Canto 3 – A Game of “Bridge”
When Ged and Trav reached the bridge of the Leaping Shadowcat, Tron’s angry face already filled the view screen. Next to him stood the flame-haired beauty known as Maggie the Knife with one hand protectively shielding their small son, Artran.
“So! Ged and Ham both? How could you both be so stupid as to take up with that worthless clown?” growled Tron in a gravelly voice. His somewhat handsome face was marred not only by anger, but by a hideous laser scar that ran from the top of the left side of his forehead, through the eye socket of his artificial left eye, down to the left side of his lantern jaw.
“Tron,” said Ged as diplomatically as he could manage, “You know me. You know I would never take up with a swindler and a pirate like Trav willingly. You must also know that I have troubles of my own about now. If you leave us in peace, I can promise Trav’s presence aboard this ship will result in banishment for him. You will never see his face in Imperial Space again.”
“Ged, I respect you more than any other space man I know. Your word is good, and you never lie. I wish your worthless brother and I both had your integrity. We’d be kings among men. But Goofy stole a priceless treasure from us and both Slimeball Harris and Blue Death Jones just died trying to get it back. Both of their corsairs were destroyed by that rotten space barge Goofy was flying.”
“You’re moaning about Slimeball and Old Blue?” asked Trav in an incredulous voice.
“Well, those corsair ships were very valuable!” growled Tron.
“Oh,” replied Trav. “Sorry.”
“What if we give you the treasure, Tron?” asked Ham.
“No!” cried Trav. “You have to let me explain that to you in private, first!”
“Yes,” growled Tron. “Give me the blue metal box and the Nebulon slave girl. You can keep the rest. And you can keep Goofy forever, for all I care.”
“Now, wait!” interrupted Ged. “Slavery is just plain wrong.”
“Yes,” said Tron, “but this one is a princess among the Space Smurfs. She is the first daughter to the Sinjarac Warlord, whatever that means. We’re not just talking slave here, but a potentially valuable hostage for the Imperial Space Navy. They would pay well to get their hands on her.”
“Why a hostage?” asked Ham.
“You didn’t see the Imperial Scout Data we intercepted,” said Maggie softly in a musical voice. “A coreward border war has erupted between a huge convoy of Nebulons in their Space-Whale Cruisers and the Galtorr Imperium. Nobody in the Imperium seems to know why, but there is a massive migration of Space Smurfs going on just beyond the Imperial Border.”
“You can’t have the girl,” said Ged. “I’d be happy to give you the box, though.”
“No!” protested Trav. “You don’t know what’s in it!”
“What is in it?” Ged asked Trav. His eyes narrowed.
Trav blushed furiously.
“You have to give us what we want.” Tron seemed too confident. “We have corsairs blocking every jump route back into known space. Soon we’ll have a hundred of them here ready to board your crappy little safari ship.”
“Yes,” said Maggie prettily. “We will take the treasure anyway and you’ll all be skinned alive with a dull knife.”
“Oh, great,” said Ged.
“Are you ready with our little surprise?” Trav asked Ham.
“It’s plotted in the nav computer,” Ham answered.
“It’s time to hit it, then.”
Ham leaped into the pilot’s seat and slammed down on the jump button. The jump into lightspeed-plus was jarring. Space began to fold around the ship. The surprised faces of Tron and Maggie the Knife faded away into white static, soon replaced by a red-and-blue-shifting starfield in jump space.
“What have you done?” Ged asked Ham with shock on his face.
“You didn’t think I would start this leap of faith without at least one jump already planned and programmed?”
“Trav?” asked Ged.
“Oh, yes. I plotted a course to a planet almost nobody has ever heard of. It’s a place with the silly name of Don’t Go Here.”
So, what are Nebulons? Gyro Sinjarac on the left in the picture is an example from Aeroquest of a Nebulon. They are aliens who are human in every respect except for their blue skin. Interestingly they can even successfully interbreed with Earther humans. This is apparently due to either the evolution of Nebulons from Earther explorers, or, more likely, the galaxy being seeded with Earth humans and Earther DNA by the mysterious alien race known only as “the Ancients”. What is not debatable is that Nebulons have unique skin. The blue skin with high levels of natural copper sulfate in it has evolved as a protection from interstellar nebula radiation. No one who has learned their language and studied their culture has ever identified a planet of origin. Instead, the Nebulons have been a space-born race since humans first encountered them, travelling in their symbiotic space-whale space cruisers. They are a mysterious deep-space race of alien beings who use organic symbiotes, in other words, living creatures, as their pervasive technology.
Catch a Falling Star 
Politics in an Alien World
I am working on the end of my sci-fi comedy novel, Stardusters and Space Lizards. It is about an alien world that is dying from too much warfare and ignoring of pollution-created climate change. So today, after personally declaring war on the Trumpinator yesterday, I want to talk about politics. Not Earth politics. Alien politics. Any resemblance to real-world politics will be coincidental, or the result of truth being far stranger than fiction.
Let’s be thoughtful for a moment and analyze the way politics works on an alien planet. The political world always seems to devolve into two sides. Remember, we are talking made-up alien worlds here. So let’s give the two sides completely made up names. Let’s call them Dumbocrats and Ratpublicans. They are nothing like we have here on Earth. These are aliens, remember, nothing like us.
On one side you have the party that is totally self-centered and cares more about business and profits and what the individual can gain from those than it does about anything else, even insignificant things like other alien people’s lives. These are the conservative, me-party folks who try to maximize benefits for themselves and the relatively small circle of alien people they care about and think of as their own. We’ll call them Ratpublicans, again, totally randomly, for no particular reason.
Then, on the other side, you have the selfless ones, the ones who are more interested in making everybody happy, an exercise in futility that invariably leaves no one happy in the long run. I mean, if you give everything away to help others, eventually you are left with nothing. It is the reason liberal alien people often starve to death. It is also the reason that these selfless beings get so used to being poor and having nothing of their own. We’ll call them Dumbocrats, only because it is the name we have left over.
What always works best is when neither side gets everything they want. It is far better that the two sides grab the Enchilada of Happiness from opposite sides and pull with relatively equal force. That way it stays about in the middle and no one gets the whole enchilada. If the Ratpublicans get the whole thing, then the most powerful, ruthless, and evil among them will selfishly eat what they want and horde the rest, letting everyone else, even less-powerful Ratpublicans starve. If the Dumbocrats get the whole thing, they will give small bits to everyone, even the space rats and space pigeons, and visiting Space Goons from other planets, and no one will have as much as they want. Keeping the whole enchilada in the middle of the great political tug-of-war is the whole trick to making things stay balanced and under control.
If something throws the whole system out of balance, say an orange-headed alien in a gold-colored fright wig suddenly uses the magic of corrupt business practices to seize control of the Enchilada of Happiness, then the whole system starts to break down.
Now, you may have noticed already that instead of outer space aliens, I have used old movie clowns to illustrate this essay. I think it is entirely possible that the best people to listen to when it comes to the matter of politics and what to do about them are the clowns, the comedians, the mockers, and the fools. They have looked at the way things are with a keen eye to find what they can make fun of and make us laugh about. But because they are looking with a keen eye, often they are seeing the truth for what it is. Did you ever hear what Charlie Chaplin had to say?
Of course, we all know this whole discussion is about aliens on other planets. It doesn’t apply here. How could it? We are nothing like them. We’re smarter and better and have all the answers… if only we would take a moment to realize that we do.
Leave a comment
Filed under aliens, commentary, goofy thoughts, humor, insight, irony, politics, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as politics