As Above on Manawaker Studios Podcast

Quick announcement - My short story "As Above" was read on the Manawaker Studios Flash Fiction Podcast this week!  Thank you to C.B. Droege for his vocal talents...

http://www.manawaker.com/podcast/0430-as-above/

Vintage Worlds Published

Happy to receive this in the mail today!





















It's nice to finally see my story "Pen Pal" in print and to be able to share it with others.  I was pleased with how naturally this story unfolded and grew from its first seed to become the full tale of sixteen years of friendship and interplanetary crisis.  I still love the narrative voices of Meliari Thulissia and Mary Havens, and I hope that folks will get as much enjoyment from reading their story as I did from writing it.

As Above

A quick announcement that my short-short story "As Above" has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine at this web address.

Under a thousand words, and, of course, fundamentally a gimmick story indulging my predilection for astronomy.  Yet in developing what it would take to make the gimmick work, there turned out to be some depths and disturbing implications, more topical than I had planned - in the accumulation and arbitrary exercise of vastly uneven economic power, in careening technological advance, in matters of character and personal history and whether to come to terms with loss.

It's common enough to seek to draw down some meaning from the stars into our own lives - perhaps by checking the horoscope column in the morning newspaper, perhaps by firing a red sports car out toward the asteroid belt.  Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly.  But the daydream of somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, finding a way of turning back time and undoing that one crucial mistake - I take that to be universal.

P.S.  While researching the astronomy for this story, I discovered that the superlative Randall Munroe had independently struck upon much the same concept.  For an exquisite visual demonstration of Tighe's task, you need look no further than here.

Vintage Worlds Kickstarter

 Several cool pieces of news on the upcoming anthology Vintage Worlds, where my story "Pen Pal" will be appearing:

Firstly - we have a cover!  Check out the spectacular illustration below by Matt Forsyth.  I think this really captures the spirit of the Old Solar System. (And seems vaguely familiar...)  I got to see an earlier version, with which I was suitably impressed, but this image takes it to a new level!

Secondly - Founders House Publishing is running a Kickstarter campaign this month to help finance publication and distribution of Vintage Worlds.  Please check out their Kickstarter site for a full description of the project, including biographies of the seventeen authors included, an excerpt from John Michael Greer's introduction to the anthology, and a beautifully done video that was put together by fellow author and video producer Arthur Vibert.  Kudos!!  

The campaign opened a couple of days ago and is running through October 2nd.  So far it looks like it is doing quite well and attracting a good number of supporters; but there is a ways to go, so please feel free to drop in a contribution.!

Thirdly - hmmm.... let's just see if I can link to that video on this page... if it does not work for you, you can pick it up on the Kickstarter site also.

Vintage Worlds

This week I was very pleased to learn that my short story "Pen Pal" - actually at 11,000 words I guess it is a novelette - was chosen for the forthcoming science fiction anthology Vintage Worlds.  The concept of this collection is space opera set in the old-style solar system of the 1940s and 1950s - packed full of habitable worlds, with Venus a swampy jungle planet full of dinosaurs and insidious creepy-crawlies, Mars the seat of an ancient desert civilization, and inhuman sinister intelligences in the worlds of the farther reaches.  True, the space probes of the 1960s and 1970s informed us that Venus is about as habitable as a pressure cooker full of sulfuric acid, and Mars is not a lot more inviting... but the older setting was and remains a great work of collective imagination from Edgar Rice Burroughs and C.S. Lewis on to Bradbury and Heinlein.

And a mere few gigabytes of ugly facts are no reason to give up writing stories set in the Old Solar System, right?  There have been a few recent books in this retro style, including the anthology Old Mars and S. M. Stirling's spectacular In the Courts of the Crimson Kings.  But there is plenty of room for more!

So, Zendexor of the Solar System Heritage website, in cooperation with John Michael Greer, have assembled a collection of seventeen stories spanning the spaceways from the Sun itself out to Pluto.

In "Pen Pal", the events of the late 20th century have played out a bit differently, on Earth as well as on Mars!  An unlikely long-distance friendship grows as history continues to throw curveballs.  I had a good time writing this story and I became very fond of Meliari Thulissia and Mary Havens; I hope others will as well.  I am quite looking forward to reading the rest of the stories in the collection!

Coda

Coda

My wife called me at work on Tuesday to ask if I had heard the news. She had been driving and had to pull over to the side of the road when the report came on the radio. Ursula Le Guin had passed away.

My wife said, “It feels like the bottom has fallen out of the world.”

