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!

Ode to Joy

A few years ago my daughter, practicing for her piano lessons, was plinking away at the keyboard and came upon the theme for the last movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, the Ode to Joy.  With a number of repetitions, the melody began to sink into my brain - and I mulled over the fact that while I loved this movement, I did not comprehend the German choral part (written originally by Schiller and adapted by Beethoven) and had never really liked the English translations of it that I had seen.  Rather than a literal transcription it should be something that matched the melodic line of the symphony - and it occurred to me that this was something I could attempt.  

Since I really do not speak German - recognizing about one word in three - the effort involved several hours labor with a dictionary.  Rather than forcing full rhymes I went for a loose slant-rhyming scheme that kept the right rhythm, and I was happy with how nicely it danced!

Joy, ye shining spark of heaven,

Daughter of Elysium.

We draw near your holy temple,

Blessed spirit, drunk with flame.

Though this world may coldly sunder,

Your soft magic knits a bond.

Where your wing has lightly brushed us,

All men wake to brotherhood.

Who through toil has yet succeeded

To his friends a friend to be,

Who has won his only sweetheart,

Join with us in rhapsody!

Yes, whoever ’cross the world’s globe

One lone soul can call his own;

Let the rest who never loved go

Slink away and weep alone.

From the breasts of Nature every

Creature drinks of Joy its fill.

Good and wicked, each is drawn to

Follow on her rosy trail.

By her gift came wine and kisses,

Friendship proven to the end.

Pleasure to the Worm was given;

Rapt by God, an angel stands

Glad, as shining suns go sailing

By vast heaven’s splendid plan.

Fly, my brothers, down your raceway –

Joy to your victorious band!

May ye be embraced, ye millions,

Kiss the world entirely held.

Brothers, there beyond the star-veil

Must a loving Father dwell.

Do ye kneel to him, ye millions?

Do you sense your Maker, world?

Seek him there beyond the star-veil,

Past the star-fields must he dwell.

One point that struck me, after having reworked this poem word by word, is that there is a triple structure to the text that echoes the Christian Trinity; three stanzas relate to the Holy Spirit, then three to the Son, and lastly three to the Father. 

Later, some months after I had finished, a story I had once read by Ursula LeGuin came to mind, in which with her usual cool grace she had limned the Ode to Joy as an enduring brilliance of the human soul that could only be weakly counterfeited, but never truly expressed, by the service of an oppressive regime.  (By counterpoint, I remembered watching a viscerally appalling advertisement on television after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in which the Ode to Joy was appropriated to accompany images of sea lions and dozens of other ocean creatures boisterously applauding Exxon's environmental stewardship.) Le Guin's story rested in my mind for a few days, and then I took the odd step of writing a letter to her and enclosing a copy of my little translation.  Some days later I was surprised and pleased to get a gracious response back by post, complimenting the verse.  It was gratifying to have such a moment of contact with an author whom I've admired for so many years - and through music!  

-GEC

Prologue

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne with swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour.
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half-course y-ronne
And smale foweles maken melodye
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages -
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrymages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes kouthe in sondry londes
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende
The holy blisful martyr for to seke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Of course, this is how the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales commences, in Chaucer's original Middle English.  Many years ago I set out to memorize this, mostly because the title echoed my own name, but soon I found it specially fascinating because of the sound and flow of the language.  It seems about halfway between an English that we could comprehend without special effort and a fully foreign language.  Almost every word is at least related to a modern word of similar meaning, even if it is not immediately obvious (for "ferne halwes", think "far/foreign hallows/holies").  But the emphasis and intonation of the syllables is very different, so when I speak it aloud most people can only catch the meaning of a few phrases.

It has been a nice party trick from time to time.  I was able to commit it to memory as far as the portrait of the knight - about three minutes of verse - but I foundered on the squire, who was just a bit too insufferable for me to tolerate him as permanent resident in my head.

It seems an appropriate piece to set the tone here, since it actually does bear on multiple facets of my life.  The recognition of characters at a distance in time and space, remote enough that speech and custom have altered, but near enough that their common humanity is palpable.  The placement of everyday human life and meaning within the cycles of nature and the cosmos.  The threads connecting these people to us, and by implication those threads connecting us to our descendants seven hundred years hence.  And I have always been fond of the "smale foweles", although the ones I know best make their annual pilgrimages from the forests of western North America to the thorn scrub and cloud forests of the Neotropics.

Bifil that in that sesun on a day
At Southwerk, at the Tabard, as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury, with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde
The chambres and the stables weren wyde
And wel we weren esed atte beste
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon
That I was of hir felaweshipe anon
And made forward erly for to ryse
To take oure way ther as I yow devyse
But nathelees, whily I have tyme and space
Ere that I ferther in this tale pace
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun
To tell you al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me
And whiche they weren, and of what degree,
And eek in what array that they were inne
And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

GEC