## Then a miracle occurs...

Copyright © 1999 by Lenna A. Mahoney

# Capture 7. Irresolution

And what finally happened to The New Theleme Club? Bill Inconnu and I moved out of the local River City calling zone for heretofore undisclosed reasons.

Free Meson: Bill, you have abused your sysop privileges by publicizing my address. Theofe, you must never once have considered my position if I were found holding such expensive jewelry without possessing the title to it. Clearly you stole the jewelry you sent me. You worked up this whole idiotic sci-fi story to con strangers like me into receiving stolen goods and helping you hide them from the police. I am going to make sure you are stopped, and soon.

Theofe: Thalp pulled out your address, did the mailing too, Bill Inconnu never knew of it. So only one of the brooches has arrived? Do you want to donate it to the police? So tell them to check, also get the one Tiffany's has for appraisal. Their jewelers will throw their hair at the cats when they see the pieces are completely identical. They'll appreciate the shock eventually. Surprise lengthens the sapient lifeline. For humans, anyway.
No other Earther has geminates of this toy yet. No one could have made it on Earth. I can't guarantee it'll hold together there in the remagic. Don't worry. No other Earther could prove they owned the brooch. So you're safe. Have some fun? Mail one geminate to Liberace, another to Zsa Zsa. If you can't stand the sight of them throw them in the lake.

Ruby Arsenic: Cute trick, guys. Really, could the Bill Inconnu you know and love have done a thing like that? He swears in all directions that he didn't know what was going on, wasn't involved, hasn't disseminated any classified information, and didn't assassinate JFK. Nor did I. Durn, we missed our chance.
But okay, I love blarney, I'll bite. Just what was this GW-evidence that you Gregarians purportedly mailed?

Theofe: Geminates of an Immerlindn brooch. Oval, large, holding a star ruby carved with a scene of a storm in Heaven, set in steel lace. In the centre of the storm, an inset cherub's face carved from star moonstone.

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Thalp: Excuse the mess, I left my computer with a so-called friend while I was away. I come back & find out he's been calling all sorts of boards pretending to be this fake ET Thalp. He says he got money out of a bunch of goobers & you bet I'll make him return it but he claims nobody fell for it on this board, well it must be Elite.
I never saw such a pile of BS about outer space & all. Anybody who believes in magic & the occult in this day and age is strictly a sucker. I bet nobody here believed that garbage about AREPO, nobody should believe it either. Getting into that conspiracy stuff is asking for trouble, am I right or am I right?
This whole mess is one big embarrassment, I won't be back here any time soon. I'm sorry about any trouble my "friend" caused. I sure won't give him any more chances to mess up anyone's heads.

D.F.R.

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Bill Inconnu: ALERT FROM SYSOP: PLEASE READ! It has come to my attention that one guest of The New Theleme Club has been abusing his privileges in a manner that may affect all the rest of us. ALL MEMBERS should take the time to read the following three messages from Black Needle. I am sorry to have to publicize private mail in this fashion, but I hope you will all see the reason. (I have deleted the names of the recipients to protect their privacy.)
Black Needle (private): What is a phreak like you doing on a jerkoff board like this? If you want to go where the elite action is, get off of here and onto W:reHeaD at xxx-xxx-xxxx (censored by sysop). That's my board and let me tell you it isn't every mother's phool I advertise it to. ;-> I've got the world primo collection of philez 'n' warez, ATM hax, NAM programs, CMOS morfoviruses, PBX codes, voice-mail 800 numbers, you name it I got something better than it, of course for informational purposes only, kids don't do this at home ;->. Come and take a look if you don't want to miss the BIG moment of your whole life!
Black Needle (private): Shit, you don't have to put up with having any stinking pig parked outside your front door spying on you. Give me the word and I'll get one of the anarchy d00dz to send you the wiring diagrams for his device of doom that burns out pig cruiser radios by RF feedback. Mr. Badge doesn't hang around long once he knows he can't call mommy for help!
Know something else? The big fuckup with this board is it's all talk, no action, and too many little ladies and feminazis and no T&A. Out in TX I found some great digitized files from a Traci Lords flick. That chick had lips that wouldn't stop!
Black Needle (to two other recipients, private): Following up a complaint from one of the board's users, I am investigating possible criminal activities on The New Theleme Club. We have reason to believe that The New Theleme Club is part of a covert network of Satanic BBSes whose resources are acquired through money laundering and are substantial. The most common Satanet approach is to first entice unwary members to write private messages of a compromising nature and then blackmail them into a deeper involvement in the cult's activities.
I am requesting your cooperation in our inquiries as a corroborating citizen witness to supply copies of downloaded files and messages. You are not required to assist actively by making inquiries of BBS members. If you choose to do so, I will provide you with responses to their messages. You may reword the content of the responses into your own recognizable writing style but first forward a copy to me for the record.
You will want to confirm my identity. Call the Costa Mesa, California police department, ask for Detective L. Cranston, and tell him Phil Bennick has requested your assistance. You can make the call person to person collect if you mention my name.

