Chapter Nine: Rites of Spring
Subject: Rites of Spring
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 04/09/15 20:11
To: Randall Clay
Here's one thing that we and the Shouters have in common: we both have a seasonal ritual involving the decoration of eggs. Of course, the eggs that the Shouters are decorating are their own. They are, as far as we can tell, hermaphrodites. We're not exactly certain of the mechanics of their reproduction-along with the lack of detailed biological information, at least that is within our power to translate at all, the Shouters did not put anything we can identify as pornography into their trans-stellar upload. So either they're prudish, or they're doing it right in plain sight in all kinds of peices and we can't yet recognize it. There are arguments for either direction. Anyhow, at certain times of the year, some of them will gestate briefly and then lay an egg. A big one, about the same size as a human baby. Then they bury their eggs in warm, nutrient rich soils that are part of the 'fungus' farms that provide much of their food, and, six months later, they dig them up, they hatch, and the young Shouters have arrive, to be raised by the elders of the community.
They decorate their eggs, as I said, applying patterns of texture and bumps on a thin but complex layer. The patterns are unique to each family-and family here goes exclusive through the 'mother' who laid the egg in question, suggesting that, however they are going about having sex, it leaves the idea of paternity in even greater doubt than it is for us. Anyhow, the point of the patterns is so that when the egg is dug up, it can be selected and thus raised by it's grandparent or great-grandparent. So the patterns, especially those of the rich and powerful amoung the Shouters, are designed to be complex and difficult to forge. Forgery does go on, however. Probably much more frequently in their drama than in real life, though, but it obviously has to happen sometime. And this egg handling is a very deeply-ingrained tradition among them, going forward all the way to the modern period when they could, if they wanted to, keep track of the eggs with their equivalent of GPS devices or perform routine DNA tests. Then again, we don't perform routine DNA tests here, do we? Who knows what the real gap between presumed paternity and actuality really is. Shouter egg-decoration is a deeply primal instinct-even their distant evolutionary 'forebears', the other animal species with the same general body plan, do it, although with far less sophistication. It could in fact be that the arms race between secure egg-covering patterns and forgers is what led the Shouters to acquire their intelligence itself.
All of this is, of course, by way of avoiding the subject of what has actually been going on over here during Jenny's much anticipated by me visit. Well, it began well. And it ended okay. But the middle part...
The Can't Believe It's Not Easter holiday runs as an extra-long weekend, with days off on Friday and Monday. Mom and Pope left Thursday afternoon for Pope's Uncle's beach house. (As a side note, he hasn't yet moved in, but they're still talking about it, with plans contingent on the expiration of his lease later this fall.) I've had the run of the place before, but not for this long. After a 'Don't invite the entire senior class over for a party and wreck the house because that's not nearly as fun or consequence free as it is in the movies' conversation which all three of us knew full well to be entirely unnecessary, they left. Two hours later I picked Jenny up at the airport, and ten minutes of driving just barely slow enough to avoid being roboticketed by any of the freeway cameras later, we were in bed.
They say, whoever 'they' are, that there's not really such a thing as bad sex, because even when it is bad, it's still pretty darn good. Which is probably true as far as it goes. But we were hoping for, expecting, even, to be having really great sex, as good as those hypercaffinate lovemaking sessions hiding from the proctors at XL camp the past summer. I guess that there's nothing like your first time, but I'd have been pretty darn happy with something as good as any of the second through sixth.
Of course, we knew each other a lot better now, from scores of late night conversations on telephones and instant messages. But while we had a fairly well developed mental and emotional intimacy, and a qucikly-resumed sexual intimacy, the rest of physical intimacy wasn't quite there. So, to recap, we were having a good time, but not as good as we'd liked to have had, and when we weren't making the beast with two backs we were fairly awkward together, all night. And the next morning. And afternoon, and evening, with a couple of meal breaks and a thoroughly ill-conceived attempt at showering together that almost destroyed the relationship all by itself, by which time exhaustion finally overcame libido and the strangeness of having someone else in the bed we were sleeping in. (We decided fairly early on that quantity would do a fair job of substituting for quality, and gave out only slightly before what I had originally planned to be a supply of condoms suffiicient for the entire visit did.)
