The Tales of Slud

Tales of Slud, Prologue, Part 3 - "On the lamentable fate of Philosophers and Historians"

  The Philosophers are a group which developed as a subordinate class among the followers and colleagues of Grankh the Pompous, that is to say, the scientists of Society. The Philosophers, they who trace their lineage backwards (or forwards) to such people as Russel the Distracted and Socraplataristo the Demagogue, the first Philosophers, have a very dangerous job.

Subtitle: "Russell the Distracted, first known Philosopher on Slud (the Planet), shown here with a rather distracted and vaguely disinterested air of pompousness, because he was totally trying to think out some solutions to a problem you totally wouldn't understand..."

For you see, it is an unfortunate side-effect of the study of philosophy that a philosopher might be in the middle of reciting a great work, expounding  upon the empirical differences between “right” and “good”, when all of a sudden, for no conceivable reason, they spontaneously explode into a chunky goulash of blood, flesh, and bone, and utterly perish.

No one has been able to figure out why this strange, tragically regular phenomenon happens, but every Philosopher on Slud (the Planet) appears to ultimately meet with this strange fate at some point during their career, and while some are silenced before they are able to make an impact, others do not explode until they are well established as great philosophical minds, with all sorts of written works of philosophy completed in their names.

It is never really known when a Philosopher will explode, but common observation appears to indicate that he or she will explode. Many have wondered if perhaps the exploding of Philosophers were an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that Time started in the middle instead of the beginning, but they generally tend not to delve too deeply into the question, so as not to face the possibility of, themselves, exploding like the Philosophers.           

The explosion of Philosophers happens so frequently upon Slud (the Planet) that whole branches of study have arisen that are devoted to the strange phenomenon. Scientists of the world have even crafted a specific term for the occurrence. They call it Sophiasplosion, and it is seen as a serious problem among the Philosopher and Historian communities, although many among the scientific community have pointed out that the Philosophers and the Historians might be somewhat biased, considering that they are more likely to be injured or killed in such explosions than members of any other group are.           

Another group which also developed within the scientific community was the Historians, as has already been mentioned. These people had an admirable goal, to be certain. They wanted to find out what really happened during the course of a given event, and write it all down, so that people who came along later (or earlier) would know what happened before (or after)  they were born. Unfortunately for them, they also tend to be very good friends with the Philosophers, with whom they get along with quite well, so whenever the Philosophers happen to fall victim to their exploding fate, Historians are oftentimes nearby, and are as a result of physics, lamentably caught up in the explosions which claim the Philosophers.           

It should be noted that the author of this document is himself both a philosopher and a historian, and he might have cause to worry somewhat, if philosophers and historians meet the same fate on his world as they do upon Slud (the Planet).           

Subtitle: "Tinc the Revisionist, first known Historian on Slud (the Planet), shown here as a stone bust from the Prydean Classical Period. He was also known as "Tinc of the Badly-Drawn-Mustache and Monacle". He was one of the relative few Historians to escape being caught up in the sophiasplosion of philosopher friends, for the simple fact that he HAD no friends. At least, no non-imaginary friends."

  Of course, not all philosophers and historians get caught in these explosions before they are able to publish works of philosophy or history. Some are, indeed, able to pass on some of their knowledge to other generations, and it is these documents of philosophy and history which have survived the explosive conflagration of their authors that constitute human philosophical and historical understanding on Slud (the Planet).           

The author inserts this side-elaboration upon the subject of Philosophers and Historians because, as a Philosopher and a Historian himself, he understands that he very well might one day also explode as a consequence of his obsessive interest in Philosophy, and so if this document happens to end abruptly and not at all in the manner that it should, it is probably to be assumed that the author has exploded, and is no longer able to write any furth-- 

KABOOM! 

(Sorry, that's just the author's idea of a joke. He hasn't really sophiasploded. Yet.)

Tales of Slud, Prologue, Part 2 - "The Unfortunate Tale Of Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time"

  JOSHUA CALENDAR AND THE UTTERLY CONFUSED TIME TRIBE OF THE CALENDRIANS

The solution to the question of Time, which the D.M. employed to solve the tremendous gaps in language, culture, technology, and understanding that had developed between human beings was incredibly complex, as has been said, and few there are in all the Universe of Slud who can even come close to understanding a significant portion of The D.M.'s incredibly convoluted solution to that problem. In fact, right up to the very present day (whenever that is), only one being among all the entire human species on Slud (the Planet) has ever been able to understand all of it, and he was, after all, that system's creator. And that system's creator happens to be to be horribly, tragically, awfully mad. He is that poor, unfortunate soul named Joshua Calendar, who would later (or earlier) in life achieve tragic fame as the Time-Keeper, and this is his story. 

Joshua Calendar originally was born into a Time-Tribe of the distant future, which even though it like all Time Tribes had thousands of different names (for the members of it spoke thousands of different languages and dialects), contemporary Historians choose for the sake of preserving what is left of their sanity to name with but a single name...the Calendrian Tribe.

It was to members of the Calendrian Tribe that Joshua Calendar was, as has already been said, born in the distant future. (Though the author of this document acknowledges that terms like 'future' had very little meaning whatsoever upon Slud, in those days. Really, the term 'future' does not mean all that much in the present day either.) 

Life within Time-Tribes such as that of the Calendrians was an experience that one might very well imagine would be, had it occurred in a Universe that makes sense, very odd and even awkward, to say the least. Evidence obtained from the archaeological and anthropological record suggests that the members of such communities spent very little time in actually attempting to communicate with each other, though they lived side by side, ate the same food, shared the same nomadic, hunter-gatherer life. Each perhaps saw such an act of communication as futile, because the highly disparate natures of each member's chronological, cultural, educational and historical background caused the various Tribespeople of the Calendrian Time Tribe, like any other Time Tribe, to quite frankly not have any idea what each other were talking about. However,  it is clear that primal humans did make at least a cursory attempt to communicate with each other when communication was absolutely necessary, as in the case of public activities such as the gathering of stores of Krunsche Berries and other forage. But the overall dearth of communication strained the development of social relationships between people to such an extent that, for the most part, it seems that the early humans of pre-society Slud (the Planet) tended to long periods of solitude and private reflection as the basic character of their social existence.  However, in a twist of fate that is quite strange considering the social problems which plagued the early Sluddish peoples, even the early humans of the pre-society Time-Tribe were, as the D.M. had created their ancestors (or descendants) to be, social creatures who nonetheless required some sort of social interaction with others of their own kind., above and beyond the usual biological functions like reproduction. Because the Time-Tribe brought together peoples of different times and cultures, of course, communicating with those who, rather randomly, were stranded there and then alongside them and stuck being their contemporaries was incredibly difficult, but these early humans sought to solve the problem of social interaction by attempting to discover ways to reach their thoughts and their words through Time itself in an attempt to hold conversation with others of their own Time who had ended up stranded in other eras. As if this concept is not confusing enough, of course, the whole idea is further complicated by the fact that, upon very rare occasions as indicated by the historical record, they appear to have succeeded in having such conversations, if only by accident.

As for young Joshua Calendar of the Calendrians, he had many relatives within the distant past (and a few within the future as well) with whom he would have loved to have gone and visited, only he could not quite figure out how to visit the past in anything but thought, nor did he seem to find the secret of how to communicate with his other-timely relatives from his own time...most likely because there was not, in fact, any such secret at all. This fact caused a profound sense of consternation and chagrin in those who made the attempt, which was so strong that it tended to unhinge the minds that, as the person was driven like all Humans are towards making such an attempt at contact with their contemporaries, people began to lose their sense of reality entirely. This was a common problem which, never really having been solved, tended to drive the older members of the Time Tribe more than a little crazy. The Youth of the Time Tribe, however, possessing a more elastic mind and the ability to process changes and oddities more effectively, were not usually overdamaged by the problem of Time. At least not immediately. But the feeling of attempting to communicate with others from across barriers of Time carries with it a similar sensation to that which is felt by those who experience unrequited love. Or blue-balls, as the case may be. And if there's two feelings that the newly-pubescent adolescent understands all too lamentably well, it is both the feeling of unrequited love...and the feeling of unrequited sexual arousal. As frustrating it was for early (or late) Humans to communicate with their other-timely relatives, however, the proto-humans of the epoch of the Time Tribes did have the ability to focus on the pressing concerns of what was, to them, the present. Food was then, as it is now, one of the primary sustainers of Human life on this planet, and the getting of food was then, as it is now, a priority of the greatest biological urgency. As the various Time Tribes of the world depended for their very existence upon the ability to organize, at least somewhat effectively, hunting and gathering parties to lay in a stock of provisions, so then the various Tribespeople, out of a necessity, found at least a temporary way around the problem of people not being able to communicate linguistically with each other...by developing what could only be realistically described as a "non-language", consisting not of verbal words but of mere glances of the eyes and the movement of the fingers of the hand as if those movements, themselves, were words.  This non-language of signs and body movements, called by contemporary linguists the Calendrian Hunting Language, was the basis of communication for early (or late) Humans, and is still seen today as a marvel of non-linguistics, uncharacteristic as a marvel is of a species who has made such stupid and egregious mistakes throuhout its history as the Human species on Slud (the Planet) has done. The Calendrian Hunting Language is seen as such a marvel because it enabled humans to not only survive, but also to cooperate with each other in community activities such as hunting and gathering wild fruits and cereal grains. The Calendrian Hunting Language also made possible the eventual domestication of several species of Blandred, notably the Dahwg and the Kaht as dedicated companions and protectors of the Tribe, and Slaughterbeasts, Woolmakers, and Middengaffles as beasts of burden and as livestock, because the early (or late) Humans of Slud (the Planet) discovered that they could use the Calendrian Hunting Language to forge a limited mind-to-mind bond with the animals in their environment. Therefore the Calendarian Hunting Language allowed Humans to maintain an evolutionary edge over the other creatures around them, and as a result of this massive success, the Calendrian Hunting Language had spread from Time Tribe to Time Tribe, all across the planet, and had, long before (or after) Joshua's time, become the standard form of conversation between one Human and another. And this act of conversation became the foundation upon which was later built the First Great Conversation, the apocalyptic event which caused human beings to create Society. The Calendrian Hunting Language also, almost as a mere incidental side-effect, caused Humans to be able to use their ability to cooperate with each other to train cooperatively, and it was there that the very first ancestor (or descendant) of armies was created, in the form of the Time Tribal hunting party.  Like the other males of his Time-Tribe, Joshua was well-trained in techniques useful in hunting, among other types, the Blahrg, which resembled large, boring Aurochs. He was also trained in working together with other Tribesmen to hunt and kill the Wammot, a rather large Blandred species of a similar appearance to wild elephants, except that they, of course, looked far more dreary with their grey wooly coats of depressingly unlustrous fur and their large, uninteresting trunks of wrinkled Wammotflesh. Wammots were so sickeningly uninteresting that for a solid week after any Wammot hunt, everyone who hunted them ended up requiring a week's worth of recuperation, in the form of mental health services, and so it was that the Humans of Slud (the Planet) invented psychoanalysts before they had even invented a Society for psychoanalysts to exist within. Joshua also knew how to hunt and kill the the Hugivzafuchitherium, which resembled a giant tree sloth, but, of course, far more dreadfully unexciting. As it turned out, killing the Hugivzafuchitherium was remarkably easy to accomplish, as the animal quite literally killed itself, by accidentally falling out the trees from which they usually dangled. The Hugivzafuchitherium had evolved claws strong enough to climb their trees but had not yet evolved claws sturdy enough to support their half-ton of body weight hanging from a tree for very long, and thus the hunters of the various Time Tribes could get half a ton of edible meat with as much effort as it took to go and pick up the smashed, internally bleeding corpse of a dead tree creature, tie it to sturdy wooden poles, and carry the creature back to the Time Tribal encampment. And this they did on an average, it is estimated, of twice a month.

Because the sheer disorganization of the Human species, as evidenced by the unmitigated confusion that was everyday life in the Time Tribe, made daily hunting and gathering an absolute necessity for all members, Joshua quite naturally was expected to take part in the activities of his fellows. As a male member of the Tribe, that meant accompanying the elders and the greatest of the hunters on their expeditions into the wilderness in search of large game to hunt down and kill, which, of course, he did, because he did not wish to starve. And Joshua, possessing despite all factors a well-developed sense of both duty and responsibility, quite naturally played his expected role in the welfare of the Calendrian Tribe. But Joshua Calendar had hopes and dreams of his own, and he had ambitions beyond the horizons of day-to-day survival, for He wanted to become a Space-Archaeologist, regardless of the fact that in a normal society where Time flows from beginning to end in an orderly progression, there would have been no way that a primitive caveman would have had any notion at all of any of the sciences, much less a highly sophisticated one such as Archaeology, the space kind or otherwise.  The fact that Space-Archaeology did not exist yet except as a thought in the mind of one cave boy named Joshua Calendar, however, is not as remarkable a fact as the fact that, because it will have existed it had already existed, and therefore existed also in the present, albeit in an ideal form rather than the physical form it would have taken when someone finally got around to inventing it. This woulc, of course, be very confusing if not for the fact that it makes far more sense due to the nature of "Sluddish Time" than it would in any other method of Time Progression in any other Universe at all in perhaps all of existence. It mattered little, due to the nature of Sluddish Time, that humankind had never been able to move past the hunter-gatherer stage of their development. Joshua nonetheless knew what Space Archaeology was because, as has been noted, in the Universe of Slud, the past and the future both happen simultaneously and are experienced simultaneously. Therefore, as was just noted earlier in this paragraph, because Space Archaeology existed in the Future, it also had existed in the Past, and therefore could be perceived in the Present. And that overly complicated explanation, of course, explains to those willing to go to the effort of unraveling it exactly how it was that a young cave boy like Joshua Calendar could have known about a thing that still lay thousands of years away in the history and evolution of his species. Yet, beyond all of that, the fact remained that the field of science of which Joshua Calendar dreamed as a young man did not, in actuality, exist yet. So, obviously, his dream to become a Space-Archaeologist was pretty much out of the question, at least for the time being (whenever that happened to be).

Subtitle: "Space Archaeology: Yeah, the author is not quite sure how it relates to this picture either..."

But young Joshua Calendar possessed a keen mind and an inquisitive spirit, and he was always seeking to learn what he could about whatever subject he set his mind to learn. It seemed to him that the Human species could solve all the problems which beset them, if they would just learn things, and put their heads together to figure out a common solution that worked for everyone. And there is much evidence, usually in the form of cave paintings and strange etchings on ancient rocks that suggests that early (or late) people did cooperate with each other on an extremely limited basis within the Time Tribe. Cooperation of a rudimentary sort was necessary in order to ensure their survival in the Tribe and in the hunt. But beyond the cooperation that each Tribesperson gave to ensure that the Tribe had what they needed to survive, the people of the Tribe did not have other dealings with each other, for they were sundered from one another, as has been mentioned, by barriers of language and culture, the Time-Tribe being composed of peoples native to different times, and thus possessing entirely different sets of values and morals and ethics and understandings.

  But upon one day incredibly far into the future (or the past. Or, even more incredibly, maybe both), like so many years far into the future that it's mind-boggling, Joshua Calendar, then a young man of fifteen years of age, went out with His fellow hunters to hunt the incredibly uninteresting Blandred, whom those idle fellows in the Blandred-classification field tend to call Blahrg, which, after all, might have been ultimately appropriate because the word pretty much sounds like the phonemic version of a shrug. And well they should, perhaps, have behaved, thus, as if they did not really care very much about the animal. After all, even the poor animal's Creator, in the act of creating it, acted as if, having gotten the frame more or less correct with but a few exceptions and then, when it had come time to decorate the skin of the creature with some fur, had been too lazy to do so, but had instead thrown His hands up, saying, “Well, that's good enough for this one!”, and then had gone on to create some other, more interesting species, perhaps a Smilodon. Or a Cabbage.

