National Lampoon's Doon by Ellis Weiner

Author:Ellis Weiner [Weiner, Ellis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0671541447
Published: 2011-03-31T05:36:49+00:00

The power of religion has been sorely underestimated by our scientists. No other force in history has been so effective at compelling human beings to say things in languages they don’t understand.

—from Mauve’Bib’s Introduction to The New Improved Testament of the Orange County Bible, edited by the Princess Serutan

The Spilgard-led troop with its two sugarlost not-Freedmenmen refugees made hootchfall together, at last, in twilightime. Raw sugarrocks strewed the entrance to the basin of a cavernous surround.

Hootch Grabr!

Jazzica marvelled.

What had seemed from a distance to be rubble scattering the basin floor proved to be a well-camouflaged experimental garden. She recognized small plots of vegetables cultivating directly out of the sugary soil. But there were other fenced-off areas of less familiar crops. They looked… strange. Jazzica’s Boni Maroni training enabled her to tell, via nosesniff smellsense, that what was being agricultured were actually crude varieties of desert chicken pot pies, poverty veal parmigiana, and mutant Mexican-style shredded beefs in a zesty sauce.

Entrees! she thought. They’re actually growing entrees in the midst of this sugar. Could I have underestimated these people?

She looked up, saw Spilgard watching her with suspicion.

“You see the mahn t’vahni, the food experiments,” the nabe said.

“They are most impressive.”

He shrugged. “Soybeans. Everything. Mashed, fried, tricked-up as best we can. It is an impossible thing, to grow true meat or vegetables in this sugary land.” Then he turned upon her a stern eye. “Yet there are many who would pay much to know a little of such nothings.”

Jazzica focused on his words, listening to them and thinking about them. I must respond, she thought. Yet what shall I… say?

She turned to the nabe, said, “Would I betray the people whose life, saved by them, which even now enables me, in fact, to live, which I do, is mine own?”

Baffled, Spilgard frowned. “You have the weirdest way, woman,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll not have to speak to you again, Schmai-gunug willing.”

They were interrupted by a commotion at one of the cave entrances. A woman in hootch clothes was confronting a small group of then-arriving Freedmenmen. She had a generous mouth. Jazzica recognized a small figure in their midst.

Pall!

Her son!

Her trained awareness confirmed the fact that the boy, Pall, over there, to whom the woman was speaking, was her son. Yet she instantly permitted herself not to experience anything.

The woman was pointing to Pall. “This outranked my Janis?” she demanded. “This… boy-child?”

“He be more than that, Harrumf,” Spilgard admonished with newfound respect in his attitude.

“Man-child,” she said grudgingly.

“More.”

“Boy-man.”

“Less.”

“Baby-man. Man-boy. Boy-boy.”

Pall stepped forward, and Jazzica heard the regret-overtones and I’m-terribly-sorry harmonics in his voice. “I—”

“Teen-boy. Youth-guy,” the woman Harrumf said with narrowed eyes. “Guy-man.”

“You’re close,” Spilgard said. “Let’m be known as a teen-man, and there be an end to’t.”

A murmur arose among the gathered troop, gradually condensing into a single discernible phrase: “Pall Mauve’Bib-who-is-Assol is a teen-man!”

“And he,” Harrumf said. “He outranked Janis?”

“I didn’t want to,” Pall said. “He… forced me to.”

“Enough,” Spilgard announced. “Assol, go with Harrumf to your new quarters.

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