Beach BEM: It's a decided, though ambiguous, relief to learn that you have already found out that there's a police investigator "lurking" your board. Black Needle had tried to convince me to act as an informant, leaving me torn between telling you at once and waiting to see if he was serious. I have never felt, you see, that phone taps and other covert surveillance are justified methods of police investigation in a free country.
This has driven me to realize how little I really know about the other users of the board. It is alarming to be reminded of the extent to which identities are mere guesswork in BBSing. There are, however, some things of which I am fairly sure; for example, that Theofe and Ruby Arsenic are two and the same. :)

Theofe: Not nearly.

NeuroGod: yeah, and you and Aquinas are the same fellow aren't you?..

Beach BEM: That would be telling...

Black Needle: I'm not any dickhead cop. You won't get far making up that kind of bullshit for getting people to pay attention to this stinking board. What makes you think the cops would give a fuck about any of this shit? If I couldn't run a better BBS than this I'd shitcan it and walk away.

Theofe: Anything you think you know about this little world, the rules, the people on it, you've made it all up. People make up IVE, Earthlocal cyberspacetime too, we compose it, unavoidably.
I've thought of logging on here as an alter ego, fighting with myself. Then do the meet-cute, fall in love, break up. Maybe try to convert myself to some cult like the New Onanism. "Love yourself! Please yourself! Nobody does it better!" I think I'd confuse myself too much. I'd rather let other people confuse me.

Aquinas: You have surprised and disappointed me, Bill, by revealing our private mail. I feel quite certain you could have provided an equal service to the Club without committing such a flagrant intrusion upon our privacy. If this is your policy, how ever can we be sure which of our messages are being read and which may be published without any fair warning? Furthermore, I did not and do not feel it the better part of citizenship to sabotage law enforcement efforts. I am truly disappointed in you.
For my own protection, I will no longer be returning to the Club.

Citizen Paine: Hail and farewell boyz and grilz, I'm off to that there final frontier, I'll bring ya back some good booz and space Amazonz when I git done with em and hey a few star dudez fer the galz and Black Needle. Don't want anybuddy to feel reejected.

