You know - and I'm sure I've said this before - a reporter's life can either be an exciting one, or it can be dreadfully dreary. Well, I found out recently that the sweeping generalizations I'm famous for are way too restrictive. I have a mind which functions in one of two extreme states: I'm either a super 'subbie' or a pseudo-dommie. Of course, I could never be as psychotically dominant as Alethea - she's so... out to lunch, most of the time - but I can and do get driven, like, totally nuts when I come across what seems to be truly dumb-ass behavior.
At first glance, Lonia Prime is a rubber fetishist's paradise! All day, everyday, everyone swishes through their world in soft, pliable and all-encasing rubber outfits. Even their heads, hands and feet are covered in it. Sometimes, they have breathing apparatus over their rubber-clad heads. Even their young children are covered in the stuff. Every possible color is available for making into dresses, stockings, socks, shoes, boots, pants, gloves, hoods, hats and even pin-striped business suits and ties.
"Wow! I'm home!" I cried, as I stepped off the access ramp at the main spaceport, named for its founder, Mayash Rendeer The Fourth, covered from head to foot in a shiny new hobble dress Alethea had brought back for me from her visit with the Empress, Serafina Roh Lin. I have a tendency to jump to conclusions, now and then, and I'd heard the inhabitants of this world were completely besotted with rubber. Little did I know, but my foot was so far inside my mouth - figuratively speaking, of course - that I should have been able to taste the shiny black leather of my Tomaso Greer's! [For those who don't know me, 'Tomaso Greer' is synonymous with finely crafted thigh length boots, corsets and 'bad girl toys' throughout the known universe. My visit to his emporium, and my reason for going there, can be read here.]
I guess I'd better explain.
Lonia Prime is a violently fertile world! So fertile, in fact, that the weed killers available to the Lonians could not force the little 'mothers' to turn up their toes. Within hours, the brown leaves and stems vanished, to be replaced by strong, new shoots. Since they first started farming, the population has struggled with the flora of their blessed planet. When they gave up hunting and gathering and first planted Maez (a kind of wild corn), it would grow a few inches tall, then become choked by the grasses which covered the open spaces outside their villages. When irrigation was necessary, during the hottest of the six summer months, the weeds and grasses were able to absorb and use the water more effectively than the Maez. The result was low crop yields, if they could find the plants hidden among the weeds. They tried burning the fields before planting. They tried striping off the top few inches of soil. They tried building stone walls around the crops. Though these worked, up to a point, when the grass outside the walls produced seeds, the crop inside was overrun within a week. In desperation, the Lonians tried covering their crops in fine nets, but the reduced light level produced only leggy stalks, with very few kernels. While other embryonic societies were inventing brigandism, war and ruling elites, who had started as the former and graduated to the latter when they had accumulated sufficient, ill-gotten funds, the Lonians focused on doing the 'King Canute' against the unstoppable tide of vegetation that threatened to dislodge their tenuous hold on progress. [Phew, did I really just write that? And me a blonde and all! *grin]
The early study of chemistry on Earth, Alchemy, was less to do with acquiring knowledge and more about fulfilling the desire of the ruling elite to own more gold. 'Knowledge' was a by-product, not unlike the space and military programs of today - neither is intended to benefit the population at large, but spin-off technologies are sometimes developed which do. On Lonia, the science of alchemy was all about the weeds! Nothing else mattered.
By the time the people of Earth were making pyramids and such-like, the Lonians had already been working on weed killers for centuries. They tried vinegar, at first. Supposedly the high acidity kills weeds, but smells like... well, vinegar. Then they went to bleaches. Bleach worked, but proved to be bad for the environment in the quantities needed to kill so much vegetation. It also killed the crops! What about salt, you ask? Didn't the Romans use it to make the soil barren after the fall of mighty Carthage? The legions of Scipio Aemilianus Africanus were responsible for sacking the city, in 146 B.C. - as mentioned in the movie, 'Gladiator' - but whether they poured salt on the land, or not, is unclear. It's hardly likely, I think, coz Rome needed grain from North Africa - ALL of North Africa - and salt was so expensive people were paid for their labor with it! Still, the biggest problem with these simple weed killers was that they were not 'systemic', only killing what they touched, which would leave the weeds damaged, but far from dead. What the Lonians needed was a weed killer that got inside the weed, destroying the root system, then devouring the cells like a virus. For that development to happen, they would need some serious inspiration from way out in 'left field', or outside help.
