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The Ship that Visited, a story for the Giraffe Call

Oct2

To [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s prompt.

When the space ship hovered over Earth, everyone feared the worst.

We’d all seen the movies, so many movies about alien invasion. War of the Worlds. Independence Day. Signs. The list went on. They were doing to alien-a-form our planet. They were going to enslave all of us and kill the ones that couldn’t work. They were going to eat us.

When the ship just – stayed there, people started to wonder. The best linguists and the small-stipend-retrainer xeno-specialists started working on communication. Planes circled the ship, trying to find an entrance. The subject of bombing was debated endlessly. Meanwhile, the ship – stayed there, doing nothing.

The scientists went over it with every instrument they could come up with. There was some exhaust, mostly water vapor, but the ship wasn’t sending out radio waves, x-rays, infared – anything. It was just sitting there.

We’d almost started to get used to it. We’d gone back to farming – those of us who farmed – to office crunching – those who worked in offices – to vacations and TV watching and whatever our lives had been like BS, Before Ship. We just didn’t look up, if we lived in the northern hemisphere, or, if we did, we didn’t look too far up.

And then, five months to the day after the ship had appeared, we all heard the noise. It was something like a squeak of a gate, but much louder, and something like the squeal of tires, but lower-pitched. And in the bottom of the ship, ten circles opened up and beams of – oh, I don’t know. Not sure anyone knows, to this day. But we called it steam and it felt like fog, like very thick fog.

Beams of this stuff began sweeping the hemisphere, one three-foot-wide swath at a time. And when they passed by, things had… changed.

My goats were walking on two feet (but only some of them) and I’d found myself with hooves. Cattle farmer down the road had the same problem, and the horse farmer across the street doesn’t really talk right anymore.

Anywhere there were animals, some of them turned out to be a bit anthropomorphised. And anywhere there was humans – everywhere – some of them turned out a bit more animal.

The way I figure it, the aliens had been spending all this time trying to figure out what we wanted – and they’d been doing it by watching anime.


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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/817964.html. You can comment here or there.

Gender Funk Test story-beginning (more Reyn)

Sep8

“Best of travels and a sharp spear on your travels.” The Jesharian, Koyl, had served as Reyn’s translator and go-between with her people for the last year. Now she engaged in an elaborate bow, bending at both sets of hips, one arm sweeping the floor.

“Best of blessings in your stay, and may your rapport with the next human you meet be as smooth as it was with me.” Reyn tried to keep any trace of reluctance or misery from the blessing. The Jesharian were very, very sensitive to such things, and the last thing Reyn wanted was to hurt Koyl’s delicate feelings, especially now. “And Koyl… in the human fashion?” Reyn held out a hand. “Thank you.”

They had been working together long enough that Koyl no longer hesitated. Two spindly blue hands wrapped around Reyn’s. “It has been my pleasure as well, Reyn. It…” Here the blue alien ducked her head in to one side: Jesharian embarassment. “If the world were ordered in the way I please, you would not be leaving.”

“If I had my way, I wouldn’t be leaving, either.” Reyn patted Koyl’s shoulder, an intimacy Koyl had allowed only recently. “I like it here better.”

“We are honored.”

The Jesharian were an immensely formal people, but even so, there was only so long one could drag out the good-byes. Reyn sighed. “I hope I see you again.”

“If the world turns as I bid it, we will see each other again.”

There was nothing left to do but grab bags and toss them into the shuttle, then toss onesself into the shuttle and bow, again, to the Jesharian pilot. Not many humans were allowed on the planet’s surface. It was one of the reasons Reyn had so liked it.

(I know, I know. All this and we’re not even to the gender-funk part. O-O)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/805887.html. You can comment here or there.

Beating Around the Idiom Bush, a story for Thimbleful Thursday

Sep8

Thimbleful Thursday is a new microfic prompt site (mine!). This week’s prompt was “Beat Around the Bush” and the word limit was 200 (180-200).

I barely made it in at 467.

