’s part by moving a little sideways, so that she could make contact with his tense thighs. She laughed in his ear “Your little rogue” and kissed him on the neck.

That’s how they met, Calle and Sofia. At the Pariscope. A submarine, where you ate snails and frog legs, but where you definitely did not listen to sobbing songs in French.

Together with the clear dazzling colors, the underground music amplified previously unexperienced boundaries by the brown Moroccan, the red Afghan or the black Nepalese, whose black color stemmed mainly from the richly mixed-in opium.

With or without Moroccans, Afghans or Nepalese, this evening at the Pariscope became full of magic.

Some days, or rather some nights, various live performances were offered and at one point, there was this guy who sat on a bar stool with his guitar and played something that at some stage came to be called Space Oddity.

IV. Unconcealment

After four romantic months, the Sofia-Calle couple decided to consolidate the covenant of love by moving together. After searching for a while, they found a small cozy apartment, the price of which was within the framework of their joint finances. When signing the contract, it was revealed that they had been dating each other in a complete incognito. Karin called herself Sofia, because she associated the name Karin with gloomy memories, which she sought to bury in the deepest corners of the amygdala.

Once they had established their personalities and calmed down a bit after the revelation that caused considerable confusion, they hovered on a grass cloud back to their childhood and their shared ruin memories. They both remembered very well their awkward first attempts to get to know each other’s genitals together. And how these early attempts had been nullified by Sofia’s, that is, Karin’s mother.

Sofia told Calle that she had never met her father, but hid her cruel experiences with the disgusting Herman Sczermonski. The school had been mostly dull and her awake intellect had lacked stimulation. The same was true of the male acquaintances she had half-heartedly maintained over the years. Until she met Calle, this her very first boyfriend. The curiosity on all sides of life, which the school and the men had managed to kill, was revived. Above all, she had become less shy, indeed, even unashamed and cocky.

For Calle, life had taken a completely different turn. As his parents had put it, Calle “has to become something proper, a doctor or a lawyer or something like that.” They therefore sent him to a school that was extremely reputable and had a formal high educational potential, at least on paper. The school’s motto was also very much a saying in Latin, Non Scholae Sed Vitae Discimus, which emphasised the humanistic character of the school, but was as uninspiring and boring as Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. Had you taken a degree at that school, all the doors would be wide open for you. It was a school of the old school, where each graduating class came to form the society’s upper class.

Calle had inherited his father’s love and devotion to music. Thus, he devoted more time to his band than to schoolwork. The band was called dikemen and mainly engaged in copying the works of other music groups. The repertoire contained very little material of its own and consisted mostly of other people’s pieces of music. The instrumentation of the dikemen was the usual setting. A doo-wop chorus was also part of the band. This consisted of two slender girls who, however, were in fact transvestites in a very feminine design. Under the imaginative and colourful costumes hid the attributes of the masculine genus. In tight-fitting swimsuits, they could therefore seem comical. The two had given the group its name, but despite this they were no lesbians. As a small anecdote, one could mention that they called each other slut.

Calle’s professional music career was very short. After numerous brave attempts to find a serious producer for their virtual demo files Homo Dikeman and just as numerous refusals, he finally gave up. A beaten man. Empty of will to live. Until the day he met Sofia. Like her, he had regained the spark. The two gave up the bohemian lifestyle and now devoted themselves to university studies. Sofia studied nutritional physiology and Calle cell biology. They lived on student loans, a special kind of loan provided by the state, as well as odd jobs to supplement their insufficient cash.

V. A Child’s Golden Section

One of these days, during a joint lunch, the couple had had an initially interesting, then increasingly lively, discussion, which had finally derailed and they had ended up in a quarrel with each other. Afterwards, there was a certain mood in their home. But as a once-hippie-always-hippie as they were, they would, in a bonobo way, settle the threatening conflict with sexual activity. With unbridled carnal desire, he took her from behind this sunny afternoon. Sofia stood on all fours on the edge of the bed, while Calle’s balls rhythmically struck her most sensitive place, the clitoral area, which gave her even greater arousal, lust, ecstasy. To the melancholy tones of Fanz Schubert’s Eighth Symphony, Calle fired a well-aimed shot straight up at her right fallopian tube. Although this destination detail is completely irrelevant in this context, it is a fact that Sofia became pregnant in less than fifteen seconds.

