Thursday September 12, 2024

Aelwyd: Scene 2

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.

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Daily Diary, Day 1471:

Today it the second scene in Aelwyd: Home, the short story in the Caelestis series set in the Paradisi Chronicles universe. 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 these two posts, and scene 1, click HERE.)

Aelwyd: Home
By Louisa Locke, copyright 2016

Scene 2: New Hong Kong Base Camp,

Leaning up against the wall of a large warehouse, Kammie sat on her rain slicker and watched as Stewart played with her mobile. Her friend Mabel said that New Hong Kong was near New Eden’s equator, so even in the winter it wouldn’t get too cold. But on this early spring day, Kammie was glad she was wearing the sweater and jeans.

She didn’t understand why the boy wasn’t freezing, with his thin shirt and shorts. Every one of the 100,000 people who’d made the journey to New Eden were limited to one personal container to bring on the trip since storage space was limited onboard the ten ships. The thought was that clothing could be printed out once they got there. But clothing wasn’t the first priority in the camp these first months, so almost everyone wore what they’d brought with them. Surely Stewart’s father packed something warmer than shorts?

Yet the boy seemed perfectly comfortable lying on his stomach on what everyone called grass, although with its tough red leaves it didn’t look anything like the soft carpet of green that grew along the edges of the hydroponics biome on the Nightingale.

Mabel had explained to her that this New Eden grass was from last winter and it would soon be replaced by the green sprouts growing invisibly underneath it. But from Kammie’s perspective it just looked dirty and uncomfortable, and the last place you would want to lie down. 

From my perspective. She had to remind herself that she and Stewart had very different perspectives… about New Eden, about their parents, about almost everything.

When Kammie was brought out of cryosleep only six months into the two-year trip because she was one of the passengers who hadn’t been able to tolerate cryosleep during the jump through the wormhole, she’d been almost as angry as Stewart to discover that while she’d been asleep her mother, the only constant in her life, had fallen in love with and married Bai Wong, someone Kammie had never met before. Bai, a distant relative of Mabel’s mother, was brought up to the station at the last minute to replace one of the doctors who’d gotten cold feet about traveling millions of miles to the Andromeda Galaxy to settle on a new world.

 But Kammie at least had the rest of the two-year journey to New Eden to get to know her new stepfather and appreciate his good points, including the fact that her mother was happier than Kammie had ever seen her before.

For Stewart, it was still a terrible shock. One night he was sleeping peacefully on the cot on his grandmother’s porch when his father woke him up and said they were leaving Earth. They immediately flew in a huge helicopter to the Tolux Sky Liftport that floated south of the Philippines. Then they were whisked up into near-earth orbit on the space elevator’s lifter and transported in a shuttle over to the SS Nightingale. Within hours he was put into the suspended animation of cryosleep, to be awakened in what must have felt to him like an instant later.

From Stewart’s perspective, less than four days had passed since he left his grandmother, the grave of his mother, and the only home he’d known. In reality it was two years later, he was in an entirely different galaxy, and his father was married to a strange blue-eyed woman named Susan Gunther, and everyone told him Kammie, with her milk-chocolate skin, curly black hair, and round brown eyes, was now his sister.

I guess lying on red grass on a planet with two moons wouldn’t seem so strange in comparison.

She just wished he didn’t insist on going to the furthermost western edge of the camp, where there was nothing beyond the invisible electrified perimeter fence but wide open space.

If she kept her head down and looked at the ground as she walked around the base camp, she could fool her senses into thinking that she was still safely inside. But out here, high on a bluff overlooking a river, if she looked straight ahead past the fence posts what she saw was nothing but blue sky. Which, for some reason, her brain interpreted as meaning that she was floating away in zero gravity. Dizzy, she’d have to sink to the ground and plant her back against something solid in order not to fall over. The whole experience was odd, particularly because she’d never felt this way during her years on the Nautilus space station or onboard the Nightingale when she’d gone through the periodic emergency drills in microgravity.

