Canto 28 – Rock and Roll Starship
The Megadeath was the only available starship left in four Parsecs of space in any direction from Don’t Go Here. Ged didn’t want to travel in a Trav Dalgoda concept, but left with no choice, he trusted Frieda’s demonstrated skills as a shipwright and spacecraft designer. He could use it to travel if only he could recruit a space crew. He needed a pilot, an engineer, and a navigator who knew how to figure coordinates from Xavier Tkriashav’s memories of nearby systems in unknown space.
The finding of a crew proved quite difficult. All they had was a pool of marooned talent left by Lupin corsairs, mostly the dregs of the spaceways. Tkriashav had a telepathic network set up on the planet, and there were some primitive crystal radios. Otherwise, the planet was bound together by a word-of-mouth commo system.
All they could find was a rather motley crew. Vince Niell was the only pilot to apply for the job. He was a merchant pilot who’d lost his final ship to Lupins in the Mingo star system. He wore mirrored sunglasses even in the dark. He had a leather flight jacket which he wore over his Fredsuit. He signed on for a pair of pants, some underwear, and a baseball cap from Ged’s own wardrobe. He wanted Ged’s brown fedora, but that hat was non-negotiable, being needed always on Ged’s own head.
Nikki Sixx was a guitar-playing engineer with bright red hair that he wore long down to his waist. He had his own hand-made electric guitar and broadcast speakers even though he had no generator to make electricity for them. He had blue ovals tattooed around each eye, and he had skulls tattooed on his bare chest. He wore Bam-Bam shorts and also carried a medium-sized stone-caster. He signed on to keep the engines purring on the promise that he would be allowed to play guitar whenever he had free time.
The third crewman was the hardest to find, and easily the one Ged would’ve most preferred to replace. He gave his name as Cold Death. He was a white-skinned near-human with skin that looked like snow and was surprisingly chilly to the touch. It was like shaking hands with a snowman. He had strange black triangles tattooed around his eyes and wore a neon green Mohawk for a hairstyle. He also had two ivory fangs like Dracula in his mouth. He, too, was unnaturally attached to a guitar. He, too, was willing to sign on for a chance to play Heavy-Metal Rock-and-Roll.
Ged’s only comfort with this crew was the fact that they came cheap. He didn’t have any Imperial coins or electronic credit-exchangers to pay them with anyway. But the music gave him headaches.
Before leaving, Ged helped Tara use the Hammer of God to build a downport on the surface of the planet. All Tara had to do was take Ged’s blueprints and descriptions, picture them in her imagination, and then telepathically download them into the Hammer. The device shot a stream of purple energy into the dirt at the construction site, turning the silica and clay into a pool of microscopic nanobots that made her mental image grow into reality before the startled eyes of the cave men of Don’t Go Here.
Plans were made for housing and high-rises to enhance the economy of Bedrock and the planet Don’t Go Here. A shuttle system was built to help Tara get starship building supplies up to Frieda and farmers up to the grange station. Ged promised many that he would come back soon to begin training spacers to man the space ships they would build. The Hammer of God allowed them to boost the planet from a quasi-stone-age to the space age in next to no time, Flintstones into Jetsons, so to speak. Of course, Ged had promised a lot of commitment on the part of both his brother and himself.
Finally they were prepared to leave Don’t Go Here in the hands of Tara and her father, Bam-Bam. Ged, Tkriashav, and little Junior Aero would head out with the crew of the Megadeath to visit Tkriashav’s world and the system of prophecy. As Ged said a final, difficult goodbye to the beautiful teenager, Tara Salongi, he never imagined that he wouldn’t be back to see her again within the year. He never imagined a lot of things that would make the memory of that one goodbye one of his greatest regrets.
The 13th Sense
I know that you are probably thinking, “What the heck are you thinking, Mickey? There are really only five senses!”
And I am probably thinking, (ignoring the fact that I should know for certain what thinking is present at least in my own stupid head), “Oh, I think you are probably wrong about that, considering carefully that I should only think this and not say it out loud, because people get mad when you suggest that you are smarter than they are.”
Besides the five senses we all claim of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, there is also that one people often refer to as “the sixth sense”, and by that phrase they don’t necessarily mean that you “see dead people who don’t know they are dead”. Instead, that sense is kinda like a sense of intuition. A feeling that you simply know what is about to occur, or you know something about something that you could only really know if you have ESP… Or if you are Spiderman, it is your “Spider Sense”… wiggly lines radiating from your comic-book head.
And what about the sense of hot and cold? Or the sense that you can’s breathe the air in the same room with your cigar-smoking Republican uncle, you know, the one with all the toxic opinions you are forced to listen to too often? And there’s a sense of contentment. Or the sense of happiness. A sense of dread. There are all kinds of senses that your magnificent stupid-old brain constantly responds to that you really haven’t been counting.
,
Of course, I am not writing about any of those today. I am writing about that old “Sense Number Thirteen”, the sense of certainty that every pessimist lives by, the sense that your natural daily bad luck won’t kill you today, but only because it would all be over and prevent more suffering if it did.
Yes, it is Sense Number Thirteen that makes you prepare yourself for the worst, because you simply have the sense that it is destined to happen. I dread going to the mailbox. I know I will hate what I find there. This week I found a letter from the IRS, who has already accepted my 2017 return and the first installment of my tax payment, suggesting that they may reopen my case in order to determine if I owe them more money. And I got the hospital bill that I have been dreading because I cannot afford to pay it.
I dread walking the dog also because there are two pickup trucks, one black and one silver, that routinely roar through the 30-mile-an-hour neighborhood doing sixty or seventy. One of them is going to run over my dog while she has me on the leash, or maybe even run over one of neighbor Frank’s grandchildren. Anyway, we are preparing by organizing a neighborhood petition and complaining to the police. The Thirteenth Sense really screws with my life. But it forces me to prepare.
The hospital payment department told me that they are going to send paperwork that will help me pay the debt by forgiving part of it, since I am already bankrupt over medical bills. I was taken pleasantly by surprise by that. I have so far successful avoided thinking about the IRS. Those jack-booted shock troops apparently aren’t going to show up at my door until next week. And the police cruiser has been on our street twice already since I last talked to Frank, and they put out one of those speed limit signs that shows you in bright red lights how much over the speed limit you are going.
So, there’s the saving grace. A pessimist gets to be happier in the long run than the optimist. By preparing for the worst, the pessimist is ready for the bad thing to happen, and either deals with it as it comes, or is pleasantly surprised at an outcome devoid of extra suffering. A pessimist is never taken by surprise for the worse. I’m glad I have a 13th Sense. It helps me be a HAPPY stupid old pessimist.
Leave a comment
Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, pessimism