Flash for Funds

And Thou! Beside Me, Whistling In The Darkness.

2008-12-07T21:14:00.000-08:00

(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...

2008-12-07T21:13:00.000-08:00

....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!

2008-06-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-04-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-26T20:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-26T20:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-18T06:46:00.000-08:00

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."

Osserverei - for Meredith L. Patterson

2008-02-17T22:08:00.000-08:00

My memories, so sticky like fresh spiderwebs. Touch them and they pull, follow your hand when you pull back.

Janna pointed out to me once: people of other religions worship, Jews observe. I'm a Jew even though I'm not a proper one. Sometimes I hold Passover seders and invite a lot of other spirits in along with Prophet Elijah. They deserve it -- this is their place, not mine, not Elijah's. Not my homeland: I confess to a little frisson of irony when I read the part in the Haggadah about hoping for a return to Israel.

I have cousins in Israel. They're still fighting over the land there.

At least on Osserverei, no one fights.

Because there is no one. My brother, who came with me on the scout ship, has long since gone, and everyone else here is dead. Janna Thompson, and Peter Javier, and Arisu Yoshida, and Deepu Chakrabarti, and my lover, Marjorie. I watched and held her hand and willed her to breathe, but nothing answered my observance. She was the first. As soon as we buried her the others were gasping.

Some quirk of genetics left me and my brother untouched as my comrades fell. The medical investigators don't know whether it's a Jewish thing or a one-off mutation. They've been mapping his genome molecule by molecule for the last two years, paying him for the privilege.

Every week he sends transmissions: Come back, Julie -- They'll pay you too, and there's talk of restitutions; we're needed in court. Come home. I miss you--

And every time I answer him with unwillingness and love. I'll leave when I'm ready, when I finish my observance.

I walk through the lush green trees and the sticky strands of my memories. I sit shiva for Marjorie and Janna and the rest, speaking their names into the spring air only I can breathe.

Strength - for Adi

2008-02-17T07:31:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Grendel is the strongest thing in New Hong Kong, the fashion island of Alpha Centauri. He has muscles that bust out of his sides like redwood burl. He bumps his elbows in doorways unless he turns to the side. Every day before the sun is up he's at the gym. He's had to change gyms twice to get bigger weights. It's the treatments with that freak gene; he had to do some searching to find someone who'd give him the real thing, not cut-rate human growth hormone, but it was worth it. He's gone up two stone a year ever since.

Tonight he's just stepped into the smoke and blinking poker blacklights of a little restaurant. Silk's Place, it's called. Not just any restaurant; a diner that hasn't been paying his bosses on time. Jimmy, one-man collection team, steps over to the bar and grunts, "I wanna talk to Silk."

The man at the counter walks away, and in a moment returns with a tiny Asian girl, who steps out in front and looks at him irritably. "Yes?"

So she's the owner. "Ax wants to know why you haven't been payin'," he growls.

"I pay my electricity, my water and the rent," she says sharply. "That's all I have to pay. Get out."

She stares him in the face and for a moment he wonders if he's picked the wrong fight. But he dismisses that idea. She's tiny, meter and a half if that, and her delicate shoulders look like they could break if he tapped them with a finger.

He raises a fist, meaning to punch her in the nose -- and suddenly he's on the floor. He rolls to his feet, tries to mount a kick -- and his foot is captured, carrying his momentum forward to fling him out along the floor again.

"I picked the name Silk for a reason," she says, not even out of breath. "It's one of the strongest materials in the world."

He reaches out trying to trip her, but she catches his wrists and does a flip, landing feet first on his back and knocking the wind out of him. "But people think it's so delicate..."

Jimmy Grendel can only manage a groan.

Service - for kijeren

2008-02-17T07:15:00.000-08:00

"Look at your hands," he said.

She did. They were small and long-fingered with dirt under the oval fingernails. The backs of them were dry from the winter air.

"Are they in a condition to be of service?"

And she knew nothing would happen if she lied, except that it would be a breach of his trust.

"No, Master."

He took one hand in both of his, inspected it. "Clean them. Put some moisturizer on... This part here," he stroked with a finger, "it's nearly cracked and bleeding."

Ashamed, she walked into the next room where there was a basin. She soaped under the fingernails, scrubbed them out until they were spotless, then rinsed and dried and covered them with thick lotion.

