Canto 119 – The Debate on the Bridge
The control panel on the bridge of the Super Rooster was made up mostly of the remnants of Dr. Naylund Smith’s old space ship, the one he had crashed and eventually junked a mere two hundred twelve years before. But it was like riding a bicycle to sit in front of the familiar controls. That, Naylund supposed was why Ged had asked him to be the pilot, taking over the role that Ged would’ve much preferred had gone to his brother Ham, but he would not take for himself.
“Thank you for organizing this mission, Naylund-sensei. I am not used to doing the job of a space captain myself.”
“It is nothing, Ged-dono. Sitting in front of these controls is a little like arriving home again. And this is the first time in the history of Gaijin that the planet can mount a response to an incoming possible threat.”
“Have we learned anything more from the scanners?”
“Not much. It is coming up on the viewscreen now. It is still 5,000 miles away. Computer, enhance viewscreen 500 percent.”
The image enlarged in the holo-digital viewscreen.
“That looks like a big piece of driftwood with a flower on its side,” said Sara, looking over her father’s shoulder.
“The sensors indicate the whole thing is alive,” said Junior Aero, sitting behind Ged. “It functions as a space ship, though. It maneuvers. And it orients itself to the gravity well of the planet like an incoming spaceship. It has to be something like the living space-whale ships of my people.”
Junior was born a Nebulon, blue-skinned and red-cheeked, and later adopted by the Aero Brothers.
Naylund looked at the plant-like thing and squinted. Hoping to see… what exactly?
“I don’t think it’s connected to your terrorist, Ged. It’s like some sort of seed pod.”
Ged looked at Naylund skeptically. “It seems almost impossible that it would be a coincidence, Naylund.”
But Jai Chang, the ninja under the Avenger helmet, was a native-born Gaijinese who had never been off planet and never known to have any off-world contacts. If there was a connection, it was not an obvious one.
“Sara, can you tell anything about it with your telepathy?” he asked his daughter.
“I hear voices, but it’s confusing,” she answered. “Could the whole thing be a disguise? I can read alien minds there… but it’s all garbled. I can usually understand anything the mind I read understands.”
Junior suddenly also looked quite confused. “I can’t read any computers on board, A-I or otherwise. How can they navigate?”
“They can’t. No starship we know of can operate without a computerized brain of some sort. Anything less than Tech-level Nine wouldn’t be able to find its way through jump space.” Naylund could only guess at the weird alien technology behind this interstellar seed-pod.
“There is a breathable oxygen-nitrogen-carbon dioxide atmosphere inside,” said Ged, reading the latest sensor scan. “We will have to go inside. Time to use your antique vacc suits, Naylund.”
“Be my guest. I will fly the Super Rooster and wait for your return in the ship.”
“You and the robot-boy, Tiki Astro. That should be enough problem-solving help to leave on this end. I will take Sara, Junior, Billy, and Gyro with me. We have five usable suits.”
“Don’t take any unnecessary risks, Ged-dono. I am trusting you with my daughter, after all. Something I would only do with the one true White Spider.” “I promise, Naylund-sensei. On my life, I promise.”
Catch a Falling Star 
Contradictions
You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.
What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.
The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.
“You are wrong, Mickey!”
“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”
“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”
The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.
But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority
Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”
One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.
2 Comments
Filed under commentary, humor, inspiration, Paffooney, philosophy