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

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

The Problem of Time: Whose Problem Is It Anyway?

Incredibly complex is time, in any universe presumably.  Even more incredibly complex by a factor of at least a hundred is the time which operates in Slud, our mixed up Universe. 

The solution implemented by the D.M., the supreme God beyond supreme Gods, the ultimate source of all life, almighty creator of our Universe as many believe, to solve the tremendous gaps in language, culture, technology, and general social understanding that had developed between human beings, however, was most certainly not very complex at all. Let's face it...complex is a bit beyond the abilities of our Almighty Creator. You know, because of the laziness and stupidity.

And because in our universe, God is both lazy and stupid, His solution was naturally to push the job onto someone else to take care of. That's just how the dice of The D.M. roll...

And who among all the mortal beings of our universe has ever been able to apprehend even a single percentile of the Idea in the mind of the D.M. our God? 

Well, actually a lot of people.  The D.M. may be our God but His laziness and stupidity make Him the opposite of inscrutible.  After all, having been supposedly created in His lazy and stupid image as lazy and stupid ourselves, we the People of this universe of ours, we have learned to recognize quite well how the minds of lazy and stupid men...and gods...tend to operate. Like recognizes like, as the saying goes.

We humans of Slud (the Planet) recognize as fact that the very laziness and stupidity of the D.M. is thought to have been the cause of the aforementioned First Mistake he had made on the First Day, and as a consequence of this, was also the ultimate cause of all subsequent mistakes He made (and there were many). What we cannot seem to figure out, however, is why our God the D.M. thought that refusing to see to such an important matter as establishing a better way for time to work would somehow make the problem solve itself.  It is almost as if our almighty Deity does not plan or think things through before He just mucks about the place, creating worlds on a whim, usually incorrectly, and seemingly without much of a care for any of the consequences of doing so.

In His stupidity the D.M. had begun the progression of days and nights, weeks  and fortnights and months and years, right in the middle of all chronologies in our Universe, so that our time began in the middle and radiated outward from the center, instead of beginning at the beginning and ending at the end as any sane timeline would do. By doing this, He essentially transformed time from an ambient, omnipresent event almost like an invisible ocean that people's consciousnesses swim in, into what amounts to a wave ever in motion in all directions, the decay of parts of which manifests as Time Holes, which had played a part in the mass confusion among the humans of the Time Tribes of that age.

In His laziness, The D.M. did not do very much to exert His divine, Godlike abilities to finding a workable solution to make all continuities work within the framework of the time He had created. And so in Slud (the Universe), time remained out of its proper sequence even as human beings spread across its surface, multiplying from a small population into thousands of different populations of many diverse sizes, and because time was so out of proper sequence, none of the beings of this world could view the subject of it with any degree of significant comprehension or understanding.

None, that is to say, save one man, and woe be to he who was that man. Indeed, woe was to him. And although thousands of years now separate us of whichever present day this is from that chosen man, several popular legends say that woe continues to be to him, somewhere in the world or beyond it.

Only one being among all the entire human species on Slud (the Planet) has ever been able to understand all of the intricacies of Sluddish time, that is to say, the time in our Universe of Slud. Only he has comprehended how all things interact with all other things, in a myriad of forms and a myriad of scenarios.  Only he knew enough of cause and effect to project them to their logical conclusions, only he knew how to adapt to the confused nature of Sluddish time and devise a system to make enough sense out of it all to conduct the day to day affairs of life on our planet, a system that only he has ever understood in any great detail, and the fact that he was the only one who could understand what to him might have seemed simplicity itself was so much to his maddening chagrin that in time it would break his mind, his mind that was the greatest of human minds that ever existed in the head of a Sluddish human.

And what, then, was the name of this wizard of great knowledge but little sense, whom the foreshadowing tells us will meet a grim fate elsewhere in these pages? He was that poor, unfortunate soul named Joshua Calendar. The same Joshua Calendar who was the second holiest being in the pantheon of the Sluddish peoples.  The power and abilities of this most unlikely of men, being second only to the supreme God of our Universe, ensured that not only would Joshua Calendar keep for all times a place in history, but that his place in history would begin history, and if the reader has thus far been paying any attention to this twisted and convoluted narrative, they will have noticed that, without having yet been given the full details of it, the life and experiences of Joshua Calendar did not (or will not, depending upon how you look at it) turn out well for him. 

Entire books have been written about Joshua Calendar. The Muncian religion, in part, sprang up around the idea of him. And all this despite the fact that nobody alive in the world for thousands of years of the past or future knows virtually anything about the man himself.This Joshua Calendar was the same man who would later (or earlier) in his life achieve a singular, tragic and most unwanted fame verging on Godhead, as the Keeper of Time. This is his tale.

A Messiah Is Born:  Joshua Calendar among the Calendrian Tribe

Joshua Calendar was born into a Time-Tribe of the distant future (and, of course, therefore also the  distant past).  The Time-Tribe into which Joshua was born  had hundreds of different names because the members of it spoke hundreds of different languages and dialects, but contemporary Historians such as the author of this prologue choose for the sake of preserving what is left of our sanity to label that particular Time Tribe, which dwelt in the lands around Mt. Conn-Fuzhen in the northwest of the world, with but a single name...the Calendrians. 

There is no anthropological evidence to tell us of the present day when exactly Joshua Calendar was born, but evidence has been found to indicate that there was an extensive settlement of hunters and gatherers based within approximately thirty miles in almost every direction of the more than six thousand meters tall Mount Conn-Fuzhen (which is today located in the borderlands of what we of the present call the country of Prydea), approximately twenty four thousand years in the past and future. It seems highly likely that Joshua Calendar himself was born around that time, a member of that Time Tribe that inhabited the area. There are cave paintings from that era depicting a figure who could be and often is interpreted as Joshua Calendar himself, gathering together all the Time Tribespeople and speaking to them in the first great conversation in human history, the first great conversation that started history.

It should be said in passing that these people, the Calendrians, were not the only Time Tribe which existed at the time of Joshua Calendar's birth. whenvever that was. Indeed, today's Hubrysines and Bellicosians and Arrogantians are descended from other non-Calendrian Time Tribes which lived in the world during the same time as their Calendrian counterparts.

While the Time Tribes of the Calendrians, the Arrog, the Bellicost, and the Hubry mainly inhabited the lands of the north, another Time-Tribe is thought to have dwelt in the lands of the South, and the descendants of that tribe are thought to be the peoples who today inhabit the islands of the Gredier League, the lands of Kan Spira and Americant, and the peoples of the deserts which separate those regions from the lands of the north. But it is with the Calendrians that our tale will primarily be concerned in this section of the story.

The Calendrian Hunting Language: The World's First Common Language

Life within Time-Tribe of the Calendrians was an experience that one might very well imagine would be, had it occurred in a Universe that makes sense, very awkward and nervous 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. They were often sundered from each other by barriers of language, though they lived side by side, ate the same food, shared the same nomadic, hunter-gatherer life.

Indeed, the layout of early human dwellings found by archaeologist-led teams indicate that although early peoples of the Time Tribes, including the Calendrians, lived together in the same places, yet even so each appears to have dwelt apart from the others, which of course is consistent with the time-tested principle that people who live with each other for prolonged periods of time generally just cannot stand to be near each other. 

Each of the early Calendrian contemporaries with whom Joshua Calendar dwelt perhaps saw efforts to communicate with their neighbors as futile.  Doubtless they were unaware of it at the time but they were correct about that. For 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.

It is clear however that the primal humans of the Time-Tribes did make at least a cursory attempt to communicate with each other when communication was absolutely necessary, as in the case of necessarily public activities such as the gathering of stores of Krunsche Berries and Raspeberries and other forage and edible grasses, and the hunting of various species of Blandred supplied meat and other resources to the Calendrian people. Early Sluddish humans would have had to communicate in some way during the hunt and during the tribe's seeing to the logistics of supplying food, but, more importantly, they would have had to have made that form of communication a form of communication that was without spoken words. Once they had accomplished this, the Calendrians could accomplish cooperation with each other in the accomplishment of shared goals, such as a successful hunt or even the setting up of their nomadic encampments, no longer distracted from such cooperation by the confusing babble of human tongues.

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, paradoxially called by contemporary linguists the Calendrian Hunting Language, was the basis of communication for earlylate Humans in cooperation mode, 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 egregiously lazy mistakes throughout its history as the Human species of our world has made. It is estimated that by twenty four thousand years in the futurepast, when Joshua Calendar is supposed to have lived, the Calendrian Hunting Language was already more than a thousand years old and was used by humans all over the world.

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 Foodbeasts, 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. The assistance of domesticated animals would play a crucial role in the later development of human life on Slud (the Planet).

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, where humans of the Calendrian time tribe began to talk to each other in words, developing a common language which touched off 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 in martial activities, and it was there that the very first ancestor (or descendant) of armies was created, in the form of the Time Tribe's hunting party.

The cooperation was a boon to early humankind throughout the world, pretty much the reason why they did not starve. But even so, the people of the Time Tribes were sundered from each other not only by the various languages spoken among them but also they were separated by entirely different understandings of the world and society and how things worked. And because the People of Slud (the Planet), for the most part, have always been both lazy and stupid like our Creator, of course we would not wish to expend the effort to learn how to communicate effectively with each other, nor see the wisdom of doing so. 

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 (or post)-society Slud (the Planet) tended to long periods of solitude and private reflection as the basic character of their social existence, when they were not busy feeding the Tribe.

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.

What On Slud (The Planet) is Space Archaeology?

Regardless of what circumstances and events would one day conspire to make of him, Joshua Calendar had hopes and dreams of his own, and he had ambitions beyond the horizons of day-to-day survival which consumed the attentions of his contemporaries. 

It turns out, or so his own unfinished autobiography tells us, when he was but a youth, Joshua Calendar wanted eagerly to become a space archaeologist, even though at the time in which the youth lived, there was no such thing as archaeology, the space kind or otherwise. But that was not extraordinarily problematic in a place like Slud (the Planet) where because of the nature of its timeflow, if light switches had already been invented at the time it would have been possible to turn on the light before one flipped the switch to turn on the light, for here on Slud (the Planet), sometimes effect happens before cause. A small thing like space archaeology never yet having been invented was nothing to stop Joshua Calendar from trying to be one anyway.

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 specialized one such as archaeology, the space kind or otherwise, but cave boy Joshua Calendar had just such a notion.  Space archaeology existed as a practice and a profession in another age, and Joshua knew it. He knew of it, and wanted to learn about it.

The fact that space archaeology did not yet exist in the world in which the Calendrians dwelt apart but also sometimes together, 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. 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. It mattered even less that nobody had ever yet invented archaeology.  Or invented going into space, for that matter. Because the humans of the Calendrian Time-Tribe were just not that developed yet, and they hadn't even bothered thinking about any of those things. Well, except for one young hunter named Joshua Calendar.

Yes, none of those things mattered, because despite all of them, Joshua nonetheless knew what Space Archaeology was.  And how was it that he alone, out of all the people of the Calendrian Time-Tribe, knew anything at all about space archaeology?

It was because he had made remarkably good use of time holes. 

It has been mentioned previously that some people sometimes tried to communicate through the time holes with other people on the other side of the holes. Joshua Calendar, the central figure in this tale, was one of "those people" who looked to passers by like they were just standing there talking to themselves but were, in reality, trying to communicate with someone from a completely different era through a little hole made of temporal distortion. Joshua Calendar was also one of those relative few who succeeded in speaking with someone from whichever destination was at the other side of the time hole.

It was all quite random, which times were connected to each other and in which places their time holes appeared. But Joshua had hit a bit of luck, because one of the people he talked to through time happened to be a genius. That genius' name was Doctor Draywin Blanke, a space archaeologist and quite a prolific one. In his own time he was published in more than a hundred and fifty two different journals, he'd received a prestigious Lamarck Award for his theory on the nursing habits of the prehistoric Saurasaurs he'd excavated from the strata of some other planet. He'd written sixteen books, and he was a star professor at the University of Boughtin. And he was smart enough to devise a signal for them to use to let each other know they were available to talk.

And talk they did. Joshua was a fifteen year old boy, just at the right age to be really curious intellectually and be full of questions which nobody around him could answer for him. Dr. Blanke was a cool, sophisticated man in his early forties who lived the planetary system-trotting life of...well...a space archaeologist. The two talked somewhat often, usually three or four times a week, at least. Joshua told him about the people and the creatures of his own time, to which Dr. Blanke would listen patiently and with great interest, because knowing about things from other times is an important goal of any sort of archaeology, the space kind or otherwise.

Dr. Blanke, on the other side in more ways than one, was teaching Joshua how to recognize fossils and other archaeological remains, dig them out of the ground without damaging them, identify them, classify them, display them, and the sorts of questions to seek to answer about their functions when they were originally made.

Despite the significant difference in their ages, or maybe because of it, there developed between that cave boy and that scientist a friendship that has been and will be regarded as one of the great friendships of human history. According to Joshua Calendar's own written accounts, Dr. Blanke was to him almost like the father he had never had, had never known, a father who could very well have been quite alive and stuck in some other time, after falling through a time hole. They had a common interest and enjoyed talking shop. They had been friends for over fifty years by the time Dr. Blanke died, at which time Joshua Calendar was and will be exceedingly grieved for the loss.

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 anywhere in the world that he inhabited. People in the lands occupied by the Calendrians and elsewhere sometimes dug in the earth with pointed sticks (usually to dig up grubs to eat), but nobody dug up fossils. Not even Joshua, though he wanted to change that. And even the tools did not yet exist which were needed to do the work. The pickaxe, the brush, the technology to make plaster casts. None of these things existed yet, when Joshua Calendar supposedly walked the Slud, some twenty four thousand years from now and also ago.

So the dream of Joshua Calendar to become a Space-Archaeologist was pretty much out of the question for him, at least for the time being. Space Archaeology: Yeah, the Authors and Editors of this Volume are not quite certain what this picture has to do with it 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. Though only a primitive cave boy barely evolved past the level of an ape, his mind was curious, so he studied everything he could.  Even the people of his Time-Tribe, who all dwelt apart from each other and shunned all unnecessary human contact, often found him loitering around near them, watching them. Watching the way they dealt with each other when they had to, watching the things that they did when they thought they were alone, and watching all the strange things that happened to them as a result of time being mixed up.