She returned. When he nodded his assent, she took the hand-brush and scrubbed it over his back, pulling out tension and dirt with the pressure of her hands.

"Only clean hands can clean what they touch," he said.

"Yes, Master."

As she finished, he said, "You have eaten, yes?" His tone didn't brook disobedience.

"Yes, Master."

She remembered the time when he'd discovered her habit of skipping meals. There had been punishments. The rule about it now was very strict, and her food had to be real and nutritious; she couldn't skimp.

"And your studies?"

She nodded.

"The highest service is perfection," he'd said to her once. "Not a blowjob -- not any facile show of devotion -- perfection. Your body is your instrument, your altar. Do you cook a meal for me with a blunt and rusty knife? Wash the dishes with dirty water?" And she'd had to admit that, no, she didn't.

Slowly she was becoming sharper and sleeker and more real.

Palilalia - for AW

2008-02-16T02:11:00.000-08:00

Alexis and Alexis always agreed. Of course Alexis¹ was the only one who could speak so she always said it twice. "Hello hello." "Thank you thank you." The doctors checked her for neurological conditions -- palilalia was sometimes a side effect of Tourette's, or epilepsy -- and found nothing.

What they did not do was ultrasound Alexis¹'s belly, or X-ray her; because, she thought, then they would have found Alexis².

Alexis² was very small, only an inch long, like Tom Thumb from the storybooks. She lived in the side of Alexis¹ under a tiny bump. She'd always been there. She was thirteen years old the same as Alexis¹, but she couldn't go out to the ice cream parlor, couldn't learn about boys (not that that was a big loss, Alexis¹ thought; she was starting to think she preferred girls) and couldn't ride a bicycle. In her daydreams Alexis¹ imagined worlds where Alexis² could ride a tiny bicycle round in circles and eat minuscule ice cream cones.

Like being at the circus, all the time.

Alexis¹'s mother worried a lot about her. "I'm fine I'm fine," she said, but her mother wouldn't believe her. Some of the other children pointed and laughed. A few of them liked her anyway. She may have talked funny, but she had beautiful white-blond hair and was very socially smooth and when she explained about Alexis², they were quite impressed.

Still her mother took her to doctors, to psychologists and psychiatrists, to neurologists and specialized specialists. Some of them said she was just anxious and suggested pills, but she wasn't anxious and she wouldn't take them. They took EEGs and MRIs and her mother went home with papers full of inconclusive data. They even took an ultrasound, finally, and Alexis whispered "Hide, hide," and nothing showed up. So Alexis² could turn herself invisible. That was useful to know.

Alexis¹ didn't care about the doctors. She just wanted to protect Alexis².

One day her mother took her to another specialist in a ground-floor office full of Indonesian dangles and slightly rubbish antique furniture. The specialist was very peculiar, Alexis¹ thought; a tall, gaunt man with a straggly goatee. He stared at her through thick bottle glasses went "hmmm." He listened to her talk for a while. He responded to her and asked her a few questions and then, to Alexis¹.'s amazement, started responding in plural. At the end of the session he told her mother: "I believe I have the root of it. Bring her back next week?"

Next week he asked more questions. So many and so intensely she got dizzy under the barrage. "Do you lke ice cream? Do you like dogs? How do you feel about your family? How do you feel about school?" and she was tripping over her tongue answering "Yes yes, a little a little, I like them fine I like them fine, I don't like school very much don't like school very much" and he asked "Do you like boys?" and she answered "No nyes."

She suddenly fell very quiet and so did the funny specialist with the soda-bottle glasses.

"Do you like boys?" he asked again.

"No."

And Alexis² was quiet.

You like boys? Alexis¹ asked her invisible twin.

There was silence in her head but she thought that was a yes.

She tested it again. "I don't like boys," she said. "Want to make something of it?" No one chimed in with her.

"The other one," said the funny specialist, "do you?"

Alexis²'s voice came out very small. "Maybe."

He smiled. "So you don't always agree on everything. That's good."

"Good? good?" said Alexis.

"Differentiation is good. Committees are only useful when they don't always agree. One of the differences between being a child and becoming an adult is that adults are more willing to hold their own opinions."

"Is it? Is it?"

"It is," he said. "It can be comforting to have someone you always agree with. But it's not always fair to them to have to agree with you."

"It's not?" said Alexis¹, and found she spoke alone. And then, in a different tone: "It's not."

He nodded, watching her make the realization.