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Ruby Arsenic (private and encrypted): To answer your question, we've had no discernible troubles with AREPO. GWemlins are another matter, so we've pulled most of our learning curve outside Clarke orbit. And thank goodness Earthuman computer encryption is still barely useful to make up for what the GWemlins do to IVE privacy.
We haven't been able to locate CP on IVE. Think he's all right? I wouldn't like to see him go the same way as Thalp and not be able to do anything about it. You don't need to feel guilty about that, incidentally; or if you simply must, be generous, share some with me.
What a thing a GW is. Emily has gone purrserk. She loves and polishes the thing; I keep hoping no passerby will notice her leaning on nothing while incessantly trundling around in rectangular circles in the driveway.
This GW. You know what it reminds me of. In all the stories I've ever read about someone selling their soul to the devil, no one ever says a thing about how heartrenderingly grateful they are to have something worthwhile to trade it for. :-*) (That's a glowing dimple.) I mean, like most everyone else I've been selling my soul a little bit every day for the low low price of keeping the peace with the neighbors and co-workers and bosses and enforcers I couldn't avoid dealing with. I appreciate getting a better price. Consider the gratitude spoken, to you, and second-sister Sabre/"Elaine", and (for whatever good it does) to Thalp.
But this isn't supposed to happen, you realize. Bill and I aren't supposed to be able to choose who we associate with. We aren't supposed to live happily (or comfortably) ever after -- and no one else in the world is, either. We're all supposed to live jammed into an anthill (anthell) with all the wrong people, so we can prove how tolerant we are. We're all supposed to suffer some, so we can prove how strong we are. We're all supposed to strain, so we can prove how responsible we are. We're all supposed to have a proof, not a life. This new life is supposed to be a hoax, or an alien attack, or an illusion the GW slid us into when first we walked through its door, or a fiendish attempt to erode Universal Law and undermine God and Finagle.
In fact I did have a bit of a diabolical clash with the initial wedge-in. I lay down with my head in the softzone, and then I turned the doorknob and went back into our house. Though I felt there was something odd about that, I attributed the feeling to the subsonics in the dark sound that thrummed the floor, an arrhythmic deep bass pulse textured like a cat's tongue. Its source wasn't in the basement, so I clambered into the crawlspace and crawled around on my dear little flabdomen listening to the dirt. Where the sound seemed loudest, I dug. Beneath the dirt was a membrane of light. When I pulled its lips apart with both hands, I saw a train flowing through the tunnel beneath me. It passed and I jumped down to the tracks.
After five steps I was a bed of crystals of no comprehensible color. All the crystals, that is, all my bones, especially the smallest ones, looped and linked to each other at Escher angles. Each crystal was an owl's eye and at the same time an eye in a peacock plume. Each strand of a feather was an index of where to find some story or datum or mentrix or image. Some of the strands talked. Some of them stank.
First I started to get scared -- no ego-loss here -- and then I got angry, because this wasn't supposed to happen. My anger came up through the crystals like a silver star, or a shining steel caltrap, and suggested things I could do about being angry, ways I could get at people and how much fun I'd have, and it wriggled and swayed and tried to snake-charm me.
I said "no!" and melted the star into a pool of calm water -- oddly enough that was one of the things it had suggested I could do. Then, perfectly clear-headed and placid, I jumped into the water and flat on the GW floor. A safe experience, I grant you, but precipitate.
Since then we've been out and about on Earth, we've been to the Moon Alice and further. I suppose we should have quarantined the Moon rocks and the bits of Saturn's ring but, too bad, so sad, don't get mad, it's too late now; and anyhoo we can't be the first GWer souvenir vectors. We've played with the geminator too and let the banquet table generate several illicit substances. Not to consume, not yet, life is maniacal enough. VR is too. Ah, sweet mania, one of my most maniacal pleasures is to think how few of the people I've known in my life I'll ever meet again.
I've gotten so used to dancing the Socratic Quickstep. Step one: have abnormal ideas, out in the 99th percentile. Two: realize how many of the normals' ideas are arbitrary, subjective, and self-serving. And-a-three: recognize the same of my own ideas. Four: make concessions to other folks to avoid imposing my arbitrariness on them. Five: find out the concessions aren't mutual, nor is the self-examination. And-a-six: watch the walls close in.
Ah, but no more siege mentality. No more waiting to see just how much further a hostile environment can nudge me into believing conformity rather than pretending it. No more waiting for my life-support to be eliminated because my runt employer has lost its grip on the greasy underbelly of the old-boy network and can't get a suck of govt funds. No more waiting for some politician to take a dislike to one of my hobbies or investments and morph me into instant lawbreaker. No more watching world news with the hope that "Après me, le shitstorm."