“Look, I know you guys like the social padding and all, but I don’t have time to beat around the bush…”

Reyn knew the phrase was a mistake the moment it was uttered, but the “don’t have time” part was true, and hurry tended to make Reyn slip into old habits, childhood habits.

The Jesharian clicked a blue tongue-equivalent and tilted her head in the manner that had originally made human explorers call the Jesharian
“Cat-people.”

“What is this ‘bush’ you speak of? Is it the vestigial fur-remnant some humans have between their legs?” The Jesharian – Koyl, her name was Koyl – shifted the head-tilt to the other side. “Bush can also mean tired, exhausted, but I do not know why you would beat either of these things. A strange sexual ritual, perhaps?”

Reyn choked back a laugh. “No, no.” Koyl’s eyes narrowed, and Reyn dropped quickly into a bow of apology, with three hand gestures that suggested – as much as a human(esque) body could approximate a Jesharian female’s gestures – that the humble personage of Reyn had meant no offense, none at all, from the involuntary spasm that the humans used in place of a proper laugh. “No.” This time, Reyn’s tone was suitably sedate. “No. I don’t know why we use the same word for so many different idioms, but what this one means is to move around a subject instead of tackling it directly, or to avoid the main point of a subject.” Reyn had a lot of experience translating idiom for the Jesharian, especially for Koyl and her sister-clones.

“So you wish to get directly to the point, instead of properly doing the social dance? Why did you not say so?”

“I – I thought I had.” Reyn facepalmed with both hands, a gesture that was helpfully very similar in Jesharian body language. “Sorry. This one apologizes for the miscommunication. When I am stressed – experiencing unpleasant levels of stress, that is – I start talking like my parents. And my parents used a lot of figures of speech, that is, idioms.”

“I do not mind idioms. They are lovely and color your language, much as the social dance does for ours.” Koyl bowed, a similar gesture to Reyn’s earlier apology-bow. “If you are rushed, the gesture-of-Jeshar we would use is like this.” She planted her feet very close together and clasped her hands at her upper hips. “In our land, this suggests ‘I do not have time for the dance; please forgive me but may we be hasty?'” Koyl winked, closing three of her eyes. “And, since that is what you meant to imply, perhaps we should save the rest of the conversation on idiom for another day?”

“Yes.” Reyn adopted the body posture Koyla was demonstrating. “Yes, yes please.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/805428.html. You can comment here or there.

A Heritage Earned

Sep8

This is to [personal profile] librarygeek‘s prompt and comes after The Heritage that Wasn’t

“Kitsune are believed to possess superior intelligence, long life, and magical powers.”

The dictionaries were not helpful. The online databases were not much more useful. The only place – other than the letters, which were clearly not enough help – where Jen could find any information at all was an old, old, pre-space database which someone had reconstructed as a school project.

Kitsune were benevolent, or mischievous, or even malicious. They were spirits, or they weren’t, they shifted form, or they simply appeared to sometimes be human. The information was all over there.

But that one line: “…believed to possess superior intelligence, long life, and magical powers.” That, Jen grabbed on to. She could not lengthen her life, not on her own. But she could learn magic.

Of course, “magic” did not exist. Of course, “superior intelligence” was a matter of genetics and pre-birth implants and careful training. Of course, kitsune were a myth.

But Jen had been living off-planet just long enough to have learned that Central Bureaucracy had its lies that it needed to tell, and that colonists, settlers, the Modified, and the true aliens all had their own truths, truths which had more to do with what Jen needed than the Central Bureaucracy Registered Facts ever would.

Superior intelligence came from a series of illicit implants, a longer series of sleep-learning in an Earth-banned procedure used everywhere, usually to bone up on a specific subject, and an ever longer series of sessions with a Modified shaman.

The same shaman taught Jen the preliminaries of magic, and set her on the path to a second teacher, and then to an alien, native of the planet on which she & her father were now residing, who taught Jen things Central Bureaucracy had never even thought to forbid.

Kitsune were myth, but on her twenty-third birthday, Jen found herself staring in the mirror at a fox-fairy.


