And Thou! Beside Me, Whistling In The Darkness.

(For: Stardansr on Livejournal.
Prompt: Seashell, honeycomb.
Title taken from a line in Principia Discordia.)

Seashells contain the secret of the universe. It's called the Fibonacci Sequence: a pattern of numbers which appears everywhere in nature in ratios which define the spiral structure of a seashell, the ordering of branches and leaves, of bones in a skeleton.

It is chief among the geometries of nature.

The spiral of the seashell, the spiral of the galaxy: we're drowning in these numbers. They're so close to our lips that we can't taste them, the way air seems to feel like nothing to our skin.

That is why, when They came from beyond, people began to go mad.

I didn't. Not everyone did. A lot of people, and the thing is, it didn't seem to matter whether they were smart or stupid or young or old; some fraction of the populace just lost it - ran and gibbered in their attics, hiding from the sight and shape of these things. Granted, those of us who can take the sight of them - like me, so far - are not exactly keen on it either. There's just something wrong about it, something vertiginous, a quality that makes the eyes go dizzy and gives the mind a headache.

They don't speak to us, as far as we can tell. They wave their strange, blocky, pentagonal appendages calmly. They teleport in and out, and they seem to understand our communication; at least, they've followed all the directions so far. So it seems apparent that they come in peace, and yet -

I don't remember who it was that started the nicknaming, but pretty soon people were talking about Elder Things, at least the people at the quarantine station.

Oh, yes, we quarantined them, shortly enough; not in prison camps - there was talk of that, but someone managed to get through to the government on the point of Them being alien beings with superior technology and unknown tempers, much to my great relief. Furthermore the teleportation made it moot. No, it's just scientists and techs like me who get to see them, in reclaimed office buildings and warehouses all over the country. Even a nature preserve, in Oregon - bless their hippie hearts, they figured the aliens would want to see the trees.

I'm in the city, a warehouse in Berkeley which used to be a transfer point for coffee shipments. The place is called the Honeycomb because of its sixfold layout, and it still holds the warm dark smell of dark-roasted Robusta beans.

Working here is hardly the worst job for a semi-educated renaissance man like myself, taking down records of entry and exit and our attempts to communicate. They enter and leave, blink in and out from the central foyer and slumph down particle-board hallways after researchers and stand, if that could be called standing, mutely in the makeshift reception rooms we've strung together from receiving bays and offices, while the Ph.Ds study them and we write down the results.

There's just one problem: no way to predict who goes insane.

The insanity doesn't seem to be catching, fortunately, so we can all go home for dinner, or breakfast; but it's still alarming. Psychological exams don't seem to get very far. We're guessing it has to do with neophilic versus neophobic, but that's not on the standard personality inventories, and sometimes people who think one way most of the time have instinctive reactions in the opposite direction. Furthermore, it's not always instantaneous.

I started to figure it out the day my colleague snapped, there in our warehouse receiving bay. I didn't know him very well. His name was Michael Parikh, and he'd seemed to like them before. He'd been observing the creature standing there, and just started blinking, and shaking his head as if disoriented, and looking unwell, and then about half an hour later started talking about how the geometry was all wrong...

That's when I figured out why people were making Lovecraft references.

That's also when I started thinking about geometry.

It didn't take much to begin measuring the ratios on which the creatures are built -- just some photographs and 3-D mapping software. I found the beginnings of a pattern that wasn't our pattern. I'm not enough of a mathematician to make further assumptions from that, but it got me thinking.

Why weren't we driving them insane?

Then again, if we were, would we know? It would be the work of years to begin to define what crazy and sane could be to the aliens, the Elder Things.

--

Some of the first to go mad are recovering, now. It seems the key is to surround the person with familiar things; I'd suggested that, remembering my experience abroad and how the normally detestable taste of chain fast food became not only palatable, but vital, a line to my old life.

These small things. These fragments we piece together...

And I've got to thinking about it. Every time I set out for myself a working model of the universe, something comes along and makes it obsolete without touching it. Founding principles change, and all thought changes with them.

I'm speaking these words aloud, half to myself, half to the alien in front of me, who stares at me with fivefold eyes that glitter, and, I think, comprehend.

Maybe to think so is madness, but it's an old human madness, putting meaning and pattern into the random events that surround us. The madness that makes pictures from a moving fire; the madness that leads us to gods and neckties and gambling, and all the nonsensical applications of order that have made up human culture from day one. The leap of logic that gives language meaning, that makes a hamburger nostalgic.