So, on Saturday we arose, wisely opted to take seperate showers, had the sort of relationship conversation that the kinds of women's magazines we both would otherwise have made relentless fun of recommends to its readers, which was the source for all of the extremely self-aware stuff I mentioned in the last few bits of this letter, and decided to spend the day in a less intense and more outwardly-directed socially speaking manner, hanging out with and introducing her to my friends over here. The plan was to get together for a late lunch, then go see the Allan Quartermain sequel, which word from the premere said didn't such nearly as much as it had seemed earlier in production, and then head over the the Patricks' for a bit of pseudo partying over there, the pseudo part meaning full parental supervision and all that that entails.
The first part of the plan worked out well enough. We met at the food court, which was strangely less crowded and more subdued than we would have expected, and were declared by both Travis and Jess as a more nauseatingly cute couple than Connie Patrick (Travis' older sister. She is, without doubt, the top computer student in town) and Frank Langer (another senior in the XL class; no great shakes at the linguistics itself but he's started coming into his own as we've started to get enough tentative translations and gists to open up the field of Xenoanthropolgy. The two of them have been together since forever, apart from their approximately annual week-long break up and reconciliation drama.) I asked why things were so quiet.
"You guys haven't heard the news?" said Travis, skeptically.
"I don't think they've exactly been watching television, Trav." said Jess.
"Huh? Oh, uh, yeah." said Travis. "They blew up the Pope yesterday."
"What?" I asked.
"Who?" asked Jenny, more or less simultaneously.
"A bunch of suicide bombers, during Good Friday services." explained Connie. "Three of them went off in the crowds, then two more rushed the stage where Leo XIV was speaking."
"They said they were all in with European or British passports." added Frank.
"There was live footage, before the European Copyright Authority shut down all access it got played dozens of times." said Patrick. "They shouted 'Allahu Akbhar' before they went, and there's some kind of tape floating around the Arab media claiming responsibility."
"Which group?" asked Jenny, still shaken. Her family is Catholic- the American sort who haven't had much time for the doctrine form the last couple of Popes, but still Catholic.
"Nobody anyone had heard of before this week." said Jess. "They made a point of making no demands and just said that a state of war existed and would until they destroy the west."
"That got them denounced by just about every Arab government out there, even Iran and Arabia. Only South Iraq and the Syrian government-in-exile didn't have something bad to say about them, and even they're bright enough to keep quiet at least." added Frank.
We ate our lunch and talked about less depressing subjects after that. Jenny went on for a while about her particular Ur-Text, which is the Shouter Creation Myth. It's another thing of which it's sort of curious that they only have one, and it's a pretty depressing kind of myth at that. I mean, the biblical myth has a few disasters in it: the flood, the tower of Babel, the fall of Eden- but with the exception of the first, they're pretty mild, at least by comparison. The Shouter myth has the entire planet getting scourged of life time after time after time, with creation starting all over from the beginning after each time. And, just like the book of genesis appears to get the general order in which types of life showed up, it looks like this myth is basically right about the history of life on their planet: a lot of ecology- and evolutionary- level biology is just starting to be unlocked, linguistically, and the geneeral story is that if evolved at least five different times on their planet, and went almost completely extinct, with the only remnants residing in exotic locales, organelles, and the occasional parasite. The history of life on a planet comes with a lot of crisis points: for example, when plants evolved and started doing photosynthesis, they started pumping huge quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, and oxygen was extremely toxic to every living thing around at the time. On Earth, life evolved around it. On the Shouter Homeworld, it didn't, and only a few anaerobic enclaves survived, and then, later, another primordial soup spewed out some microbes that liked oxygen just fine. It may seem like I'm drifting away from the narrative, but I'm really not: we were talking about these very things. I think my presentation is less tedious than a transcript of the actual conversation itself would have been, which was mostly Frank talking and occasionally asking a question to Jenny. Anyhow, eventually it was time for the movie, which was okay. The studio originally wanted to actually remake the Indiana Jones films, you know, but the Spielberg Estate couldn't be brought on board, and so the whole project was moved over the the Quartermain property. Well, the first film was okay, but no Raiders of the Lost Ark. But at least the second film, which we say that night, was no Temple of Doom.