It seemed to him that the Human species could solve almost all the problems which beset them, if they would just make the effort to learn necessary things, and put their ideas 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.

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. Nor, really, did they have any desire to, 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, ethics and understandings. Attempting to communicate with each other under such circumstances was frustrating and mentally exhausting and seemed to net them no success, so they did not waste their time with it.

It occurred to young Joshua Calendar that the answer of how to break down those barriers of language and culture probably lay in the commonality of the Calendrian Hunting Language.  We know this because he admitted it in writings from a later (and earlier) time after he had become literate, that were found in the ruins of the Lo Tsarok Mountains. 

"Surely," he wrote. "The movements of the hunters, understood by all, are a common language which, if expanded to include words with agreed-upon definitions, humans would be able to cooperate with each other much more effectively. I was pondering this very notion on the morning of the hunt, that one particular hunt which has changed my life forever, when my thoughts were interrupted by the insistence of the others in the hunting party that I join them so that we could all depart."

And that brings this tale to the morning that changed it all for young Joshua Calendar of the Time-Tribe which bears his name. The tale that in the following section the author shall strive to relate as faithfully from the source material as possible.

Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time
 

The Wammot Hunt

As for young Joshua Calendar of the Calendrians, the events and experiences of his life were shrouded in mystery until one particular day in his fourteenth year, which fell upon a day quite far into the future (or the past. Or, even more incredibly, most probably both), like so many years far into the future that it's mind-boggling to most people.

That was a fateful day when Joshua Calendar, then a young man of fifteen years of age, went out with His fellow hunters to hunt the incredibly uninteresting blandred creatures, in particular ones whom those idle fellows in the blandred-classification field tend to call "blahrgs". 

The name "blahrg" might have been an appropriate choice of name, because the word pretty much sounds like the phonemic version of a shrug. And a shrug happened to very often be the reaction people had when they saw one. It was difficult to resist the urge to shrug at an animal so uninteresting that people barely even notice it's there, even when it' stood right in front of their line of vision.

Even the poor animals' Creator, having in the act of creating them gotten the frame of the creature more or less to a correct, generally beastlike form, had then slapped some skin over it all and then had said “Well, that's good enough for this one!”, and then had gone on to create some other, more interesting species somewhere and somewhen else. Perhaps He created a Smilodon. Or a Cabbage.

But they were good eating, the blandred creatures such as blahrgs and mammots and hundreds of other types, and Joshua Calendar liked a good meal as much as anyone else. In that time, vegetarianism was uncommon and that meant animal flesh was what was for dinner.

Blahrg flesh is nutritious, rich in protein, and a skilled cook can prepare it to be quite tastier than one would think such a boring creature's flesh to be, and hunting creatures like the blahrg to feed the hungry mouths of the Time-Tribe was the central focus around which their Time-Tribe had banded together in the first place. All males older than seven years of age played some part or another in the logistics of feeding the people, and that part was almost invariably participation in the hunt.

Although Joshua did not like harming living creatures usually, he did make an exception for foodbeasts like the blahrgs. This should not, the author wishes to note, be held against him, for it was under the circumstances virtually impossible for any human, Joshua included, to care very much about blandred Particularly if eating one would help keep the bite of starvation away. If the reader of this history is Sluddish, their eyes are already glazing over just seeing the word blandred in this text. Something about the way those creatures were created prevents the human mind from even noticing blandred creatures are around most of the time. And a man did need to eat. They had not yet developed agriculture, so it wasn't really possible to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. And Joshua had never been allowed to abandon the hunt in favor of joining one of the foraging parties, which at the time was viewed as women's work.

Like the other males of his Time-Tribe, Joshua was well-trained in techniques useful in hunting the various creatures of the plains of the northwest of the world. One type, the blahrg mentioned previously, resembled large, boring Aurochs but with slightly shorter horns. He was also trained in working together with other Tribesmen to hunt and kill the ponderously large and heavy 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. Truly a Sluddish sort of thing to do!

Joshua also knew how to hunt and kill 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.

Joshua quite naturally was expected to take part in the hunts. He did not like killing things as has been mentioned elsewhere, even when he knew it was for food that he should do so. But a male's participation in the hunt was not a matter that was up for debate. If a boy did not hunt or gather, he did not eat.

So the practical reality of Joshua's life up to that point had been that he had to hunt with the rest of the males of the tribe, and he did so.  And young 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 as mentioned elsewhere, the people of Joshua's Time-Tribe went out to the hunt. It was a cloudy day, the sun was well-hidden beyond a flat gray blanket of cloud, and this was prime weather for hunting the blahrg. 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 (and will mean) "Dirt and Grass". Much later (and earlier) artist's representation of the rather confused fellows in Joshua Calendar's Time Tribe, engaging in a bit of caveman badassery.

The Calendrian 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.

The Calendrian hunters stalked silently through the grass, grunted quietly at each other and made motions with their hands in what would in other times be named the Calendrian Battle Language to coordinate the attack, and when they killed, they killed quickly and effectively.

The hunt shifted away to the west, then. Two wammots had been spotted further out onto the plain, grazing upon the midsummer grasses, and seeing them, the hunters left behind the wounded and panicked herd of blahrgs, and those who had been too slow to keep up. Such as young Joshua Calendar.

The youth having already helped to take down a blahrg that day, sauntered at his own pace and considered himself done hunting for the day, for he had no wish to kill the poor creatures needlessly and he had already secured enough meat to last him until it would begin to spoil. So he just walked along, his spear replaced in its sling across his back, minding his own business and thinking. Thinking, like he tended to do when nobody was watching him. Just thinking.

But as the hunt had shifted further westward, the hunters had left behind slain blahrgs that lay dead upon the field. They had also left behind surviving blahrgs that were spooked, frightened, and fleeing in straight lines every direction from the site of the slaughter.

A fleeing blahrg, boring as it is, can still be quite a dangerous thing to those who stand in its way, and it so happened that young Joshua Calendar found himself standing directly in the path of one such creature this day, as it fled in a furious panic away from the killing field.

Running away from danger is one of the defining characteristics of most the creatures of the world, and the blahrg, being so utterly boring, are certainly not the species to break that mold. So, naturally, the blahrg, by running away from the hunters throwing spears at them, were of course 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, as he had done many times beforafter He had hunted the blahrg at other times, and he knew that a 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 that were not directly in their path. He knew, quite well from past (and future) experiences 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 blahrgflesh that was bearing right down upon him.

But Joshua had a tendency to become somewhat lost in his thoughts, preoccupied with this problem or that problem as he was on that occasion, being one who absolutely could not stand to leave a question unexamined. Therefore, the abstracted young man did not exactly pay very close attention to what was going on around him, indeed what was charging directly toward him on four powerful bovine legs, 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 full of mutually-alienated individuals to some sort of unified, cooperative multitude with an understanding of how to interact effectively 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.

So Joshua realized he would have to see to the building of a society in order to make space archaeology possible, and to have a society be possible, the sundered, aloof people of the Time-Tribe would have to be brought together, united through common language and a shared sense of public affairs and civic duty. In other words, humankind had to be advanced from the level of primitive nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers and builders whose sense of public identity would be centered around a concept of the body politic.

But how did he propose to advance humankind? That was the question that young Joshua Calendar pondered, that fateful moment when he stepped unwittingly into the path of a charging blahrg, there upon the meadows of the plains of Dirtengras, which lay under the shadow of great Mt. Conn-Fuzhen, the sacred high place of the Calendrian Time-Tribe.  

He was about to learn a painful, poignant lesson about how painful it is for a human to collide with the body of a charging blahrg.

Dying, Joshua Calendar Meets the God of Gods

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 nor what he had been doing, he had been hit by the rush of the oncoming animal, and was now flying through the air, an action to which he was not accustomed, since it was well known to him and oft-lamented 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.

It did hurt more. Much, much more. 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 among them at first noticed Joshua laying in an internally bleeding heap of human wreckage 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. Was it? 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 had, epoch upon epoch upon epoch away from that time, created Slud (The Universe), and whom now stood before the wounded Joshua Calendar who lay, perhaps dying, upon the Plains of Dirtengras.

Even in the intense agony of his predicament, it was not at all difficult for Joshua to identify the D.M., for He was recognizable from paintings of Him that had 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.

Joshua had often thought that the cave-paintings were really rather poorly rendered because cave people tended to be excellent hunters but rather incompetent artists, and their scribblings of the God of our universe upon those cave walls looked more like rather rude graffiti than a figure drawn in the His likeness. Thus, not really a good example of what the God of the Universe looked like, but the Being standing quite suddenly before young Joshua's injured and broken body now was every bit as mediocre as the cave-paintings had led Joshua to believe.

Looking upon the D.M., who was really this sort of dumpy, slobbish fellow with a slight gut hanging over his beltline and a rather slack-jawed expression on His objectionally Divine face, even in his pain Joshua could see how such dreary, uninteresting creatures like blandred could have come into existence, if they were indeed created by this Being of Beings.

And even in his agony, Joshua laughed, for with that wisdom which comes of a sense 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 no! God is an idiot!” sort of way. All the humans of the world were fashioned in the image of their Creator, and this God, the same D.M. who had created the first humans Al and Evelyn and thus their descendants and ancestors alike, He was nearly as uninteresting a fellow as any of the blandred which lay even now slain upon the plain.

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...All strength was leaving his body, ebbing away like a tide which would never return again. He was dying from his injury, and it was only a matter of...time... until the light would go out from his eyes entirely, and his breathing would stop, and he would be truly, irrevocably dead.

“This must not be!” exclaimed the D.M., raising one of his arms into the air.

“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 now could be seen sprinting towards the location of the fallen boy.

“I meant, 'This must not be!'”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. 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 as suddenly as it had appeared. 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 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. "Oh wait, I am." Then the D.M. cleared His throat, and spoke.   

“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.

“What in the world would make you need to check about something like that, oh my God? Are you not omniscient?" Joshua asked half in wonder and half in consternation.

"God" just sort of looked around at the terrible mess that was this world that He had created, his face remorseful.

"I don't think anyone who created yesterday to be sometime next year has any right to claim omniscience, under the circumstances." He said ironically.

"But I live...Somehow I feel no pain anymore. Does this mean I am not going to die, then?” Joshua asked in wonder, 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 yet. Maybe even never. You would have died eventually, you know, had you been any other human. Even if you had not been injured by the blahrg, you would eventually have died. Almost everyone does, after all." The D.M. told him.

"Why? Why must people die?" Joshua asked, sad at heart to have a cruel fact of life confirmed by no less than God Himself.

"You are mortals. Dying is what you do, when the time comes to do it. It's built into who you are, as a species and as individuals. But you, Joshua, you will not die for a very long time. You're a special case.” the D.M. answered.

“I am? Me?” Joshua asked, his eyes widening in incredulity. He was a mere fifteen year old boy who could think of a few 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 exist to fulfill a special purpose. You see, you're going to save your people, who are presently 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 stupid sometimes, sort of...well...coughcoughcreatedtimeinthewrongordercoughcough.”

The D.M.'s rather transparent 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 far in the future, and you, your Mother, and your Sister live here in this other future which is to them their past (and their future if you're going backwards), and it is also the reason why none of you can even understand what each other are saying. Because you have been a creature of this age and they are creatures of other ages. 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. Such as how it could be that his brothers hundreds or thousands of years in his past while his grandfather would not even be born yet for thousands of years of the future.

As The D.M. explained, His own face took on a look of consternation mingled with curiosity which could only indicate to the observant that even The D.M. Himself 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 though, with a sudden 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!

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. Whom I insist is not me.” 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, ungodly, dorkish Supreme Being standing before him, with his glasses and can of mountain dew in one hand, a clipboard and a bag of dice in his other hand, and why not? Sixteen other hands holding stuff too because what else is anyone going to do with a total of eighteen hands, anyway? 

Each element of the D.M.'s clothing were a different color and all the colors were 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 covering the back of the God of Gods.

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 our entire Universe was, in Himself and his own creative style, rather an absurdist, indifferent, maybe even self-effacing sort of Being. But 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, Oh, D.M. 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-pay 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.” said the D.M.

“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 also, you were chosen because for some reason, you were the only human in the entire world to think of any such thing as society, which is, in fact, exactly what you'll be required to create. I have chosen you to unify the measure and classification and also the quality of Time into a single, continuous system, Joshua."

"But that cannot be possible, my God!" Joshua protested, horrified at what he was hearing. "And I am just a human! I live in a cave like all the other humans! What may a mere human do to make sense of time?"

"I would get rid of any notion that you are a mere human anymore, Joshua Calendar." the D.M. admonished him gently, speaking in a quiet, somewhat sad voice now. "You are more human than human now, like the white zombie song goes. No matter what happens in this world, you will always be the most powerful, the most intelligent, the wisest of humans. Out of all the humans that ever will exist in this universe, you will be the greatest of them, the one who has come the closest to the ideal of humankind that I intended to create here."

Joshua fell down on his hands and knees, and touched his forehead to the ground in genuflection before the D.M., begging Him to choose someone else.  The D.M. shook His head, and replied.

"I will not choose another.  It has to be you, Joshua, and no other. I have created a way to make sense of it all, somewhat, but you will be my vessel, Joshua, to transmit it to humankind. I have chosen you to reveal to the people of your species the methods by which Time may be reckoned, and the ways that a society of all the humans of the world may be built. And to unify all the people of the world into a society which operates by that reckoning. You shall speak for Me, and do My Will in the world, and through you shall I bring order to the orderless, and bring your species out of the chaos to fulfill their great destiny."

"But how am I supposed to do any of that?  I do not even know what any of that means, oh my God!" Joshua demured. But even as he said it, much to his surprise he knew that was not true. He did know what it all meant.  He didn't know how he knew but he knew he knew it.

"Throughout this conversation I have been placing within your mind both potential and ability, evolving your mind beyond the level the natural forces of evolution have brought your species to. You will need to be much smarter to see what you must see. And so I am making you smarter. For by My Will, you will now 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, our...your species, into developing not just a Society but the best Society. And have no doubt of it, Society you will cause humans to create, I guarantee it, and how you do it will come from you and who you are. You will either do it by willful design or you will do it by accident. But either way, Joshua, you will do it.” 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 his surprise, Joshua 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, Joshua noted to himself with great disappointment that it didn't look like he was ever going to get to be a space-archaeologist now.

