So, when I joined this site back in April, it was with the intent to add to its entertainment value. I assumed at the time I would be doing so by contributing quality storygames. However, after my... uh... antics the other night, I feel the need to atone for my behavior.
Therefore here is a preview of what will someday be my next storygame, which is still a long way from completion. What you're reading would be the second of three opening pages — establishing the scene and several key characters. The story was inspired by the succubus contest in July; my attempts to bang something out at the time resulted in page after page of exposition, so I shelved it for a few weeks. Recently, I figured out some of the problems that had stopped me before, so writing has resumed.
No snakes were harmed in the passage you're about to read, and there are no intentional references to any forum members (with the exception of the bit about Ingersoll, Ontario, which is indeed a real place). What are your thoughts? Are you able to follow along, despite the time-shifts? Is Manny perhaps a bit too creepy? TL;DR? Comments are welcome.
Tuesday, Third-July 9th, Year 28. Afternoon.
You crouch in the forest vegetation, the wet leaves spilling their moisture onto your skin. It is humid, and the woods are filled with a moist cloud that is more like haze than fog. Rather than cooling you, the dampness from the bitterberry bushes mingles with your sweat, adding to the salty tear-like drops that run down your forehead and drip off your cheeks.
There is no breeze, and without the sound of birds — which were so ubiquitous where you came from, all those years ago — this emerald space seems unnaturally quiet. The only exception is the sound of your quarry, the dark grub-like creature the size of a monkey that is currently grasping onto the bole of a fiddlehead tree. Hommmmm-hommmm-hommani-manni, it seems to say as it gnaws at the green stem of the giant fern-like plant, as if in ecstasy. The sound is like the chant of a monk, as you remember them from back on Earth, murmured softly as though the creature were praying to the tree it was eating.
You have the creature in the sights of your hunting rifle, but it is not a clean shot. It has circled around the tree, leaving you with just a sliver of its rounded back still in view. In fact, it was this movement as the thing clawed its way around the tree that first got your attention a moment ago. But now if you were to try to circle around and follow it, you'd risk scaring it off.
It doesn't matter, though, because Grieg Carterton and his daughter Gemma have quietly taken position on the opposite side of the tree. Normally it would be Grieg taking aim with his rifle, but today you can see that he is helping Gemma set up her shot. They, too, are taking cover in the bitterberry bushes. You can see him whispering advice into the ear of his daughter, probably telling her that the only place where a kill shot is guaranteed is the head; anywhere else, and the wounded creature will drop from the tree and scurry into its burrow. This tree is so scarred with chew marks that you know the den must be very close by, probably hidden among the roots, and despite the creature's stubby legs it would almost certainly be able to flee to safety. One shot, or go hungry. This is all the same advice you gave to Grieg once, long ago.
God, she is beautiful. Gemma. For a second you forget the creature munching on the skin of the tree and watch your friend's grown daughter focusing carefully down the length of her rifle, studying the target for a pattern in its movement. Twenty years old, shoulder-length brown hair and eyes to match, svelte and supple. Her hair is pulled neatly back into a tail today, to keep it from impeding her vision; but when she wears it loose, she is like the image of your own long-departed wife, Marisol, reincarnated in this youthful form of female beauty.
She is here this week because she told her father she needs to learn how to survive on this world, just as your generation did when you first arrived here twenty-eight years ago. Never before has she come on one of your annual mountain hunts, which have become a celebrated tradition in the colony. Many of the young people, for whatever reason, have never expressed much interest. But the scare last year, when the captive creatures kept as livestock by Mat and Cathie Makreedy escaped their enclosure and fled back into the forest, may have helped her realize that survival here is not a given, and that every member of the colony plays a role.
It didn't help that the crisis last fall may have been an act of sabotage, however unsettling it is to consider that a member of the colony would willingly jeopardize the welfare of everyone. The act — if indeed that's what it was, since you have no proof — occurred just a few short months before winter, and it left you scrambling to re-capture as many of the fleeing creatures as you could. No one needs to remind you that meat supplies were lean this winter.
