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.
*****
If you are going to entertain a completely absurd notion like, “Shakespeare wasn’t really written by Shakespeare”, then you have to have some knowledge of the times and the context within which such a profoundly counter-intuitive thing could possibly be true. And it also helps to understand more precisely what the “writing of Shakespeare” actually means. Now, I know it is not particularly fair to confuse you, dear reader, right before I try to dazzle you with my complicated and over-thunk lackwit conspiracy theory, but that is, after all, what obfuscation actually means.
The Be-Bop Beat of Mickey’s Brain
Truthfully, when I look back at the string of posts in the picket fence of this daily blog, I fail to see the overall map of it in any semblance of pattern or order. Honestly, I did not set out to be purposefully wacky.
I did, however, set out to be purposefully surreal. I mean it, I consciously put bizarrely dissimilar things together in an attempt to find parallels and connections in unlike things because, not only is it funny and surprising, but is a comic act that serves to keep the mind nimble and never numb. I do think quite a lot. And I try to see connections between things where others wouldn’t. For instance, the Coppertone girl with her bare butt and Bullwinkle with his unicycle are both being threatened in a way that is both comic, and taking advantage of their inherent image of innocence. Neither will lose anything by it. The girl stands to brown her pale white behind in the sun, while Bullwinkle will probably land on his head and it will make a decent cushion to preserve him because of it’s empty and rubbery qualities.
I must also admit to a bit of the old telling of stretchers, the misrepresentation of the truth, the loquacious layer-onner of lies. Not Trumpian lies that land on you like elephants dropped like bombs out of B-52’s. Instead, fictions that entertain and elucidate. It is the most likely reason I keep saying connecting words and phrases like “truthfully” and “honestly” and “I mean it”. Those are words that liars love.
Yes fiction writers like me tell little white lies.
I have now published my novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children. It is a novel based on real people I have known and loved and listened to. It is about an old German woman, a survivor of WWII concentration camps, who loves to tell stories to children and bake gingerbread cookies, especially gingerbread men. It features a pair of teenage nudist girls who believe in going completely naked whenever you are indoors, even if you are in someone else’s house. It features Nazis, both in flashback and ghostly forms. It also features fairies from the Hidden Kingdom of Tellosia, a fairy kingdom filled with little three-inch tall magical people living under our very noses. And it has a werewolf in it, though admittedly a very young one. It is a comedy with its requisite sad parts, and it is definitely an example of surrealism. It is also full of lies… err, I mean fiction.
But the real purpose of this supposedly be-bop brain fart in blog-post form is not so much to explain my blog (because how do you explain a blog that goes from Flashbacks and Foobah to telling about Madman Trump to Another novel part… #37 to Centaurs to a book and movie review, to this eccentric and eclectic thing, which probably exists more to make alliteration jokes than anything else in the most musical beat I can bang out?) but to prove that I do often think about thinking and how things fit together and what it all means… and how to write a run-on sentence that adds to the effect rather than simply annoys. And, yeah, I’m doing that. And it feels like a good thing to do.
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