"We have to tell you something. We have to tell you something. I read an article about it in a magazine. An article about it in a magazine. One of us is big, one of us is big, and one of us is very small, one of us is very small." Alexis¹ again, quietly: "She lives in my side."

"Perhaps she did," says the specialist. "But another doctor looked at your body, and medical science can't find her, so it's entirely your job to make sure she has a good life."

That was the last thing Alexis¹ had expected to hear at the end of the sentence. "My job?"

"Yes. No one else can listen to her and no one else can take care of her. So it's your job to see she gets to grow up. It's a very important responsibility..."

"Oh! Oh!" He was right, she knew he was right, and she was awed by the new sense of care.

"And to give her space to disagree with you."

That didn't make Alexis¹ so happy. But she nodded, slowly. She could feel Alexis² smiling, the smile you'd have if someone gave you a new bicycle and an ice cream cone. The smile you'd have if you went to the circus and didn't have to perform.

The Gods of the Lost City of Paratanis -- for tenacious_snail, prompt 'cats'

2008-02-16T00:23:00.000-08:00

Lucy, also called Luli, appears with sleek black fur and green eyes. Children and gemstones are sacred to Her, as are stone houses. Her symbols are emeralds and bamboo trees and Her offerings are insects, especially butterflies. On Luli's altar there is always a silken pillow. Despite the city's abandonment She sometimes walks abroad as a house-cat in neighboring Engetanis.

Pyewacket, an orange tabby tom, protects the lost and hungry. It is wise to give Him small scraps when cooking, and for this reason in the region eating food that has fallen on the ground is unlucky. He can start fires with His eyes, and always leaves or enters in a cloud of flame.

Cinnamon, a motherly tortoiseshell, is the Queen of Justice. One of Cinnamon's names is Destroyer-of-Vermin. Her adherents have seen Her Paw swipe down from the sky, in a hail of small stones, in answer to prayers, killing a rapist or robber with a blow to the head, such that claw wounds open in the offender's arteries and their neck snaps like that of a mouse. The traditional offerings for Cinnamon are warm milk and little minnows, and in calling for vengeance, a mouse with its neck snapped.

Inkabon, a pure white cat with blue eyes, and deaf in one ear, governs the realm of sleep. He can put people to sleep with one word, which is why He is deaf in one ear, so He will not fall asleep when He hears His own miaow. Pray to Inkabon to receive dreams of abundance, of hunting through sunlit fields or catching fishes in a clear stream. Pray to Him also for the dreaming souls of the dead, for it is well known that He can move from the cat dream-world to the realm where they walk, and there can twine around their ankles and lead them safely on.

Coeur, for Ava (ran a bit long!)

2008-02-16T00:11:00.000-08:00

Justin Sr'sevian, first son of Sevian of the Craft Eighth of Sand, did not follow his father as a master clockworker. His younger brother would take on that duty. Justin himself found mechanical things beautiful but somehow incomplete. He wanted to make something complete.

So he went to Trakuin, to apprentice himself to a mage. Through travails we will not iterate here he found a master who was willing to instruct him in the art of motivation: the process by which clockworks and electronics and other imitations cease to imitate, and assume true life. He did almost nothing but study for eight years.

Then a message came one day on a horse from Sand, scrawled by his sister. Their father was ill in the heart.

Justin hired the first cart he saw, left an abrupt note for his master and put on clean clothes, and went at once jouncing down the desert road toward the river Ke'aine.

He ferried across to the Sand pier, then made the long climb up staircases and across terraces to reach the high levels of the Craft Eighth, where Sevian and family made their home. He had no time for nostalgia in the hot streets and upper terraces, returning among the craft houses, the men selling corn cakes three for a bit. He reached the closed clock shop and scrambled in through a side door.

His sister and brothers were there, and some of their children, and his father in the next room in his sickbed with a doctor by him. Justin went inside.

"Father."

"You didn't visit," said the old man, smiling. "Got any clever new tricks?"

"One."

"Only one, in eight years?"

"Only one that matters."

And he leaned down and told his father, and told the doctor. They both looked at him as though they knew nothing.

"If you can," said the doctor. "If you think it would help."

The next three days he took over Sevian's workshop, employing everything he'd ever known about clockwork. Blue glows emanated at night. When his siblings tried to enter he sent them off with requests: "a sheep's bladder." "A fresh tincture of oregano." And they brought him what he asked.

