Starship Castle

On the outskirts of our solar system, there is a small chunk of rock and ice that is not referred to as a planet.

It is not Pluto.

This chunk of rock and ice was never noticed by ancient astronomers, and was never named after a Greek or Roman god, but its inhabitants call it The Pebble.  They call small stones pebbles, too, but when the T and P are capitalized it’s referring to the chunk of ice and rock itself.

The inhabitants of The Pebble aren’t colonists from Earth (which is another confusing name), and they aren’t terrifying space monsters.  They don’t have acid for blood, they aren’t telepathic, and they aren’t a mind-wiped military outpost that will one day destroy Earth.  They have no spaceships (but they do have other forms of space travel), and they certainly don’t have nuclear power.  On the whole, they live far more simply than most other intelligent species.

The inhabitants of The Pebble are penguins.

Lenny swam through the inky blackness around The Pebble, looking for fish.  There seemed to be less recently than he remembered from a few years ago, but the rookery’s leaders insisted that nothing was amiss.  ”Part of the natural order,” they squawked.  ”Some years more fish, some years less fish.”

Despite their assurances, Lenny was worried.  He was having to swim further and further to catch a meal.  He was afraid that something was causing the fish to leave The Pebble.  Last week he’d spoken to a passing whale said he’d noticed the decrease in the food supply but hadn’t given it much thought.  Since whales migrated in-and-out of the system regularly, the availability of kelp was constantly changing.

Lost in thought, Lenny didn’t notice a black shadowy object hovering above and behind him.  He did notice when a glowing orange beam surrounded him.  ”That’s funny,” he thought.  ”There’s sort of an orange circle on the ground, and I think that’s my shadow in the center.”  As he began drifting towards something that looked like a giant clamshell, he wondered if there were fish inside, and whether it would share with him.

Lenny woke up lying on his back. He was in a brightly lit room, with white walls and a smoothly polished stone floor. The penguin rocked his weight forward and flipped onto his feet. He waddled in a circle, examining his new surroundings.

There were several other things in the room with Lenny. A few were other penguins, one was a buzzard, and one was a coconut that rolled around making a worried squeaking noise.

“Well, this is probably not a good thing,” Lenny said.

The coconut rolled over and bumped into his stomach. “Squee squeek squeek squee,” it said.