For almost forty years Le Guin's writings have been touching my life. I think the first one to do so was A Wizard of Earthsea when I was in junior high school. I remember on winter nights in Alaska reading the tales of the wizard Ged who spoke with dragons, and who knew the true name of every reach of water in the Archipelago, and every herb, and with a word could call the magewind into the sail of his little boat Lookfar. 

It appealed to me that his name was close to my own initials, and on one occasion when I reached a high score on a quarter-eating arcade game I put them in, GEC – and then tapped the button once more to make it GED. A fitting tribute to Earthsea? Nope! But it does show that the story came to speak to me there where I was at age eleven; and every time I have revisited it since it has turned a fresh face. 

The nature and power of names... the unwinnable battle against the darkness manifesting out of one's self... Those lessons have only grown deeper. For a long time I retained a mental image of Ged as a sandy-haired white man, and it was many years and many returns to the story before I realized that I (and, to be fair, the cover illustrator) had been completely wrong – for the story had always plainly described his appearance, as coppery-skinned as a Navajo. A rueful lesson in the insidious nature of presuppositions! The story one reads is not always the story one thinks one is reading.

Once, while reading from Always Coming Home at night on a city bus in Sacramento, I looked up to realize that nothing around me – not the traffic on the road, not the city lights, not the preoccupations of the people – would have been carried forward into the living world of the Kesh so many millennia from now. And that this city would be entirely lost, submerged in a vast inland sea, remembered only as troubling tales for children. The bus drove onward into the darkness.

I read Le Guin's stories to my own children at bedtime when they were young, and when they were no longer so young – Catwings, and later the Earthsea books, and pieces from The Wind's Twelve Quarters. Books that are good to read yourself are not always the ones that are good to read aloud to others. But hers were.

On the way home from work on Tuesday I sat in a light rail car full of commuters. Outside rain was dripping from heavy gray clouds, and the sky was beginning to darken toward night. Around me under the ceiling lights people tapped at their phones and paged through books; a couple chatted and flirted. A teenager leaned his head sideways against the window, eyes closed.

The car took the curve of the track and began to lift into the crossing of the Willamette River. In the windows I could see the illuminated space reflected, the passengers mirrored and appearing half-real against the dimness outside as if they inhabited one of the alternative iterations of Portland in The Lathe of Heaven, a fragile contingency of history that might fall away into old chaos with any waking of a dreamer. Nonetheless the gray river moved below, regardless of any transient illusion of mine. A cormorant beat across the surface of the water, laboring to take to the air; and higher above a flight of gulls moved, long-winged, gray against gray, trailing downriver to their night's roost.

I have lived in Portland for over twenty years. Ursula Le Guin and I hardly crossed paths – I saw her only a couple of times at public events, and once we did correspond by post, briefly but memorably. But I always was aware of her presence in the city, and I have appreciated having her here. And from time to time I would see her speaking out on issues of the day as a private citizen, in the Oregonian's letters to the editor; tart, witty missives that struck to the heart. The touch of imagination and humanity that she brought to our civic life has made Portland that much finer a place.

We have now lost many of the writers who created the speculative fiction I grew up reading. I think of Tolkien, charting out his great secondary world of Middle-Earth, its peoples, its tongues, and its history, as around him Europe rose up from the slaughter of one world war and then fell agonizingly into the next. I think of Bradbury, shouting out the awe and terror of a twelve-year-old boy's first encounters with the multifarious wonders of life. I think of Wolfe, whom we have not yet lost, spinning tales that meditate upon memory and divinity, with mysteries coiled up inside them, and further mysteries veiled within.

But Le Guin had no peer for pure narrative grace in the expression of wisdom and love.

She played with ideas, as so many science fiction writers do. She played with manifestations of magic in this world and its shadows, as so many fantasy writers do. But more than that, she was the one who told it all. She told the stories of the not-heroes – the maimed child, the persecuted scientist, the old woman forgotten, the grocery store clerk. She illuminated their lives with a compassion and a gentle humor. She did not fail to attend to the character and sentience of beasts and birds. She saw that the world we find ourselves in is not the only possibility.

From a barren desert a band of exiles could build a new world without government or property. Gender could become fluid in a world of frost. A team of women could assemble a secret expedition and be the first to reach the South Pole. Ants could write poetry upon acacia seeds. Her stories demonstrate that a space exists for exercise of a radical freedom; yet, as every citizen of Omelas learned in time, there is no forgetting that such freedom exacts a price. Le Guin made new worlds from the free play of imagination; and without flinching away she grounded those creations in the pain and mortality fundamental to incarnate existence.

