anke

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

I had heard the name Elizabeth Moon in author recommendations, so when I saw one of her novels available for free at BAEN, I gave it a shot. It's the first volume in a fantasy series.

The prologue tells us of a written account of Paksenarrion's (here not specified) deeds being delivered to her humble family. It amazes them. Since chapter one jumps back to when she ran away from home, that prologue smells to me like a cheap ploy to build interest.

In the following, we get rather a lot of detail about basic training in a mercenary army. While we hear how to handle a spear, what the food's like, and what the unit marches past on the way to their first campaign, we don't see much character interaction beyond orders and some bullying from a fellow recruit. Paks making friends is covered with "Despite having little time to talk, she knew that Saben, Arñe, Vik, Jorti, and Coben were going to be her friends". The occasional conversation seems to be designed primarily to lay out worldbuilding details (gods, elves and dwarves, geography).

The only point which is not that boring is a sort of investigation after an offstage fight involving Paks and two fellow mercenaries, in which she is initially accused. The thing is, this has her locked up, and the interesting part is someone else showing initiative.

About a quarter of the way into the book, Paks is still a cipher to me, rather than someone I care about, and she's supposed to be the protagonist. I read too character-centered to be interested in this, and couldn't be bothered to finish.

Might might be interesting for military aficionados (Elizabeth Moon was in the US Marine Corps, so presumably it's not too far-fetched), but the more military-centered stories I read, the more I think I just should stay away from the topic/genre.

When can you run away?

If your heartbeat pounds so loudly in your ears you can’t make out the words of a challenge? If your arm falters, your fingers tremble, useless? If your mouth is dry as a dusty road, if your voice fled already, with your breath longing to follow?

But there was no difference between trying and failing, or failing for not trying. She’d be ridiculed either way.

“Gail? Do you need the blackboard?”

“No, I prepared handouts.” As those were passed around, she clutched her prompt cards, cleared her throat, and began, “My topic is Nicolaus Copernicus.”

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I heard Nico approach, and didn’t hide from her. I could not… well, if she was looking for me, she’d go on, and who knows in what trouble she’d end up.
She took a breath and stood still when she noticed me. She must have looked at me for a while, I guess. I didn’t look at her. Eventually she sat down next to me.
“Want to talk about it?”

“Do you really leave me a choice?”

She chuckled at that. “Ah, sorry. I think it might be good for you.”

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.

“Do you think she lied?”

“What?”

“Well, she said she understood you were hurt and scared. Not quite yourself. That she didn’t blame you.”

“Nico, she tried to help me, and I hurt her. I just lashed out.” Losing control like that. Again. It’s shameful to be so untrustworthy. Nico kept quiet for a while. I was glad she stayed, even if I didn’t deserve it.

“How often does that happen to you, hm? Once in a lifetime? Once in two lifetimes?”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t happen at all.

After a little exasperated huff she asked, “Do you think jumping off a cliff would help? Or having her cute little boyfriend cut your throat?”

“Wouldn’t change me.” Rather strange, talking from experience in that matter, but I’d died four times already, and all it changed were my surroundings. Nico was obviously looking for something to to say that would make me feel better, which made me want to come up with something to say that would stop her trying. She finished thinking first.

“Look, here’s the thing. You can’t do more than your best, but the best of your abilities is sometimes not enough, and your best judgement is sometimes a mistake. You are not perfect. Nobody is.”

“Some things are just not done.”

“Flies in the face of evidence, no? You did…” She probably trailed off because she noticed those words hurt, for the next thing she did was reach for my arm and lean against me. She still trusted me. We sat in silence for a while. Eventually she said, as much pain in her voice as in my heart, “Daaren, you will have to find a way how to live with yourself, and go on. What is the alternative?”

She must have been speaking from experience. Older than I was, more used to very nearly everything…

“Learning from you will be quite a challenge.”

She grinned. “You did well enough last time. Teacher.”

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Nico had the vague impression that the impact crater was too small for the body that had caused it. She also had the distinct impression that the molten mass at the bottom, deep iridescent green like beetle wings, was not a meteorite, particularly when it started moving.

It flowed together and rose, like a slime mold attempting to take on a humanoid form.

A psychic message flooded Nico’s mind, which put it in words as “Fear not!”

After a moment’s pause, she answered, “If you’re going to tell me I’m pregnant, there will be trouble.”

That left the angel confused.

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Marie tried to write despite Ron reading over her shoulder, looming just at the edge of her vision. That would have been distracting enough even without the stench of the vile thin cigars he smoked, and of course—

“You know you’ve got three adverbs in that paragraph already? Are you even trying?”

“I’ll worry about phrasing later.”

