TamlinMediaco

"Dragonfly, fly by my window"    

  -Paul McCartney

                   Everything is going down as a dry run at present - snd check time. Learning what can an can't be done - am a little pressed for time and will  expound later - as always w/ dealing with corpse you have to take into consideration their monetary schemes and google is no different in that regards.  tamlin 

here's alf

                      It is traditional in many parts of the world to begin a concert/mass with an invocation to the muse and since I am a traditionalist I follow this rule.

It is inspired or modeled upon Shakespeares poem "The Phoenix and the Dove" wherein the two creatures, being of different breeds cannot bear progeny.

So too I beseech the muse that all my efforts previous to this moment have been barren in production and that she may bless me with her grace and allow me to bring forth such sounds and vibrations as may begin to praise her majestrie.

It is called "The Schnauzer and the Poodle"

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NFC80BCI

- ALF

N.B. - this track is ambient music - no singing or discernible beat=

plus (if it means anything to you) It's not Kitaro ambient

it's IRCAM ambient. 

Plus we'd like to stream it  but Google doesn't want to host audio files - so must create workaround  or go back to Apple.

Ben And Stella

                     We had been hawling mutes for what seemed like an eternity. This is no exaggeration. All told there were well over a hundred thousand time frames involved for each of us. The crew was pretty good about it. They were not over eager to work and had no nefarious reasons for wanting to go on such long voyages. The real reason the work periods were so long is people tended to want to do the job and then forget about it. They didn’t want to go home and tell their kids about it.

                    They didn’t want to return to what ever their homeworld had become and have to tell their friends and family what they had done for a living. Again it was nothing illegal.

                        I spose we all ought to be better then we are when it come’s to these things. It’s instinct I guess.

In my experience it’s usually easier to deal with a completely Alien thingy then with a hybrid – this is because the hybrids tend to not show their mods until near delivery. Call me prejudiced if you want but I really believe the old wives tales about ‘brids being high stringed and a having a tendency to have nervous conditions. It’s the uncertainty that does them in. They never know when some kind of genetic marker is going to come through.

                            The thing is if you have official authorizations on both sides of the zygote then the beon that is created is human. No questions asked. End of story no matter how dumb or sickly the beon is. If there’s going to be a termination then it’s up to the genome contributors. Most people are sensible about it but some insist that terminations are immoral, for religious reasons mostly.

                                  For the majority of beons though the law is the Biocos are allowed a seven percent failure rate before the DNA is considered unusable and has to be reprocessed. But the Biocos tend to cheat on that. The law was meant to mean seven percent of the code, but they usually interpret it as seven percent of the Beons produced which gives them much more leverage. What happens is the faulty models usually get sold on the grey market at a substantially reduced rate.

Some people swear by them, but you’re always taking a chance unless you know exactly where the code is faulty and that’s not always possible either because a lot of times bad code is corrected in the building process, or on the other hand, good code is somehow mangled in the building process. In any case if you get two or three hundred thousand time frames out of a cut rate beon then generally speaking most people are satisfied.

                                As has always been there’s problems if you get attached to a faulty beon but most people have enough sense to be practical about such things and eventually terminate it.

                                  There’s always been a small minority of people that want to extend legal rights to the beons but they never seem to get anywhere, in large part because the beons themselves are totally indifferent to what happens to them. If anything the beons advocate stronger restrictions on the freedoms of beons because they think that will improve the quality of life for those who are well adjusted.

                               The whole subject is one that doesn’t weigh very heavily on most peoples minds, but I came across a situation recently that made me think about it.

                                There’s a saying that if you want to know what is really happening on a trans or a systrans don’t ask the Captain, because he’s always playing and entertaining, and don’t ask the First Mate because he’s the one actually running the trans. Instead ask the Comlink because he’s got so much spare time he’s always sticking his probes into other people’s databases. As it happens I am the Comlink on the Tor-547, a Tortaloni Class trans carrier.

