As Zeus watched his wife gather her children into her arms, her face glowing with happiness, he couldn’t help but feel that he’d done the right thing. A little fun was all right. Manageable. Perhaps even desirable. Some of these gods were so glum. So serious. A wee prank now and then? What was the harm? And maybe their brief sojourn had, somehow, matured them. Given them some perspective on how destructive chaos can be.
As Detritus pulled away from her mother, she flicked a booger into Debris’ hair.
Maybe not.
About the Story
* * *
I’ve always told myself that I couldn’t write short stories. That I needed too much backstory, too much dialogue to provide the handle that I need to develop a “voice” for a story. When I read a story or a novel, voice trumps everything. I can read what is essentially a mediocre book, but if it has a killer voice, then I’m willing to look over myriad sins. This was a personal test. Can I do this? I have to admit there were a number of fits and starts and a sense of looming failure. Most authors I know have faced writer’s block at some point in their career, and its genesis is a fear of criticism and failure. Of course, if you don’t write it, then you don’t fail. But if you don’t write it, then there is nothing to edit, fix, stretch, mold, massage, or craft. *Cracks knuckles.* Write one sentence. Just one. Then write a second one. Two sentences. Then . . .
* * *
Claire M. Johnson
5
HeartStones
Robin D. Owens
Planet Celta, Druida City, 424 Years After Colonization, Winter
SOMETHING, SOME SOUND some pain kicked him into consciousness. The splintering hurt rippled through the door, sharpened as it hit the metal hinges, then dulled a bit as it traveled through his walls and floors, then eventually dissipated through his whole three-storied self.
Pain more than he’d felt . . . long, long, long time.
Ssshh, whispered through him, and a wisp of alive-ness inside him but apart from him whisked through him. It trailed energy that soaked into each of his fibers. Riveted, he watched himself mend and grow stronger.
He’s aware!
Then we must withdraw. He can Heal himself.
A while later, he turned his attention back from his beams and stones to understand a kick did it, brought him to full awareness and kept him there. The kick on his slammed door. His door, part of him. His main portal to the world outside. And odd that he sensed a world outside.
A different type and temperature of air against his rough outer walls than the smooth inner ones.
He began to sense many things, put them in order. Think.
Live.
Primarily, hurt. The smashing of the door hurt. He whimpered and strained and the small pieces rose and set back in place. Still aching, he sent . . . energy . . . into it, soothing himself.
Better.
But still the door didn’t quite fit, and a gaping crack let the cold winter air in.
Now silence lived within him instead of the noises, the mumbled words that he’d been aware of for a while and that had stirred him, reminding him of other times and sounds and voices of beings that moved around inside him, vibrating on his floors.
Yes, he remembered other voices, a snatch of back and forth between two beings long ago . . . conversation.
His oldest memory—words echoing through him, bouncing off his interior walls instead of soaking into them, then. “If I am debris, then you must be detritus.”
He turned over the syllables, again and again, began to get meaning from them.
Debris and Detritus. He liked those words. Said often within his walls, the words fit him because they’d shaped him.
Now as he thought them, he tried to form them in sounds. Odd creaks, not like the smooth facility he’d sensed from those who’d originally made the words. But those sounds, the first words said by his own self, echoed through his walls, sank into his stone, seemed to anchor his being.
He was Debris and Detritus.
The concept of self floated through his mind, new and sparkly thoughts.
A vibration outside his walls, outside, heavy, stopped near his broken door—oh! from a mobile being! Additional ideas tumbled through Debris and Detritus’s mind-self. He was not a mobile entity.
That odd being forced the door in, scraping and hurting. Debris and Detritus let wind whistle through his rooms, giving noise to the pain.
“Huh,” the mobile person grunted, bootsteps stomping on the floor, through the tiled hall of the entryway, into the round mainspace of marble. “Yep, definite squatters here. Kicked in the door. Left a lotta trash. I’ll call in a report that I’m doin’ a sweep of the house. That’ll keep me here and out of the police guardhouse until end of shift. Good.”
The new being mumbled a word, one with weight that fizzed the air around it. And Debris and Detritus experienced another recently-remembered sensation; the inside of the mainspace chamber held less dark, became brighter with light.
He liked that.
“What’s this? A hundred silver coin?” The new person made a series of deep sounds and radiated . . . amusement. Another concept came to Debris and Detritus’s new thoughts. Laughing.
“Those fliggering squatters left something besides trash here. They’ll sure miss that. And I’ve got it! Only fliggering thing of value in this cruddy building.”
More laughing. “Huh. Will come in handy. I’ll stay to end of my shift, do my regular thing so they don’t look at me for stealing that brooch. Only twenty more minutes. But then gotta get out of the city with the jewel. Immediately. Live good for the rest of my life.” The bright white bathing his walls vanished from the mainspace.
He felt the air in his rooms change as the mobile entity traversed every chamber, light coming and going. As the being thumped up his staircase, Debris and Detritus listened to the words coming from the entity.
“Stupid, trashy place.”
That made an odd and different pain inside.
