Prologue
Many questions arose after Tananius-Ofo, God of the Universe, selected Evander Harold McMurtrey to deliver a startling celestial message. Certainly McMurtrey, of the small planet D’Urth, was no religious leader to rival Hoddha, Zillaster, Krassos, or Isammed. He was merely the self-proclaimed Grand Exalted Rooster of “ICCC,” the Interplanetary Church of Cosmic Chickenhood.
Never before in history had God spoken through such a droll personage.
It was a crazy time anyway, even before the Holy Event. One escaped Tenusian dissident termed it “an age of peculiar turmoil, of war mania without evidence of war.” According to government propaganda, the terraformed planets Tenusia, Maros, and Ercu were allied with D’Urth in the “Inner Planet League,” opposing a like “Outer Planet Confederacy” comprising the rest of the solar system. Inner Planet dissidents were hunted down routinely by Bureau of Loyalty agents and executed without trial. Often the executions became public spectacles with bizarre means of death, scenes that had chilling and predictable effects upon the populace.
No one acquainted with McMurtrey knew where the war zones were, if they existed at all, and he didn’t pursue the topic. Rumors favored Saturus or the larger moons of Ranus.
McMurtrey, like every other Inner Planet citizen, had to take annual loyalty oaths, and the Bureau assigned him a “Loyalty Quotient.” It was like the old IQ number except it was called “LQ” and had other connotations beyond being smart enough not to oppose the system. McMurtrey didn’t have any idea what his own LQ number was, but he knew braggarts who professed to have high numbers.
He didn’t care much about any of that, except to the extent that he tried to stay out of trouble.
He had been fairly successful in that regard for a number of years, but he sensed the old ways would never work for him again.…