                            I expect someday to be a Captain, but for now I was doing my service on the Tor. It wasn’t a bad job, mostly because there were no long hauls and we got to stop over at many interesting planets and planetoids. We steered clear of the major trans stations because they we usually more trouble for us then they were worth, and beside the traffic there was usually taken up by a better class of trans. There was also another reason we kept to the littler known pathways. If we happened to not get charged duties for trans ops then the credits saved could be split between passengers and the Captain and crew. It is not quite legal but everybody does it. Central knows about it and they don’t enforce the codes too strictly because it’s a way of keeping the less important zones supplied and they can always enforce it strictly if they want to make an example of someone.

                            We picked up a young girl on Beethoven Three. She says she’s going to Planet Renoir and she has authorizations which seemed to me to be a little shaky. Renoir is a luxury planet with open atmosphere and a very low beon to human percentage. Naturally the first thing I wondered about was what she was doing on Beethoven Three in the first place. It’s not the kind of planet one goes to pick up social networking skills. But I let it pass until I notice she’s being very friendly with the Captain.

                           This for him, having a young beautiful woman interested in him, was not something he was used to. Whether she had some inside information, or just made an educated guess, the Captain was addicted to hydroponic hallucinogens, something he had in common with a lot of these older guys who had seen about all the space they ever would. Of course, I know something the girl didn’t which is that the Captain’s taste run’s more towards young men.

                           It’s not so much a sexual thing with him. It’s just, like a lot of men who fancy themselves leaders he saw himself at best as the war leader of a squadron of capable men. If it happened they had good hair and teeth, and well proportioned bodies, so much the better. He was not that strange a bird, the Captain, and in his way he was a classy guy. Maybe he just took himself too seriously or maybe he just never had the chance in life to test himself to the limits. He’d never admit it to himself but he’d always taken the easier road a habit he regarded as no more, or less, then simple prudence. The crew would laugh at him behind his back.

He’d invited me on short vacations off trans but I never went. I wasn’t comfortable with that and to his credit once he realized it he didn’t seem to hold it against me. His response to the girl, Stella, was different though. It wasn’t sexual, it was he responded well to her flattery and perhaps even he sensed she needed him, and who can not enjoy the idea of being needed?

                        But needed or not, I could see a train wreck up ahead there if the girl pushed him too hard. The guy was not that stable and whatever she wanted, assuming she wanted something, she was probably not going to find it coming from him.

                          Ah, but she was lovely, and not only physically. She had a way of paying attention to a person that everyone finds irresistible. No matter if she knew something a hundred times better then the other person she’s still be able to convince them they were a genius. Who knows what might have happened had things turned out differently, but then they couldn’t, actually.

I tried a few times to engage her in conversation, but once she realized I was the Comlink She seemed to shy away. I remember I was sitting at the screen one time when she walked by.

I said “Hello Estella, how are you today?”

                               And she said something inconsequential, but she stared at the com screen like it was the devil himself. Then she made an excuse and hurried away. I admit my interest was piqued. I ran a few elementary tracers on her and nothing came up. This in and of itself told me something. As they say in the data mines, “Two things matter, when there’s info and when there’s no info.”

                         I’ve thought about her a great deal in the years since I met her. When a boy first meets an attractive girl he tends to see her incorrectly. He over emphasizes her beauty, even the size of her breasts and the perfection of her facial symmetry , but with Stella it seemed like the more I saw her the more attractive she became. Over time I began to realize what I did not realize then, which is that she projected a need, a vulnerability that I and many others found over powering. You just did not want to leave her alone, even for a moment, lest some dark forces, unperceivable yet real, come and take her away.

Those were strange days for me. Life beats us down. It makes us hem and haw. It makes us “careful.” Men become charming, and circumspect, which is another way of saying they learn how to lie better. In defense of this one must say that this is a consequence of seeing the truth yield, shall we say, “negative consequences.” We see the brothers that lie advance in their careers. We see the guys who claim to be millionaires get the girl and when they lose the girl, they get another and we begin to realize that it matters not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose.

                                   It’s always been this way and if you are too young to have learned the truth of what I speak, don’t worry, you will, you will.