The person kicked more stuff from the center of chambers to along his baseboards. “If it weren’t for finding that silver piece and for giving me a good excuse to hide out alone until end of shift, I’d be long gone from this abandoned and rotting house.”
Debris and Detritus creaked in surprise at more insulting words. He checked, fast. No rot lived within him.
Vibrations back from his third floor down the stairs and into the mainspace, then a ping sounded, a non-being-made noise. Then came a wheezing huff. “That’s it. Shift over. Will report in, then teleporting straight outta Druida—”
Mumbling, then a whoosh of once-occupied-air, and the being vanished from Debris and Detritus’s space. But as he left, a clink sounded as something fell onto the marble floor.
Fascinating object, full of pulsing energy, giving a heavier feeling than the true mass of the worked minerals. Debris and Detritus drew it toward his essence, his thinking stones, and surrounded it with energy, kept it safe. He liked the feel of it.
Then no more sounds or vibrations, either inside or close to his outside walls. Silence and not-light, dimness and dark, gathered within him, and he had much time to recollect the other noises and beings and conversations past, from long ago.
He considered time: minutes, septhours, days, weeks, months, a year.
Terrible event happened perhaps four years ago. Something he disliked—hurt—recalling. The end of the sounds and warmth and light of mobile beings, the beginning of emptiness.
Thoughts feathered at the edge of his brain, that portion of him he understood consisted of his stones.
There had been two mobile beings, persons, people. An old couple who had . . . talked to each other? Communicated?
He knew that word now, conversation and communication—ideas sent to other intelligent beings.
He scoured his memory and it flickered like . . . like the fire in his fireplace in the mainspace he had once felt, close to his stones. And he felt, then considered, things he’d heard an
d what the people had read aloud and those words that had echoed in his walls
Debris and Detritus recalled the last deliberate touch of those two, near his stones, and their words. Shouldn’t be long now; other Houses are Awakening, the higher voice had said, smoothing a hand over the fireplace surround.
The other part of the couple replied in a deeper voice, He will reach critical mass soon, of Flair that has sunk into him from this ground and atmosphere of Celta, of all the Flair his inhabitants have given him over the centuries.
Like us. We’ve shared, said the first.
Like us.
A loud breath from the higher voice. We won’t be here.
Maybe, maybe not.
That conversation went around and around in his mind. He had much time to be, and remember and contemplate.
To come to decisions.
He needed . . . people.
He needed Family.
Somehow he’d get them. He would keep the next ones who came.
One night later
Zane Aster had heard a whisper of treasure . . . a treasure lost in Druida City.
While on duty, a venal city police guardsman had pinched a jeweled brooch from a GreatLord—a stupid deed. From that Lord’s sentient Residence—an even more unintelligent action, since the Residence eventually figured out who’d stolen the item. And, the worst and final idiocy, the guardsman-thief had misplaced the brooch.
Reward money had been offered.
As he stared into his thick, expensive brew mug, Zane wondered if he’d been supposed to hear that rumor. If it had come to his ears because his Family worried about him.
He sat in a luxurious noble social club frequented by all but the highest of society, his ass cradled by a thick cushion that conformed to his butt, the furrabeast leather chair tilted slightly to accommodate his wretched back.
If he’d been whole, he’d be down in a low-class tavern frequented by sailors and other treasure hunters like himself, but his pride wouldn’t let him go back there in his crippled state.
Glugging down the last of the brew, he acknowledged his Family should worry about him. With his sight fading along with his finding psi-power, his Flair, he wouldn’t give himself good odds of making it to spring.
He might not actually commit suicide, but he wouldn’t take care of himself, and there were plenty of ways to perish if you just didn’t give a damn whether you ate or how much alcohol you drank or what streets you wandered down drunk and wearing expensive clothes.
What he had to look forward to tomorrow was another Healing session. Maybe the Healers would break his spine again or plump up the pads in his spinal column or something equally nasty he didn’t want to contemplate. The Healers could fix his back . . . eventually.
They had no clue how to stop his blindness.
Or the diminishment of his Flair.
And he couldn’t just stay sitting on his ass and contemplating a very bad future.
So he called for a hot toddy to go—and exited the warm social club by the main door into the snowy night instead of calling for a glider to take him home.
The wind cut into him despite cloak over jacket and tunic. He didn’t have enough Flair, psi magic, to bend a weathershield over himself. He barely had enough power to activate the warmth spells on his clothing.
As he walked through the streets no more than a half kilometer from his own home neighborhood, he acknowledged that he’d made a mistake in not summoning a vehicle. Even his clothes and the false warmth of the alcohol in his blood didn’t keep him from shivering.
Unless that was just another symptom of the damage he’d gotten in the underwater accident.
Still, when he reached the crossroads where he should turn left, instead he angled right, tripped over the curb of the sidewalk, then slid his foot to test the height and stepped onto it. Because he heard the faint wispy notes of a melody that called to the heart of him, to what had once been his primary Flair. A whiff of an odd but compelling tang curled into his nostrils . . . the scent of treasure.