Those scientists who lost it, who went catatonic, they weren't mad, if you think about it the way I'm thinking about it; they had gone starkly sane. The sheer departure from pattern that the aliens represented to their minds broke down the chains of meaning, broke down the careful lattice of human superstition, and left them adrift.

And knowing this, I know I'll never fall to it. I've made my choice. I'm going to keep living out here in cloud-cuckooland, where everything makes sense, whistling fondly into the darkness.

I must apologize...

....I've been going through a period of writer's block, for reasons at least as foolish as not, so the batch of stories that follows is several months late.

But they're arriving: watch this space (the first one, I have done, and it is coming up at once.)

Alright already!

SO! I'm finally doing custom fiction commissions again, mostly because I again have important reasons to do so. Two main objectives this time:

* To make rent. (Very important, that rent stuff.)

* To increase my aptitude in the sacred art of BICFOK (Butt In Chair, Fingers On Keyboard.)

This may or may not be the last time I'll do fiction-on-request at this rate, given the upcoming shopping of my novel to publishers by my awesome agent (cross fingers for me. clap hands and do believe in fairies) -- and if that goes well I may have deadlines again and long projects to write. Then again, I love this kind of thing and it's damn good for my writing drive.

So here's the deal:

* Story lengths: $10/300 words, $15/500 words, $30/1000. I'd be willing to do some longer requests as well, but not necessarily for random people.

* You are guaranteed at least the length you pay for, often a little lagniappe.

* Since I'm home in Portland now with my own computer and many coffee shops, I'm willing to write a LOT more stuff -- I have a lot more time and space to do it. My wrists are still slowing me down a little but I have the resources to compensate. I'm still capping it at a certain level just so that I can do all the commissions within a few weeks and not leave everyone waiting, though.

* Instead of doing it straight through Paypal, and flood-controlling by means of "check email constantly", I have set up a shopping cart thingummy on my website.

* The story you buy is dedicated to you, or your chosen dedicatee. Your one- to two-word prompt informs the content. It will appear on the blog at http://ajflashfiction.blogspot.com. Other than that, you have several options with what to do with it. You can print it, in your blog or anywhere you care to (and on request I will delay posting it to my blog so it can appear first on yours: let me know if you want to do this, I don't expect it will come up very much but I'd be happy to do that if anyone wants it); alternately you can choose a Creative Commons license that I will then release it under.


* In the event that I do a Lulu/POD collection later in case anyone wants hard copy, story buyers can have it for the base printing cost.

* I put them up as fast as they come and in the order they're ordered. First-come-first-serve.




Oh and I don't have a newsletter, so you needn't bother signing up for it in the shopping cart. I'm just tired of wrestling with PHP. :-)

The Gardener - for Feedle (prompt: angels)

Celeste hummed to herself, making a pattern of notes in private harmony with the generator. The red sunlight was just starting to filter in through the glare panels, and the early morning rays gave a gilded touch to the garden -- capturing light in dust that hung in the air, lending the world a sense that everything was still young and sparkling with inner light.

She was planting today -- tomatoes and eggplants, peppers and squashes, for the food stores; garlic bulbs and rosemary, of which were derived some powerful medicines; lilies, simply because she could. The humans on the station relied on her work, and joined it with their own. She often kept to herself, but coached others as needed; the ways had changed over the years with the territory. The ground beneath human feet wasn't always ground anymore, and it wasn't always "beneath", at least in the sense of planetary gravity, but it still grew things, and so she was still needed.

Celeste lived in a little apartment in the west quarter of the Refuge, slept in a narrow but comfortable bed, taught classes in the afternoons. She looked about fifty; she looked like someone who liked her work.

After the planting there would be weeding, not of stray green shoots but of the local spores that caught in the soil and sent up inedible fungus. (She had noticed, this year, that the mushrooms were evolving: maybe in years to come, they would produce food, or drugs, if coaxed, if sung to.) There would be tending: watering, the feeding of nutrient solution and the clearing of dead matter. The plants would grow and their genetic code would tell them to produce perfect things that nourish humans.

That was why Celeste. That was why all of it.

She could remember seeding dead lands into life in the Permian period. And later, a different weeding, clearing the dominant tropical life so that new forms could emerge. She had not been so small, then.

Celeste tightened the band around her ponytail, and dug another row, still humming her tune in the filtered light. She tossed some fungi in the bin, and whispered something to the nearby soil.

Even in the absence of a true layered crust, the soil stock changed, the microorganisms in it still evolved, same as ever ... The New Refuge was growing, itself like a garden of glass and metal. It wasn't that nothing else was left; it was just that the Earth had become something else, and the Refuge had become one of many chapters of the new Earth, by dint of people living there, people gardening. And like any garden, it grew; it lived.