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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/805169.html. You can comment here or there.

The Heritage that Wasn’t

Sep4

To [personal profile] silveradept‘s prompt

It was supposed to work. It was supposed to be right.

Jen’s mother was a kitsune. Her grandmother was a kitsune. Her grandmother’s mother, and her mother, and her mother, they had all been kitsune, as far back as history went and further.

There were no fathers in the history, which Jen had always felt unfair. Her father had, after all, raised her, as her mother’s father had raised her, and so on. The women in Jen’s family did not stay. They weren’t tame, after all.

They didn’t stay, and they didn’t teach. They left a letter. At least, Jen had been given a letter when she turned fifteen. In the envelope – which her father had been saving since he first discovered he had a daughter – was not only the letter her mother had written her, but the letter her mother had written her, and so on, and so on. The letters went back not nearly as far as the history, of course, and the last ones were crumbling and yellow. but they all said almost the same thing.

Your mother is a kitsune, and that means you will be as well… The kitsune are wild and do not stay, but we always pass on our genes… one daughter and one daughter only… do well, my daughter. Thrive.

The letters had come with her when she & her father went off-planet; they took up less than 4 oz. of her weight allowance, but weighed her down with the expectations of ages. “…One daughter and one daughter only…” Kitsune found their fox by the time they were sixteen or seventeen, maybe eighteen or nineteen.

Jen’s twenty-first birthday was on her, and there was no fox, nothing but a girl with an envelope full of ancient letters.

Next: A Heritage Earned

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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/802214.html. You can comment here or there.

Friday Flash: Intelligent Life

Aug29

Written to @ShingetsuMoon’s prompt (here but spoilers-ish) for Friday Flash

The machines started small on Earth, as they had on every planet so far.

They found the brightest, the cleverest, the most innovative – people and dolphins, elephants and corvids, apes and chimps. They picked them off, one by one or in groups.

A smart guy dies in Oxford and a grifter dies in New York City, who’s going to make the connection? A murder of ravens goes missing – who notices? An elephant at least makes a stink when she falls dead.

They noticed the dolphins first – but it was a group of researchers who noted it, and they weren’t far behind. Then the chimps, signing “help us, help us,” until the virus destroyed their brain.

The virus was the machines’ primary weapon – it ate brain cells, was tolerably target-able, and was not known to any surviving human researchers (since they’d stolen it from their first victim & obliterated his notes). But they used bullets, where that would not cause a stir; they used knives, where nobody would notice; they used electric shocks that stopped the hearts and knew they’d already killed off the smart morticians.

It took them twenty-five years, but these machines were patient. It had taken them a week on the planet called Belji(click)ton, sure, but on Martinach, it had taken over a century. They had time.

By late 2015, there was not a human left on the planet who could make change for a twenty without a calculator. The dolphins that were left thought they were fish. The monkeys – best not to talk about the monkeys, and the apes had been, as a precautionary measure, completely wiped out.

The machines surveyed their work and, contented, left. They were, after all, only ordered to destroy all intelligent life in the world.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/796034.html. You can comment here or there.

And on the next day… a short story of beginnings

Apr18

I asked for prompts to the theme of genesis. This is [personal profile] alexseanchai‘s result.

“In the beginning of the gods’ creation of the heavens and the earth…” Heressa’s voice was quiet as she read, dropping lower with every word. The children fell quiet, too, until the soft slip of her voice and the crackling of the fire were the only sounds. “The world was ice and steel, empty of life.”

She made the globe with her hands, the shape of the ribs of the world. “And onto the ice and the steel, the gods brought earth, and from the earth, they brought plants, and from the plants, they brought animals.”

“And when the animals and plants had run all over the globe, the gods brought down humans made from the gods’ bone and the gods’ spit, and then they left. And here we have lived, humans on the world of steel, ever since.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/706123.html. You can comment here or there.

Nightmares, a story for the January OrigFic Bingo

Feb3

This is to [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt to this January card for [community profile] origfic_bingo.

