58. 16 February 2019
Saturday morning. You have section three of Chapter One of the originalMerlyn's Mind(©2006) below for work. I will help you with the error corrections and clarity when you are ready to begin. - Amorella
18 February 2019
Monday evening. You are slowly working through sectionthree of Chapter One now titled "FutureDreamOne". Last night, sister-in-law Linda arrived to spend the night. Today you and Carol drove her to up to Marion where you met Patty who took Linda up to her house in Tiffin. Tomorrow, they leave from Detroit to Newark to Iceland for most of a week's adventure. Tonight, you spent time talking on the phone to Craig and Alta about setting up another week together at Madeira Beach, Florida next October or November. - Amorella
2138 hours. I am ready to finish up this section three, tonight if plausible.
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FutureDreamOne
Trexer rubs the dark sweat from his forehead, “Problem,” he says quietly, “we have a captain.” He scans for his current mate, Hartolite, pond in his life. He whispers, "Where are you?" Trexer’s heart pours into an eddy. His reasoning shifts to a conscious flood of trained equations balancing his survival instincts. If Ship remains, thinks Trexer, stress will break the machinery. We shall languish until death’s sleep. The antigravobars trickle by Ship’s engine. Ship lies an exposed withering vine clinging to a hollow stump. Minding the tearing teeth of physics, Trexer winces. He whispers, "Hartolite, where are you?" Trexer stands theatre-like raising a curtain of fingers to halt his stubborn tongue. Careless courage jabs haphazardly while his bright green eyes refocus. He automatically becomes conscious in a deeper level: ‘I am Tall Trexer, Ship’s Master Engineer.’ Then, in only a second or four of time, the master engineer says aloud, “Captain, we have a problem.”
With fingers dancing while standing barefoot on Ship’s grassy floor, Captain Fargo inquired, “Is blackanot on?” The childhood and adulthood of two hundred years earlier on popped into memory and an old phrase flashed, ‘the brighter the berries, the more shade in the head.’ Fargo queried again, “Is blackanot on? Is beacontohome on?”
“Yes," replied Trexer, reflecting the resonance in his old friend’s secure voice, “but Ship’s not running. I don’t know why.”
Captain Fargo’s eyes reflected a flashing storm cloud. We four are stuckinagray. Is this the event foreshadowed from Homeplanets’ prophets? I am a good runner, a very good runner. Ship is a very good runner too, and normally we both follow our homing instincts. My feet are ready for a running, but here I stand. Our fellow marsupials at PrimeThree do not detect us missing. Trexer’s eyes are set like dead rocks. I am the only one on board experienced with the native Earthlings. Why, o Godofamily, did PrimeThree keep Friendly home? She’s my best friend. I am her companion. Beacontohome is on. Blackanot is on. Friendly and I had a flawless first trip here twelve years ago. His eyes drew to Ship’s living grassy floor. He shudders - back then we two found the bony remains of billions of Earthlings one-year dead. Godofamily, I need Friendly here now. Fargo asks Trexer, “How long before critical?”
Trexer, with eyes appearing as old tree knots, responds, “One week.”
“One week? Time-wise, antigravoskimming is nearly complete. We must be near Earth’s sun. Can’t we pushanpull blackanot to off and navigate by sight?”
“We can’t risk exposure. Blackanot remains on,” replies Trexer strongly; “besides, we could disrupt solar functioning if we are too close. Our rule is to run. We have to run, this is how our species survives," grumbles Fargo. "We are not stand-an-fighters like earthlings."
“Running gets us home, Captain,” reinforces Trexer. The thin-lipped engineer turns from Ship’s instruments and digs his toes into the well-manicured floor of mixed and trimmed home grasses. I draw my eyes to the rocks between the wildflowers. I stand in Ship’s central breeze and smell the tall and wild-leafed bushes nearby. I view Ship’s blue sky streaked with white spidery wisps; long stretches of spinets set to dim a marsupial Ship’s artificial sunlight. The distant crooked limbs of wild swamp oak stand thirty to eighty feet tall. Trees run up the sky and down to dirt. Marsupials like us run Ship.