“Yes." Joshua said in a tone of wonder verging on ecstasy. "I can see the answers within my mind. My mind is huge, Oh D.M.! Huge! I can see just about 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, my Son, and you will be able to do so much good for your world, for I have made you something very like a God yourself."

"But I do not want to be a God, oh Lord of Lords, God of Gods! Please take this direful fate away from me! Please pity me, oh my God!" Joshua pleaded, though it did not give him the result he hoped for.

"Oh, quit being melodramatic, Joshua.  Sheesh!" the D.M. responded irritably to that. "Every human in the world has a destiny that they have to live up to. Very few of them will ever be happy with it but in the end they do what they must to fulfill their destinies.  You are no different than they when it comes to the fulfillment of destiny, except maybe that your destiny is a lot loftier and much more exalted than theirs.  How many professional commode cleaners and piss bucket boys wouldn't kill to have your job instead of theirs?"

Joshua was silent then, for he did not quite know how to respond to that. 

"Besides, you're worrying too much. In fact, the problems of this world will be solved through you, Joshua Calendar, one way or another. Though it will probably take a long time and much heartbreak, and you might well go crazy before it's all said and done.” the D.M. continued.

“Wait, what?” Joshua asked, his eyebrows shooting upwards in dismay. He did not want to go crazy. He liked being sane 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 swore 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 swear words. He'd have to remember at some point to sit down and come up with some proper swear 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?” Joshua asked apprehensively.

“You will teach your fellow humans how to create a society. And then you shall 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. You will teach them how to understand the way things work in this universe.  And in that understanding shall you set humankind's feet upon the path to fixing it.  You will be honored for this, exalted beyond all others of your kind.  The people of this world will eventually innovate a certain device for determining the correct time at a given moment, 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, silly. 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...

The D.M. cleared His throat rather noisily, and said, "So anyways, I hereby charge you with the task of putting together a way of life for your people 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 probably human beings could be counted upon to do what is 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.

…...

…...

…...

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

…...

…...

…...

And, having determined that the reader has likely, by this point, purged themselves 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. Do your work 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 stupid. Which, of course, He was.

And Behold! Having rendered instruction unto young Joshua Calendar, the D.M. murmured something about a Call of Duty 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. Deep thought, in a member of a species which had hitherto been barely more than beasts who walked upright on two legs!

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-proto-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, he would first have to teach them how to even comprehend the existence of a language at all. 

"Let's go back to the camp." Jacob sighed then, 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 returned to the encampment of "his people" at the base of the holy mountain of Mount Conn-Fuzhen, quite a different person than he had been when he had left that morning. For one thing, people could see it in his eyes, eyes which had been the callow, unexperienced eyes of a fifteen year old boy when he had taken up his spear and thrower after breakfast and made ready to depart for the hunt, but which now were the eyes of an old, old man. His body still looked as if it was only fifteen years old, but his eyes, ah, his eyes looked no less than fifteen thousand years old.

Of course, among primitive cave folk like the Calendrians, people tended to die of "old age" at around twenty eight to thirty years old. But that is not the sort of old age that his eyes seemed to have attained, but the more mythical sort of old age, the one that the most powerful wizards, deathless beings like elves, and Gods tend to attain. The age measured in millenia, that type of age.

For another thing, Joshua no longer spoke in the fractured, incomprehensible tongue of the previous days. He spoke people's language.  No matter which language that happened to be, he spoke it back to them, with perfect grammar and punctuation, every linguistic rule it could possibly have upheld in his speech to the utmost. Somehow, this boy, this simple fifteen year old cave boy had brought back to the Tribe a secret of language that none of the others who dwelt in that place had even been aware they had been wanting.

Imagine the feeling of suprise that bolted through the encampment of the Calendrian Time-Tribesmen of Mt. Conn-Fuzhen when suddenly, for the first time in their lives, there was this boy who was not of their own time or place, who should have no familiarity at all with any of the words they spoke, but who nonetheless understood them and could communicate with them in their own language! 

Joshua achieved instant celebrity for that. Word spread all around the land around the holy mountain, to other Calendrian groups on the other side of the mountain, and even spread to other Time-Tribes, such as those of the Arrog and the Bellicos, from which Tribes observers came to...well...observe.

The news had spread that a boy had come who could understand any of them, no matter who they were or how they spoke, and before long people from other groups were already arriving at the western encampment, where dwelt Joshua, seeking to hear for themselves this miracle which according to the way things worked on Slud (the Planet) should not have been possible.

Joshua had little peace after that, and even less solitude. Suddenly he could not go anywhere or do anything without crowds of curious, awe-struck humans hovering around him, trying to watch his every move.  At first bemusingly amusing to him, it all grew very annoying for him latearlier, after it didn't stop.  

Joshua did his best to keep his patience with all those people, however, and to try to teach them things when he could, things that they would need to know for what was coming in the futurepast, although even for a superintelligent human like himself, this was an extraordinarily difficult thing to accomplish for much the same reason that teaching a garden snail how to solve collegiate-level calculus problems is a difficult thing to accomplish. That being that they just did not know enough for any of the answers to make much sense to them. They were, after all, primitive cave people who had never really had any thought of a unified civilization at any point in the previous existence of their species.

But Joshua Calendar was about to discover that even the superintelligent could make mistakes, and in but a short while he would come to understand how it is possible that even the God of Gods had made so many mistakes in making humans.

But he kept his focus upon fulfilling the duty that had been assigned to him by the D.M., though with each passing day, he grew more and more aware of all the deficiencies in the ways that humans think (no matter which language they speak), and grew more and more in dread of the idea that no matter how gifted his consciousness had become, he might very well fail in really teaching any of these people anything that truly should have mattered.

Still, Joshua Calendar was in the time of his inexperienced youth, being only fifteen years of age, and yet at that time remained quite optimistic about human nature, believing that even if humans act like fools today, it does not actually follow that they must automatically act like fools tomorrow, which of course, is thirty six years ago next Tuesday. As history has demonstrated on occasions beyond count, however, acting like fools is something for which the members of the Human species are known to have quite an affinity.

But Joshua, it has been previously noted, had a strong sense of duty, so he stuck with his endeavor no matter how doomed it began to seem to him with the passage of time, hoping that even superintelligent people could be mistaken, and that stupid humans could somehow comprehend things which gave even a man of power and wisdom headaches.

Joshua found that he was to achieve little by trying to teach individuals and shape their understanding individually, for as anyone who has ever been on the interweb can confirm, any time a person tries to explain anything to another person, person number two inevitably digs their heels into the cyber dirt and refuses to believe anything whatsoever that person one says, no matter what it is and no matter how objectively true it is, just on general principle. It is the same in real life, of course, with the convincibility of a given position being affected by an additional variable, that being how easy it would be for convincer to beat up convincee until convincee believes what convincer is saying to them.

It cannot be said that individual humans cannot learn anything, but anything they learn is usually not what is being attempted to be taught to them,  and at any rate the processes by which individuals must be brought to an understanding acted far too slow to be acceptable to Joshua.  So he made a fateful decision one day to call all of the people of the Calendrian Time-Tribe together, along with their cousins visiting from other lands and other Tribes, to a meeting at their sacred mountain of Conn-Fuzhen, where he would teach them all, the entire population at the same time. In light of what came after (and of course before also), historians have almost unanimously viewed that decision as a mistake, one of the great mistakes of human history. Well, when they weren't busy attending barbecues at the residences of philosophers, or else becoming barbecues at the residences of philosophers anyway.

When the people of the Calendrian Time-Tribe had gathered, as well as the visitors from other lands, Joshua spoke to them all, and he set himself to the task of explaining to the rest of them the mission that had been laid upon him by the allegedly divine but incredibly flawed will of the D.M., their God of Gods. First he told them what had happened to him on the plains of Dirtengras, told how he had been hit by a runaway blahrg and had been within a moment of death, and how the D.M. Himself had appeared there and healed him of his injuries.

After the review, then, he got down to his first point. He told them that it was the will of the D.M. that they should be unified with each other, that together they might accomplish necessary things that seperately they could not. He pointed out to them how the seeds of this unity had already been sewn among them, and he taught them all to speak a common language, which today we refer to as "Old Calendrian".

But he made no mention yet of the society he had been commanded to create. He did not wish to create that until he had educated the people up to a extent where they would be capable and motivated to do it right. Until then, he concluded quite reasonably, the people would only be a liability in creating it. They would, he understood, thwart his every intention by blindly blundering into creating the institutions of society before humans were ready to universally reject hierarchy as the basis of their social existence, and that, he knew as all wise people must, would be disastrous beyond compare to all humans, and to all other creatures in the world, to the world and maybe the entire universe itself.

Humans in the time tribe had never really known anything about hierarchy.  The Time-Tribes themselves  were egalitarian in structure. There had been no such thing as a government or other form of administration for any human to gain more power in than another. No chieftains had existed, no shamans, no figures of authority at all, for authority itself had not existed. Each person had participated in the Time-Tribe as a personal choice and a matter of pragmatism, but the Time-Tribe was really just an amalgamation of hundreds or thousands of individual wills, rather than the single will that forms government doctrines.

Joshua was wary of saying anything to them which might cause his fellow humans to think up any such concepts as hierarchy or rulership, and yet that was one of his problems.  For a society requires hierarchy to put it enough into empowerment to establish the rules, customs, and taboos which are essential to giving it enough structure to survive all the debates which craft its narratives. To put the idea into a metaphor to make it easier to understand, hierarchy was a cage which,  when humankind had a small population and was endangered in a world full of predators, protected humans from being overwhelmed by their predators, by allowing them to coordinate their activities for defense and the building of prosperity. However, Joshua knew that there must always come a time when humankind must grow too big for the cage, and the cage called hierarchy instead begins to poison humankind, and to choke them out.  

He knew that to build a society at all, humans would have to start it out as a hierarchical one, and could only develop something better once they had grown big enough to not need hierarchy anymore and, more importantly, once they had discovered in themselves the desire not to ever again allow hierarchy to exist at all.

He would have to give men power, only to later demand that they relinquish that power willingly and, indeed, destroy the power at its very conceptual level so that it could no longer be used by anyone ever again.  And that was the truly monumental task about starting a society. It was a very delicate line that the human species would have to walk, and until their minds were evolved to the correct extent, he dared not even give humans the chance to try it.

But Joshua Calendar had made a mistake, for he had not reckoned with the true power of language, which is that once a people develops a common tongue which they all speak well enough to communicate their thoughts with each other, a society becomes almost an inevitable side effect of that. So, in fine, what Joshua had done was unintentionally set the footsteps of his fellow humans on the path to creating a society by themselves without any input from him, which indeed they were soon to do.

But unaware of this, Joshua carried on as if nothing disastrous had happened. He just did his best to educate his fellow humans, and he figured, what better way to educate someone, than to do it with a story?

So he told the story of their history, or at least what we today call history, but he told it in such a way as to present a picture of a humankind which always makes the correct choices to make, which learns from their mistakes if they make any, and defines human existence as an ever more increasingly prosperous and wise progression of ideas and actions. In other words, he told them a story about humankind creating a veritable Utopia, and because storytelling was actually a hidden talent of his, Joshua told the story extremely well. So well, in fact, that were any normal person to hear it they would immediately be filled with an unquenchable zeal to build such a utopia and live in it. Sluddish people, the reader has probably noticed by now, are not normal people. And the effect of Joshua's story was not exactly the effect that he had been seeking.

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 but discuss, and debate, and argue. Because that's what humans do, even when the time for debate is long past and what is desperately needed is direct action.

Joshua had intended to wait a while to tell humans about the society he hoped to create, but as it turned out, apparently the Calendrians created one anyway, quite suddenly. As suddenly, if we're to believe Joshua's own written accounts of the First Great Conversation, as if they accomplished it within ninety days, which is about how long the First Great Conversation is thought to have lasted.

And how does a people just up and create a society?  In other universes, one might very well imagine that societies are cumulative effects of thousands of years of lessons learned, technologies innovated, ideas generated and spread, and the forces of chance, circumstance, and opportunity motivating a general progress toward an evolved mode of being for the species.

On Slud (the Planet), during the so-called "First Great Conversation"of the Calendrians at Mt. Conn-Fuzhen, it didn't take any of that to create a society.  It apparently just took a bunch of arguments, that lamentable practice that would in other times come to thwart progress around just about every corner: What today we call "debate".

As they were not themselves blessed with the same far-reaching wisdom that Joshua had been, the other far less-evolved members of the Calendrian Time-Tribe did not by their debates arrive at the same conclusions that Joshua had patiently explained to them about equality, mutual respect, personal sovereignty, anarchy, and the intrinsic value of each human life, all of them positions that he knew a society must adopt in order to evolve past internecine warfare and hierarchy. As a matter of fact, when one views the society that did come into being and eventually spread across the human populations of Slud (the Planet), it is pretty clear that humans did not implement a single one of Joshua's ideas at all. 

Ever.

And that fact might help to explain what came later, and the poor condition of mental health that Joshua was to be in for the rest of his known existence as a human, the same wretched condition of mental health that he appears to still be in, to the very present day (whenever this is).  Of course nobody can really be certain about that last part, since no human in the world seems able to speak the language of birds.

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 was born. Nobody appears to have noticed it, except maybe Joshua Calendar himself, though if the undying one noticed it, he never really wrote anything about it in his memoirs. We do know that the Proto-Language appears to have arisen among humans in the northwestern lands of the world at around 24,000 years in the futurepast.

The evidence which tells us that is circumstantial but consistent with what we have learned about how language is used. In the archaeological record. there dates from that time physical evidence of greater coordination between hunters at ancient kill sites that have been excavated. We see dating from that time also the first appearance of hieroglyphic pictures on cave walls at sites from Mt. Conn-Fuzhen to as far away as what is now called central Bellicosia, half a continent away. Humans began to leave behind to posterity names and stories of what they had experienced, using the same primal, proto-heiroglyphic symbols to describe them.

Around twenty four thousand years in the futurepast, an event occurred which we actually know about in some detail, despite the fact that just about everyone involved in it left behind conflicting, revisionist accounts of it.  Luckily for students of history, however, Joshua Calendar himself left behind a written account of what happened, and his story is pretty much generally accepted as the general truth of the matter.