But as mentioned before, the people of Joshua's Time-Tribe went out to the hunt, as they always did when their stock of food dropped below a level that was safe to disregard. It was a cloudy day, and the sun was well-hidden beyond a flat gray blanket of cloud, and this was prime weather for hunting the Blahrg. And all the hunters knew that boring weather was the best weather in which to hunt a drearily boring creature.

The hunt went well for the hunters of Joshua's Time-Tribe. They caught a totally unremarkable herd of Blahrg with a couple Wammot companions on the Plains of Dirtengras, which, in the language of (some of) the people of that time, meant (or will mean) "Dirt and Grass". 

Subtitle: "Much later (or earlier) artist's representation of the rather confused fellows in Joshua Calendar's Time Tribe, engaging in a bit of caveman badassery."

The hunters, brandishing leathern slings and wooden spearthrowers armed with long stone-tipped spears, killed several full-sized adult Blahrgs, and the two Wammots, obtaining enough meat to feed the whole tribe for several weeks, and all seemed to be going much as it usually did when the hunters went out to the hunt.

But a fleeing Blahrg, boring as it is, can still be quite a dangerous thing to those who stand in its way, and young Joshua Calendar found himself standing directly in the path of one such creature. Running away from difficulty and danger is one of the defining characteristics of the various species of Blandred upon Slud (The Planet), and the Blahrg, being so utterly boring, are certainly not the species to break the mold. So the Blahrg, by running away from the hunters throwing spears at them, were reacting in a very predictable manner.

Had young Joshua kept his mind on the task at hand, he would have known to dodge to the side. For he knew that the Blahrg, being terribly predictable, would only charge in a straight line, and would not turn aside from their set path even to attack nearby people. And he knew, quite well actually, that by merely stepping out of the path of the Blahrg, he would be in no danger whatsoever of being hit by the oncoming rush of Blahrg-flesh.

But Joshua had a tendency, on rare occasions, to become somewhat preoccupied with this problem or that problem, being one who absolutely could not stand to leave a question unexamined. Thus it was that sometimes, the abstracted young man did not exactly pay very close attention to what was going on around him, or at least not as close attention as he should have.

On this particular occasion, he happened to have been distracted by the question of how to advance the human species from Time-Tribes to some sort of unified understanding of how to interact with each other...he did not know why he chose the word, but in his mind he called such a general understanding a "Society"...so that he could provide the groundwork for establishing the field of Space-Archaeology. His motivation for devoting his attention to that particular problem is that it occurred to him that Space-Archaeology could not possibly come into actual existence until a Society came into existence first, and he really, really wanted to do that for a living. That seemed like a way better job than hunting boring creatures and then spending long, tedious hours cleaning the meat for cooking.

But how did he propose to advance humankind? As has already been mentioned, people could not cooperate with each other very well because they were all stuck in times other than perhaps they should have been. The people of this era and the people of that era, though they lived side by side in the same location and the same Time Tribe, nonetheless held the values and opinions of their own eras, as well as the languages and even their very modes of thinking of their own eras, instead of sharing, like other cultures in other modes of reality presumably do, a common verbal language and common understanding of the world. And thus the people of Slud (the Planet) were separated by all sorts of gaps of language and culture, so that it was difficult to communicate well with even the members of one's own Time Tribe. They all had some very interesting things to say, but making themselves understood was very difficult. Now, in other worlds, people have the ability to overcome linguistic barriers, by learning the languages of each other and thus becoming able to understand the thoughts transmitted by each other. But the People of Slud (the Planet), it must be remembered, had been created with The D.M. as the ideal upon which they were based. And let's face it...by now author and reader alike has come to an understanding that The D.M. is really rather sort of a stupid jerk. Thus the humans of Slud (The Planet) inherited from the D.M. his essential attributes of laziness and lack of common-sense, and thus they found themselves unable to muster the willpower necessary to learn the languages of one another, a condition which, sadly, has persisted to some extent even after the development of Society made it easier to learn a language. (And this fact has led to periodic bouts of mass-depression amongst the humans of this world. Seriously, you would not believe how soul-drainingly depressing the thought is that the D.M. is God here. For real. We have the lamest God ever. I mean, starting the history of Slud(The Planet) in the Middle instead of at the Beginning? Who does that?)         

CRACK!!!

Joshua's thoughts were suddenly, jarringly interrupted when he realized two things, almost at the same time. The first thing he noticed was that, because he had not been paying proper attention to where he had been going and what he had been doing, he was now flying through the air, an action to which he was not accustomed, since it was well known that human beings could not fly. He saw the still-charging Blahrg below him, running in that straight path past the point where Joshua had lately been standing. The straight path in which he had known the creature would run. 

The second thing that he noticed was that he was in a great deal of pain. Apparently, the cracking sound had been one, or several, of his ribs. He was badly hurt, and he knew it was going to hurt more when he hit the ground.

And hit the ground he did. Another rib snapped, and his prophecy of an instant before now then coming true, Joshua screamed once in terrible pain...but the rest of the hunters were intent upon the hunt, and their attention was focused elsewhere, so that none noticed Joshua laying in the grass, bleeding internally and moaning in a quiet, pitiful voice. Joshua found that he could not move, and even making any sound at all appeared to grow more and more difficult, as one of the cracked ribs pierced his lung, filling his air passages with blood, a situation which is generally not considered to be exactly conducive to the fine working order of the respiratory system. As time passed, he began to fade in and out of consciousness, and in a dazed state of mind, young Joshua wondered if this was what it felt like to die? The pain! Would it stop when he was finished with dying? It seemed unbearable! He had no clue how much time had passed with him laying there upon the turf of the Dirtengras, his insides filling with his internally-spilling lifeblood.  He was only vaguely aware of the voices of his fellow hunters, seemingly far-off in the distance, shouting slightly confused commands to each other. 

And then, after a couple moments that seemed like an agonized eternity, the air in front of Joshua's broken body shimmered, and a being appeared, standing on the grass. He wore a coat of every color, with hues tempered in such a way that the colors blended together into a color unspeakably beautiful and unspeakably profound...

Or, rather, that's how the color would have looked, had The D.M. not been too lazy to make sure that He had mixed the colors correctly. Instead, the color was closer to a purplish, beige-ish puce color, perhaps one of the ugliest colors there is.

And indeed it was the D.M. Himself, the God who created Slud (The Universe), and whom now stood before the wounded Joshua Calendar who lay, perhaps dying, upon the Plains of Dirtengras. It was not at all difficult to recognize the D.M., as paintings of the D.M. appeared on many of the cavern walls of the world's time-tribes, always drawn in a bit of a half-hearted, “good enough” sort of fashion, and usually drawn in some measure of anger or frustration. He had often thought that the cave-paintings were really rather poorly rendered, and thus not really a good example of what the God of the Universe looked like, but the Being standing before young Joshua now was every bit as mediocre as the cave-paintings had led him to believe. Looking upon the D.M., who was really this sort of dumpy, slobbish fellow, even in his pain Joshua could see how such dreary, uninteresting creatures like Blandred could have come to have been created by such a being as the D.M. And even in his agony, Joshua laughed, for with the wisdom of impending death, he had comprehended and understood the great joke that is intertwined into the very center of existence itself. It really was pretty funny, in an “Oh my D.M! That's so wrong!” sort of way.

Joshua shuddered from the burning pain. He was bleeding internally, and heavily at that. His lungs were filling with his blood, and he was choking. Choking...

“This must not be!” exclaimed the D.M.

“Wh...wha...what?” Joshua stuttered weakly, laboring greatly to speak even that one word.      

“Oh, sorry!” the DM said, and His voice immediately lost much of its power, and much of its loudness, though the sound of his booming words had drawn the attention of some of the nearest hunters, Joshua's fellow Tribespeople, who now could be seen sprinting towards the location of the fallen Joshua.

“I meant, 'This must not be!'”

Subtitle: "This God is way more awesome than The D.M. Like maybe 32 million times more awesome than The D.M."     

“I...heard you...the...f...f..first t...time.” Joshua muttered. His body shook with a wan little cough, and blood trickled from between his lips, to run in a little rivulet down his chin. “Am...am I going to die?”

“That will not do at all, Joshua Calendar. I have different plans for you.” the D.M. said with a look of impatience upon His face, and He snapped His fingers, for The D.M. sometimes felt the need to snap His fingers or make some other gesture to indicate a use of His power, almost as if no one would actually believe He were using His power otherwise. This was, of course, completely unnecessary, as He could create matter within Slud (the Universe) by mere Thought alone. However, it is to be understood that the D.M. apparently had reasons of His own for such ostentatious behavior.  And those probably had something vaguely to do with the fact that He was lazy and stupid. 

But regardless of The D.M.'s snapping fingers, or, for that matter, regardless of The D.M.'s reasons for snapping them, Joshua Calendar noticed that the pain was gone. Completely. At that very moment, Joshua Calendar was fully healed, and all pain was gone from him. Joshua marveled at the sudden change...one second his nerves had seemed to send burning signals to his brain as if they were on fire. The next second, the most balmy and healthy feeling had spread across his entire body, and he discovered quite to his surprise that he did not even feel the headache with which he had started his morning, a few hours and a seeming eternity ago.

In disbelief, Joshua rose to his feet, dusted himself off, and stared at his own body in wonder. Had he not just been laying there upon the ground, spilling out his lifeblood upon the grass? Yet now he stood, as healthy and hale as he had been when he had awakened that very morning, and it was as if the Blahrg had never struck him, though he clearly remembered the pain which had only a moment before convulsed his body.

“Wow! You're really Him, aren't you?” Joshua shouted, his voice ringing with a note of disbelief. “You are the God of the whole Universe!”

“Aww, shucks.” the D.M. replied, bashfully staring at the ground, a foolish smile creeping across his face as he playfully kicked at the dirt beneath his feet. “I'm not all that great, really.” And then, as if remembering that He really, actually was the God of this whole Universe, He cleared his throat, and His eyes narrowed slightly.      

“Right. Down to business.” said the D.M., and he squared His shoulders. He reached forth one single finger, and poked at Joshua's forehead, and the force of the D.M.'s poke drove Joshua backwards.

“What did you do that for?” Joshua asked, and the D.M. smiled with a fraudulent, humorous twinkle in His eye..

“Just checking to make sure you're healed, Joshua.” He replied in a tone of feigned innocence.

“I'm not going to die, then?” Joshua asked, slapping the grey fur of the animal pelts that, sewn together with deer sinew, made his clothing. A cloud of dust bloomed in the air around him. The D.M. shook His head, His facial features for a moment crossing awe with a peculiar look of pity as He gazed upon the young man who stood before Him. 

“No, Joshua, you're not. Not for a very, very long time. Maybe even never. You would have died eventually, you know. Even if you had not been injured by the Blahrg, you would eventually have died. Almost everyone does. You are mortals. It's built into who you are, as a species and as individuals. But you, Joshua, you're a special case.” the D.M. answered.

“I am? Me?” Joshua asked, his eyes widening in incredulity. He could think of words to describe human beings, but “special” would not have been one such word, and Joshua was not even certain that he knew what the word meant anyway. Was it like getting to become a Space-Archaeologist? At any rate, he did not see how he could ever be special, even among human beings. 

“Yes, you are, Joshua. You see, your people are stuck in a terrible rut.” the D.M. said, and there was a hint of annoyance in His voice now. “It's not really your fault. I won't go too deeply into the details, but it appears that some dumbass who will remain nameless, but whom I assure you is very lazy and doesn't possess the best common sense, sort of...well...coughcoughcreatedtimeinthewrongordercoughcough.”

The D.M.'s attempts to conceal his words within an intentional cough were, certainly, not fooling anyone, especially not the precocious young Joshua Calendar. It was clear that The D.M. had been referring to no other "dumbass" but Himself, for who else could have created Time at all? But what did The D.M.'s enigmatic words mean? Joshua was resolved to discover the answer to that question. 

“Created...time...in the wrong...order?” Joshua asked, slowly sounding out the words to ensure that he had pronounced them correctly. 

“Yes. It is the reason why your three Brothers and your Grandmother live in the past, your Nephew and Grandfather live in another age, and you, your Mother, and your Sister live here in the future. Well, it's their future, but it's your present.” the D.M. replied, and his answer was not at all doing for young Joshua what answers are generally supposed to. In fact, it was leaving his inquisitive mind with more questions. As The D.M. explained this Time discrepancy, His own face took on a look of consternation mingled with curiosity which could only indicate to the observant that even The D.M. might not have been completely sure how Time Progression was supposed to work here. 

“Then there are others? Others like me, and in other times, I mean?” Joshua asked with astonishment, cutting into The D.M.'s momentary self-bemusement. The notion had indeed occurred to people of the Calendrian Tribe that they were somehow incomplete in their social arrangements, and that a part of their families lived elsewhere, in another time or another world...that much had been surmised by even the most inept communicators among them. But to have such a surmise thus confirmed by The D.M., the God of Gods, the Creator of all Things and the Essence of all Things in the Universe! Amazing! Such a thought was so big that it took up an entire Universe of being...and though Joshua's mind was stronger and larger than most, it shrank back in awe and terror from the sheer immensity of the being who stood before him, looking far more dumpy and foolish than any God probably should, but whose presense was so overwhelming as to almost wipe out every other thought...almost.  

“Certainly there are. And because Time was...created in a way other than perhaps it should have been, you are stranded in different Ages. You are incomplete creatures, and I really must apologize for that...on behalf of that lazy fellow who created all this...problem.” the D.M. responded in a stern tone, His gaze burning like fire doesn't.  

“But you are God! You are the D.M., the One that is painted on the cavern walls!” said young Joshua, his eyes widening even further in awe of this utterly disappointingly unostentatious, dorkish Supreme Being standing before him, with each element of clothing a different color and all colors precisely those colors which do not match or compliment each other.  Around His neck and upmost chest was tied a makeshift cape that would have looked more at home on a towel rack than on someone's back. If Joshua Calendar had not been preoccupied with another thought at that particular moment, which, of course, he was, he would have realized that the God of the entire Universe was, in himself and his own creative style, rather an absurd, maybe even self-effacing sort of Being. But, as has been noted, Joshua Calendar did not notice that, for he was presently grasping at the thought which had occurred to him but a moment before, which was this... 

“The Elders who speak the same language that I do, they say that you are One who created Time. Does that not mean that you created this problem?” “Your Elders talk too much.” The D.M. retorted with a disgusted sigh, His eyes flashing with irritation. 

“And the Elders also say that it was You, O my D.M., Who cast humans into different Ages from our Families, and they say that You do this thing to us because we have angered you!” 

“Well, that's not exactly true.” the D.M. muttered, looking somewhat embarrassed. A momentary look of self-loathing passed across his eyes like the shadow of a passing cloud...it seemed to Joshua that here was a God who really disliked the limits of His own ignorance. “I did create Time, but I didn't create it that way in order to punish you. It's just that I had to clean the fryer at work that night, and then do inventory, and I was a bit tired, so I wasn't really paying attention to the chronological order of my campaign notes.”

“Fry-ur? In-vent-o-ree? Chron-o-log-i-cal? Cam-pae Jin notes?” Joshua asked, sounding out each syllable slowly...for the words that the D.M. had spoken were strange to him, and he was puzzled that he did not know their meaning. 

“Never mind. It's not important. What is important, though, is that you, Joshua, are now Immortal.” the D.M. replied. And now His features displayed a mixture of amusement and pity, and even a fair amount of awe of His own. Joshua was somewhat taken aback to notice that. What was it that the D.M. saw in him, to justify such a gaze?

“I am Imm-ortal?” Joshua asked. There was another strange word.

“It means you won't die. You can't die. You're too important to the world now.”

“Me?” the youth asked, disbelievingly. “Why me?”

“'Why me?' What is this, an Eddings novel?” the D.M. muttered crossly.

“I don't quite think that I take your meaning exactly.” Joshua said uncertainly, looking at The D.M. through narrowedly lidded eyes.

“Never mind. You'd probably not understand the reference.” the D.M. replied, rolling His eyes skyward. “But in order to head off the probability of you asking such a silly question again, I will answer it for you, Joshua.”

