Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, Day 1469:
Today I am going to start publishing Aelwyd: Home, the short story in the Caelestis series set in the Paradisi Chronicles universe here on my newsletter. I will publish a new scene every Tuesday and Thursday. If you haven’t read the first two introductory posts yet, I strongly suggest you do so before you start on the short story itself. To find the first of these two posts, click HERE.)
Aelwyd: Home
By Louisa Locke, copyright 2016
Scene 1:
New Hong Kong Base Camp,
Caelestis, New Eden
“Stewart, slow down. I will be out in a minute.”
Kammie Gunther hesitated at the door leading out of the Center West dining room. She’d promised her mother she would watch her nine-year-old stepbrother this afternoon but that meant leaving the safe confines of the building because the boy seemed incapable of staying inside.
Stewart’s father, Bai, kept reminding her that his son was used to being outdoors when he lived on his grandmother’s farm, even sleeping on a porch at night to stay cool in the oppressive heat and humidity of the Philippines.
Kammie couldn’t even imagine what the boy’s life had been like on Earth. No schooling because the educational systems everywhere had shut down, his mother dying slowly of one of the new wasting diseases, and his father working long hours in a high tech research facility, while he was left in the care of an old peasant woman.
She took a deep breath and stepped out the door, clutching her shoulder pack which held her mobile, disinfectant wipes, protein bars, canteen/purifier, and rain slicker, as if it were a security tether to civilization.
She knew she was being silly. New Hong Kong Base Camp wasn’t the wilderness. Instead, three months after the military scouts set foot on the planet of New Eden, it was already a bustling town of three thousand people, with more people being shuttled down from the ship the SS Nightingale every day. There were streets, residences, community centers, and factories. Soon there would be a fully operating hospital. The Yus, the Founding Family who’d been given Caelestis to settle, were certainly efficient in everything they did.
But Kammie had always lived in space before. Her first five years in the small research station out by Jupiter and the wormhole, then nine years living on Nautilus-11, the huge space station above Earth where the Asteria-class ships for the journey were built, and finally two years on the SS Nightingale traveling to New Eden, their new home in the Andromeda Galaxy. Living in space provided her with simple choices: inside walls she was safe and outside walls death awaited her.
On New Eden, safety was harder for her to determine.
When she was having a meal in the Center West cafeteria, or helping her mother out in the medical offices on the second floor, or going to sleep in their small residential unit, she could almost imagine she was back on the SS Nightingale, eating in the mess hall, working in the medical sector, or sleeping in crew quarters. The base camp buildings even looked and smelled much like the SS Nightingale. Probably because the buildings had been constructed from standardized parts extruded by the Paradisi Project Missions’s gigantic 3D printers that had helped build the ship itself.
But outside the buildings was different. One minute the blue sky showered her with warm sunlight and the next minute the same sky dumped liters of water on her and the ground under her feet would morph into a sticky mess that soiled her clothes and followed her indoors. Her stepfather, Bai, laughed at her and said that neither the rain nor mud would kill her. Yet the orientation material constantly warned everyone to be careful not to ingest the soil (as if anyone would do that) or drink unpurified rainwater.
Stewart simply ignored these warnings and continued playing in the dirt and splashing through the puddles, forcing Kammie to trail after him.
Sighing, she walked quickly to catch up with him as he disappeared around the corner. At least taking care of Stewart, she didn’t have to confront the fact that while she felt safer inside the community building, she didn’t feel safer with all the people inside that building—most of them strangers who’d spent the two year journey from Earth in cryosleep.
She didn’t know which was worse… coping with the outdoors or coping with the effects of her shyness indoors.
It had been this way forever for her, never feeling safe, never feeling completely at home.
She didn’t remember much about Sideris Station where she was born and spent her early childhood. Her main memory from back then was of her father—a giant of a man whose loud voice made her cry and whose fists made her mother cringe and who was the reason her mother fled with her to live and work on the Nautilus-11.
“Hurry up, Kammie, you are so slow.” Stewart stood in front of her, his thick black hair sticking up, his skinny arms windmilling in front of his red jersey, and his perpetual frown bringing his eyebrows together in a glower.
“Where do you want to go, Stewart? I heard that Center East has a game room up and running already. Since there aren’t that many kids down here yet, it shouldn’t be too hard to get time on one of the newer holographic consoles.”
Up on board the SS Nightingale, the crew was waking up those in cryosleep in batches. They didn’t want too many people awake until the housing at the base camp—and the food supplies—were ready for them. As a result, most of the other kids who’d come on this long journey wouldn’t be down at the base camp for weeks. Thank goodness Mabel Yu, one of Kammie’s few friends, was also among the first groups to come down. They saw each other at meals, but during the day Mabel worked with her mother to set up the camp’s gardens, while Kammie was stuck doing childcare.
Stewart grimaced and said, “No way! Who wants to play pretend worlds when there’s a real world to explore?” He turned and sprinted across the street, barely escaping being run over by a hover vehicle loaded with building parts.
“Stewart, watch out!” Kammie ran, mouthing an apology to the irate hover driver, trying to catch up to the boy before he got himself killed.
“Hey, young man, wait for your sister.” A tall man grabbed Stewart by the arm to arrest his flight, permitting Kammie to catch up.
“Thanks, sir,” she said, her cheeks reddening from her embarrassment. She gripped Stewart’s hand firmly.
“Does she look like my sister?” Stewart spat out, trying to pull away.
And there it is. Poor kid. I’ve had a year and a half to come to terms with our parents’ marriage… for him it’s only been three weeks.
To be continued…
Brief check-in: Another morning skirmish with ants this morning with my trusty all purpose citrus cleaner, but I know I will prevail! I also feel good about the fact that I’m not sending poison outside (which is what the traps do) because I feel like ants have the right to be outside, while I have the right to keep them from setting up house inside. Otherwise, it was a little cooler last evening, and isn’t supposed to get as hot today. I do have a phone call this afternoon, but otherwise, nothing but editing to do.
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A frightening new life . . .