A fingernail clicked against the F key without pushing while she tried to jump back onto her train of thought. Duller clicks as she typed a few words, a few lines…

“Didn’t you spell that name with an i rather than y in chapter one?”

…and a patter as she dropped her fanned fingers onto the keyboard rather than going for Ron’s eyes.

“You are not helping.”

“Hey, I’m your muse. Means I’m the expert for creative work here.”

Marie glared up at him and gave a barely audible growl. “Whoever thought this’d be the job for you must be a complete idiot.”

“Your invective isn’t exactly imaginative. Besides, the people doing the assigning are experts, too.”

Telling him to go away while staying where she was to continue work without him watching had never worked before, so she just got up. “I’m done for now.”

“Yow. Don’t be so touchy. You’ll never get anywhere—”

Marie interrupted him by walking right through him, making him waver like a mirage.

Ron “tch”d before disappearing in a shower of sparks.

***

The next time Marie went to work on her novel, Ron popped back. As always. She would have brought an axe if he hadn’t been incorporeal. As things stood, she tried to ignore him.

“Bad news for you, you’re getting what you asked for.”

That cheerful proclamation did make Marie curious. And worried. “Getting what?”

“Rid of me. There was some mixup with the paperwork, and I shouldn’t be working as a muse.”

“So I was right.”

“Oh, no, there was no idiot who-thought-I-was, just an idiot who switched two sheets.”

“Whatever… They aren’t going to send a replacement, are they?

“I didn’t ask. Don’t think so, unless you wish again.”

“Wonderful,” Marie said dryly, turning to the screen. “So shove off.”

She sighed with relief when he disappeared a moment later.

***

Ron was just as glad being rid of the little ingrate. After a change of career, he’d certainly be assigned to someone who appreciated his input.

He showed up early at the Agency for orientation. The instructor gave him a brochure with information about his assigned future position. It sounded a perfect fit. His satisfied smile failed when he read some of the terms.

“Here, what is that supposed to mean?” he asked the instructor, pointing out a paragraph.

“That means that you are required to be semi-corporeal while interacting with your assigned human.”

“But why’s that?” Ron remembered one previous client throwing a wine bottle at him while he had been in that state. It had hurt.

“Read on.”

He did, and sputtered with outrage. “Beat up, stabbed or shot?!”

The instructor made a calming palm-down gesture. “It might not come to that. At least not regularly. But the fact of the matter is that for some creative people, the main reason for externalising their inner critic is to get a way to get rid of it.”

“I won’t—”

“I’m here to teach,” the instructor said, nodding towards half a dozen other people that had wandered in. “You’re welcome to listen and learn along with your prospective colleagues. It might be a good idea to get the full picture, rather than rushing off half-cocked to complain to the Agency.”

Ron made a disgusted noise, but then pulled himself together and found a seat. He even kept from snapping at the guy next to him, who gleefully reminded him, “We live to serve, pal.”

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

“Hey’ we’re having a party on Saturday. Why don’t you come?” she’d said. Simon wondered if he would have accepted if he had known that her rather large group of co-habitants included her brother, cousin, and uncle. Particularly since his first thought upon seeing Brother was that he could probably break Simon’s neck without much effort.

It wasn’t as bad as Simon feared early on, but when later in the evening he ended up alone with the three of them, his nerves won out. “So, is this where you tell me if I hurt her, you’ll kill me?”

Uncle scratched his jaw and smiled thinly. “Oh, no. If a decade of knifework drills didn’t get her to the point that if she wants you dead, she can take care of it herself, I’ve been doing something very wrong.”

“We would help her hide the body, though,” Cousin added, grinning, which earned him a half disapproving, half amused look from Brother.

Scrambling for anything resembling small talk, Simon asked, “A decade? How early do you start teaching…” He flailed a bit.

That did lead to some comments about the place they had grown up at – apparently a farm in the middle of nowhere. Cousin made sure Simon knew how his crush had taken to castrating livestock.

Simon wondered what exactly he had gotten into.

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

After overhearing  a fierce, if undervoiced, argument of her parents’, Cari lay awake well past midnight. Her father had left for a business trip, her mother had in all likelihood fallen asleep long ago thanks to the miracles of chemistry, and she had enough of her thoughts circling ceaselessly. She needed answers, but were could she get them – from a source she did not have to doubt?

As the digits of the clock slowly flicked towards one in the morning, she snuck into the sitting room. A streetlamp near the window provided illumination enough to see by. Cari lighted two candles in front of the ancestors’ shrine, enough to read by.

The bowl at the front was clean; her mother had emptied it before going to bed. It was less traditional than leaving the food offering overnight, but more practical than letting it dry to the stoneware. Cari had no idea if that was good or bad.