Joshua Calendar did not at all think that he had asked a silly question, and he was a bit indignant about it, but he reminded himself that The D.M. could pretty much condescend to whomever in the world that He so chose, so Joshua kept his peace, and allowed the D.M. to continue without interruption.

“Why you? First of all, because I will it to be so and because I say so. But the reason for that is because I have chosen you to unify the measure and classification and also the quality of Time into a single, continuous system, Joshua. I have created a way to make sense of it all, somewhat, but you will be my vessel, Joshua. My reasons for doing so are my own, and I do not consider that to be information you need to know just now. However, what you do need to know is that I have chosen you to reveal to the people of your species the methods by which Time may be reckoned, and throughout this conversation I have been placing within your mind the ability to see the relations of Time unto Itself, so that even though the Time of this Universe is pretty badly jumbled, yet now, by My will, you may see how all Ages must progress within the boundaries of this world I have caused to be. And it will be up to you, Joshua, to spur humankind, your...our species, into developing a Society, Joshua, and Society you will cause humans to create, I guarantee it, though the ultimate destinies of all creatures, I will keep as My own secret. But indeed you will cause humans to create society, and you will either do it by willful design or you will do it by accident.” And the D.M. stared purposefully at Joshua Calendar. “Do you understand, Joshua? And do you see the answers within your mind?”

And, quite to Joshua's surprise, he found that he could indeed see the answers within his mind. There was a lot there that had not been there before, really. His mind was suddenly filled with knowledge that he had no memory of ever having acquired through study. Every language that had existed, did exist, and ever will exist, in any species, on any planet, in any universe...each and every letter of each and every word. He discovered with wonder that he saw how every creature in all of existence interacted with every thing that they encountered, and he perceived also how each was related to one another in a bond of similarity and equal heritage. He saw each and every relationship in the entire Universe of Universes, and the utter boundaries of his mind expanded outward in all directions like a Tsunami shaped as an ever-increasing sphere, like the waves of concussion which follow an explosion. Like the ripples which eminate out from a raindrop. Suddenly, old thoughts of the past that he had at other times set aside because he had not understood them, he now understood them. Solutions to problems he had not yet even thought to ponder came pouring into him from the all eventualities in all times. And his mind, his intellect, his consciousness, even, rippled outward from him.

For that matter, the physics of the expansion of his mind reminded him somewhat of the apparent physics of Time itself in that Universe. At the centerpoint, there had Time begun, as his mind also had started at the centerpoint, and had expanded from there. Each had expanded from the Middle. And there, within the very center of the concept of Time itself, ahhh, there was the answer he was supposed to know.

Suddenly, Space-Archaeology did not loom so prominently in Joshua's worldview. “Yes." Joshua said in a tone of wonder verging on ecstasy. "I can see the answers within my mind. My mind is huge, O D.M.! Huge! I can see everything I need to know! It is even as you say.” Joshua responded, his eyes wide with awed wonder. There were so many details to take in.

“Because I have so willed it, you now possess within you knowledge of many things. Among them is the sacred knowledge of literacy. Not just literacy, but universal literacy. You know how to read in every language that ever will exist within Slud (the Universe), and you know also how to write in every language, and this is a knowledge that no one else, not even the Elders of your Tribe have learned. "I can see it!" Joshua said triumphantly, reading entire books in his head while he said those four words.  "In fact, Joshua, I didn't stop at giving you that power. I have granted you also a keen intellect, with which to process the incredibly huge amounts of data that you will need to sort out.” the D.M. said in almost a matter-of-fact tone. “You weren't precisely stupid before, Joshua my boy, but now you're positively brilliant, Son, and you will be able to do so much good for your world. In fact, the problems of this world will be solved through you, Joshua Calendar, though you might well go crazy before it's all said and done.”

“Wait, what?” Joshua asked, his eyebrows shooting upwards in dismay. He did not want to go crazy. He liked sanity just fine, thank you very much, and he did not at all like the concept of not being in control of his own thoughts. He made a mental note to himself that crazy was a state he should make all attempts to avoid in the future (or past, or present, for that matter).

“D.M.damn...” Joshua said with dawning horror in his voice. Yet, even as he said this, he noted in passing that the people of Slud (the Planet) had some pretty lame curse words. He'd have to remember at some point to sit down and come up with some proper curse words for a new Sluddish language. In fact, he'd probably have to come up with an actual new Sluddish Language...and for that matter, he'd have to come up with the Old Sluddish language also. “D.M.damn” just was not cutting it.

“What is it that you want me to do, that I would have to give up my sanity to accomplish it?”

“You will compile a great work, which will allow the people of this world to measure time properly, and your work shall always be with the people of this world, Joshua. The people of this world will eventually innovate a certain device based upon your work. They shall even name that device after you, in fact.”

“They shall call it a Joshua?” the young Joshua Calendar asked. His intellect might have been supercharged by the will of the D.M., but his powers of perception were still laboring to catch up, for they were still very much focused on seeing the wondrous new thoughts that had flowed into his head for the past few minutes.        

“No, they will call it a Calendar. Like your surname? Get it? Ahahaha haha ha....ha...ha?” the D.M. asked, His voice trailing off as both He and Joshua slipped into an awkward silence.                  

Somewhere in the background, a cricket chirped twice.

“Right." The D.M. muttered, his eyes darting back and forth after the manner of a man caught in an awkward moment, which, of course, with the publication of a history containing this particular scene, He has been...He cleared His throat rather noisily, and said, "So anyways, I hereby charge you with the task of putting together a Calendar that makes sense out of Time. From the fruits of your labors will the beings of the world come to know what they need to know in order to create a Society, which will be as a road to the fulfillment of their destinies, both as individuals and as equally human members of human Society. From you will humans learn of the true meaning of what it means to be human, though many of them will not learn at a rate which you might prefer, and sometimes the lessons they learn will seem strange to you. Guard yourself well and conduct yourself with patience, my young Immortal, because if ever you go mad, it will be from frustration, and anger, and chagrin, and, worst of all, despair, and then, the fate of the Universe might very well be left to chance, without you to guide it.”

And a shadow fell once again upon the thoughts of Joshua Calendar at the D.M.'s warning. But Joshua figured that the D.M. was overstating the danger somewhat. After all, it seemed to Joshua that human beings could be counted upon to be reasonable, if the solutions to their problems were explained to them in a rational and reasonable way.

The author of this history will now pause the flow of this document long enough to allow the reader ample time to snicker at Joshua's naivete.

  …...

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tah-tah-tah-tahtah taaaah......

…...

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  And, having determined that the reader has likely, by this point, purged himself or herself of all but the most lingering guffaws, the author will now resume this tale where he left off...  The D.M. cast a stern look at Joshua, saying,

“Among all the creatures of this world, you will be the absolute authority on Time, Joshua. I hereby will that you shall be the Time-Keeper. Make your Calendar well, Joshua, because in all matters of time, the people of the world will appeal to you for all inquiries. And with regards to Time, your word will be law. Therefore use the knowledge I have gifted to you, Keeper of Time, and use it with wisdom, for if you falter in the Keeping of Time, who in all of the human species will there be to keep it for you?”

And Joshua's mind still reeled, somewhat, for there was stored there, now, a knowledge far beyond the knowledge of his fellow humans, although Joshua had not been taught nearly as much as he would have been, had the D.M., of course, not been lazy and lacking in common sense. Which, of course, He was.

And Behold! Having rendered instruction unto young Joshua Calendar, the D.M. murmured something about a Guitar Hero tournament, and He turned His back on Joshua, as if to walk away, even though they both quite understood that He could have simply vanished out of Slud (both the Planet and the Universe) and returned to that subjective world in which He spent the vast majority of His time and attention. But then, as if stricken with a sudden afterthought, The D.M. turned to face Joshua once more, and raising one hand from his side to hold up one finger for emphasis, He told Joshua one more thing. "Remember always, Joshua, that whatever you may ever seek to learn, you already know it." And then, quite as suddenly as He had appeared, the D.M. was gone once again from the world, and the peoples of the world would have been sorely troubled at His absence, but for the fact that the general human populace at that time more or less realized that whenever the D.M. showed up, some bad things happened to them. And they more or less figured that the less God was involved in their affairs, the better off everyone in the world would be. 

But as for young Joshua Calendar, who now upon this very special day found himself transformed (or rather...enhanced) into a very intelligent man, he was now as comparable to his fellow humans as his fellow humans were comparable to cockroaches. Really dense, maybe even obtuse cockroaches. As it turned out, Joshua's opinion of his fellow humans might possibly have been overstated. 

Almost before The D.M. had finished disappearing from the entirety of Slud (the Universe), Joshua Calendar had begun to turn his massive powers of mental computation to the the desired nature of the Society that was destined to come to Humans around the world. As his fellow hunters came upon him, thinking to find him laying in the grass injured by the tiresomely boring quarry that several hunters now carried between them hanging from long bamboo sticks that they slung over their shoulders, they found him standing there among the waist-high grasses, unmarked by even the slightest wound, as if in the very flower of health, which, of course, after his life-saving and life-changing encounter with the God of their entire Universe, he was. His erstwhile companions also encountered in young Joshua something that no human on Slud (the Planet) had ever before encountered...a man staring abstractedly ahead of him at thin air because his mind was completely absorbed in the complex workings of deep thought. They being by all accounts rather average humans, the hunters of the Calendrian Time Tribe, of course, completely missed the point of this.  But they asked Joshua, in that halting, badly pronounced, confusing and ever-changing patois which passed at that time for a proto-language, if he was okay. "Yes. I am okay." he said with an accent so fluent and graceful that his previous self, the rather foolish young man he had been when he had awakened from his bed of animal hides that morning would have thought that the words his present self was now speaking were an entirely different language...or rather, it would be A language, while the hackjob that the rest of the humans spoke, barely noticeable before, was now not so much a language as it was a vulgar, guttural, cavemanish abomination of grunts and clicks and not a few actual bodily noises thrown in for bad measure. Joshua made a mental note that he was going to have to teach them how to speak a proper language. And indeed, how to even comprehend the existence of a language at all.  "Let's go back to the camp." Jacob said, suddenly weary with the heavy weight of a premonition that none of this would end up turning out very well for him...

  THE FIRST GREAT CONVERSATION

Joshua Calendar immediately set himself to the task of explaining to the rest of his Time-Tribe the whole mission that had been laid upon him by the allegedly divine, if incredibly flawed, will of the D.M. And in the telling of his story, Joshua Calendar's words set fire to the imaginations of his fellow humans like a spark sets fire to a dry field. Humankind, which before Joshua Calendar had had no ability or occasion to converse with each other and discuss topics of importance, were for the first time in Human history inspired to do precisely that, and for a time, the Humans of the Calendrian Time Tribe did little else. Joshua's words about Society had inspired them to create one, but as they were not themselves blessed with the same far-reaching wisdom that Joshua had been, they did not by their debate arrive at the same conclusions that Joshua had patiently explained to them about equality, mutual respect, personal sovereignty, anarchy, and the intrisic value of each human life. But the fact remained...Joshua Calendar had gotten the People to talking, and in the process of that talking, the first common language of human beings on Slud (the Planet) began to take shape, and the Proto-Language had been born.  This event, called the First Great Conversation, took place at the Time-Tribe's cave dwelling in Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen, which tradition places as being located somewhere in the southern reaches of the land of Yig'N'arranze, one of the frontier regions astride the border between the Theocracy of Prydea and the Empire of Hübrys.  The First Great Conversation is held by most of the surviving Historians to be the utmost beginning of human civilization on Slud (the Planet), and that this event marks the very moment in human history in which Human Beings invented society. And for this reason anyone in the world with an intellect above the level of total buffoon curse the day upon which began the First Great Conversation at Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen as the darkest day of horror in the history of the human species.  But as for the vision that Joshua had intended to impart to the gathered Calendrians, and indeed did impart to them though they heeded it not, it seemed to Joshua that the best way to go about building the type of society that would be beneficial to all involved, was to ensure that everyone was completely equal and had a completely equal share of everything that was produced by human beings. He suggested that people cooperate with each other in each and every aspect of daily life. That was, after all, only logical, and it seemed to Joshua that if humans took the course of logic in their actions, their actions would be well with the way the Universe actually works. Yet when he tried to explain the concept of heeding counsels of logic to the gathered masses of people involved in the debate, he could not seem to get his point across to them.

Quite naturally, no one in the entire tribe, at first, had any idea whatsoever what it was that Joshua Calendar was now trying to say to them, and though Joshua Calendar could speak any and all languages, it was clear that, for some reason beyond his comprehension, he was nonetheless not speaking their language. Well, he was, technically, speaking their language but apparently they didn't speak their language quite as well as he did. And that fact had nearly the same effect as he not being able to speak their language either. 

Subtitle: "Joshua Calendar, the Immortal Keeper of Time...The Man who accidentally created society..."

And poor Joshua soon found himself the subject of much hostility from many of his fellow Tribesmen. For it has always been the way of the ignorant, the unimaginative, and the uncurious to treat with contempt those who themselves are aware, imaginative, and curious.  The Tribespeople started to gather together into groups, however, and to discuss questions of how to create a civilization, because the words of Joshua Calendar had set their previously silent brains into a flurry of activity, as they considered the great questions of that Age.

With the separation of the Calendrians into several different groups, each of those groups began to develop apart in relative isolation, evolving their own ideas of how civilization should be shaped and formatted.

There was one group that wanted to figure out how his mind worked, so they suggested breaking his head open and studying his brain, which is a remarkable fact in that, at this point in Time, they had not yet any real knowledge of anatomy detailed enough to even know what a Brain was or which functions it was to fulfill. Yet, nonetheless, they wanted to crack open Joshua's head and study his brain, all the same. It was not that they particularly wished any harm on Joshua, it's just that they were really curious how his mind worked, even though they were completely operating without a premise of any sort, in their supposition that the mind is at all located in the brain. But really, they just really wanted to know. Which is generally an admirable desire, but in this particular case would have meant much pain for Joshua Calendar. Joshua did not, needless to say, endorse their idea.

There was another group that thought that Joshua Calendar was a Prophet, sent by God (in this case, the term refers to the lazy and sometimes not-so-sensible D.M.), and they wanted to make Joshua the Emperor of the world. This goal that particular group held to be paramount, and even said so, although they not yet had any idea what an Emperor was, nor, indeed, what an Empire was, nor even what a Prophet was, for they had never yet evolved past the Tribal structure of society. But upon this occasion the group invented both the concept and the word "Empire" that they might thrust that entirely new political configuration upon Joshua to rule by decree. It is to be noted that they did not have any more clue what a "decree" was than they had about Empires. Yet still they wanted to make him Emperor of the world. Such, indeed, was the power of the aura which was now upon young Joshua Calendar, that many were in awe of him, and he seemed to inspire in people thoughts that they should not, by rights, have had, simply because in them, the thoughts had no social precedent from which to derive.

Yet another group, however, thought Joshua to be a warlock (they created the term “Warlock” just for him), and that particular group wanted to build a bonfire with him as the centerpiece, even while another group also believed he was a warlock, but instead of wanting to burn him at the stake, they wanted very badly to learn how he had managed to accomplish witchcraft, because they thought that witchcraft (which term, of course, they also made up in order to describe what they thought that Joshua was, though he was in fact not, doing). Yet another group wanted to ally with Joshua, but they wanted to order things differently than the way he had suggested, and do so according to their own ideas and amendments.

Yet another group just wanted to stand around and talk about things some more, seeking to get to the bottom of what exactly was going on. Yet another group wanted to rule the world too, and suggested that, regardless of who was leading the country, the Tribe should conquer everything and kill a bunch of people for any reason at all or no reason at all, just so long as they were killed, which was, of course, as they saw it, the point. And this rather beligerent group, primarily composed of those who had been the best hunters, they further stated their position that the population should justify the Conquests and killing in their minds by using absurd and misleading terms like “defending the homeland” to always make the enemy look like the bad guy.. These fellows did not quite know about following this Joshua Calendar fellow, though.  