                          But there was another factor, one which doesn’t seem to have changed over the years. Between the beons and the zygotes (or Zee-Goats as we used to call them in school) and the strong hierarchies, love, whatever that is, doesn’t seem to play much of a role in things. It’s like a vestigial appendage - something left over from an earlier stage of the human race when it perhaps performed some function. Now it seems the less we are bothered by it the more fortunate we are.

                       And yet the damn thing won’t go away. Love is a disease, a madness that causes us only pain and the loss of social prestige and we are confronted always with evidence that it only hampers ones career opportunities. For women, who have for a long time measured love by one’s bankbook and ones physical attributes this is not so much of a problem but for men it is a nightmare.

                              In short Stella could do nothing for me. Just because she was beautiful, and vulnerable and terribly lonely some part of me responded by wanting to take care of her. Had she been otherwise, had she been a woman of means, it would not have been the case. I could not sleep nor eat after awhile and began to spend my time investigating, as best I could, her back ground, but she remained a mystery.

When we were less then sixteen time frames from Planet Renoir I almost did something really dumb. I almost hacked the nav system so that we’d spin out half a light year. There seemed nothing else to do. Then I decided I would be selfless for once. Love is a cruel beast yet within that beast lives the heart of the God. On Renoir, I was certain some guy with a better gene code then me would pick her up and take her away with him. She would be with someone who deserved her.

                            How little I knew back them. Love is the greatest paradox in the universe, one before which all science and mathematics must bow!

                        There are so many things I could say and see today that I could not see back then. Is this not cruel in and of itself? Now that am old and unwanted I begin to understand the complexities of life and my understanding can amount to nothing!

                            What is human understanding you ask? It is something that happens in those brief moments when the fogs of desire and self protection are blown away. Then and only then can we see things as they are and such visions as are permitted are soon lost again in the illusions of being and consciousness.

The harsh truth is it was not her purity and strength that drew me to her, but on the contrary, her disease and her weakness. She was a mutant. Of Oz Mutantes. It was the First Mate who informed me. He stopped by my console and said,

                        “We’re taken up a collection for Stella. There’s a terra former from one of the smaller planets in the Ravel System who knows a place she may survive – either that or she’s terminated.”

Then he showed me a photograph. It appeared at first to be a large spider. It was naked and hairless and it’s body was a round ball. The head seemed to be made of a hard substance with prongs of a wire nature protruding from the upper lip. The arms and legs were long and very thin, ending in what seemed to be claws. The body was entirely whitish grey.

                           “This is what she’s going to look like in a few years. The transformation will come almost overnight and if she’s not in a special environment she’ll be killed instantly. The Chief asked the Bioco that made her if they were interested in further research but they denied any connection,, which is only to be expected.”

I was numb. Yet in that numbness, so close to unbelief my mind carried on as if this sort of thing happened everyday.

                       “Yes, well they would say that wouldn’t they?”

                                     “I wouldn’t even hazard a guess how she came about but we think she might be second generation. Some idiot farmer on Beethoven Three couldn’t keep his pants on, then the mother was killed when she transformed.”

                         That then was why there was no record of her childhood.

                            “Does she know?” I asked

                                 “Nobody ever came out and told her, as far as I know, but she’s got to have her suspicions.”

                         I gave the mate what little credits I had and said if at the end they needed more I would borrow what was needed. He nodded his head but it was only to assure me he doubted not my good intentions.

I saw her one last time. She had requested of her guardian that she walk by my console. There was another trans alongside the T-547 and she was moving to it. Her guardian was a gruff looking man with the full body suit that suggested he’d at some time suffered a skin disease.

For whatever reason she had undid her long blond hair and it fell in waves over her shoulders.

“Ben, I’m going to planet Renoir now. If you’re ever in the neighborhood…”

“Yeah,” I said

“Stop in and see me” she said

“Yeah, I will”

Then she walked away.

That was many years ago and many times have I cursed the God that made me,

And many times has it cursed me, leaving me friendless, famililess and childless

Yet I swear before all that is and all that will ever be

No man ever loved a woman as Ben loved his Stella

And she loved I, for she needed me.

G.R.S.

Oct 2011

New Paltz, NY USA