Canto Thirty-Seven – On the Moonbase of Gundahl
Starbright used the material synthesizer to make a wide variety of synthetic meat dishes. Tellerons really didn’t care for that sort of protein-heavy fare, but if the synthesizer had not run out of molecules in the storage bin, the little lizard people would’ve eaten until they burst like over-filled balloons. As it was their little lizard bellies were round and stuffed to the point of hurting on the synthetic meat and Skoog gravy. The lizard children all curled up in satisfied but stomach-achy balls on the control center floor and drifted off into hibernation-like slumber.
“Now that you fed them into a stupor,” said Farbick, “I will pick up all their weapons, and we are in control of the situation at last.”
“You don’t fight fair,” growled Stabharh the violent little lizard man. “You are not supposed to win the battle by feeding my troops into a coma. There was no blood and death and drama. Where’s the glory in that?”
“I don’t think we were looking for glory,” said Starbright. “Victory for us is staying alive… and possibly finding a new place for our people to live.”
“Not here!” protested fat Bahbahr. “This moon is my sacred property, legally purchased with the blood of slaves and warriors, and owned by me and my family for all time.”
“You have family?” asked Stabharh surprised.
“Well, not any more. Senator Tedhkruhz probably ate them when he took over Predator’s Preserve and all the military bases I owned on that sub-continent.”
“What about these children?” asked Farbick. “Were you going to share this place with them?”
“No,” said the fat overlord, “we were planning to eat them, since we are running out of edible food all over the planet. These are all merely low-class slaves and chattel. I might’ve saved a female or two to fertilize eggs with… there don’t seem to be any other living nobility besides Tedhkruhz and Rekhpahree and a handful of their kin.”
“Those young soldiers still belong to my command,” growled Stabharh. “You will turn them over to me when you let us out of here.”
“What if we don’t?” asked Farbick. “We could put the two of you down on the planet with the force-field box you are trapped in. We could keep this Moonbase for ourselves, and let Harmony Castille teach these lizard-tadpoles some manners.”
Bahbahr howled incoherently at that.
“What kind of mind-control device is a Harmony Castille?” asked Stabharh. “Especially one that is strong enough to control lizard brats that I have trained as killers? It would take a very powerful force.”
“Harmony calls it Christian Bible-teaching,” said Starbright with a shrug. “I have noticed it has the power to make Tellerons feel shame and self-loathing. And it can apparently also help any species to care about one another in a self-less way. I’d say that was pretty powerful mind control.”
“Well, you better hope it works at a distance,” sneered Stabharh. “You see that monitor over on the control panel? The one with the blinking red warning lights?”
“Yes,” said Farbick, suddenly concerned. “What does it mean?”
“One of Senator Tedhkruhz’s space battle cruisers is headed here to destroy this moon for all time.”
“That can’t be good,” sighed Starbright. “How do you know that that is who it is?”
“Because only Tedhkruhz still has working space ships, and you lot stupidly allowed one of them to survive its encounter with us. He obviously figured out who we were and where we were going in spite of your lah-dee-dah invisibility cloaking field.”
Stabharh’s evil smirk was loathsome and foul to look at, Farbick thought. Even serpents on Telleri, the really big ones, weren’t as horrid to look at as this reptile was. Even if he was about to die right along with Farbick and Starbright, Farbick knew this lizard-man was going to enjoy whatever happened next.
*****
Catch a Falling Star 
The Centaur
The centaur… Kentaur, Κένταυρος, Centaurus, Sagittary… human from the waist up,horse body from the waist down… I hate to break it to you, but the damned things are only imaginary. There are no real ones anywhere. Not even in Thessaly. The half-horse children of Ixion and Nephele are totally made up by goofy story-tellers in the distant past.
And yet, what they actually represent in poems, plays, stories, and myths is a very real part of what it means to be human and what it means to be alive.
There are many centaurs in literature, going all the way back to the Greeks. But my favorite depictions of the man-horses of literature occur in what are basically children’s books. In the Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis portrays centaurs as wise and noble, gifted at star-gazing, prophecy, healing,and warfare. Aslan the Lion, the Christ-figure of the tales, relies on their steadfast faithfulness in his battles against evil and the White Witch. In the Harry Potter books of J.K. Rowling, the centaurs live in the Forbidden Forest just outside of the Hogwarts grounds, always in hiding from the human world and shy, at least until Firenze comes Chiron-like to join the faculty, aid in the teaching of magic, and help in the struggle against the evil of Voldemort. In the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, Chiron himself of Greek myth teaches the young heroes, though the rest of the centaurs you meet in the stories are very Dionysian and basically a bunch of drunken party boys… err… party horses… err… horseboys.
So essentially the centaur has a dual nature. On the one hand they are cultured and learned and wise. On the other hand, they are directly connected to the earth and the natural world, liking the sensual half of the human experience. And it might be important to note… centaurs never wear pants… in fact, could never wear pants.
In Greek mythology, the Centauromachy, or war between the centaurs and the Lapiths, represents a central struggle in the human psyche. The centaurs are pictured as being as wild as untamed horses. They are sensual and willful and try to disrupt the wedding of Hippodamia to Pirithous, King of Lapithae by kidnapping Hippodamia and all the other Lapith women and girls. It turns out badly for the centaurs because they represent unbridled sensuality without rules while the Lapiths (who are directly related to the centaurs as cousins) represent rules and rationality. We all know how that is expected to play out in human society… so of course that is what happens in the myth. The rational always rules in the end.
So I identify strongly with the idea of the centaur. The rational man-part guiding the sensual horse-part. The whole teacher-y Chiron thing… and getting to walk around naked… on four legs. The centaur is a thing to draw and a thing to tell stories with and a thing to invade your dreams. Part man, part horse, and totally unreal.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, commentary, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism