The Sack of the Redmond Line's Gerrald short story
The short story "The Sack of the Redmond Line's Gerrald" forms the source material for my feature screenplay "Minnie Finster," a semi-finalist in the prestigious Final Draft Big Break! Competition. I bet it's the first time a script has ever placed so high written from a story that began as a rather vague attempt at a pun on the name of a Gordon Lightfoot song.
I have to admit to having been somewhat influenced by the late yet still hilarious Douglas Adams in the writing of this short story. At the time I set it down, I wasn't sure if I'd created a fantastically quirky and amusing pastiche of space opera and Mafia family saga, or the most offensive story I'd ever written.
Time has proved the former to be far more possible, but I wait in some fear for the heavy footstep behind me proving that the "Fat Ladies' Mafia" was not in fact a figment of my imagination, and additionally lacks a sense of humour...
The Sack of the Redmond Line's Gerrald by Jen Frankel
I
The famous Redmond Line (Of Fine Fleets and Otherwise Awesome Ocean Liners) declared bankruptcy after sinking all of its assets into one last swan-dive extravaganza, the known universe's first interstellar commercial cruise ship.
It was a bold move, but nothing could have saved the Redmond from oblivion, after seventeen decades of horrible mismanagement. There were some that said that the sudden plummet in the value of Redmond stock in the spring of that year was a direct result of the ridiculous attempt at alliteration in the company slogan. Others pointed out the obvious culpability of the advertisers, who billed the maiden voyage of the new ship as a sixty-and-over cruise, and were considerably chagrined to discover that two-thirds of the registered passengers had passed away during the twenty-three year delay between booking and sailing, and that most of the relatives of the deceased were refusing to pay up.
Laying the blame for the Redmond Line's demise will probably never be accomplished to anyone's satisfaction. The sad end to an era of incompetent but always entertaining shipping is only a small prologue to the greater story that would never have happened without the decision of the Redmond's president to cut losses as much as possible by raffling off all unclaimed tickets on the universe's first international cruise ship, and the possession of one of those tickets by Minnie Finster, the timid writer from New New Jersey.
This is the never-before published true account of that same story - of Minnie, her connection with organized crime, alien space-rats, and most of all, the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. Gerrald.
II
The Gerrald was nobody's idea of a pretty sight. Even the name was an eye-sore, painted in fuchsia across the bright red of the bow.
And who would call a ship Gerrald anyway? What famous Gerralds do you know? And what happens to the idea that ships take a female pronoun if you give them male names?
Nothing at all had gone right from the first stroke on the drawing board to the setting of the launch date. Even as she - he - before the thing even left the International Earth Docks to take up space in space (space that could have been filled a thousand better ways) after the longest delay ever in holidaying history (twenty-three years), it was evident the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. Gerrald was going to be no picnic.
For one thing, the Gerrald's decorator, Sandora La Bintra, was unconventional to say the least. She was the latest of the "Homogeny" artists to come crawling out of Greenwich village.
The Homogenies were reported to subject new adherents to all sorts of torturous initiations that left them without much of their sight, and with a strictly limited palette. This produced hideous enough results in their fine art, but their interior decoration was the real horror. Still, she had been very cheap and that was the first consideration in all of Redmond's decisions.
True to Homogeny tradition, Ms. La Bintra chose only two basic colours for the Gerrald's decoration, red for the outside and purple for the interior. It was no sight for people who wanted to maintain their health.
It is generally accepted that it was standing admiring her work on the interior of the Gerrald that drove Sandora to suicide soon after the ship was christened.
But the ship itself wasn't the only problem. There was also the Captain.
For starters, the Gerrald's Captain had an impossibly bad sense of verbal imagery, which meant, basically, that he couldn't construct a metaphor, or make an analogy, or even find the right words to express his thoughts to save his life.
If the idea of incorrect metaphors doesn't disturb you, take an example from the Captain's past.
During an important negotiation with a group of interstellar terrorists, the Captain remarked that the leader of the bandits was as thick as a brick, possibly meaning he was being a good sport. Negotiations broke down, naturally, and plunged both sides into another year of vicious battle.
Still, despite his inability to distinguish `shutting up' from `shutting down', it hardly mattered in this case if the Captain was mentally competent or not. After all, you were only dealing with civilians, and a pretty silly lot of those if you asked us and have a nice day, if you really think you should.
There were other problems, quite apart from the Captain's belief that you carried a tune for someone with whom you were in love, and a torch was a kind of dilemma you took by the horns.
The Captain stood two point five meters in his bare feet. However, no one would have guessed at his height being so outlandish, with such a potentially commanding presence, because he was always sitting down, in an archaic Earth-style chair-litter no less. He had to be carried everywhere he went by six porters who should have been otherwise engaged in portering, which didn't go down terribly well with the crew, you may guess.
