Canto 114 – Desperate Men, Desperate Measures
Several system-defense boats, the so-called Atmospheric Police Force of the planet Coventry rose to surround the wrecked but recovering hulk of the First Half Century.
“Enemy craft! Stand down with your weapons. Prepare to be boarded by the Coventry Air Guard.”
Dana Cole turned to her beleaguered crew. “Any chance we can escape or fight our way out of this?”
“Not without using that… that THING!” said a horrified junior officer whom she didn’t know.
“Yeah, that is definitely out of the question.” She turned to the reanimated thing that was now her beloved Trav. “We have to surrender now, lover. I expect we will be facing trial.”
“Ah, a primitive justice system. That sort of illogical display will prove most enlightening in these times of our intellectual progeny.”
“I’m not talking to the mind of Trav Dalgoda am I?”
“Decidedly not. Tyrrix ManSel wishes to observe for the next decade or so.” The dead eyes were lit from behind with a yellow luminescence.
“Yep, that can’t be good.”
“There is a possibility of incarceration and even execution, isn’t there,” said Tyrrix with Trav’s mouth.
“Yes. If they don’t kill us as soon as they come aboard.”
“Well, if my database on the Xandar future is accurate, our ride should be showing up at any moment.”
“Our ride?”
Outside the viewport, two Blackhawk Corsairs, both in rather battle-worn condition popped out of jump space.
“We need the Coventry forces to back off for now. By proxy orders of the White Duke.” Dana easily recognized the voice of Razor Conn.
Through the viewport, the crew could see the system defense forces backing down.
One of the Blackhawks sent a half dozen air rafts out through its blast-blackened docking bay towards the First Half Century.
In moments, the leader of the Blackhawks, Razor Conn, stood on the bridge looking at Dana through mirrored sunglasses. He was wearing a white, wide-brimmed cowboy hat like so many veterans of the Pan Galactican Border War.
“I take it this incident was mostly the fault of the evil Tesserah thing?” Razor said simply.
“Yes. It seems to have a mind of its own. An evil mind.”
“We are going to tell the Coventry government that we have the rogue warriors in custody and we will give this starship to them as compensation.”
“So, you’re not going to hand us over to be executed?”
“No, of course not. We already know it wasn’t the fault of you or your crew. Our own ranks are a bit depleted now too, so we will be taking you aboard to work for us. We will only claim to have executed the war criminals. Once the emergency is over, any necessary investigations can happen in a few years. We have more pressing things to worry about now.”
“Oh? Like what for instance?”
“That evil Ancient thing wants to kill us all. Maybe the whole universe. We have to find a more effective way to deal with it than just doing what it tells us to do.”
Dana looked at Trav. “Are you telling them what to do?”
“Not I,” answered Tyrrix. “Your friend speaks of the evil inherent in the Tesserah. It is, after all, an ultimate Ancient doomsday sort of device.”
“Do you know how to get rid of it?” she asked Razor.
“No, but we have to figure something out. In the meantime, I would ask for everybody’s company aboard Blackhawk One. We really have a lot of work to do.”
Catch a Falling Star 
Strawberry Fields
This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.
This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.
But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.
You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.
She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.
And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.
But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)
And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.
She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.
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