22nd Century Blues

The Book of the Century, being the life and incredible times of Muggeridge Chaffinch, who left England during the final days of the Anita government to travel far into the stars, first as prefect of H.M.S. Billingsgate, later as Archbishop of Bunnyland. Written in the year 2199 on the planet Cats-by-Nowhere, witnessed and with a prologue by J.W. Mathis, false man.

Extracts from the sequel to '21st Century Blues', which continues Steve Walker's detailed history of the future of mankind, as seen through the eyes of a planet-hopping pastor and a World War One brass robot.

I never met anyone who left Earth who regretted it. A liberation of the spirit takes place when you're out among the stars. You are at one with a stolid neutral God, a nature God who feels nothing but comforts all. Out here the kind of passionate love I felt for Clarissa all those years ago just doesn't happen to anyone. There is a freedom too in this lovelessness - God's subtle gift to man on his next great step. So am I a heretical old wreck for believing that an oak in Tutt's Clump in old England, if it yet lives, carved with the motto JEROME LUVS CLARISSA, is a more vital remnant of mankind than all the cathedrals we abandoned there? I Married an English Rose, She Married a Robot from Ipswich, p. 107

Finally the vast illuminated sign of PATEL & THOMBS glowed ahead like a sparkly nebula, and underneath their names the entrepreneurs blazed the motto: EVERYTHING YOU'LL EVER NEED. Idea was, thee see, that one would buy everything one would ever consume for the rest of one's life in one go, flinging it into ginormous trolleys. (May I add in complaint that abandoned trolleys turn up mysteriously in every scenic view and watering hole throughout the boggn Universe - one crashed here a week ago!) I was daunted - daunt double-daunted me with its dauntitude! This was the real tough-cookie full-of-biz hands-on can-do Space, not the sheltered village life I'd been used to for 30-odd years. But I flipped the communion-wafer-sized disc that was the bishop's hologramismic epistle to me, and up popped the good bishop, as senile as I am now myself, assurething me that I was part of the 'everything you'll ever need' at PATEL & THOMBS. For solace was greatly required there, and I was the instrument that God hath made to give solace. Solace, sayeth the bishop, was craved lotslotsly by the shoppers and the storepeople. Solace is what they would ask me for, I was assured, and solace I must give abundantly. Some folks became upset, he explained, when looking at the ton-and-a-half of pickled onions the salesman reckoned they'd fork through in what time remained to them. Many went on a binge there and then, just to prove the salesman wrong. They required, yes: solace. My job, that. The megasuperdupermarket, I was told, stirred up all manner of strange emotions, each needing more or less the balm of solace. I was warned especially about the Span Measurement Booth, a medical gadget into which one stepped to have one's life expectancy calculated down to the nearest nano-second. Distressing information to be relayed by a gum-chewing shopgirl - a chaplain had to be on hand to give the moment solace. Solace also in the chocolate department in the presence of the 43 or perhaps just 3 Easter eggs some poor soul had been issued. Solace, the bishop said, always solace, and having added that the church was a major shareholder in PATEL & THOMBS, he leaned over in his hologramismic pulpit and issued me with a half-hour of his own solace-for-vicars, as immediate solace and as an example of same for solaceizing solacefully when my turn to so do came. SOLACE!!!! Huh! An Old Bird Says Hello, p. 171

Lookie-see, the natural world of forests and creatures had long since died out, the seas poisoned, the English countryside gone foxless, Africa elephant-empty, the Garden of Eden withered. a brickyard, ruined... So when Byron Joop hit upon the iffy scheme of a time experiment which would take the planet back to its God-given luxuriant state of jungly abundance, while leaving us as we were, he was given the 'ooooh, rather!' by the lovely Anita, our ravishing leaderette, who announced the impending return of dodos, whales and rutting elk on the viddywall with her usual girlish enthusiasm. The nation was thrilled.    'Will there be bears, wonders I?' bubbled grandfather as we walked to a sickly copse across plashy fields, in the company of Tadese, my grandfather's ginormous Ethiopian disciple. Byron Joop's piggnboggn time experiment misfired, did it not, a corker snafu, and caused not nature's garden to bloom for us, but rather poured the Hittites into our laps, that's whatya! HITTITES - a warrior empire from ancientmost times, returned to life, invading our peacefully noxious present with their curly beards and stone gods, roaring out of the temporal fog in their chariots, obsessed with the vulgar impulse to conquest. But how could an ancient army, though its generals be Napoleons all, cause much botheration to us, with our vaporizers, FQ-bombs, phasers, with our vast armies, militias, polices, every manjack with a zapper, pop-gun or skizzer in each hand?? Even your local Hittite-hating wino with a cricket bat might swat them as they emerged from your local rift in the fabric of time. Nopes! The time rifts spat Hittites at us at an impossible rate. And not just the actual Hittites who had existed in history, those who had left their dusty archaeology upon the hills of Anatolia, but every potential Hittite who may have existed had one Hittite girl married someone-else-instead, had one Hittite sperm won its egg-race instead of another...as all possibilities come to pass in one dimension or another, Hittites came from every parallel dimension, and as dimensional layering is infinite, we might well have been witness to a how-many-Hittites-can-you-fit-on-the-world contest. But after 30 days all the portals healed up, locking 63 billion hungry Hittites on our poor overcrowded world of 20 billion worried souls... A World Gone to the Hittites, p. 189

No, grandfather, I am not like you at all!' spoke Mugg the boy, proudly. 'Speaky-do not to me your outdated twaddlesomeness of a world without rulers and ruled! Heyup, I tell thee, the Lovely Anita is our rightful Queen. Her beauty and wisdom are God-given! He guideth her! He both made her and chose her to rule over us!' The lattersome bit there, of course, is quite true. God chooses our rulers for us, which is why democracy is such a pointless exercise - the Lord hath rigged every election, hath He not indeedy! He chose His daughter Anita to be Queen of England before the Universe was made, also His servant Mugg to one day rise up and be Archbishop of Bunnyland and inspire rabbits in the Christian faith. It is all part of His vast incomprehensible plan, which I have down the years come to believe - though denounced by the Galactic Synod for this as a heretic too long in the company of rabbits - is a plan now incomprehensible even to God Himself, hence the multiplying horrifications and confusifications of these modern times. But tis easy to forget, is it not, that in the infinite dimensional layers of life all conceivable things come to pass, and as God studies these layers what He watches for are the inconceivable things, for only the addition of those may bring His Holy Plan back on course to perfection. Moreso, the Plan is God, God is the Plan - when He grasps it clearly again, He will be Himself once more, all-powerful, all-loving, and evil will be banished from the lives of all His creatures. End of sermon. The Lovely Anita, p. 223

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