This event, called the First Great Conversation, took place at the Calendrian Time-Tribe's western dwelling at Mt. Conn-Fuuzhen, which tradition places as being located somewhere in what is now 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 mark the utmost beginning of human civilization on Slud (the Planet), and that this event delineates the point in human history in which Human Beings for the very first time invented society in any shape which is recognizable to those of us in the present day, anywhere on the entire planet.

To the humans who have come aftearlier, the First Great Conversation marked the beginning of History, the beginning of social existence as a part of something bigger than their individual selves, and a beginning to the idea of relating to others as a fact of everyday life. 

To Joshua Calendar, however, the First Great Conversation was nothing so grand or worthy of being remembered in histories, except perhaps as a cautionary tale.  To Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time, it marked the point in time when humankind went astray from the path of righteousness.

The First Great Conversation: Humankind Divides Into Groups

As the reader will discover throughout the following pages of this volume on the history of humankind in our world, just about every evil that has ever since befallen a human here has been a result of society existing and humans existing as a part of it. 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.

Joshua Calendar himself wrote latearlier:

"The First Great Conversation was a disaster for humankind. It did not have to be but it was. It was an opportunity for all the people to come to an understanding of how to live in harmony with all things, but instead humankind learned the wrong lessons, came to the wrong understanding. And how unbearably human that is. What a human thing to do. Only humans would  invent a language, a common language that they all could understand, just to then use that language to divide them from each other! The fools!"

As for the vision that Joshua had intended to impart to the gathered Calendrians during the First Great Conversation, and indeed did impart to them though they heeded it not, Joshua told the gathering of the Time-Tribe that the best way to go about freeing themselves from the neverending struggle for survival, was to ensure that everyone was completely equitable and had a completely equal share of everything that was produced by human beings, their claim to that share being the unavoidable fact that they were all equally human. 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.

After all his fellow Calendrians got done laughing at his simplistic naivete, of course, they threw farm produce at him. Because they were to become peasants all too soon, and that's just sort of the thing that peasants tend to do, isn't it?

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, debatably, none of their descendants in the present day do either.

For although 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. 

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

Poor Joshua soon found himself the subject of much hostility from some of his fellow Tribesmen, particularly the more religiously-minded and superstitious.

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. That's just how lazy and stupid people roll their dice. And in all the world there is no more lazy and stupid species on the planet than homo sapiens sludicus, the humans of Slud.

That, in itself, did not bother Joshua. What bothered him was that the hostility he was getting from those types tended to involve them urging their fellow Tribespeople to set him on fire and burn him as a witch. Joshua most certainly would have been bothered by that.

Zealots made only a relatively small percentage of the number of people gathered there at Mt. Conn-Fuzhen, however. There were many others, both individuals and members of groups, who had different ideas, at least at first. Some of those ideas were truly stupid (and possibly lazy too, depending upon how you interpret them), but at least they had the benefit of not including plans to put Joshua to death. Which, of course, none of them could have done anyway, since, after all, The D.M. had made him impervious to death. Which he tried repeatedly to no avail to make everyone understand. Making people understand things never did seem to be Joshua Calendar's strong suit.

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.

Joshua told them repeatedly that they were leaping far too soon into such a thing, that they were trying to run before they could walk, but they did not listen.  And perhaps Joshua should have known better than to offer that sort of objection in a place like Slud (the Planet), where running before one walks is something that probably happens millions of times a day throughout the world, Sluddish Time being what it is and all.

What was happening that was truly important, though, was that with the separation of the Calendrians into several different groups, each of those groups began to develop apart in relative isolation. This resulted in groups of people essentially developing into distinct human subcategories or castes, each with their own idea of how civilization should be formatted, which, just like pretty much everyone else, they argued with others about extensively.

Each group also had an agenda concerning Joshua Calendar himself. Joshua thought that fact was disgustingly contemptible. Had he not been trying to help them?  Had he not been trying to help everybody?  Was this, truly, the way humans treated those who tried to help them?

There was one group that wanted to figure out how his mind worked.  That in itself didn't bother Joshua, since he valued curiosity, especially in such lazy and stupid folk as the Calendrians. They were really, really curious about it, though, so they suggested breaking his head open and studying his brain, which is a remarkable thing to suggest 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, nor which functions it was to fulfill. Yet, nonetheless, they wanted to crack open Joshua's head and study his brain, all the same. That, on the other hand, Jacob thought was quite beyond the pale. 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. That didn't matter to them though. They believed the mind was in the brain anyway because they figured of course it is, right?  But really, they just really wanted to know the answer to their questions. Which is generally an admirable desire, but in this particular case would have meant much pain for Joshua Calendar since that's what cracked skulls are, painful. Joshua did not, needless to say, endorse that group's idea at all.

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. They were correct in a way about Joshua's prophethood. That part about him being a Prophet was far truer than anyone knew (except Joshua himself, of course). But Joshua found the Emperor part to be absurd.  Though in retrospect, years latearlier he would write in his memoirs that he regretted not taking the people of the Time-Tribe up on their offer to crown him Emperor. Indeed, he wrote:

If I had let them enthrone me, I could have shoved my ideas down everyone's throats and made them do what I wanted them to do. Refusing that sort of power over my neighbors seemed the right thing to do at the time.  It may still be the moral thing to do, the ethical thing to do, but I regret the day that I ever did it, for it was not long until someone with less vision came along and committed the very sin that I had refused to commit.

This goal that particular group held to be paramount, and even said so, that Joshua Calendar should be crowned Emperor although they not yet had any idea what an Emperor was. Nor, indeed, did they know what an Empire was, nor a crown or a throne, nor even what a prophet was, for they had never yet evolved past the Tribal structure of society and those things did not exist within that structure so they had never invented them, innovated them, or experienced them.

But upon this occasion the group of would-be kingmakers invented both the concept and the original word that eventually evolved into "Empire", that they might thrust that entirely new political configuration upon Joshua to rule by decree at the top of a species-wide hierarchy. 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. One of the tragedies of the First Great Conversation was that they brought such an idea into existence, gave words and definitions to it and actually, by the great power that was upon that cursed debate, they actually ended up bringing the earliest form of such an idea into existence as a thing of the physical world.

This, of course, was exactly what Joshua had not wanted to happen. He knew that Empires are necessarily and inevitably hierarchical, and he knew that hierarchy would ultimately doom the species to extinction, and an interminable period of pain and misery, suffering and grief and loss before the extinction happened. He told them this but humans do not tend to let ideas go once they grab hold of them. So of course, nobody listened to him. Nobody heeded his words. Nobody.

Yet another group emerged from the throng, the elsewhere-mentioned religious zealots who thought Joshua to be a warlock (they created the term “warlock” just to describe what they thought of him), and that particular group wanted to build a bonfire with him as the centerpiece. To say that Joshua disagreed with them about that would be a gross understatement of facts.

Another group also believed he was a warlock, but instead of wanting to burn him at the stake, they just wanted to learn how he had managed to accomplish witchcraft, because they thought that witchcraft was cool and they wanted to do it too.

("I'm not doing witchcraft! Don't be ridiculous!") Jacob replied angrily from somewhere.

The term "witchcraft", of course, the superstitious zealots had also made up, one of the first three dozen words humans started using as part of the Calendrian proto-language, in order to describe what they thought that Joshua was, though he was in fact not, doing.

Yet another group wanted to make an alliance 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 and everyone in it, and conquer all the other Time-Tribes in order to make that happen. Some of them 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 killing people, which was, of course, as they saw it, the important thing. 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.  They just wanted a neverending war and a military industrial complex.

Some of the more materialistically inclined people of the Tribe discovered that there was much advantage to begained, 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 Calendrians. They took over the distribution of those goods to the gathered assemblies for the price of a share of the wealth while nobody was paying any attention to them or the food stores either.  This theft 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. The Calendrians were now so thoroughly engrossed in debate that they could not have organized a hunting party to save their lives. In other words, they were poor, they were about to starve and they needed to feed themselves and their children any way that they could, So the businessmen preyed upon their fellow Calendrians and 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 by the coming of hierarchy among them, crime also developed apace. A certain group formed, calling themselves Brokers found that there was advantage to be gained at the expense of others by 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 instead of mugging and robbing their fellow Calendrians with words they decided to mug and rob them with actual weapons. 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, crime also developed within the Tribe, which, indeed, could no longer properly be called a Tribe, for the Calendrians were developing a society to rule all of them, and already its fundamental structure was undergoing a very big change. Gradually but rather quickly the concept of tribe was growing smaller and smaller in the minds of the Calendrians, and it was being replaced by a broader notion of society, the nation.The Tribe was now a nation. Possibly even several nations.

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. 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.

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, as the story of humankind's creation goes, were compelled to find ways to live with each other, to coexist with each other even though they could not stand each other's company. All other humans that had sprung from them were stricken with the same question...how to live with each other? And because this event, the First Great Conversation, had happened at all, it was at the holy mountain of Conn-Fuzhen that human civilization first began, in the land of what would later be called Y'ig'narranze, among the people called by history the Calendrians. 

Whereas previously, humankind, even in that far futurepast age, had been stuck at the level of social evolution equivalent to that of primitive cave people, their minds after coming into contact with Joshua's own, had begun to evolve at an almost incredible rate. Inspired by the Keeper of Time, the minds of his fellows had begun to expand in their capacity to form and hold increasingly complex thoughts, and were now filling with all sorts of ideas as to how to become something different than they had been. The question was, what should they become?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.

The First Great Conversation: The First Leaders in Human Society Appear

As has been mentioned earlier, there were many different groups involved in the great debate, who indeed formed from the great debate of the First Great Conversation. Various elements of society had begun to stratify around these groups. 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”. It was from Grankh himself that the idea of dissecting Joshua's head had come, for Grankh was a biologist.  Or he would be once he had gotten around to inventing the science of biology, which indeed he did at another time. Grankh, like pretty much every scientist that ever will exist or ever has, wanted to know answers to his questions. He did not care if getting those answers involved splitting open a supergenius' head and studying his brain.

Grankh was a short man, which we know in the present day because what is believed to be his skeleton has been found in an excavation at a site in what is the western portion of the present country of Arroganse. He was shorter than most of his contemporaries, smaller even then many of the women and larger children. In fact, analysis of his skeleton has left anatomists convinced that he suffered from a form of dwarfism. And he was apparently bald.

Grankh had such a posture, 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.

Naturally, given his eloquence and his fondness of the sound of his own voice, Grankh wrote many treatises and posited many different hypotheses during his lifetime, some of which he composed right there at Mt. Conn-Fuzhen during the First Great Conversation, Incidentally, he also invented literacy as an after(and 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 students 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 the debates, was to be found experimenting and testing his theories, darting back and forth with his clipboard in his hand and a pencil in the other, talking and debating with the all the rest of the Calendrians, convincing them that the phenomena that he had studied with the scientific method that he had made up to make sense of it all were all true facts that had been proven scientifically.

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.  Which led to the first Awards Show being cancelled and the presenters sort of shrugging and then going to the after-party anyway.

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, or usually they're the same person because Time problem), many scientists who came after beforafter 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, and he grew insufferably overbearing in his dealings with other people, particularly people he considered to not be as intelligent as he was, which meant pretty much everyone who was not a scientist. At this point in his story, his fellow humans began to call him Grankh the Pompous.

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 Tribespeople, staunch hierarchists 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, Tegah and Ughah enjoyed a much louder voice in the debates of the First Great Conversation than ninety nine percent of the other people. As things turned out, the influence of the families of Tegah and Ughah was to have fateful consequences in forcing society to become hierarchical.

Tegah had suggested creating an Empire and making Joshua Calendar the God-Emperor that ruled it. Ughah had quickly seconded his proposal, and of course the large families of both men backed them, and pretty much the rest of the Calendrians backed them also because they saw no point in even attempting to defy Tegah and Ughah and their huge numbers. So the proposal became deeply entrenched in the debates to the extent that people stopped debating whether or not they should create an Empire and instead accepted that the Empire must exist and they just debated who it should be that they placed on its Throne. And someone invented a throne out some tree limbs that had been around the area to be chopped up for firewood, with a seat of hay placed between them, promising to make a better throne as soon as they could invent a palace to put it in.

At the time of the First Great Conversation, both Tegah and Ughah and their families favored placing the holy salad oil on Joshua's head as an annointment to the Imperium, but Joshua steadfastly refused to have any part of that.

It wasn't that Tegah and Ughah particularly liked Joshua Calendar. Actually, they felt their new positions in the nascent Calendrian nation to be threatened by him. But they did respect him, and they did fear him, and they did believe him truly to be the 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, wanted there to be an Empire because they 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). They wanted to make the office of Emperor a largely ceremonial one, with little actual power, while they themselves determined policy and gave orders.

Tegah the Selfish and Ughah the Arrogant, who happened to be brothers, convinced many others of the Calendrians that it was their view which should be supported, and they and their original supporters, and the family members present with those supporters, became the foundation of a Sluddish aristocracy. 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 thought it was their D.M.-given right to own everything. The other thing they were obsessed with was religion, because they saw it as a convenient way to build, keep, and expand their power over the people of the burgeoning Calendrian nation. Post-Shamanic 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.

In the councils of the First Great Conversation, Tegah the Selfish and Ughah the Arrogant and their aristocratic following spoke long and loud about how Joshua Calendar should be made God-Emperor of the World. And when their word had gone forth, the rest of the Calendrians saw the deed done. Except that it would not be Joshua Calendar who was crowned, but someone else, who, being the figurehead that his aristocratic handlers had intended the Emperor to be, was such an unimportant fellow that the histories do not even record the name of the First Emperor. 

Indeed, centuries upon centuries of futurepast were to run their course until there was anyone with the title of Emperor who did deeds that made his name worth remembering. That particular Emperor is seen as a sort of second First Emperor, and his name was to be Hulk Smashing, the man who ruled the world. More will definitely be told of him in another part of this prologue.