No more serfdom. No more boss-oids calling me a "professional" to guilt me into working longer hours. No more having my hobbies curtailed so that they can't possibly interfere with my worktime. No more piss tests. No more shared office with the privacy of a Turkish jail cell. No more of those meetings that run into my overtime because the manager takes exhortations as his personal pastime. No more of the endless stinginess about how we must never do anything personal on the company computer network, or mail, or phones, or copiers, and never post anything in the halls. No more always a peon, never a peer. No more independent reviewers with fire-hydrant mentality, where they prove they're really big dogs by leaving lots of comments behind them. No more toplofty junior PhDs sparing me distant glimmers of their superstellar attention. No more working for chronic bachelors and finding out why they never married, what they have against women, and how little they know about not getting their own way (a trait they refer to as "having high standards"). No more office lords insisting I should only speak when I'm spoken to and never never interrupt.
No more leaving home. No more sitting in distant cities wondering if our house is burning or being robbed. No more airports plangent with imbecile remonstrations about parking and white courtesy phones. No more dimly lit stinking shoddy hotel rooms with obscure red smudges on the pillowcases and glasses. No more smoking parlors and perfume test labs in the guises of restaurants and elevators. No more public toilets last used by she-mutants with urethral spray attachments. No more public restroom graffiti, "If you want to make a trucker happy open up your blouse, show him your titties as he goes by and his dong will jump with joy."
No more traveling and parking in mobs. No more commutes. No more black ice. No more gargantuan trucks and breedermobile vans blocking my view of traffic. No more merging behind little old men on downers, and glamor-mimics relimning their mascara. No more wondering if the geek sniffing my hind bumper is gonna plug me with an AK-47 when he gets fed up and roars past, or if he'll just cut me off.
No more noise. No more top-goon militboy jetjocks thunderously playing chicken over our neighborhood. No more neighbors' kids bouncing their basketballs off the side of our house. No more portable-earthquake car stereos cruising by. No more bitch next door barking at the passing air molecules.
No more tumblebug chores. No more shit for Shinola shoe polish applied by our back lawn, courtesy of the bitch's wannabe boyfriends. No more lawn mowing, no more leaves to rake, no more apricots to pick up, no more weeds to pull. No more oil changes. No more gas station fumes. No more toilet cleaning. (Hey, this is getting good.) No more dusting, no more vacuuming. No more cobweb and cob removal. No more dishes to wash! No more cries from Billisarius, "You've been washing my socks with the alien socks again! I don't want to wear socks for people with three feet!"
Umm, actually I suppose washing may still be the most effective way to handle dirty socks, and I'll still have to sort them into mere pairs. And we may need to do some driving to camouflage ourselves among the other Earthies. And it looks like a lot of Gregarians are going to be even pissier than entry-level PhDs. And, speaking of pissier, I might have to use public toilets on rare occasions. Other than that, the paean stands as is, trivialities and all. Being eaten alive doesn't have to mean being devoured by lordly lions, it can mean being nibbled to death by ants. Just think of all the verminous little things that won't reach me now, that I no longer have to pretend don't matter!
But yes, IVE needs no computer backups, hallelujah sisters! My oh my, and I was thrilled to find out I can use IVE for my engineering simulations. The hardest part of a simulation is expressing the boundary and initial conditions in a way a computer can understand. It's simple in VR. IVE seems totally capable of handling equations with scope and grandeur, equations that ought to be governed by the laws of plate tectonics. It looks like the difficulty lies in doing without any form of I/O except letting the puter drive my body to draw the plots und so weiter. No news there, I/O always reeks.
Ah, we have come upon such domesticity. Interior decoration. Who owned this thing last, anyway, someone with a tinsel, plush, and marquetry fetish? Ewww. We may keep much of our present furniture for familiarity and backup. Wouldn't want to have the power go off and not have any sofa! OK, no GW life-support failures have ever been known to occur, maybe because there were no survivors to report them? So we're fools. But we're fools who have bottled O2, camping gear, spare books and records, medicines, and a portapotty. And a shotgun, and an electric power generator and fuel. And our geminating originals... Our storage "room" is rather extensive.
Bill finally gets his Room of Brass. I get a desk and a little lighted cushioned reading niche. (Yes, a padded cell of my very own.) We carefully designed our dens to let the "bathroom" pop up anywhere. Is astonishingly comfy. But we blocked the "kitchen" from the dens. That makes us come out and socialize for meals.