Some of the more materialistically inclined people of the Tribe discovered that there was much advantage to be gained, now that these groups of like-minded beings had banded together, by acting as middlemen between one group and another. Others saw that as there were quite a number of people gathered together now, discussing all these great and weighty topics, they weren't really paying very much attention to anything else, and so this burgeoning mercantile laid hands upon the stored goods of the tribe, and distributed them to the gathered assemblies for the price of a share of the wealth (which they called "profit" so as to make themselves sound better than everyone else), and it was then that the first manifestations of the concept of “business” came into being, and the first class of businessmen began to build ever widening margins of profit for themselves. And a good job at that too, they thought, since everyone else was pretty much ignoring the status of the food supply, and they businessmen ought to plunder their fellow tribespeople of a profit for what was left while the getting was good.

The newly-created businessmen and businesswomen saw that the Tribe had all joined in this grand debate that was now taking place, and because the Tribe was spending so much time and energy debating what should be done their store of food, which never was really all that plentiful during the days of hunting and gathering, began to dwindle ominously, so that there was worry among many that the Tribe might starve during the winter. In other words, they were poor and they needed to feed themselves and their children any way that they could, so they started providing goods and services to all the crowd that was gathered to debate what should be done, in exchange for the promise of due compensation from them.

And even thus, while commerce and industry developed as a response to all the inequality that had been woven into the fabric of the Tribe's sense of their own identities, crime also developed apace, when a certain group formed, calling themselves Brokers who found that there was advantage to be gained, at the expense of others, from acting as go-betweens moving from one group to another and carrying messages or setting up deals between them. The author will not at this time make mention of the terrible pun implied in that particular group's name, when one self-fancied witticist comprehended the tremendous cost to society that the Brokers had incurred.

Others, however, found that it was fairly expedient to simply rob people who had wealth, and transfer the wealth unto themselves that way. And these original robbers were brokers who had decided that brokering deals between people was too much work, and they preferred to get their wealth by less strenuous means. So they picked up hefty sticks, cudgels even, from the nearby grass and began to beat people with them until they would promise to pay a portion of their food as compensation for stopping the clubbing that was being inflicted upon them. And so you see, crime also developed within the Tribe, which, indeed, could no longer be called a Tribe, for its fundamental structure was undergoing a very big change. The Tribe was now a society. Possibly even several societies.

Humankind had not really had all that much of a society before Joshua Calendar. His sudden elevation to Immortality had been an almost totally incredible incident. And it had gotten the People to talking, just about all of them within the Calendrian Time Tribe. As they talked and they talked and they talked, as has been before mentioned within this volume, the Calendrians created a common Language, and found that talking with each other became a lot easier as a result. And this suddenly exponential increase in both quality of communication and frequency of communication accomplished among the Calendrians what it is thought to accomplish in most other cases too...it caused human beings to think and to share thoughts, and by that occurrence they were, as they usually are, inspired to give at least a cursory bit of attention to the problem that The D.M. had laid upon their ultimate ancestors Al and Evelyn, the first humans. Al and Evelyn were to find ways to live with each other. All other humans, after all, were stricken with the same question...how to live with each other? And because this event, the First Great Conversation, happened at all, so human civilization first began on the slopes of Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen, in the land of what would later be called Y'ig'narranze, among the people called by history the Calendrians. Thus it is, ironically, that the Time Tribe of humankind developed society accidentally during that far future day, the day of Joshua Calendar, in and as a response to a direct challenge to the notion that they had not as yet, hitherto, developed such a society, which point Joshua had mistakenly made the first point he had expressed to his fellow timepeople after gaining powers of intellect, the selfsame point that had begun the First Great Conversation. This could be properly called his first mistake.

Whereas before, humankind, even in that far future (or past) age, had been stuck at the level of social evolution equivalent to that of primitive cave people, their minds, inspired by the Keeper of Time, had expanded and were now filling with all sorts of ideas as to how to become something different. The question was, what should they become?

Subtitle: "Cave Artists Representation of the "First Great Conversation", the meeting of primordial humans which took place at Mt. Conn-Fuuzhenn. The "First Great Conversation" is of historical significance, as, indeed, it is the event which began history itself, for it was the event, nearly every tradition in the world tells us, that Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time, accidentally created society by starting the conversation."

As has been mentioned earlier, there were many different groups involved in the great debate, around which the various elements of society had begun to stratify. In every group, one or a few strong leaders emerged, pushing forward their agendas, and the rest gathered around them like pet-monkeys, snapping at each other and wrestling in the dirt like apes, which of course they were not, fighting for the indulgence of the leaders and the privilege of speaking next.

Now, within the group of participants in the debate that wanted to take young Joshua's head apart, there were a few individuals whose voices were louder than the others, but the most vocal among them was Grankh, whom History would later (or earlier) name as “The Pompous”. He was short, shorter than most and he was bald, and he made such a figure of a man, according to most accounts, as to develop a habit of looking down his nose at just about everyone to whom he spoke, no small accomplishment for a man who usually wasn't as tall as the person with whom he was conversing. Grankh, naturally, given his eloquence and his fondness of the sound of his own voice, wrote many treatises and posited many different hypotheses, incidentally inventing literacy as an after(or before) thought of the process of didacting himself. As a consequence of this, of course, he drew students to him from among his group, and the descendants of those disciples went on to start what passes for the scientific community on Slud (the Planet).

But during the First Great Conversation, Grankh, in between lectures and dissertations, looking to gain access to study materials specific to his project of proving the horrendously audacious things he was saying in council, for Grankh had a slight mental condition which made it impossible for him to face the unfolding of events in any way but backward. What this meant, of course, was that Grankh was one of those incredibly odd fellows who tends to experience reality by first coming up with a theory, the words of which usually happened to be the last random thought that happened to have fluttered by his consciousness' inner eye as if on butterfly wings. Grankh, having taken hold of this random thought, would inevitably raise his hand meaningfully, signaling the gathered crowds for their attention, and then, without much ceremony at all the words of his thought would just sort of tumble out of his head through his lips, and into the pages of Academic journals. Having stated unequivocably such things as "I believe the world is made of layers and layers of various shades of butter!" and "Freemasons own the entire damn country, I tell you!", he would sort of saunter away into the distance, looking to describe and classify phenomena that would prove such words. Sometimes, it shall be noted, he succeeded at this, as in the case of when he accidentally invented the sciences of both metallurgy and theoretical physics while trying to invent a water wheel capable of generating enough latent electricity to power the cake mixer in his kitchen. This achievement, by the way, caused Grankh to be given an award by the newly formed Backward-Operating Scientists and Engineers Guild. The award, for "Most widely-unrelated sciences discovered by the same man", did not, of course, ever arrive into the hands of its intended recipient because it was at right about that time, during the first Awards Show on Slud (the Planet), that the people began their long-standing tradition of celebrating Awards Shows by not going to them, watching them, or any other thing which would at all make them aware of who got what award and for what.  At any rate, it must be noted that, as humankind's limited understanding of the sciences developed, and thus so did scientists themselves, many scientists, in keeping with the Sluddish Human's tendency to worship and emulate the deeds of his ancestors (or descendants, however the case may be), many scientists who came after (or before) Grankh adopted his same method of positing a theory first and then observing the world around them in order to prove it right, and seeing how many of his colleagues followed his example, Grankh began to feel rather overly proud of himself, at which point in history, his fellow humans began to call him "Grankh the Pompous", because it was true.   

The group that wanted to make Joshua Calendar the Emperor centered around a few strong leaders, including Tegah the Selfish and Ughah the Arrogant, two of the Calendrian Tribesmen who happened to have been fortunate enough to have come through Time Holes with much of their families intact, that is to say, with much of their families present in the same moment and the same location also. As a consequence of the size of their families, which . It wasn't that these humans particularly liked Joshua Calendar. Actually, they felt their new positions in the tribe to be threatened by the upstart Joshua Calendar. But they did respect him, and they did fear him, and they did believe him to be a Prophet of the D.M. And they figured that someone should be made the Emperor of the world, and that Joshua Calendar was probably someone that the Tribe would accept as Emperor far more than would be accepted they themselves. Tegah and Ughah, and their families of course, were interested in placing themselves atop the actual power structure of an Empire, you see, even though the concept of an Empire had not, up until that point where it had occurred to them, ever appeared anywhere on Slud (the Planet). Tegah the Selfish and Ughah the Arrogant, who happened to be brothers, convinced many others in the Tribe that their view should be supported, and they and their original supporters, and the family members present with those supporters, became the foundation of a Sluddish Aristocracy. And the aristocratic descendants of Tegah the Selfish and Ughah the Arrogant were ever after obsessed with two things. Power, they were obsessed with because, like Tegah and Ughah, they wanted to own everything, and religion, because they saw it as a convenient way to build, keep, and expand their power over the Tribe. Religion, of course, was only just beginning to come into existence, which shall be related in further detail a little later (or earlier) on in this text.

But the aristocratic followers of Tegah the Selfish and Ughah the Arrogant spoke long and loud about how Joshua Calendar should be made Emperor of the World. However, because of their obsession with religion, they got along pretty well with the followers of Munc the Zealot, who had previously aided the Time-Tribe as a Shaman of mediocre power and, really, absolutely nothing going for him but superstition, but who now, with the advent of the Immortality of Joshua Calendar, had his very existence as a being of importance both validated and threatened by this mere youth of fifteen. Munc the Zealot declared vehemently that he and he alone had the power to speak to God, that is to say, to the D.M. And he called for the People of the Tribe to burn Joshua Calendar as a warlock, saying to them that by burning Joshua alive, they would prove him to be a heretic. But a few attempts to set Joshua on fire ended in failure, for he was, after all, Immortal, and such attempts were usually met with replies from Joshua that ran similarly to “What on Slud are you doing, fellow?” or “Must you do this?” or even “D.M it! I am Immortal! I cannot be burned to death! Seriously! Stop what you are doing and sit the hell down!” None such reply, however, sounded anything like "I give up! I'm a heretic and you, Munc, speak for The D.M.", which makes sense because those words were not said at all.

However, when Munc realized that such an absurd course of action wasn't really getting through to people, he instead tried a more clever tactic. He said that he himself spoke for Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time Himself, and that the people of the Tribe could not speak with Joshua Calendar without going through he, Munc the Zealot. ("No you don't!" shouted Joshua from the background, as he pushed away yet another would-be assassin trying to set him on fire). Many of the Tribespeople nearby were quite gullible, and they were awed by Munc the Zealot's fiery sermons about the D.M., and in consequence of this they became faithful adherents to Munc the Zealot, and the original disciples of Munc, and their descendants (or ancestors) became the founders of the religions of the world, which was most definitely perceived by pretty much everyone to have been a really bad and stupid idea. The reason why the idea, bad and stupid as it was, nonetheless managed to catch on with people was because, as all religions in all universes do, the religion of Munc the Zealot was built upon the insane, absurd notion that badness and stupidity were good things, and not only good things, but also were the path to paradise. This, of course, is utterly and completely wrong.

But all people, at some time or another in their short, insecure lives, share an almost desperate longing to want to be wrong, perhaps as a protest against having been dealt a lot in life that is wrong, they attempt to be wrong about what is wrong so that they can, thereby, cancel out what was wrong with what is not wrong. This behavior, of course, would be stunningly effective were it not for one particular mistake that humans seem always to make...they do almost all that they are supposed to accomplish to do it right...wrongly. And because they do the wrong things, they end up with the result most directly opposed to all that they had been seeking to acomplish. And in the case of social development, Religion has often proven to be one of those wrong things. but people did it because, you know, they just didn't really like that Joshua Calendar fellow very much, and they were already used to listening to Munc's sermons that he'd been giving for years and years already anyway, and by golly, they were Conservatives and just didn't like believing new things. By golly. 

Joshua thought that this was all going way too far.

The group that thought that Joshua was a Warlock and were not, themselves, opposed to the notion of him being one, even though they repeatedly ignored his insistent corrections that he was not, in fact, a Warlock at all and that Warlocks had not existed prior to this group of Tribespeople mentioning the word, they approached Joshua and thwarted further attempts to set Joshua on fire. This they did because they wanted to learn from him, and to pick up from him the secrets on how to be Warlocks themselves. Of course, Joshua, for all his new intellect and his Immortality, was nonetheless still just a 15 year old non-Warlock young man. It was true that he had the power to do just about anything he chose to do, and he certainly had the time, but he could no more teach them how to be a Warlock than he could teach them how to be a tree. Because though Joshua Calendar might well have been many things, he was no more a Warlock than he had been a Space-Archaeologist. He did not, he told them, particularly rule out the notion being tried in the future, however.

Nearby, some people were giving speeches, and among them, Regah the Ruthless and Shub the Slithering, and Kintahn the Cunning and Oparba the False drew large crowds of supporters. They talked of allegiance to the D.M., and even acknowledged that Joshua Calendar was Immortal. But they felt that they themselves were far more qualified to run things in the Tribe, and they were calling for the Empire to be ruled by Kings and their Governments (they invented the concept of Government right there on the spot, which of course would have been the only way that such a hastily thrown together, ill-considered concept could ever come into being since even a half a minute of reflection upon what a Government, by definition, does for a living demonstrates amply to a person that Government was never really a good idea. That, of course, was the very reason why the Politicians attempted to sell the public on that very terrible idea. Politicians are, of course, sadists. But from these initial speeches by the politicians, and the crowds that they drew, a polity was formed, and the foundations were laid for the existence of a political class, which is, of course, an even more horrible idea than the existence of politics themselves. And the new adherents of the polity, the followers...or "party members" as they called themselves, were willing to do whatever they had to in order to remain the ones that ran things, including delude the people of the newly created society with empty and meaningless platitudes, which they had to do almost continually in order to keep people from realizing how utterly futile and tragically hubristic an idea it was for human beings to submit themselves to the rulership of people who were just as human as they were and therefore, just as stupid and lazy as they themselves, having evolved from the same stupid and lazy ancestors created by the same stupid and lazy D.M... But the fast-talking politicians managed to convince people, because people when left to their own devices seem to think that they should choose to be stupid and lazy like all their predecessors, and the masses of people gathering around the politicians felt it would be easier to just believe the politicians were right about everything than to put in the work to discover for themselves what was right and what was wrong. Of course, if they had not made such a decision as that, neither the Muncian Churcn nor the Political class would have come into existence at all, and so both the Muncians and the Politicians saw the necessity of filibustering the crowd with a bunch of trivial, nonsensical speeches, so as to forever keep the attention of the public steered away from such dangerous decisions as the decision to dispense with both the political and religious classes entirely, which, of course, they could quite easily do at any moment just by deciding that such is the way it has to be. But the political class became the politicians of the World, and they invented something called a social contract, which caught on quite firmly in the Tribe for reasons which, even to Historians of the present day, are still not very apparent. It was a concept that sought to define which rights a Government had, and which rights the People ruled by a Government had. Of course, Government was the idea of these fellows, and they and their allies kept talking and talking and talking because that is, after all, what they do best. But at no time whatsoever would they ever allow anyone to suggest that there should not have been a government. Not even Joshua Calendar would have been able to sway them from the notion that Government was absolutely necessary. Not surprisingly, there were many of the Tribal Elders among this group. And the most charismatic, most eloquent among them called themselves Prime Ministers, while others called themselves Senators, Councillors, Representatives, Secretaries, Cabinet Members, Judiciaries, and all sorts of other names which made them sound more important than they really were. 

The politicians discovered almost before politics had even come into existence that starting fights between people, particularly those people who did not believe in the doctrines the politicians were crafting, was a convenient way to distract llarge numbers of tribesmen from the fact that they were getting enslaved by Politicians, which, of course, they were. A distracted populace very much served the wicked purposes of the Politician class, the most sinister class of humans in all the history of Slud (the Planet), and for that reason distraction of the general public became from the very first the primary directive of the members of the political class. Such distraction was such an ally to the Politicians that the most adept among them easily developed techniques by which to slip draconic policies and doctrines while no one was looking that no one in their right mind would ever accept as law into the general body of law, which the speeches of the politicians had built (via the brand new mechanism of legislation), and which, because it was a general body of law, they had inculcated for it the greatest respect among the masses of the general populace.  

