Holian's Heretical Hagiographies, Chapter 12: Milksaint Carvery

Commentary by Dr. Drenchat Egarszoon Holian, PhD, DDiv, Director of the Lyons Imperial University Center for Heresiographical Research. Edited by Natalla Drenchatsdochter Pfalz-Holian, Adjunct Professor of Literature, Lyons Imperial University.

This hagiography — or "hagiogram" — was composed c. 695 BIE (ShipYear 540 in the local calendar) by the Freedreamer sect of the generation-ark Tsiolkovsky. The Freedreamers had their origins in the Casteless Movement, a revolutionary political party that replaced the ship's corporate oligarchy with an egalitarian democracy and eliminated its hereditary caste system. Milksaint Carvery — then known as Milkwright Carvery — was one of the primary architects of the Casteless Movement, and soon after their assassination in 810 BIE (SY 425) became one of the first saints of the nascent Freedreamer sect. The text is written in FreeCant, a non-Standard dialect used by the Freedreamers as a liturgical language; with the glosses included in the commentary, it should be relatively intelligible to most modern readers. If you still cannot understand it, look for the translated version in the Young Reader's Edition of Holian's Heretical Hagiographies, coming to children's bookstores some time next year. (Natalla, can I actually write this? I think it would be hilarious. Remind me to cut this sentence, by the way.¹)

throbbing withways. hekatomb branching nightmare². name STEEL name STONE name MILKSAINT CARVERY. ectopic mothergutter, wombripped glasscradler³, soothsaid olivetwister⁴. (paternity null: dadatest negative, bribeprince⁵ / stoway / genepurged⁶.) clan CARVER belonged mothername, suffixed bastardwise CARVERY. praenomen ungiven.

ninermonth hatched. wetnursed avtomat. halfyear kidraffle⁷, castenamed MILK agcaste dairyguild⁸. creched + schooled SEVENHULL, SIGMADECK, THREEAFORE SIXAPORT⁹. (shrined thoroughness + walldrug¹⁰ very.) apprenticed ephebic, mastername H MILKWRIGHT KIM (cognomed postly “PENITENCE KIM”, saintblessed + misericored¹¹). cruelty apprenticewise KIM, starver, forceworker, mostall shocklasher¹², sadesoul deepness. fifteenyear CARVERY sidesees lash, saintlife engaged:

>MIRACLE ALPHA¹³
»shocklash incoming
»MILKSAINT martyr intercepts
»niner-by-niner
»unmarked unbled unweeping
»stonesuffers nervepain

swift retribution. bilgebanished, ALPHADECK, hullscrape chainganging vaccslave¹⁴. toiled sixyear, freedreaming, joycraving, hopeholding fulltime. rebelsong heartbeat, MILKSAINT, rebeltale tongue; forthflowed flightplots, sleepcycle schemesmithed, escapevangel. windcatch overseen. counterplotted hagicide¹⁵.

>MIRACLE BETA
»oxydecouple
»MILKSAINT chaingang fellowslaves
»threekilosec tank
»duration doubledoubled
»shepherdsafe homeward

doubledozen voidsaved, heromyth stat. actuarial imminence¹⁶, unchaining necessity, maydayed swiftness, rogered¹⁷ railroaders, nightflight victorious. TWELVEHULL refugeed, cognomed FREEHULL + HOPEHULL + foewise SCUMHULL¹⁸. farfamed MILKSAINT spartacussing¹⁹, casteless freeguilds²⁰ encraving; soothsaid crosspath Ω FREEQUEEN, SAINT-OF-SAINTS²¹.

Ω prequeenly; metcute²² pubwise, tonguetouching²³ freeschemes, emancipates, revolutes; + postlastcalled, tounguetouching²⁴ eachother. daywise rabbleroused, nightwise starcrossed²⁵, shipwide casteless insurgency. halfagainyear finality; revoleve²⁶ councilmeet infiltrated, decapintended²⁷, Ω regicide almost:

>MIRACLE GAMMA
»flechettes incoming
»MILKSAINT martyr intercepts
»niner-by-niner
»heartbled unbowed soulweeping
»stonesuffers deathblow

saintlife complete.

The original Freedreamer sect is no longer extant; the last record of them can be dated to c. 220 BIE, two centuries after the Tsiolkovsky reached its final destination (Vortigern, a verdant moon of a gas giant in the Dumnarth system), when the last remaining Freedreamer communities were purged as dissidents by a local dictator. Their sacred texts were preserved by the library of Vortigern Planetary University (now Vortigern Imperial Technical Institute)²⁸. A small reconstructionist Freedreamer community has been active on Vortigern for about half a century, although by their own admission many of the actual practices of the Freedreamers have been lost. I give them another two generations, max.

Show Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Editor's Note: This chapter, and the remaining sixty-seven chapters of HHH, are entirely unedited; I blame my son, Liutpold, who decided he wanted to be born a full month and a half before his due date. I would offer my apologies, but my father says he prefers it this way.

2. This phrase begins to appear in Freedreamer hagiographies around 750 BIE, and by the turn of the century it’s a universal element of the genre. I cannot find any commentaries of the time explaining why this would be the case, nor any explanation of its meaning. My personal theory? It just sounds cool. Say it to yourself. Really get your jaw around those syllables. Fantastic.

3. Glasscradler: a child gestated in an artificial womb. Common practice aboard generation-arks, although unlike Carvery most such children are also conceived in vitro ("shipborn") to maintain the ship's population.

4. Olivetwister: an orphan. From "Oliver Twist", the protagonist of a popular Old World musical stage play. (This is a joke, Natalla, I'm not that senile. Yet.)

5. Bribeprince: A member of one of Tsiolkovsky's oligarchic dynasties. The dynastic families kept their genetic code out of the ship's databanks to prevent illegitimate children from confirming their parentage, and to prevent DNA evidence from tying them to any crimes.

