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Mapping, a story for the Giraffe Call

Aug26

Another one where I’m not sure where it wants to go, um, but I’ll post it anyway.

“Here’s the space-view surveys of the planet. Here’s the original plans for the first three settlements. Here’s the builders’ notes. Here’s the town records.”

If they had been working in paper, Orchid would have been dumping papers into Cauli’s arms. As it was, he was shifting files from his data tablet to hers with wide sweeps of his fingers. “And here’s the notes from the second survey team and everything they pulled up. Is that going to be enough?”

Cauli, with heroic effort, did not laugh at the little bureaucrat. “More than enough. But I need to get down there, too, you know.”

“You’ve only got two weeks while we’re in orbit here.” This was the seventh time Orchid had told her this. It was the thirtieth time she’d heard him say it altogether. She wasn’t the only expert visiting the colony.

“I know, Orchid. It’s all right. I have my tools.” She patted the bag, which constituted almost half of her weight allowance on this trip. “I have my mind. I’m all right.” If she kept saying it, maybe he’d believe her. Orchid didn’t appear to think people could live without at least three terabytes of data on them at all times. “I’ve got it.”

“All right then. I’ll put you on the first shuttle down.”

The first shuttle down held four other equally-amused specialists and three fretting bureaucrats, cut from the same cloth as Orchid. Cauli made small talk with Zeeb, the xenobotanist, until they were situated in the settlement’s town hall-slash-community center.

“Just give me a table to work with and, if you have one available, a school-aged child to give me a tour.” She’d given this speech in twenty different settlements, and generally met with little resistance. “That’s all I need.” Around her, the other specialists were saying variations of the same thing.

“You can’t.”

That was not a reaction she’d been expecting. Settlers were generally practical people.

“I’m sorry.”

“You can’t. Not with a child. You need a priest.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/565657.html. You can comment here or there.

X is for Xeno-everything, a story for the Giraffe Call

Apr30

All of my X prompts were to people for whom I had already written all of their allotted prompts, so I mushed them all together; have something strange for free.

When the Introductory Team went to a new planet, they made sure to bring samples of their culture with them.

There were three reasons for this.

The first was the human habit of hospitality and guest-gifts; if you were going to drop in on someone unannounced, it was polite to bring a present of some sort.

The second was to test for xenophobia. A new culture’s response to common human artifacts would tell the Team a lot about the culture: did they fear the new? Did they step back from common, everyday objects?

The third reason was very related to the first and second, and was what the Introductory Team was all about, in the end.

When they landed on Cunnel Six, the Team brought three of their best xenolinguists, their xenobiologists, and their xenoempaths. They also brought their gift bag of common items – a xylophone, a box of xocolatl, knitting needles and yarn, bread, and so on – and their gift-giver.

Matthiew Ornan had done this now on seven planets. He bowed carefully to the first representative from the Xantusia people, and then, even more carefully, imitated their greeting as best as his human body could.

The Xantusia – an approximation of the words they used for themselves – looked to human eyes like large bipedal lizards; their greeting involved clasping their hand-like appendages together tightly and then turning their back on the person they were greeting. They made clicking sounds – the xenolinguist told Matthiew they were approval, and his own empathy agreed – when he did a similar gesture.

“We bring you gifts.” He paused while the xenolinguist translated. “Things from our home, as tokens of our good-will.”

He watched the Xantusia as it picked up the box of gifts, its claws tinkling over the xylophone. Early studies of their broadcasts had shown that the Xantusia had a similar instrument.

“Xinpahzian.” It tinked its claws against it. “Lii-eer.”

Matthiew needed no interpretation to recognize kin.

He bowed again, hiding a smile. If the Xantusia could be made to recognize them as kin, than the rest of his job would be so much easier.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/524123.html. You can comment here or there.

Even the Insect that Bites You, a story for the Giraffe Call

Feb17

This was written to To [personal profile] sharpeningthebones‘s prompt(s).

“Everybody dance.”

The Ahme were a peaceful, happy people. Tonight, on the fullness of three moons, their music swirled over the forest.

“Everybody step, forward now, left foot out. Backward now, left foot in. That’s it, everybody dance.” The Ahme had taken the first opportunity to go into space, rough-colonizing instead of waiting for the full terraforming, accepting the steps backwards in technology, embracing them.