Therefore it is good to see the children taking more of an interest in the colony's traditions and well-being, although you are surprised that it was Gemma who insisted on coming, and not one of Grieg's sons.
"I can't explain it," Grieg said to you a few days ago, as you were in the storage hold of the Newfoundland sorting out the camping gear for the annual week-long hunting trip. "I asked David, but he seemed more intent on mastering algebra with Teacher. Gemma seemed pretty excited to see what we do on these big trips we're always talking about, so how can I tell her no?"
"She's never hunted before, though, right?" you said.
"No, but you have to start somewhere, eh?" Grieg said. "Don't you worry, though, I'll take care of her. She can use her brother's rifle, since he won't be needing it this week."
"If she takes to it, you can have Wallace Thryce make her one of her own," you said.
"Who knows? Someday she may even take over your role, Manny!" he said, laughing at his own attempt at humor in that nervous manner he's always had.
"How is it that she still hasn't taken a husband?" you said, trying to make the question sound as innocently as possible. You could tell your best friend was worried you might be upset that he was bringing his daughter along on the year's big hunting trip, especially this year when your goal was so ambitious. What he didn't know, and what you never want him to know, was that you were secretly thrilled to have her along. You are thirty-six years older than Gemma, and she is the only daughter of someone you have known since Toronto. There is no way you would ever act on your attraction to her, and indeed you are embarrassed that you think this way.
"Beats me, eh?" Grieg said. "She doesn't talk much about it."
"She's not... ?"
"Nooo," he said, with an exaggerated expression of denial. "If she was, I'm sure she would've told her mother, and Annee's never said anything to me about that. All I know is she thinks the other guys her age are strange. That's what she told us once: they're strange."
"How so?" you said.
"She didn't say. But you've raised three boys, Manny, and look at how much trouble you've had connecting with them."
"Yeah, but that's different," you said. "They're Embryonics, and they've always felt out of place."
BANG!
The report of the rifle snaps you back to the present. You see the creature falling from the bole of the fiddlehead tree, and then you see Gemma and her father rushing forward from their cover in the brush.
"A clean shot!" Grieg says to her. "Manny, come here and look at this!"
You are already on your way. You find a break in the barrier of bitterberries and join them at the foot of the tree. The tubular creature lies curled on the ground with a clean bullet wound to the head, its eight caterpillar-like claws reaching up towards you in its final spasms. You can see all of its distinguishing features: the dome of whitish skin on what passes for a head, like a painted-on halo; and the red marks on both of the forward claws, which from the very first day you ever saw one of these creatures reminded you of the stigmata. This, combined with the murmuring sound they make that evokes so vividly the ritualistic chanting of men, inspired the name the colony has given to them: saints.
And by extension, as the chief hunter on Kaitoo, your nickname has long been Manny the Saint Killer.
Grieg is congratulating his daughter on her first successful wild saint hunt, but at that moment you feel strangely detached from the present. You are being overtaken by a memory: you and Marisol, sitting at the dining room table across from Grieg and Annee Carterton; the cramped size of the room, humble despite the amount of rent you paid; the bustle of an anxious and discontent humanity outside the window on Yonge Street.
You know this place: it was your flat in Toronto, the best you and Marisol could find after your flight from Argentina, and then from Rochester after the invasion. The landlord seemed reluctant to let you move in, but she relented when you offered to pay more in rent than she was asking. It was small and outdated, but it was the best you could hope for. With the door locked and the window closed, you and Marisol could huddle together and pretend you had found contentment on a warm and crowded planet.
There is nothing for you here, Grieg was saying. Hell, there's nothing for any of us here.
Where else exactly can we go? Marisol said. If not Canada, then where?
I don't mean Canada, Grieg said. I mean Earth. Everybody knows this whole place is on the verge of blowing — too many people, too few places left to grow food, eh?
Yeah, but how do people like us get out of here? you said.