Because of their obsession with religion, the aristocratic families of Tegah and Ughah got along pretty well with the followers of Munc the Zealot, who had previously aided the Calendrian 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 among the Calendrians 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 himself, Munc the Zealot. ("No you don't! Only I speak for me!"" 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 just chose to believe Munc even though Joshua Calendar himself had rejected the idea, and indeed had rejected the idea literally right in front of their faces, personally. After all, they figured, this Joshua Calendar, no matter what special things had happened to him in the previous few months, was just a mere hunter but Munc had been the Shaman of the Calendrians, a person of nearly supreme importance in the Tribe. The tribespeople, from their perspective, no doubt had every reason to believe Munc who had served the spiritual needs of all the tribespeople around Mt. Conn-fuzhen for decades of his life, and they had almost no reasons to believe Joshua, who despite everything was after all still but a fifteen year old boy, and a rather foolish one, always chasing his silly dreams about becoming a space archaeologist. Of course, they chose to believe Munc the Zealot. 

These selectively credulous folk became the first peasants in the world, and their belief in the words of Munc made his religion viable. They were awed by Munc the Zealot's fiery sermons about the D.M. and the ones about Joshua Calendar too, and in consequence of this some of them became faithful adherents to Munc the Zealot and his original disciples, and the successors (and predecessors) of some others became the founders of the Muncian religion, which was most definitely perceived by pretty much everyone with any degree of critical thinking to have been a really bad and stupid idea, but which just about everyone was to participate in anyway because participating in bad and stupid ideas is just sort of what humans do, and besides, what else was there to believe in anyway? And after all, hadn't Munc said that he spoke for The D.M. and Joshua Calendar?  Surely a man that can do that doesn't lie, those proto-peasants thought.

The reason why the idea, bad and stupid as it was, nonetheless managed to catch on with peasants 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 regardless of how wrong it is, the peasants mostly chose to believe it because they themselves knew they were lazy and stupid just like their Creator, and they were quite okay with believing in a religion where they could be on the path to paradise just by being the lazy and stupid peasants they were. It seemed a pretty sweet deal for the peasants at the time...paradise for no effort expended. And again, that view was not only highly improbable, but 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 the Zealots did it with zeal because, you know, they just didn't really like that Joshua Calendar fellow very much anyway, 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 because new things are for Communists. By golly. 

Joshua thought that this was all going way too far. He knew the last thing the humans of Slud (the Planet) needed was religion. Again, he tried completely in vain to make even one person understand that.

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.

Then there was the group of Calendrians who just sort of wanted to keep talking, keep the debates going, keep the questions being asked although they hated it when the questions were answered. Some of these people went on to found the newsmedia, or go into the arts or showbusiness. But some of them followed a different path, as philosophers and historians, who, it should be noted, get along with each other far better than they should, and certainly far better than is healthy for any of them.

The first philosopher known to history was Socraplataristo, who himself was present at the First Great Conversation, where he acted as sort of a moderator to give shape to the debates taking place at Mt. Conn-Fuzhen, before later capping off his long career of asking questions which probably shouldn't be asked by promptly spontaneously exploding all over his friends and family members at a dinner party.

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 to their own group, also from the numbers of newly peasantizing Calendrian tribespeople.

They talked of allegiance to the D.M., and even acknowledged that Joshua Calendar was Immortal. But they felt that they themselves were the most 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, as all humans know by adulthood, are sadists.

From the initial speeches by the first politicians, and from the crowds that they drew, a polity was formed, and the foundations were laid for the existence of laws and a legislative political class, which has been, of course, an even more horrible idea than the existence of politics themselves.

The new adherents of the polity, that is to say the alliance of the Muncian followers of Munc, the families of Tegah and Ughah, and the bureaucratic governmental followers of Regah and Shub, Kintahn and Oparba, were willing to do whatever they had to in order to remain the ones that ran things in the nation of the Calendrians. In this, they would have been at odds with both the Muncian zealots and the aristocrats of Tegah and Ughah, were it not for the fact that their alliance was built on a common understanding that they must all work together to keep peasants poor, lazy, stupid, and bound forever in slavery to a hierarchical social, political, and economic system.

To that end, Munc and his growing number of disciples deluded the peasants of the newly created society with homilies of empty and meaningless platitudes, and having had scribes trained in the new written alphabet that had recently been invented by Grankh the Pompous, they wrote down the doctrines of their emerging religion in scriptures. Tegah and Ughah and their hundreds of family members, for their part, agitated for Calendrian statehood, and it should be noted that it was not long before they had gotten what they had wanted. The four leaders of the politicians and their bureaucratic henchmen also availed themselves of the new technology of literacy to write down their framework of laws so that when the Empire finally got around to inventing a police force with which to oppress the people, the police would know which laws to use to justify killing peasants' dogs and other household pets.

The coalition of zealots and aristocrats and politicians spared no effort to keep peasants from ever gaining power or influence in the emerging Calendrian state, and this they had to do almost continually in order to keep people too distracted by the daily quest for survival to realize 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 thus, much of the history of Sluddish humankind would be unwritten, having been motivated by both religion and the state.

So both the Muncians and the Politicians saw the necessity of filibustering the crowd with a bunch of trivial, nonsensical speeches, and they made an alliance with each other to that effect, so as to attempt 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.

The political class, unsurprisingly, 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 solely the idea of the emerging magnates of the Calendrians, who included followers of Munc, Tegah and Ughah, and the loathesome politicians Regah and Kintahn, and they and their allies kept talking and talking and talking because that is, after all, what politicians do best and because their bids to seize power in the newly arising society depended upon it.

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, Chancellors, 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 large 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.  Because after all, the peasants figured, if a law exists, good or bad, you have to obey the law.  Because that's what you do with laws, right?  Obey them? Isn't that right?

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. But their new pyramid scheme required that the vastest majority of people involved in it, those on the bottom of course, absolutely had to be kept on the verge of starvation and at any rate desperation at all times, or else the hierarchy itself would begin to collapse in on itself.

In this hierarchical system, in which each person was encouraged to steal from each other person in any way which would bring them a larger portion of the wealth and resources and try by any means necessary to bring each other to ruin, 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. And they did everything in their power to make sure that everyone in the entire society believed with unshakeable conviction that this was exactly how things were supposed to be.

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 politicians explain nothing which is not completely forced out of them.  On that basis, less than one month 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 hired some of the artists to start a media apparatus to ensure that all Calendrians were propagandized in favor of the emerging Imperial theocracy/imperial diarchy.

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, took to the written word in Grankh the Pompous' new alphabet like fish to water. Entertaining the people as paintings and storytelling tends to do, before long they had people associating 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 Calendrians 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 politicians 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. Formerly the foremost of the tribe's hunters, the subordinates of Gunkar and Patu, whose successors became known as the Gunkari and the Patuenes respectively, had shifted their focus away from killing blandred creatures to killing humans. In a unique way which could only be possible in Slud (the Universe), these warriors learned to be deadly and efficient soldiers before there ever existed even the first war to give soldiers any justification to even exist at all.

The followers of Gunkar the Terrible and Patu the Avenger, unlike most of the other Calendrians, did not really have any position of their own 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, so long as people died, because it was the people dying part that was important to them. Because of this, they did not require much convincing from the Politicians who recruited them to become willing accomplices in the politicians' political system, which, after all, is like all hierarchies exactly designed to kill people.

And all of the preceding events happened during the First Great Conversation, which for something like three months occupied the attentions of the Calendrians, the first civilized human society in the world, at their ancestral home of Mt. Conn-Fuzhen. Humans had, as a result of the that great debate, created a society, on their own and against the wishes of the man whose idea society had been in the first place, Joshua Calendar. But it was not, in any way, shape, or form the simple, equal, and logical society Joshua Calendar had foreseen and had hoped one day to explain to the Tribe when they were evolved enough to understand it.

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 try to destroy 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 when one lacks 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, obtuse, and divisive nonsense that now had come to constitute human social existence. 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. Those were the ones who infuriated Joshua the most.

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 and 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, only about three months later, though he was still technically a 15 year old boy, he was then 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 gave up on the Calendrians, the people who are called by his name, finally understanding that nothing he could ever say or do would make them stop being fools. And he saw then that there was no other course left to him but to wander away from the mad, insane society that the Calendrians were building, and so he 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. For Joshua Calendar, the man who had been made messiah to this lot of brainless jackasses, really never wanted to see or hear them ever again.  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

The Callendro

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. So he just created a new tunic seemingly out of the thin air in front of him, some new sandals for his blistered feet, some new non-blistered feet to be attached to his ankles instead of his old ones, and then, he figured, why even keep walking at all?  And he spoke but a word and created a twenty six-story Vimana to fly around in the sky in.

Joshua was by nature a nomadic person, for the Time-Tribe into which he had been born had been originally been nomads, and the nomadic life was the life he had been trained by his life's experiences to live, but Joshua did not feel like doing anything anymore like he had done for almost fifteen years as a member of the Time-Tribe around the holy mountain. He was so disgusted by humans that he no longer wanted to be one.

His time in the Wilderness had done for Joshua 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 was weary, sad, angry, disappointed far beyond the furthest boundaries of chagrin to be in a position where he no longer had any reason to believe in goodness and virtue in humans. And Joshua was fiercely resolved not to ever have dealings with humans ever again if he could avoid it.

The D.M. had thought Joshua capable of the task laid upon him, but it seemed to Joshua that obviously the D.M. had been wrong about that.  It was not such a stretch...all men knew that the D.M., the God of Gods in our universe, is lazy and stupid. Surely a lazy and stupid God can be incorrect, he told himself. At any rate, the evidence had been made very clear to Joshua that he was not, in fact, equal to the task of piercing the fog of self-willed insanity that is the human view of the world. Perhaps it had been hubris to think he could, perhaps it had merely been his optimism getting the better of his better judgment. But it was obvious that his species had gone crazy, and that they quite intended to stay that way, thank you very much.

Joshua Calendar wandered the world after he had struck out on his own, through mountains and over plains, through thirsty deserts and delightful gardens. Rejecting humankind and their ways utterly, he chose instead to live like one of the beasts.

It was around that same time that the legends of the day abounded with tales of a strange creature of tooth and claw and lithe, well-toned sinew, who was sometimes spotted off in the distance by hunting parties. The creature had gray fur that matched his large gray eyes and a long, whiplike tail. He had sharp claws at the end of every foot, razor sharp incisors the size of a yardstick, and was a fierce hunter but a terrible one, who killed his prey savagely and indiscriminately, and especially sought to destroy the burgeoning villages of the Humans, Calendrian and otherwise, whenever he could find one.

The mighty Calendro, a creature which may or may not have been Joshua Calendar himself, transformed. The Calendro was a killing machine which stood over a hundred feet tall when on its hind legs.The creature, which was named after the creature's alleged human alter-ego, was called the Calendro, and that one creature of the old tales was the only one who has ever been known to humankind. It is believed that the Calendro was none other than Joshua Calendar himself in animal form. This belief largely springs from the fact that some of the hunting parties that had spotted the Calendro roaming throughout the world had clearly heard the creature say in a human voice as it charged angrily at every human it encountered,  "I am none other than Joshua Calendar in animal form!", which, the author here admits, if those words were not spoken by Joshua Calendar then that makes one heck of a hunting cry for a nonhuman animal to make, and one of the most interesting coincidences in the history of the universe.

The Calendro hunted a broad variety of creatures, usually blandred species, but it ate humans especially if it could locate one of their dwellings. At more than a hundred feet tall and impervious to pretty much every weapon ever, and able to wipe out any other creature on the planet with ease, he needed fear nothing from anyone or anything, and the same certainly could not be said for his hapless victims.  Fear of the Calendro was so great that some of the first histories mention entire communities immediately uprooting themselves and moving to entirely different regions at the very mention that the Calendro had been spotted in the area.

If the Calendro was indeed Joshua Calendar, however, then its rampages across the world of Slud (the Planet) were relatively short-lived.  For about two years after Joshua Calendar had turned his back on the idiot humans of Calendria (the country which the humans of his Time-Tribe had already begun to form by the time he had left), he was back in his human shape, and already beginning to plan a habitation for himself in the mountains. And, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, reports of the Calendro began to grow scarcer and scarcer, and sightings of the creature even more so, despite how tall it was.

Eventually, eyewitness reports of the creature were replaced with hearsay, which was itself replaced by the legendry of folklore. Much like the human who allegedly shapeshifted from time to time into the creature, one Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time, whose legend was to be far greater and more enduring than that of the Calendro.

The Tower of Babblion

Joshua had wandered a full two years in the wildernesses of that as yet largely unsettled world and then some, during that era which was the cusp between the primitive late stone age of the Time-Tribe and the age of the first civilization in the world, Calendria, 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. 

At some point, it is not known exactly where or when, Joshua Calendar began to take thought for his situation and decide what to do with his time and attention now that he had given up on the idea of trying to turn the old Time-Tribe into the society he had envisioned.

Joshua remembered the D.M.'s warning to him, that the process of bringing what he envisioned into reality in the world might very well drive him insane. At this time the reader is asked to try to imagine what it must have felt like to Joshua Calendar to be told something like that by God.

"Oh, hey, I need you to do this impossible thing for me, Joshua. Oh, and you've got to do it knowing the whole time that it's probably going to drive you insane. You don't have a choice, so, yeah, do it. Okay, I'm going to go play video games now.  Bye." The D.M. had essentially said to him on that day a bit more than two years ago, when He'd ruined Joshua's life, ironically, by saving his life.

That was it. The D.M. turned Joshua's life upside down which, itself, probably had not itself been a big problem with Joshua, who like all the humans of Slud (the Planet) must have been quite used to things in the world not being what they should be. It was all very unfair, but besides that, it was downright cruel to create somebody to fix the problems caused by a God, and then saddle that guy with an impending descent into madness.

Joshua was determined, however, to avoid going insane. It was his first priority, foremost in his mind and will. He had abandoned the people of the Tribe when it had become obvious to him that his interaction with them could very well be what would unhinge his sanity, for indeed humankind in our world is truly a maddening species to deal with. The society that the Calendrians were creating was an abomination to him, and he hated his fellow humans not only for creating their vile hierarchy but also for believing, and continuing to believe, that it had been a good thing to create. That was a thing about humans that he could not find it in himself to forgive, because it had frustrated him so much that it had unhinged him and sent him careening down the road towards crazy old manhood.

Now, resolved to live alone in the mountains, he found himself wondering what to do in such an unfamiliar situation as he had found himself.  What, after all, did a boy who had been raised a nomad know about settling down into a sedentary lifestyle?  And what did a human, a social creature who needed to interact with other social creatures like himself, know of living isolated from all of his kind in the life of a hermit? Indeed, the world's first hermit?