You realize, incidentally, the GW wastefield will take some getting used to, what with it removing not just unwanted exudates but those hapless rootless pubic hairs that retain a certain attachment to their firmly planted neighbors. Yeowch. I suppose I should be grateful the growing stuff doesn't go, hair, nails, and all. But it certainly takes pluck to use the toilet nowadays. Maybe I'll shave.
Urk. Scratch that subject.
Big surprise -- you and I, and Icsoner and Bill, don't seem to quite share tastes despite our common births. We inloaded the green-spice chicken liver soup instructions you recommended; it had the look and flavor of a meal that could do its own digesting. Unlike you we like "The Motoslybnians", except when they use that instrument that sounds like scraping fingernails down a blackbird. Further examples to follow, I daresay, especially with Sabre. (She married into the IRA?!)
We tried putting a night sky on the bedroom ceiling, but sleeping out under the stars twisted my mind. I woke up, I was looking up, and there was a feeling of some enormous process going on that would have been wholly unimportant to me except I felt compelled to watch it. Like "Starry Night". Instead the bedroom is pale gray and satiny, with several Amazon aquarium windows armed with cichlids. The greenish ripple light glosses on the walls in a restful alpha rhythm. And we can even have Emily the allergen in with us now.
We keep the Earth computers and their batteries et al in the strap-on. Zero-gee and my astigmatic contact lens don't get along, so I wear glasses more often nowadays. With fasteners, mind you. Yucko! I'd really rather have the scaffolding off my head; after all these years I'd like to think my face wasn't still under construction.
One of these times I'm going to inload some mescaline and see if I can reprogram my eyebrain to wipe my optical deficit. Mesc has been said to occasionally accomplish such things. If people can relearn to see "properly" when they wear glasses that turn everything upside-down, and they can, then maybe I can teach my visual center to interpret clarity where the present gradually learned optical processing displays a blur. For now, though, I'm going to limit my medical experiments to the nerve proximity-mapping. You've heard of this, right? I might actually be able to trust acupuncture, once I find out which of my nerves enter my skull so closely packed together that stimulating one causes potentially healthful crosstalk in its near neighbors. Aha ha ha, now it all makes sense that I get a twinge in my left middle finger when my bowels are about to go off!
You know, sister-entity, Bill and I have got a lot to learn and I don't think we'll be getting very far offEarth for a while. Besides, I don't want to leave Earth now that we've found a way to do without the people. It's like falling in love, when suddenly he looks like a different man with the same face. Earth terrain is entrancing, but that's not the best of it. Our local Washegon skies are so lavish and so little like anything that needs to have any meaning or beauty for simple human animals like us. And yet they do mean.
Snow storms in the headlights like a rout of angels. Ethereal celestial pillars and arcs and icy iridescent lepidopteran smears always warily well back from a sun that might melt them. Spring migrations of cloud armadas that return no more often than lemmings. Clouds like swirls, saucers, tilled fields, froth. Thunder monsters, with great hulking raindrops making startled eyeball bubbles in the puddles and octopus suckers and smashed baby jellyfish on the windshield. Vast splashes winging their way out from under cars. Autumn windstorms, the tilled potato and wheat fields rising up in wrath (and the farmers in ignominy), as I look out the window into something like an aquarium dosed with sherry, filled with barbed-wire concentration-camps of throbbing tumbleweeds yearning to breathe free. Fog in all colors, twilight mauve, bruised steel blue, Viking-eyes blue, and white, and gold and scarlet for the traffic light I almost missed seeing.
But we have those infamous gray-wool-sock skies for most of the winter. Good time to be in space, where the beauty isn't seasonal. Winter's when the local heavens stop to recharge their tinctures and I get the time to dream up gaudy new metaphors. (Fun!) All we get in winter are a few days of heraldic skies, party per bend nebuly azur and argent, the kind of days that make me want a phrase "live of winter" to match "dead of winter."
Winter. That reminds me. Xmas. We made this lawn ornament just for Xmas and now we won't get to use it. I'm talking about a giant green sheet metal praying mantis tastefully outlined in little green lights, eyes beaming with seasonal cheer and high-wattage bulbs, gazing out high over our head-high front hedge, holding a white-tufted red Santa cap in its jaws and a black Santa boot in each mighty inverted elbow. Maybe we'll make it a condition of purchase on our house that every year the buyers put up our Xmas bug in the front yard; that'll ensure the kind of buyers who are worth selling to.
Thus far we've told everyone a fable about having gone rock-hounding in Montana, found a wholly exceptional opal, sold it, and decided to get away from the abhominable rat race while vooming around the continent in a mobile home. That explains our frequent breaks in communication and our apparent wealth, and for "proof" we've shown photos of that black opal hulk you sent us thru Thalp. (Keep your lies close to the facts, as Heinlein's wise oldepharts used to say.) I don't know what our absences and income loss will do to our credit rating, tax status, and paper-chase personas. We want to leave those workable just in case. Maybe it would suffice to overpay our taxes regularly.