This morning I looked at my bookshelf and saw my copies of Le Guin's books, and I realized that they were now emissaries from a mind that was no longer in the world, and for a moment I imagined their spines fading and going gray with the loss. But then, that is the special magic of books, that they can bring you the voice of those who are far away, or gone out of this world. They are not subject to the same mortality that governs us.

So, that gray-fancy was a silly one. Instead, think of her books now deepening in hue. Red sunset spreading across the oceans of Urras; a brown owl gliding through the deep blue sky above the Valley of the Na. After all, with their author gone they have come into their own. They alone have the task of bringing her imagination and her heart into connection with ours. And of course they've been doing it for a long time already - there's no doubt that they are up to the job.

Her language was described as luminous, and I think the nature of the light that fell from it was a sublimely clear sense of what was right. But as Owen Griffiths said in the slim volume Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, “She didn't mean morally right. She meant right the way the music or the thought comes right, comes clear, is true. Maybe that's the same thing as moral rightness. I don't know.”

I am glad to have had the opportunity to know Ursula Le Guin through her books, and in a small way to share this city with her. I wish that I had known her more. But what I know of her from her writings is what I have no doubt that her legacy will remain – the bravest and most generous of friends.

[Note: This remembrance was also published on January 26 by our Portland weekly paper, Willamette Week.]

Publication of Merigan Tales

I'm happy to announce that the shared-world anthology Merigan Tales, including my short story "Eight Stars of Gold," has now been published by Founders House Press.  My printed copies came in the mail and I enjoyed looking through the eight stories with their authors' individual perspectives on the future history of Star's Reach. 


http://www.foundershousepublishing.com/2016/12/merigan-tales-stories-from-world-of.html

Merigan Tales

I'm happy to announce that my short story "Eight Stars of Gold," posted here in March, has been chosen to appear in the science fiction anthology "Merigan Tales."  The list of stories to be included has been posted on the Meriga Project website.  It's a good collection by some talented authors, and I'm looking forward to seeing the collection in print.  Will post updates on progress as available.

Eight Stars of Gold

Eight Stars of Gold

            Old Charley backs water, and the bow of the boat comes across the fetch of the waves.  The plashing against the hull changes its note, the keel lifting and breasting in the swell as the line begins to draw taut; Nikolai shifts in his seat.  The second boat rocks in the irregular cross-chop of the waves beside Agvik, as Andreas leans out to secure his line.  Hikaru watches the movement of the water, bites into a wave with his paddle to brace the boat more steadily for him.  Pretty well done for a chichak.  Bright blood has speckled the sleeve of his coat.

            Gray mist moves over the heaving water with the wind, disappears against the gray horizon.  Gray water, gray sky – the only color a couple of orange-painted floats bobbing by Agvik’s darkness.  Above, a brighter spot in the enclouding marks the position of the sun, coming about toward the northwest on its long slide.  Still many hours before darkness.  Nikolai hears the yelping of brant on the move, somewhere back on the coast.  Andreas, Ivan, and Hikaru bend to their oars and the other boat comes out toward them, Little Charley paying out the coiled line as the slack is drawn up. 

            Old Charley and Andreas call out to one another across the water, conferring.  “We pull straight, but not too close to each other.  And keep the pull matched up even.”

            Andreas says, “Oh, we’ll keep it easy for you.  Don’t want to spend all day going in circles out here.”

            Old Charley laughs.  “I’m saying, you all keep up!  I know you got two chichak to our one.”

            “That’s fine, I’ll spot you one.”

            Ivan’s English is still so-so, but he understands this okay.  He swells and thumps his chest, maybe mocking affront for them, or maybe for real.  “You think I’m a chichak?  I’m Rosh!  You watch, see how a real Rosh pulls.”

            Old Charley elbows Nikolai.  “Well we’re still even.  We got our own Rosh fellow.”

            Nikolai mutters, “Half.”

            “We’ll see then, eh?”

            Nikolai draws out his compass on its chain – a relic of his father, with a tarnished brass housing and a makers mark engraved in Cyrillic lettering.  He considers for a moment their last sighting of land before the fog, the set of the current, the angle of the sun, the substantial declination of the magnetic pole (this year drifting fast across Severnzemlya); raises one arm out straight to indicate the bearing for Port Tagera.  Andreas nods and sculls a moment to shift direction.

            “All ready?”  Old Charley reaches out and taps Isaac and Selden.  Both are travellers themselves.  Isaac’s a gray-haired sardo from up river in the Laska back country (down here at the coast visiting his daughter, who’s married to Little Charley – there’s a grandkid on the way any day).  The other one is a world-wanderer, claiming to hail from the country of the Nihonjin, and before that from distant Merica.

