"A
War of Cosmic Insignificance"
(Science-fiction)
 The people of a planet knew their sun was
about to go nova. So they built a generation ship so they could leave and
survive. They didn't quite make it... but then again, maybe they did.
I have to say, finding out this story
had sold to Blood, Blade & Thruster was one of the best feelings.
This story is less than 1,400 words, but it has been a devil to sell. I
wrote it nearly 16 years ago, not realizing at the time that what I was
writing was what would be considered a "Feghoot" which, although once
popularized by Reginald Bretnor in his "Through Time and Space with
Ferdinand Feghoot" stories, are no longer quite as popular. Basically, a
Feghoot is a short "shaggy-dog" tale that ends with an atrocious pun...
sort of a "speculative fiction shaggy-dog tale."
Anyway, I've sent this off to several
places over the years, and it was always rejected with a snicker and a
"That was cute, thanks... but it's not for us." I'd resigned myself to the
fact that I would never find anywhere that this could find a home. But in
November 2006, I sent it off after reading the very amazing writer's
guidelines on BBT's Web site (which told me these folks had good
senses of humor and were at least as twisted as I am).
Whaddaya know, it worked. They loved it.
And they're publishing it in their second-ever issue in January 2007. Let
me tell you, this is a slick-looking magazine with fantastic covers!
Anyway, at this point, I've typed almost as many words
telling you about this story as the story is long! And below will be a
painfully short excerpt from "A War of Cosmic Insignificance."
And this issue featured an interview
with the one and only Piers Anthony. (Or, as many fans jokingly call him,
Pier Xanthony.) It's exciting to imagine that maybe Piers himself read my
work!
A nice review of the issue in general on
Tangent Online, with a specific note about my piece:
- Scott M. Sandridge at Tangent
Online: "David M. Fitzpatrick
gives aggressive Scrabble playing a whole new meaning in 'War
of Cosmic Insignificance.' An alien race from another planet fails to
escape their star system in time before their sun goes supernova.
Bizarre radiation rips their souls out of their cooked bodies and
transports them to Earth where they end up inhabiting the playing pieces
on a Scrabble board. Has this advanced alien race learned from
their past mistakes, or are they destined to obliterate themselves in a
foolish war on a game board? A humorous story with a serious meaning..."
Read more...
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 "A
War of Cosmic Insignificance"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
Many thousands of years ago, a random
star in some distant cluster went supernova, taking out every planetary
body in its own system and everything for a few billion miles' radius to
boot.
The technologically-advanced inhabitants
of the star’s sixth planet had seen this coming for many centuries. Long
before, they set about building a generation ship that was to carry their
entire population to another inhabitable world. Shortly before their sun
exploded, they set out across their galaxy. They should have started out
earlier, for they were not quite out of range when the star gave up the
ghost. The ghost met the generation ship, which was just outside the
system, in the form of a near-lightspeed shock wave. Fortunately, they
suffered no physical damage either to their bodies or their ship—at least
not from the force of the wave.
Unfortunately, the wave carried with it a
unique type of concentrated radiation, formed in a powerful, focused
pulse. Of the passengers, nearly all got sick from extremely lethal doses
of radiation and died, leaving the generation ship a galactic graveyard on
course for a distant planet that no longer mattered.
However, some of them were killed
instantly as the pulse passed through them—but their life forces were
caught by the pulse. Like a celestial arrow, the pulse beelined across the
universe, carrying those life forces with it.
* * *
It was far too late for the four
opponents to continue their game, so they agreed to finish the competition
the following evening. The Scrabble board sat, bathed in the silver
moonlight that shined through the sliding glass doors in the dining room.
The square-gridded board held numerous wooden tiles spelling out various
intersecting words. The tiles were held firmly in place by little ridge
walls, because this was the deluxe version; barring an attack of the house
cats, the board should have remained undisturbed until the following
night. Fate and the universe, however, had other plans.
* * *
After a million years spent traveling at
the speed of light, the focused radiation pulse entered a star system with
nine planets. As if with conscious effort in mind—although, in truth, the
trajectory and its ending point were simply the mathematical result of
sheer, dumb luck—it rocketed straight toward the strong gravitational
force of the star in this system. Fortunately, the ancient energy pulse,
now weakened considerably since its birth from the supernova so long ago,
was stopped by a blue planet blocking its path.
The pulse rippled through the atmosphere
and streaked, straight and true, for the surface. As if it had always been
on target, it fired down over an ocean, across a continent, low over a
forest, and finally shot weakly through the glass of the patio door and
into the dining room. The pulse hit the Scrabble board and met its end
there. Too weak now to penetrate solid matter, it quietly settled down
after its long journey.
The tiles began to move, and then they
stood up on invisible feet, destroying words all over the board and making
the game illegible. Certainly, the house cats would be blamed for the
destruction. In the upside-down box top, face-down tiles turned their
newborn letter-faces up to view the sights.
The souls of the only survivors of that
doomed world, souls that had been caught in limbo for eons, were finally
physical again. They were also not too happy about the whole situation,
having been incorporeal for so long only to become Scrabble tiles. In
fact, there was some dim understanding of the letters, the language, the
nature of this planet—perhaps more of that than of their own original
personalities. Some sort of cultural osmosis perhaps, but they didn’t
understand it...
* *
* * * * * *
*
And then primal instinct takes
over... and all Scrabble hell breaks loose.
To read the whole story, visit
www.BBTMagazine.com and order the
Winter 2007 issue.
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