I know a guy. His name is Pawl Ondersonn. He and his wife Eida have secured a ship and rights to some distant world, KAI 222-d or some damn thing. I don't know how he did it; he's a teacher, but he used be a colonel in the military, so I guess he has connections. Says he's through with Earth, wants to go someplace where he can make his own way. Can't go north anymore, because everything's been mined and Nunavut has taken a hard stance on immigration.
But here's the thing: it's a small ship, and this is all being bankrolled personally, Grieg continued. Pawl doesn't want to advertise the fact he's putting together an off-world colonial expedition when at best all we can take is forty people. So this will be forty carefully selected people. Pawl is asking me and Annee because he knows we used to live on her parents' potato farm in Manitoba. We won't just consume food — we know how to grow it. And we're asking you because you know your way around a hunting rifle, Manny. Don't deny it; that story you told us once about how the two of you survived for a month down in the Adirondacks evading the Federalists really impressed me. I told it to Pawl, and he wants you to join us.
You remember well what came next, after that meeting in your flat. The four of you took the 401 out of the city a few days later to some small, run-down town named Ingersoll; there were giant autocar plants in the outskirts, and the air reeked from a nearby oil refinery. Here you and Marisol met Pawl and Eida Ondersonn for the first time. When Grieg and Annee talked about the possibility of moving off-planet, you couldn't help but consider they might have been scammed. But hearing Ondersonn explain his plans, and showing you the hundreds of human embryos he had collected so far in a special cryochamber he had installed in his basement, the idea that you and Marisol might actually be able to escape Earth started to seem more real.
Being ex-military, Ondersonn struck you as straight-edged and almost humorless; the students in his math classes must not have dared to show any insubordination. But you sensed that his guard was down with you and Marisol, as if he wanted you to think one of the perks of joining his planned colony was the prospect of being admitted as a friend.
KAI 222-d was discovered twelve years ago by the Kepler AI satellite telescope, he explained. Spectral analysis of the atmosphere revealed it to be Earth-like. But it's nearly thirty lightyears away, so none of the big corporations like Tyuu-Amcorp have any interest in it: too big of an investment, and too long to wait for a return.
Too long? you said. Why? How long does it take to get there?
I figure more than seventy years, Ondersonn said.
So that was the catch: the risk was not that Pawl Ondersonn was trying to cheat you out of your money — you had little to give, and he wasn't asking for it anyway — but that the world he wanted to settle on, this KAI 222-d, was so far away that there would be little room for error. Seventy-five years was about the maximum lifespan of a cryotube, in which you'd all have to sleep in suspended animation for the duration of the journey. If there was the slightest miscalculation in the ship's acceleration, or in its course, untold years might be added to the length of your journey.
My ships are good ships, Ondersonn explained. One is the transport ship: ion propulsion drive, solidly built. I call it the Labrador. Once we settle into orbit around KAI 222-d, we'll take the smaller transport shuttle down to the surface. I call that one the Newfoundland. These were from a forgotten American government contract before the war. As you know, the old U.S. space fleet was the protectorate of Canada for a while, but now these two ships are just surplus and obsolete. Trust me: no one will miss them if we take them.
All you and Marisol would have to do was book passage to McKinley Station, the international spaceport in orbit above Earth. Instead of belongings, Ondersonn encouraged you to think in terms of tools and implements — rather than your grandmother's heirloom china cabinet, for instance, think of how you might build such an item once you arrived at KAI 222-d. But possessions weren't a problem; you and Marisol had already traveled so far just to reach Canada that you had dispensed with such baggage long ago.
Rather, the problem that you had with this entire plan was its finality: blasting off to a world so far from Earth was an action that could never be reversed, no matter how many ways it might go wrong. If your goal was simply to improve your life and find a place of your own, then there had to be a simpler, more practical solution — even if you had spent your entire life up to that point searching for it with no success.
As you returned to the city that day, your wife noticed you were quiet. Don't worry about ol' Manny here, Grieg tried to reassure her. This is a big deal for him to consider, eh?
