
Adagio 5 – Psion Society
Now, I told you before that I wasn’t a Psion myself. I, Professor Googol Marou, expert on practically everything, must rely on testimony and speculation to tell you about the Psions themselves. Strange people they are, with unnatural powers. Oooh! Spooky! It’s little wonder the Galtorr Imperium was so deathly afraid of them. Still, I suspect that Grand Admiral Brona Tang of the Imperium was himself a Psion, him and all of his clones. So, I believe that the Imperium only feared Psions they couldn’t control. It turns out that Ged and Ham were not the only ones to seek escape from persecution of Psions by leaping outside of known space. It seems it had been going on for so long that an entire Psion Empire had blossomed in the stars just beyond the Imperial Border.
Of the nine billion people living on the planet Don’t Go Here, only a handful were Psions. The few I came to know well seemed to originate from the cavern-world beneath the surface of the planet that bore more than two thirds of the dense population of the planet.
Most of the Psions in our galaxy lived on the worlds of Zanatas and Zarane in the Phoebus IV Star System. It was a good 40 light years beyond Don’t Go Here in the Unknown Regions. It took at least 10 Jumps in space to get there with a good starship, and the Don’t Go Hereians had no ships at all. The Psion Colony Worlds were Tfriash, Kvarii VI, and Rhaskoo. All three worlds were many light years further away. You may have noticed that they are also hard to say. They seemed to have a thing for names with too few vowels in them. Kinda like Poles and Czechs, I suppose.
So the fact that Don’t Go Here had a Psion Master living on it was nothing short of a miracle. The thing is, though, that Tkriashav was himself capable of telepathy, teleportation, and clairvoyance. He had been anticipating Ged Aero’s arrival on Don’t Go Here since well before he found himself marooned upon the planet.
I like Tkriashav. I count him as a friend of mine. But I find him creepy in many ways. It is very unsettling to be around someone who can, in a sudden flash of insight, at any moment reveal to you the manner and place of your death. Oooh! Spooky again! Some things I really wish I didn’t know.
Tkriashav had been the mentor and teacher of several Psions as he lived on the planet Don’t Go Here. He had brought his sister’s family along on the space voyage that had resulted in his being marooned on the planet. Young Friashquazatl, Freddie they called him, was a shape-changer like Ged. He was Tkriashav’s nephew and Tkriashav had raised him since he was an infant, teaching him to control his power.
Tara Salongi, the beautiful girl who saved Ged’s life the first time he completely transformed into another species, was a gifted telepath. Tkriashav had taught her how to use her mind power to heal and to help. She was probably the one student he was proudest of. Bam-Bam Salongi’s only daughter was destined to be one of the most important Psions in the history of known space. That should raise some tremendous expectations in your humble imaginations.
The Psions themselves were only about two percent of the population of their own empire, but their planets were fertile and heavily populated. A large number of people with mind powers were available there to accomplish things that ordinary people could only dream of doing. Therefore, one has to conclude that Ged Aero was not only the right man on the right planet at the right time, but gifted with the right powers and teaching skills as well. Teaching skills, you say? Yes, he was a scout, a hunter, a spacer, and a psion before he met Tkriashav. But after meeting him, he became the most important teacher in all of known space.


So, what are Nebulons? Gyro Sinjarac on the left in the picture is an example from Aeroquest of a Nebulon. They are aliens who are human in every respect except for their blue skin. Interestingly they can even successfully interbreed with Earther humans. This is apparently due to either the evolution of Nebulons from Earther explorers, or, more likely, the galaxy being seeded with Earth humans and Earther DNA by the mysterious alien race known only as “the Ancients”. What is not debatable is that Nebulons have unique skin. The blue skin with high levels of natural copper sulfate in it has evolved as a protection from interstellar nebula radiation. No one who has learned their language and studied their culture has ever identified a planet of origin. Instead, the Nebulons have been a space-born race since humans first encountered them, travelling in their symbiotic space-whale space cruisers. They are a mysterious deep-space race of alien beings who use organic symbiotes, in other words, living creatures, as their pervasive technology.



























Body Image Advice for Truly Ugly People
Yes, I, of all people, should probably not be trying to give advice to ugly people. I have some wisdom about ugliness to share, but only by participation in the world as a member of that class of people that ordinary folk would really, really, extremely importantly not want to see naked. I am not Boris Karloff’s Mummy unwrapped, but I am in no way pretty under my clothes.
So why would anybody with six incurable diseases, one of which is a skin disease that involves reddish pink bleedy spots, ever contemplate becoming a nudist?
Well, horrible as I am, I have had a lifelong yearning for a life lived naked. I recently found an online quiz thing that asked the question, “Should you become a nudist?” Here is the result it gave me;
So, apparently, I have nudist tendencies. I have been concealing a long-standing desire to throw off all my clothes and walk around naked all the time. And I have been doing it all my life. But I am not some mentally ill pervert, or even an exhibitionist. I just have an innate feeling, as I suspect most people do, that I was meant to live a more natural life wearing only the things that God clothed me with. When I think of myself naked, I try to think of myself more like the boy I have drawn here to picture the feelings I have about nudity;
There is a certain innocence and rightness involved in being nude. I don’t generally push it in people’s faces. I don’t plaster a bunch of naked pictures of myself on the internet. Some nudists do. I see a lot of naked people on Twitter now that I have written articles for nudist blogs and joined a couple of nudist websites. But they are not Playboy magazine nudes. They are more often than not the slightly overweight, blobby sort of people that look like oddly bulbous stacks of uncooked pancake dough. They are the kind of unfettered and unashamed personal body images that go a long way toward making me feel better about my fat old blobby-spotty self. If people like that can be proud of their naked form, then my bugged-out eyes help convince my stupid head that I could do it too.
I have been to a nudist park precisely one time. As chronicled in this blog last July, I visited the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. I have been naked in the presence of other naked people. And it really is a liberating experience. Being seen naked by naked girls is not nearly as soul-crushingly embarrassing as I once believed. Especially since being a nudist is in no way about sex. In fact, lewd behavior of any kind gets you kicked out of a nudist park faster than if you were doing the same thing at the Ballpark at Arlington for a Texas Rangers baseball game. (Most of those lewd dudes, admittedly, were fueled more by alcohol than hormones.) Those people at the nudist park did not look at me, scream in horror, and run away. They looked me in the eye, smiled, and talked to me as if I were the same as they are.
So my advice to sincerely ugly people, based on my own experiences as a bug-ugly human being is… become a nudist. Learn to accept your whole ugly, horrible self as an ordinary human being with no artificial veneer. Do not cover up who you actually are. Then, you may begin to see that what you always thought of as ugliness and horribleness is really beauty and grace and healthy human-ness.
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