little odious vermin

One fine day on the eighth of May, space aliens from a faraway galaxy came to Earth. After a day or two settling in, the aliens commenced the census they had been instructed to perform. Thanks to their advanced census-taking technology it took just under a week to collect, collate and analyse all the data. The key findings were... that the bio-diversity index had fallen by 95% since the aliens' previous visit, and that a new species of hairless ape with a talent for toolmaking had arisen. The downside was that the hairless apes pestered the aliens day and night, imploring them piteously for answers to such questions as:

"How can we solve world hunger?"

"Why are there fewer fish?"

"Where have all the flowers gone?"

"When will we ever learn?"

The aliens would turn toward the person asking the question, and a bemused vibration would move up and down each of their seven eye-stalks in turn. The alien answering the question would then clench zir throat-wattles in a rather off-putting way, thereby enabling a bizarre semblance of human speech to emerge from zir central feeder-cavity.

To most questions the alien(s) replied, "Person of Earth, if you are in need of information may we suggest that you direct your enquiry to your XXXXXXXX…"

Sometimes they said, "We are certain your XXXXXXXX will be able to enlighten you in relation to that matter…" or "There's no cause for alarm or undue emotional affect. Undoubtedly your XXXXXXXX has foreseen these events."

And sometimes, demonstrating that even alien patience has its limits, they said, "Don't ask us, stupid earthling, ask your bleepiddy bleeppiddy bleep XXXXXXXX!"

Most people understood the general thrust of "bleepiddy bleepiddy bleep" — an alien expletive translating roughly into "go fertilise your progenitor's seed-pod!" — but as to "XXXXXXXX", no-one had the foggiest idea what that meant. Nor did it prove possible to capture "XXXXXXXX" in the writing or speech of any of the living or dead languages of Earth, including but not limited to the scent trails of ants and the dancing of bees.

The United Nuclear Nations therefore commissioned a panel of the world's leading philologists to develop a new word that humans could use in place of "XXXXXXXX". What the Panel came up with was "berrymudraks" — a strange-looking and stranger-sounding formulation that was phonetically equivalent to five of the nine phonemes of "XXXXXXXX".

To illustrate, below are a number of excerpts from an email that one leading world leader sent to another: "…cannot be tolerated… absolutely unacceptable… how can we ask our so-called 'berrymudraks' when we don't know who or what or where that is, let alone pronounce it correctly?"

Soon, world leaders were queuing up in front of the alien spaceship to ask about the berrymudraks. (Actually it wasn't the world leaders themselves. It was their delegates, or to be totally accurate, their delegates' delegates.)

The delegates of the delegates asked the aliens, "What or who or where is this Berry Mudracks? Is it the Pope?"

It was not the Pope.

"Is it the Secretary General of the United Nuclear Nations?"

It was not the Secretary General.

"Is it the President of Elbonia?" (Elbonia was the number one superpower in the world at that time.)

"No, it's not the President of Elbonia," the aliens replied, somewhat impatiently, "and furthermore, if you don't know your berrymudraks, you probably never will. Nor can we assist you in that respect because it would be in direct contravention of Galactic Ordinance 7.1 b, Section 13, Paragraph 42.2, which prohibits any exchange of data in relation to the berrymudraks, on pain of defenestration."

So that was that. The people of Earth had not the foggiest idea about the berrymudraks, nor were the aliens going to tell them, or help them find out. Many people felt that this was the least of their worries considering that the end of the world (or at least, the species) was coming up fast.

What with global warming, mass extinction, endemic pandemics, a pile of garbage the size of a small country in the middle of the Atlantic, apocalyptic horsepersons galloping to Armageddon, and much much more, there didn't seem to be any point worrying about a strange alien word that nobody could articulate let alone understand.

But there was one person who knew about the berrymudraks: a gnarled and aged guru sitting in the lotus position on top of a high mountain. Thanks to the wisdom ze had accumulated in the course of ninety lifetimes, and zir extensive yogic powers and abilities, the guru knew about the berrymudraks (though not the specific location). Thanks also to a news app on zir smartphone, the guru was also well aware of what was happening down below, with the aliens and everything, but did not feel it was zir place to intervene. Besides, this was zir ninety first incarnation, and ze was determined to enjoy a little peace and quiet.

So ze didn't tell anyone what ze knew about the berrymudraks. Ze continued to sit on top of the mountain, meditating, and eating one grain of rice per week, hand-delivered by a devoted farmer from the valley below.