            “Put your back in then... hut!”  The men heave, and eddies spiral backwards from their oars.  Agvik rolls in the swell, shifting not at all.  Twice and again, and slowly the black bulk turns, the waves beginning to lap it at a different angle.  There is nothing like a wake, but one float and a second begin to drift trailing astern.

            “Slow and steady.  Hell to get it moving again if we stop to rest, hey?  Just keep on going slow.”  They settle in for a long pull, muscles working, with the promise of aches to come branching out through their shoulders, arms, thighs, calves.   Old Charley mutters to himself, “Yeah, wishing now we’d waited on that third boat.”  Behind their backs the slow, irregular clang of the gong buoy over Hope, ventriloquial in the fog.  Before their faces, the dark island-like mass of Agvik, slowly drawn to follow them by the lines fixed to his lip.  A spreading fan of black baleen juts from his half-open mouth; his flukes sway loosely in the swell.  The oily smell of his blood is brought to them on the wind.

            None of them is weak on his oar, Old Charley’s jibes notwithstanding.  But it’s true Selden is not bred to handle boats like the others, and from time to time he misses the rhythm of the stroke, jerking high across a wave or biting too deep.  Not too bad, and he’s in good humor.  Beside him Isaac gives a companionable jeer when he fumbles.  Still, they may be drifting south of their best course.

            Now a different bell begins to ring in the fog, distant, steady and high.  It grows louder, approaching.   In response Andreas whoops, blows sharp on a tin whistle.  “Ahoy!”  They begin to hear voices calling over the water.  “Give way,” in Rosh.  Some ship out of Murmansk or the Lena.

            Nikolai shouts back, “Give way yourselves, we’re tethered!”  The Rosh vessel appears – triple masted, moving under moderate sail – and ghosts toward them in the fog.  Going slow, yet too close for comfort; they can see the sailors working the rigging, the metal cladding of the ship’s hull scratched by a thousand growlers from each passage of the northern ocean.  Leaving it a bit late, the helmsman turns the wheel and angles away from them.  The bow wave rocks them a moment later.  Sailors wave, point at Agvik, call out to them from the ship’s stern as it settles back onto its course, toward the straits and the Pacific.

            Ivan has pulled his hood up, bent forward so as to watch the ship without showing his face much.  His chance of being taken up is not great, to be sure, but no doubt Nikolai would have done the same.  “See any old shipmates of yours?” Nikolai calls over to ask him, still in Rosh.

            “No.  Not any more.”

            “Neither did I.  Of course it has been a long time since I sailed with my father.”

        They pull harder for a while, hoping to come out of the sea lanes soon.  Nikolai remembers those childhood journeys on the Davidov, now twenty years gone.  Baffin Island, Helsinki, Vrangelya.  Cruising off Greenland, hearing the perpetual roar of the water-torrents and the thunder of ice-mountains crashing into the sea.  Pondering the mysteries of the sea-charts, the interplay of cosines and tangents, the use of the sextant.  The slow synchronous dance of the moons of Jupiter, seen through telescopic glass.  Lying out on the deck at night, watching Polaris poised at the zenith.

            The gong buoy is ringing louder to starboard.  Nikolai tosses out the lead for a sounding, and suddenly they are at four fathoms.   This is the tough spot to judge.  They are out over the old spit now, most likely, and the deepest crossing is a bit north of Hope; but the bottom is unconsolidated, still shifting under the changing currents.  And they may have veered too close in.  This would be no danger for the boats themselves, but even with the floats Agvik must draw at least two fathoms.   Worriedly Nikolai makes another sounding – three and a half now.  A few grains of beach sand adhere in the seal-grease on the lead.  He looks at Old Charley, who shrugs, gestures to port.  They change their course a couple points, and pull.

            Three and a half fathoms.  The tide, weak as it is in the northern ocean, is now falling; if they ground they cannot count on it to float them free.  Three and three quarters.  Three and one quarter.  Four, and smiles appear on the men’s faces.  But they hear or feel a scraping, transmitted to them across the taut lines, vibrating through the water and hull into their feet.  Their motion slows.  Yet it does not stop.  Andreas calls, “I don’t think that was a gravel strike.”  Old Charley nods.  Maybe Agvik has brushed against a structure.  The framing of an old military installation, or the remnant walls of a house from the drowned village of Point Hope.

            The next sounding shows four and a quarter.  If the bottom is flat here, okay.  Maybe they are past the village.  Or maybe they are just over an old street...  

            At last the bottom drops solidly away, down to six and seven fathoms.  Old Charley whistles, and they all draw in oars and allow themselves a rest.  They munch on jerky and pilot bread as the boat rocks beneath them.

