The Demi-Monde: Summer (62 page)
Read The Demi-Monde: Summer Online
Authors: Rod Rees
Unbelievable … or I guess, more accurately, non-unBelievable.
This clever cow went back to first principles to demonstrate the logicality and consistency of the Demi-Monde and hence its intrinsic reality. It is one of the keystones of Confusionist philosophy (accepted, remarkably, by both WunZians and TooZians) that the Kosmos is fuelled by Qi, the ineffable and undetectable energy which flows through and around all Living things. Qi is the unseen and unseeable
élan vital
which energises the soul and which resides in all things constituted by the Living. Qi is present in two forms – Yang and Yin – the polarity of each bundle of Qi oscillating between these active and passive states over a period of two thousand years.
The stunt Su Xiaoxiao pulled was to measure the unmeasurable: she measured Qi!
Of course, she had help. It was the WunZian philosopher Mozi who had the insight to appreciate that whilst Qi itself is unseen and unseeable, its effects are not. Mozi called this process of measuring Qi indirectly by gauging its impact on the Demi-Monde ‘ImMaterial Analysis’. To do this Mozi developed the Qi Scale, which by the examination of certain aspects of socio-economic activity allowed an assessment to be made of the level of Qi prevalent in the Demi-Monde. The original elements used by Mozi to calculate the level of Qi in the Demi-Monde were:
Number of murders
Number of political assassinations
Number of wars involving 50,000 or more combatants
The height of men’s hats
The number of centimetres women’s skirts rise above the ankle
The number of slaves per capita
The number of profanities used in newspapers
The average height of yarrow growing in the Hub.
Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Mozi (being a pompous WunZian bastard) announced that the level of Qi would be measured
in Mozi units. Now by the use of the Qi Scale WunZian scholars were able to show that the level of Qi in the Demi-Monde oscillates around an
unchanging
Base Level. I stress ‘unchanging’ because – as those WunZian wankers delighted in telling me – anything that it is in stasis with the rest of the Kosmos cannot be subject to variation because of differing individual perceptions. QED unBelievability is crap and the Demi-Monde ain’t Virtual. They even propounded the Law of Qi which states:
Qi can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change from the Yang to the Yin form and back again. Thus, in a closed system, such as the post-Confinement Demi-Monde, the Yin/Yang aspect of Qi will oscillate around an unchanging mean – also known as the Base Level – but its total quantity in the system will remain constant
.
So, according to those crafty WunZians, the levels of Qi (the summation of Yin and Yang Qi) present can never change. The belief that the Demi-Monde is in a permanent and unvarying state of equilibrium regarding Qi was called by Su Xiaoxiao the Doctrine of Equilibrianism. She even developed a graph demonstrating that although the
total
quantity of Qi is in equilibrium, the active and the passive aspects of Qi are forever in flux, with the two elements oscillating over a two-thousand-year period thus:
As can be seen from Su Xiaoxiao’s graph overleaf, the thousand-yearlong Ages of Yin and Yang alternate, with the Demi-Monde predicted to move from the Second Age of Yang (or as it is called by the renegade HerEticals, the Age of the nonFemmes) to the Second Age of Yin (aka the Age of the Femmes) around the year 1000 AC.
It was a persuasive argument and I must tell you, Dear Reader, that for a while I was gutted. But after much careful meditation and the consuming of several bottles of Solution I re-examined the maths and by incorporating additional elements into the Qi Scale (the amount of
naked flesh displayed by women in public, the average calorific content of a Demi-Mondian’s daily food intake, their choice of smoking materials and of recreational drugs … that sort of shit) I was able to show that, rather than being in equilibrium, the quantity of Qi in the Demi-Monde has been inexorably
rising
over the last four thousand years. By the skilful remodelling of the factors used to calculate it, I demonstrated that Qi oscillates around an ever
-increasing
Base Level (a contradiction in terms, but there you go). This enabled me to postulate a Second Law of Qi.
Graph Showing Levels of Yin and Yang Qi in the Demi-Monde and the Socio-Gender Consequences (after Confusionist Sage Wun Zi)
When two systems are connected with each other, there will be a net exchange of Qi unless or until they come to be in Qidian equilibrium. Qi will always flow from a higher-Qi system to a lower-Qi system
.
This, of course, supposed that the Demi-Monde is
not
a closed system, but I was able to support this contention by reference to religion (and boy, did that piss off the WunZians!), citing that all religious types insisted that the Demi-Monde was merely one of the Nine Worlds, albeit the one which was most closely connected to the first of these worlds, the Spirit World.
On this basis I proposed that Qi flowed from the Spirit World – which by definition has the highest level of Qi as it is the one occupied by ABBA – to the Demi-Monde and that it is this flow which is responsible for the ever-increasing level of Qi in the Demi-Monde.