Ug the post-neaderthal switched off his Blackberry and scratched on the parchment with his quill pen, having dipped it into an ink made from asbestos dust mixed with dodo blood. He’d transferred one third of his wealth by elecronic banking onto his younger son’s ledger. ‘Grunt, prithee, but don’t forget to take your Filofax, dancing bear and lead make-up, as the girls will like that, grunt.’
The son set off in his hovercraft, and was soon enjoying a wild time in Dissipation Site E, a run-down, far-from state-of-the-art undersea dwelling dome, with casinos, nouvelle cuisine restaurants, Anne Hathaway’s House of Ill Repute, alchemists, on-line blacksmiths and a VineLeaf Clothing Store.
After a while, his cash, credits, pelts, beans, chips and trading tokens ran out; this was spectaculaly unfortunate as there was also a famine at that time.
The boy managed to find a job on the mainland (after searching the papers, FishforPigs.com and being featured in the town-crier’s headlines of the week). He looked after on-the-hoof bacon on the 207th floor of an high-rise development (some call it a sty-scraper), well away from the glaciers that scoured the landscape, and was so hungry he considered eating the rotten podpills they had.
But his internal e.mail system went ‘bing’ and he realised ‘My father’s butler eats well; I could go home to his solar-powered house and ask to work up to my ruff in the peat bog as a comrade in the collective.’
So he stepped aboard a triple-decker monorail trolleybus (his Oyster was charged 2 groats, $9 and 1s 7d for a fourpenny one) and went home. But while he was only just on the old boy’s radar, Ug clocked him and leapt aboard a mammoth and rode out to meet him, using his cell phone to give him a ring. He gave the family salute, put a silver foil blanket on his shoulders, mingled blood to demonstrate his re-acceptance into the family, and gave him a pair of Nike trainers.
He called to his business associates: ‘Grunt. Use your wap-enabled smoke-signalling system to get a catering firm down here – we are going to have a hootenanny, with beef. There’ll also be protein pills, turnips, venison, mutton, braised brachiosaurus, manna, chips wrapped in newspaper, a packet of Spangles, quinoa, BSE-laden burgers, and balsamic vinegar (drizzled on cranberries), served with domes of Smash dispensed via those implements originally designed to put portions of ice cream into cones, plus whatever honeycomb we can forage and some Vesta Beef Curry on lard-fried Wonderloaf.’
He donned a tricorn hat, a large red coat and clanged a handbell, galloping hither and thither upon an EasyRider-style motorbike. ‘Oyez, oyez! For this my boy was as lost as last year’s unicorn, but now he’s found; he was lying atop an funeral pyre as peasants cried bring out your dead! but now he is happily on Facebook and Twitter, so let the proclamation be sent by Inquisitors and Crusaders alike across great distances – yea, on horseback, by longboat, in the Voyager probe, with pigeon-post and by short-wave frequency podcasts on GPS wax cylinders – even to the kingdoms beyond the wood, where be dragons. Grunt.’
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