“Everybody back, bow to the fire, bow to your partner. All lovers dance. All lovers, swirl.” They were, as a culture, very happy, and very relaxed.

“That’s it, beloveds, twist around. Grab your partners, swing them down. All lovers dance, all lovers sing. Ah-neee-ah-ne. Ah-neeee-ah-ne.”

They never saw the Tovane coming.

“All the mothers dance, one foot, two feet. Spin around now, bow left, bow right. All moth…”

They were captured while they danced, chained, bound, and dragged off into the woods. They had not known there was another settlement on their planet.

They were horrified to find the train tracks, so close to their settlement that they could have walked to them, had they been inclined.

They sang on the train, because the Ahme would be happy. Ah-neee, ah-ja-neee, they sang, all are loved, all are under the moons.

They had assumed they had the planet to themselves. That they had companions was unexpected, but they would be happy. Ah-neee, ah-ja-neee. Ah-neee, jes-nur-nee. Even the insect that bites you is loved.

The Torvane locked them into concrete cells. “You will work, or you will starve.”

“Such is life,” the elder of the Ahme told them. “We will work. And we will sing.”

They sang while they toiled in the Torvane fields and factories. “Work, now, all lovers work. Press die down, press die up. Left hand out, all lovers work.”

They sang while they were locked into cells at night. “Sleep now, all children sleep. Ah-nee. Jes-nur-nee.”

“They sing love songs to their own shit,” the Torvane mocked. But the Ahme were good workers, strong workers. If they sang, well, they had fewer workplace injuries than Torvane workers.

“Ah-nee, les-aru-neee.” Even our enemy is loved. That was a song they had not sung in a very long time, but they remembered it. Ah-nee, les-aru-neee. They whispered it between the cracks in the walls. They sang it in refrains while they worked. Under the three moons, do we love out enemy. Under the three moons, do we love our children.

Under the three moons, they took back their freedom. Ah-nee, ah-es-tek-esh. All is loved, but all must die. Ah-nee, jur-nur-tek-esh. The insect that bites you, being loved, still must die.

The Torvane never saw them coming.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/479418.html. You can comment here or there.

Fuze Logic, a story for the Giraffe Call

Sep18

For EllenMillion‘s prompt. Captain Fuze, who appeared in the Alder by Post, is my new favorite character..

They were having trouble with the Senedacht.

The Senedacht were… well, that was part of the problem. Nobody was
quite certain what they were. Best guess was a created intelligence,
but humanity had yet to deal with a created intelligence in a created
body, so they weren’t sure if the Senedacht were what it would look
like.

In the Senedacht language, as far as the translators could tell,
“Senedacht” was a pointer that meant the creatures who called
themselves that. It didn’t mean “people” or “those who live on
Sene-something” or anything else.

The whole Senedacht language was like that. Their words had no nuance,
no borrowed meanings, no connotation. Very rarely did their words
even appear to have any relationship to each other: Their word for
ghost, for instance, looked nor sounded nothing like their word for
ghastly. It was almost as if someone had gone through their world and
cataloged things, labeling each with a collection of sounds.

That was not where the humans running the translators gave up, crying. The Senedacht were
more than willing to spend hours pointing at things, reciting the word
for them. it was tiresome, in a language where you could not
extrapolate, but it was honest work.

It was in concepts that they came to the real problem, and not even all concepts, but specific concepts. When it came to the idea of “maybe,” both human and Senedacht translators ended up breaking down, the human crying, the Senedacht fluttering its antennae and muttering, over and over again, “yes or no, yes or no.”

Captain Fuze watches it all with more than a little amusement, but only because Captain Fuze had learned how to be amused by most things. “This planet,” she murmured to her navigator, “is not going to deal well with Fuzzy logic.”

Fuze Surprise

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/402721.html. You can comment here or there.

Delfugiaran Bunnies, a story for the Bunny Safari

Aug29

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt

There were planets where you set down, built the first houses, and spent your four years of prep playing house like you were in the burbs back on Earth.

There were planets where you barely got the house up before the storms the weather satellites hadn’t seen nor predicted blew over you, and you spent four years just trying to survive and get enough built so the colonists coming after you wouldn’t die.