The thing he produced at the end of his labor was small and steel and perfect. It glowed blue. It opened and shut and ticked in his hand. It could suffice for many years.

Sevian looked at the doctor. "Do it."

"Do it," Justin said, and tried to have courage.

Safety -- for Beaq

2008-02-15T21:38:00.000-08:00

Rae's last painting was called Safety. Its subject was a monstrous creature with a wide fanged mouth, tusks protruding from the edges, a beard of scales and feathers running in braided lines down the rippled cheeks, and large round eyes with yellow whites that everyone thought were creepy but she thought they'd turned out somehow gentle. Safety had long gray claws and crouched on goats' legs with cloven hooves. One of her friends said he looked like a demon from the parts of the bible people don't read these days.

He was her last painting because she wasn't going to paint anymore.

She always met the worst piece-of-shit men when she painted, and mistook them in some fatal flaw of eysight for men who would take care of her. It got so they'd come in all shocked by what the last guy had done to her and then do it themselves or worse and leave, always taking at least a couple of fair-weather friends with them. And she would paint to get over the guy and then the next asshole would cole along and say deep things about it and she'd tie herself in knots thinking she'd finally found someone who understood.

She'd decided now that maybe the problem was that they really did understand. Rae was pretty crazy herself. She'd stay up all night painting and go out drinking in the morning, or get the wild hair to give all her clothes to the homeless woman on the corner, or try to walk from Seattle to Vancouver to prove a point.

That time, she'd given up halfway to Everett, soaked through with rain, blisters on her feet, and taken a taxi home on boyfriend's money. Boyfriend had thrashed her for it, literally thrashed her, black eyes and bruised ribs and everything, and she'd kicked him out and changed the lock.

That night with her feet bleeding she painted Safety and hung him so's he was the first thing you'd see, going into the tiny foyer.

Because she was a monster.

After she painted him, everything got calm. Not just for a day or two like usual. A whole week later she realized she wasn't drinking, wasn't blowing off her bartending job in order to get screwed and regret it in the morning, wasn't... feeling so desperate, so misunderstood. Once she got up in the night with a dream of betrayal, and lay in bed hyperventilating until the sense crept upon her that someone was watching. Not a stalker; something blissfully benevolent and powerful.

She wandered barefoot to the foyer and Safety looked her in the eye with those big yellow eyes she thought were so gentle. She crawled back into bed and slept like a kitten.

It was after about a month of this strange quiet feeling that bad trash blew back in.

He came roaring up the stairs about how she'd stolen his graphics card. She didn't even know any graphics card. Being a spitfire she would normally have opened the door to yell in his face but this time that funny fierce calm centered her and she just waited.

He pounded harder. "Open up! Little thief, goddamn little shit, did you sell it for your stupid fucking artsy Stoli?" He was just warming up. She didn't move.

Then she heard a rattling sound and knew he was picking the flimsy little doorknob lock that was all she could afford. And as soon as she realized it the door flew open.

She leapt up ready to fight, ran out in the foyer, and stopped. Because he'd stopped. He'd gone stark white and looked like he was going to faint. He was staring at Safety. Safety was staring back. The look in his eyes wasn't gentle now.

The man turned and stumbled back down the stairs.

The calm continued. Safety looked larger than before, but Rae didn't want to mention that to anyone. She didn't hear from the ex again. One of her friends said he'd gotten sick, sold everything and moved to the country. And Rae went into book cover design. She was tired of trying to be understood. She wanted to communicate.

The Journey of the Penitent - for Helen

2008-02-15T17:08:00.000-08:00

Ademin was making the journey of the penitent.

Each series of narrow, steep stairs cut into the mountain led to another plateau. On each plateau there waited one of the Oldens. One couldn't tell a gender, a set of unique characteristics, from those large eyes and wrinkled faces; they were swathed in so many layers of robe that it was hard to guess what their bodies might look like. They had been on the planet long before Ademin and his kind had come. Little monks, the first settlers called them. Oldens was what stuck, and it had been adopted by the folk themselves, meaningful or meaningless.

On each plateau, he bowed to the Olden. "I'm sorry," he whispered. On each plateau, the inhabitant studiously ignored him.

The Oldens had communities -- entirely unlike human communities; anthropologizing them was an exercise in madness. The settlement had broken something about the way they interacted, despite best efforts. They murmured to each other in a language no one had managed to translate, and always seemed to be gravely apologizing for something. And then there was this. "The journey of the penitent" was their own phrase. The trouble was that it didn't translate, either. The penitence seemed futile to everyone who climbed.

