Another Graphic from Butcher Billy’s Space Oddity Series

You can see a complete game of Space Oddity played out in the original post.

I’m going to tell you a short genre story that makes sense of the inscrutable lyrics of an otherwise popular song. I’ll do it in very brief parts to keep things interesting. There will be weekly clues.

Your job is to guess the song before the story is done. The first person to correctly guess the proper song receives…High Praise Indeed ™.

No one hit on the right song last week, so refresh your memory on Song 2, Clue #1 and then dive into the second clue below:

The prisoner, Ternie Suffragan, held fast to his cot to keep from floating. The gravitons had been bolted to his feet, making them like lead. His bones were nearly insubstantial now and he prayed against fate that his skin would simply rip like paper at his execution so he might die swiftly. Perhaps the thin, impure oxygen of the prison would kill him first.

The part that bothered him most of all was that his memory would die with him. He looked at the trembling eyes of his accuser and he remembered when he had first seen them. Ternie had been a much younger man, and those same eyes belonged to a boy. His ranting accuser did not share the memory; or at least he had the political savvy not to mention if he did.

In those days, as now, Central Forest had thrived on stolen sunlight and a twenty foot ocean of augmented dirt. Of all the hydraulic, hydroponic, hydrogenic miracles that kept their great ark alive, harvesting dueterium, mining the harpooned, decades-rare asteroids in the grand bay, it was Central Forest that had become the Chief Miracle of all. Back then, the population held steady at about 700 souls, not many more than had been aboard for the secret launch of the Arisch in 1939. Still, there was only one place on the entire vessel where an individual could hide – if only for a little while – and that was the great park.

It was there that Ternie had performed his first illegal marriage. The initial religious restriction of strict, short-term polygamy on ship had quickly proven moderately untenable, but so-called “covenants of pairs” were still considered selfish, traitorous actions.

He had just finished his fourteenth such covenant that year, which, had it been known, would have been a scandal with an instant death sentence. He cautiously exited the Forest into the port-side exhaust hallway only to find the boy, Robert Morhtwedt, waiting for him there. He didn’t know his name at that moment, nor recognized that he had his mother’s eyes – only that those eyes were trembling, and that, at last, Ternie had been caught.

He quickly suspected the truth: he had once married the boy’s parents.

The words choked in the boy’s throat, but he managed to release them.

“You killed them. You killed them both.”

A few hints that were discovered last week: Song 2 first aired sometime between 1971 and 2016, and songs overtly about trains, ships or even spaceships can be ruled out.

Any guesses?
Next week: Song 2, Clue 3 (if necessary)