Joshua had many things to figure out about the new life he had chosen, but luckily for him, he had plenty of time, for he had still the double-edged gift of the D.M. had bequeathed to him, that longevity that meant for him essentially immortality. And after his years of wandering, he was finally starting to get an idea in his mind to which projects he would devote his energies in this new, unfamiliar life of his.

His first priority was to build a home in which to dwell. Despite all that he had been through (mostly in the past two and a quarter years), and regardless also of all the other nonhuman forms he may or may not have transformed into during that time, Joshua Calendar was nonetheless still human. Quite human, with a more or less human concept of what a home is, which therefore involved a floor, a ceiling, at least four walls. And because he was human, and home is such a very important, one might say even central concept to how a human views the w+orld, he was naturally quite homesick for the environment of his youth. Joshua Calendar was taken with a particular longing for the home he would not, could not ever again return to, the caverns of Mt. Conn-Fuzhen.

He 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 somewhere else, as a dwelling for himself. Besides, he had had quite enough of the dirt and the grime and the sore feet and the constant moving around that he had done the past two years. So he decided to start himself a proper home somewhere, far away, in a mountain place like that of Mt. Conn-Fuzhen in whose monumental shadow he had grown to adolescence. And to Joshua Calendar, apparently, a home was a massive Tower and a vast subterranean city populated entirely by himself where he could live and spend his time in quiet contemplation of the mysteries of the universe.

But even though Joshua had rejected the social existence as a human, he was nonetheless still human, and as a consequence of his humanness, he was still a social creature. Social creatures who reject humankind tend to find themselves in conundrums, quandaries even, because a human can not completely blot out sociability from their character. It is part of what humans are, the philosophers assure us all before they disappear. But, wishing to be free of all association with other humans, some humans try to deny and suppress their social instinct, only to find that, even if they live on their own completely isolated from all others of their species, they nonetheless remain human, think in human terms, are subjected to human instincts, and cannot ever truly go completely without what the human social instinct is wired to seek...that being interaction with others.

Joshua Calendar must have experienced much the same conundrum himself, during the time when he dwelt alone at Mt. Pile.  Joshua did what any self-respecting hermit would do in that situation...He talked to himselves a lot, men who thought like him and agreed with his views about things, pretty much because they all were him, and he found he liked their company far better than he had liked any of the people of the Time-Tribe.  The Himselves got him, they understood him. He did not have to worry about them learning the wrong lessons because he himself was the source of all their understanding. So he created other selves and enlisted them to help him in his endeavor, which endeavor, the reader will recall, was recently revealed to have been the building of his home in the mountains of Lo Tsarok.

The reader could be forgiven if they found it hard to believe that one single man living alone in the mountains had managed to build such a grand home as Joshua was to build. "How could this be?  How could one man build a great Tower on the mountain? How could one man delve a great city into the living rock of said mountain?" the reader might very well ask, and if Joshua Calendar had been any other person but who he was, the answer to that question might very well have been "Well, obviously he couldn't. He's a human that is not Joshua Calendar. Don't be absurd."

But he was not any other human. He was Joshua Calendar, a human who was endowed by the God of Gods with  powers of mental prowess and a will which could transmutate ideas he pictured in his mind's eye into physical realities, who could manipulate the world and even the creatures in it with but a word from his lips. Joshua Calendar could lift things high into the air without even physically touching them, he could forge a weapon out of thin air, he could speak to animals in their own ways. He could summon storms and catastrophes, and he could divide himself into many different people who were all him but in seperate bodies. He could even create several different himselves and make a baseball team. Just about everything that Joshua could imagine, he could make it real. Physically, actually real.

Building a tower and a city beneath the tower was not going to be a problem for him. No, sir.

He created a workforce of other himselves to help him build his city, probably the first city ever built by human hands in all the world, and employed his telekinetic powers to help them carve it. Which was good for him because he lived by himself and the place he ended up building is reputed to have been gargantuan in size and would probably have taken an entire army of humans centuries to build it the normal way.

In time, however, the various Joshua Calendars built his tower in the Mountains of Lo Tsarok, those same mountains which are called by the actual people who live in the region around them the Himselvian Mountains.  By "built his tower", the author of this text means to indicate not only that Joshua Calendar built a tower in the geographical proximity of the Mountains of Lo Tsarok, which he did, but also that he extended the dwelling actually in the mountains. As in, inside of them.

Actually, to say that Joshua built a tower in the mountains is slightly misleading. It was a city that he built in the mountains but the tower was only for the most part at the summit of the mountain. What actually happened is that he parked a tower there. 

The reader will recall that Joshua had created a twenty seven story Vimana earlier in his wanderings, The Tower of Babblion (and according to some the Tower of Time), home to Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time, could have looked like this. It didn't. But it totally could have.and when he decided at last to cease his wandering over the world and settle down somewhere, he figured he had a tower already made that only needed to be moved into position. So that was what he did. He alone, with nobody to help him except Himselves, and only the powers of mind and will that had been given him by the God of Gods, Joshua delved a mighty foundation into the tallest mountain in the area, and parked his Vimana in it, and the remainder of the great structure appeared to be a incredibly tall tower, which the legends of the humans he had left behind would come to name The Tower of Babblion.

The tower of Babblion stuck up out of and over the summit of Mt. Pile, the tallest of the mountains in that region, which rears up above the plains below for more than twenty six thousand feet into the sky, surrounded by other, shorter mountains, foothills, and the grassland of what is now in the northern reaches of the Republic of Americant, on the western continent. The interior of the mountain was honeycombed with successively layered caverns and galleries that he delved with the help of many himselves, and it was there that he built his city.

Joshua Calendar's tower is popularly named the Tower of Babblion, but some of the unexploded historians have given it also the name the Tower of Time, even though Joshua had made a special point to carve into the rock faces of the tower exterior (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".

Joshua called the his tower "My office", but the city beneath it, he named Emptirion, because it was empty of all humans except himself. And not surprisingly, the city he gave over to the many Himselves that he had created to help him build it. There they dwelt together, and by Joshua's will which was their will also, they formed a society there in all its institutions and all its infrastructure.  And it has been rumored in folklore that the society that had existed at Emptirion was the most perfect one that has ever existed, although we have no way of knowing for sure since nothing remains of it in the present day to prove it.

By "the perfect society", the author intends the reader to understand that all or most of the things which have characterized the other society, the ones created by the arguing Calendrians at Mt. Conn-Fuzhen, such as division, competition, endless debate and hierarchical oppression, were not present in the one at Mt. Pile.  The society of the Himselves of Emptirion, therefore, would have probably been extremely harmonious, prosperous, and prolific, and that much we have some evidence for, in the writings of the Keeper of Time himself, for it must be remembered that he kept a journal of his observations, and parts of that journal have been found over the years.

So if the society of the Himselves, the thousands or maybe even millions of Joshua Calendars that lived in Emptirion, was so very prosperous and prolific, then what happened to it?  For certainly in the present day there has been discovered no physical evidence of the Himselves themselves, and how then can we know what they looked like, how they might have behaved, what they ate and drank and how they interacted with each other? Besides what has been told us in Joshua's journal, there doesn't seem to be any way we could know. But we do know that none of the Himselves that inhabited Emptirion appear to exist anywhere else in the world, and since humans have been searching through the holy mountains of Lo Tsarok for thousands of years, searching for answers to just such questions and have found none, it is generally assumed in the present day that the Himselves are probably extinct.

But what of the Keeper of Time himself? Joshua Calendar dwelt quite alone at the Tower of Babblion, and that quiet, aloof life appears to have lasted for several centuries of futurepast, during which he spent his time 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. He just really enjoyed making statues that were appalling caricatures of people he did not like, in a rather passive-aggressive, schadenfreudian sort of way. According to some rather smug, self-satisfied writings that he left behind, Joshua sculpted statues of many of the people he had left behind from the Calendrians, some 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 (and oppressed) peasants who will gladly take part in their own oppression and further their own confusion as far as possible.

During his time of quietude at Mt. Pile, Joshua Calendar, when he was not otherwise busy contemplating something, also began to take thought for his mission, which he still felt a deep and irresistable compulsion to accomplish somehow. He developed 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 Calendrians 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), in time they heard reports of a great tower that had appeared in a distant mountain range and not incorrectly thought that such a place was probably where Joshua Calendar, the lost founder of Warlockism or whatever it's called had ended up.

So these curious Calendrian would-be warlocks went to the Mountains of Lo Tsarok, 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. And besides, he was very angry at humankind and wanted nothing to do with any of them.

The Calendrians petitioning to be his students 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 better just sort of saunter off back to their stupid "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 where Joshua had placed his tower and eventually, in attempting to figure out what it was that Joshua did and how he did it, one of them, a guy named Gluffin Puddlekins of the Stupid Name, stumbled upon the secrets of the Arcane Arts himself, and he taught the newly discovered arts to his fellows, and they became the first practitioners of magic in Slud (the Planet), and from the disciplines they developed were trained the sorcerers and the magicians of the world.

Joshua pointedly ignored them all, and kept to his work. They spied on him almost constantly, which was their work.

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, create new ways of measuring Sluddish Time according to mathematical principles, and develop a prototype calendar to facilitate that, and categorizing 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, for time is an almost infinite field in any universe, and the human mind is not really equipped to deal with just how huge it is.

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, a nearly infinite number of tiny little connections or circuits between the time of the observer and the time of the object being observed...In other words, the human mind did not yet have enough storage space in it to hold the knowledge of every connection that exists in the universe.

In the case of "the Joshua Calendar" (that was what he called it and he adored the pun with a sort of droll relish, as opposed, of course, to hot dogs, which he adored with regular 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 just to provide the sheer amount of processing power necessary 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 most of 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. 

But as Joshua grew older and older, his age surpassing that of the oldest humans that had ever lived and continuing on beyond that unabated, first one century then another and then another and another, the old grievances Joshua had nursed against his fellow humans began to mean less and less to him, and in time, though Joshua remained in his hermitage, he eased up a bit on his grudge against humankind.  They had, after all, been but stupid, superstitious cavemen when last he had seen them, more to be pitied than hated, the pathetic wretches. In time, he was on the verge of forgiving them their terrible stupidity.

Surely they had by now come to their senses, Joshua figured, and he was actually sort of curious to see if they had finally decided to view the matter of society logically and come to logical conclusions about it.

A Week in the Life of Joshua Calendar, Keeper of Time

Even so, Joshua did not leave his hermitage and go out into the world to check up on what his fellow humans were doing. He meant to do so some day, but he never quite felt that the time was right to do it. Besides, his weeks were filled with all sorts of important matters to see to as it was. To illustrate this point, the following is a description of an average week in the life of Joshua Calendar.

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 either too much fun or else not very fun at all. Then he repaired the roof with telekinetic manipulation of the Cosmic physic. He then ate supper, which on this particular Sunday happened to be some blahrgburger goulash he had cooked yesterday. 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 abstract 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 he had drunk 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. Hair of the Dog and all that. 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!

Meanwhile, in the first Empire in the world, Calendria, people in large groups were doing what people in large groups do...being lazy and stupid wastes of oxygen who let even lazier and more stupid wastes of oxygen rule over them and ruin their lives.

The Final Straw

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 afterfore Joshua had sent himself into self-imposed exile from the settlements of humankind. 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, and even forgetting that he had sworn off having anything to do with humans a full thirteen centuries previously, he 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. Ah, but humans had ever been the ones to go about anything they attempted the hard way, he remembered sourly.  He knew all too well about that.  That was, after all, one of the main reasons he had been living as a hermit in a tower for the past thirteen hundred years.  Well, that and the fact that his own people had tried to burn him alive.  That's the sort of thing that tends to end friendships.

As the peasants saw him appear at the edge of the roof where they could see him, 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 just sort of milling about being a more or less passive nuisance as humans tend to do. Joshua estimated there were more than fifty thousand peasants gathered to the summit of Mt. Pile now, through and upon which his Tower had stood for thirteen hundred years largely without any visits from humans to darken its doors. 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 in such great numbers, to this place to which he had removed himself in his exile. The Mountains of Lo Tsarok, after all, were far from all the lands known by him to have been populated by humans, except for Gluffin Puddlekins of the Stupid Name and his sorcerous followers about twelve hundred years beforafter. 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 thirteen hundred and fifteen years old 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.  He had never in his thirteen centuries of hermitage had any reason to believe that his fellow Calendrians, 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. They certainly had not seemed at all to listen to anything he had said to them back then. They had been too busy trying to burn him at the stake as a warlock. Even though Joshua would factually have said, for the thousandth D.M. damned time, he was not nor had he ever been a warlock!

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...Forty five thousand peasants had apparently come halfway across the world, together, to come see him. For the first time in centuries, Joshua began to think that maybe humans might have gotten things right after all, or at least that they possessed the potential to get things right, eventually. And that was something he had not believed since he had been fifteen years old, during the First Great Conversation.

Could humans, after all the mistakes they had made, eventually choose to do the correct things? Joshua was intrigued by that ancient possibility, now at least for the moment resurrected. And yet, the more cautious side of his personality questioned why, if the Calendrians had gotten things right, they were still peasants?  Surely the right path did not have any such thing on it as peasants! It could not! Peasants were a part of a hierarchy, and hierarchy could not exist if people were getting things right. Joshua did not really know what to believe anymore. 

He decided to learn more of the peasants' circumstances, although already a sense of impending dread was already beginning to creep into his soul. But he said, a bit sadly,

"I do not recognize any among you. Some of your faces look familiar but I do not know any of you. Thirteen hundred years have passed since I knew the people of the northwest, when I dwelt with them at Mt. Conn-Fuzhen. Are you, then, descendants of those humans who took part in the First Great Conversation?"

"Descendants (and ancestors), O great high Keeper of Time." one of the peasants corrected him. "It's descendants and ancestors. We always pair things like that with their opposites, you see, because--"

"I know how time works, fellow." Joshua replied with a sort of dry irony. "I'm the one who invented that practice of pairing words with their opposites for the purposes of describing the effects of Sluddish Time."

"Oh?  Was that you?" another peasant asked, a dull look on his face as he absentmindedly picked his nose. "I always sort of wondered who was the bloke what came up with that."