After the film, on our way to the Patricks', we stopped by a convenience store to load up on sodas and snacks. And there my troubles began, as we were unlucky enough to be in that convenience store when two large pickup trucks pulled up and a dozen red-robed God's Red Sworders piled out, eager to wreak vengeance for the Pope (and those who had died in the audience) against the clerk. One would think that after more than a dozen years of living with the actual danger of foreign terrorism on US soil, at least by now the various groups of bigotted shit for brains types in the country would have by now learned the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, but no such luck. I did notice, from looking at their hands, which extended out of their robes and were not gloved, that this new organization ,for all it's similarity to the old Ku Klux Klan, has managed to recruit as many hispanic and black anti-Arab bigots as white, which probably says something or other about the state of modern race relations, although I'm not sure what.
What happened next was a practical demonstration of the fact that the rumors of the death of chivalry are greatly exaggerated, although anyone wanting to rectify that situation has my support. The Sworders advanced on the clerk. Jess, Jenny, and Connie took up positions between the two mismatched parties. The goons suggested, in extremely insulting terms, that they step aside. They stood their ground. Viler insults were hurled, and, when they proved ineffective, the goons approached, clearly intending mild violence at least upon the three young women followed by a huge additional helping of violence upon the clerk, who had by this point surmised that his silent alarm had been interfered with in some way.
And that is how I found myself in a fist fight-well, mostly fists, anyhow- outnumbered by at least four to one against men twice my age and nearly twice my size. My advantages were two: that I was better-motivated and consdierably more sober. I have to think that those two facts are the only possible explanation for the fact that I failed to suffer any broken bones. Bruises, yes, or more precicely, one large, body-shaped bruise, but nothing broken. And two of the other side lost their hoods in the fighting, allowing their faces to be captured on camera and presumably meaning that the police will eventually catch them. Provided the sheriff isn't too Catholic, I guess. No, that's too cynical, I'm sure they will. The fight (a much more dignified term than 'distractionary beating', I'd say) lasted all of nineteen minutes before a police car showed up, for a routine coffee stop, and the Sworders dispersed.
And so the rest of the holiday was spent convalescing, with Jenny by my side, and, despite the whole being in pain all over my body, somehow more comfortably than the first day. And then she had to go back home, and Mom and Pope Paulsen showed back up, and things went back to normal, or as normal as it gets around here.
Your Brother
Douglas
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 04/09/15 20:11
To: Randall Clay
Here's one thing that we and the Shouters have in common: we both have a seasonal ritual involving the decoration of eggs. Of course, the eggs that the Shouters are decorating are their own. They are, as far as we can tell, hermaphrodites. We're not exactly certain of the mechanics of their reproduction-along with the lack of detailed biological information, at least that is within our power to translate at all, the Shouters did not put anything we can identify as pornography into their trans-stellar upload. So either they're prudish, or they're doing it right in plain sight in all kinds of peices and we can't yet recognize it. There are arguments for either direction. Anyhow, at certain times of the year, some of them will gestate briefly and then lay an egg. A big one, about the same size as a human baby. Then they bury their eggs in warm, nutrient rich soils that are part of the 'fungus' farms that provide much of their food, and, six months later, they dig them up, they hatch, and the young Shouters have arrive, to be raised by the elders of the community.
They decorate their eggs, as I said, applying patterns of texture and bumps on a thin but complex layer. The patterns are unique to each family-and family here goes exclusive through the 'mother' who laid the egg in question, suggesting that, however they are going about having sex, it leaves the idea of paternity in even greater doubt than it is for us. Anyhow, the point of the patterns is so that when the egg is dug up, it can be selected and thus raised by it's grandparent or great-grandparent. So the patterns, especially those of the rich and powerful amoung the Shouters, are designed to be complex and difficult to forge. Forgery does go on, however. Probably much more frequently in their drama than in real life, though, but it obviously has to happen sometime. And this egg handling is a very deeply-ingrained tradition among them, going forward all the way to the modern period when they could, if they wanted to, keep track of the eggs with their equivalent of GPS devices or perform routine DNA tests. Then again, we don't perform routine DNA tests here, do we? Who knows what the real gap between presumed paternity and actuality really is. Shouter egg-decoration is a deeply primal instinct-even their distant evolutionary 'forebears', the other animal species with the same general body plan, do it, although with far less sophistication. It could in fact be that the arms race between secure egg-covering patterns and forgers is what led the Shouters to acquire their intelligence itself.
