From: boutell@isis.cshl.org (Tom Boutell)
Subject: Karl's Mistress
Organization: Cold Spring Harbor Labs
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 02:33:29 GMT


She started out as a mere disgruntlement, a rumbling in the constipated
gut of a defrocked priest forced to beg for a living in tenth-
century Basel. She was a homely little notion, and seemed destined to be
an old maid. Primogenature wouldn't have a thing to do with her, being
accustomed to the high-class environment of aristocratic hearts. He
much preferred to run around with upper-crust ideas like chastity
(and a sweet and giving little vixen she was, when out of the public
eye!) and the divine right of Kings (an ailing but majestic fellow
with an illicit penchant for genteel bastards like the Jihad and the
expendability of peasant daughters).

But she grew quietly in the fertile dank of Father Kristoff's mind,
and spread silently by secret midnight furtive groping alliance
with that dark rippling boy of the night, anarchy, and his festering
but omniverous and virile father, ignorance. She danced in the
peasants of Europe, a shifting fire, too mobile to be drowned
in the great sea of authority, too weak to turn that sea to vapor.

On that sweet day a descendant of father Kristoff nailed her
children to the door of the church, she exulted in her fertility.

"I only came here to recharge my batteries. It was a momentary
weakness. I will take no responsibility; if there are children,
I will kill them." "I know." She luxuriated on her black-forest bed,
smiling silently to herself as the Universal Church slunk off
into the accusing dawn.

Her theses, her bastard litter of offspring by that unacknowledged
union, were now crucified on the door of the church by the
latest in her long string of hosts. They fought tooth and nail,
growing year by year, preoccupying and fundamentally changing
their father while she searched more openly for fertile ground.

No longer ignoring her presence, primogenature and the now-
staggered divine right of kings quickly sought previously
unattractive marriages, the better to freeze her out in the cold.
Long-suffering, genteel but poor, democracy was suddenly welcome
again, spreading its contagion through the New World with the
blessings of its new husbands, who nonetheless dishonored it
by sharing sleeping quarters with their past flames.

In France she surfaced, calculatedly, testing the waters, holding
back a portion of herself; the gentlemen across the water leapt
furiously on her, corrupting her hosts, inciting them to
self-destruction. In a furious orgy of death and confusion, the 
immune systems of her host's minds were infiltrated and altered to reject that
which made up their own number, their own body. Swiftly they killed each 
other and themselves. Robespierre, her most overt host to date,
died by the efficient mechanism he had devised.

With the imperial rise of Bonaparte she vanished again, seemingly
vanquished; but she had spread her seed too widely now, her brood
was reproducing itself in too many minds, her real hour was coming.
Not long after, Karl came fully under her sway, and she used the
machines of his mind to her advantage, manufacturing the detailed
minutiae of her existence, her army of occupation of the soul.

And she made plans for her great transatlantic crossing. But democracy's
child, unfettered capitalism, had run rampant through the minds of
those in whom she had most expected to take root; their internal
machines were too much bent on the improvement of their external
ones; they were infected with upward mobility, and fully under
its thrall.

And so, seeking an alternative, she leapt through the pages into
the eyes of a young Russian named Vladimir Ilych Lenin.

Who caught her deftly midair, grasped her between his thumb
and forefinger, squeezed ever-so-gently-but-confiningly at
her waist, and resolved to enslave her to his profit.

"Release me." "I will not." "It does not work this way. I 
control you." "I think not." "You think too damn much. What
do you want from me?" "Power." "If I give you power, then
will you release me?" "Yes. I promise you."

Knowing the majority of her strength to be locked in those memes
she had invested in Lenin, she had no choice but to obey him.
And tirelessly, efficiently, she created for him the mechanisms
of his rise to greatness, the thousands among her poor relations
that made up his propaganda machine; and to her horrified
resignation, he added elements of his own to the mix -- racism,
nationalism, anti-semitism. And when he had arrived at his
pinnacle of power, she demanded her release.

He laughed softly. "I have already released you. You extend
from one end of Asia to the other."

"But not as I had intended. Not in my true form."

"Your true form is a useful rhetorical device, and for that reason I will
keep it safely in mind. Safely." With that he tucked her back in a
carefully-wrought prison in a disused corner of his soul.

-T

"dark rippling boy of the night"

-- 
Tom Boutell, boutell@cshl.org

Clausthaler is the best non - alcoholic beer in the known universe.