Sadly, however, on a particularly inauspicious day, the devoted farmer arrived empty-handed. He was ashamed and unhappy that he could not provide the guru with zir sustenance for the week. "Oh mastress," said the farmer, "there is no food left, everything is destroyed, the paddies are all dried up".

Hearing about the paddies jolted the guru into action. Ze disentangled zir limbs and intestines and performed a series of standing asanas. It was one thing to sit and meditate and not say anything about the berrymudraks, but when one's weekly meal was at risk, well, that was another thing entirely. So ze put on zir cleanest loincloth, picked up zir gnarliest walking stick, and set off down the dangerous mountain path to the village in the valley below.

In due course the Guru gathered around zirself a group of dedicated disciples. One night, sitting in padmāsana around a campfire sipping yak-buttered tea, the guru spilled the beans about the berrymudraks.

"Every thirteen-thousand generations, say, or more," said the guru, "emerges a being, an entity, technically a person, but of such unique qualities that ze stands apart, above, beyond, and ahead of every other person on the planet, dead or alive. Such a being is the berrymudraks. Ze is the Guardian, the Leader, the one and only sentient entity with the power and authority to help humankind understand we're only renting this planet, we don't own it. And that in the end, all damages will be deducted from our rental bond," said the guru to zir disciples.

"Now all we have to do is find this stupendously endowed berrymudraks, and plead for assistance in our time of travail," said the head disciple authoritatively.

"Yes," said the other disciples, "that is what we must do."

"Not we," replied the guru, "You. I'm hungry. Where can a guru get a grain of brown rice around these parts?"

By then things were starting to get really bad on the Planet, with hundreds of thousands of people dying every day from plague or from being shot in the head, or from having their arms and legs chopped off. And they were the lucky ones. Everyone else was dying at a slower rate, such as that of starvation.

Eventually the disciples and their assistants, supporters and assorted hangers-on identified the berrymudraks and zir address, which was great. The not-so-great part was the rather disconcerting fact that the berrymudraks had no special powers or wonderful insights into the human condition, nor even an intention to do good and help his fellow persons.

In fact the berrymudraks was a public relations coordinator in the Tasmanian office of the United Nuclear Nations' marketing division, and a rather mediocre one at that. Nor was he particularly pleased or excited by what the disciples had to say.

"Look here," said Bruce (the berrymudraks' name was Bruce Flamstead). "I don't know what you are talking about, and I'm not in a position to drop everything and start saving the world. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a media release to draft."

Naturally, the disciples were not going to take no for an answer, not with the future of the species at stake. But they didn't know what to do to persuade a recalcitrant Bruce Flamstead to invest himself in the mantle of the berrymudraks (actually the mantle went over the vest). After much meditation, visualisation, affirmation and consultation with the guru, the disciples decided to ask the aliens what to do in the event of a reluctant berrymudraks.

The alien response was, "Bring the Guardian to us, so that we may bask in zir effulgence".

So the disciples snuck into Bruce's house, hit him over the head with a garden gnome, tied him up and took him to the aliens as instructed.

"Is this the berrymudraks?" the disciples asked the aliens.

"Why yes," they replied, "of course it is, well done on finding him!"

"He's not much good," said the head disciple. "He's got no superpowers or anything..."

"Don't you worry your pretty little shaven head about that," replied the aliens, "you leave him to us, we'll power him up in no time at all."

And that is exactly what they did. By means of several procedures involving advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, they turned the obstinately mediocre Bruce Flamstead into a being of majesty and power beyond the dreams of mice and persons. He got it all, the full treatment — the x-ray vision, the force field of invulnerability, the strength of Samson and Delilah put together, and a whole lot of other wicked powers as well.

But the aliens went one better. Not only did they give Bruce the superpowers, they also operated on his psyche, his selfhood. They turned him into a saint, an enlightened one, a bodhisattva. They made it so that he wanted nothing more than to save the world (well, humankind anyway).

And so off went Bruce to do his stuff. The first thing he did was to appear on television and the Internet.

"My fellow humans," he said, "for too long have we followed the path of wrongdoing. Now we must follow the path of righteousness. Look into your hearts, and you will see the light. Ahh, you know what I mean.

"Let us meditate on what we are doing to ourselves and this planet. We have built an economic system that delivers plenty of goods and services. Yet we live lives of quiet desperation and misery. We measure gross domestic product, but we ignore the gross domestic disharmony in our homes, houses, huts and factories.