And among the Politicians giving their speeches and deluding their newly-assembling constituencies, Regah the Ruthless understood that, in order for his colleagues and, especially, himself to remain in power over the Tribe, they would have to make sure that the Tribe was kept too busy to go back to replenishing the food supply, for Regah, at once both a highly cunning and blindingly stupid man, had invented a hierarchical political system by and through which he and other Politicians could effectively achieve a position in society where they could quite literally exploit each and every other person on the planet, thus creating the world's first pyramid scheme. In this hierarchical system, in which each person sought to steal from each other person in any way which would bring them a larger portion of the wealth and resources, and each progressive level of the pyramidal organization of society contained within it individuals who had stolen more than the individuals within the lower levels, and each level contained fewer people to occupy it, so that at the very top of Regah's hierarchical model of society, there were but a relative few, into whose hands gathered the largest portions of the entire wealth generated and possessed by human society. The mode of society that the Politicians proposed got adopted by many of the gathered Calendrians, who agreed to the terms of the Politicians because, like anyone who participates in politics at all knows, the thing that is barely explained is the thing that is easily accepted. And on that basis, less than one week after the beginning of the First Great Conversation at Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen, Politicians at the behest of Regah the Ruthless and his colleagues in the newly formed Calendrian Senate quietly started a media apparatus, agreeing to pay a bribe in sheep and goats to local cave artists and some of the storytellers which had been telling stories around the campfires as of the beginning of the proto-language.  In exchange for this bribe, the Politician-owned Media, at first spreading the evangelism of politics through the traditional ways of cave painting and verbal storytelling. And entertaining the people as paintings and storytelling tends to do, before long people associated the new field of politics with the feeling of being entertained, so that the most numerous portion of the Calendrians came to believe the view that politics was an indispensible part of human social life. Which belief, of course, made the Politicians ecstatic since they were very cynical people and also they were people who were quite relieved to discover that their grip on the power of a society they themselves (particularly Regah) created would go largely unchallenged into the foreseeable future. And while the people were distracted by the stories being told to them by the burgeoning Media, the Politicians did next another one of those things that Politicians are good at. They took the lion's share of the wealth and resources for themselves or for their donors and patrons, and levied harsh taxes against all of their constituents, saying that taxation was the only method by which the things that society needed could be paid for, because they certainly were not going to use any of the money they themselves had stolen to pay for it while Peasants were around who could be taxed. But the taxation the Politicians imposed on the peasants was not universally received with a smile. A few of the more intelligent Calendrians realized the swindle being perpetrated by the Civilians and attempted to attack the politicians with rocks and crude flint-tipped spears out of sheer rage for what they were doing. But Regah was shrewd and very cunning, so he made alliances with and enlisted the help of another group, the ones that wanted to conquer the World in the name of the Tribe. Chiefs of the hunters, this group was led by Gunkar the Terrible and Patu the Avenger, and they were fierce warriors all. And the followers of Gunkar the Terrible and Patu the Avenger did not really care terribly much about Joshua Calendar at all.  For that matter, they did not really care that much for anyone...They just wanted to smash some faces, because they were always spoiling for a fight. They didn't even really care if they conquered, so long as they got to fight. Because of this, they did not require much convincing from the Politicians who recruited them.

And all of the preceding events happened during the First Great Conversation, which for many months occupied the attentions of the Calendrians, the first civilized human society, at their ancestral home of Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen. Humans had, as a result of the that great debate, created a society. But it was not, in any way, shape, or form the simple, equal, and logical society Joshua Calendar had foreseen and had tried to explain to the Tribe, and by the time the First Great Conversation passed its zenith and began to wane, and portions of the Tribe began to leave Conn-Fuuzhen and to settle in the unpopulated wildernesses beyond, right then and there, Joshua Calendar saw indeed the terrible mistake that he had made. Society might have been a very, very, very bad idea for him to start a debate about. He had gone to them, thinking to convince them to adopt a model of Society where all shared equally in abundance and common spirit, but the reality which had grown instead was monstrous. In a short time, humankind had quite literally lost their industriousness and what common sense they had possessed, choosing instead to war against each other in any way that they could, through exploitation and violence and intolerance. The exact opposite of what Joshua had intended!

Joshua had discovered almost immediately that there is a large price to pay for having an active and healthy brain, but lacking an eloquence and a charisma to match that intellect. Great intellect is a great gift that can do many great things for the world and human society, but as the intellect of a person rises, their ability to explain the concepts of their thought to other human beings grows weaker, because they increasingly find themselves trying to explain concepts which are increasingly beyond more and more peopel's ability to comprehend what they're talking about, until the ability to communicate with lesser minds becomes all but impossible for the genius to accomplish.

Try as he might, even though he was the Keeper of Time, an Immortal endowed with all sorts of powers no human probably should ever possess, yet Joshua just could not, apparently, reason his way through the wall of obdurate and divisive nonsense that now had come to constitute human thought processes. Try as he might, Joshua just didn't seem to be able to convince human beings that they were making far too many mistakes...sometimes they would even agree with him, yet do little or nothing to address the mistakes he had just pointed out. And so there, on the slopes of Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen, the Calendrians discussed many matters, made many decisions, most of them very unwise, created the earliest forms of the various social, political, and economic classes which during the heyday of the Hierarchical societies carried the weight of both castes institutions within Sluddish society. And most of the decisions that had been made, many of them against Joshua Calendar's will, were made and announced proudly by those who had made them, who, even as they announced their intentions to basically lock everyone into a human-destroy-human hierarchy for the next several thousand years of their existence, almost every single one of the gathered leaders and demagogues, from the scientists of Grankh the Pompous to the warriors of Tegah and Ughah, from the partisans of the Politiians Regah and Shub, Kintahn and Oparba to the magicians of Gluffen Puddlekins of the Stupid Name, set themselves to building their various and absurd visions in the very name of Joshua Calendar, the one man in all the Tribe who appeared to stand for the very opposite of what they were claiming to do in fullfillment of his vision. His vision!

The whole debacle of the founding of such an absurd society in his name distressed Joshua greatly, and the trauma of it aged him much. When he had begun the debate with his fellow Tribesmen, he had been a boy of 15. Now, though he was still technically a 15 year old boy, he was a 15 year old boy with long hair draned of its color, and a face so haggard and drawn from frustration that he looked as if he were at least a century older, at the very least. His form seemed hunched and seemed to stoop ever the more with every new stupid word said by men and women of extremely limited vision, as he had watched the madness of humankind unfold before his eyes.

Finally, in disgust, Joshua Calendar wandered away from the Tribe, and went off alone into the Wilderness, determined to forever after (or before) dwell apart from the human species. The rest of the Tribe, caught up as they were in their own madness, the collective arrogance and self-absorption and madness of human society, did not really seem to notice his departure, and so much was probably for the best, he concluded. Let them do what they are going to do, they could do it in the name of someone else! He would not be there to serve as a justification for their insanities! In this, however, the joke was on Joshua Calendar. For people who are insane require no justification, no justification at all, for their insanities.

  THE CALENDRIAN CATACLYSM

Joshua Calendar wandered, at times delirious, and ill-nourished, and tattered-clothed and barefoot in the wilderness for more than two years, but eventually he got really bored with all of that and he remembered that he had been awakened to wondrous powers by the D.M. and they didn't always have to completely lead him to his own grief, though they quite often had done precisely that. But Joshua was not by nature a nomadic person, and his time in the Wilderness had done what it had been intended to do...it had been there to calm him after he had left the Time Tribe of the Calendrians in the wake of the of the disastrous result of the First Great Conversation. He found that after two years in the wildnerness, he had finally regained his ability to think clearly...well, as clearly as anyone who was a part of a stupid and lazy race that had been created by a stupid and lazy D.M. could have been. And one day exactly two years, three months, and twenty seven days after he had thrown his hands up in disgust, turned his back on the Calendrians, and wandered off unnoticed, Joshua Calendar was taken with a particular longing for the home he would never again return to, the caverns of Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen. Joshua knew he would not and could not ever return among humans and watch their stupidity unfold in ever increasing, ever more complex disasters. But he missed the caves where he had spent his childhood, and he wished to recreate them as accurately as he could, as a place in which he coud dwell. And so he decided to start himself a proper home somewhere, far away, and to use his powers of mental prowess to help him build it.

  In time, Joshua Calendar built a tower in the Mountains of Lo Tsarok, and by that, the author of this text means to indicate not only that he built a tower in the geographical proximity of the Mountains of Lo Tsarok, which he did, but also that Joshua Calendar made his dwelling actually in the mountains. As in, inside of them. The Tower of Joshua Calendar stuck up out of and over the summit of Mt. Pile, the tallest of the mountains in that region, while the interior of the mountain is honeycombed with successively layered caverns and galleries that he delved himself because he had been bored and he had wanted to find something to occupy his time because he was immortal and it was not like he would be dying of old age any time soon. Out of the weariness a human (which, admittedly, he was one faced) when attempting to leave completely alone, cut off from any and all others of his species (which, admittedly, he was) Joshua did what any self-respecting hermit would do in that situation...He talked to himself and proceeded, also as any self-respecting hermit would do in that situation, to build an entire society just like the one he had left behind, but instead of that society being a collective cage, an exclusive tool, and a terrible idea as had been the case with the society he had left behind, he built a new society for his hermitage crafted intentionally for him and just for himself only, and fixed every single problem he had seen others create by not getting the point of society at all.

  And it is said that by his mental talents and by the supernatural powers he was able to harness because he was just that smart, Joshua Calendar built an entire city of caverns under the Mountains of Lo Tsarok, larger by far in its totality than all of the biggest cities in the world combined, and that the great city of Joshua Calendar, populated only by Joshua Calendar, was the site of the most perfect model of society ever discovered by humans on Slud (the Planet)...and the city, already a marvel of engineering unmatched before and since on all of Slud (the Planet), was surmounted by a tower which, had it not been built through a mountain and had a mountain, of course, to brace it and keep it standing upright, would have long ago collapsed, fallen over, and probably caused a miniature Great Extinction in its fall, for Joshua Calendar's Tower, which some of the unexploded historians have named "The Tower of Time" even though Joshua had made a special point to carve into the rock faces (in every one of the four cardinal directions) an inscription, complete with an accompanying arrow carved into the rock, pointing upwards at the walls of the tower, saying "This is not the Tower of Time. It's just my Office. Sorry for any confusion this may cause. - Joshua Calendar, KoT)

Of course, as Joshua Calendar dwelt there in hermitage and thus no one else with the ability to communicate through language happened to be anywhere nearby to corroborate the account of the perfection of Joshua Calendar's society, the author of this document is forced to admit that to all intents and purposes outside of his own, Joshua Calendar's society might very well have been and maybe even was precisely what every other society has been...a great big waste of time. But Joshua dwelt there in that massive city under the mountains and the impossibly tall tower that rose above it, and he named it "Emptirion" because of its emptiness. And there, the Keeper of Time dwelt quite alone, spending many quiet centuries of the future (or the past) in quiet contemplation of the world, the natural systems within that world, the creatures which populated that world, the universe outside of that world, and also the art of sculpture because, after all, every genius needed to have an art to practice and because there was all this stone laying all about the place anyway, and because he just really enjoyed making statues that were appalling caricatures of people he did not like, many of whom no doubt were even at that time back in Calendrian society, transforming through tyranny small numbers of confused Tribespeople into that which a society usually creates. when it is crafted incorrectly..large numbers of confused Peasants.

During his time of quietude at Emptirion within Mt. Plie, Joshua calendar, when he was not otherwise busy contemplating something, also began to take thought for his mission, developing with much difficulty and more than a little swearing a rather complicated system to make sense out of the mixed up Time that the D.M., being lazy and lacking in common sense, had created for Slud (the Planet, and probably the Universe as well), and had quite neatly dumped in Joshua's lap.

Some of the people who had been attempting to hit up Joshua Calendar for the secrets of Warlock magic (even though he had told them time and time again that he was most certainly not a Warlock), they went to the Mountains of Lo Tsarock, and sought Joshua there, seeking to learn the secrets of power and immortality at his feet, which, of course, he objected to strenuously, as he was always walking places and could not imagine the benefit of having a bunch of blokes laying about, strewn all over the very places where he intended to walk. They asked him then, if they could not study at his feet, could he maybe let them take up their dwelling in the great city he had built, but again Joshua refused their request, bidding them to begone for he had much work to catch up on and he still had to finish studying a blade of grass today and hadn't they all just sort of saunter off back to the "civilized" world before winter could catch them unaware in the wilderness and freeze them to death? But this group of determined students, perservering despite his repeated refusals, had come to dwell near Joshua Calendar and to learn from him. And so they took up their residences in the mountains near Mt. Pile, upon which Joshua had built his tower and eventually, in attempting to figure out what it was that Joshua did and how he did it, they stumbled upon the secrets of the Arcane Arts themselves, and they became the first great practitioners of magic in Slud (the Planet), and from them were descended the sorcerers and the magicians of the world.

The system of time reckoning developed by Joshua Calendar was extremely complicated, took more than a century for him to work all the necessary equations out to their conclusions and build a prototype calendar device to facilitate that, and measuring time in all its vastness, even to one of great power, immortality, and great potential such as Joshua Calendar was alleged to be, it tended to stretch a person's sense of what is credible to limits beyond the average horizon of sanity, as the human mind had not as of yet developed the evolutionary adaptation in the design of their brain to be able to comprehensively process, simultaneously, millions of tiny little connections or circuits between the time of the observer and the time of the object being observed...

In the case of "the Joshua Calendar" (that was what he called it and he adored the pun with a sort of droll relish), the process of creating the device was complicated endlessly by the fact that he, unlike every other human on the entire planet, had seen the entirety of all relationships between one moment and another, the entirety of time in all its intricate details, and so his mind developed a measure for time that reflected his view of the whole of it, which, unfortunately, no one but himself could fully understand.  The whole process is incredibly complex by all accounts, and the author is reluctant to elaborate in great detail upon the way that Joshua Calendar's system of time actually works, even if indeed the author really has any clue to it himself, which he does not, because it would absolutely fry your mind how mind-bogglingly complex it is. In fact, entire branches of scientific study have arisen specifically to study Joshua Calendar's method of time-reckoning, but such sciences have hit several notable setbacks, not the least of which is the dearth of archaeological evidence left behind at Emptirion and other sites within the Lo Tsarok Mountains, and also the fact that Joshua Calendar, though he was precisely the man to think deep thoughts and perceive profound epiphanies, yet, he was not much of a man for writing his observations down. What history knows of Joshua Calendar's vaunting and confusing system, history has gotten from the few notes Joshua Calendar left behind, estimated at a mere ten thousandth of the research the man was believed to conducted.