            Nikolai passes round a canteen of fresh water, and they drink.  He asks Selden, “Where is it  you’re from originally?”

            “Minsota.  The lake country.”

            “Is that over by New York?” Isaac asks.

            “A bit farther inland, you might say.”

            “Long ways to come,” Old Charley says.  “What really brings you here?”

            Isaac says, “He’s here to collect fifty years of back taxes!”  His laughter creaks.

            “And I know you’d be good for it, man.”  Selden chuckles, then looks downward into the belly of the boat.  “No.  But it’s true, I am here because of... ” He pronounces it deliberately.  “America.”

            Old Charley cocks back his head at that, uncertain.  Selden turns in his seat toward the others.  “Listen.  I don’t care whether there’s one president or fifteen.  And we must be getting close to that.  What have we got now?  The good old United States.  Minus the Southern Revival.  Minus the big dust, minus Deseret, Cascadia, the Calfornia fiasco.  And Laska.  I expect the New Englanders will be bidding us fare-thee-well before long.  They always know what’s best, eh?”

            “We always did see things different, right from the beginning.  We came from different places round the world.  It used to be one country just because we agreed it was.  Maybe agreed after getting kicked in the ass, sure.  But we all knew the same stories in those days.  And not so hard for that to happen when someone could talk into a mike in New York and have a million people hear him in Georgia, Oregon, Maine.  But the thing is, that was an artifice.  What people heard talking was a machine.  Not another person’s real voice and breath.  So when all that began to go away, those stories broke up like old plastic in the sun.  And what was left was not so much the same everywhere any more.  The country they had, it wasn’t as real as they thought.”

            Isaac says, “Laska’s real enough.”

            “That’s why I travel.  That’s why I walked over the big dust.  I’ve watched the hurricanes driving Florida under.  I’ve seen the Sphinx in Vegas.  I’ve had audience with the Empress of the Nihonjin.  I want to hear your stories in Laska.  I want to bring them back home and tell them.

            “It won’t stop the fighting.  Sometimes I hope it will. But probably not.  Hell, my cousin, my uncle died in the Second Civil War.  You bet I feel that, every day.  I know that goes on, that will go on.  But whether it’s brothers fighting, or strangers, that’s because of the stories you both know.  Maybe if we do, we can be a country again someday.  A real one.”

            He grins.  “Hope that doesn’t make you want to toss me out of this boat.  If it does, well, in that case I’m just a simple trader who doesn’t know a damn thing about Laska.  That’s true too.”

            Old Charley says, “I hear you.  Don’t worry, we’re not tossing you out.”  He chews meditatively on a stick of jerky, stone-faced.  Nikolai can see this one coming.  “You still got to row.”

            So, after a bit, they do again, creeping onward in shifting fog with Agvik following them astern.  They pull across the deeper water another hour or so, angling on a bearing toward the mouth of the Kukpok.

            Andreas suddenly curses.  Nikolai follows his gaze, sees nothing for a moment.  A bulky movement and splashing back behind Agvik, obscured in the fog.  Bearded seal?  Then Isaac whistles.  “That’s a damn griz, way out here.”  A robust, water-slicked pale head bobs up, well back behind, and the bear regards them.  “Oh, damn he’s big.  Christ.  Biggest griz I’ve ever seen.”

            Old Charley says, “Probably you don’t have slope griz up the Kobuk, Isaac.  They got the blood of the ice.  This guy’s more than half nanook.”

            Andreas takes up the harpoon, though the range is much too great for a cast.  Little Charley has their only gun – currently loaded with duckshot.  The griz considers the boats, swims with little hurry back toward the rear of Agvik.  It’s a poor angle for any shot, low in the water and with considerable cover from the great body.  The griz paddles against Agvik’s side, braces with a clawed forepaw, and bites at the flank, wrenching away a mouthful of blubber.

            Hikaru whoops, bangs his oar against the hull, to no great effect.  Little Charley shrugs, raises the shotgun, and fires into the air.  The report rings out sharp, dies away flat in the fog.  The griz pauses, looks at them, lowers its head to take another bite.  But the shot has made it uneasy, and its efforts to open a wider gash in the body are distracted by keeping an eye on the men.  After swallowing a few more bites it growls and pushes back into the water.  The men see it swimming away behind Agvik, glancing back at them now and again, head low in the troughs of the waves.  Gone into the fog.

            The encounter with the griz has slowed them, and they labor to bring Agvik back into motion.  But they are closer now.  The fog begins to clear, first in ragged gaps blowing past above that show glimpses of blue sky, then in an opening-out of the water horizon.  A flock of cackling-geese passes, moving for the south.