Not original, or untouched. Never that: from the very beginning, things grew when she touched them with her hands, and her hands changed them. She'd never been able to figure out what it meant when people used the world natural. They seemed to sometimes use it as a surrogate for the old way of doing things, but the implication ran deeper than that. In her mind, the word meant alive and balanced; alive and able to stay alive, to grow and change, to make further life.

Gardening was what she did, now and always, had done at the beginning, before the Earth and among the dinosaurs and as the skyscrapers rose from farmhouses, the arcologies from skyscrapers: Planted the green things and tended them. Quickened the great fan ferns to shade the emergence of new creatures on land; scattered the first seeds of vegetables and herbs; seeded fruit orchards to lay the path of human habitation...

The scope and the nature of it had changed so much, but it was the same. She was smaller now, and more and more she became of the world as well as in it. Sometimes the changes made her feel lost. Still her purpose remained like a core of light inside.

She missed the plants she'd known, the ones that had gone extinct; they were dead friends to her. But, as with people, always new ones came. New plants in new rows, new soils and new gardens. Gardens of soil and roots; of steel and glass; of water and chemistry. Gardens under yellow suns and blue suns and red. And as long as there were new gardens, she would tend them.

Native Tongue -- Requested by Sithjawa, for her flock -- themewords: xenophilia and metamorphosis

Tyrida Station. The name makes a shimmering mirage of neon, of soft-lit rooms and everywhere music and movement, of a heat-drenched night that never ends. Riotous laughter and raucous cphone conversations in fourteen languages -- more, but fourteen is what you notice.

Amid it all Sinder, a gentle, gawky person, androgyne with silver eyes and thick serious glasses, stands in a windowed room at the top of the city and looks out upon the lights and wonders can I do it?

Chhel, the linguist, whom Sinder loves: she is on the bed, and she seems more abashed, even frightened. Sinder doesn't know why. She has less to lose--

Or maybe not.

Sinder takes off zir glasses and rubs them in circles on the tails of zir vest. They aren't dirty; it's just a nervous habit. Without the glasses, the city looks like a bright diffuse nebula and Sinder feels like a child, staring through a telescope, all soft edges and wonder, look at that!

They came here to the city for the same reason, each trying to lose something behind them and find something else in front of them. Tyrida is an altered state of consciousness in itself, a nightside place on a planet with a rotation period so long that the city will build a shield before the first, years-long smouldering day comes.

Tyrida Station. Always open and lit and moving, quickly, circulating like blood, and always speaking, speaking, desperately, in fourteen languages, trying to reach out, everyone with their language getting in each other's ears and eyes and making new neural patterns all over each other because they're there --

And Sinder, in the middle of it, just enough of a telepath to find the world fracturing into thirteen languages and a fourteenth that is silence to Sinder's mind, mysterious, mute.

Because it can only be passed by contact.

When Sinder first came to the city ze had spent months drunk, speaking in tongues, losing one language in favor of another in the middle of the sentence, forgetting what ze'd come for but achieving it all the same. This wasn't an uncommon problem, but Sinder had it bad, in the desire to open to the city, to understand...

Sinder had learned to control it by taking off zir glasses. It cut down the input to a manageable level, brought back a sense of peace under too many sights and sounds.

Chhel has been watching Sinder for longer than ze's known it. She followed Sinder's paths through the corridors and levels of the city, because her kind are telepathic and they know one when they see one. And she sees better than most. She finally introduced herself, in English, and Sinder stared at her and exhaled softly and zir eyes were wide with wonder.

When Sinder met Chhel, who had been watching in silence for so long, ze felt at once the need to know her, wanted to get inside her head -- the way ze was inside everyone's, except speakers of the fourteenth language. The silence, itself, drew Sinder to her. She was a calm, radiant center in a land with too many voices.

She could never find a companion of her own race; her understanding of other languages is too deep. "Like poison to their minds," she said. "Like eating alien food. I was born in a human hospital and, alone among the xkinh children there, began to pick it up at once, and at once they knew."

Knew what she would become. Herself. A linguist. The ambassador of her people, and alone among them. Because coupling relies on language -- and her language is not, was never pure.

Sinder understands what it's like, to be too much of one thing and not enough of another. To be impure. To never fit the type.

Sinder's body was born unclassifiable, with parts that could do things as interesting as anyone else's, just not the same things. The personal freedom laws ensured there was no need to mark a gender by zir name, yet humans always wanted to write words on Sinder's image in their own minds...