"Yes. I invented it, though only as a stopgap measure until I could come up with a more accurate way of describing the phenomena that occur as a consequence of the middle-outward rippling of time."

"Huh?" another peasant asked blankly.

Joshua rolled his eyes, and sighed.

"Never mind. You clearly won't understand it if I do the math in front of you." Joshua said in a slightly sinking voice. "Well then, you've come a long way to see me. Here I am, Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time. What is your purpose here, you thousands of people loitering about outside the walls of my office that totally is not, I repeat, not the Tower of Time?"

“Well, our ancestors (or descendants) were arguing on and on about what to do. You know, the whole First Great Conversation thing that created civilization. it never really ended. It's still going on. People have been arguing with each other for thirteen hundred years now. It gets to be so tiresome sometimes."

"I've...noticed that." Joshua tried to keep his tone level, but his words spoke volumes of unvoiced sarcasm.

"Anyways, O holy Keeper of Time, O Undying and Immortal. We got tired of listening to the nobles argue with the politicians 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 our ancestors had gotten society 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, relaxing a bit. This sounded like maybe good news would be coming 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. Famished, even, 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?”

“Well, the ancestors (and descendants) had been arguing a lot about who should be leader of society, even though they hadn't really even gotten around to getting all the bugs worked out of society yet because they were all too busy arguing. Finally, someone decided that the best way to go was to pick Regah and Shub and Kintahn and Oparba to be our leaders." one of the peasants began to answer. One of the other peasants, a rather ugly fellow with dirty blond hair and dirty suntanned skin stepped forward, his chest swollen with pride.

"That was Syd Kophantus, my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great great, great, great, great, great, great, great granduncle. He was a supporter of Regah the Cunning.  He was also the first cop." the peasant with the dirty blond hair said, positively beaming.

Ugh. It was worse than Joshua had thought. If the blond peasant who had just spoken had spoken truthfully, then the Calendrians had not only kept hierarchical society intact but had already started enforcing hierarchy with tools of oppression, namely an institution of police. Joshua was mightily disgusted by that prospect, which seemed now to have become an appalling reality.

"So you have decided to have leaders to make laws binding you to obedience, and you've let police have power over you and, no doubt, oppress you also. Is that correct?" Joshua asked, a sneer of profound contempt and something that sounded like bitterness in his words.

"Well, yeah. Of course.  Peasants have got to be oppressed.  Being oppressed are what we peasants are for.  Everyone knows that." the dirty blond peasant stood there, his facial features looking perplexed. Then he shrugged, and it seemed to Joshua that the man's shrug was the shrug of the entire peasant class, a class which should not have existed at all because class should not have existed. The peasant went on. "It took us a few years to even define what a leader is, because you never told us anything about that while you were there and we didn't know, so our ancestors and descendants had to invent leaders themselves. They wanted to be truthful about their definition of leadership, so we as a people more or less came to the conclusion that a leader is someone whose job it is to 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. Still, he said,

"You don't have to have leaders at all, you know. That was one of the mistakes that the people made.  You assume there always has to be leaders, and it's not true." Joshua looked down at the thousands of brown smock-clad peasants, so poor and dirty looking.

"What?  Of course it's true! The Muncian Church says that to believe otherwise is blasphemy, O Keeper of Time.  Please do not call down upon us poor peasants the damnation of the God of Gods! Of course there have got to be leaders! Who else will tell us how to live our lives and how to die?" one of the peasants, apparently a more devout one than many of his fellows, kowtowed repeatedly and anxiously before the wall of the Tower of Babblion.

"Munc was a fool. A damn fool. He became more concerned with maintaining his status in the Tribe than in seeing earnestly to the spiritual needs of the people, and that lousy son of a rat tried to have me burned alive. Anyone who follows him should be ashamed of themselves."

The more religious among the crowd loudly denounced with a sudden clamor the utterance of what was to them dark blasphemies against the founder of their religion.

"SILENCE!" Joshua thundered. Literally thundered, for he had summoned a bolt of lightning to crackle through the air above the throng and the sheer force of the sound wave that created knocked them all to the ground.

Joshua was beginning to see that there, that very day, there at the tower of his long solitude, the madness that the D.M. had long ago foretold would come upon him would indeed come upon him. And he was determined to thwart that madness, and conquer it once and for all, so that never again would it ever hang over his head like a razor sharp sword suspended by a single hair. So almost as quickly as he had lost his temper, Joshua willed himself to regain it.

"Now...You were telling me your story. Get on with it." Joshua said quietly, but willed that his voice should be clearly heard by all that were gathered there, and so it was.

"We, and by we I mean our entire people throughout the futurepast, well 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. They were turning out to be the same stupid, stupid, shortsighted, stupid, lazy, and stupid jerks that Joshua had known at Mt. Conn-Fuzhen, and Joshua was already beginning to feel a malaise creep over him and give him pain in his stomach. An ulcer, perhaps.

"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 standing near the sheer mountainside cliff at the edge of Mt. Pile's summit answered, even as some newly ascending peasants coming up the mountainside pushed him off to his death thousands of feet below in their struggle to climb up onto the flatter place near the tower. He died fulfilled, though, as speaking that one sentence had, unbeknownst to him, been his entire purpose of being born in the first place. His purpose now fulfilled, he went to Nirvana.

“Then the people from Tegah and Ughah's group, who call themselves 'nobles' now, they got the help of some of the Gunkari and the Patuenes, the professional warriors who are descendants (and of course ancestors) of the followers of Gunkar the Terrible and Patu the Avenger. and they basically threatened everyone with execution if they didn't make Tegah and Ughah the leaders, so it was agreed to let them govern all the land and resources and people in the name of the Emperors. So basically, now the aristocrats own all the land, and they they rule in the government's name in a most cases. Most the time though they just write the first drafts on laws to make everyone give most of the money and resources to them. ” another peasant said, his brown peasant smock flapping in the brisk, twenty six thousand feet high mountain breeze.

Ugh again. Now the idiot Calendrians had gone and invented money too. Another terrible mistake. Joshua shook his head sadly.  The society being described to him was showing all the signs of being irretrievably corrupted by private interests and class warfare.

Joshua could not believe the stupidity of it.  First, letting there be aristocrats, and then letting aristocrats write laws that basically legalized aristocrats stealing from the rest of society. And these stupid peasants were all just standing here smiling about it like it had ushered in some sort of golden age for their lives.

"So that's it, then?  Your ancestors..." Joshua began to say something.

"And descendants." one of the peasants butted in unsolicitedly.

"Will you shut up?" Joshua demanded of the fellow with a withering look.

"Sorry..." the peasant muttered.  Joshua cleared his throat.

"So your ancestors just gave control of society to the descendants of the families of Tegah and Ughah for no reason?  Without even any resistance?" he asked incredulously.

"Why on Slud (the Planet) would we resist something like that?  Even if we could, why would we want to stop the Tegites and Ughites from ruling over us? We want to be ruled, after all." another peasant protested, shocked at the attitude the peasants were getting from the ancient hermit of the Tower of Babblion.

"Why wouldn't you resist that sort of thing?  What sort of human being is so foolish as to want to be ruled?"

"Uhhhh...I mean, we are lazy and stupid. You know, because we were created in the image of the D.M. the God of Gods." one of the other peasants pointed out what, really, probably should have been obvious.

"Right, you're lazy and stupid.  I should have known." Joshua muttered under his breath. And then he drew into his lungs a deep breath, bidding his agitated emotions to calm themselves, determined not to let these fools drive him into a rage. "So that's it, then?  The bloody aristocrats rule your society then?"

"Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. You see, O Keeper of Time, after the aristocrats had taken up the reins of power, the politicians decided that they didn't really feel like giving up the power. They got a few crazies to start talking about how we should let the politicians rule the people in actuality, instead of just in mere name. And those crazies got a lot of people to listen to them, because as it turns out, listening to crazy people is one of those things we humans do best. Apparently some of the uncommitted Gunkari and Patuenes listened to 'em also, because pretty soon they was together with the politicians like stink on a middengaffle sow. And they started saying that the politicians were going to rule and if any of us had a problem with it we could just up and die and they'd help us along the way to it. Anyway, that's what started the troubles between the aristocrats and the politicians.  The aristocrats and about half of us peasants thought it was all a right dumb idea, and we weren't about to take no rubbish from them politicians.”

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. "They told us on both sides to fight each other and we did it because we're loyal peasants and always happy to help those richer than us. I got a medal of valor for killing my grandnephew."

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. He was losing his struggle to keep a firm hold on his emotions. He wanted to scream at these fools, these damned fools, all of them eagerly taking part in such a spiraling descent into total collective madness. For these fools and thirteen hundred years of their ancestors (and descendants) to have done everything wrong in building a society, everything wrong done willingly, eagerly...proudly...It was horrifying to Joshua. The most obscene thing that ever he had heard.

"Why are you proud of what you have done? Don't you see that you have let evil men corrupt all about your social existence that was supposed to be good, and you have gone along with them in causing you to suffer? Why do you people do this?" Joshua asked, sounding distraught.

“Well, we're peasants. Peasants are supposed to suffer, that's why we exist." one of the peasants just sort of shrugged as he said it. Peasants shrug at things a lot, as everybody in the world knows.

"That is NOT why you exist, you morons." Joshua snapped angrily. "You weren't created to kill each other, steal from each other, and compete with each other. God created life on this planet accidentally, while skipping lightning across the waters while He was thinking of ways to create life. You, me, none of us humans were originally intended to exist. We are a mistake! We can be anything we want to be because our destiny was not written in stone!"

One of the peasants pulled a rather large disc of stone from under his tunic, and Joshua had no idea how he could have fit it under there and kept it in place while he literally had climbed the sheer cliff of a twenty six thousand foot tall mountain to come show it to him. But sure enough, it had writings upon it. Joshua facepalmed himself. After all the idiocy which had spewed forth from these peasants today, he really should have expected this.

"We do have it in stone. Master Regah the Cunning, the head of the politicians, was good enough to have it carved in discs of stone like this one so that we would never forget what we were supposed to do for him and the other politicians." the peasant with the stone disc said.

"Will you shut the hell up, you jackass?" Joshua demanded in a withering tone. "I don't care what Regah said. You are your own people. You belong to yourselves, and only yourselves!"

"We are not capable enough to own ourselves. The Grand High Mucketymuck of the Muncian Church says that we--" another peasant started to say, but Joshua cut him off.

"I do not care what the Grand High Mucketymuck of the Muncian Church or even Munc himself said. I know what you are, they don't! You didn't have to fight a bleeding war against each other to make them rich and powerful!"

"That war ended eventually, you know." one of the peasants told Joshua, a bit defensively.

"Well at least you imbeciles had enough sense to do that." Joshua snapped at the whole body of the gathered peasants. "Now please give me some good news, some actually good news here. Please, I'm begging you."

"We thought we were." the peasant said like the imbecile he was. "But the war did eventually end.  After about two hundred years or so, several million people on both sides had been killed in the fighting...all of them, we've decided, having been good and just and 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. That way both those groups could take a part in oppressing us, which was so very important to them that they had fought a war over it. 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 was now quite sick to his stomach, in utter agony so painful that he was finding it difficult to remain standing upright. And that ill-defined malaise was not because of his hunger pangs. He had pretty much forgotten entirely about his lunch. He didn't even want to continue living in the world in that moment, much less eat something. His stomach felt like it was killing him.

"What happened after the war?" Joshua asked in a strained voice, uttered through teeth clenched in anguish. His stomach hurt so much, so very, very much. Almost, but not quite, enough to wipe from his mind the dreadful, fearful sense of his sanity slipping away from him.

“Well, those of us who survived went back to our lands. The aristocrats had taken them over while our ancestors and descendants were off denting each other's helmets, and when they got back the aristocrats said that it was actually their land and not ours, and it always has been, but 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, because they said so)."

"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. His heart raced, he could feel his blood pounding through his veins and arteries like hammer blows. "They charge you a share of your harvest in exchange for the privilege of working land that is already yours to begin with? They want to steal the food out of the mouths of you and your families, but they don't even have to because you just give it to them?" Joshua could not believe he had lived to see a day when he had any reason to ask such a ridiculous question to anyone.

"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 those that send us off to war, of course. The Gunkari and the Patuenes were very clear about that.  They said that war has to be eternal and that when one war ends we all have to take some time to recover a little bit and then plunge ourselves into the next war because if we didn't die in wars there would be too many of us for them to control." 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.

"But why? Why do you submit yourselves to such outrages?" Joshua shouted in deep frustration.

"Why? Because they're aristocrats.  Being someone to submit ourselves to them is why aristocrats exist. After all, they are of the lineage of Tegah and Ughah, so they must be better than us, though none of us ever really could figure out why. But they remind us often that they have these really long lineages, 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! He had been so sure of 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? How could it be that they were so very different than he?

“G...g...go on with your abominable story...” Joshua stammered, leaning weakly against the topmost rampart on the edge of the rooftop, starting to lose his cool. 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 said.

"You do not have my pardon and Munc does not, has never, and never will speak for me.  No matter what happens for the rest of eternity, Munc will NEVER have the right to speak for me.  NOBODY has the right to speak for me, except me!" Joshua replied in an irate tone.

Then another stepped forward, saying, “Well, we couldn't take that chance.  We didn't want to offend you since you're like pretty much a god to us, so we figured we had better give in.

"Your giving in is what has offended me." Joshua snarled back at them. Quite a few of the peasants visibly flinched at those words.

"Begging your pardon, o holy Keeper of Time, but we didn't want to burn up in no lava place like the poor disobedient souls go to. 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 the Holy Mother Church, though everyone else just calls it religion, by the way, and they own what land that the aristocrats and the politicians don't.”

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, and his knuckles were white with pressure. His fingers, of course, failed in this because the stone windowsill 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, and the even more terrifying concept that he, himself, was also going 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', because they figured since it was our job to kill each other in battles, we might as well have organized armies to do it with so we could kill more. And they started having blacksmiths make tools that hurt people, which we didn't really like very much because we like peace when we can get it and getting hacked to death by a sword  is painful. 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've using bronze for some of them for a few centuries 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.  

