Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Dana Takes a Dare
Monday, October 11th, 2010
The Women’s Battle College didn’t have nine days of chariot races, law-giving, marriage-sanctioning, and mead-drinking on Samhain. They had a special dinner instead, and contests all afternoon.
The students had their own custom: they dared someone to walk nine times around the standing stone on the headland at midnight. They said Skye herself would come and grant a favor.
Dana took the dare.
Nobody came with her. She swished through the long dead grass, wondering how they would know she’d really done it. At least it wasn’t raining, for once; the moon rode the wind.
The stone made her nervous even in daylight. It always seemed about to turn, grating on its axis, to have a look at who had come to visit.
Nine times around, counterclockwise; then she stood and waited, feeling cold and foolish.
“You’re up late, Yamamoto,” said a pleasant voice from behind her. Dana squeaked.
It was Dr Eire, the headmistress, who laughed kindly, saying, “so much for back awareness.”
Dana ducked her head. “Yeah.”
“It’s all right. I’m supposed to be that good,” grinned the headmistress. “Come sit.”
Dana followed her.
“Mead,” offered the headmistress, passing her flask. Dana took it.
“Thank you, Dr Eire,” she said. “Am I in trouble?”
The headmistress looked out over the bay.
“I suppose you ought to be,” she said. “But I generally come here on Samhain, to see who took the dare this year.”
She paused.
“Supernatural beings grant favors at a price. Students never seem to remember that. Still, now that you’re here, did you have something in mind? If I can grant it, I will—at a price.”
It was good mead. Dana passed the flask back.
“I’m such a terrible student, and now I’m benched for a couple of months with this broken wrist. I just want to do better.”
Dr Eire turned, but Dana couldn’t see her face, angled into darkness.
“You’re not a terrible student,” she said. “Your coming to this headland proves rather that you are a determined one. The trick will be for you to see that yourself.”
Dr Eire helped Dana up. The headmistress stopped at the stone and poured some mead at its foot.
“And the price?” Asked Dana as they went down the hill.
Dr Eire chuckled.
“Don’t tell anyone what happened,” she said.
“Fair enough,” Dana grinned.
Escape from the Goldilocks Planet
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
She lost her name on Stiltskin 9, another casualty when the reputation economy crashed. She made it offworld with a few credit cubes and a broken-down matter fabricator.
From the first, though, her new planet turned out to be just wrong. The fabricator’s nanotech assembly was stuck, would only convert straw to gold. And she couldn’t find any straw, just calderas of steaming, congealed, or lukewarm porridge. The last of her cubes bought her way into a domed city, but it was nearly hibernation season, and the super-intelligent bears shunned her, in spite of her fur coat and matching gloves.
The bears favored semi-communal open-plan architecture, so wandering the city felt to her like wandering a single immense home. Soon enough, she was completely alone, the bears having all retreated to the privacy of their winter dens. She made herself at home, helping herself to the leftovers in the bears’ kitchens, snoozing warily in their summer beds, and whiling away hours in their virtual reality entertainment chairs–at least, whenever she could find one with a neural helmet neither too large nor too small.
One day, she met an insomniac. His was the only brightly-lit living area. Where she’d heard white noise forest-sound lullabies coming from the dens of other bears, he had a frantic electro-fiddle hoedown screeching from his speakers. He was sitting at a bark-covered kitchen table with a mug of coffee as big as her head.
“I get nightmares,” he grumbled.
She hadn’t asked.
“Humans in my house while I sleep. Touching my stuff.”
She folded her hands in her lap.
“Never seen a human.” He shuddered. “I hear they’re mostly hairless.”
She’d noticed the VR entertainments were redacted so that all other sentient species appeared as bears.
She tugged her fur-lined hood forward. “I can’t sleep either. Just moved from the other hemisphere. Biological clock still off.” The quick-spun tale surprised her. “I could keep a lookout for you. Let you rest.”
There was gratitude in the bear’s bloodshot eyes. “I couldn’t pay you, except in trade.” He motioned toward stacks of crates. “I’m in import. High-end porridge bowls.”
She shrugged, “Sure.” It was safer than serial housebreaking.
“Didn’t catch your name,” said the bear.
She saw an open crate, a bit of packing material spilled out. Straw.
“Call me Goldy,” she said. The fabricator was a restless weight in her pocket. “I’m in export.”