There were places where Murphy’s Law seemed to be in full effect, you lost half the team, but somehow managed to present a colony that looked tidy enough, so tidy the company was left asking “so what was the problem again?”

And then there was Fuge.

The Delfugiara was an M-class planet off the “beaten path,” inaccessible enough that the prep team was given a six-year stint instead of the normal four, Earth-like enough that they were sent down with a double team and livestock in sleepers, enough to get not just a colony but a town ready for the long-termers. It looked to be a Suburb Hop type of stay, what Marcel called Old McDonald’s Farm. They built their houses and their barns, thawed out their animals, and laid their fences.

And then the Taigups showed up.

Taig got to name them, because he brought the first one one, and Taig was three, Marcel and Stiggie’s son from their last stop. It looked sort of like a bunny, but the only place Taig had seen rabbits or hares was in picture files, so it was a Taigup, after, Siggie assumed, his father’s Marciup (an antelope-like creature on Tanner Three).

The Taigup liked the warmth of the house, about five degrees warmer than the surrounding area, which was in early-spring. It turned out it – and then the three others Taig brought home in quick succession – liked not only the warmth, but the lack of natural predators; their three-year-old would stand for them eating any number of things, but not His Pets.

They’d wondered at the lack of other small omnivores or herbivores. There were Taigups in the brush, but not massive numbers – enough to allow for reproduction over the number that were eaten by larger omnivores and the few big carnivores – but no mice-analogs, no dog-analogs, no badger-analogs. Nothing but Taigup.

When they came back to the house after a long day of Terradjusting to find sixteen Taigup where they’d had four, and the same the next three days as they spread them out like Free Kittens in a box, they began to understand.

“We’re going to have to get used to Taigup stew,” Marcel decided, as they pushed a box of the things out into the wilderness for the carnivores to eat. “Or we’re going to be drowning in bunnies.”

“I don’t think we can eat that fast.” Stiggie picked up a Taigup as it split itself into two. “Well, at least we can teach Taig exponential growth.”

(I was going to call it Welsh Taigup, even though that’s cheese, but I decided to go with something that actually involves bunny).

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/396804.html. You can comment here or there.

Icon Flash: The Shooting Star Problem

May26

Continuing flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today’s icon:

Shooting Star

Icon by [personal profile] later_tuesday

Yeah, the first one of the Asteroid-hits took us by surprise. I mean, shooting stars didn’t hit the earth that hard very frequently, and when they did – crater, some rock, that was it.

Nobody expected there to be sentient life, not in that first one. And, because the government did a quick and thorough job of covering it up (I know, I was there), the rest of the world wasn’t expecting the second one, either, or the third.

By the thirty-seventh of these Shooting Stars, everybody knew. Hobos who lived in shacks in the desert knew (and I’m not counting that guy who got superpowers because the asteroid almost landed on him). People with no TV knew. Everyone knew about the Star People, the Asteroid Aliens, the Palondeze refugees.

I knew, of course. I’d been working with them since the beginning, since we first hid the skinny-furry-strange thing that, I swear, looked like an anthropomorphized anorexic platypus. I knew when they learned ASL (English was beyond their beak), and I knew when our linguists figured out their language.

I knew the first thing that one of them said to us, too:

We are here to help.

And what an older one, weaker and smaller, said in counter:

We are here for help.

By the time we’d worked out what they’d really meant, there had been fifty-three Shooting Stars in the course of a year and a half, and we started watching the sky, nervously, for the long blue contrails across the twilight.

Their definition of help, we were beginning to understand, was not quite the same as ours.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/347128.html. You can comment here or there.

Out of nowhere, a story for the May Giraffe Call (@shutsumon)

May17

For [personal profile] becka_sutton‘s prompt. Names by @Anke.

“We’re so screwed.”

They were not, technically, screwed yet. Their ship was set up for
three years of subspace travel or up to thirty of semi-cryo
hibernation; they had over half of their time left. But if they did
not find a planet to terraform by the time they reached their halfway
mark, they were going to be very screwed indeed. And the sensors were
showing them nothing.

“We can send out the last three probes,” Jeanne offered. “Those might
find something.”