6. Genepurged: A punishment for certain particularly heinous crimes, similar to damnatio memoriae. All records of the offender are purged from the ship's databanks, including their genetic code.

7. Kidraffle: A semi-annual lottery that assigned the Tsiolkovsky's orphan and ship-born children to castes and guilds.

8. A full explanation of the caste and guild system would be entirely out of scope for this commentary; while this hasn't stopped me before (my fourth book, Those That Will Permit Fire: A Biography of Gulnisa Akramova, Book-Burner was originally published as footnote 47 of chapter 6 of my third book, Xenolatry), I have decided to take pity on my editor and my keyboard this time. Suffice it to say that poor Carvery was destined for the life of a milkmaid. Or milkman. Or milkperson. We aren't sure what their gender was, actually. Possibly nobody was at the time.

9. The Japheth-class generation-arks had a standardized layout, with twelve hulls divided into twenty-four decks, from Alphadeck on the outer ring to Omegadeck adjacent to the spindle; Carvery's home-block was three blocks forward and six counter-clockwise from the deckhall (the central administration building).

10. Walldrug: a tourist attraction, especially one that is overpriced and overrated. Etymology unclear.

11. Misericored: granted divine mercy. Penitence Kim's hagiogram survives only in fragments; he was known as the father of Freedreamer asceticism, and lived for ninety-six years on a diet of nutrient paste and water.

12. A shocklash was a thin whip with built-in nerve-impulse pain-inducers, originally developed by the Tsiolkovsky's security forces for crowd control. It was quickly adopted by all strata of society on the ark as a tool for torturing dissidents and abusing servants (and apprentices).

13. The Miracle-verse is a core component of Freedreamer hagiograms. Miracle-verses are always five-line stanzas, with a 5-7-5-7-5 syllable pattern; all extant hagiograms have an odd number of miracle-verses, usually either three, five, or seven, although a few minor saints only have one, and all hagiograms of Omega Freequeen (see below) have nine.

14. Routine maintenance on the generation-arks' outer hulls was typically performed by prison labor; the high mortality and disability rates of these jobs were intended to act as a deterrent to crime, and a method of disposal for undesirables.

15. Hagicide: the murder of a saint, and also the title of my next book. Natalla, please make sure I don't start that one until I'm finished with this one, I have too many ideas already.

16. Actuarial imminence: impending death.

17. Rogered: responded in the affirmative, although the obscene meaning is also well-attested in FreeCant — see the Hagiogram of Fucksaint Hardcock (which I'm pretty sure a parody, but it's a really well written one, definitely worth a look).

18. Tsiolkovsky was not the only generation-ark whose twelfth hull had an unsavory reputation. The twelfth hulls of both Goddard and Parsons were consistently known for criminal activity, and three separate revolutions were launched from the twelfth hull of the Von Braun.

19. Spartacussing: inciting slaves to rebellion. From the protagonist of an Old World film. Oh, wait, I already did this joke with Oliver Twist, didn't I. Damn. Sorry, Natalla, maybe I am going senile.

20. Freeguilds: unofficial organizations for professions not recognized by the traditional caste and guild hierarchy (e.g. actors, prostitutes, tattoo artists). Some of these were semi-legal, and tolerated by the oligarchic regime; others were essentially organized criminal gangs (most notably the Narcoguild, responsible for the production and distribution of illicit drugs). Freeguilds of both types were critically important to the Casteless Movement.

21. Omega Freequeen was the political and philosophical head of the Casteless Movement and the messiah of the Freedreamers. Born Omega Lawscribe Nguyen to an affluent govcaste family, Omega did well in university and was beginning an apprenticeship with a prominent lawyer when (according to tradition) she was visited in her dreams by the voice of God, who commanded her to free the people of the Tsolkiovsky from the oligarchic regime. She broke her apprenticeship contract the next morning and left for Twelvehull, where she wrote for a radical newspaper and provided pro bono legal services for the poor. By the time she met Carvery, she was a well-established force in the Twelvehull underground.

22. Metcute: You know what a "meet cute" is. It's past midnight and I haven't consumed anything but coffee and gin in the last eighteen hours and I'm tired of treating my hypothetical readers like children. Fuck. Natalla, please fix this one, I'm exhausted.

23. Tonguetouching: Used in a literal and a figurative sense here. If you know what I mean.

24. (I mean sex.)

25. Starcrossed: Engaged in a doomed love affair. Natalla insisted I gloss this, because she did not know what it meant; apparently, one is no longer required to study Shakespeare in pursuit of a literature degree. My heart weeps.

26. Revoleve: contraction of "revolution eve". Revoleve and Revolday were important high holidays for the Freedreamers, and marked the start of a new liturgical year.

27. Decapintended: contraction of "decapitation intended", "decapitation" referring to the assassination of a leader rather than a literal head-cutting-off. You would think they wouldn't need a word for this, but it comes up a lot. I don't think anyone has been almost-assassinated as much as Omega Freequeen. Except maybe Emperor Tycho IV, cognomed (I'm starting to adopt some of the FreeCant vocabulary. Very useful.) "Felix" ("Lucky") because of all the times he managed to avoid assassinations by sheer chance. Died peacefully in his sleep at the age of one hundred and thirty-five, about ten minutes before the next assassin crawled in through his window. Can you imagine the look on that poor bastard's face?

28. For more on the history of the Freedreamers and the Tsiolkovsky, see The Hagiograms, Unabridged by Epsilon Hockberger and The Will of the Universe: Revolution and Religion on the Ark by Annabella Lippincott, both published by Vortigern Imperial Press.

+Translations

More From This Author

ch00bakka's Other Works
Entries
Other