            Then they can see land to the east.  Low clouds creep across the hills of Lisburn.  Pale patches of tundra remain on the heights, but fresh dark forests clothe all the slopes.  Spruce trees grow thick as hair on a dog.  The line of the sky dips toward the valley where the Kukpok flows out of the hills.  In many places along the shoreward water there are fields of fresh snags, where forest has briefly claimed the tundra only to be drowned.

            It is none too soon to make it to land.  They are all bone-tired now from their hours of pulling at the oars.  And the sun is skating low toward the ocean horizon.  Late August, so the night will be short enough.  But a real one, a dark one, not like the brief twilights that punctuate the perpetual day of July.     

            The buildings of Port Tagera come into view by the Kukpok.  Back toward the foothills some hay meadows show pale green swaths against the forest; a few hardy horses and cattle amble and graze at pasture.  In the harbor, fishing boats with their sails furled; the moored hulk of an old Rosh ship; the Gennida trading vessel that has been in port a few weeks for repairs.  A little farther out, a Laska coast guard cutter rides at anchor, the blue starry flag fluttering from its mainmast.  Andreas fires a flare, and after a few minutes they see minute figures running toward the water; one ignites an answering red flash.  Children climb on boulders, jump and wave to them.

            Some folks come out in boats to greet them.  There are cheers, congratulations, high fives mimed across the water.  A girl in a kayak paddles round Agvik, trailing a hand on his black side.

            A few more lines are set into Agvik, and the new boats help pull him into the shallows, by the gravel bar at the edge of town.  Andreas and Old Charley cast loose, and they row the last few yards up to shore.  Heavily they get out, boots sliding on the slick cobbles.  The men stagger up-beach to sit on a driftwood log, exhausted; Little Charley lies down flat on his back in the gravel, arms out wide.  Selden says, “I will be sore.”

            More onlookers are arriving from the village every minute.  Port Tagera is a town of little wooden buildings, many salvaged and barged over from Point Hope and Kotz over the last few decades.  There’s been no point in setting down solid foundations; most of them are planted on skids.  A team of Percherons has been working to haul one up a few more yards from the waterside; their owner unhitches them, lets them drink for a bit, leads them down toward the gravel bar. 

            Hikaru’s wife comes flying up to them from town, cutting across the crowberries and cotton-grass, beaming.  Halting, she speaks to him in bursts of rapid, excited Japanese with a few pauses for short breath, dances from one foot to another.  Then she collects herself, bows.  “Kujira-tori!”  And promptly she whirls and dashes back.

            Hikaru says, “She forgot to shut up the mercantile.”

            “Well tonight no one will be there, pretty sure,” Andreas says.  “I think we should make sure and tell her it was all down to you, eh?”  Hikaru grins.

            The sky and ocean flame red and gold as the sun slowly angles toward the horizon, skims the water, touches in the northwest and begins to sink.  Cables have been looped around the flippers and stretched to shore.  When the horse-team is hitched up, at a word they lean into the harness and heave.  Their hooves punch sharp dark dents into the gravel bar.  Agvik shifts, slides massively in toward shore behind them.  But he grounds out in the shallows before they can pull him quite all the way onto the beach.  After a few more tries the horses are let to rest. 
They’ll pull best at high tide, in a few hours.

             Old Charley rouses himself and wades out knee-deep, puts his hands on the black hide, looks into the great eye.  For a moment he speaks, softly.  He glances at Selden splashing up beside him, shrugs.  “Thanking him.”

            The sun gone, the sky darkens toward blue-black; Venus begins to shine out bright.  Children are running up and down the gravel beach, having been deputized to go gather sticks of driftwood.  They bring them back, some working in pairs to haul the bigger awkward branches.  Some folks have scraped out a quick fire-ring, and they pile up twigs to kindle a flame.

            The men sit out on the log, watching the fire grow.  Lots of people have come down to look, pacing off Agvik’s length along the water’s edge, the crowd-noise chattering louder.  Someone sends a toy firework zipping into the sky.  Isaac gropes about in his bag and pulls out a metal flask.  He unstoppers it and takes a quick drink, holds it out.  “Hey, you want some?  Good Sen Petersburg vodka.”

            Nikolai takes a sip.  Alcoholic fire traces the shape of his throat.  He coughs; beside him Little Charley stands up, glowering at Isaac.  “You got nothing better to do than sit and drink?  Don’t you know any better than to bring out liquor?”  He was “Little” when he was a kid; these days a head taller than Isaac, and disgusted mad.  Isaac waves his hands to ease him, but Little Charley turns on his heel and walks away.