The best thing Joshua Calendar could have done at that moment was to flee, to flee far away from that place, far away from humans, all the stupid, lazy, self-annihilating humans.  Even if the place happened to be the his office, the Tower of Babblion, but most certainly not the Tower of Time, but at any rate the tower atop Mt. Pile in the Lo Tsarok Mountains, which had been his home for thirteen hundred years, where he had lived in quiet, peaceful contemplation of the universe. The place where Joshua had achieved what humans are supposed to achieve as a species, even if it were that place (and it was), Joshua should have left that place and gone far away.

But he didn't.

Something told Joshua that mastering his emotions was going to be a battle that he had to win, and he had to win it here, where these humans were telling him anything they could to drive him insane. He had to conquer insanity, or be destroyed by it. 

Joshua summoned all of his will, all of his hopes and dreams, all of his skills and all of his attention to regaining control of his nerves and his thoughts. Mt. Pile was the hill that his sanity would live or die upon. This was his home, and he intended to stay.

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 for several minutes, spoke no words at all to interrupt the peasants in their absurd account of recent history. All the while, the battle raged on within him, the battle against that creeping, terrifying insanity that was even now trying to come upon him and claim him for its own.

When the report was finished, however, he cleared his throat, and asked in a remarkably 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! How could these people possibly be so utterly obtuse? 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.  Despite his intense loathing for all these idiot peasants, Joshua was still a man of compassion. He had built an entire society out of Himselves that had compassion as one of its guiding principles. So he gathered his will to the purpose of feeding that multitude, snapped his fingers irritably, and instantly a large loaf of french bread appeared the hands of each of the assembled peasants, who looked at their unlooked-for edible windfall in expressions ranging from gratitude to shock, instant ravenous hunger to sheer wonder.

"It's...a miracle!" one of them shouted with a full mouth, spitting out pieces of soggy bread as he did so.

"No, it's not a miracle. It's just physics.  A subject you would have studied about if you peasants hadn't been too busy being lazy and stupid jackasses." Joshua retorted hotly. But it was too late.  Already there was forming among them a cult, who almost immediately began to move forward to the wall of the tower and genuflect before it.

"Praise the Keeper of Time!  Praise Him!" they shouted in unison with each kowtow, capitalizing the pronoun to denote "His" elevation to godhood in their beliefs.

"Stop that! I am not a God, I do not accept you as disciples and you are not currently even worthy to be my pupils. You don't need a God.  You need an idea of your own individual wills, and an intention not to sacrifice them to society unless society is the type of society that refuses to make you sacrifice them!" Joshua told them.  But they were peasants, too lazy to do what he told them, and too stupid to understand why it was what they shouldn't have had to be told it. So the new cult continued to chant about him, while the rest of the peasants just milled about indolently as peasants do when they're not drudging away at their work for starvation wages.

“What did all those fools offer you poor, ridiculous peasants, to get you to accept such a sociopathically anti-peasant type of society as your ancestors (and descendants) built? 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 to the aristocrats who own us.  When they come every Autumn to take their share of our harvest, they tell us 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 if we keep on giving most of it to them. But what else is there?” one of the peasant women 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, confused that anyone would suggest they shouldn't be.

“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."The rulers of society, they have a country they call "Calendria" off to the northeast, that they let us live and work in, though they charge us such dreadful taxes for the pleasure of doing it. And...well, I mean, it's a country. You got to have patriotism for a country. That's what patriotism is for."

The Calendrian Cataclysm, the Aarghing, and the Flight of the Time Raven: Joshua Calendar Goes Freaking Nuts

"Whoa whoa WHOA! Hold on a damn minute!" Joshua exclaimed, his eyes widened in ire and fury. "CALENDRIA?!  You named your horrible country after me?!"  He was actually beginning to spit froth from his lips now as he shouted, a detail which should have showed him the necessity of backing out of this situation right now, going somewhere else far away, and maybe even rocking back and forth in a fetal position. But he didn't even notice that detail, so caught up was he in the sheer rage he felt then.

“Of course we did it in your name! We do it in the name of the D.M., the God of Gods, and also in your name!” another added, proudly. Proudly. PROUDLY! The word repeated time and again in Joshua's mind. Each time caused new and increasingly spasms throughout his body.

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 other thoughts.

“YOU HAVE ALLOWED ALL THESE EVILS TO COME TO PASS...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 voice of 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. To the person listening to the words of Joshua Calendar echoing through history, it is like what a person listens to when they have their ear to a seashell. They 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. They cannot distinguish between the sounds enough to understand truly what is making them, nor what is happening.

Still, there is a phenomenon that has been noticed, recorded, and analyzed over the years by scientists and theologians alike, where people occasionally have been more powerfully affected by the hazy and indistinct words of the Keeper of Time echoing throughout time...affected, that is to say, by the vibration of the sound of the words than by the words themselves. Audiologists have noted that vibration such as those from sounds influence the behaviors of living creatures in subtle ways, and the words of Joshua Calendar have been no exception to that.

Whether or not it was to affect the behaviors of people in other times, though, Joshua's voice was amplified by his outrage, and all around the area, the vibrations from it most certainly did have a physical effect on the terrain surrounding Mt. Pile. The Lo Tsarok Mountains started to shake violently, including Mt. Pile itself, as entire mountain faces began to split away. Landslides and avalanches abounded, and everywhere, humans and wild beasts alike screamed and screeched and made a horrible clamor of anguish as they were crushed by rocks, fell into newly opened chasms, or just were knocked off the high places upon which they had been standing and fell to their deaths on the fatal rock surface far below.

The Tower of Babblion began itself to buckle and sway dangerously, as Mt. Pile began to crumble beneath it.

Many of the magic users and students of supernatural powers living in those 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 localized cataclysm. Thousands of the wizards and sorcerers, witches and actual warlocks, summoners and seers, necromancers and magicians who lived in the surrounding area perished, as much of the Mountains of Lo Tsarok were leveled that day. In our present day the region is 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! THAT'S ALL I WANTED! JUST TO DIG UP SPACE DINOSAURS FROM SPACE OR WHATEVER SPACE ARCHAEOLOGISTS DO!!! BUT NO! COMPLETELY UNASKED FOR, I HAD TO BE SADDLED WITH THE TASK OF CONVINCING HUMAN BEINGS TO BE HUMAN, AND, OH! HOW I REGRET IT! HOW I LAMENT IT!  HOW I WISH THAT NO HUMAN IN ALL THE WORLD HAD EVER BEEN BORN!  A THOUSAND, A MILLION, A BILLION CURSES UPON ALL OF THE HUMAN SPECIES FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!  AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”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.

The preceding paragraph, as emotionally charged and clearly angry to the point of hostility as it is, actually managed to make it into canon Muncian scripture. For it is published in epic poetry form as its own mini-Book, called "The Callendrion" in the larger work known as the Muncian Gospels, which is the seminal scripture of the Muncian Church. The quotation which the preceding paragraph used is called by church scholars "The Aarghing", and the Muncian faithful believe that the Aarghing was when all the devils and malicious spirits which tempt humans from the path of righteousness (righteousness being, of course, defined as the path laid out by Munc and his followers) were expelled from the mind of the Keeper of Time, in which they had been suppressed for more than a millenium.

The Aarghing, therefore, is seen as a pivotal point in the theological story of the Muncian scripture, a sort of "Fall from Grace" where the holiest man in the world, Joshua Calendar, the Keeper of Time, fails in the great task that had been assigned to him, and his faltering leads to his downfall as a sage and the beginning of his transformation into the popularized boogeyman we know as the Time Raven.

Though the learned doctors of the Muncian Church have named the event the Aarghing, however, that same incident has also acquired a different name from the much more bluntly and plainly spoken peasants of Slud, and it is that term which became the more widely used, and indeed, so widely used that it eventually served as a dividing point between time epochs when humans finally got around to measuring time in any meaningful way: "When Joshua Calendar Went Freaking Nuts".

Whatever a person chooses to call the incident hereby highlighted, there can be little doubt of the consequences of it. For they were so destructive that they literally changed the world.

After the Aarghing, Joshua Calendar spoke no more in human words, but 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. The sole exception to this was the language he spoke while attacking humans as the Time Raven, for his battle cry was very human-like.

All the 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 Joshua Calendar mad. Completely, utterly mad. You would not believe how mad Joshua Calendar became. Gibbering maniac doesn't come close.  Nor does raving lunatic. Those are like mild, almost negligible mental illnesses compared to the mental illness which spewed forth from Joshua Calendar when he had finally had enough of humans and their stupidity. 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, which were about to end as the great twenty six thousand foot tall Mount Pile collapsed underneath their feet. With a scream which pierced in all directions, that reportedly lasted for a full fourteen hours, Joshua Calendar Went Freaking Nuts.

The peasants who had gone there that day to the summit of Mt. Pile and the Tower of Babblion had no cause to forget it, and they had no time to forget it either. Something like twenty four thousand Calendrian peasants had come to see Joshua, and of the ones standing there before his tower on the summit of Mount Pile, there was no hope of survival. All of them died a brutal death, crushed and pulverized by the crumbling mountain.

Some few who had been lower on the mountain or in the foothills below that were able to escape their deaths during the so called Calendrian Cataclysm, however. Some survived among the magic users of the Gluffen Puddlekindred, and some even of the peasants, some of the stragglers who hadn't made it up to the Tower of Babblion yet and some few even who had been on the summit and had climbed back down early, so as to carry news of what had been said. That is why in this part of the Prologue there was a story at all to tell about the life of Joshua Calendar. The story has been handed down (or up) through the centuries, as has the fact that Joshua Calendar was one of the survivors of the Cataclysm he had caused. He reportedly changed his shape into that of a great raven larger than any eagle, and he was seen to fly away, far, far away from the wreckage of his tower as it became wreckage.

The scene of the Aarghing and the violent upheaval and tremendous death toll it took have been the subjects of many famous paintings throughout the history of Sluddish art, the most famous of which, of course, being the exquisite painting The Fall of Babblion by the strangely named grand master painter Lion's Innards of Venji, who, being quite human, looked neither like a Lion nor its innards. The painting hangs in the famous Museum of Paintings Not Usually Getting Stolen, in the city of Eawright.

As for Joshua Calendar, we know very well that he survived, for he torments humankind to this very day, coming and going unexpectedly, streaking through a random area at supersonic speeds, screaming in that same loud, loud voice that has from time to time shattered human eardrums even in those who were lucky enough to survive the instantaneous, spontaneous, random attacks of the Time Raven. Those near to his streaking form as he attacks are set on fire by the friction of his passage.

The Time Raven. This is not actually a picture of a raven but you have to admit, the words on it sort of fit the narrative, don't they?But the Time Raven does not always attack. That is usually only when it happens to be flying low enough to graze some landbound creatures. It only attacks humans when it does attack, and its battle cry sounds something like "IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED!  HERE, YOU PATHETIC HUMANS! HAVE SOME OF WHAT YOU WANTED! BURN! BURN! BURN!" and when it does attack, the Time Raven charges in a more or less straight line in an almost blahrg-like way, too overcome with fury to do anything else. There are places all over the known world where people are killed by the attacks of the Time Raven, but no one region is particularly hard hit quite like the region in which he once dwelt as an immortal human, for thirteen hundred years.  The region which had held the mountains of Lo Tsarok, which now is called the region of Aarghingward, on the northern edge of the large country in the southwestern area of the world, Americant. It is that region where the Time Raven is said to appear most often, and people do not even venture onto that particular plain except at great risk because of the frequency of the great bird's attacks there.

To this very day, Joshua Calendar, the mad Keeper of Time-turned-Time Raven is occasionally spotted flying across the azure skies still, in random places and times throughout the rest of the world, and sometimes, as the raven flies low, it can be heard to screech “Timeneverstops! Caw caw! Makeitstop! Caw!” And then the Time Raven flies away beyond the sight of men, to some sort of nest, the location of which is not known to humankind.

So the legend goes, formed from the stories of the few survivors from the Aarghing, when Joshua Calendar departed from all fellowship with the human species, he has never been seen in human shape since that day. And the peasants whom had so infuriated him, the ones who had survived, they stood for a time, confused as to what had just happened, before with heavy hearts returning home in disappointment. They had thought the Keeper of Time 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's vast, crushingly heavy social pyramid?

Nonetheless, though Joshua Calendar was gone, his legacy was not. The Calendrians, discovering that so few of the peasants returned who had gone to find Joshua Calendar, sent another column of thousands to go and find them and bring them back to Calendria, and that column, arriving, found the desolation that had been wreaked upon the region, and the great numbers of dead laying beneath fallen rocks. And some of them, using scientific methods developed by Grankh the Pompous and other early scientists, began a long process of excavation there, looking for remains of the following so they could be cataloged and sent back to the Calendrian homeland for proper funerary rites. And these efforts represented the first attempts in the world at the science of archaeology. Quite ironically, Joshua Calendar's story had begun with trying to figure out how to create archaeology, and by the close of this particular tale, had ended with actually creating archaeology as a biproduct or consequence of what had happened there after the Aarghing.

Had Joshua Calendar remained human, and remained in control of his sanity, he might very well have been unexpectedly pleased at that. We might even see him at one of the digs that now happen at important historical and prehistorical sites around the world, himself digging in the dirt for clues to the futurepast. But of course, he didn't. And we don't.

Workers looking for survivors in the collapsed dwellings of what had once been the Mountains of Lo Tsarok found survivors indeed, some of which even happened to possess copies of Joshua Calendar's system of calculating and reckoning time, that had been stolen by enterprising spies among the magic-using Puddlekindred.

The system, written in the form of a bunch of notes, tables, diagrams and graphs which alone had been developed to be able to pull the mixed-up time of Slud (the Planet and the Universe) into some semblance of a cohesive system, were very confusing to humans of the time and remain so today, though we think maybe we have a better understanding of the material than they did. The people who discovered the complicated diagrams named them 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 work a “Calendar”, or specifically "The Joshua Calendar", and they used it to reckon year one of our species' 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.

And because the methods by which Joshua Calendar, the Time-Keeper, had measured Time were discovered so close to that day, the story of the Tale of Joshua Calendar, Keeper of Time is still reflected within the acronym which is now universally used as the unit of measure when the peoples of Slud (the Planet) measure time. Thus it is that the author writes this work in the year 24,020 A.O.B.J.C.W.F.N. (After Or Before Joshua Calendar Went Freaking Nuts!)