Unfortunately, the mind of Joshua Calendar did not survive the creation of his system of time, for the job of Time-Keeper is frustratingly difficult in a world where the beginning started in the middle, and it is easy for a person to lose their mind when the past and the future happen more or less simultaneously, which they do, and the person happens to perceive it from all angles simultaneously when it happens, which most do not. Little by little, Joshua's ability to reason slipped a bit more with each passing year. Such, it would seem, was what happened to poor Joshua Calendar. The touch of The D.M. upon him had endowed him with intellect unparalleled, but being lazy and stupid as He is wont to be, The D.M. had neglected to install in Joshua's body, mind, and soul the evolutionary adaptations necessary to actually process all that intellect effectively. Then, too, there was the matter of frustration, which, more than any other factor is widely held by psychologists to have been responsible for what eventually happened to Joshua Calendar's mind.  So that the Reader may be given a clearer understanding of the type of frustration that eventually drove Joshua Calendar mad,  the author shall here enumerate the major events in one week in the life of Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time: 1.  On Sunday he awakened from sleep. He bathed. He ate breakfast, and because for Joshua breakfastime was during that time which many other humans tended to call "the middle of the night", he studied the stars, which was fun. Then he ate lunch and watched the sun rise in the very center of the horizon (where else?). This was also very fun. After lunch he invented gunpowder, which blew up half of the rooftop of his Tower, which was not very fun at all. Then he repaired the roof with telekinetic manipulation of the Cosmic physic. He then ate supper.It was good but he rather thought it needed a dash more paprika to make it delicious. The wine, however, was delicious. He could not believe he had drunk the whole bottle. Before bedtime, he summoned a copy of Socraplataristo's book, Philosophy: A Thought Explosion. Rubbish. It was eight hundred and ninety pages of reasons why Socraplataristo thought he was better than everyone else. Still grumbling from the waste of time and attention that he had expended on Socraplataristo's latest monstrosity, he went to sleep.  2.  On Monday, Joshua awakened from sleep. Then he bathed and ate breakfast. Then he studied the stars again, which was again fun. Then he ate lunch, and watched the sun rise in the middle of the horizon as it did every day. The sunrise was not as vibrant a sunrise as the previous day's but still quite good nonetheless. Then he sent off a letter to Socraplataristo's publisher telling him what he had thought of the book and the present state of the whole field of philosophy. Then he invented abstract algebra, for a reason he forgot almost immediately but which had seemed urgently important at the time in which he had invented it. He then also invented a time-lock to place upon abstact algebra so that the numbers entirely disappear whenever it falls into the wrong hands, and no one can then figure out how to make any of it work. Then he gave the mice living down in the caverns their Sluddish as a Second Language lessons...there were a couple of them already almost ready to graduate. He was so proud of them. He ate supper. He could not believe I drank a whole bottle of wine. He attempted to look at the existence of an empty wine bottle sitting before him on the table as compelling evidence that he had, indeed, consumed an entire bottle of wine at one sitting for the second night in a row, but he couldn't find it so he had to drink another whole bottle of wine just so that he could have an empty bottle to look at for evidence that he had drunk the first one. Then he noticed the first bottle, laying in broken shards on the floor where he had inadvertantly dropped it. Ah well. He finished off the second bottle of wine...and then he accidentally dropped that one on the floor also. Oops. Perhaps the third time would be the charm. He made it, staggering, to the threshold between the hallway and the bathroom. He went to sleep.  3. Tuesday - He awakened from sleep. He was hung over. He cured the aforementioned hangover with wine. Then he ate breakfast. Then he went back to sleep. 

4. On Wednesday, Joshua awakened from sleep. He bathed, and ate breakfast. He received a reply in the mail, via pigeon, from Socraplataristo's publisher, regarding his exquisitely penned, thoughtful, insightful letter about the lack of literary merit of Socraplataristo's latest opus. The publisher's letter in its entirety is hereby transferred verbatim from the original in the pages of Joshua's diary:

"Dear Mr. Calendar," < new line >, < new line again >, "We here at Doubleray/Tamban-Ort-CarperHollins recently received your letter regarding your opinion of Sacraplataristo's most recent publication, and we found it to be an exquisitely penned, thoughtful, insightful letter. In the exquisitely penned, thoughtful, and insightful spirit in which your letter was written, we had an entire committee recommend to our executive board a proper response, and therefore, it is with the greatest of pride that we are able to now give you that response...and the response is... Fuck you. Bugger off, ya bleedin' ol' sot! What you know about the complex and highly esoteric nature of philosophy? You're probably just some crazy old man living alone in the mountains. Go fuck yourself, The friendly and cheerful editorial board, Doubleray/Tamban-Ort-CarperHollins, Inc."  This, of course, made Joshua Calendar terribly upset, not for the reason that the Editorial Board of that esteemed publishing House had told him to fuck off, nor even because they had called him a crazy old man living alone in the mountains...which, of course, he was...but because they had called him a "bleedin' ol' sot". Harumph, he wrote in the pages of his diary. A sot?! He? An alcoholic? Preposterous!  He went off somewhere to debate philosophy with himself...which...of course, can only be safely done, without explosion, when one is in fact a crazy old man living alone in the mountains. And all that philosophising was thirsty work, so he went ahead and killed off another bottle of wine.

5. On Thursday, Joshua awakened from sleep and started out the day with some wine. He did not remember Thursday.

6. On Friday, it is presumed that he awakened from sleep, though he could not be sure of that. He did not remember Friday either. 

7. On Saturday, Joshua woke up with a headache. He went down to the caverns of Emptirion. The blasted little mice had discovered Revolution and were already halfway through their Second Great Purge! He was still somewhat proud of them but more than a little afraid of them also. But the whole matter sounded to him like a cause for celebration, and he thought the time had indeed come for some wine!

As for the ever-approaching madness that, every day, tiptoed ever the closer to him, reaching out to cover his perceptions in shadow, the final straw came one spring morning, some thirteen hundred years after (or before) Joshua had sent himself into self-imposed exile from the society of man. As Joshua was sitting at the table in the top of his Tower, he was bending all his thought towards the solution of one simple question. No, the question did not have to do with whether or not he should drink some wine. That one was a given. Nor was his mind focused upon that tired old question about Time Progression, either. He had an entire eternity to work on that one, and there was a question to consider far more pressing at the moment. That question had to do not with complex time measurements but with lunch. Specifically...and this was the part that really perplexed him the most, he was trying to figure out what to prepare and eat for his lunch. He was very hungry, after all, and his indecision with regards to this particular matter was as agonizing to him as was the gnawing of his empty stomach.

He was sitting on the roof of his Tower, as has been mentioned, and he just happened to look down at the grassy plateau which formed the largest part of the summit of Mt. Pile, when he saw a human hand grasp at the air above the plateau's sheer cliff edge. A moment later, a man wearing a dirty brown smock heaved himself up over the verge, and lay there panting in the grass for a few moments, as other humans, also wearing similar dirty brown smocks, followed the first man's example. Before long, more than a hundred smocked peasants lay on the plateau, gasping for air. Joshua, now distracted from his previous problem and somewhat dully forgetting for the moment the hunger gnawing at his bowels, thought it quite strange that so many peasants, who were not even supposed to know where he was and certainly were not supposed to have any reason to visit this remote mountain location, had nonetheless apparently physically climbed the grades and cliffs of Mt. Pile to come before Joshua's Tower upon its summit. What struck Joshua as even more strange, however, was that they had opted to climb the sometimes sheer faces of this mountain...rather than use the perfectly serviceable road up the mountainside that Joshua had built to make it easier for himself to come and go from there.

And then the crowd of peasants approached the grounds outside of his tower, tromping gracelessly across that lovely and verdant meadow of mountain grasses which covered the small and precipitous plateau. Why they had come up there, that high into the mountains. Joshua was not certain, as he ran to the window of his Tower and looked down upon the gathered peasants, that he wanted to know what they were about.

As the peasants saw him appear in the narrow rooftop window, they let loose a thunderous cheer, and well they could and did, because there were now several thousand of them gathered there on the plateau, trampling the beautiful grasses into the soil and sort of milling about. Joshua estimated there were more than fifty thousand peasants gathered to the summit through and upon which his Tower had been erected. There were more attempting to push their way up the sides of the mountain, and as they elbowed their way onto the plateau, some of those who had been standing on the plateau previously sort of fell off down the sides of the mountain, plummeting to their death which, they being peasants, they did not really mind very much because they were sort of used to their lives being treated as expendable anyway. The cheers and chants of Joshua's name that went up from the assembled throng of peasantry shook nearby mountains, which then experienced rockfalls and avalanches as the echoes reverberated all throughout the area.

“People! People! I beg you, have a care for the volume of your voices! The mountains are not overly fond of loud noises!” Joshua said, raising his arms in protest, and the crowd quieted down almost immediately.

“Sorry!” murmured one of the peasants below, apologetically.

“People of Slud (The Planet), what has brought you here today?” Joshua asked, and indeed, he was mildly curious what it had been that could have been so important as to compel these peasants to come all the way to this remote location, to which he had removed himself in his exile. The Mountains of Lo Tsarok, after al, were far from all the lands known by him to have been populated by humans. To have come here to see him would have required a long and perilous journey through the swamps of Muckmire, the Desert of Notwater, and of course the Plains of Screwitt-Notgonnanameit, which, ironically, did have a name, and a very long one at that. At any rate, the venerable sage standing within the rooftop laboratory of his Tower, gazing down upon the gathered masses on the ground below, found the whole situation in which he now found himself really rather strange, considering that he had had no reason to believe that his fellow humans, caught up in their own narrow concerns as they had been when he had disgustedly abandoned them all at Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen many years previously, had even bothered to remember him at all. And now, here were enough of them assembled at the foot of his Tower to have made even the bloodthirsty followers of Gunkar and Patu jealous at the sheer number of this army without leaders...

“Well, our ancestors (or descendants) were arguing on and on about what to do, and we more or less reached a decision,” one of the peasants spoke up hesitantly, he being the first of the entire delegation, who were also quite hesitant, to actually start speaking to the purpose of their visit.

“Yes!” said another, speaking with a little bit more confidence than had the first one. “We remembered that you had left before we had it all sorted out, and we were looking to find you, so that we could report to you what we've done. We think you will be proud of us!”

  “Well, that's good.” Joshua congratulated him, though privately he thought that this unexpected meeting in the the wilderness of Lo Tsarok was not nearly as good as lunch would be at the present time, for he was still hungry, and these peasants were keeping him from doing something to fix that.  But he kept that private monologue to himself, and instead, he said, “What did they end up coming up with?”

“We decided that the best way to go was to pick Regah and Shub and Kintahn and Oparba to be our leaders. It took us a few years to even define what a leader is, but we more or less came to the conclusion that a leader is someone who should oppress the masses for the sake of increasing his own advantage and resources." Joshua, despite the fact that this conversation was already making him quite ill at ease, had to admit that, if one were to consider the definition of "leaders" with actual candor, it really would be very difficult to argue against the definition of the word "leader" that the peasants of Slud (the Planet) had apparently developed. "We weren't sure at first what sort of power a leader should have, but finally we decided to just go ahead and  give them life or death power over us, so that they could protect us from our biggest enemy, which which we understand to be ourselves. We call our leaders “Rulers”, or “Emperors” now, or sometimes “Kings”, because it makes them seem awesome and majestic and we figure that if we're going to allow anyone to get us killed for personal profit, we might as well make their name sound majestic." "I see." Joshua replied in all of the tone of a man who most certainly did not see their point at all. "So you made Regah and Kintahn and Oparba and even that disgusting serpent of a man, Shub the Slithering, your Kings and your Emperors then? And they are the ones who rule you?" "They get to rule sometimes, but most times, they merely look like rulers, but others rule for them.”  another peasant answered, even as some newly ascending peasants coming up the mountainside pushed off to his death thousands of feet below. He died fulfilled, though, as speaking that one sentence had, unbeknownst to him, been his entire purpose of being born in the first place. He went to Nirvana.

“Then the people from Tegah and Ughah's group, who call themselves 'nobles' now, we agreed to let them govern all the land and resources and people in the name of the Emperors. So basically, they own all the land, and they they rule for the Emperor in a most cases.” another peasant said, his brown peasant smock flapping in the brisk mountain breeze.

“But a then a few crazies started talking about how we should let the people from Regah and Shub and Kintahn and Oparba's groups actually rule the people in actuality, instead of just in mere name. And those crazies got a lot of people to listen to them, though the Aristocracy and about half of us peasants thought it was a right dumb idea.” Yet another peasant chimed in.

“And so there was this big fight decades ago, and the descendants of Tegah and Ughah fought the descendants of Regah and Shub and Kintahn and Oparba, and us peasants, we were split down the middle...some of us sided with the Nobles and some of us sided with the Politicians.”

“Yes we did.” another peasant said with a terrifyingly vapid look on his face. The poor fellow sort of looked like he was actually proud that society had been ravaged by Civil War. As if they had done something good. Joshua did not at all like the direction this was going.

“I see.” Joshua said again, though for the Immortal life of him, he could not see why these peasants were happy about any of this. It sounded like they had universally gotten the short of end of the stick when society had been organized, and it also sounded, very much, like a very wretched way to go about constructing a society at any rate. “And then what happened?”

“Well, after several million people on both sides were killed in the fighting...all of them, we've decided, having been brave souls who sacrificed their lives very generously for the sake of society...after all of that, we finally decided to just go ahead and let the people of Tegah and Ughah keep ruling us, only we'd say and act like it was the people of Regah and Shub and Kintahn and Oparba who were ruling us. And whichever of them, be they Noble or be they Politician, that asked us to go ahead and die for their cause, we decided we'd just go ahead and do it because, after all, they're the leaders and I mean, you've got to do what a leader tells you, right? That's the whole thing about a leader."

Joshua now felt sick to his stomach. And that ill-defined malaise was not because of his hunger pangs.

“So, Time-Keeper, the Nobles had been kind enough to let us peasants live on our land (they say it is our land, and because they say it, we quite naturally believe them, even though we realize that they own it all and everything on it, including us)."

"Yes, we think it's downright kind of 'em to let us live on our land, sure do! And we have created ways of farming it so that we can pay them for the privilege of working our own land. And all they ask for it is a big share of our harvest." "What?!" Joshua exclaimed, his sense of dawning horror growing stronger with each passing second. "They charge you a share of your harvest in exchange for the privilege of working land that is already yours to begin with?" "Well, sure we give it to 'em! It's a tax, Lord Joshua. You got to pay taxes. That's their purpose after all.  And that ain't even the only tax we pay. No sir! We get taxed for our bodies, also, and we are proud to say that we pay that tax too!" "Your...bodies? How are you taxed for your bodies?" Joshua asked, though a mere two seconds' reflection told him that he already knew the answer to that, and it was almost even more repugnant a concept to him than the theft of their crops had been. "Why, by dying for them, of course." the next Peasant said it with such simpleminded innocence in his voice, and it was clear to Joshua that he just did not have any clue, whatsoever, that he and his fellow Peasants were being used and cynically discarded like mere tools. Not only that, but it was also obvious to Joshua that this poor, stupid fool of a Peasant did not even have a clue that he should have a clue.

"We prove that we are loyal peasants by dying when they need us to, and by submitting to them and deferring to them in every way we are able." said another Peasant, this one a tall and lanky fellow with shaggy, unkempt hair the color of mud. A small cloud of flies swarmed around him, and his words were punctuated with swats of his hands in the air about him. His words were also delivered in such a tone as to suggest that they explained the logic of the whole situation the Peasants faced, which, of course, it did not, for there was no logic to any of it at all. "After all, they are of the lineage of Tegah and Ughah, so they must be better than us, for they remind us often that they have lineage, and lineage, they have taught us, is the basis of the right to rule. We have no lineage. We're just peasants.” another peasant, a chubby fellow, seated on a rock and picking his nose with the knack of a person who normally spends his time picking his ears instead, continued where the last one had left off.

Joshua's sick feeling in the pit of his stomach had graduated from malaise to full on bowel-gnawing anxiety. Something was seriously, seriously wrong with these peasants. That much had become quite painfully clear to Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time. It was as if these smock-garbed simpletons were wired backwards of how they should have been. How could they be so tragically obtuse? They had to be joking. Yes! That was it! That was the reason why they were saying this stuff, Joshua decided. These peasants had come to play a cruel practical joke on him, and to make him believe that they had adopted as fact a bunch of nonsense that no one with a brain would see buy at all. There was no way, Joshua insisted to himself...a bit desperately, in fact...that any Human in the entire world could possibly actually believe all that nonsense!  Humans were, after all, endowed with brains and functional ones at that! Why, was not he, Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time, not also a human, just like they? Did they not have the same anatomy as he, the same brain as he, the same potential for understanding that he himself had?  He had been taught much by the touch of The D.M., of course, but his brain was, after all, the brain of a Human, and were not each of these poor, benighted, naive Peasants endowed with the same Human brain in their own skulls?

