Another Little Bit of Stardust from Space Opera (Patreon)

Thanks to everyone for being patient with a slight delay in rewards--to make it up, here is another little tidbit from my Sekrit Project which is so Sekrit I can't actually tell you what it's about, except that it's called Space Opera and it'll be out next May. All my Totally Voluntary Test Subject already got to see the first chapter, this one is the beginning of Part 2. Hope you like it!

 

8. Hunter of Stars

Mira and Oort were wrong, by the way. There are shy, nerdy predator scientists. The Things of Thing-World will, very occasionally, venture beyond the opportunities afforded to them by 24/7 slaughterparties and exploding blood. 

Scorpions do go to the moon. 

Take, for example, the Yurtmak of Planet Ynt, a deranged gutter ball of gas-jungles and carnivorous rivers hurtling through the beer-bottle-strewn lanes of the gravitational bowling alley that is septuple star system Nu Scorpii. Improbably, the body of an adult Yurtmak is basically the same as a human’s, if slightly a snailier color and capable of producing a pernicious pheromone from its nipples which has an effect on the IQ of any foreign visitor quite similar to the effect of a folding chair on a professional wrestler. Unfortunately for all of us, they also have heads. The head of a Yurtmak can best be described as what you would get if a hippo mated with a chainsaw and produced something you wouldn’t let into public school even with a hat on, who then went on to have an unhappy affair with a spiny pufferfish, whereupon, at the height of a particularly pustulant, turgid puberty, the resulting grandchild’s face exploded. The Yurtmak are obligate carnivores for whom murder occupies the same cultural space as football does for humans in a World Cup year, complete with merchandising, celebrity players followed by hordes of fans, and families gathering of a Sunday to bond over the the spectacle, maybe hitting the backyard to show off a few trick shots for the kids.

Yet the famed philosopher and beloved children’s author Goguenar Bloodcannon was Yurtmak. Even as a juvenile, her carnage was workmanlike and derivative at best, leaving her outcast, underemployed, and unpopular with men of her peer group, despite the best efforts of modern Ynt-wide dating services. Goguenar took this reasonably well, for a Yurtmak. She fondly stabbed her mother and father goodbye, carefully avoiding major organs, and vanished into the wilderness. Eventually she settled down, built herself a traditional heartvalve-hut in the depths of the fluoro-chloro forest of Yllir and buckled down to invented a way, any way, to get off that rock full of socially-challenged chainsaw-faced hooligans. 

That is what Mira and Oort forgot, having always been, if not popular, always cool. No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species. And so it was that, eventually, between drawing meatship schematics in the dirt and dreaming of a world where she didn’t hate literally everyone, the shiest and most sensitive of Yurtmaks began to plan the most ambitious massacre in the history of the galaxy: the murder of stupidity. 

The fateful weapon? A large-print, mildly venomous picture book for which the general galactic population feels a level of affection and tender attachment that falls somewhere between Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Goodnight, Moon. Goguenar Bloodcannon’s Unkillable Facts contains 99.9% pure reliable and comprehensive laws of the universe as observed by an underachieving socially anxious mutant murderhippo, and is considered to be as essential to a healthy, balanced childhood as hugs, nightlights, and cellular division. It is nearly impossible to forget one of Goguenar Bloodcannon’s Unkillable Facts. The gently envenomated pages produce flashes of temporary but breathtakingly colorful pain as you turn them, so that the simple, heartfelt prose is charred into the reader’s sense-memory with incredible efficiency.

This is Goguenar’s Second General Unkillable Fact: For everything that exists, somewhere in the universe, there is a creature that eats it, breathes it, fucks it, wears it, secretes, perspires, exhales, or excretes it. If you want to argue with me on this one, consider the Brick-Breathing Beast of Ballun 4 and shut your cakehole.

You have already heard the First General: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice is anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

Given her sales numbers, Goguenar Bloodcannon, Assassin of Ignorance, is, to this day, idolized among the Yurtmak throughout the seven slaloming stars of the Nu Scorpii system as the greatest serial killer ever to play the game.

Perhaps, if humans had been able to read the First General as a bedtime story like everyone else, they wouldn’t have had such a terribly tough time figuring out the whole trick with interstellar spaceships.