Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
Air Is Not So Hard
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Sometimes when the wind picks up I miss my hometown. It’s the way the windchimes clatter and ring; they sound like the drowned bells of my home. I think then about how I never noticed the taste of salt until it was gone from my mouth.
Air is all right. I manage—there’s a way to still your gills with spells. Feet and tails aren’t so different; it’s easy to change from one to the other. And love, while not a simple matter, is still reason enough to remain. I gave up mermaidhood for her.
Her drunk friends at the palace on the shore dared her to go down to the water and call for a lover. They were all at her engagement party, stealing bottles of wine while their parents celebrated the coming union of Princess Madeline, 16, to Prince Bertram, 21. She’d never met him. He’d sent his portrait, and the original was traveling by slow nuptial progress through the kingdom. He was six carriage-stops away by the time she was two bottles in, stumbling down the rocky path ahead of their shouts.
She took off her shoes halfway down, I remember that. I watched from a rock out from shore, ignoring the songs and shouts bubbling up through the waves.
“Go on, Dauphine,” my friends had said, “Go to the rock and call for a lover. You don’t want that old prince anyway—he’s probably got a tail like a trout.”
I worried that she would cut her feet on the rocks, before I remembered that she had climbed down this cliff hundreds of times. I had seen her before. Maybe she had seen me. She came to lip of the water and pressed her toes into the foam.
I watched her for a while, while she stared out across the water. When I swam up she didn’t look the least afraid.
“I haven’t called yet,” she said, as if we already knew each other.
“I know,” I said. “My name is Princess Dauphine.”
I swam along the shore in the breakers; she ran along the shining edge; we went round the point of the bay; we went on and on; after many stories we wound up here, in our shack on the inland road, with wind chimes, a simple life, the occasional argument, plums from the orchard. Air is not so hard.
Sound in Space
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
The Scrabble-playing lawyer, Senshu, (every colony ship should have one—it’s amazing how many skills someone like that brings to a new planet) said he’d been fighting with the head chef at the time. What about? Asked the judge. A dictionary entry, the lawyer replied.
The head chef, Montague, said, yeah, that’s where he was, too, and anyway while it was certainly his 10-inch steel Martian-made the murderer used, he shouldn’t be a suspect, because he’d have had better sense than to use one of his own knives. And anyway he’d have cleaned it afterward. Not like the prep cook. Why didn’t they ask her?
Of course I did it, said the prep cook. I’m crazy. Got a card says it. And she pulled out, not a standard colonial Form F-120 (a.k.a. “Crazy-page”), but a dirty napkin with numbers written on it. The judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation, pending charges. But she was one of those get-to-the-bottom-of-it type judges. Jupiter just bristles with them. Anyone wanting quick verdicts should leave the solar system.
I got called up after the prep cook. I told them that I was where the log book said I was, on the bridge, doing the trajectory numbers like a good little subnavigator. Anyway, Jared, I’m sorry, “the deceased,” and I were pretty much finished by the time we came aboard. No, no hard feelings. I started seeing Monty—the head chef—about 1020 hours into flight.
Monty’s ex Sarah, who’d never liked me, said she thought I’d taken a break from the bridge about the time she’d heard Jared’s life-support hit the landing dock.
At about 0600 hours? Asked the judge.
Yes, she said, and pointed out she’d already testified to that.
The landing dock on the outside of the ship?
Yes, she said, that’s where landing docks usually are. Otherwise other ships can’t land, y’know.
The judge ignored her sarcasm, and charged her.