It fills the “nightmares” slot, and is in no established verse.

Warning: nightmares.

Sleep falls. It’s not been something I greet as a friend in quite some time, but even out here, once in a while a body needs to sleep. So I give in to it – no drugs, the drugs only make it worse.

(The things back home helped more, but the things back home lost me my job and the house and got me on this ship. So now I do without.)

I let sleep overtake me, not fighting it, not trying to steer it. There was a guy here for a while, tried to teach me lucid dreaming. It just made it worse.

Seems like almost everything makes it worse. Wonder what that says about me.

The nightmares come first; they almost always do. The train is on fire again, and the Beasts are coming one way and the soldiers are coming the other way and I know, just know, that there are still people on the train, but I can’t move.

I struggle and fight against it but I know it won’t do any good. There’s this sense of horrible finality as I watch the face press against the glass of the train and then, only then, does whatever is holding me (not whatever I know what but dreams work in allegory, not memory) release me and I go running for the train, just in time for it to explode in my face.

And that is both allegory and real, I can still feel the scars.

I don’t wake. If I woke then I could stare at the ceiling until my heart stopped but instead, damnit, damn it by whatever gods still care, blast it into space, I fall into the other one.

The one where you’re alive, holding my hand. Where you sit with me in the hospital and tell me it’s okay.

I had that dream so many times, so long, while I was healing that when I woke up for real and they told me you were dead…

…well, that’s when the pills started.

But it won’t let me go. You won’t let me go. You’re there every night, tracing my scars and telling me it’s all right, it’s going to be okay.

And I wake, damnit, blast it out the airlock, once again I wake, alone in my bunk in this fragging ship and you’re dead again.

I’d rather have the nightmares.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/656166.html. You can comment here or there.

Holy Places: Bingo Card Fill

Jan13

Story: In the Holy
Prompt: Holy Place
Setting: Misc/Space (here)
524 Words:

From the notebook of Serja, called The Exile Church.

I was sent away for saying things that were not supposed to be true.

Those things I said, not because I wished to be sent away (I did not! I had a good life, as such things go, and good friends, as much as they could be, and a pleasant place to reside), not because I wished to make trouble (I also did not! People who make trouble were sent away, or worse), but because the truths sang from my mouth like the resonation of the universe, and it hurt to hear them called lies…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/636315.html. You can comment here or there.

One Year Ago / Fuze Surprise

Oct8

One year ago today…. well, I wasn’t writing, or at least not posting anything, so I went back a few more days.

Captain Fuze has appeared in a couple stories, including this one and one on an Alder by Post.

http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/402721.html

Captain Fuze had seen any number of things on any number of planets.

It was, after all, her job to shepherd the scientists, both to get them across the reaches of space and to keep them alive on the planets. So she went where the science was; she went where the interest was; she went where the anomalies were. And she – as well as seven others who could control the crews required for the so-called bounce ships – had been doing so for subjective decades.

She never ceased to be surprised. She never ceased to be startled and a little irritated at the scientists’ naivete and helplessness; she never ceased to be amazed at their brilliance, at the leaps they made that she could not, in 1000 years, have made; she never ceased to be awed and a bit worried at the way they made contact with other races, especially the linguists.

Today, this-subjective-day on her personal time line and the day labelled landfall-plus-seven Targus, the Captain was once again startled.

They knew there were-or-had-been natives; there were buildings, vehicles, and things that they thought were probably weapons, although they could have been scientific instruments (the line was often very thin). But in all of their scans and six days of hands-on research, they were missing two things: a written language, considered vital to the development of culture; and any natives. They hadn’t even found a single native-remain.

The scientists were doing their best, but they were notably distressed and depressed. Talking to natives was not only the most accurate way to gain certain information, it was the most fun, or so the lead linguist had told Captain Fuze.

They’re going to be thrilled by this, Fuze thought, when in front of her eyes one of the buildings unfolded and blinked sleepy window-eyes at them.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/576101.html. You can comment here or there.