They experienced the following months of pregnancy in devotional anticipation, mixed with terrible anxiety concerning the child’s physical and mental condition. Finally, the time of childbirth had come and the delivery went entirely normally, with endless, strenuous torments and unbearable pain for the mother.

The newborn baby was extremely slenderly elongated, eighty centimeters long, but at three thousand two hundred and fifty eight grams, the weight remained relatively close to normal limits. It is by no means uncommon for the head of the newborn to have a distinct elongated shape. That is why no one attached any importance to this in Sofia’s birth, but due to the long body, an extra midwife needed to be called in who could help support the baby’s soft back row. The risk was obvious that this, after the passage through the birth canal, could otherwise be broken off.

According to the latest findings, the newborn baby should not have its umbilical cord cut immediately, but would have to wait for three minutes before the procedure was performed. This is to provide the baby with a proper flushing of the mother’s blood to prevent all kinds of immune deficiency diseases.

During these three minutes, there was ample opportunity for everyone present to use the time to explore the child’s external proportions. These did not seem to closely follow the norm for the golden ratio. Apart from the remarkable body length, however, everything seemed to be as it should be, ten fingers, that is, five on each hand, and also ten toes, on two feet. On the other hand, when the sex of this remarkable child was to be decided, it could not be agreed whether it was a girl or a boy. In fact, the child’s gender was, at first, rather indeterminate. It seemed to hang a little boy’s penis out of a little girl’s vulva. Possibly it was an enlarged clitoris that had made its way outside the intended, but closed, inner area.

When the parents were to decide shortly afterwards what the child’s name would be, it was decided that, due to the indefinite gender position, names such as Hermes or Aphrodite would for the time being be declared inappropriate and had to be excluded.

Sofia and Calle thus decided on the prefix Eli as their working name. Once the exact gender of the child had been established, the rest could be taken. That is, the suffix, either -sa for a girl, i.e. Elisa, or -as for a boy, i.e. Elias. If it was neither, that is, something in between, it would probably be Hirudinea. S-he was affectionately called Hiri by hir parents. However, this nickname should not be confused with the name of the language spoken by the Motu people of Papua New Guinea. These two are completely different phenomena.

Letitia Crassasius-Levin, who came from the east, was as her maiden name suggests of Jewish descent. Since only one half of her was Jewish and she had not been particularly versed in the Mosaic faith, she had later also neglected the traditional commandments of her own family. She had never taken her son Carl to the slaughterhouse. But in recent times she had become proud of her people’s many thousands of years of history and believed that her children’s family would now preserve and carry on the beautiful traditions. She therefore told Carl and Sofia that she would like to see an honest and traditional circumcision of the male part of Hiri. The child’s parents did not believe their ears, were utterly terrified and upset by this quote: insane proposal and told Letitia that such a thing would be completely out of the question and would never happen.

But Letitia, in her newfound religious zeal, had abducted her grandchild behind hirs parents’ backs and handed hir over to a scalpel master named Nathan Guldblom. This Guldblom was in some circles known for performing genital mutilation in a very exquisite and artistic way. The fact that the children at the time of the circumcision used to cry heartbreakingly and scream loud and pitifully was not much cared for. As a result, Hiri did not currently have to pull down the foreskin, but the glans was still proudly and pompously exposed between her outer labia. That these would not meet the same fate was due to the fact that the child’s parents had given Letitia a restraining order and that they no longer left Hiri out of sight for a second.

VI. The Triple Helix

After fifteen years of Hiri’s gender ambiguity, the official name, as it is written in a person’s passport, finally became Hirudinea Crassasius-Werd-hem. In the small box on the passport application, where you would write an F or an M, hir mother Sofia put an mf. It can be added that another ambiguity was that the baby’s body length had hardly changed since birth. By and large, these were still the same values, that is, eighty centimeters plus or minus one and a half centimeters, depending on whether the hair was freshly washed or not.

The weight had not risen significantly either. The head possibly become even more elongated. But Hiri’s macrocephaly was not artificially conditioned, as in the case of the Monbuttu people in the center of the most central black Africa. There, the skulls of the newborns were tied together to achieve the long-head effect.

Hiri was, of course, an extremely interesting study object for the life sciences. The sequencing of hir genome revealed that the nucleotides were five in number, consisting of the usual amino acids A, C, G and T. And a viral U. These five were put together in a triple helix, in a very different mixture of so-called DNA and RNA. This triple helix was now called DRNA, pronounced Dirna. The germ cells were also peculiar, the chromosomes were neither XX nor XY, but XYZ.

