True, we – like the other Animals – were blessed, and ordered to increase and multiply, and to replenish the Earth. But by what humiliating and aggressive and painful means this replenishing frequently takes place! No wonder we are born to a sense of guilt and disgrace! Why did He not make us pure Spirit, like Himself? Why did he embed us in perishable matter, and a matter so unfortunately Monkey-like? So goes the ancient cry.

What commandment did we disobey? The commandment to live the Animal life in all simplicity – without clothing, so to speak. But we craved the knowledge of good and evil, and we obtained that knowledge, and now we are reaping the whirlwind. In our efforts to rise above ourselves we have indeed fallen far, and are falling farther still; for, like the Creation, the Fall, too, is ongoing. Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything? We have betrayed the trust of the Animals, and defiled our sacred task of stewardship. God’s commandment to “replenish the Earth” did not mean we should fill it to overflowing with ourselves, thus wiping out everything else. How many other Species have we already annihilated? Insofar as you do it unto the least of God’s Creatures, you do it unto Him. Please consider that, my Friends, the next time you crush a Worm underfoot or disparage a Beetle!

We pray that we may not fall into the error of pride by considering ourselves as exceptional, alone in all Creation in having Souls; and that we will not vainly imagine that we are set above all other Life, and may destroy it at our pleasure, and with impunity.

We thank Thee, oh God, for having made us in such a way as to remind us, not only of our less than Angelic being, but also of the knots of DNA and RNA that tie us to our many fellow Creatures.

Let us sing.

OH LET ME NOT BE PROUD

From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

When I’m thinking back over that night – the night the Waterless Flood first began – I can’t recall anything out of the ordinary. Around seven o’clock I was feeling hungry, so I got a Joltbar from the minifridge and ate half of it. I only ever ate half of anything because a girl with my body type can’t afford to blimp up. I once asked Mordis if I should get bimplants, but he said I could play underage in a dim light, and there was heavy demand for the schoolgirl act.

I ran through some chin-ups and did my Kegel floor exercises, and then Mordis called in on my videophone to see if I was okay: he missed me, because no one could work the crowd like me. “Ren, you make them shit thousand-dollar bills,” he said, and I blew him a kiss.

“Keeping your butt in shape?” he said, so I held the videophone behind me.

“Chickin’ lickin’ good,” he said. Even if you were feeling ugly, he made you feel pretty.

After that I hit the Snakepit video, to check the action and dance along to the music. It was strange to watch everything going on without me, as if I’d been erased. Crimson Petal was teasing the pole, Savona was subbing for me on the trapeze. She looked good – glittery and green and sinuous, with a new silver Mo’Hair. I was considering one of those myself – they were better than wigs, they never came off – but some girls said the smell was like lamb chops, especially in the rain.

Savona was a little clumsy. She wasn’t a trapeze girl, she was a pole girl, and she was top-heavy – she’d blown herself up like a beach ball. Stick her on stilettos, breathe on her from behind, and she’d do a vertical face-plant. “Whatever works,” she’d say. “And, baby, this works.”

Now she was doing the upside-down splits move with the one-handed midstroke. She didn’t convince me, but the men down there were never much interested in art: they’d think Savona was great unless she laughed instead of moaning, or actually fell off the trapeze.

I left the Snakepit and flipped through the other rooms, but nothing much was going on. No fetishists, nobody who wanted to be covered in feathers or slathered in porridge or strung up with velvet ropes or writhed on by guppies. Just the daily grind.

Then I called Amanda. We’re each other’s family; I guess when we were kids we were both stray puppies. It’s a bond.

Amanda was in the Wisconsin desert, putting together one of the Bioart installations she’s been doing now that she’s into what she calls the art caper. It was cow bones this time. Wisconsin ’s covered with cow bones, ever since the big drought ten years ago when they’d found it cheaper to butcher the cows there rather than shipping them out – the ones that hadn’t died on their own. She had a couple of fuel-cell front-end loaders and two illegal Tex-Mexican refugees she’d hired, and she was dragging the cow bones into a pattern so big it could only be seen from above: huge capital letters, spelling out a word. Later she’d cover it in pancake syrup and wait until the insect life was all over it, and then take videos of it from the air, to put into galleries. She liked to watch things move and grow and then disappear.

Amanda always got the money to do her art capers. She was kind of famous in the circles that went in for culture. They weren’t big circles, but they were rich circles. This time she had a deal with a top CorpSeCorps guy – he’d get her up in the helicopter, to take the videos. “I traded Mr. Big for a whirly,” was how she told me – we never said CorpSeCorps or helicopter on the phone, because they had robots listening in for special words like those.

Her Wisconsin thing was part of a series called The Living Word – she said for a joke that it was inspired by the Gardeners because they’d repressed us so much about writing things down. She’d begun with one-letter words – I and A and O – and then done two-letter words like It, and then three letters, and four, and five. Now she was up to six. They’d been written in all different materials, including fish guts and toxic-spill-killed birds and toilets from building demolition sites filled with used cooking oil and set on fire.

Her new word was kaputt. When she’d told me that earlier, she’d said she was sending a message.

“Who to?” I’d said. “The people who go to the galleries? The Mr. Rich and Bigs?”

“That’s who,” she’d said. “And the Mrs. Rich and Bigs. Them too.”

“You’ll get in trouble, Amanda.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “They won’t understand it.”

The project was going fine, she said: it had rained, the desert flowers were in bloom, there were a lot of insects, which was good for when she’d pour on the syrup. She already had the K done, and she was halfway through the A. But the Tex-Mexicans were getting bored.