I doubt we can ever truth our family, fine folk though they are, or bring them up (I mean out) to meet you. Our most minimally abnormal data (that is, the jackpot tales we told them) have already been an experience they've found too much of a tax. Anxiety attacks. Heart attacks, potentially. Carp attacks, definitely.
"You're getting older, it really is time to think about saving for retirement instead..." Unspoken answer: "I'm not getting older, I'm getting away. Bye-bye!"
"You haven't been able to pull your projects together in the past. What makes you think this one will work out?" Unspoken answer: "Wouldn't you like to kno-ow?"
"Who ever said the world was fair? I can't feel sorry for you if you can't learn to accept everyday life the way it is." Unspoken answer: "Don't expect me to only do the things you can feel sorry for."
"I can't imagine why you'd want to do something as drastic as this." Unspoken answer: "If your imagination has atrophied, it ain't my problem, boyo."
"But almost everyone feels this way about life, you aren't the only ones with troubles. You really shouldn't take it so personally." Unspoken answer: "Suppose I punch someone in the nose. You, for example. I take it personally for the sake of my knuckles, you take it personally for the sake of your nose, even though lots of people get punched every night, especially Friday nights in bars. Next, seeking to avoid the cult of personally, I clone myself 250 million times and all of me go out and punch everyone else in the country in the nose. Everyone gets punched, so none of us should take it personally enough to try to stop it. I like the plan but, personally, I'd rather do all the punching. Just tell me when to start."
You perhaps perceive the difficulty of helping our relatives into GWs and out of Earth, though it's something we'd like to do. Empirical evidence suggests it's literally impossible to tell them the truth. By what means, and to whose benefit, can we tell the truth about us -- to people who misapprehend us too damn fast, in the way that most upsets them and us?
For experimental purposes, we like totally truthed one of our healthiest, longest-running, most difficult friends. It was like being run through a highly moral ball mill. First he disbelieved everything, on principle, and was vigorously offended at our wasting his time and insulting his intelligence. "Who do you think you're fooling?" Then we demonstrated Saturn's rings to him by walking him out the door plop yeep into the ballfield; the discussion languished while he recuperated in the shower.
At that point our "flying mobile home" changed over from unbelievable to inexplicable and probably incorrigible. Everything else, magic, gemination, dopples, et cetera, stayed on the "unb" page of his personal dictionary. For starters he was highly dubious of just accepting the whole Gregaria story as true, and he had to be assured that we were checking into it in depth. Next he disapproved of what our departure might do to our various parents, and he had to be assured that we would break the news gradually if at all. (We'd already decided not to follow Bill's one-time parental announcement paradigm: "by the way, we're engaged".)
Next he disapproved of our running away and leaving the world -- if we don't like the way things are here, we should stay and try to make improvements from the inside, not avoid the challenge. He had to be assured that we had carefully considered our qualifications for world-saving and therefore refused to serve. I added a prompt offer of a geminate of our GW. If he felt there was some glorious obligation to try saving the world, why he could go right ahead and do it himself. The man whose most substantive political act has been putting a John Anderson for President bumper sticker on his office door. Har har har.
Well, you know? He took me up on it.
The Ulan Bator Lost and Found recently contacted me to say my temper had turned up there. Now I begin to understand the true meaning of GWupture.
Oh yes, we won't just take GW, we will pass it on. We definitely will try to recruit our newer, closer friends, never mind their names even encrypted sorry sorry. Speaking as a rankless amateur, I think they could make it as raumstamm. One of them was born to be a fur trapper. One or two others should have been eccentric, titled 17th-Century inventors who had servants on their servants. Yet another was born to be a knight. Unfortunately none of them exercised their selective nativity options. One chap is especially cursed with the ex-wife about whom the poet wrote, "Abandon all hope ye who enter her." He'll likely be so gung-ho we'll have to stuff him under a bull elephant in musth to keep him quiet enough to tell him all.
But if our friends won't let us give them GW, then by golly we'll shanghai strangers from SF cons and jam it up their noses! Yowza!
You know what else I most look forward to? No, not sharing the GWealth. No, not saving the world. (Please! how tacky!) No, not those violet-induced lucid dreams of yours. Something that's even more impossible without GW. Something that's definitely impossible while BBSing. I want a lerg-free zone. I want a decontaminated vocabulary. In memory of Thalp, I'll start by swearing off all further use of the toxic verbiage "Paulian" and "normal". It isn't like they ever told me anything I didn't already "know".
And let that be my last word on the subject. <Fe>

