part 6

Both the Xns and the Mms, it seems, liked to return to the land of the former nomads for vacations, since there was lots of beachfront, and plenty of rocks, and also many interesting places to see that they had heard about when being told stories about the carpenter. And naturally, since they both liked the place, they both just assumed, in the manner of people who were accustomed to having whatever they liked, that the place belonged to them.

So they began by shouting at one another, "Hey, we are the natural ideological descendants of the carpenter who brought a contract which contained a directive that we love each other and of the nomads who brought a contract containing a rule that we shall not take each others lives, so the cosmic ET obviously meant for us and only us to own all these rocks and if you don't hand them over, and we mean right now, we will kill every last one of you and anyone who looks like you until there aren't any more of you left!"

And that is what they did, or tried to do, with all the effort and stamina they could muster, whatever that means. It was, to be sure, an impressive sight, both of them charging at one another across the rocks, wearing fancy costumes, and each and every one of them wearing a hat that said on it, "Cosmic ET Rules!" It apparently never occurred to anyone that the land might actually have belonged to anyone else, but if it did, they kept it to themselves.

They were having so much fun it didn't much matter anyway. What was very nice was that both sides were pretty evenly matched and so they could keep the game going for many hundreds of years until eventually the Xns found a way to shoot large round pieces of metal through other people from so far away you couldn't even read what it said on their hats, and by that time they had forgotten why the fight had started in the first place, which didn't much matter as long as they got to fight, because fighting and putting holes in one another so their juice would run out is what hominids like to do better than anything else.

After several centuries though, it got old. Not because it wasn't exciting, but because not everyone could enjoy the fun. Back in the days of the natives, ordinary everyday members of the ruling class could get tickets anytime they wanted to go watch the large exotic carnivores being fed whomever they were being fed that day, but now all the action was taking place so far away you could hardly even get there on foot, especially since you would have to carry everything you were going to need along with you, and back then it was pretty hard to find a good internal frame pack, let alone a decent pair of Gore-Tex trail boots. Plus, at the rate which people's juice was running out, the Fall membership drives had become full time, year round demands for new members that played on your sense of civic responsibility and however justified, got really annoying.

So the Xns needed some entertainment that local people could enjoy, so they invented a new game. They talked about bringing back the large exotic carnivores, but they were in short supply since many of them came from lands occupied by the Mms, but they decided this was not a problem. It was not really the carnivores that people came to see anyway, it was the screaming of the people they were eating that was the real source of the popularity of these events, so it was decided that they just needed to find a way to make some people in the local population scream and everyone else would have something to do rather than sitting around waiting for television to be invented so they could watch people screaming, and their juice running out, or at least Jerry Springer, pretty much anytime they wanted.

They tried to find some original Xns, but they were in short supply these days, and if any of them were still around they were keeping pretty quiet about it. So they needed a way to ostracize members of their own communities and came to the conclusion that the easiest way to do this was simply to pick people they didn't like and accuse them of something that would get them into trouble. But whatever you accused them of had to be bad enough that when you made them scream, you could feel good about doing it, and the cosmic ET would approve . It was decided that the only thing anyone could do that was that bad was to cheat on the cosmic ET with another one. Even though they had been telling everyone that there was only one true cosmic ET, they began accusing people they didn't like of being friends with a different one, the bad ET. Not only that, but the bad ET gave out his phone number and if you called him up, he would talk to you and give you things that you wanted, including supernatural powers. (You could call the cosmic ET, but he wouldn't talk to you, you could only leave a message)

So if you didn't like someone, you could tell your friends that you heard him on the phone last night talking to the bad ET and then you could all get together and make him scream until he agreed that yes he did, in fact, talk with the bad ET, and was very sorry about it, and would never do it again, and once he said that, you could go ahead and set him on fire. If he didn't agree to what you said he did, you could just keep on making him scream until there was no more of him left.

It was all great fun and everyone got to watch and the boss of the Xns had other Xns specially trained to make people scream and also to make sure that once people were accused of talking to the bad ET there was no way they could get out of being made to scream. They got to wear a special hat, that wasn't very fancy, but got people's attention, and helped them remember to pay their membership dues on time.