Contrary to the hopes and dreams of the scientists slaving away at S.E.T.I., there are not hordes of aliens wandering aimlessly around the galaxy, just busting for the opportunity to drop in on a newly discovered world. But, it gets worse! Not only are they listening for signals from space, they are also sending signals, thereby announcing our existence, as if countless Law and Order reruns, Star Trek episodes and all those endless, mind-numbing commercials weren't already winging their way past Alpha Centuri! Do electro-magnetic waves 'wing'? Or do they sort of, well, wave? Anyway, I must say, I find this action to be just a little misguided, bearing in mind that whenever an advanced civilization encounters a less advanced one, the result is never to the long term benefit of the latter. To my mind, the prudent course of action would be to turn off all of the world's T.V. transmitters in an attempt to maintain a low profile, thereby raising the I.Q. of the entire population by at least 20 points - to say nothing of curing obesity and hypochondria. I might miss Fox News, though. Glenn Beck is probably the funiest man on TV right now. I swear, after I watch him, which isn't often, I can barely resist the urge to go running into my bedroom and begin searching under my bed for 'progressive' monsters. Alethea has noticed this behavior and uses my tail up posture, as I shine my torch this way and that, as an excuse to render me a sound paddling. Perhaps I'm not so scared of 'progressives' after all? Perhaps it's just that I enjoy a warm, tingling bottom? Ya think?
I realize that turning off our televisions could result in the citizens of Alpha Cangooli getting upset at the fact that they could no longer watch the Super Bowl, or the Olympics, but I doubt they'd start a war over the loss. After all, it would take their warships fifty years to get here, by which time they'd have run out of beer and would have decided, most likely, to go home. Sadly, many scientists do not live in 'our' world! Nor, it seems, do they ever read a history book! They believe in 'peaceful co-existence'. Well, those that aren't busy coming up with ever more efficient means of killing the rest of us, that is!
So, absent alien visitation, it was up to the Lonians to figure things out for themselves. And, they did! By mixing certain neurotoxins from dozens of species of creepy crawlies with selected plant alkaloids, they arrived at a systemic weed killer which decimated almost the entire eco-system. Strangely, their domesticated crops flourished and provided them with a plentiful source of nutritious grain... Or so they thought.
Turn the clock forward by several millennia. A defect on the Lonians 'X' chromosome appeared one day. It gave rise to the disease of Hemophilia, which expressed itself, initially, in the male sex. Quite literally, a small bruise would become a gusher and the individual would bleed to death. The Lonians came to fear any kind of physical interaction with both their world and each other. Though it was quite rare, at first, and restricted to the upper echelon of Lonian society through the custom of breeding exclusively within their own class, it soon became widespread - probably coz the upper class tend to play with girls and boys who come from outside their group. Over time, the female population-at-large become infected. Giving birth became a death sentence. The global population started to implode.
The solution was two-fold: prevent injuries of any kind - including pregnancy - and seek extended longevity to give themselves time to figure out a cure. The first part they achieved by encasing themselves in rubber at all times, including during sexual intercourse, and by covering any surface they might come in contact with heavy padding, also covered in rubber. Trust me, there is something truly weird about a rubber covered house, with rubber covered doors and windows and rubber covered foot paths. And don't get me started on rubber covered toilet plungers!
Longevity they achieved by leaving their cities and studying those parts of the eco-system which had managed to survive the weed killer. It took several years, because before they could take a step, they would cover everything in rubber. Vehicles were already rubberized, but trees had to have rubber bumpers put around their trunks and pathways and roads had to be padded and covered. In the end, salvation arrived when their advanced biological laboratories isolated an enzyme, present in the lowly earthworm, which slowed the aging process. Though they do still age, their wrinkled skins are not a disincentive when it comes to hooking up with each other, because, you guessed it, they're covered from head to foot with lovely, soft and supple rubber. They have not, however, come up with a means of removing the corrupted D.N.A. from their genes. Perhaps, they never will?
At first glance, Lonia Prime is a fetishist's paradise. It takes a highly trained and determined reporter, like yours truly, to get to the truth! Even so, they do swish beautifully!
