Canto Sixty-Eight – Return to the Moon Gundahl
The golden wings that could be retrieved touched down on the moon base where Biznap and Xiar had established a new colony for the Telleron people. Material synthesizers were busy churning out components for a new Telleri-swamp enclosure. The ruined Galtorrian fortress was swiftly becoming the kind of homey organic mess of a construct that the Tellerons had left behind and lost track of at Barnard’s Star.
The entry doors of Harmony Castille’s mission wing popped open with a snap-hiss worthy of a cobra celebrating victory over a mongoose. Many mongooses in fact. Harmony and Shalar both led the way down the ramp, rushing into the arms of their beloveds, Biznap and Xiar respectively.
“Bizzy, we have conquered a planet for you at last,” Harmony said happily.
“The evil Senator and his minions are defeated?” Biznap asked.
“Defeated and eaten and dead,” said Shalar. “Those the man-eating Lester-flowers didn’t eat were turned into food by material synthesizer and fed to starving Galtorrian survivors.”
“How about the little ones?” Xiar asked. “The missing children from our ship and the little wounded lizard girl?”
“We found all the tadpoles alive and well, except for Tanith and Davalon, who got a little bit crunched under a falling space ship. And they are recovering in the same hospital room with Sizzahl, the little lizard scientist. That one will be invaluable to us if we are going to help the natives rebuild a society here.”
“Tanith and Davalon? Is that the one who saved our behinds on Earth and his nestmate, the pretty one?” asked Xiar.
“Xiar! You don’t know your own offspring even yet?” said Harmony.
“Well, I, uh… hey, I remembered them correctly, didn’t I?”
“You did,” said Shalar. She practiced the human thing about kissing him on the cheek affectionately.
“And they stayed on the planet?” asked Biznap.
“Yes. Alden and Gracie Morrell are looking after all the tadpoles, along with their new children, the half-human, half-lizard fusions.” Harmony’s eyes twinkled as she talked about it. “They will be great parents, even though they are perpetually child-sized themselves. They even have me thinking about adopting some children myself.”
“We have plenty of Galtorrian orphans right here,” said Biznap. “Teenage lizard boys and teenage lizard girls. Still think you can handle teenagers? Even the toothy ones?”
Harmony laughed a Sunday-school-teacher laugh. No mere child would ever get the best of her and her beloved Bible. She’d have those heathens tamed in no time.
“And just think,” said Xiar with a grin, “none of this could’ve happened if your Earther primate wife hadn’t corrected your math.”
Biznap grimaced. “Yeah, working on math and star-charts is going to be a thing for the next few years.”
“You’re not looking forward to living here?” Harmony asked.
“I guess I’d better get used to the idea. We are not going anywhere else until the coordinates to everything in the universe have been fixed. We don’t know where Earth or Barnard’s Star, or even Telleri were misplaced at now. Their correct positions have to be fixed.”
“Fixed in your charts, you mean,” Harmony said. “I think they are still right where God originally put them.”
“Yes, I guess they are,” Biznap finally admitted.
So now, dear reader, after having posted a chapter every Tuesday for over a year, I have managed to post an entire novel, three years in the writing, for free on WordPress. Now that I have accomplished such a stupid feat, I am going to try to publish this thing, along with many other things I have finished writing. Fair warning. I am certainly not done inflicting Mickian fiction on the world. This world… not Galtorr Prime. Sorry if I misled you there. I know lots of Galtorrian lizard folk are looking forward to reading this story. But they will have to be extremely patient.
stuff, and doing some of it naked.
But that, of course, is not how it works in real life… even without the nuclear physics which was an exaggeration for humorous effect.
Mickey at Sixty
It is true that I am now only a month away from being 61. But this reflection is based on what happened to me while undergoing the year past. My fictional character, Valerie Clarke, took the selfie above of the two of us. She doesn’t have her own smartphone, after all, she’s a fictional character, so she used mine. It shows in the picture what she looked like at eleven and what I looked like at sixty years and eleven months, in other words, this morning.
So, what exactly does the picture reveal about us?
Well, for her, it is fairly obvious that she’s only an imaginary person. She was eleven in 1984, the year of the fictional snowstorm in Snow Babies. She’s a bright and vibrant young girl with hopes and dreams ahead of her. She’s also known tragedy, especially after her father’s suicide. But the fact that she’s fictional and based on more than one real person from my past does a lot to explain why this reflection is not about her.
For me, however, you get a look at a grumpy old man with a straw farmer’s hat, an author’s beard, and silvery Gandalf hair. More of my drawings are glimpsable on the wall behind me. I look like the kind of seedy old curmudgeon who yells at neighbor kids who walk on his lawn.
But I’m really not what I look like.
I am a writer. So I am full of experiences, ideas, and feelings. And I am also full of people. Valerie is only one of those. I create fictional people from the people I knew or knew about in my little Iowa town, Rowan, where I grew up. Kids that went to school with me. Their parents. Shopkeepers and business people and creepy old people that I sometimes encountered. Hot tempered people. Wise people. And stupid people who were often laughed at for good reason.
I can also draw on (and draw pictures of) all the people I knew as an educator. More than two thousand kids who passed through my classes in four different schools, some of whom I knew as well as I knew my own children, were available to pull details from to mix and match and make fictional characters from. Fellow teachers, some gifted with a natural way with students, some hopelessly lost in the wrong profession with the wrong sort of personality were also available to make characters from. Fools and idealists. Bullies and shrinking violets. Heroes that possible readers could look up to and love.
I am the kaleidoscope, the thing that you can look through to see the world and have it refracted and patterned to make it beautiful, even in its ugliness.
But all of this reflection is only that, the view in the mirror, the outward look of the man who is me. Mickey at sixty is many things, not all of them pretty, not all of them wise. But some of them are. And some even better than I think they are.
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