Fiction: Avatar Remaindered, 17

Camel roaring its displeasure: A percentage of qimg-57c8ad4156121c492d1fab9d8550f06bcopy

When the Wind Changed

A loud braying roar like a clarion from hell woke Sard out of deep sleep. The light, the angle of the sun was wrong. How long had he slept? And what was that terrible terrible racket? The kite’s fabric tenting them, rippled with the vibrations of the roaring!

He rolled into a protective crouch over Ahni—oh fuck, she was still trussed, yesterday was not a nightmare! Great animal legs trampled among the bushes he saw through a gap between the ground and the flapping tent.

You delivered us into a game? he thought at the life-suit. He jerked loose the life-suit’s zip and shoved the hood up and out of his way. Couldn’t trust any damn thing the life-suit told him. Bet Youk is doing this in his hide-out. Why pick on me? I didn’t cast him out.

The animal brayed and slobbered its stinking breath over him where a corner of the wing flapped loose. Sard fell back. It’s real? The animal is a real animal? He scrabbled to his feet, semi-crouched under the wing, froze. Couldn’t think.

The Ahni’s voice came. “Srese-brother! It’s-a-camel-animal!”

Will the great thing attack the kite? Trample us? Why is Ahni still talking to me? Words from long ago history lessons sprang into his mind. One-humped, feral over a large area of the continent. He dragged Ahni from where he thought the animal might step next.

“Sard! The-tent. Bird-to-fly-away.” Ahni stared wildly past Sard at the flapping kite.

Her eyes were fever bright, he noted before realising what a flapping billowing tent meant. The wind had got up finally? He ditched his other half-assed plans. This was his chance. They could escape for the best reason in the world, an attack by a wild animal?

He wriggled into the harness and made quick lark-headed loops to what bridles he could reach, two on each side would have to do. He concertina’d the wing loosely behind him.
Roooaaahhh!

The slobbering roar overarched them. “Enough!” Sard punched at the infernal gape—his knuckle hit a chain hanging from the camel’s lower jaw! A domestic animal?

A gust of wind took the wing from Sard’s quick containment and billowed it up over his back. The camel skittered back with mad eyes and a different note to its bawling. “Yeah, just back off!” But coming fast, he now saw, was another. A braver animal, he wasted time thinking. Two more roars sounded in the distance. “Ahni! Come on! We’ve got time!”

The canopy filled and lifted Sard onto his toes. The wing was about to take off. How could Ahni get up, trussed as she was? He bent. “Arms around my neck, hurry! We can make it!”

“Sard, leave me. Leave me,” she cried. She wriggled up the hollow’s wall, scrambled to her knees and then her feet. She started to run.

How can she run? The wind swept him into her. To save her being bowled over, he grasped her around the body with his hands and knees. “Quick, turn around! Loop your arms over my head!”

The wind walloped under the wing and they were dragged face first over the saltbush. “Hang on!” Sard kicked hard at the ground. The next gust will get us up.

A pair of fists came out of nowhere and squeezed his arms. Sard’s hold around Ahni weakened. He shouted. “Ahni! Grab the lines!” She screamed a helpless bird cry as she slipped from his arms. His strength was sapped, hers fever-burned.

Somewhere below him and out of sight she cried joyfully. “Kes! Kestrel!”

Kestrel? Who’s that? Sard swung confused as the wind gusted and he rose high and free. Must have misheard. “Ahni, I’ll be back as soon as I can! I’ll find you!” he yelled. What is there for me otherwise?

— — — —

Brassy sky, red gravel, and a dozen tussocks of spinifex grass kaleidoscoped as he bounced over the plain, the wind that gusty. He pushed at the ground when it came at him with now a foot, now a hand, all the time willing that the wing take him properly into the air.

Then the wind dropped altogether. The wing wilted and Sard with it. When he’d fought from among its folds, he was alone with only the ridge of home in the distance, and a singing silence. He’d fallen between two clumps of spinifex, his only luck so far. A raptor hovered overhead.