Trexer watches for the playful antics of the squirrel-like rodents who lived in the environment. Food, he thought, fish, and furry rodents. Nature sucks us in for the swallowing. Why do we worship Nature? I will never know? Look, see how serene and tree-like the captain now stands. He glances about. There is no presence observing, just us two and Ship.
I love Ship, reflects Fargo, but I see doldrums moving into Trexer’s eyes. “No returning to HomePlanets until we complete our mission,” snaps Fargo. He ruminated - twelve years ago Friendly and I made Homeplanets’ first direct contact with Earth natives. We found two women and two men after a plague killed more than six billion. Now I return with a crew of three. The survivors did not want our help except for medical supplies. Friendly and I scrutinized our biochemical probes and found no hint of the problem that lead to those billions of quick human deaths. Each of the four surviving natives must have a genetic mutation that allowed herorhis survival, but we never have discovered what it is. It isn't wishful-thinking though, that's a known. Our clergy had foretold we would have a similar plague years ago, but nothing happened. One malcontent even predicted our sun would darken for a second or two then re-flame and burn us to cinders. Where do Marsupials outlandish fears come from? Obviously, humans have similar fears, but now there are far fewer. We know better than to believe in the implied injunctions of our clergy. Yet, here is Trex terrified at the prospect that we are stuck in the mythical gray, in an eye blink between this universe and another. He thinks we are a doomed voyage, that we marsupials, like the Earth natives, are the lock and key of a long foreshadowing calamity. The fuller minds of Earth natives and ours are as alien to ourselves as we are to each other.
“Checking Ship’s machinery,” states Trexer. “If we survive, this will be my last hop-and-skip from the other side of the galaxy.”
“We have a week,” mutters the captain. “We . . . .”
Trexer interrupts, “We have a working Shuttlevator believe it or not."
“Good,” grins Fargo, “Shuttlevator will take us to Earth.” The captain double-checks instrumentation. “Shuttlevator is not functioning, Trex.” Where's Ship, why isn't he fixing this?
***
Elsewhere on Ship Hartolite is talking with her crewmate Yermey. "We can’t afford to disrupt Ship's gravity when we don't know where we are.” For comfort Hartolite slides her hands into her pouch through the horizonal slit in her dark blue overalls. “What do you think, Yermey?”
“We should be within a day of Earth,” ruminates Yermey, “There should be a way to check this without blackanot off even for a nanosecond. There is no sense of adding to the possibility of discovery.”
“I don’t think there is,” adds Hartolite, “There are only a few humans on the planet.”
Yermey gave her one of his finest disgruntled looks, “Fine, Hart,” he comments, “Let's get to the base and work our way up.”
She dryly comments, “I think it is a timing problem. For some reason we are at this point early and Ship’s debating what to do.”
Yermey smiles, “We have a week, I’ll think of something. Lighten up.” His mind muddles. Hartolite is always like this when she sleeps with Trexer.
Hartolite continues, “If we are stuckinagray, ParentsinCharge will direct Ship Two to search us out.”
Yermey the agnostic reflects on the ancient Marsupials myth of the Great Fall. I don’t believe the myths or our clergy - yet old stories hint at truths. There is a close connection between our concept of Godofamily and the Earth natives’ concept of Godofamily. The Earthlings have similar ideas and concepts to us - even the story of the fall of the Angels from Grace before creation of the universe. It is interesting. These far seeded myths may be genetically predisposed. I am positive higher consciousness is a condition of natural law, not metaphysics. Why did the few Earth natives not die? Hartolite needs to study their genetics more closely, but then that's why we're here.
Hartolite deliberately interrupted Yermey. “I told Fargo you will solve Ship’s problems -- this being stuck business is just one of them.”