She was uncomfortably aware that for a long time she had treated the ceremonies, big or little, as pure gestures, chores to get over. She could not remember ever feeling a connection, discounting back when she was tiny enough to believe anything.

Trying to compose her mind, she stared at the memorials one by one. Wood or plastic, each showed the name of a person, and each held a part of them – the newer ones a lock of hair or a drop of blood, older ones might have a finger bone. Under her breath she recited the lines of ancestors for each starting with herself, followed by her father’s name, one of his parents’, on through the generations as far as she could remember.

This is not only to prove you learned names by rote, she told herself, slowing down from merely reciting, calling to mind whatever she could remember about those people, most of whom she had never met. Creating a— no, calling upon a connection that was there. Should be there.

“Your child calls on you,” she whispered. “Will you grant me the answer to one question?”

Silence, apart from the odd passing car, and stillness. There wasn’t even a flicker of candle-flame or a nervous twitch of her own muscles she could try to parlay into an answer.

Frustrated and bewildered, Cari had one more idea for something to try. She padded into the kitchen, and came back with a knife and a bit of plaster. She hesitated, blade set to her right palm, and instead made a shallow cut on the outside of her forearm. Less inconvenient to bandage. Gritting her teeth she squeezed a few drops of blood into the offering bowl.

Still whispering, but a bit louder than before, she said, “By our shared blood I implore you. Are you with me?”

She swallowed a sob. A strangely quiet part of her mind wondered why she had attached so much importance to an act that she had likely picked up in some melodramatic story. The rest of her quivered in hope.

Disappointed.

Again nothing.

Cari covered the cut. Feeling stupid for the attempt, for believing in childish superstitions, was the easier alternative. The other was holding her question answered. If she really was a bastard, her not-father’s ancestors had no reason to care.

No, I think this was silly, start to finish. Maybe he was just flinging accusations to hurt Mother, whatever he could think of. An unkind suspicion. She shook her head, trying to summon “we’ll see how it plays out when he comes back” and other practical thoughts to crowd out the worries. The bowl and knife should better be cleaned, to avoid questions.

She nearly dropped them. The bowl was warm. Gingerly reaching out her hand, Cari determined that it had absorbed heat from another source. It emanated like a candle flame’s from one of the memorials. Her mother’s mother. The only of those ancestors that had known her.

Think, Think, THINK. If that is the connection… Be sure…

Fingers spread wide, her hand hovered over the shrine, only just brushing the memorials. There was none for her maternal grandfather, who was still alive, but his – and his dead wives’ – parents’ plackets were warm to the touch. As were their ancestors’, if slightly less so. Her father’s side of the family… all as cold or warm to the touch as wood or plastic would be.

She had her answer, then. But what to do with it?

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Nora had not seen her grandmother in over a decade. Her parents had moved so far away visits were inconvenient, and were postponed to “next year”, until it was too late.

The conversation with and between the rest of the family was awkward, punctuated by sobs and too-long hugs. She turned her attention to the knicknacks around the room, and the memories the familiar one awoke. A box-frame holding a single feather caught her eye.

The phoenix feather. I remember. It was magic. Now she recognised it for a simple red feather with glued-on glitter.

After some careful negotiation with her father and his sisters, she took it to the funeral, to place it in her grandmother’s coffin.

A year later, and in the second trimester, she stood in a crafts shop, in one hand goose feathers, dyed, in the other a small jar of duo-colour metallic paint, red and gold, contemplating magic in children’s eyes.

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In Katie’s garden everything grew. She first put this to a test planting jelly beans, being rewarded with a miniature tree bearing sweets. Post-it bookmarks grew into a plant with rectangular leaves in neon colours. An USB stick buried sprouted small chips covering the ground, moss-like. A pin was a seed for a silvery bristling cactus.

Everything grew, bigger every day, until there was hardly any room to move left. The plants were starting to spread beyond the boundary.

Katie planted a coal. It brought forth fire, blooming brilliantly.

What would YOU plant in such a garden?

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Gina sat in a chair, glaring at her son over crossed arms, slowly tapping her foot. The fact it did not make any noise just added to her irritation.

“You really thought this was a good idea, yes?”

“Mum-”

She leaned forward, her legs partly sinking through the chair as she lost sight of it.

“I thought once you moved out you’d learn to stand on your own feet, but you’ve kept bothering me to tell you what to do for the last forty years.”

“But mum, you’re the wisest person ever. I need you.”

“Good god, Quentin, I don’t know what I did wrong, but you’re such a failure. If even me dying didn’t give you the push you needed…” She shook her head.

He was close to tears, and the technician took the initiative to switch off the projector.

“Sir, maybe we should adjust her self a little. It would be no problem to remove the awareness of being a hologram.”

“Ah. No. Not right now, anyway. I’ll think about it.”

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.