“Or we could turn back.” Daniele didn’t look at her senior science
officer as she said that. They both knew it was a last-ditch option.
There was nothing left for any of them back home.

“Look, I’m going to make some modifications to the next probe. Maybe
it can find something everything else is missing.”

Something everything else was missing would probably be a
planet they could barely survive on, even after fifteen years of
terraforming. But it would be better than earth. Daniele nodded.
She’d let her officers do everything they could, because the death
decision would have to be hers in the end.

“What in the nine billion names of Bog is that?”

The distressed exclamation came from behind them; both women whirled around to find Yori Tagani, their navigations expert, staring at the monitors.

Seconds ticked by. When Yori kept staring at the screen and said nothing, Daniele asked, rather impatiently, “well, Yori, what is it?”

“It’s a creatio ex nihilo.” His tone was between awed and terrified.

“What?”

“Something from nothing. Basically the universe just spat it out to spite us.”

“The universe…”

“Spat out a planetary seed in the middle of our path. Collision in about three hours if I don’t divert.”

“So why in the bloody hell aren’t you diverting?”

“Well…” He turned to look at her, letting her see the ‘planetary seed’ growing on his monitor. “I kinda thought you might want to stop.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/342436.html. You can comment here or there.

Sol Invictus, a story for the April Giraffe Call (@blueVulpine)

Apr15

For sauergeek‘s Prompt.

Thanks to @blueVulpine for picking the language.

The weather was chilly when the team landed on Anderman Three, the wind blowing and the snow falling all around them. “They’re only three-quarters of the way to their coldest point,” Esteba pointed out, studying her readings. “It’s only going to get colder. How have they survived?”

The Kendar Corporation had, seven generations ago, seeded colonies as far out as their ships could reach and then, as such corps seemed to do, gone bankrupt in a spectacularly messy fashion. Only now were the survivor companies getting back on their feet enough to track down the colonies.

This one looked big – four small cities and several settlements, all gathered across a series of valleys between a large lake and a wide river. There was more land further south that wasn’t, according to their radars, yet getting snow, but the colonists seem to have stuck to their cold valley complex.

“It looks like we arrived just in time for a party.” Nord gestured at the camera views, which showed people congregating in large groups, and the radio feed, which was babbling away cheerfully in a language none of the science team could follow. “Is Mains working on that?”

“Mains, Tanner, and Jordy are going nuts on it. Jordy thinks he has a basis of translation; from the sound of it, they’re celebrating Sol Invictus. He says it’s past-ancient sun-ceremony that turned into the Christmas rite.” Clemantis worked as the liaison between science and cultural teams, mostly as a translator. She’d condensed seven paragraphs of Jordy-speak into that Nord-digestible tidbit, for example.

“Never do understand how these colonies do that.” Nor did he need to; he was the company representative for marketable resources. “All right, is Jordy ready to send a team down?”

“Yes. He says the second city from the East is the best bet, see that spiraled tower near the river?”

“Not the West one? It’s biggest.”

“But least elaborate. The spiral is either a temple, a capital, or a really happy corporation.”

“That’s where we’ll talk to them about planetary resources, as well. This is the only populated area on the planet?”

“The only big enough to show up on our instruments. Doesn’t mean it’s the only.” Clemantis was wasting her breath. She pointed, instead, at the screen. “There, Geo team says land there.”

“There it is.”

The landing team set down just shy of 12 hours later, in a rare clear spot, Nord in his best uniform, the rest looking suitably behind-the-scenes behind the large man. Jordy, especially, stayed blocked from sight from the colony by Nord, Clemantis, and the far-more-appealling-to-the-eye Mains. There was something he was missing, something he hadn’t gotten yet. Something important.

Nord began his speech in clear, careful Nouveau-Français, translated by Mains and Tanner into first the languages of the original colonists (Third-English and Spanish) and then into their best approximation of their current creole. Jordy fiddled with the translation matrix and scribbled in notes from overheard commentary.

It was just as Nord was reaching his great finale, about lost colonies and rescue and mutually-beneficial trade, that it came to Jordy. “Wait, wait.” It was a hurried, panicked whisper in Nouveau-Français. “Wait, Nord. They’re not celebrating their sun god. They’re atheistic as a culture. Sol is their emperor. They think we’re here to invade them!”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/323238.html. You can comment here or there.