She knew from conversations she’d overheard that she wasn’t the only “spacer” who’d been having difficulty adjusting to life planetside. She should probably tell her mother. But her mother, as the head of the nursing staff on the base, was so overwhelmed with taking care of more serious medical emergencies that Kammie didn’t have the heart to say anything.

Instead, she tried to view the time spent outside with Stewart as a kind of desensitization therapy. Today, she even forced herself to look briefly out towards the horizon. To the southwest she got a glimpse of the yellow river winding through the greening grasslands far below. To the northwest she saw that the land sloped gently down to a forest of ghostly white trees. But almost immediately the floating feeling started, so she concentrated on looking at the land right in front of her.

She was just wondering what the trees in the forest would look like with leaves when a pair of shiny black boots obscured her vision.

“Move back, boy, you are too near the fence. Nasty shock if you accidentally touched the current.”

A soldier stood with his back to her, looking down at Stewart and nudging the boy with one of his boots when he didn’t get a response. By his looks, a Thorndike relative of hers. Each of the ten Founding Families had different areas of responsibility in the massive project to bring people from a dying Earth to settle this new world. The Thorndikes, a family with a long military heritage, handled security for all of the ten families. The Gunthers, her mother’s family, were responsible for anything connected with the medical sciences, and many of them worked for one of the other families. That was one reason why she and her mother traveled to New Eden on the Yu’s ship.

The whole founding family dynamic could be confusing. Their teachers on the Nautilus said that once everyone got to New Eden, all the old divisions that had ruined Earth would be forgotten. Everyone would be a citizen of this new world, everyone would have access to housing, and education, and health care, and everyone would find a productive job to do. But here she was, watching a Thorndike throwing his weight around with a small boy because he was the one with the uniform and the stun gun.

Stewart continued to ignore the soldier, who then turned to Kammie. He flicked his eyes over her face, no doubt registering her mixed heritage. She was clearly not a Yu.

He said, “You really shouldn’t be out here. Our scouts have seen some bear-like animals that might be able to withstand the shock from the fence since we can’t have it so strong that stupid boys like him get themselves killed. Then there’s the Originals. We’ve had reports they have arrows lethal enough to kill the larger predators, which also means they could shoot and kill you from the other side of the fence.”

Kammie had heard that there had been some of these natives near the base camp, but they’d all disappeared. Ten years ago, the founders of the Paradisi Project had been surprised when the SS Jim Pruett discovered the planet they’d chosen as their new home was already occupied. The Council of Ten, the Paradisi Project’s governing body, announced that these “Originals” were no threat because of their limited numbers and stone age technology, and their plans to settle on New Eden would go forward. But any speculation about them was strictly discouraged.

Kammie felt the soldier stare at her, looking for a response, so she nodded and didn’t look at the soldier directly. She'd learned in infancy that was the best way to respond to a Thorndike male. They always assumed you were agreeing. Then she made motions like she was going to stand up, putting her rain slicker away in her pack.

“Right then,” he said, looking at his communications device on his wrist. “Got to go.” And he marched off to patrol the rest of his section of the fence.

Kammie sat back down, perversely refusing to let the soldier chase them away. She knew he wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. Stewart actually looked over his shoulder and smiled at her.

Lifting her face up to the warmth of the sun, she closed her eyes and let her imagination take her back to one of her favorite spots on the Nautilus, the therapeutic sauna her mother let her use when no patients were booked. One of the few places on the space station where she could spend a whole hour alone.

A sudden shriek caught her attention. She looked up to see the noise was coming from a small brown animal with enormous ears that had just been snatched up off the ground in front of her by a bird with fiery red plumage.

She jumped up in panic as she realized two things simultaneously. The small furry animal had somehow gotten inside the invisible electronic fence… and Stewart was nowhere to be seen.

To be continued…

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Brief check-in: Good news on the trigger finger front, had a phone call from an orthopedic surgeon who has approved me getting surgery for the trigger finger on the right hand. Now I wait for this to be scheduled. Otherwise, continuing to enjoy the cooler weather. I have a friend coming by this morning for visit outside, and then my usual Thursday mid-day zoom and phone meetings, so I probably will not get much editing done.

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