His victorious escape with Ahni in his arms had ended with her caught by a clay face—though he didn’t recall that the man actually wore a clay mask—and Sard scudding witlessly along the ground. I refuse. My adventure is not finished. He bundled the wing furiously into his pack. He would trail the clay faces to a good ambush point so he’d be able to explode from behind a rock, startle the camel carrying his beloved into skittering so that she could fall into his arms. Shouldn’t be too hard. He’d practiced everyone of these moves in the virtual performances back home.

Sard pulled the life-suit’s hood back over his face as he’d need the suit to spare him the brunt of the sun. Handy too that it would salvage his sweat and so be able to save him from dehydration. Thumbs hooked behind the straps to steady the pack, he took off through the spinifex, angling into the direction where Ahni said the swamp lay. A contested place where both the clay faces and Ahni’s people rested, it made sense as the place to make for. A raptor, same or different he didn’t care, kept station overhead.

The problem was that he had to choose directions, left or right, around every tussock in his way. Hours went by with the life-suit helping him only with that, it telling him the time passing, with him like that bug crawling over a tabletop. The weight of the pack was a joy-killer, though there was nothing in it that he didn’t need, he decided a couple of times.

When he finally stopped for a break, it was due to his legs. Like they were on fire? I have got to sit down have a break have a bite to eat. He punctuated each thought with an action. Shucked off his pack. Sat down. Explored the pack for something good to eat. Drank a long draught from the water bag. Ate some of Greg’s health bars. Mm-mm, can that man cook.

He lay back against his pack, shut his eyes. He might even have slept if the life-suit hadn’t decided otherwise and let him swelter. Damn. What is it with you?

< A dangerous place to stop, in sight of the home ridge. >

I’m nowhere near home! Been walking for hours!

< Nevertheless. >

He was quarrelling with a bit of Youk’s programming? That’d be right. Just like quarrelling with Youk himself. But, never the fucking less I should have a look. See if I can see any familiar landmarks. See how good my map reading is. All that.

He grinned, cheered by his take on his troubles with the damn suit. He hauled himself to his feet and walked to a little rise. Might as well take in the scene from up here. Ha ha ha. Good one, Sard. A rise all of thirty centimetres above the plain?

He looked all about. Practiced the old-time compass points by staring into the north. Nothing he recognised there apart from blue distances fronted by saltbush. Red dirt. East. Mmm, ditto. South? Give me something to recognise. Okay, yeah, in the southeast is that low old mountain. But funny it’s no nearer than it was yesterday? Move along, Sard-man. In the south proper? Not even the a roll of dust brown up by a camel. There remains only the west.

In the west lay the dark shape of the home-ridge, near enough that he could see smoke rising from the moldeckery. A bad taste flooded his mouth. His gut griped and sent reflux. Why?

< I’ve taken over the functions of this suit and you need to ask? So stubborn—such a know it all—so much self-praise. A good dose of fear might wake you to the danger of hanging around too near ridge. >

As before, the life-suit python squeezed him to the ground. < Taking you from the horizon. >

Sard crawled to where he had left the pack. Is this all about Youk, how I bested him? His revenge?I’m supposed to think I’m the fool? That I wasted all my time and energy purposely?

Read Doomed? 1: Mongrel

Mongrel … the fellow in the banner … is available for just 99 cents from 30 June to July 14 … click on Universal Book Link: https://books2read.com/u/bW9Pgq for your favorite ebookshop

The first installment of a series set in The Eleven Islands, Mongrel tells the beginning of the story of Tardi Malko, a 22nd century surfer and trucker.

He needs a second job. While videoing his application to work at Virtual Surfing, he’s thrown against some alien coral. The Moogerah Monster, an alien entity, instantly invades Tardi’s mind and starts to force Tardi to help it break out of its prison.

Tardi begins his resistance by intending to stay himself. His ex-girlfriend signs him up for a job with her, and his drowned brother wants to stay dead next time his CPU freezes. Then the Stormies, a mysterious underclass, claim him as their own. Tamer, they call him. They expect him to control the alien monster, to use it for the good of all Stormy kind.

How will he stay human?

Wordsmithing

The excerpt below is written in a fictional, grammar-based dialect. It has one word I made up … skanzy … and some that are used in different ways than you might be accustomed to.

Watercolor painting of what one of the characters described might look like. — A typical skanzy is hard to see when you’re
trying too hard.