“G...g...go on...” Joshua stammered, starting to lose his cool, as he realized even while he noticed that the sickness in his stomach had not gone from him, that there was no joke...at least not a joke being played by the Peasants. They truly believed the garbage that was issuing out of their lips.

“Well, your Honor, then the people from Munc's group started telling everyone else that unless we bowed down and acknowledged that Munc's disciples were the true spokesmen for the D.M., and for yourself, of course, begging your pardon your Honor, we would all go to this terrible, terrible place under a mountain somewhere, where they told us there is a bunch of lava and people were horribly unhappy. We don't rightly know what 'lava' is but the followers of Munc assured us that it's very painful stuff, like water that burns like fire. That didn't sound like a very nice place to go to.” yet another Peasant stepped forward, saying, “So a lot of us, we put our heads together and sort of decided to go ahead and believe Munc's disciples about the lava and about him speaking for you and for The D.M., and Munc's disciples also became very powerful. Sometimes, they even fight wars with the aristocrats over who gets to squeeze us peasants for all our wealth. It's awful nice of them to take so much thought for our well being like that. Munc's group started calling themselves religions, by the way, and they own what land that the nobles do not.”

Joshua felt as if his strength were failing him. He could barely keep himself standing there, his fingers attempting for all the world to dig into the stone windowsill beneath them as if it were made of gelatin. His fingers, of course, failed in this because it was not, in fact, made of gelatin. His fingers would really have hurt had he the presence of mind to have noticed what he was doing with them, but he did not, for his mind was gripped by the terror of contemplating practically an entire species that had, apparently, gone mad.

“As for the followers of Gunkar and Patu,” an almost emaciated peasant contributed, his face pock-marked and covered in old scars, “Well, they started these groups called 'armies', and they started making tools that hurt people, which we didn't really like very much because we like peace when we can get it. But they gathered us together and explained to us why it was necessary sometimes to hurt each other with their tools. Since they explained it to us, we suppose it makes sense, so we fight in their wars when they want us to. They made their weapons out of sticks and sharp stones chipped to a cutting point at first, though we're using bronze for some of them now and they kill a lot easier. The armies are all led by followers of Gunkar and Patu, but since they've discovered that there's a lot of suffering and dying involved in war, they rely upon us Peasants to do the actual fighting and the actual dying anymore. The armies go around building stuff, like roads and aqueducts, until they can manage to get a war going, in which case, they have us destroy people and places with those tools of theirs and with fire, and then they make people do stuff, and if the people do not do what the armies tell them to do, the armies kill them. That's pretty much what the armies do. Except when a real war breaks out. Then they have us do the killing. They're just so darn generous.” Joshua's stomach heard that last comment and a fresh assault of gastrointestinal acids flowed into it, forming an particularly painful ulcer. But Joshua did not as yet notice this new pain, for his mind was distracted by the horror that he was hearing. Humans had invented warfare. The worst of his fears about human stupidity had come to actually happen.  But Joshua stood there, continuing to listen to the Peasants describe the miserable society in which they now lived, his face pale and his fingers trembling with distress. It was much to his credit that he remained silent, spoke no words to interrupt the peasants in their absurd account of recent history. When the report was finished, however, he cleared his throat, and asked in a level tone,

“I see. And what, might I ask, is in it for the Peasants? That is to say, what is in it for you?”

“I beg your pardon, O Keeper of Time?” another peasant asked, somewhat confusedly. “But what do you mean, 'What's in it for us'?”

Inside the silence of his inner being, Joshua wanted to scream! But he kept his tone carefully measured.

“I mean, what is it that you, the Peasants, the people doing almost all the work, gain from this order of things? Surely, you must accrue some benefit by unquestioning loyalty to the Emperor, and by allowing this 'nobility' you speak of to own the land where you work the fields. Is there not also some benefit accrued in recompense for your lives when you join these 'armies' you mentioned? What do they pay you for all this, as a fair trade?” Joshua asked, and the peasants all fell silent. Many of the faces had an utterly mystified look on them, as if Joshua had asked his question in some sort of foreign language, which, considering how many years it had been since Joshua had gone into the exile of his self-enforced solitude, and considering also the nature of languages to morph into different forms and dialects over time, it might very well have been. 

“Fair...trade?” one of the peasants asked, as if a mere child, sounding out a word for the first time. “What is this Fair...trade that you speak of? Is it some sort of food? We like food. We don't really ever get enough food.” The peasant who said this doubled over slightly and clutched his stomach between his fingers, looking momentarily sad at the thought of the biting pangs of hunger.

“You do get something out of all this, don't you?” Joshua demanded. Again, there was no response but uncomprehending silence. “Is there no reward at all for your labor, then? Do these men whom you have chosen to rule over you not give you something of value equal to the labor you donate to them? The blood, sweat, and tears you give them?” 

Then one of the peasants gathered below, as if inspired by some thought or another that might be valid and relevant here, stepped forward and spoke, saying,

“Ah. We get the pride of knowing that we are good servants of the Emperor, and the nobles who own us tell us, when they come every Autumn to take their share of our harvest, that we are an integral part of maintaining the order of society. So we're proud of that too. Then, of course, there's always the honor of dying for our country. We also believe that it is a pleasure to do our part to make sure that the people who own the businesses are making money. And, after all, Munc and his disciples have been telling us for centuries now that if we serve the Emperor and our Lords and the business owners and the followers of Munc's religions, we will get to go to some place that is very nice, where we won't have to work no more, and we'll always have enough to eat, and--”

“That's it?!” Joshua exclaimed in shocked outrage, the echoes from his voice knocking another nearby rock pile loose of its anchoring, and sending it skidding down the side of a nearby mountain. “That's all they give you in return for all you do for them?! A promise that things will be better in the next life while they steal the entire wealth of Human society away from you in this life?! That is absolutely the worst idea I've ever heard! The few ruling the many?!  How on earth is that supposed to ensure the rights of all people?!”

“Well, they do tell us that some of the food might eventually trickle down to us. But what else is there?” one of the peasants asked, and from her tone, Joshua could tell that she was asking the question in all seriousness.       

What else is there? WHAT ELSE IS THERE?! The question just proved too much for Joshua, and his poor mind started to snap.

“And you're okay with this treatment?” Joshua asked with incredulity.

“Sure we're okay with it!” one peasant said.

“Not only that, we're proud of it! And well we should be! We're doing our part!” another added.

“What...what was the basis? What was the reason that your Emperors and your Aristocracy and your Religions and your Armies gave as evidence that they had the authority over you to do all that to you?” Joshua asked, biting off a multitude of curses and struggling audibly to keep his voice under control.

“Why, patriotism, of course.” replied one peasant.

“And above that, religion! We do it in the name of the D.M., and also in your name!” another added, proudly.

In his name? In the name of Joshua Calendar, people had waged war on each other for centuries, murdered each other for centuries?! The war and the waste and the exploitation was in his name?!?! The thought was too horrible for Joshua to comprehend fully, and his mind filled with fire that blotted out all thought.

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! IN MY NAME?!” Joshua asked in a voice they probably heard on the other side of the planet, for it has been said that in that moment, his voice had become great and terrible like the very voice of God, that is to say, The D.M. his Master. And, indeed, human beings apparently heard the echo of these words all throughout the ages of the mixed-up time of that world, though that echo, echoing through Time as it did, was indistinct and muddled so badly that none who heard, hear, or will hear such an echo can quite make out the words that were said, as the person listening with his ear to a seashell will hear the distant echo of the sea, but never distinctly enough to distinguish between the sound of the crashing of the waves upon the beach and the sound of a seabird splashing into the water in pursuit of a pescatarian snack.

Joshua's voice was amplified now by his outrage, and all around the area, the mountains started to shake violently, as entire mountain faces began to split away. Many of the sorcerers and magicians living in the Lotsarock mountains met a gruesome fate that day, buried in rockfalls and collapsed caves. It was a terrible tragedy, that would be remembered in other Ages as a Cataclysm. For indeed, much of the Mountains of Lotsarock were leveled that day, and became in other ages a sprawling prairie dotted with small hills.

“ALL YOU PEOPLE HAD TO DO WAS JUST SPLIT EVERYTHING UP EQUALLY AND AGREE TO JUST SHARE ALIKE AND COOPERATE WITH EACH OTHER, AND CONSIDER EACH OTHER TO BE THE CLOSEST OF FAMILY! BUT NO! YOU COULDN'T DO THAT! NOW LOOK AT YOU! YOU ARE CALLING IT PRIDE TO BE FARMED LIKE CATTLE! YOU ARE CALLING IT AN HONOR TO BE KILLED. YOU ARE CALLING IT A PLEASURE TO BE EXPLOITED!!! WHAT ON SLUD IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! I JUST WANTED TO BE A SPACE-ARCHAEOLOGIST!!! BUT NO! I HAD TO BE SADDLED WITH THE TASK OF CONVINCING HUMAN BEINGS TO BE HUMAN! AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Subtitle: "Joshua Calendar, Keeper of Time, shortly before stupid peasants basically drove him absolutely freakin' nuts. Then he turned into a raven and flew away. Cawcaw."

And then, Joshua Calendar lapsed into indecipherable gibberish, and from that day forward (or backward), few, if any, could ever again understand much of anything that Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time, said. For his frustration at the utter nonsense upon which the future (or the past) generations had based their society, in his name, so utterly opposite of everything he had hoped and dreamed for centuries to see humankind adopt, it drove him mad. Completely, utterly mad. You would not believe how mad Joshua Calendar became. You just would not believe it. Seriously. Insane doesn't even begin to cover it.

What Joshua Calendar did then was quite possibly the most awesome thing that any of those gathered peasants had seen in their entire lives, and they had no cause to forget it, so the story has been handed down (or up) through the centuries, but Joshua Calendar changed his shape into that of a great raven larger than any eagle, and he flew away, far, far away.

And to this very day, Joshua Calendar, the Mad Keeper of Time, is said to be flying across the azure skies still, for sometimes, as the raven flies low, they can be heard to screech “Timeneverstops! Caw caw! Makeitstop! Caw!” And then the Raven flies away beyond the sight of men, to a nest, the location of which is not known to humankind. But no human may know if there is any truth to such a tale, and some, as a consequence, call it a myth.

But, so the legend goes, Joshua Calendar departed from all fellowship with the human species on that day, and he has never been seen in human shape since. And the peasants whom had so infuriated him stood for a time, confused as to what had just happened. They had thought he would be proud of them for their service to the Emperor and the Nobles and the Church. Why had he been so upset to discover them existing in what they had thought was their proper place, down at the bottom of society?

Nonetheless, though Joshua Calendar was gone, his legacy was not. Workers looking for survivors in the collapsed dwellings of what had once been the Mountains of Lotsarock found survivors indeed, some of which even happened to possess copies of Joshua Calendar's system of calculating and reckoning time, which alone was able to pull the mixed-up time of Slud (the Planet and the Universe) into some semblance of a cohesive system. The people who discovered the complicated diagrams called it after the only thing they could think of that was even close to being as confusing...the man who had devised them. But confusing as the diagrams were, they caught on very well in Society. The people called the diagrams a “Calendar”, and they reckoned year one of their history to begin upon that very day, and one of the strange habits they developed was the pretense that they actually understood the calendar, or, indeed, even fully understood the concept of Time at all.

Tales of Slud, Prologue, Part 1 - "How the entire Universe of Slud was created. And how both a planet and a man also got that name."

In the Beginning, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. You would not believe how empty the place was. Like, think of something. Anything you choose. An apple. A cute little puppy. The 3rd law of thermodynamics...That didn't exist. It wasn't there. Because there was nothing. Quite literally nothing.       And then, the Universe came to Be, for much the same reason, many wise people throughout countless centuries have been driven to confess somewhat ruefully, that any universe is created; That is to say, a dry and very poignant boredom was the reason. That, and also because there was a consciousness to perceive it. But mostly it was just the boredom...and by the use of that particular term, the author of this book intends to convey a general picture of the most dreadful tedium, as if that of a bad dream which never really seems to end until at one time, for one reason or another, it does. Such, the author has noticed, can be called "life" and indeed is called "life" by many, many tongues, and many more fingertips. Such a terrible, wearisome boredom exerts a certain pressure upon many individuals to create things as a means of an at least temporary escape, and that attempt to escape from the horrendous tedium of mundane existence, it is thought by many of the scientists of our world, provided the impetus for the very existence of our Universe. 

Thus, Behold! Upon one Thursday night in the subjective time and space of a Creator, there appeared a being known only as The D.M., shapeless and formless, and as small and yet as vast as a single thought, and for the first time, there was something. For The D.M. had come forth with a Will to create, and thus the Universe was no longer empty, nor was it Void, nor meaningless, nor uninhabited, but it had a population of one, and that one was He who had come forth to create. 

And the Thought of The D.M. called forth into being the Universe in all its potential, as if it were a great Mansion that had not yet been built, whose outermost walls had been fashioned as a sort of boundary to everything, although the inside remained as yet unfilled. And The D.M. looked upon the boundaries of the Universe that He had created, and He thought that It was good...enough. Sort of an underachiever, that D.M.      

But eventually, the idea within the mind of The D.M. changed, and He took thought once again for the shapeless vision that He had caused to come into existence, that it should not remain so very empty, but that it should rather be filled with all sorts of objects of existence. And it is known, as well as any being can ever know anything, that within the worlds and the Universe that He has created, the Thought of The D.M. is reality, as He wills it, so that He can create a thing out of nothing save His Thought alone, whenever He so desires it. And nothing at all within the structure of the Universe (if it can truly be said that He gave the Universe any such thing as structure, or, at the very least, a structure which makes sense) has got its existence but that it has its uttermost source within the thought of The D.M. It should be noted that the preceding fact has caused no small amount of consternation among the ranks of the Enlightened.

But it is a widely accepted theory, posited from countless centuries of basic observation, that The D.M., the God of the whole Universe of Slud, is lazy and sometimes a little bit lacking in common sense. Such, of course, explains the fact that He, in His lack of common sense, had not bothered to devote enough energy to the research of optimal Time-Progression patterns before he got down to the business of creation, and even thus He ended up creating the Universe somewhere in the Middle of the Progression of its Time instead of starting at the Beginning as would a sensible creator, were they given to the process of Creation in place of The D.M.

Subtitle: "He's got the whole world in His...Oops"

And in His laziness, He then decided it would be a good idea to leave the notion of Time Progression up to others to try to figure it out. After all, He had seen that He had made a terrible mess of Time, and He shuddered at the amount of work that would be necessary to fix it. Better to let someone else deal with that headache.  And this, then, was the First Mistake of the D.M., that primary error from which all the chaotic strands of history were thereafter (or therebefore) woven.    It has followed from that First Mistake that the Progression of Time of that Universe has, as a consequence, flowed equally in all directions from that mistake, so that the past and the future are actually created and even experienced simultaneously, as they ripple outward in all directions from that primordial Mistake that The D.M., lacking in common sense, had made, and being lazy, had put off fixing. And it has generally been thought by the largest majority of the creatures who have dwelt within that Universe, that the whole process of Time Progression was, as a result, needlessly complicated, entirely inconvenient and even counterproductive to the processes of evolution, for reasons all too apparent.             But when The D.M. had gotten enough of the Time issue sorted out for life to more-or-less function and be somewhat viable, He got to work creating things. For sometimes, The D.M. in addition to being lazy and lacking in common sense can be somewhat impatient, or so many of the scholars of the world tell us. Those among the Wise of the World (if any such creature can truly be said to exist) say that He thrills in the act of creation, and having created something, He then grows bored of it, and He tends to move on and create something else, leaving the things that He has created to deal with the inconvenience of their own existence on their own, whether or not He has happened to have endowed them with the wisdom to do so. Many of them, the D.M. had in fact not endowed with the wisdom to do so. Thus, unfortunately, explains the lamentable notion of suicide, which is estimated to claim the lives of some four-fifths of all living beings in the Universe.             But in that primordial age, called by all people "The Center of Time", The D.M brought forth, of His own creativity, the eldest of the planets and stars, and He looked upon them for a while, and He saw that they were good. But then He revisited his old Astronomy textbooks, and discovered that He was going about the process of cosmic creation in the wrong order. (Surprise surprise.)  And The D.M. took thought for the mistake that He had made, and He decided that He would create the great birthplaces of the stars...the gaseous, dusty clouds of the Nebulae...later on, but that He should probably at least figure out something to do with the planets and the stars that he had already caused to be. And thus He arranged them into galaxies, each one supposed to be, with its own particular sheet of unique and vital statistics, transcribed within the "pages" of some mysterious tome called The (Cosmic) Notebook, of which more shall be detailed anon.

