A swarm of old withered addicts clawed like scavenging alley cats at the faces of the children. A syringe hung out from the screaming boy’s palm just long enough for one of the addicts to seize upon it. In the chamber of the syringe, there were still a few lingering drops of Nectar-13—a substance synthetically created to mimic closely the state of ecstatic euphoria that the Divine Nectar initiated when injected into the bloodstream.
The effects of Nectar-13, of course, were somewhat different from those of the Divine Nectar as the high tended to be shorter in duration. In addition, Nectar-13 had been shown to accelerate the aging process in the addict to an alarming rate, as well as cause unstable mood swings and an inability to metaphysically comprehend the existence of certain numerical quantities in base-10 (including the number ’13,’ which, ironically, made it rather difficult for the chronic user to obtain more of the substance without first going through a rigorous detoxification regimen, or—in dire circumstances—to even seek out a druggist well enough aware of the substance’s effects that he could make sense of the user’s pleadings for Nectar-1101 by means of a simple binary-to-base-10 conversion).
The Divine Nectar, on the other hand, seemed to have fewer harmful effects upon the system. Being the limited commodity that it was, however, it was extremely difficult to get a hold of, as it was often used for religious rites and could only be acquired clandestinely by way of an Orthodox Morellan shaman. This was assuming that the shaman in question was willing to sell it, which—in most cases—he wasn’t. As a result, numerous mercenaries had attempted to penetrate the Orthodox Morellan faith so as to gain access to the tantric rites through which the Divine Nectar was concocted and learn the secrets of its creation. But the Orthodox Morellans were a relatively closed order and any attempts to infiltrate their group were countered by the austerity of the Order’s endeavors at making a newly-entered brother into a pure and unquestioning devotee of their faith. Nevertheless, not all the shamans were capable of rejecting absolutely the lures of material objects and, as a consequence, there was a pipeline, however minimal, of the Divine Nectar available to well-connected, well-financed merchants. The end result was a substance of incredibly limited supply that was only accessible to users at the highest echelons of society.
On the other hand, the substitute, Nectar-13, was a benevolent aristocratic scientist’s attempt at bringing that same ecstasy to the masses, by attempting to extract and subsequently replicate the active agent. However, with a limited scientific knowledge and the inability to synthesize the substance effectively, he had to settle for something close enough and ended up developing a substance that targeted the same areas of the nervous system, albeit with inevitable and sometimes catastrophic side-effects. Nectar-13 was, of course, the product of many previous incarnations that continually needed to be improved upon. And now, the ‘Common Man’s Nectar’ had become a thriving industry that manifested itself in many forms, from additives in brand beverages and confectionaries to snake oil cure-alls and finally, more recently, to the more concentrated extract, which could be injected directly into the bloodstream.
In the Dowa District, however, the effects of this substance had been monstrous, as evidenced by this scuffle between the addicts and the Untouchable children. Ottoman-13 now looked up at them and said quietly to himself, “That, my friend, is what we call survival…”
“Well…” the Coach said to Bunnu, glancing at Ottoman, “it seems our friend here has a bit more insight than I’d given him credit for…”
“Are we still talking about the smell?” Bunnu asked quietly.
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“I’ve tried very hard to entertain your point-of-view,” Bunnu sighed, “but it seems that I still don’t quite understand where you’re going with this. Nor do I understand, for that matter, why I’ve been brought here.” Bunnu then turned and said to Ottoman, who was standing with his back to him, watching the scuffle, “I don’t even know what I’ve been charged with.”
“Well, my dear Bunnu, I’m afraid you’re trying too hard,” the Coach said matter-of-factly. “I urge you to find something else in your environment—anything!—and adjust your perceptions to match it.”
Bunnu looked down the bank to see Ottoman’s men and the Coach’s men having a smoke and laughing at something together. Further beyond them was the old Orthodox Morellan woman who had performed the Tantric rites with the upper-class women, earlier on, in order to collect ingredients for the Divine Nectar. Apparently she had already passed the bowl on to one of the Orthodox shamans; now she was pushing a wheelbarrow full of geodesic abacuses in the direction of another set of stairs next to a bridge. Trailing behind her, but attempting to stay in step was a sacred pig-like creature—though not a sacred pig, precisely, as it seemed to possess fins and whiskers, as well as tail feathers—who seemed to be questioning irately the validity of the newly devised system of taxonomic classification that the Republic had recently taken to endorsing, as it designated his kind as a regional variety of Lesser Bison-144 (presumably, for the purposes of having more simplified categories by which the government might keep track of its available domestic resources), when, in fact, his was a sacred and divine species that had, until recently, remained safely distinct from the countless lesser creatures that had now come to be lumped into the same category with them. In response to this, the woman produced, from a pocket in her ceremonial robe, a pair of rusty hooks which she used to perforate the ends of his ears, attaching to the other side of each hook a length of chain, which she, thereupon, hung from a nearby tree branch. Through all this, the sacred pig—the Lesser Bison-144 rather—flailed and squealed uncontrollably, attempting to run away, despite being suspended in mid-air. The woman, then, reached into the wheelbarrow and produced, from underneath the abacuses, a chalkboard and easel. She set it up in front of the terrified pig and proceeded to teach him about differential equations, proclaiming in a haughty, high-pitched tone that contrasted greatly with the crude, raspy screech she had taken with the upper class women earlier, “…and if we were to correlate the equation underlying the necessity of taxonomic classification systems with the existing algorithm for population dynamics, as defined by the Amimu Minanga principle, we see ranges in which values coincide, with seeming gaps of randomness in between that one can only take to be a sign of Divine Intervention. We call these gaps the ‘Interstices’, but they are more commonly referred to by the layman as the ‘Trenches of Absconditus.’”
“Well…” the Coach remarked, “it seems we have a closet Algorithmist in our midst. I don’t suppose her Order would like that one bit! But OK…let’s forget the sacred pig, Bunnu. He seems to be getting us off track. Let me give you a bit of guidance. Listen: I ask that you—and I hope I am not asking too much in saying this—I ask that you re-align your perceptions to those of a lizard, or perhaps, even a Mole Fly. You’d know a bit about the Mole Fly’s sense of smell, would you not?”
“Yes…” Bunnu said contemplatively as he heard, as though spiraling in at him slowly and from a distance, the voice of Rakesh-7 on a brisk winter’s eve in the attic of their house. “Yes, I think I do.”
On the Perceptions of Mole Flies