The effort of the climb was getting to him, but even more, their stony silence. "I'm sorry," he said to the next gatekeeper, who also ignored him and stood on the plateau, watching the wind, ignoring the traveller. He climbed up another stone stair, and then another.

And then was at the top of the mountain, blood pounding in his ears.

He looked down, trying to see the last plateau, and he saw that it was obscured. Every stone plateau was obscured, every Olden able to gaze upon the horizon but not upon him. And, himself, alone.

With the giddiness of altitude and exertion twisting his thoughts, the meaning came to him of a sudden and he knew.

Instead of trying to speak to the colonists, the Oldens were trying to show their way, and the essence of it was not-speaking.

Their apologies: of course, you would apologize for intruding on someone else's consciousness -- when each soul was a plateau with a clear horizon. Ademin's kind hadn't influenced the Oldens; they'd crowded them.

He went back down the mountain, saying no words to anyone. Perhaps it was his imagination, as they did not look at him directly, but their eyes seemed to understand.

Chimaera -- for Erelin (prompt: achievement)

2008-02-15T11:37:00.000-08:00

Sable, a chimaera sejant erect, Or.

This was the heraldic achievement of the Genus Corporation; the sort of thing the uncouth would refer to as a 'coat of arms.'

Of course, any and all couthness claimed by Yunatan Shain was earned rather than born.

His name was a complete fabrication, an Ellis Island hybrid long after Ellis Island was closed and only passed through anymore by gawking tourists. His parents were scientists; theirs had been laborers in the rice fields. His mother was Korean and his father Chinese and he was raised in Canada, speaking only English.

He'd always thought of that monolingualism as a defect, rather than a benefit, and strove to learn more languages as he grew older. But languages weren't his gift. He managed Old English all right, and his college friends started calling him the heir to King Arthur, just because it was weird and who knew?

College turned him onto something different.

It wasn't, precisely, genetic engineering -- not as we know it. It was a new field. Applied Teratology, it got called for a while. Cancer farming. The tilling and tending of strange growth, its shaping to specific ends. Or beginnings.

It had begun as a sub-field of stem cell research. Namely, the squeamish fundamentalists and certain elements in the Catholic Church had split enough hairs to give the field some serious bad hair days, especially in the States, and the recovery had come at the hands of one William Hurlbut, a Stanford researcher who figured out that stem cells showed up in teratomas as well as embryos. And who loves a teratoma? Certainly not Jesus. Monstrous things, they are, all eyes and teeth and hair and lopsided coils of skin growing anomalously in ovaries and occasionally on people's feet. Tumors that quiver. Tumors that get idees. That don't know their place.

Yunatan Shain loved his teratomas.

Oh, he didn't love the average joe teratoma; that was just a mistake -- some scrap of life that theoretical God forgot. But he saw potential the way an architecture student finds whole worlds opening up in junkyards between the giant twine-spools and the broken girders and paint-peely boards.

And he could shape that potential into something new.

While his peers were discovering ways to make stem cells build spines, he was working on four or five parallel master's theses; at any given point; throwing them out periodically and starting over again. The monsters went through distinct phases, visible in photographs of his work and occasional jars of formaldehyde; if he'd been a graphic artist, there would be galleries, but it's really not so easy to frame and store a thing with human legs and the head and wings of a featherless chicken.

You think it's so bad to live with a taxidermist? Some of these were too big to fit in jars, and Yunatan lived in dormitories and flophouses in his college days. The labs were only so inclined to act as a graveyard for rough beasts cut short while slouching towards puberty.

But still it was agreed that he had distinct periods of creation like any great artist.

He named his beasts in Old English, things like Ceahhetung and Cwánung. Most of them didn't manage movement, only pulsed with a certain uncanny life. Some of them learned to move around in automatic patterns, trailing their vestigial tails in circles.

He never did finish the Master's. They thought his work disorganized. His friends kept calling and visiting; they were oddball enough in their own ways to respect his mission. But at some point, even their company became too much for him.

Then the money started piling in. Venture capital. Shain got a big place out in Redding: an office with a balcony, and kitchens and hot tubs and the lot. He slapped a name on the company -- the Genus Corporation -- and put together the heraldic achievement which would be the logo. He gave his friends all positions, though he mostly ignored them when he was working, and he worked quite a lot. Or played. It always seemed that he was playing when he was working. Little round cancers chased each other around tables, legless, snapping at each other with full sets of teeth.