Down in Human Town, a story for the Giraffe Call (@lilfluff)

Jan19

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s Prompt, with thanks to @inventrix and fourteen minutes for the names.

The humans hadn’t been the first to Landfall-Etrian, but they hadn’t been latecomers, either.

The lush, Earth-like planet had been discovered in a prime location in a solar system not all that far, as galactic scales went, from Earth; the Fordante had discovered it (at the same time as the Ngedik, and totally ignoring the Exxonoth who were native to the planet).

(Actually, humans could be grateful to the Fordante and Ngedik, because without them “inviting” other races to “their” planet, the potentially-sentient status of the Exxonoth would have precluded their settlement. But that’s another story).

The various races had their own settlements, their own towns, their own desires from this beautiful, resource-rich planet, but in the two main port cities, they all came together, melting into a messy, loud, fragrant salad of multi-culturalism, governed by the Fordante and primarily financed by the Ngedik. And in these port cities, there grew up a human-town, ripe with the flavors of home and all the variations Landfall-Etrian could provide.

“What is this?” The translation program wasn’t perfect yet, but Alukri could get the gist of the Ngediko’s question.

“It’s called sushi.” She stretched the word out, enunciating the sounds the Ngediko’s mouth-parts could handle and not leaning too hard on the susurrations. Most of the Ngedik called it loo-lee, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that. “It’s fish – lina-in-the-sea from the Rion Ocean here in the port – wrapped in rice and seaweed. Try it; it’s a human delicacy.”

“You humans eat the strangest things,” the Ngediko muttered, but it wrapped its mouthparts around the spicy tuna roll, clicking in appreciation. “Wooo! This is almost as attacks-the-mouth as the [5] yll-yoll-loll! You should try some of that, human.”

“After you try our bomber roll. We imported the wasabi roe from Earth. Here, just one…” Alukri smiled wickedly, knowing that the Ngediko would not translated the gesture properly. Tourists were the same wherever you went.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/237531.html. You can comment here or there.

Birth of a City, a story for the Giraffe Call (@Inventrix)

Jan16

For [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt

It started, as most things do, with a single settlement on a major route.

The route was, in this case, a slip-hole through an asteroid belt, not a long valley or a waterway, and the settlement was a group of seventeen people, miners and their kin, who staked out the best chunk of belt and attached their settlement to the biggest stable land mass.

The first to come was a teacher, someone whose skills lay in education but who had always had what they called “void-fever.” He brought with him a module that attached near the settlement, and the tubing to make a “road.”

After the teacher came some scientists, who were curious in studying – well, they were scientists, they wanted to study everything. Micro-G living on humans. The elements found in the asteroids. Void and zero-G’s effects on just about everything. They brought a company-sponsored seven-level settlement, and triple-wall tubes to connect to the miner’s cubic. Since they also brought children, they attached to the teacher’s module, as well.

And many of them brought spouses, partners, cuddle-friends, which meant that there had to be something for those people to do. Three of them dreamt up a small business, and wrote up a proposal, bringing money, a module, and materials from the grounded cities. They also hired three programmers and a mechanic who could handle micro-G, and, as their business took off, another seven employees, only half of them already on the Rock.

There’s some argument about whether that first company was the tipping point, or the bar-slash-bordello that followed (Angie’s, done in an imitation old-style, complete with swinging saloon doors past its airlock and girls in bright saloon costumes), but, one or the other, people started coming for things other than the mine, the miners, and their children. And once the hydro-farm and distillery came to service the bar, and the gidget factory to support the first building, and the hair salon and massage parlour to support the factory workers… Well, then they needed a water refinery and a toy store (and a “toy store”) and a movie theatre.

The police first formed when the population topped a thousand and, while the city did not have a fire department, quite, it had a leak department, and then a public works bureau, that collected money and used it to reinforce the tubes and, at about ten thousand, build a globe around the whole thing for another layer of protection. And then, of course, they needed someone in charge.

It surprised no-one, except possibly herself, when the first miner, whose idea this had all been, was elected mayor seventeen years after she had first started digging on the rocks.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/234327.html. You can comment here or there.