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Ruby Arsenic: Once upon a time there was a deep dark utterly insignificant mystery. Two of River City's most notable sysop nonentities, Bill Inconnu and Ruby Arsenic, had dropped (or perhaps drooped) out of sight. No Thursday coffies, no Friday hearts games, no Saturday shindigs had witnessed their presence for longer than anybody could be bothered to remember.
And lo, there were strange events in those days. The IBM, Amiga, and Mac factions of the BBS community weren't speaking to each other. That wasn't strange, but why was the Repo faction so popular? Why were there no X-rated pictures on any of the boards, except for the ones featuring beautiful girl-shaped cellos? And where had all the wombats gone? Long time passing...
Glaum and Lady Uriel hired Bill Inconnu's pal Colossus to investigate. He disappeared too, but in an even bigger way. Men in black kept asking about him. People with badges that identified them as Justified Ancients of Mummu or Priests of the ParatheoAnametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric kept asking about him. People (or reasonable facsimiles) with 1970s clothes, blond wigs, and odd inorganic odors on their breath kept asking about him.
The answers didn't become clear until much, much later. You might almost say too late. The questions became clear much, much earlier. Almost too early.
It was a dark and stormy day. It was a dark and windy day. It was occasionally, extremely briefly, a fiercely bright and high-bass-fidelity day. The power was to be out for three non-dark and non-stormy days after this festive display. The modem nerds of River City were unplugged, unhappy, and correctly anticipating more tedium to come.
Glaum too was anticipating. He was wrong. The earwax-jarring thump from overhead did not quite sound like the rafters breaking under a tree or telephone pole. It was a very loud, definite sound, but minus the little breaking and crunching noises that generally accompany a really front-page photo-opportunity structural disappointment.
Glaum went outside. This might have been very brave of him, but then again it might have been braver to have stayed and perhaps have been crushed in his very own home. So it goes. When he stepped out into his front yard to get a view of the roof the rain did not fall upon him. The wind did not blow upon him. Two voices called to him from on high. He recognized the (not-so-familiar anymore) speech patterns of Ruby Arsenic and Bill Inconnu.
"Hey, Glaum! Come take a look at our invisible flying mobile home!"
Glaum decided he had been struck by lightning and died and all the major religions had been wrong, which was probably just as well.
However, it was a genuinely fine mobile home, even excluding the warp drive and the factory-inspected protective force field. A mobile home that doesn't have to worry about weight, which was why it could land on Glaum's roof without unduly antagonizing him, can do some really amazing things in the way of stained-glass toilets, marble fireplaces, and gilt-edged plastered arches in the living room. While his hosts worked very hard to avoid explaining exactly where this miracle of rare device had come from, naturally Glaum had to covertly check out his roof. Flying mobile homes just come and go, that's what they're built for after all, but you have to live with your roof a long, long time.
The rooftop panorama was not quite as might have been expected. All three participants saw the anomaly at the same time. Plump legs wearing striped stockings and ruby boots were sticking out from under the FMH's veranda. Presumably all the body parts above the upper shin were a monomolecular film ornamenting Glaum's much-enduring roof.
"Wow." said Glaum. "Hoo boy!" With immoderate enthusiasm.
Bill Inconnu and Ruby Arsenic looked upon him strangely. "Huh?" one of them inquired.
"Nice legs." Glaum explained. "Hey, they could be a little less on the chubby side, and too bad about the rest of her, but still, not bad!"
Bill Inconnu and Ruby Arsenic moved a step away from Glaum and, simultaneously, looked upon each other strangely.
"Do you want to pick this abode up off the remains or shall I?" Ruby asked.
"Go ahead, I'll tell you if you do anything wrong. Oof! Ow! What did I say?"
With much helpful advice from Bill Inconnu to provide a sufficiency of thermal lift, it was possible to hover the rather unusual mobile home about two feet above Glaum's roof. Not too eagerly, the three modemnerds returned to the picture window to view the wreakage. There were only the legs, which might have evolved over countless aeons to be merely and solely legs for all the sign there was of the flattened gore they had presumably once supported.
The legs moved. Ruby Arsenic cringed in the expectation of watching limbs rolling flaccidly down the roof, bouncing bruisingly off the gutter, falling with a heavy meaty wet thump into Glaum's soggy yard. Instead the legs flexed (revealing that the pork was muscle not fat), bent at the knee, and rose to stand insouciantly on the roof. They then obliged the audience with an indecorous little jig, at which the stripes fell off the legs' stockings, humped themselves, and squirmed off along the ridgepole.
Ruby Arsenic's teeth started chattering in 6/8 time. Bill Inconnu said "oh shit" in a completely refined manner and blinked several times. A small wet hole with a tongue in it opened up under Glaum's mustache.
The legs stroked each other languorously and then one began the slow but ultimately fulfilling job of stripping off the other's ruby boot. Madonna couldn't have done it better, even if she was coated with hashish honey at the time. When the second boot came off, a tattoo of the famous Rocky Horror lips could be seen on the legs' left ankle.
Even after the legs had done their final stockingless can-can off into the rain-cloaked distance, the three voyeurs were still standing and staring at the abandoned (in many senses) ruby boots. There were funny noises coming from somewhere but it would bring on a lawsuit to say who was making them, or why. The boots didn't care, not having ears. They just sat on the roof, at the kind of vaguely wrong angles that would have made H.P. Lovecraft nod in skyey recognition.
Nothing at all happened when Glaum ventured out to get the boots. They weren't even perfumed, and they didn't even giggle. They sank in methylene iodide, and they scratched red tourmaline and red quartz, and they went right ahead and passed all the tests that ruby boots should reasonably be expected to pass.
"Well, you could put them on." said Bill Inconnu. "You've proved they're ruby, now prove that they're footwear. Don't jump to conclusions just because they're shaped like shoes."
"Uh uh, no way, no how." Ruby Arsenic hid behind Bill's laboratory equipment. In skilled hands an Erlenmeyer flask can be a deadly weapon. "You put them on. I bet they'd fit anyone. You saw how tight they were at first and how they got loose just before they got taken off."
"Yeah, I saw that." Glaum chortled appreciatively.
"Or YOU can wear them if you like them so much. I don't care. Just keep those boots away from me. I don't want any part of them."
"Hey, what do you think they are, vampire boots? Those legs looked plenty healthy to me. OK, to prove they aren't any problem, I'll put them on, and then I'll give them to Lady Uriel if you two are still scared of them."
"I didn't say we were scared. I think it can be a mistake not to approach these paranormal phenomena carefully and methodically. Things are seldom what they seem." elucidated Bill Inconnu.
Glaum and the boots fit each other like a glove. In some indefinable way the boots had become distinctly masculine footwear without shedding a single one of their rose-cut gems. Bill Inconnu took several careful photos to prove that point. Insurance companies like photos after accidents.
"All right, now what?" Ruby Arsenic emerged from cover, carrying a diamond-edged, newly sharpened shoe horn.
Glaum started to tap dance -- no beat, no pattern, and a lot of muffled cursing of and clawing at boots, but at least a two-star performance. After a few paragraphs had gone by, everyone noticed the dots and dashes in the rhythm. By the time the peroration was over, Glaum wasn't willing or able to do anything more than sit on the floor while Bill Inconnu got out the Ouija board and Ruby Arsenic held the shoe horn to the boots' Achilles heel. It wasn't hysteria. It was just in case they had any ideas.
"Let's try repeating the question. Now what?" asked Bill Inconnu.
"FIND COMPANIONS FOR THE QUEST," spelled the boots.
"God DAMN it," muttered Glaum, calf muscles twitching uncontrollably.