All of this is, of course, by way of avoiding the subject of what has actually been going on over here during Jenny's much anticipated by me visit. Well, it began well. And it ended okay. But the middle part...
The Can't Believe It's Not Easter holiday runs as an extra-long weekend, with days off on Friday and Monday. Mom and Pope left Thursday afternoon for Pope's Uncle's beach house. (As a side note, he hasn't yet moved in, but they're still talking about it, with plans contingent on the expiration of his lease later this fall.) I've had the run of the place before, but not for this long. After a 'Don't invite the entire senior class over for a party and wreck the house because that's not nearly as fun or consequence free as it is in the movies' conversation which all three of us knew full well to be entirely unnecessary, they left. Two hours later I picked Jenny up at the airport, and ten minutes of driving just barely slow enough to avoid being roboticketed by any of the freeway cameras later, we were in bed.
They say, whoever 'they' are, that there's not really such a thing as bad sex, because even when it is bad, it's still pretty darn good. Which is probably true as far as it goes. But we were hoping for, expecting, even, to be having really great sex, as good as those hypercaffinate lovemaking sessions hiding from the proctors at XL camp the past summer. I guess that there's nothing like your first time, but I'd have been pretty darn happy with something as good as any of the second through sixth.
Of course, we knew each other a lot better now, from scores of late night conversations on telephones and instant messages. But while we had a fairly well developed mental and emotional intimacy, and a qucikly-resumed sexual intimacy, the rest of physical intimacy wasn't quite there. So, to recap, we were having a good time, but not as good as we'd liked to have had, and when we weren't making the beast with two backs we were fairly awkward together, all night. And the next morning. And afternoon, and evening, with a couple of meal breaks and a thoroughly ill-conceived attempt at showering together that almost destroyed the relationship all by itself, by which time exhaustion finally overcame libido and the strangeness of having someone else in the bed we were sleeping in. (We decided fairly early on that quantity would do a fair job of substituting for quality, and gave out only slightly before what I had originally planned to be a supply of condoms suffiicient for the entire visit did.)
So, on Saturday we arose, wisely opted to take seperate showers, had the sort of relationship conversation that the kinds of women's magazines we both would otherwise have made relentless fun of recommends to its readers, which was the source for all of the extremely self-aware stuff I mentioned in the last few bits of this letter, and decided to spend the day in a less intense and more outwardly-directed socially speaking manner, hanging out with and introducing her to my friends over here. The plan was to get together for a late lunch, then go see the Allan Quartermain sequel, which word from the premere said didn't such nearly as much as it had seemed earlier in production, and then head over the the Patricks' for a bit of pseudo partying over there, the pseudo part meaning full parental supervision and all that that entails.
The first part of the plan worked out well enough. We met at the food court, which was strangely less crowded and more subdued than we would have expected, and were declared by both Travis and Jess as a more nauseatingly cute couple than Connie Patrick (Travis' older sister. She is, without doubt, the top computer student in town) and Frank Langer (another senior in the XL class; no great shakes at the linguistics itself but he's started coming into his own as we've started to get enough tentative translations and gists to open up the field of Xenoanthropolgy. The two of them have been together since forever, apart from their approximately annual week-long break up and reconciliation drama.) I asked why things were so quiet.
"You guys haven't heard the news?" said Travis, skeptically.
"I don't think they've exactly been watching television, Trav." said Jess.
"Huh? Oh, uh, yeah." said Travis. "They blew up the Pope yesterday."
"What?" I asked.
"Who?" asked Jenny, more or less simultaneously.
"A bunch of suicide bombers, during Good Friday services." explained Connie. "Three of them went off in the crowds, then two more rushed the stage where Leo XIV was speaking."
"They said they were all in with European or British passports." added Frank.
"There was live footage, before the European Copyright Authority shut down all access it got played dozens of times." said Patrick. "They shouted 'Allahu Akbhar' before they went, and there's some kind of tape floating around the Arab media claiming responsibility."
"Which group?" asked Jenny, still shaken. Her family is Catholic- the American sort who haven't had much time for the doctrine form the last couple of Popes, but still Catholic.
"Nobody anyone had heard of before this week." said Jess. "They made a point of making no demands and just said that a state of war existed and would until they destroy the west."