You remember that the autocar ride on the 401 was especially long that afternoon. Traffic was at a standstill because another car's AI processor had failed; C-News was reporting that the vehicle had veered lanes a few kilometers ahead of you, wiping out a dozen other cars and shutting down the entire inbound half of the highway. With the road blocked, every other autocar behind the accident mindlessly came to a halt, unable to reason its way out of the dilemma.
Look at this nonsense! Grieg raged at the motionless freeway. There's just too god-damned many people, all of them dependent upon technology no one can understand. One faulty sensor, and all forward progress grinds to a halt.
And you think flying off on a spaceship will be better? you said.
Manny, you can't seriously be having doubts, can you? Annee said. This is an opportunity to leave all of this forever! The wars, the famine, the crowded cities. Pawl Ondersonn isn't looking just for the rich and elite; he wants real people with real skills.
Face it, Grieg said. Someone like Manuel dos Santos — and his beautiful wife Marisol, I might add — will wither in an environment like this. On KAI 222-d, you can both become truly free!
There was no way he could know that! Were you really the only person who could see it that way? You had too many questions no one could answer: How reliable were these old American ships, and just as important, how good were the cryotubes? Was a public school math teacher really up to the job of planning an interstellar journey? And what exactly was this small, distant planet like? Sure, the spectral analysis could reveal the content of the atmosphere, from which you could infer the presence of biochemical processes — life, but what kind of life? How could one assume a world thirty lightyears away could be inhabited by humans? This would be a one-way journey, of course, and if KAI 222-d failed to live up to your expectations, there would be no recourse.
But Marisol was sold on the whole idea. She waited until nighttime to discuss it with you — and in your experience that was the time of day she could be most persuasive. You were both in bed, but you had not yet turned off the lights.
You know, someday I'm going to want to have children, but I'm not going to want to raise them in a place like this. She was lying on her side next to you, her head propped up on her arm. She was speaking in Spanish now, which seemed like your private code language whenever you spoke it together alone in this northern city.
Someday? When?
Soon, she said.
Soon? But if we climb into Ondersonn's cryotubes, it will seventy years before we climb back out again.
You know what I mean.
Marisol never liked it when you needled her, and now she knew she had to up her game. She rose up from her prone position and straddled you where you lied, a knee on either side of you. Then she leaned down until her long brown hair formed a curtain around both of your faces. God, she was beautiful; it was like you had been programmed to respond to a specific type of woman, and then into your life walked this creation. Small, slender, dark, warm, emotionally intelligent. You were nearly twenty-eight back then, she was twenty-four. There was nothing you would not do for her, although in retrospect it's possible you didn't tell her that often enough.
But there you were, that night after your first visit with Pawl Ondersonn, pinned down in your own bed by your lover. Her brown eyes were staring intensely into yours, but she said nothing.
You really want this, don't you? you said to her.
Marisol's response was a wordless nod, her hair brushing your cheeks. Then she closed in for the kiss, and at that moment you knew the deal was sealed: before the year was out, the two of you would be bound for KAI 222-d.
But then this odd daydream of yours shifts abruptly to a more recent memory. You are no longer on Earth, but here on Kaitoo, the nickname the children have given to KAI 222-d. It was that day two summers ago when you were spending the afternoon with your oldest foster son, Kendrick — the day of the double eclipse.
Kendrick had recently moved to a spot on the seashore where he had built himself a small shanty on a bluff. It was a modest structure, several kilometers away from the main settlement, and it pleased him to live here in isolation, with no link to the Newfoundland's automated nuclear power plant. This was his hermitage, you said, but he corrected you and called it his home. He had no desire to live in the colony, he told you, and that he preferred to spend his time beside Kaitoo's only ocean, attempting to master its wild tidal currents.