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The Baron von Munchausen: No, no, no! All wrong!
You must start at the beginning of this story, "Theofe". You must give your mirrorkin the complete and true history. You never would have had that "invisible flying mobile home," as it was so inelegantly termed, if I had not given it to you. And I could never have given it to you had I not received it from the curator of the Fomalhaut Art Museum as an entirely unwanted token of his gratitude.
It was the pictures, you see. The museum's visitors simply could not get into the art. People who were accustomed to walking into any picture they liked, merely bounced off the surfaces of the pictures in the Fomalhaut. It caused a scandal! And it made the practices of the reality tax collectors very unpopular.
As you very well know, there had been a disagreement between the reality tax agency and the Fomalhaut. Following the audit, the tax collectors, whom your mirrorkin did remember to mention as the Men in Black, confiscated all but a mere pittance of the reality of the Fomalhaut's artworks.
I had a great admiration for the Fomalhaut's collection, especially the portraits of the beautiful Shining Lady of the Coma Berenices clusters. Of course I stepped in to save the Museum. The reality tax collectors had made one mistake, which was to cost them dear: they had neglected to cut the silver cords of the astral sculpture. Seeing my opportunity, I had my trusty servant Albrecht fetch the Great Horn of Procyon, which as you know serves as the hall in which the museum's permanent collection is located. I then ordered Gustavus to blow a note on the Great Horn that would precisely match the resonant frequency of the silver cords. The vibrating astral sculpture shook the very fabric of reality, directly in the center of the headquarters of the reality tax agency, and the entire agency simply blinked out of existence. Conveniently, all the reality assessments they had collected remained behind. I turned over the entire lot to the curator, but he insisted that I keep one item as a reward. That is how I came to have the "mobile home." It was only later that I learned that it was, in fact, the Personal Portable Pleasure Palace GW of the Terroress of Terranova.
Naturally, I presented it to two of the sterling members of the rival Prankster coterie, and you will remember we all enjoyed a fine laugh. But now, surely, it is obvious why the stocking stripes chose to slither away rather than merely vanishing!

Munchausen.

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