The discovery of DRNA was sensational and self-evident in the Nobel class. The remarkable thing about the prize was that it was awarded in the subject of medicine, as if one had discovered, and successfully fought, a notorious or previously unknown disease.

Hiri’s physique was above average healthy, so there could be no question of any disease. In addition, s-he was super-gifted intellectually. However, the committee in charge never even considered for a second to award the prize to young Hiri, but chose an obscure biochemist from Minnesota. He was a male and had family ties in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The other two laureates, one from China and the other from India, were also male and both were active at the Institute for Humanoid Race Evolution in British Birmingham. All Nobel laureates had long since blown out more than eighty candles on their birthday cake and were still alive when their names were announced in early October, entitling them to receive the award from the monarch in December of the same year. In Sweden’s proud and beautiful capital.

The Chinoindian duo had early on suspected that Hiris’ gene mutation would involve fundamental changes in human survival. Among other things, they had predicted that Hiri would develop hir own metabolism that would prove to be significantly more energy efficient than what is commonly the case. For example, Hiri peed only every two months and pooped every four. Of course, it goes without saying that Hiri ate very sporadically. Hiri could often sit motionless for long periods of time, even for several weeks, as if in a kind of dormancy. With the people in hir immediate vicinity, s-he was then also completely non-communicative.

What was generally considered to be the most important conclusion was equally grand, namely that Hiri was aging extremely slowly. Hiri’s DRNA telomeres did not wear as fast as the DNA ends of “normal” people. Interest in this remarkable circumstance increased extremely rapidly, especially in the general news media and in the so-called low-iq reality shows. Government members around the world reckoned that their time in power could almost legitimately be extended indefinitely, and consequently they also increased research funding to unprecedented levels. This took place on a global scale with the competing scientists in many countries, even in those which usually cared very little about scientific research that was not of an explosive nature.

Knowledge of most research results was reserved for a very small group of people with special qualifications. The non-secret material was published in the newly founded journal The Triplehelix Cognitive News Letters. This publication was extremely reputable and the researchers considered it very nice to appear in it with their names. To emphasize the sensational news value of the articles, the number of pages was limited, but also because people did not have to read so much. You had so much else to do.

This lack of space could mean that the content was not sufficiently reliable or less trustworthy. Several of the often many co-authors of the articles could be interviewed on TV, a coveted employment in paid working hours that could lead to a notoriety at national, even international, level. This narcissistic playground attracted more and more dreamers of wealth and celebrity. Fewer dreamed of the progress of science for the best of mankind.

The information that did leak to the media included Hiris’ diet. The interest in the same was based on many people’s vanity to acquire or maintain a slim figure. Perhaps to be expected, mostly middle-aged women were among the slimming enthusiasts. However, they expressed concerns about the essentially non-existent breasts of Hiri. To the extent that Hiri’s flat front could be attributed to the lean diet, the women felt maneuvered in an information vacuum. In them a seed of concern was planted, namely, that one might expect a considerable bust loss. This would clearly be an unwanted side effect. So far, however, this fear has not been substantiated by reliable data. The scientific community was silent.

In dollyish Scotland, on the other hand, people were not on the lazy side. There they were in the process of sowing new seeds, as they had done so successfully before. The purpose of the experimental work was to produce copies of Hiri through cloning. There were also far-reaching plans to persuade Hiri to reproduce parthenogenetically.

Hiri had so far responded with indetermination. But Hiri also realized that the purpose and benefit of having access to an entire population of hiris is, of course, the opportunities that open up for longdistance travel through space.

Although the technology has been mastered since long, cloning of humans has so far not been allowed due to ethical reasons. In any case, no cases of cloned individuals were known. However, the conspiracy theorists believed that there was tangible evidence in the form of tons of cytoplasmic material in the waste bins in many laboratories around the world.

Who could resist the temptation?

VII. Ad Medinam

Sofia and Calle mostly tenderly called their child Hiri-darling, Hiri-love, Sweety, Little Beauty and the like. On the few occasions when they felt that the child had done something stupid, they used the old name Eli. In short, Eli. Only Eli meant trouble. But for the most part, the calls were loving. And Hiri reciprocated her parents’ warmth, s-he loved them dearly and deeply.