"That got them denounced by just about every Arab government out there, even Iran and Arabia. Only South Iraq and the Syrian government-in-exile didn't have something bad to say about them, and even they're bright enough to keep quiet at least." added Frank.
We ate our lunch and talked about less depressing subjects after that. Jenny went on for a while about her particular Ur-Text, which is the Shouter Creation Myth. It's another thing of which it's sort of curious that they only have one, and it's a pretty depressing kind of myth at that. I mean, the biblical myth has a few disasters in it: the flood, the tower of Babel, the fall of Eden- but with the exception of the first, they're pretty mild, at least by comparison. The Shouter myth has the entire planet getting scourged of life time after time after time, with creation starting all over from the beginning after each time. And, just like the book of genesis appears to get the general order in which types of life showed up, it looks like this myth is basically right about the history of life on their planet: a lot of ecology- and evolutionary- level biology is just starting to be unlocked, linguistically, and the geneeral story is that if evolved at least five different times on their planet, and went almost completely extinct, with the only remnants residing in exotic locales, organelles, and the occasional parasite. The history of life on a planet comes with a lot of crisis points: for example, when plants evolved and started doing photosynthesis, they started pumping huge quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, and oxygen was extremely toxic to every living thing around at the time. On Earth, life evolved around it. On the Shouter Homeworld, it didn't, and only a few anaerobic enclaves survived, and then, later, another primordial soup spewed out some microbes that liked oxygen just fine. It may seem like I'm drifting away from the narrative, but I'm really not: we were talking about these very things. I think my presentation is less tedious than a transcript of the actual conversation itself would have been, which was mostly Frank talking and occasionally asking a question to Jenny. Anyhow, eventually it was time for the movie, which was okay. The studio originally wanted to actually remake the Indiana Jones films, you know, but the Spielberg Estate couldn't be brought on board, and so the whole project was moved over the the Quartermain property. Well, the first film was okay, but no Raiders of the Lost Ark. But at least the second film, which we say that night, was no Temple of Doom.
After the film, on our way to the Patricks', we stopped by a convenience store to load up on sodas and snacks. And there my troubles began, as we were unlucky enough to be in that convenience store when two large pickup trucks pulled up and a dozen red-robed God's Red Sworders piled out, eager to wreak vengeance for the Pope (and those who had died in the audience) against the clerk. One would think that after more than a dozen years of living with the actual danger of foreign terrorism on US soil, at least by now the various groups of bigotted shit for brains types in the country would have by now learned the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, but no such luck. I did notice, from looking at their hands, which extended out of their robes and were not gloved, that this new organization ,for all it's similarity to the old Ku Klux Klan, has managed to recruit as many hispanic and black anti-Arab bigots as white, which probably says something or other about the state of modern race relations, although I'm not sure what.
What happened next was a practical demonstration of the fact that the rumors of the death of chivalry are greatly exaggerated, although anyone wanting to rectify that situation has my support. The Sworders advanced on the clerk. Jess, Jenny, and Connie took up positions between the two mismatched parties. The goons suggested, in extremely insulting terms, that they step aside. They stood their ground. Viler insults were hurled, and, when they proved ineffective, the goons approached, clearly intending mild violence at least upon the three young women followed by a huge additional helping of violence upon the clerk, who had by this point surmised that his silent alarm had been interfered with in some way.
And that is how I found myself in a fist fight-well, mostly fists, anyhow- outnumbered by at least four to one against men twice my age and nearly twice my size. My advantages were two: that I was better-motivated and consdierably more sober. I have to think that those two facts are the only possible explanation for the fact that I failed to suffer any broken bones. Bruises, yes, or more precicely, one large, body-shaped bruise, but nothing broken. And two of the other side lost their hoods in the fighting, allowing their faces to be captured on camera and presumably meaning that the police will eventually catch them. Provided the sheriff isn't too Catholic, I guess. No, that's too cynical, I'm sure they will. The fight (a much more dignified term than 'distractionary beating', I'd say) lasted all of nineteen minutes before a police car showed up, for a routine coffee stop, and the Sworders dispersed.
And so the rest of the holiday was spent convalescing, with Jenny by my side, and, despite the whole being in pain all over my body, somehow more comfortably than the first day. And then she had to go back home, and Mom and Pope Paulsen showed back up, and things went back to normal, or as normal as it gets around here.
Your Brother
Douglas
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