            Isaac looks after him awkwardly.  Old Charley says, “Yeah, he’s not wrong.  But I guess I’d have one swallow.”

            They pass the flask about.  The fire’s got a good blaze going now.  Someone’s picking out a tune on an old guitar; a few couples are dancing back in the shadows where the ground’s more flat.  On an old length of mast a Laska flag has been raised up.  Fluttering above the firelight, the seven stars of the Big Dipper, with Polaris opposite.

            Ivan scowls.  “Dancing under their pirate flag,” he mutters.  Nikolai puts a warning hand to his elbow.

            Andreas has overheard, unfortunately.  “Watch your mouth there.” 

            There’s no big trouble with the Rosh these days.  But it’s not so long ago there were plenty of folks who might put out false lights on a foggy night; or take some small boats out in the dark to board a Rosh merchantman just passed through the strait.  Most especially down near the Waikeh, the new shallow sea with its broad fields of eelgrass, its shoals shifting every month, its maze of deltas and distributaries from a hundred rivers, where no deep-draft ship could ever pursue.  Andreas doesn’t talk much about those days, but Nikolai’s pretty sure he knows plenty.

              Once word got out, it became the practice to form up in convoys with naval escort.  It never quite got to what you would call a full war, but there were plenty of skirmishes at sea, before folks finally came to a settlement.  And before the Waikeh finally went deep enough under.  A few ships were sunk on the Laska side, a few on the Rosh.  Including the Davidov, lost with all hands off of Sen Lawrence Island.

            Ivan lurches up, goes sourly down to the fireside to warm his hands.  Selden leans back against the driftwood log, looking up.  “I think this is the first time it’s been dark enough for me to see the stars since I’ve been up here.  Never thought I’d see the North Star up so high.  Right at the pole, eh?”

            Nikolai says, “Almost at the pole, anyway.  Really he does make a circle round the point of the pole every day like the other stars, but a tiny one.  Just half a degree off.  My father told me it was the year he was born the North Star came closest to the pole.  Ever since then, been drifting away.”

            “But not fast, I guess,” Selden says.

            Nikolai laughs.  “Not too fast.  Come two thousand years, though, the pole will be over by... him.”  He points upward.  “Alrai.  Maybe we’ll need a new flag then, eh?”

            It’s full dark now, no moon, and uncountable star-fields are speckling the sky.  Great curving luminous shapes have begun to twist and glide above the ocean.  Far-flung are the banners of the northern lights.

            Selden says, “When our ship came in from Kodiag, the captain told us we were supposed to make Port Tagera on Friday, and I woke up Thursday morning, what I thought was Thursday morning, and here we are coming in to port.  I was, what the hell?!  Was I so seasick I slept away a day and a night?”

            Andreas laughs.  “Nobody told you we keep Rosh time here?”

            “They told me nothing!  I’m still not sure I got it right.”

            Andreas says, “There’s a good story about that.  So we used to have the line between today and tomorrow out on the strait.  You saw the Dimee islands when you came through?  Right between them.  You could stand on one of them and look cross to tomorrow on the other one.  So there was this fisherman Peter Corrin, he’s still around, and he had the biggest fishing boat on the coast, he’d go out with his crew and chase pollock out on the Chokchi.  A big wheel.  And there was this woman he knew over in Provdenya, that’s on the other side in Chukotka.  On the Rosh side, but you know Chukotka folks aren’t particularly Rosh any more than us, we all got relatives back and forth over the strait.  Anyway the two of them had this long time thing, and what he’d do is stop by Provdenya on the way out, spend a warm night, go on out fishing next morning. 

            “Well she ended up getting married to another fellow, but she still did like Peter, so they carried on like before – she’d leave word for him when her husband was going to be out of town.  Worked okay for a while, but then he got confused about the day, some say too much to drink the night before, I don’t know, but for sure he came sliding in to bed right beside her husband.  Got the hell beat out of him, came back to Nome with his tail between his legs, and this is actually true, he decided from now on, hell or high water, he was going to be on the Chukotka day of the calendar.  Not only that, he made it stick with his crew, and pretty soon the other boats took it up, and within a couple years it was general all along the coast.  You can ask Old Charley, he’ll tell you it’s true.”

            Selden says, “Hey, Old Charley.  Tell me about Agvik now.  What do the people say about him?”