Yermey frowns while pushanpulling the fabric-chute for his clothes, then, frustrated, he scratched himself unperturbed. He looked directly at Hartolite saying, “We’re close enough to Earth. Where are my overalls?”
“We can fix the Shuttlevator,” comments Hartolite confidently. Chuckling, she adds, “You are a cutie, old and naked, but still a cutie.”
“You women think we marsupial men look cute naked our twig curled and small dangling. That’s the only reason.” Yermey breaks into laughter seeing Hartolite smile. “We know why you and Friendly want to visit Earth. We know the women of HomePlanets talked after Friendly returned with a box of paper soda straws twelve years ago." He shakes his head, "What a humiliation for us males.”
Breaking into a broad smile, Hartolite, brusquely states, “You men are a crumpled lot, with a squatter-bush of pubic hairs constantly in need of scratching. Scratching what? The mighty bendable twig, the soft and the slow, the uncalculating and uncurling of a twiginatwig. When Friendly pulled a human made paper straw from that box, folded it in half inch segments and let it dangle there I thought I would die laughing. When she told me what Earthlings used those straws for, I lost my breathe in the humor. Within a week the women on all three planets knew the joke. We had a plague all right, just like the clergy had predicted, but it was a plague humor, at least for half the population.”
“Yeah,” grouses Yermey, “You enjoy our fingers crawl-to-pouches though, luckily we have fingers more easily aroused.”
Hartolite feigns a blush answering, “You mostly arouse our patience.”
“Yeah, well, gripes Yermey while slowly dressing his cock-of-the-walk old legs, one at a time, into fresh overalls he found in the clean clothes chute.
***
Late that night Trexer and Hartolite privately lay together. He says softly, “Hartolite, I don’t like being stuckinagray any better than you. I saw you glancing at our suicide capsules on the nightstand as though you were about to take one. We have most of a week left. Yermey will solve the problem. He pauses, I am dumbfounded that we haven't heard from ParentsinCharge. It is inhumane for them not to note our problem. It is very unMarsupialan.
Hartolite gives Trexer another quick kiss and replies, “Yermey can’t solve a stuckinagray. You said so yourself not more than ten minutes ago.” I’m the psychiatrist, she thought. I’m debating which one is the quick suicide and which is the terribly sick pill. We take them both and become terribly sick. What a way to end our lives anyway. No one else on our three planets has ever solved the trick as to which pill kills and which one makes you sick. If anyone can solve the difference in the two pills, Yermey will. In thousands of years no one has ever even come close to being about to tell the difference. She gives Trexer another peek.
“Do you need a little action, Trexer? It’ll be the first time in seven months.” She notes his quiet smile as he slid his right hand into her pouch. She whispers, “you are sixty years younger than any of us. You were the best patient I ever had. We held hands for the whole time you recovered from thinking fevers.”
“You want me to play dead,” pans Trexer, “like one of our tree rodents?”
Hartolite turns closer and drops her right hand to Trexer's upper thigh, stroking down to his knee and back. She comments gleefully, "Let’s see what I can get cooking.”
“I’m not really in the mood,” he asserts as he half-heartedly stops her hand. “I’m tired and we are under too much stress.”
“You silly boys are never in the mood,” giggles Hartolite. “Don’t you feel good when I do this?” she leans down kissing his stomach. “Too bad you boys don’t have pouches too.” She blows a kiss further south, but it might as well have hit his toe nails for all the difference it makes.
Trexer mutters with a bit of frustration, “What would we do with pouches?”
“Well,” she said coyly, “I could slide my hand further in and down.”
Trexer’s voice takes a boyish tone, “We’re all pouch babes. Hand in a pouch is not much different than holding hands.”
Hartolite sighs, “Not true, Trexie, and you know it.”
Trexer stubbornly sits up, “We all share one another privately,” he says. “You are in my bedinabox. What else are friends supposed to do? You should respect my being tired.”
Hartolite smirks teasingly and whispers secretly.