“A skanzy by kind and a skanzy with aptitude is what I am, though I’m quite long-winded as well. The bottom falling out of the bio-engineering market left a lot of us product scrabbling for a living. Cities wouldn’t have us, or anywhere you live. You who are not mis-made.

“Down to the rivers is where we drifted, and where we now live in permanent river-camps, despite floods and melting floes. The some of us what hold down jobs support us all. The jobs never notice there’s an unending succession of us—seen one, you say, seen us all—so when one of us is too sick to get out of bed, injured, or arthritic of a morning—someone else will turn up.

“We can’t afford to lose any of the jobs so we have a rota and a job school in every camp where we all learn all the jobs.

I’d love it if you leave a comment on how well you can understand it, and would maybe like to read more by this character?

Writing a Made-up Dialect

There is all sorts of good advice out there about not writing in strange dialects that I can quote you page and paragraph. But hey, it’s OK to experiment. This is the beginning of a short story. Does it work for you?

Scrim ate the rest of the day’s gleanings standing by the window of his high-up.
Blue sky beyond with birds so free as Scrim and every other inside the hell was not. This morning he’d stole a pair of pigeon eggs and gulped them raw at the scene. He couldn’t be found with them on him. Later he found a crust, the whole top of a loaf of bread. What kind of fool drops that?

Reprise

‘Reprise’, disappointingly, merely means a repeat of something. I always thought that ‘doing a reprise’ meant making a correction. That the repeat would intentionally be better than the original. Well, that is the flavor of this post.

What I wrote yesterday? Pure verbiage. When I read such drivel elsewhere I move on. Yesterday’s effort shall join the deleted pile.

Mapping is a vast subject when there’s a whole world to be mapped. Or, in this case, when there are eleven islands to describe. And, if there are to be people on the ground doing the mapping, what scale will they use? Travelling on foot, for example, produces a whole different understanding of a world than travelling by ship.

Arit and Hellion, the couple introduced so impulsively, are on foot. So far, if Arit were more involved in the mapping aspect, she might have drawn three parallel horizontal lines in her journal: the lower one representing the edge of the beach, the next two the near and far edges of the red sand road. Beyond the road she could perhaps scribble some shrubbery and outline the wallow …

1-red-aus-road-copy — Same present day road again.

Instead, she and Hellion have involved themselves in the local life, in the story of the Eleven Islands. They’ve just treated a Skin-Torn youth for his wounds and infections. And Arit has drawn her line in the sand. Despite her lack of knowledge of any other people in the scenario, her sympathies are all for the Skin-Torn youth’s people.

As a result, they are in a quandary. As is their trip planner. It’s obvious now that the idea to masquerade them as a pair of neutral, sight-seeing tourists was never going to work. How now to proceed with this project?

Ideas Are Everywhere

Yesterday, when I signed up for another project with an original user name — Arit Reede — I remembered a free-floating, nameless character I’d once invented for an anthology, and how this made-up name would suit her very well.

She was the carbon-knitter companion of a medic at a time when almost all the useful extras of modern life had for one or another reason disappeared. With my next thought, I wondered how to get her and her partner into The Eleven Islands scenario, given that the events for which she was invented, took place in the UK a hundred years from now.

With a certain amount of clandestine shipping still happening, that shouldn’t be too hard. Arit and Hellion like to be constantly on the move. They’ll be able to show us the islands from the point of view of a pair of foreign travelers. Future backpackers if you like, working their way round The Eleven Islands.

Despite the recommendation of ~NO TRAVEL~ to The Eleven Islands, the ship’s boat landed Arit and Hellion at the Southern Ocean end of the Red Sand Channel.

The Red Sand Channel where Arit and Hellion landed

The bosun at the tiller pointed to the island to the west. “Bight, the Isle of Wizards. The wizards leave neither flesh nor bones to be healed when they take their prey.” He changed hands to keep command over the tiller.

Pointed eastward. “Souzadelay. In the north of the island are four city states strung along the coast. A feudal overlord keeps three of them honest. The east south and west are agricultural lands in part, with fortified villages, and of course the delta. People trying to live peacefully. The Clay Faces rove and maraud. They enslave whoever they find on the road or out of their proper encampments.”

Go to my The Eleven Islands page above to read more …