There was a simple reason for this. The Captain was not human.
The Captain was in fact a Centauran, a member of the first alien race man had met on his twenty-five years of travels between the stars. The crew was all Earth-born, and there was a reasonable amount of animosity toward aliens still, perpetuated by the very un-Earthlike culture of the Centauran race.
The Captain was probably unaware of any hostility toward his command. Centaurans had much trouble understanding Earth-style authority.
In fact, the reason the Captain always sat down was simply because, in Centauran society, the higher in status one was, the lower they were allowed to remain. The King of Cent Two, feudal capital of the Centauran system, hadn't moved above a squat in the thirty-eight years of his reign. Most often, he remained prone.
No one knows the exact origin of this custom; possibly it stems from the fact that many Centaurans have as poor a sense of verbal imagery as the Captain, or maybe it was something to do with high gravity and low-flying aircraft. Needless to say, the crew of the Gerrald felt righteously forced to look down on their leader.
The manner in which the Captain had ended up with command of the Gerrald hardly pleased the crew either. Simply put, it was public relations, or maybe more accurately, a necessary case of doing the least damage possible in a difficult situation. It was another case of hugely misunderstanding the customs of another race.
To explain: when the Centaurans had first been established as a friendly race and nominal political pleasantries had been exchanged, the remarkably human-like aliens had insisted on taking an Earthfleet Starship Captain into their armada as a gesture of good will.
He was made an official member of the Imperial Low Command of the Amalgamated Centauris, and accorded all honour due to that station.
Earth, forced to reciprocate or risk destroying diplomatic relations with the only alien race humans had ever encountered, had offered a prime commission to a Centauran of his government's choosing, which was more dangerous than it sounded.
Judging from the gossip issuing from the Interstellar Communications Department during this time, the fun-loving Centaurans had jumped at the chance to play a practical joke on their new allies, and had landed Earth with the least competent, least knowledgeable, least likely to succeed of all their officers.
If the International Earth Corps (`Bureaucracy and Inertia for a Happier Tomorrow') had been prone to listening to gossip from the Interstellar Communications Department, they would have discovered what was already general knowledge to all twelve billion Earthlings not involved in governing their planet.
It seems that the Centaurans were already known far and wide for having the worst sense of humour in the universe. A series of `Centauran jokes' had been making the bar circuit almost since first contact (most of them having originated in the Interstellar Communications Department anyway) involving the Centauran's ridiculously bad sense of humour.
These popped up all over the world in fact, translated into Earth's most obscure languages. For example, in a rare South Ibadan dialect, the `Joke of the Week' three months running went
`?dkjeu guut SED ig?.....Fekifk siiif looe!'
Roughly translated: A Centauran telling a joke - `Why did the chicken cross the road?' (pause as he waits for laughter).
Centaurans haven't yet been able to grasp the concept of punchlines.
So, since members of the International Earth Corps didn't frequent bars, or listen in on ICD gossip, they had no idea that sending the Captain to take the proffered Earthfleet commission was actually nothing more than a bad joke.
The Centaurans were understandably confused when the IED failed to call their bluff, but, when the Captain was assigned to the Gerrald, a worse joke than even a Centauran could have thought up, the aliens felt justice had been well served.
Besides, it really couldn't have been nicer for them to drain some grease out of their space navy's complexion, and toss off a bit of driftwood clogging up the inspiring downward fall of the Centauran Low (and getting lower every year) Command.
Unfortunately, the Centauran surprise at Earthfleet's acceptance of the generally more than incompetent Captain was so great that no one remembered the Captain hadn't been briefed on a good number of important facts about life in the universe, because no one thought the joke would last more than a week.
III
Minnie Finster was perturbed.
No, it was more than that. She was truly, genuinely ticked off.
She stood on the observation deck of the god-awfully ugly purple-interiored ship Gerrald with sixteen-hundred hype-happy holiday-goers, wondering if she'd have been better off on a conventional ship, where at least she'd have been able to throw herself overboard, and also if it was too late to murder someone and be sent to the blessed quiet of a jail cell.
Minnie was ticked off because she hated being tricked by her mother, and her mother's trickiness was the only reason she was on this vacation.
The last time she let her mother get the upper hand had ended with Minnie getting married to a nice young doctor from the New Brooklyn Bronx.
She had thought she was standing in for an actress friend on the set of the popular soap `Bells for Bethany'. It was only when they wedged her finger into the purposely too-tight wedding band that Minnie had caught on and made a run for it. It took Luigi's Garage twenty minutes with a hacksaw to get the ring off.