One sunny late afternoon, Calle watched as Hiri with poised lifted arms danced gracefully in wavy movements. Hiri had gone to one of her favorite places, a tiny glade in a tiny forest grove a few hundred meters behind her parents’ home. Hiris’ shadow was almost ten meters long and gave the dance a magical dimension. It was summer vacation and Hiri was carefree and happy. Before the holiday, after only four months of study, she had mastered Finnish as the seventh foreign language. S-he hummed a Finnish version of the Swedish Midsummer song Little Frogs with her own, slightly free, translation that read

lyhyet jalat, pitkät jalat, häntä poispäin suuret silmät, pienet korvat, mansikka-pensasaidat

which was something like

short legs, long legs, tail away

big eyes, small ears, heck of clayand so on.

When Hiri became aware of another person’s presence, s-he stopped dancing and looked around. Hiri saw that it was hir father and wondered in surprise, “What are you doing here?”

Calle: “I came to talk to you, my darling. Thought to hear from you, what you think where we would go on vacation this year. Do you have any idea?”

Hiri: “I do not know, if you think it’s a good idea, but I would really like to go to Tamanrasset at some stage.”

Calle: “Where did you say you wanted to go?”

Hiri: “To Tamanrasset. In Algeria. In the middle of the Sahara desert. To the Ahoggar Mountains.”

Calle: “Yeah, you. To Tamanrasset. I’m going to talk to mom. Oh, how far is it there, by the way? Ah, it was nothing.”

Calle set out to find his wife Sofia. He already knew beforehand what she would answer, but still thought it would be polite to ask her about her opinion on the matter. Both she and Calle tried to fulfill all of Hiri’s wishes, that is, to the extent that these were reasonable and practically possible. They were worried about the risk that Hiri would not live that long, because they had learned that dwarves seem to have reduced lifetimes. In any case, they were completely unaware of what was causing Hiri to stop growing. If it was a question of some kind of illness, then there was a significant risk that this was in its terminal phase and Mr. Dead could knock on the door any day.

“I had hoped that the cutie had said Saint Barth or Bora-Bora or something like that, but Tummyrasslat? Have never heard of it and do not even know where this place is located”, Sofia sighed. Calle replied laconically “this place is actually as big as Bath, dear”. But both parents had already made up their minds and immediately started planning the trip. Visas were obtained and flights to Gibraltar in southern Spain were booked. From there it takes only half an hour by car to the ferry terminal in Algeciras.

The short crossing from Algeciras to Ceuta went smoothly and without significant incidents. It only takes an hour by boat to jump from Europe to Africa. In summer, the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar are usually calm, especially on the Mediterranean side. There was plenty of time to enjoy the Moroccan national drink, a glass of sweet hot tea with fresh mint leaves. The Crassasius-Werdhems soaked up sun and tea and were cherished by the warm breeze. They sat in the bow on a simple wooden bench and did not attract any special attention.

In Gibraltar, Carl had ordered a rental car that was off-road. It also had a winch on the front bumper. Now Calle was busy studying a wrapped Michelin map of North Africa. It was red and was called “Carte a 1/4 000 000 - 1 cm pour 40 km, AFRIQUE NORD ET OUEST”. He pondered which route would be best to take. That is, least dangerous. Through the Sahara, the world’s largest desert, without access to water, without a drop of the elixir of life, but full of scorpions and other vermin.

Sofia had a crossword puzzle in her lap and chewed on a pencil. She mumbled “refractive inability, vertical eleven letters” and Hiri’s quick response came back like a boomerang at supersonic speed: “astigmatism”.

“By God, you are so smart!”

“Come on, Mom! It’s not that hard. I had that in the anatomy course.”

“I know, but you answered so quickly.”

Sofia looked pensively and her big wide open eyes rested questioningly on this strange child of hers. She loved her child so desperately, that sometimes it even hurt inside. With her new haircut, Hiri looked like a cute little girl, in t-shirt and jeans. And with painted lips. Hiri did not paint her nails, “you should be able to see that they are clean”.

Hiri most of all wanted to get to Tamanrasset as quickly as possible. Hir physiognomy therefore assumed an annoyed look, when hir father Calle declared that they would first go to Fez. Calle wanted to cash in on the city’s medina, which now houses the domestic market with all sorts of oriental seductions. There they were to buy their own shalaba, a kind of kaftan with a hood. According to Calle, this item of clothing would be the “absolutely best in the heat and cold of the desert”.

