Adagio 7 – The Planet of the White Spider
The planet Gaijin would prove to be the closest thing to home for Ged Aero since he and his brother left the planet Questor. It was a singularly beautiful world. A water world orbiting the star known as the Old Yellow Man. It had sixteen continents all roughly the size of India on old Earth. The ample oceans of the world teamed with sea life. Like many places where the Ancients left their imprint, there was a substantial population of Cetaceans; dolphins, porpoises, and whales that were genetically identical to those of Earth. The most common form, the Emerald Dolphins, had a language and a sort of non-tool-using culture based on the sharing of stories, songs, religion, and poetry. They interacted with the native humanoids very little. It is a shame that the dolphins didn’t care to be the dominant life form on the planet. Their way of life was far less disease-like and virulent than the that of the eventual dominators.
The Gaijinese were themselves an artificially melded race. They once had been purely a race called the Sylvani, inhabitants of the star lanes since before the memory of any living race. They had been willowy humanoids with long, silky white hair and lemon yellow skin. They were very intelligent and relatively long-lived, reaching ages of 500 Earth years and up. Such racial goodness is supposed to be a star marked on the celestial score-card of existence. They had, however, run afoul of another pre-Earther space-faring race called the Tellerons. The Tellerons of the planet Telleri were green-skinned amphibian humanoids, hairless, and possessing a single shark-like fin sprouting from the apex of their skulls. They would do their best to undo Sylvani goodness. The Tellerons had conquered and enslaved the gentle Sylvani before they met the first Earthers in space. It is probable that most of the Telleron technology that Earthers stole in turn in order to become a space-faring race was originally created by the noble Sylvani. The Tellerons, however, used the technology to colonize and conquer rather than study other worlds. It seemed only fair in the long run that they would be displaced from their dominance of the Orion Spur by the combination of the primate Earthers and the reptilian Galtorrians who were both worse and more violently ruthless.
When humans conquered the star lanes held by the Telleron Star Empire, the suddenly freed Sylvani disappeared from known space. On the idyllic world of Gaijin, Japanese Earthers and Sylvani met and fell in love with each other’s complex and poetic cultures developed separately. The dually settled world of Gaijin eventually evolved into one culture made of equal parts of both. Because the two races were entirely compatible, the people themselves changed from two races into only one. They became very Japanese-ritual-oriented and very yellow in color.
So it was when Ged Aero dropped out of interstellar space into the unspoiled star system of the Old Yellow Man, he found a complex and peaceful world that had long awaited his coming to reach outward for greatness.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will made that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
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