Nobody was quite sure why he was developing that. But the money kept coming.

One day they ran across him lying on a laboratory table, and he wouldn't answer their questions, only repeating, "Aaa. aaaa." Worried that perhaps their company president and continual crash-pad host was having a stroke, the recent graduates called an ambulance. However, when the ambulance arrived, there was a commotion indoors, a loud argument, and then Mr. Shain himself ran outside saying there was no need for their services. He signed some waivers and the vehicle left.

Of course you, the wise reader, have guessed that the stricken man was not Yunatan Shain.

But in fact the answer is more complex than this.

Several days after this incident, the doppelganger appeared again. This time he spoke. His words, recorded by the company vice-president who was in the kitchen at the time, were in no human language. He ignored the vice-president, fetched himself a cup of ice tea, and drank it with odd sucking motions.

The company officers -- all long-haired young men, some glasses, some scruffy beards -- sat down and had a talk. They agreed something was going on with their former classmate and that perhaps an intervention should be mounted -- at the very least he should let them in on this kooky shit he was doing because wouldn't they lose the venture capital? I mean, he's a genius, man, really a genius, but this shit is crazy.

So they were all piling into the office when they saw the two Yunatans together.

Fused together. Not sexually but in some far more intimate congress, arm to arm, finger to finger, spine to spine. Naked as newborn things and clearly, quite clearly, something had gone wrong, someone was stuck...

(One witness: "Like a battery plugged into a charger, but I couldn't tell which one was which.")

They watched in amazement as four arms extended from one spine and two legs unfolded into wings.

Shain said something to them. ("He sounded clear. Calm. Benevolent.") It was in no human language. Then he molted the remnants of his old body, the parts he hadn't wanted, on the floor. He opened the glass doors to the balcony and started beating his wings like mad and leapt into the air.

Flight wasn't possible. But when his feet touched the ground, buoyed out and down lightly by the parasail effect, he began to jog and kept going. Towards the Cascades. Away from humankind.

The little tumors all died, but the disorganized mass of his research has passed to his friends. Despite their higher education, they can hardly understand it, but one must keep the venture capitalists happy.

All the Fishes In the Sea - for Barry Deutsch and Charles Seaton

2008-02-15T02:51:00.000-08:00

His name is Cayman, after the Cayman Islands. When he told this to her, the first time they met, she said, I'm interested in oceanography.

She's been to school on and off for years and never for oceanography or for a degree in anything. But she likes to go diving. She doesn't have her own equipment, and the trips are always these long escapades in foreign countries that burn off mad amounts of money. More than seventy percent of the world, she says, is underwater. See the world, see the water.

It makes sense, but he has never gone with her.

Her name is Marianne. Like the song. Cayman sometimes thinks she's better than the world, and sometimes doesn't. They are both disheveled late-twenty-somethings and so it is strange that they smoked cannabis for the first time together, in her cigarette-scented apartment, but sometimes things happen that way. Cayman rests heavily on the couch with Marianne and feels like coral on a reef.

"Do you think," she is saying

very slowly,

"do you think

I'm not good enough

to marry you?"

The clock ticks and he shakes his head, but the answer doesn't come too easily. Thickly he says, "I, I," and looks at her face, her round heart-shaped face with its ratty crown of ginger hair. "I don't know, Marianne."

Not the right answer. The wrong answer. He feels suddenly that he's on a game show, the crowd tittering as they stare through him. But Marianne isn't getting angry. She is staring at him right along with the imaginary emcee and the crazed suburban studio audience.

So he tries again. "No, not that. It's..."

"How we met." She puts her feet up on the couch, and wraps her arms around her knees, facing him. So calm, but not really. Calm-looking. Calm-sounding. The ocean can be like that. He remembers his father warning him.

Cayman's parents met in the Cayman Islands. They weren't divers; his father had been working there as a nurse, his mother a birdwatcher after red-footed boobys. It's a boring story and he reduces it to a mumbled line when people ask about his name.

"It's, yeah, I guess that. A little. Not how we met. How we started. There's a difference. I mean I could have met you in a supermarket." He stumbles over the words, stumbles into a world in his head where they did, fantasizes bonding over cheap hamburger and onions, but those two people in his mind are older and more desperate than the two people in the room, and they live in the suburbs and they are wearing sweatpants.

