The Green Lady 🗽Washington, D.C.

 The Elkbalam 

Molotova looked at the shopping mall that towered over Washington, D.C. Its sheer plates of gold-coloured glass and its giant T were mirrored in the Lincoln Pool. Molotova remembered that several months ago there was a big statue of Lincoln and an enormous dome, but those were gone now.

She looked at Antonyminious the Communist crouching next to her, who reminded her of a close friend back on her home planet. Her friend looked like a large hunting dog and went by the name Rover, on account of his tendency to rove from one planet to the next in search of a master who he could respect enough to follow. Yet Antonyminious was a human, and because of this she wasn’t entirely sure that he would risk his life on her say-so. Nor did he have giant paws with razor-sharp talons. Still, she had to do the best she could with what was available.

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Looking up at the shopping centre, she recalled that there was once an obelisk that pointed into outer space, where Leo roared above the Milky Way, where the Cat’s Eye Nebula burned through the contorted body of Draco, where the Lynx slipped barely visible into the night, and where Felis the Cat crouched beneath Hydra, the terrible Water Snake with many heads. Hydra was the largest of the 88 constellations, and was reputed to grow another head if you chopped one off. Eventually, Iolaus seared its necks together so that Hercules could finally slay the hideous monster. Felis the Cat, however, was not impressed by Hydra’s outlandish display. He merely licked his paws, completely unperturbed.

In Molotova’s native galaxy, Silvania, they worshipped obelisks and the Elkbalam, who resembled large cats. Sleek and black, the Elkbalam reigned supreme over the 77 castes, many of whom had feline shape, while others resembled animals of prey like rabbits, lizards, or sheep. The Elkbalam most resembled black jaguars, except that they also had a brain to body ratio like that of humans, and they were about twice the size.

The Elkbalam were the first Silvanians to reach Earth, from their dark corner of the Green Buzz universe. The Mayan obsession with jaguars and the Egyptian craze for cats and obelisks were a tribute to their early influence.

All Silvanians worshipped the Elkbalam, who themselves worshipped the Great Green Obelisk of the Nether Jungle. It was for this reason that Molotova was particularly incensed that the dictatorship had taken down the obelisk and replaced it with a casino and oversized Burger King. She vowed to herself that the first thing she’d do when she took over the city was build the largest obelisk Washington had ever seen.

The government had also taken down the old columns in the Arboretum, and replaced them with a putting green and gift shop. Molotova remembered the old columns with fondness, because they reminded her of the moment in 575 BC when Silanius IV gifted an obelisk to his good friend, the pharaoh Apries. Molotova’s plan was to mount columns and obelisks on various statues of animals, in much the same way that the Romans mounted the obelisk from Silanius IV on top of an elephant statue and placed it in the Piazza della Minerva. Molotova had plans to steal this obelisk from Rome, as well as the sphinx of Apries from the Louvre.

She would put the obelisk atop the feline god and place it in a giant golden bubble at the exact spot where the Capitol dome used to be. Inside the dome she would plant yagé, or banisteriopsis caapi, the hallucinogenic plant whose roots were a special delicacy of the Amazonian jaguar.

Molotov’s Arboretum would cover the entire ground where the Shopping Mall now was. From there, the new Arboretum would stretch in a series of lush caverns and sinuous rills all the way from Richmond to Philadelphia. She dreamed of installing fifty thousand statues, some atop animals, others atop temples that would jut up from the dense foliage, like the Mayan temples of Tikal.

In her labyrinthine fantasy, the stoney fingers of the obelisks and columns pointed once again to the stars. She imagined herself prowling between the columns through the tall grass, which was filled with all sorts of wild game to play with.

On Silvan 7, Molotova was known as a transbalam, that is, an Elkbalam whose mind was transplanted into a humanoid body. This was a great sacrifice, and could only be accomplished by the bravest and most resilient of the Elkbalam. To go from a powerful feline body of an Elkbalam with four feet on the ground to a weak biped always about to topple over would have been a disgrace, were it not for the fact that such a transformation was required at the very highest levels of the Silvan Empire.

The Silvan Empire prided itself on its subtle infiltration of foreign worlds and universes. To operate seamlessly, it needed transbalams who could go anywhere. Some transbalams were felomorphs, others were hydromorphs (like the fearless Guáranthai), canomorphs, dracomorphs, ursalamorphs, centamorphs, marsupialmorphs, swampmasters (who morphed into a variety of slithering scary forms), skystalkers, gauzestrappers and corepoppers. The less other species knew about the last three, the better.

The Silvanians lived in a universe apart, like a cat staring into space, while other citizens of the Green Buzz wagged their tails like dogs and wondered what their masters wanted. The Silvanians were so stubborn and independent that they didn’t even call the 13 universes the Kraslika. To them, it was the Jungle, and the Elkbalam was its King.

And yet the highest echelons of the Elkbalam weren’t on any intergalactic councils. They certainly didn’t participate in Great Assemblies, except disguised as some other species that played a spectator role, or perhaps served drinks at the bar. And yet they prowled the Kraslika, like Henry V before the battle of Agincourt, who bids his soldiers “good morrow with a modest smile / And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.”

Upon his royal face there is no note
How dread an army hath enrounded him;
Nor doth he dedicate one jot of colour
Unto the weary and all-watched night…

While the Transbalam was on the surface greatly disadvantaged in a humanoid form, the Silvanians had made a few alterations and improvements. Underneath the black leather Molotova wore, she had fold-in wings and wrist-guns that could project lasers and glue-lines. Her hands and feet had claws that retracted, and she could climb with all four limbs better than a spider monkey in the Amazon.

Not that the humanoid form wasn’t a miracle of sorts. This miracle was often attributed to evolution by the scientists on Earth, as if humans became brilliant in the last thirty thousand years or so, while all the other animals on Earth remained as dumb as horses and dogs. The huge leap in human intelligence was in fact the result of the Vicinese, who infracted onto human DNA a simplified version of the Vicinese brain. The Vicinese referred to this as The Infusion, although the Elkbalam wondered why on earth they would make their prey more powerful. Perhaps for a better game of cat and mouse? When Silvan felosophers wrote on this question, they left whole pages blank.

Molotova conceded that while humans weren’t complete idiots, it still wasn’t easy going from a giant flying jaguar to what Molotova called a stick-person.

For instance, when she was a jaguar-bodied Elkbalam, Molotova had never felt the types of urges she felt now. Between her legs was a particularly difficult one. Before her felomorphism, she used to come together with other Elkbalam in circles called cat naps. One Elkbalam would lie down in the centre of a swirl-chamber, then another would fit neatly beside and behind it. Each Elkbalam fit into the previous one until the swirl-chamber was full, at which point the entire swirl went into a deep state of sleepy bliss.

The sleep lasted anywhere from ten hours to ten days, after which the first Elkbalam to enter the swirl-chamber got up and then the whole room unwound itself and went back to work or play, refreshed and calmed in a way that even the occult Elkbalam Balam couldn’t explain.

But what was between her humanoid legs was different indeed, requiring more a dose of carfentanil than a cat nap.

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Molotova looked at Antonyminious the Communist crouching next to her, a thick bar of C4 inside his Leninist greatcoat. He had a look in his eyes that said, Do whatever you want with me. Make me thy vessel. Take me in your hands and let me be thy rod. Gripping her pale yellow phial, a mix of alcohol and nitroglycerin, she thought to herself, OK.

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Next: ✏️ 1825

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