And the Learned of the world throughout the centuries have speculated that somehow, the statistics transcribed within The Notebook translate within the Universe as real attributes within existent objects. But this theory, as is the fate of many scientific theories in many different worlds and universes, has been met with the scorn and the ridicule of the superstitious and cainotophobic general public, usually in the form of thrown cabbages, rutabagas, turnips, or other farm produce of the sort, and the learned beings who have espoused what is, among themselves, rather pompously named the “Special Theory of Existent Statistics”, they tend to keep their opinions on the subject more or less to themselves, due to tremendous pressure from the Muncian Church. 

The Special Theory of Existent Statistics, itself, was generated within the scientific community, of course, but the concept has in after (or before) days been co-opted by the Muncian Church, as has every idea ever thought by humankind that might ever prove dangerous to the status quo that is kept in place by the ruling order. 

The theory is referred to in the Muncian community as “Transcriptions of God (The D.M.)”, and is known to the Reformed Muncians as “Endowments of God (The D.M.)” on a particularly pleasant day, but when they're having a bad day, Reformed Muncians tend to use the much more common “Oh crap, why the hell did I have to be born without the ability to _______?! What the crap, The D.M?! By the way, your name is so lame. What manner of God calls Himself “The D.M.”? Just saying...”

And in those eldest of Ages, The D.M (eventually) brought forth also great nebulae and quasars and black holes and all that stuff(after He had done His astrology homework), and He set them in the deep places of emptiness in between the stars, where His creation was looking a bit on the threadbare side. And this has long perplexed the various persons among the circles of the enlightened, for they have never been able to figure out the precise reason why He had created such a thing as a Black Hole in the first place. For it is known amongst the astronomers of the world that a Black Hole devours the substance of the Universe, and the Wise have often scratched their temples and kicked their feet in frustration, trying to figure out why any sane Intelligence would first create a Universe and then create inside the Universe a great big Void that eats the Universe He just created. And having reflected upon this notion, it is small wonder that many among the Enlightened are, in fact, gone quite mad. Though there have developed theories within the metaphilosophical circles which have seemed to posit that it is The D.M. Himself, and not the mortal being who has perceived the handiwork of The D.M., that is really the crazy one.

But The D.M. named this Universe that He had created a most odd and slighly unsettling name.  He named it Slud, although it is not known by any scholar alive just why He had endowed the Universe with such a strange and entirely unattractive name. Perhaps the action of naming something so great and solemn as a Universe such a singularly ugly name speaks to an attitude of irreverence or purposeful impropriety on the part of The D.M. Or perhaps He just simply found it humorous to name a Universe such a thing. Many theories have arisen throughout the Ages, with the specific purpose of answering this particular question. Indeed, entire branches of science have developed just to examine why it is that The D.M. would sum up the entirety of the being of an entire Universe in one extremely unattractive syllable such as “Slud”. The members of the Slud family, who of course also bear that name, have been known at times to note that the very notion of an entire branch of the sciences devoted to discovering why the D.M. would name the Universe what He did is, at the very same time, both flattering and really rather insulting. Suffice it to say, the members of the Slud family tend to be rather satisfied with the name of the Universe. Of course, it must be acknowledged that they, themselves, might very well be biased.

At any rate, with regards to the question of why The D.M. chose the name he did for the Universe, it is a possibility acknowledged by the author of this document, that The D.M. might have been inebriated at the time. Such an explanation, the author believes, would indeed account for much of the inherent absurdity which is present in the very processes of life. However, in the interest of candor, the author admits that He cannot be entirely certain on that score.      

What is known, however, is that The D.M. apparently found the name amusing enough to use again and again, for He had made also a planet by that name, and it is upon Planet Slud that the events of the following tales, some great and some merely okay at best, have taken (or will take) place. And many of those events include yet another manifestation of the incredibly strange name, this being Slud (the Family), members of which family were mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. But the Slud Family came later (or earlier, depending upon how one looks at it), and the lives and the exploits of the most famous of that bloodline are known to historians. That is to say, known to the historians which have survived the process of Sophiasplosion detailed in another chapter of this volume. And so, consequentially, the tales of the Slud Family will be elaborated upon at another place within this document, and shall be treated with greater detail within that section.

  And having created the Universe (and the Planet) of Slud, for even thus had He done upon the First Day, The D.M., being quite lazy as all the Enlightened know, decided at that point to finish up for the Day. And it was here that He met with an peculiar sort of problem. For, you see, Day itself did not yet exist within the Universe or the Planet of Slud, for the D.M. had not yet created them. And after a hearty facepalm at his own lack of attention to detail, Day and Night themselves the D.M. created by His Thought and His Will, and He wrote Them even thus upon the pages of The (Cosmic) Notebook, thus making them a reality within the Universe. 

It is interesting, though not particularly relevant, for the author to note here that when The D.M. created Day and Night, He had not yet created Time Zones, so it quite literally was 8 in the morning everywhere in the world simultaneously. But after The D.M. had created Day and Night, (and then time zones as an afterthought), He rested, for He had a long day of job-hunting before Him in the world of his own residence.       Upon His return to the Universe upon the Second Day, The D.M. set Himself to the task of creating life to live upon Slud (the Planet). He created first a great firmament of the waters above, and He looked upon it and He named it “Sky”. And He made also the waters, which He gathered into a great Ocean upon Slud (the Planet). And The D.M. caused great pillars of fire to burst forth from the center of the world, and to sear the bed of the great Ocean, and these were the eldest of Volcanoes upon Slud (the Planet). 

But the fires of the deeps met with the waters of the Ocean and they cooled. And wherever the fire of the deeps cooled, there the fire hardened into stone, and many successive layers of stone were laid upon one another, so that in time, some of the stone had grown tall above even the surface of the waters. Even thus is it believed by geologists that the the first continent on Slud developed and rose from the sea. And The D.M. looked upon the land that he had caused to be, and He saw that it was good...sort of.             But, as has been mentioned, The D.M. was bored. That is to say, He was still bored, even though He had created the stars and planets and the ocean and continent. So, for some reason that seemed perfectly sensible to Him at the time, He cast lightning from His fist into the waters, idly, and badly, skipping bolts of electricity across the surface of the great Ocean as one might skip a pebble across the surface of a pond, while He pondered what should be the next thing that He would make. But when the lightning struck the waters, there formed many tiny little droplets of water, each forming a "skin" of water tension to encompass all things inside them, and each containing within them the elements of life. There were within these primal droplets proteins and amino acids and the essential metals which compose living beings, and the minute quantities of these building blocks of life that were present within the tiny droplets were even thus charged into activity by the Holy Lightning of the the Creator-God. And The D.M., at first, did not see that it was good.      

For The D.M. did not at first notice what it was that He had done, and He took thought, and He took thought, and He took thought yet even more upon the subject of exactly which life to create. And then He paused to eat a sandwich. He enjoyed the sandwich very much, and He tasted that it was good.

      After the sandwich, however, The D.M. labored upon something He called “homework”, for something He called “Statistics class”, but that appears to have only peripheral bearing upon the History of Slud (the Universe), therefore the Author shall leave off of entering into too much detail upon that particular subject, but rather shall he take up the tale again at another point in time, when The D.M. was not quite so...preoccupied.      

And Behold! The D.M., who is God to the entire Universe of Slud (and by extension, is God to the Planet and the Family as well), He returned to the world, and He saw then the tiny droplets of life that He had made, saying, “Ahhh, but this be truly a wonder, that I have caused to gather within these tiny spheres of water all the required substances from which the the great work of life might be constructed. Therefore, I go to my task, for I will finish in earnest the great work I have begun in ignorance.”

And doubtless, The D.M. was comfortable in making this confession of His ignorance, only but for the fact that there were, as yet, no living things around him that were capable of hearing his candid admission, and thus none could shame Him with their comprehension. Some there were in later (or earlier) Ages who thought to question how any might know that The D.M., in fact, made this statement at all. However, those people subsequently exploded, so the question has never really been settled.

But The D.M. caused more of the fires of the deep to rise from their molten source, and in several locations did mighty volcanoes arise, which warmed the seas, and which acquired more substance unto themselves throughout the eons of the Center of Time. But the warmth of the seas caused the droplets to fuse together, and thus bonded to one another, the droplets became living cells of greater, more complex, and more evolved creatures by the will of The D.M. 

And of these cells of life, The D.M. made algae and sponges and the fish of the sea, and He started making from these primal creatures yet even more complex beasts that could leave behind the waters of the Ocean and go forth to walk even upon dry land. And some of those creatures grew well there. Indeed, in the time of when these land creatures waxed to their greatest population and mightiest stature, they evolved to be tall and majestic, some so great as to blot out the sun. One such creature, a great reptilian beast known as Rexasaurus Tyre, so thoroughly evolved towards the end of becoming such a great predator that no creature before or after has ever achieved its deadly efficiency in the hunt. The creatures of the D.M.'s first creation achieved a pinnacle of evolution rarely seen in any universe, and in their time they dominated the entire landmass of Slud and a sizable portion of its sea also, and endured in continuous evolution for a span of time thought by modern paleontologists to have been at least two hundred million years. But that was all, of course, very boring to the Creator-God, and The D.M. decided that He wanted to do something different. This would indicate, apparently, that The D.M., in addition to being lazy and lacking in common-sense, also suffered from a case of attention-deficit disorder.      

So that He might wipe clean His mistakes, The D.M. sent a comet against Slud. (The Planet, of course, not the Universe). The comet big enough to wipe out the whole Universe would have had to be huge, and, much to the gratitude of the inhabitants of Slud (The Universe), The D.M. was too lazy to think of sending that one. But the Comet sent by The D.M. wiped away much of what He had created, and the whole affair has since been regarded by historians as a rather irresponsible act for Him to commit, and really, just a sort of a terrible idea.

But The D.M. created new plants and animals to take the place of those which He had destroyed, and He filled the world of Slud once again with teeming life, but eventually, after that, The D.M. again got bored with creating a bunch of plants and animals. And thus He decided to start on a new piece of work to entertain Him, and He thought that perhaps He would create beasts who could think, and reason, after a fashion, and take thoughts of their own. He called them human beings.     

Subtitle: "Creation Rule #1: It is recommended to at least have a College-Level Education before attempting to create a Universe..."

Now, human beings were a bit trickier to create.  The reason for this, the D.M. realized, was that if He were to create a species of creatures who were to exist solely to entertain Him, He would have to endow them with complex personalities. He also, He knew, would have to endow them with emotions, and an ability to adapt to their environment, and He would also have to bestow upon them the intellect to be able to think beyond the merest horizons of basic survival (and how well humans seem thus far to have accomplished that...).  All these factors taken in the aggregate, it is quite clear that all this would not have been very easy for a being known to be lazy and lacking in common sense to have accomplished. As a peculiar consequence of the laziness of The D.M., however, He created many creatures without distinguishable personalities, and they exist to this very day, and are called, collectively, the Blandred, because they're boring and they do not really stand out all that much. Some few humans, however, finding themselves with more time on their hands than they knew how to properly utilize, have taken the effort to classify and give names to particular subtypes of Blandred, though few, other than those with too much time on their hands, have reason to care much.      

But as for humans, The D.M. created three human beings at first, two males and a female, for He thought that by thus creating more males than females, they would amuse Him by doing all sorts of strange and foolish things to impress each other. But because The D.M. is lazy, He never bothered to remove from humans the mating-instinct of primal mammals, and because He is not the most common-sensical of fellows, He said, “Ah, why not?! I shall leave these humans that I have made as they are. For it shall be entertaining to Me to see how they develop.” That, of course, turned out to be a mistake. The author of this volume must ruefully note that the D.M. seems to make a lot of those.            

And Behold!  Before The D.M. could get around to explaining things to the humans, and establishing some ground rules for how they should treat each other, the three Humans of Slud (the Planet) discovered mating and reproduction quite on their own, and one of the males destroyed the other during the first week of their existence in a fight over the affections of the female. The female, of course, having witnessed a murder for her own sake, was somewhat distressed emotionally by this incident. And by "somewhat distressed", the author of this volume seeks to downplay the fact that this first ancestress of the Human Species discovered that rare condition known as "catatonia", and it endured thus with her for a long time ere she ever recovered her wits and her psyche sufficiently.                  

And The D.M. was very angry that this crime of murder had happened, so He cast a dreadful judgment upon the two surviving humans (who, by the by, were named Al and Evelyn), that they should forever have to live with each other until the very last day of their lives, and that they would have to put up with each other's often overly-exaggerated gripings by whichever means they were able to discover. By the judgment of The D.M., therefore, they were compelled to build a home and live together, and listen to one another as they complained about how badly their day had gone at work. And sometimes they would be kind to each other, but more often than not, they would bicker back and forth, usually at mealtimes. And this also grew dreadfully boring for The D.M.. Indeed, it grew so utterly tiresome for The D.M. that He began to regret picking the living humans to inherit the earth, instead of choosing the corpse.

  But eventually, the two humans were able to put aside their differences enough to have children, and throughout the past and the future (or maybe both, whichever the case may be), they proved to be a fruitful and numerous species, although indeed, theirs was a strange and even dysfunctional existence. For The D.M. had created humankind upon the model of another form of Humankind which existed outside the boundaries of the Universe, within that different, subjective Universe in which the D.M. Himself resided, and that model of humankind we are given to understand was built with the ability...indeed, even the need...to experience time in an orderly progression from beginning to end, upon a linear path.       

Yet time flows outward from the middle within the Universe of Slud, and thus, as the beings of Slud (the Planet) were born and lived their lives, they often found themselves often within different time-epochs on different sides of the middle of Time than their kindred. And humans being thus separated from their kindred by barriers of Time in such a world, it was very easy for men and women to fall through sinkholes in the fabric of Time, and be stranded in other eras than their own, although it was virtually impossible to fall back into one's own Time in precisely the same place one had been located previously, or even at all. As a consequence of this, Grandparents found themselves living in what should have been, to them, the distant future, ages after their grandchildren had died of old age, and Brothers and Sisters and Cousins found themselves also vainly attempting to communicate with each other throughout the long years which separated them from each other.       

So it was that, despite the fact that the human species was fruitful and multiplied, they were not able to build much of a society, since they existed in different times from each other, and the languages they spoke were themselves a product of the unique and peculiar circumstances of the time periods in which they lived, and thus the humans of Slud had no way of seriously cooperating with each other, or even communicating at all effectively with each other through time.            

Thus humankind pretty much just lived in caves and went out every once in a while and threw some spears at several of the species of the local Blandred, who, being very boring creatures as has already been mentioned, would probably not have been missed anyways. (Blandred might be terribly boring, but they make for decent and nutritious eating, if not particularly appetizing eating. Thus, the various faunal species of Blandred formed the foundation of pre...or post...historic Man's diet.)

Beyond a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle, however, in which people stranded in the same era banded together loosely into wary and confused associations that have been called Time-Tribes, humankind could not progress further in the evolution of their social being, for they could not muster the conversation and cooperation with each other that is necessary for the development of a sophisticated society. And The D.M. saw that this was not good, for their destiny had not been intended to be stuck forever in a state of suspended development. That fate, as all the Universe knows, was reserved only for those who placed importance upon the realm of politics...