Canto 152 – Ged on Mingo
The Ancient Red Dragon starship popped out of jump space to find the planet Mingo bustling with activity. The spaceways around the heavily industrialized planet were crammed with merchant ships of every kind, from gargantuan, cigar-shaped mass haulers to the smallest of independent beetle-shaped personal transports. It wasn’t that no one noticed the dragon-shaped vessel as it arrived from the complex gravitic web of outer space; it was more a matter of everyone being too busy to care.
Three system defense boats came out to look over Ged’s Ancient spacecraft, but as they scanned it and found it was not alive, they quickly lost interest. It had no weapons that registered on any kind of detector. The human signatures on the routine life-scan would tell the transport police that nothing about this unusual craft suggested it was hostile in any way.
“Ged-sensei, we have arrived at the place your girlfriend is hidden,” said Billy Iowa, coming out of his clairvoyant trance. “I see her in the palace below, the one called David King’s Hall in the Ruined Palaces District.”
“It is a shame we don’t have any computer database available on this ship,” remarked Ged. “I suppose even if it did, it couldn’t tell us anything about Emperor Mong or his planet Mingo.”
“We have to get down to that palace and save her,” asserted Junior, looking determined.
“Don’t get ahead of us, Smurf,” growled Alec. “What are the Ruined Palaces?”
“It’s a place where the buildings have all been attacked at one time or another,” said Billy, looking with his inner eye. “Their damage has been preserved as a part of the decor of the buildings. David King’s Hall is one of the three biggest ones.”
“Whoa,” said Alec, half-laughing, “why would they rebuild something and make it look like it’s still ruined?”
“An evil sense of humor,” said Phoenix. “It’s like something Bres might do.”
“You put Bres down too much!” said Alec, suddenly hot.
“No, he can’t be put far enough down, Alec,” answered Phoenix coolly. All could see the air begin to sizzle around the Phoenix.
“Yeah, whatever.” Alec backed off from the subject.
“We do have to go down there,” said Ged at last. “We need to be prepared to use our Psion powers. We know what rot warriors are, but we have no experience of what they can do.”
Taffy King, who had only been looking at the back of Rocket Rogers’ neck before, spoke up. “I grew up around them.” Her blue snake’s eyes glowed with angry fire. “They are like robots who don’t work right. They lurch around and stumble into things, but when they are ordered to fight, they do it one hundred to one. They overwhelm the opponent with bone-headed force.”
“What are they really?” asked Sarah innocently.
“Re-animated skeletons,” offered Rocket. “I’ve seen them before on Bradalanth Colony. They are bones and circuits and some patches of leathery skin. Mechanoids with no brains.”
“Monsters!” moaned Hassan Parker.
“Remember, young ones,” said Ged, “they are easily defeated because they cannot think for themselves. As long as we work together and let no one get overwhelmed by numbers, we should be able to overcome them. I worry more about what other problems may arise as we try to get past Emperor Mong’s living minions.”
“Geez, you sound like an old holo-cartoon show!” remarked Phoenix.
“You disagree with something?” Ged was suddenly a bit annoyed.
“Oh, no. You are right. It just sounds so cartoonish!”
“So, what will we do, Sensei?” asked Junior carefully, afraid of rousing more ire from Ged.
“Sarah? Can you help us see the distant places Billy can sense?”
“Yes, Sensei.” Sarah was capable of transferring images from one mind to another.
“Jackie, if you see the place, can you teleport us there one by one?”
The pretty, brown-skinned girl smiled at Ged for the first time in a while. “You know I can!”
“Well, then, that’s our way in.”
Catch a Falling Star 
Fascination
I am falling apart. My health is poor and continuing to fail. My memory is suffering from an inability to remember the names of things. I find myself in the kitchen having gone in for a specific purpose, and not being able to remember what that purpose was. That is not to say I am not coping. I have quite a lot of adaptability and significant problem-solving skills. But that will eventually become a losing battle. Especially if I get the virus… any virus. So, what am I going to talk about with a dissolving brain and an hourglass of lifeforce swiftly running out? Fascination. I am fascinated by the details of the process. Like Mr. Spock, I find practically everything, “Fascinating!”
Birds and butterflies
My childhood fascinations turned into obsession first around natural things. When my mother would go to Vey Osier’s Beauty Salon, Vey had this fascinating parrot that was probably a hundred years old and knew how to swear really, really foully. I remember that being the only reason I was willing to go there and wait for Mom to get her hair fussed up (What my Grandpa Aldrich, her father, used to call it.)
I remember waiting for hours to hear that bird say the magic F-word or the horrible S-word. Or even the zillion other bad words I didn’t know anything about when I was seven. And, of course, I never did. The bird was mute the whole time during who-knows-how-many visits. But I did get to look endlessly at that green parrot’s amazing nutcracker bill that Vey always assured us would snap our fingers off like biting a salted pretzel if we got them anywhere close to the bill.
And when I was nine I was given as a present a plastic model kit of a Golden-Crowned Kinglet (the bird in that first picture). My relatives knew I was a burgeoning artist since my teachers constantly complained about all the skeletons, crocodiles, and monsters I drew in the margins of my school workbooks. So, I had a plastic bird to paint with all the necessary paints, but no idea what the bird looked like. We had to go all the way to Mason City to Grandma Beyer’s house because we called up there and checked, and, sure enough, there was a colored picture in the K volume of her Collier’s Encyclopedia. I painted it so accurately, the danged thing looked almost alive.
And if you have ever seen any of my butterfly posts, you know I became a butterfly hunter before ever entering junior high school, where Miss Rubelmacher, the rabid seventh-grade science teacher, made that obsession a hundred times worse. (She didn’t actually have rabies, just a reputation of requiring excessively hard-to-find life-science specimens like a nasturtium that bloomed in October in Iowa, or a Mourning Cloak butterfly.
I was able to find for her numerous Red-Spotted Purples like the one in the picture. I got them off the grill of Dad’s Ford, as well as in Grandpa Aldrich’s grove. And I eventually caught a pair of Mourning Cloaks as well on Grandpa Aldrich’s apple trees, though not until summer after seventh grade was over for me. I could tell you about my quest to catch a Tiger Swallowtail, too. But that’s an entirely different essay, written for an entirely different thematic reason.
Needless to say, my bird fascination led me to become an amateur bird-watcher with a great deal of useless naturalist information crammed into my juvenile bird-brain about birds. Especially Cardinals. And my fascination with butterflies opened my eyes to a previously invisible world of fascinating and ornately-decorated bugs. (Of course, I should’ve said “insects” instead of “bugs” since I absolutely did learn the difference.) And I still to this day know what a Hairstreak Butterfly looks like, what a Luna Moth is (Think Lunesta Commercials,) and how you have to look at the underside of the lower wings to correctly identify a Moonglow Fritillary Butterfly.
During my lifetime, my fascinations have become legion. I became obsessed with the comic books done by artist Wally Wood, especially Daredevil. I became obsessed with Disney movies, especially the animated ones like The Rescuers, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. I rode the bucking bronco of a fascination with the Roswell Crash (and the actual alien space ships I am almost certain the U.S. Army recovered there.) And so many other things that it would make this essay too long, and would probably bore you into a death-like coma. So, here’s what I have learned by being fascinated with my own fascinations;
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