Ze stares through the glass at the fuzzy nebula of lights.

Chhel asks, "Are you ready?" Her accent is always unplaceable. Sinder turns around, and sees her naked for the first time, a soft configuration of skin and color and dappled pattern, a Monet painting at close range.

Sinder puts the glasses back on for a moment, to carry the little details of her in zir mind forever. So Sinder sees the small shiver that runs down her spine, the thirsty brightness in her eyes.

Yesterday they talked, holding hands over a table in a cafe, here in the top levels of the city, and Sinder felt the current between them, like a force pulling their hands together, pulling their bodies closer, something unclassifiable by science. They drank chirri juice from the same vessel, from the same fruit, and spoke of childhoods and wishes and the wide, wide sundering. And she said:

It will be your native language, after. The whole world, every aspect, every color and sound and smell and distance, will be different. You will think of them differently. And you will never be human again, and never be xkinh either. The language will settle into your backbrain, into areas of your brain that haven't been used or mapped, and change you forever...

Her voice saying these words comes back to Sinder's mind, and the idea itself excites every nerve, all at once. Ze can only make a faint, wordless, languageless throaty sound as she comes up behind, hand to shoulder and then around Sinder's back, and then inwards, towards, not with hands but with minds.

At some point the glasses are tabled...

Sinder is conscious of their bodies pressed together so tightly there's no air, no distance between them, perimeters opening, trying to merge. Not searching. Speaking.

And then English is alien in light and sound and wonder, and her mind and body are open to Sinder, all at once.

And when the glasses come back on, birthing clear stars out of the whirling nebula, the constellations are different.

Brevity -- for kijeren

Ami-Ann sat at the rickety little kitchen table, in the heat of a day full of water and fire. She sipped at her iced tea through a straw, and sweat ran down the back of her neck and she wrote haiku.

he remembered what
my name was, how my eyes looked
and drank to me then

All was silent except for the incessant hum of the cicadas. The poems weren't conventional haiku, as she didn't write about nature, except human nature. That was nature too.

day in the city
he didn't remember me
in front of his friends

Her mother had told her he was no good, but she hadn't listened. That was Ami-Ann's nature, as it happened; always to go her own way. Even her fair-weather friends had accused him of being a fair-weather friend. But she'd still gotten slapped in the face by it.

to answer a call
is a small human kindness
as should be done all

She hadn't meant to kill him, really. She hadn't even really killed him.

It was just so belittling, when people ignored her. When all her intellect and charm came to nothing against some skinny lady with designer clothes. So how was she to know that when he'd gotten stuck under his car, in his driveway next door, the engine was on and there was an exhaust leak and he was getting a lot of carbon monoxide under there?

He'd just yelled he was stuck. And she'd let the cicadas drown it out, because he was just no good.

in the world after
you don't have to remember
the shade of my eyes

She reached for the blotter, stopped, and added one last poem.

I'm sorry, honey,
if you're sorry too, and not
only saying it

Then she blotted the sheet and tore it off and went to go lay it in his casket.

Because You Were Lonely (prompt: Addiction) -- for Kijeren

The first time it was too easy to craft a dream with the machine. The dream was of a little boy, riding a red bicycle. Because somewhere, you're always a little boy, riding a red bicycle.

The device itself is the brain of one of the dragonfly people -- they have a name for themselves, but you can't pronounce it -- within coils and fields and electrodes, temperature-regulated. The brain had a name once; the name was lost to time.

You connected the electrodes to your temples and ate the enhancer paste -- made from some foul-tasting, bioluminescent ants -- and then you were in, easy. Like paddling down a calm river in the sun. Like riding a bicycle. You could make anything you wanted.

But it got harder. Because the first time, you didn't know what you could do; you only wanted something simple, were impressed by small magics. Later, though, the dreams have to be just right. You want to make something perfect.

Cut. Retake. It's a festival in the town square, and sunny -- no, not that. Snowy. Snowy, and clowns and dancing bears and a gaggle of Japanese tourists in black suits. Walking -- no. Cut. Running wildly. And if the angle isn't right...

A pool with girls. The more you look away from them, the more bored and disaffected they look. They start reading from Nietszche and walking around slowly, rhythmically... No. Not such smart girls. Dancers, all laughing, riotously drunken...

All night. All year.

You walk out thin and dizzy, wondering why you've done this to yourself.

You stay away for a while, but eventually you return, tenuous, wanting to connect just once for old times' sake. You affix the electrodes to your scalp.

"You've been gone so long," says the dragonfly's brain. "I thought we were friends."