Canto 133 – Pink Space Cadillacs
The Super Rooster’s docking bay was filled with all the air/rafts, grav speeders, and small vehicles that Shen Ming had been able to muster from the city of Kiro and surrounding areas on the planet. They were not exactly the most up-to-date technology in space, but they would do.
Four of the grav speeders were designed by an old interstellar vehicle company called Space Cadillacs. Two of those were gray and white, while the other two were pink and white.
Shu Kwai was busy lifting boxes of equipment with his telekinesis and placing them into the cargo spaces of the speeders.
Hassan Parker was busy watching and “supervising.”
Gyro looked at the pink Cadillacs with considerable curiosity. “These things have a cockpit open to space. How do we ride in something like that?”
“In our space suits, Smurf,” said Billy. “The ones you altered to fit us.”
“Oh, sure. I hope we don’t get swallowed by blossoms again.”
“That was actually a spaceship’s air lock, Gyro.”
“Oh, yeah. But it was certainly icky.”
“Ha, where did you get a word like icky?”
“Some of you guys are real nerds, Billy. You use lots of weird words like that. And the Galactic English was put directly in my brain by Sara’s telepathy.”
“These pink Cadillacko thingies, Billy… I kinda like the look of them. Do we get to drive them?”
“Well, I might. You would just crash one, Gyro. You can’t drive to save your life. Remember that grav-bike on Pan Galactica Five during the War?”
“It’s not fair to bring that up. We crashed because it took too long to figure out what you were saying to me.”
“Yeah, it’s much easier to talk to you now. It’s like you were born speaking Galactic English.”
“And that stupid bike thingy wouldn’t fly when I gave it a command.”
“That’s because you have to turn it on and use the proper controls in the proper way.”
“Nebulonin kanjeriey are so much easier to use. You just tell them what you want to do or where you want to go and they fly there.”
“Those are the space-bird things that Nebulons use to get from the space-whale cruisers to the planet, right?”
“Or anywhere else you want to go. They are much smarter than your Cadillackos.”
“It’s pronounced Cadillacs, Gyro. And your space-birds are alive, aren’t they?”
“Very much so. Born on gas planets, they fly in space, or they fly in atmosphere. They carry their own oxygen-nitrogen fields with them. Hassan could ride one through space totally naked and be fine, protected from the vacuum of space.”
“Yeah. I don’t understand Classical Worlders either. Why would anybody prefer to be naked all the time?”
“You remember we almost had to live like that back at Dr. Crushcracker’s school? It was a boarding school for Classical Worlds kids. They wanted you to go to school naked.”
“My worst nightmare. I’m glad your dad got us out of there. It was just too weird.”
“Yeah, well… we had to leave there because of our skin color. We were hated for it.”
“Really? Because of my brown skin?”
“Not really. Because of my family’s blue skin. We were hostile aliens to them. They wanted to treat us as no better than the faceless ones.”
“I’m sorry about that. It’s just stupid to think you and Jor and your Mom are not like the rest of us just because your skin is blue.”
“Well, and you and I are different too because of our Psion heads. That’s what the Zaranians wanted to hang us for.”
“Yeah. Thank the gods for Shan’s Prophecy and the Zaranian who saved us with it.”
“Anyway… Billy? Would you teach me to drive one of those cool Cadillackos if I could make it have an energy-field and an atmosphere just like a space-bird?”
“You can do that?”
“I can now that Ged-sensei has trained us to get everything we possibly can out of our Psion powers. It should be easy to make a field-generator that mimics the field-gland of a Nebulonin kanjeriey… um, space-bird.”
“In that case, I can teach you drive anything. Especially a pink Cadillac. I’ll have you driving it even better and with more style than Elvis the Cruel.”
“That famous pirate pilot?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Thank ya, thank ya very much!”
“Oh, stop it! You didn’t do that right.” As the driver’s training plan ended, Shu Kwai nearly dropped a crate on Hassan’s head, not because he couldn’t control it, but because the boy who was supervising was simply insufferable.
Catch a Falling Star 
Ending the Story
The first chapter of the story of my life does not open with my birth. It begins with my first memories around the age of three or four, when I first really became aware and my mind began seriously pulling itself together. Similarly, it will not ultimately end the final chapter when the lights go out and I pass away. I myself will not be able to write that particular sentence because, as I die, I probably won’t be in the act of writing about it.
This topic comes up because I have been thinking long and hard about how my AeroQuest series is going to end.
The original story in my terrible first-published novel has been divided into five different parts. Admittedly they are not as stand-alone in nature as I had originally intended.
Of course, since it all evolved from an on-going role-playing game, it was never really supposed to have an end point. And if I manage to finish this number-five novel, I already have a story to fill the number-six novel. It will be called Galactic Fire and the story is already tied to the other five.
At the same time, I am rewriting and updating Stardusters and Space Lizards. This too is an ongoing story. As a sequel to Catch a Falling Star, it takes up the tale of the aliens who tried and failed to invade a small town in Iowa. It takes them to a dying planet where the population of meat-eating lizard people are determined to make themselves extinct.
So, naturally, this book has the problem of the need to kill characters who are not the villain. Characters I have come to love. One of the characters shown on this new cover was supposed to tragically die during the climactic battle of the book. It began my awareness of how I can’t seem to end a novel without killing characters.
Of my fifteen existing novels, only Superchicken and A Field Guide to Fauns make it to the end of the story without killing a character.
I am lucky society doesn’t charge authors with murder for killing off characters in their books. After all, we fiction writers are a murderous lot. And characters are real people, at least to the author.
But, life as a story, is like that. Nobody that we have photographs of makes it out alive. And all the exceptions to the general rule may be highly metaphorical in actual reality.
The character in my initial Paffooney, Orben Wallace from The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, is a good example of the ongoing nature of life’s story. I call that book a prequel-equal-sequel because it tells a story that begins before Catch a Falling Star, includes some of the same story as that book, and ends with a story that occurs well after the other story departs for outer space.
I fully expect my own life to end its story like that one did. There is a story that comes both before and after. Birth-to-death stories are always part of something larger. And it is all connected.
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