Later he would perform an experiment. He wanted to measure what the temperature actually was. It had been rumored that at night it could even be frost. People’s experience of such cold could possibly be due to the large temperature differences between day and night. When it could be over forty degrees in the middle of the day, twenty degrees at night would probably be experienced as quite cool, he reasoned. To find out what actually applies, he had bought a special outdoor thermometer. This was a conventional mercury device, but graded between minus fifty up to plus fifty degrees Celsius. In general, outdoor temperatures are measured in a shadow. In the Sahara stone desert, however, there was no such thing, and consequently Calle placed his thermometer just straight out on the ground, in the scorching sunshine. After a short while, the thermometer exploded and Calle later noted in his travel diary “noon sun, only lower limit of fifty degrees; the thermometer is broken, can not measure at night”. Ergo, the mystery remains.

Hiri pointed out that Fez was clearly in the opposite direction and going there was clearly a detour. In addition, tourists were warned in the travel guide that one should enter the kasba only in groups and then only with the help of local guides. Since the kasba seemed to lack sensible urban planning, tourists would easily get lost and be exposed to unwelcome inconveniences. As for foreigners, assaults, robberies, and even murders were often reported.

Neither Sofia nor Calle embraced Hiri’s intimidation propaganda. The democratic family voting resulted in two to one in favour of Fez and its kasba. Sofia in particular proved to be extremely keen to visit the kasba. She had heard about the fantastic leather goods marketed there and she wanted to buy a pair of saddlebags for her motorcycle. They would be “so much cheaper than what you got for a pair of just leather items at home”.

Inside the kasba, there was a throng of stalls, goods and people. But it was very helpful that the neighborhoods were divided according to their product range. Here, all beautiful vessels and art in copper were provided and there, was shop after shop with carpets, then gold jewelery and silver work, and so on. Calle made his way to the shalaba department and after a while of searching, they finally stood in an alley with lots of colorful Moroccan clothes. Calle’s eyes fell on a white shalaba that hung in a clothes hanger under a striped canopy. When he curiously fingered it, the store owner appeared in the dark doorway. “Ah, nise peepel! Wont nise peepel by nise shalaba?” The store owner turned his attention to Carl, who kindly replied “We would like three of those, one for our child, one for my wife and one for me. Are the sizes available?” The shopkeeper who, as it would later turn out, was called Altair answered politely but resolutely “Jes, Jes, Jes! Misjiu nise. Ay shou.” He disappeared into the black hole and returned shortly afterwards with three garments. “1400 Dirham for woan nise shalaba” he proclaimed, “Woan fourr la petite, woan fourr Madame ent woan fourr joo, Sire”.

Two children, a girl and a little boy, appeared in the doorway and looked curiously at their father and the strangers. The girl could be five, the boy maybe three years old. He and Hiri were about the same size. The children had been attracted by the large number of Dirham that their father had shouted out loud, clearly and distinctly, so that the competitors around could also hear this.

Sofia tilted her head slightly and said “But Carl, one thousand four hundred dromedaries for one nightgown! Isn’t that too expensive?” “Darling, it’s not dromedaries, but Dirham. Their money is called that. Like Drachma in Greece but in Morocco.” Carl was able to get Sofia even more confused, but Hiri came to the rescue, “Dad, I think he wants us to bargain. Fourteen hundred of their money! It’s ridiculous!” Carl collected himself and then turned to Altair, as it would soon turn out that this was his name: “My good nice man! I think that we need to discuss the price a little further. Don’t you think that fourteen hundred a piece is a little hefty?” Altair waved his arms and exclamated “Ah. Jes, Jes, Jes! We can go inside and have some tea.” Carl thought “His English has suddenly improved. We’ll see how it goes” and then they all went through the dark doorway into the room behind. It was a little cooler there with a fan spinning in the ceiling. On the floor there were large pillows around a large round copper table. There were also a couple of short-legged chairs with camel fur on, or maybe it was sheep skin.

A small woman with her face hidden behind a piece of cloth came in with a tray. She placed drinking glasses, a sugar bowl and a copper-colored teapot on the round table. Then she disappeared. The children were still standing. Their father nodded at them with a wide smile. “These are my children. The name of my girl is Aisha and my boy is Ahmad” he declared proudly.“Your daughter and my boy are of the same age, yes?”