Kings of the Future

Prologue

From the Memrecord of Mikkol Bandy, taken Chicago of the year 2532:

"Back when my granda was young, and one of my gret gret grandas was an old man, nearly to his end-time, he told my granda of the way things had been when the world began. He told him of the great fertilization, a thing he’d never seen, it had happened too long ago. No one could remember that far back, and everything they knew had been passed down to them from their grandparents. By measuring in years it had been more than four hundred since the fertilization, and my grandfather was seventeenth generation. What his grandfather told him, he passed on to me, since my father was selfstart man who didn’t take to religions or idiothink.

The story was ancient, and my grandfather told me with great pride that our line of men, the Bandys, had kept every word the same as that which they’d heard from their ancestors. The tellings differed, he told me, on the skirts, where men raised families in isolation, cut off from the rest of the kingdom by distance and mountains. He told me that our version was the most pure, and that I would learn it well to pass on to my chicklets and grandies as well. Then he set me down and said, Mikkol Bandy, you are about to hear the music of truth.