Trexer quickly nurtures a deep, sexual laugh. “So, you have decided to bed each of us fellows; playing away, hoping it will induce a creative means out of our situation. Is that not your plan?”
Hartolite rolls over rakishly, "Not quite, but I thought it would do you some good." She pauses, Rub my back will you, Trex and my inner thighs too. You know, to relieve the stress we are feeling.
Trexer begrudgingly complies and says, “Okay, Hart. Let’s try the sexual physics for an eventually cuddled sleep.”
***
The next morning Trexer awakes alone. He gets up and pushanpulls bed into the floor thinking Friendly is always upbeat and positive like Yermey. I can never move her to gloom. Hartolite is a good cuddle babe. She is no doubt manipulating old Yermey, Fargo and me. Women. Sex. We men would just as soon do our public works in peace then sit around and tell manly adventures. The women pop us in those pouches before we are babe crawlers and never let us go. Men grow up expect at least a hand-in-a --pouch. The women never seem to tire. We men are distracted with sports or community goals. Sex is way down on the list, but -- he smiles, last night was good -- Hartolite sure knows how to twist a twig.
***
Later, after a day of consideration and attempted options the crew sits at the small communal table for dinner. Trexer looks to Fargo, “I’m sure the problem is in Ship’s machinery.”
Hartolite quips, “This is yet another reason for Ship to be referred in the male gender, even with neogravoengines, our middle-aged Ship is like you men. I am the sole woman on board to get you men to work. Friendly would have you cracking. We need to stand Ship on the top of his non-navigating head and turn him over for a quick kiss and tickle. That’ll wake him up from this stuckinagray sleep of his.” She pauses perplexed and with a bit of finger theatre says, "Where are his little balls anyway?"
The men laugh in childhood comradery. Fargo smirks, “We jog to solve a problem and end up nearly dying of exhaustion, perhaps Hart’s right, we need to do a kiss and tickle.”
Trexer comments dryly, "I'd rather work myself to death."
“I agree with Trexer,” says Yermey. “We need a solution before an untimely one is made for us. Our sole woman on board will slight us until we do something.” He takes time for a long yawn, then continues, “Why don’t we close blackanot, and head home on the Shuttlevator, it’ll get us there in a pinch.”
Fargo mutters, “Shuttlevator will not move because Ship thinks he’s near HomePlanets.”
“Ship thinks he is home,” replies Yermey, “but I think he is nearer Earth than we suppose. Something is running against the grain here.”
“Can’t we trick Ship then?” asks Hartolite. “Ship’s an entire computer and ego-bionics system combined. He has an animal-like consciousness. Ship knows to run for home when things are not safe, and if he thinks he is home like Fargo says, then why would he move from where he is?”
After ten minutes of silence Fargo comments, “Ship may think two opposites are true, ‘Ship is home andShip is not home.’ He has developed a schizophrenia. This stuckinagray may be as Hart suggests, a psychological not a machine malfunction.”
Trexer adds, “Ship is what he is."
Hartolite raises her left eyebrow, “I agree, Trexer. Ship is in a funk.”
Yermey asks solemnly “Can’t we give Ship a perspective he does not have? Perhaps, a sense of conscious freedom will arise, and he’ll naturally run either on to Earth or back to HomePlanets. We have been focusing on the science and not a Ship philosophy, though I cannot come up a reason for a philosophical consideration in Ship’s navigation. I'd like to try.”
“Good, Yermey,” says a sparked Hartolite, "Let's hear it."
Yermey begins. “Marsupials used to be cannibals; we shared the bodies of the dead to survive the Great Starvation. What was that historical struggle for?” Yermey pauses, thinking of Friendly, the first marsupial to make herself known to an Earthling. “Darkansoul,” he mutters. As a last resort, before pill time, I am willing to turn blackanot off and hope the antigravobars don’t do a loop. We are runners. Stopanstill is not for us marsupial species. Let’s remake Ship’s grammar so he’ll be fluent enough to finish his objective and ours too.”