"There's too much choice, too much stuff. Walk into a supermarket and choose from 433 varieties of hydroxilising moisturiser, or 666 types of de-moisturised instant coffee. And just around the corner, children are starving to death for want of a crust of bread.

"We hop into our four wheel drives and conquer every hill or ditch. But we can't conquer the fear and loneliness in our hearts." (A lot of people threw up when they heard the preceding.)

"Well I've got news for everyone. Things are going to be different around here. I've got the power of the berrymudraks, and I'm going to make sure we change things for the better. And let nobody try and stop me, because I'm invulnerable, and I'm very strong too. I can travel from place to place in the blink of an eyelid. I can even walk through walls if I want to. So when I say something must be done, it's gonna be done, and that's that, end of story!"

True to his word, in a short space of time the berrymudraks launched a whole slew of initiatives aimed at making the planet a nicer place to live. For instance, he made a law that said that no more trees could be cut down to make paper, and that the plant, hemp, should be used instead. Another example was his prohibition on the manufacture and distribution of garden gnomes (no-one quite understood his thinking on that one, but it didn't seem like a huge deal at the time).

Initially, the changes introduced by the berrymudraks were well-received, or at least not as badly as might have been expected. Of course there were people who grumbled and groaned — there always are. But the number of grumblers grew and grew until you couldn't hear yourself think for all the grumbling. And all of those unhappy people tried as hard as they could to block the changes, or at least sabotage their implementation. But with his alien superpowers, the berrymudraks was more than a match for the blockers and the saboteurs.

"Resistance is futile," Bruce would say, appearing suddenly out of nowhere having walked through a wall. With his super-strength and x-ray vision and super-intelligence, he rode roughshod or at least sandal-shod over all the opposition to his plans to rejuvenate the Earth and make humankind a much nicer species for everyone to get along with.

But nothing went according to plan. Take the whole hemp thing, for instance. It worked out well for a while. People stopped cutting down old growth rainforest trees to make newspapers and magazines. Instead they used a genetically engineered variety of hemp, from which the psychoactive compounds had been removed. The initiative was deemed a great success, until it became clear that tens of millions of newspaper-smokers worldwide were not only failing to get high, but in fact were being laid low by a wide range of horrific respiratory pathologies. All over the world, first thing in the morning, you would hear the hacking and spluttering and coughing of a global chorus of newspaper-smokers expiring their last.

Another example. Bruce put a stop to the underground slave trade in Eastern Europe, Africa and elsewhere. He did this by personally bashing up all the slave traders and freezing their bank accounts. Unfortunately, however, what happened next was totally unexpected and regrettable. All the people who previously would have been enslaved, were at one stroke free to roam their home countries pillaging, burning and generally making a nuisance of themselves in a fruitless quest for food.

Not to mention the fact that in the wealthier countries such as Elbonia, people had to start doing their own cooking, cleaning and washing up — tasks that previously had been undertaken by the slaves (also referred to as 'domestic servants').

And that was the pattern: everything Bruce did went bad. Everything he touched turned to shit. He would stop a war; a new one would spring up behind his back. He would save a species from extinction; that species would then prey on others until those became extinct. He prohibited the cultivation of cotton in areas of low rainfall; the cotton farmers turned to rice instead.

Notwithstanding Bruce's best efforts, right on cue per the original script the species calling itself homo sapiens became extinct (committed suicide, according to the aliens). Bruce, however, with his superpowers and invulnerability, was physically unaffected by the cataclysm. He remained alive and well, but very miserable.

So he put on his best berrymudraks robe and his best berrymudraks face and off he went to have a chat with the aliens. They seemed happy to see him, in their inscrutably alien way. They even offered him a cup of mineral tea, which he declined.

"No thanks," said Bruce, "I couldn't keep anything down. I'm too depressed," he sobbed. "I just couldn’t get anything right, and now every man, woman and child is dead because of me. Even with all the superpowers you alien guys gave me, with the x-ray vision and all that, I still couldn't do my job properly! How lame is that! What a deadbeat am I. A waste of space. A total failure, complete and utter and hopeless failure, I tell you!"

The aliens rattled their throat wattles in a semblance of sinister laughter.

"Au contraire," the chief alien said (in French, oddly enough) "quite the opposite. You are a huge success, a true hero. You have single-handedly saved this planet from the depredations of 'the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth', as one of your writers so eloquently puts it".

Then they got into their spaceship and returned to base, some 200 light years away. Mission accomplished.

HOME