You assumed that because he was an Embryonic he felt like he didn't fit in with the main colony; certainly, he returned as seldom as he pleased. But he did return from time to time, in the early morning hours when perhaps he thought no one was watching, usually to visit Teacher, the holographic simulation on the Newfoundland that contained the sum total of human ingenuity. Judging by the strange linear patterns that were starting to decorate his body, Kendrick had been using Teacher to learn the art of tattooing.
He lived with Karl, your middle son, who had moved in with him within days of his eighteenth birthday. Kendrick and Karl were gracious enough to host you and the Cartertons on the front deck of their joint hermitage, which had an unimpeded view over the sea — and more importantly for the occasion, an unimpeded view of the sky. Solar eclipses were not an unusual occurrence on a world with three moons, but this one would be a double feature, with two of the moons passing across the sun in quick succession.
There is a specific moment from that day, though, that seems to insist that you now remember it. It was sometime after lunch, when Marisol was standing down on the rocks with Grieg and Annee. On a planet with three moons — and therefore three agents of tidal force — the ocean is often wild and unpredictable, with currents that no one has yet mastered. However, on this day the sea was oddly calm, as if your wife was a natural force capable of taming the untamable. The first of the moons was nearing the sun, and the back-to-back eclipses were less than half an hour away. You wanted to call Marisol back up to Kendrick's shanty so that she could observe the celestial spectacle through the special glasses you had brought, but you hesitated. She was so beautiful, so full of life in that moment, that you were content to watch her from afar.
But then a sense of revulsion kicks you out of the dream-memory. Like a fish caught on a hook you are reeled violently upwards into the present, the dead saint at your feet and its stigmata pointing at you. Grieg is directing Gemma to hold up the creature and stand next to you, Manny the Saint Killer. In your disorientation, reality seems as dream-like as the dream.
"Hold it up between you, honey," Grieg says, stepping back from the tree and trying to frame the two of you with his camera. "Manny, you're going to have to move to your right, closer to Gemma, because I can't go any further back."
Your elbow is now in contact with Gemma's shoulder as she displays the body of the saint in front of her. You realize you're supposed to be helping her hold the creature so that it will appear centered between you, and as you do so you steal a quick glimpse at your young companion. She is looking straight toward her father's camera, beaming with pride.
"On the count of three..." Grieg says.
Just then you realize what went wrong in your dream-memory, what kicked you out of it and sent you reeling back into the present.
That day down by the seashore: There is no possible way Marisol was there, because your wife never survived the long period of cryosleep on the journey from Earth. When you awoke after the seventy-three year voyage, as the Labrador was approaching its destination, you discovered you were the only widower among three dozen couples; Marisol had probably died forty years into the voyage when her cryotube malfunctioned, her once-perfect body now a withered raisin inside the faulty device. That was all there was to it; no good-byes, no warranty claim against the manufacturer. Cry and it get it all out of your system, some of the Canadians said. These things happen, eh?
The day of the double eclipse was a real event, and it was true that you spent it at Kendrick's shanty with your foster sons and the Carterton family. But the woman on the rocks, so beautiful and full of life? The one that your eyes followed, instead of the moons in the sky?
That wasn't Marisol; it was Gemma.
"...two... three!" Grieg says. You see him press his finger, you hear the soft whir as the digital image is captured, you feel Gemma standing close beside you.
"What do you think, Manny? Maybe we'll eat well tonight in camp, eh?" Grieg says.
Gemma looks up to you expectantly, the colony's famed Saint Killer. You're used to similar moments on past hunts with some of the teen boys; when they shot their first saint in your presence, you were expected to confirm that it had indeed been a good hunt. It is an informal custom that has developed over time, much to the pleasure of the beaming boy and the proud father. But you are hesitating too long now, in the presence of this attractive woman — as if her gender somehow changes the equation. This is a proud moment for Gemma, too, and you know she is looking for the same validation as those boys who came before her.
"Indeed," you finally say, "I hope Mr. Ondersonn and the others worked up an appetite today, because they're going to need it!"
And with any luck, neither of your companions sense any of the places your mind has been these last few minutes.