Fargo smiles; the crew will now work the plan not to ask Ship a question but set a command 'to Earth'followed by a period not a question mark. His memory drifted - when Friendly and I did our first study in human Earth history we concluded our original trip would be somewhat analogous to the first European explorers contacting American natives. We were sure the native peoples of Earth would think of us as coming conquerors just as the Native Americans came to think of the Europeans. Fargo continues.
We have better built and more lasting machinery. Our goods and knowledge would sway the Earthlings our direction whether they liked it or not. The Earthlings would grow to dislike us. They would fear our colonization and our potential diseases. Humans would fear the loss of their worth and dignity. Self-identity would dry up. Our secret fear was that Earthlings would eventually stand together and fight us tooth and nail. Our arrogance, they would say, that you people could dominate us with your culture and ways. We have regional rights. Leave us to our own business, they would shout. We have seen enough of foreign empires in our days. Money and power are as a mosquito and its bite. We have endured enough. We need to rid the world of more foreign tyrants.
Fargo scratches his left ear, and then rubs the back of his neck. He sits in continued contemplation. Earthlings would stand and fight while we would run. We are not pedantic European settlers, and the Earth cultures of today are not analogous with the indigenous Americans of yesteryear. When we finally arrived on Earth that first time, there was no one to greet or to destroy Friendly or me.
Fargo suddenly beams and said, “I am a shy and slow with man manhood as Hartolite knows. She knows the three of us all too well. Women teach and raise us up with their deliberate and measured methods. We need to work this stuckinagray problem in a woman’s subtle manner. We need Ship’s immediate psychological profile, and we must provide him with a broader perspective than he has at present. We must toy and humor him as Hartolite would with either marsupial or human.” Fargo pauses and smiles in sexuality, “perhaps Hartolite, you could whisper sweet nothings in Ship’s masculine ears, and he’ll perk up on his own. He glances at the others, don't you think?”
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On another passenger craft, unknown to Fargo and crew Friendly is already near Earth. She thinks, I sit directing a Class A Shuttlevator from Homeplanets through a quick slide of antigravobars to stop near the orbit of Mars. My secret objective is to land on Earth with blackanot on and wait for Fargo and crew before setting out to discover the remains of that once populated human colony.
Shuttlevator’s machinery stops short, near Earth’s moon. ‘I am not where I am supposed to be. Blackanot is on.’ I pushanpull the manual blackanot defaults, but by Godofamily - data shows billions of human people existing. How can this be? The large city near the lake appears a good target so I will set for it.
With a pushanpull of switches Friendly maneuvers Shuttlevator to Earth near a small grove of trees. A few homes lay on the edge of the tree line. ‘I can ease in and hover invisibly just above the trees. Blackanot is on. Billions of these people died; Fargo and I were witness, yet on this Earth billions appear still alive.
PrimeThree sends the directive to wait for Fargo. Where are they? The Earth date: 14 June 2020. Fargo and I first arrived here on 14 June 1988. This is thirty-two years after the great Earth plague, and exactly twelve years after Fargo and I first arrived and found four human adults and a small baby alive on the planet. Whatever plague occurred in 1988 has not happened here in the year 2020. Billions of people are alive at the very time I say to myself, ‘these earthly humans are dead and don’t know it.' That's how this appears to me. Fargo, Hartolite, Yermey and Trexer and Ship are not in the sensors. They are not stuckinagray as they believe. Where are they?
***
> Hello. I, am the Soki,and I will have some observations about this FutureDream in most every chapter. The marsupial crew is presently stuck in large Ship of their own making. People everywhere are also stuck in identities also of their own making. The individual has a voice to speak his mind. I am a Floater between the Living and the Dead in this, the first of three books, I have discovered that the Dead have limited rules. What are the rules for a Floater like me? Presently, I have only a vague notion. Were I but a tiny eggshell, the whole of all Living would be within and the Dead without. I roll across on the nature of the Dead and so do the Living whether they realize it or not. <
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