He plodded in the blue gray evening, ignoring the warm yellow or white blurry rectangles of lit windows as he passed still-open businesses and apartments above them. He should go home to GraceLady Aster’s Residence, his MotherDam.
Where he’d be fussed over and nagged, and he’d hate every minute.
But he could not ignore this final opportunity to hunt for this last treasure before his talent failed.
Time to accept that the large and drifting flakes of snow in the evening light weren’t what dimmed his sight. That deteriorated all on its own. And the sensation of his Flair for finding a prize should have been a lot stronger, sizzling through his nerves, buzzing along his skin, especially since FirstFamily GreatLord Ivy’s recently stolen bauble was more than a brooch, some sort of magical Family artifact.
Zane simply continued to put one foot in front of the other, following the whiff of energy and magic of that power-imbued treasure, calling himself foolish with every step. And he traveled from an upper noble-class part of town to an area of deserted streets devoid of inhabited houses.
The colonists from Earth had built Druida City, sure their descendants would populate it and the world beyond the walls.
But Celta was a tough planet for the humans. Though individuals lived longer, the sterility rate was high, the birthrate low, and the colonists’ grasp on life still slippery.
So the city had never been full, and this part was empty.
Finally, he stopped in front of a tall, narrow house in a row of tall, narrow houses. His vision cleared for a few instants, and he saw rounded bowed windows on both the first and second floors, a balcony on the third, and a whole facade embellished with elongated designs.
A very elegant and beautiful building. And if his eyes and back and feet didn’t throb with aching, he might have been able to call up from memory the Earthan architectural style this row of homes had been modeled after.
But his sight did flicker from the dim evening of reality to gray fuzz to a blank darkness, and he couldn’t quite make out the exterior sculpture.
He could see that the tall and narrow door with a half-round top showed a large, and recent, gaping split. Zane sniffed, flexed his fingers, stomped his feet to move his sluggish blood a little faster and stimulate his Flair, and used his talent. Yes, the treasure awaited inside.
The icy wet of the iron door latch nearly seared his hand, and with a grunt and a shove of his whole body, he forced the thickly paneled door open. It scraped across the floor—a not-wood floor, unusual.
A spurt of anger zipped through him that someone had damaged the door, and he used the tiny amount of energy left to mend the wood fibers by feel, not by sight. Made the door whole, straightened it on its hinges.
His balance failed, and he windmilled and managed to set his shoulder, not his bad back, against the wall as he panted. Probably shouldn’t have fixed the door, though he’d locked out the wind and weather.
He blessed the Lady and Lord for being out of the spitting weather if not out of the cold. He breathed and felt the warmth of his breath against his face as he moved forward through the entry hall, extending his senses. He passed doors on his right and left, he thought, then tripped on a low threshold from one room to another and stopped. A touch of sweat filmed his armpits.
His breath came ragged and harsh, sounding too loud. Did the material of the walls cause sound to echo? Or did he strain more to hear since his sight faded?
The drips from his clothing plopped around his feet, and since standing in a puddle didn’t appeal, he scuffed his toe around and found even and solid ground.
Dark filled the interior of the abandoned house and he hesitated. On one hand, he could pretend his sight didn’t decline in a night-black room. But he cherished even the slightest haze of pale gray that he could see. Which might vanish during the night.
Find the treasure and go.
So he stood tall and probed the room with his senses and push
ed at his psi-power to work.
Oddly enough, the room felt circular, with a bank of colder, tall glass windows curving some meters ahead, looking out on the back. Not that he could see.
He tilted his head, noticing that the reverberations of the small noises he made sounded unusual. Slowly stretching out an arm, he touched a smooth pillar. Ah, more small columns must grace the room. Probably marble. He sniffed. Smelled like marble.
And yes, something not of the house, new to this environment, throbbed in slow and heavy pulses. A great magical artifact indeed. After inhaling through his open mouth, he tried to taste the essential magic of the artifact, thought he got a tang of bitter ivy. More overwhelming was the flavor of the house—sweet like golden honey, another peculiarity.
Blinking, he peered into the darkness, saw nothing, no glow from the brooch, which should blaze to his Flair-sight. He swallowed the despair coating his throat, shuffled a couple of steps in and past the pillar. Turned in the direction of the ivy taste, the whiff of Flair, the tiny hum of a magical artifact out of place. The jewel that needed to be returned to the Ivy Family, where it belonged and would be cherished.
“Just get the brooch and go,” he muttered.
So he ignored his blindness and strode to the right into the room. A chill breeze whisked through the place, his foot came down on a piece of thin papyrus, and he slipped, toppling backward. His head hit the column, definitely stone. His mind spun dizzily as he fell, then his wits got swallowed up by a more gentle darkness than that of blindness.
The mobile being with male genitalia—a man—lay too still on Debris and Detritus’s floor. An unfamiliar feeling, a rising sting, pulsed through his walls. He did not know the name of the emotion and did not like it. His windows on the third floor shivered as his air pressure increased due to the emotion.
No, he did not know this feeling and needed this man, his new Family, to explain it. Explain a lot.
Debris & Detritus Page 6