"But you didn't." Over seventy percent of this conversation is underwater. "I don't work in a supermarket, Cayman. Could I go diving if I worked in a supermarket?"

"If I..." (got a better job)

"...it's not about you."

"I could..." (pay all your bills and get us a 401k plan and everything)

"Then it would be about you, and it's not."

He sighs, and pulls on his fading hairline. "I don't understand."

She looks like she's about to make an angry retort, but with everything going in slow motion like anemones, she reconsiders and her face recomposes itself and instead she says, "I'm sorry. I'm going to try to explain. It's not about money. It's integrity."

"Your job..." (sleeping with other men for money)

"I like my job."

"You come home with all these horrible stories."

"And good ones. But didn't your father?"

He suddenly remembers listening after he was supposed to be asleep. A patient who died choking on their own vomit in a mishandled operation. Upended bedpans and shit all over. And the worst one, the time his father had been quarantined for six months after an accidental needle stick, not knowing if he was walking dead -- this in the nineteen-eighties, when AIDS was an unstoppable juggernaut.

Cayman turns it around on her. "It's risky," he says.

"You know the precautions I take."

"Do I?"

"You know because of how we met."

There it is again. Her words are echoing through a deep-sea canyon, coming out with the timbre dismantled like whalesong.

She goes on. "Do you think you're taking a risk every time you sleep with me?"

He's about to respond with something angry, but thinks about it. "No, not... not with my health. Not really."

Somehow the emphasis comes out of that deep-sea canyon between them and into the light, because Marianne is looking at him and there's something new in her eyes.

Maybe the rest of his words will cross the chasm safely. He has to try. "It's not the job. I've been hiding behind that, but it isn't, not really. You met me as a client," he continues, slowly. "It's not the bad ones I fear," he says. Her eyes have little lights in them like angler-fish. It's hard for him to finish the sentence. "It's... how do you... what if you met another Cayman? What would you do? There are good guys -- lots of good guys."

"What if we'd met in a supermarket?" Marianne says. "What then?"

Asking, would you try to protect me from repeating that circumstance?

She's just so... so unmercifully logical, and he tries to mount a defense in his mind. Sex is different, he wants to say, but everything is different from everything else. The world is already fractured. He thinks of the millions of creatures under the ocean, and all their weird relationships, and suddenly remembers that someone somewhere thinks a gay couple is an affront to God, God who going on their notions must have designed the remora living in the shark's mouth, and he bursts out laughing: oh, irony, you win, you win. He's uncomfortable thinking about it but that just makes him want to laugh more.

"Go to school," he says, exasperated. "Get a degree in oceanography."

"I will," says Marianne. "I will when I want to."

Aspects of Water -- for Rialian

2008-02-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

Ke'aine, the river, the motion passing through a hundred towns and villages, she has a thousand shrines and a few temples. Or rather -- 'she has' implies ownership. The villagers have shrines to her. The shrines have Ke'aine. No ownership; only relationship.

One. The temple at the port of Ravensdin. The ravens of Ravensdin are communication; the land is the healer and feeder; so here, the sound of Ke'aine's name rings with money, with the voices of auctioneers, the rhythm of paddled barges and the whistle of steam-ships. Ke'aine brings riches from the fields to the colder north; she brings vessels of gold and shells against the current into the hilly city so far from the sea. They bring her red ribbons for fortune. They burn imported oil, a tithe in the hope of more imports.

Two. A shrine along the main outer border of Sand. Ke'aine is life. Irrigation channels run out from her, bringing the fields vitality. Accordingly her image has many limbs, all bringing treasures: grain in one tentacle, a vessel of water in an open hand, cows offered by another, fish in a fourth...

Three. A forgotten shrine below the city levels of Sand. The bed is dry here, the river long since moved on, changing her path with the crooked shifts of a sidewinder. They remember her sometimes with dances, irreligious; everyone drinks, and they bathe each other with drops of water that glitter in the desert sun.

Four. At the rapids of Hallun, between mountains and ocean, they kill fish for her and make deliberate prayers, trying to appease her, but sometimes she takes a sailor or a child East with her to enter the ocean. Her temple here is stone and filled with pictures: stolen children of the earth, who turn to water spirits after they die, and do not go to the other realms, or come back in new bodies upon the land.