            Old Charley drinks a long swig of vodka from the flask, winces, passes it over.  “Truth is, most of the real stories are gone.  We lost them with the language.  With the troubles with the Rosh.  Now, with the water.  Asking me about Agvik.  I’m Yupik myself, mostly.  I was born in Bethl, my brothers and me grew up fishing salmon and hunting geese.  First time I even saw Agvik I was over forty.  Well, we couldn’t stay in the Waikeh once it went under, could we.  But this here was all Inupia country once.   Point Hope was Inupia.  This place, Port Tagera, it wasn’t even here when I was a kid, there was nothing -- now look at it.  And half the people here Yupik, half Rosh, half Nihonjin or Gennidan or whatnot.  Too many halves, I guess.  But you get me.  That fellow over there, he’s all the way from Zealand, his family had trouble with the Chinese and he lit out.  Can’t go much damn further than that, can you.

            “So no wonder if we don’t know who the hell we are.  You’re right, you know.  But all those old stories are gone.  Washed away…  Down under the ocean with Agvik.  But if we wait, hey?  If we listen right.  Agvik will bring them back to us.”

            Isaac has gone down to the crowd around the fire.  He slaps Andreas and Hikaru on the back, hacks out a fierce laugh.  Suddenly they hear his voice lifting up in song.  “Eight stars of gold on a field of blue.  Laska’s flag may it mean to you.” In fact, the old sardo has a surprisingly fine baritone.

            Others have been drinking too.  They sing along with him, plenty loud, more boisterous than in tune for sure.  Ivan shakes his head, still annoyed, but Nikolai sees his lips following the words.

            “The Bear!  The Dipper! And shining high!  The Great North Star with his steady light!  Over land and sea a beacon bright!”

            Nikolai stands, walks back over the cobbles into the darkness.  Vodka burns in his belly.  By the firelight he can see women clambering onto Agvik’s back, loosening long strips of pink blubber with their knives.  Up above, the curtains of the aurora ripple and glow green against the brilliant constellations.  He cranes his head back, glances along the pointer stars to find Polaris.  Still slowly spinning over the northern ocean, above Agvik’s realm, suspended between Laska and Rosh for the balance of this age of the world.

He watches there, guiding all alike.

After Oil 2 - On Space Bats

As John Michael Greer announced in today's Archdruid Report, the second volume of the After Oil science fiction anthology series is now available from Founders House Publishing.  My short story "Winterfey", which was originally posted on this site last year under the working title of "Dreaming", is the first story in the book.  You can click here to order After Oil 2: The Years of Crisis in trade paperback or electronic formats.

I'm very pleased to have the opportunity of sharing this story with the public through this anthology. The other stories from my fellow contributors are:

"A Dead Art Form" by Calvin Jennings
"Byte Heist" by J. M. Hughes
"Promised Land" by Matthew Griffiths
"Story Material" by Rachel White
"Al-kimiya" by Tony f. WhelKs
"The Big Quiet" by Diana Haugh
"Crown Prerogative" by Martin Hensher
"A Fish Tale" by David Trammel
"A Break with the Past" by Joseph Nemeth
"A Mile a Minute" by Martin Freitag
"When It Comes A Gully Washer" by N. N. Scott

All of these stories are about people dealing with the constraints of resource depletion and the creaky shifts and declines of industrial civilization in the near to middle future.  Mr. Greer's challenge for the story contest was to show this in a way that relied neither on world-shaking catastrophe nor a leap to a game-changing new technological solution ("alien space bats").  The characters in these stories, by and large, are dealing with the interlocking crises of our civilization by simply muddling through - so the tales may not be on as bold and heroic a canvas as some, but the people inhabiting them are most human and real.

Okay, "Winterfey" actually does have some Space bats, if you look closely.  But these are definitely not alien ones, but ordinary small flying mammals, completely native to Terra.  It was nice to see that white-nose syndrome had spared them as of the mid to late 21st century, since the prospects of North American bats at present in 2015 are a bit daunting. 

Of course "Winterfey" is not about bats; but their eventual recovery from the terrible plague currently devastating them is implicit in their small presence in the story. Perhaps some of the other losses we can foresee now, though real and mortal enough, are also seeded moderately with hope.  At the close of the story I sought to evoke this mixture in its bitterness and its sweetness.

Story to be published!

I'm happy to announce that my short story "Winterfey", posted here in March, originally under the title "Dreaming", has been chosen to appear in the second volume of the "After Oil" science fiction anthology series.   See this week's Archdruid Report post for the announcement and a list of the other stories that were selected for volumes 2 and 3.  I have looked at a few of them so far and it seems to be shaping up as a very nice collection.  I particularly liked Bill Blondeau's "The Borax Road Affair," which has a style pleasingly reminiscent of Frank Herbert and Jack Vance. 

More news later.

Winterfey

Winterfey

This short story of mine was published in the science fiction anthology After Oil 2: The Years of Crisis.  It's now available here, here, and here!