I'll Find Your Planet

The diminutive globular manager wasn’t putting Cherry’s psychic powers under any strain in his bids to commune with her from the other end of the auditorium. In fact his despairing gyrations and palpitations were most expressive on a purely visual level, especially in the wake of one earth-tremor and the annihilation of an outdoor passage. Keep calming them down! was the general gist. We’re sure to lose them otherwise!

Such a worrier, Cherry privately thought. Someone should remind him the whole point of her generation was they came pretty well shockproofed as standard. Still, Cherry supposed it was his dance-hall, so she signalled accordingly to the band.

At once her insectoid six-handed bass-player began to pluck the very line, with accompanying harmonizations in his deep melodious voice. It brought a steady sky of blackest velvet arcing overhead, while the backing-trio pushed from softly pouting lips such interwoven rises and falls as to illumine that spectral firmament a thousandfold. On Earth it would have been the quintessential oldie, transporting even the youngest of listeners to a mythic past where love and life were somehow so much simpler. Cherry’s audience however, for whom this was new, were living that time now. The second gender rested a cheek on one palm and with sighs of inner tranquillity surrendered to the romance, while the first dared hope that later they might find themselves in the happy position of doing the same. Then as imaginary heavens poured their afterglow down upon these limpid-eyed lotos-eaters, Cherry and her tender tones slipped effortlessly in.

Above the Xandreth rooftops and the wreckage of building-site and ship, Blaster-Track, his Commander and Spookan the Sinister were setting down to a very different manner of discourse. The last-named was fallen, his lank frame outstretched on the prison-transport’s hull.

“Now, Spookan, do you yield?” inquired Blaster-Track Commander, his crimson companion parked by his side. “Or perhaps I should call you Prince Agaric. For yes, I know who you are.”

Spookan hauled himself up onto his elbows and inclined his mouthless mask at the valiant duo.

“Then you know likewise that in apprehending me, you strip the one named Phoenix Prime of all support pledged her by my Back Garden dominions,” he observed. “An admirable military stratagem, if what you wished was Phoenix Prime’s death, or for her to languish in Alliance custody the remainder of her days. But was it not your aim to restore her instead to the bosom of her loving kin?”

“I need not ask how you know of this, for your vile kind is reputed to be telepathic,” returned Blaster-Track Commander. “But I might ask why you imagine such an outcome cannot be, now you are defeated thus?”

“Because Phoenix Prime will fight on,” Spookan explained, not without a certain artfulness, but assuredly too. “She believes herself to be in the right. Her actions are inspired by a cause she is convinced she is upholding. So shall she strive on, even against impossible odds, even deprived of my resources, my army. Perhaps she will die in so doing, or perhaps she will be brought before Alliance justice, and live out her life hating those who denied her when she sought only to defend her beliefs. In either case your female, she who is known as Carmilla Neetkins, should lose a sister. Ever after when she looked on you, you would see that hurt in her eyes. And you would know some of the blame for it was yours. I cannot think you want that,” Spookan concluded, his tones tinged with mocking sympathy.

This time there was no response from Blaster-Track Commander, and for a while no conversation at all, save for a low chuckle from Spookan which gradually began to rise.

“Something new has come upon the galaxy,” he declaimed. His lilting incantatory voice was strangely like song, akin to Cherry’s at least inasmuch as it held the potential to work enchantment, though it was doubtful Spookan meant for his to be anything so benign. “And not even our oldest and most stalwart defender is immune to it. He does not know what it is. It troubles him, for nor does he know whether it is right or wrong. To think he was once so certain as to what both of those were! All he knows is that this is the way he now feels, and that he feels so endlessly, agonizingly, whenever she is near. Do not presume you can keep such matters from me, you sack of blood and bone. It is no crude human telepathy we sons of Empress Ungus boast. It is something far more, and only my elder brother Draxu was more skilled at it than I.”

“We’re not here to listen to your overdone prose, pal, we’re here to shut you down!” the jeep Blaster-Track put in stoutly. “Right, boss?”

But still the Commander remained silent, such that soft strains from a distant dance-hall were all but audible as Cherry continued. When the Commander’s words came at last they were addressed not to Blaster-Track, but Spookan.

“You speak as if you knew of some alternative, creature,” said he.

“How astute,” was Spookan’s reply. “As is your precious Carmilla Neetkins. She sees already that her sister’s choice is indeed what Earthlings would call the biggest mistake of her life. Phoenix Prime does not want war between Toothfire and The Back Garden. I do, and my empire does, and so shall Scientooth. In due course Phoenix Prime will discover she could scarcely have found followers who cared less for her so-called cause than we. When that time comes, she will leave us. And gladly may she do so. She has served her purpose even now. Scientooth and his skills were all we sought.”

All three eyes on the face that hid Prince Agaric’s seemed to be smouldering a subtle red.

“Let her make the discovery on her own,” he proposed to Blaster-Track Commander, his voice not far from a whisper. “And then, by all means, vanquish us. Thwart our wicked warmongering scheme. For poor remorseful Phoenix Prime will already have fled to her family, just as you would have it. Still shall you save the day. Only now, your loved one’s heart will no longer be the price.”

“Boss…?” Blaster-Track repeated anxiously. “Boss, this isn’t what Carmilla wanted!”

“It is not what she said,” corrected the Commander. His speech was slow, and all the strength of it gone. “That she was ready to make such a sacrifice, I have no doubt. But loyal Blaster-Track, if I am to profess I care in the smallest measure for she of whom we speak, then the duty of safeguarding her happiness must surely be mine.”

The stars never lie, so like them I’ll be true,

Sang Cherry,

And follow my heart ’til it leads me to you;

So it was that Blaster-Track and his Commander together on the roof of the fallen transport watched Spookan the Sinister’s stringy skyborne shape beat a path into the black beneath Xandreth’s stars, making swiftly for a tomorrow which the Commander had handed him, while Cherry’s band in the dance-hall played out the last bars of their waltz:

My star-chart’s the one written deep within me,

I’ll find your planet, and how happy we’ll be.

“I’m not sure if this was a good idea, boss,” stated Blaster-Track.

“I am sure of still less, old friend,” the Commander confessed readily, to his comrade and also to the wide luminous night, through which Cherry’s longing lyrics sounded one last time:

I’ll find…your planet…and how happy we’ll be.

NEXT: 'DARK MATTER DATE'