rix_scaedu

This comes some time after A Possible Way Ahead and runs to 738 words. It was written for aldersprig's second prompt.

Rensa was looking after Mirren for once, not the other way around. Bannoc was away giving his lecture to another set of new military recruits and Mirren was within three weeks of her due date. Her baby could decide to be born at any time and everyone knew it, so they were making sure that help was near to hand. Tonight it was Rensa’s turn to keep an eye on her. Rensa’s pregnancy wasn’t as advanced as her friend’s but if they called for help to get to the medical section of the palace, she wasn’t sure which of them would be whisked away more quickly. At the moment though, they were two pregnant ladies, positioned to watch the moons rise, in comfortable chairs they could get out of, with their feet up on footstools of just the right height and an array of suitable snacks carefully positioned between them. Despite that, Mirren was eating fruit and nut ice-cream.

“Shouldn’t you be having something healthier?” queried Rensa.

“I used to get a lot of my calcium from soft cheese,” said Mirren gesturing with her spoon, “which neither of us are allowed to eat at the moment due to our interesting conditions, so I picked this ice-cream as my favourite substitute.” She ate another spoonful and then licked the spoon. “I have a very indulgent husband,” she sighed happily.

“You do,” agreed Rensa. “In the best possible way.”

“Speaking of which,” said Mirren, waving her spoon around in punctuation, “you should let your husband be more indulgent.” The light from the first rising moon made her spoon glitter.

“What do you mean?” Rensa turned to her friend and companion/keeper. “Yannic does a lot for me.”

“He gives you things you need,” replied Mirren, “but you don’t let him give you things you’d like to have just because you’d like to have them. You get enthusiastic about something, he asks if you’d like it, and then you’re all sort of ‘No, thank you,’ and withdrawing.”

“I don’t want to be greedy,” said Rensa quietly. “I already have so much.”

The second moon came up over the horizon as Mirren pointed out, “Not that much that’s yours, and you lost more, which may be unkind of me to point out, but it is true. I know Yannic feels guilty about his part in that,” there was another gesture with the spoon, “and you can make him drown in that guilt or let him come to think it’s not important, but I don’t think you should do either of those things.” She ate another spoonful of ice cream. “It wouldn’t be good for either of you in the long run. Besides,” she went on practically, “very soon you’re going to need all the help you can get because babies take a lot of work to look after properly.”

“I know,” agrees Rensa. “Another reason not to ask for too much now.”

Mirren looked at her oddly and asked, “Are you budgeting that?”

“Um?” Rensa stopped for a moment and thought before saying, “I might be.”

“I’m fairly sure that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”

“I don’t know any other way.”

Mirren sighed. “You could just let him give you love gifts because he wants to.”

“Why would he want to give me love gifts? I’m not Kiriel.” Rensa began to look pensive.

“He might want to give you love gifts because you’re Rensa,” replied Mirren tartly. “He was a widower. He’s allowed to move on and what he feels for you may not be what he felt for Kiriel, but that doesn’t mean it’s not love.”

“My therapist says that too,” admitted Rensa.

“So do you listen to her?”

“I’m trying to. Can we change the subject?”

“Of course,” Mirren conceded.

“Good,” Rensa smiled, “because between you and me, while none of the men are around, I think I know someone who’d be good with Kolloc.”

“Oh?” After Mirren spoke both women took a moment to appreciate the rising of the third moon.

“She’s one of the leaders in my support group. She survived a nasty accident that killed her first husband and she’s just had a son, so she’s probably nowhere near interested in new relationships of that sort yet…” Rensa trailed off, and then began again, “She has scars and the prettiest red hair.”

“Kolloc has been partial to red heads and brunettes in the past,” admitted Mirren.

Here in response to aldersprig's prompt at my Female Characters and MarWomen post, is Rensa.

Rensa is an Imperial Princess of the Third Persisan Dynasty and the last surviving member of that Dynasty. When the revolutionary coup that breached the palace struck, she was locked in her work area’s stationery storeroom by her work colleagues and kinsmen and was not found until the resulting massacre of her family was over. She survived because everyone who would have had to pull the trigger had had enough killing for the day.

Raised, like the rest of the women of her family, to believe that her idiosyncratic skin markings and hair colouration were a sign of brokenness that needed to be concealed, Rensa had gone veiled outside her immediate family her entire adult life. She had also lived her entire life inside the Imperial Palace with the belief that she and all the rest of her family were responsible for repaying the rest of their colony world for the damage wrought by the Second Persisan Dynasty. Having wiped out her family and destroyed the world she knew, the revolutionaries striped Rensa of her veils and forced her on a months’ long gruelling trek on foot across the countryside to the Shrine of the First Emperor and back, ostensibly so she could offer prayers for the new regime.

It was not the intention of the charismatic revolutionary leader who originally ordered this that Rensa would survive the experience. During this trek she was kept on short rations and beaten but spared intimate indignities through the intervention of the man who replaced the initial charismatic revolutionary leader after he was killed by the security protocols of the Central Unit of the Colonial Development System. Rensa would probably still have died but for her extremely efficient metabolism, something which is definitely related to the genetic engineering her ancestors underwent.

Her return alive form her ‘pilgrimage’ meant that the new regime still had to decide what to do with her. Of the options of putting her to use, permanent incarceration, execution and releasing her to become a focus for old regime loyalists, they chose to put her to use. Consequently she was married to the new regime’s Emperor.

Her life could be worse. Her husband, a widower at the time of their marriage, is kind and affectionate but she doesn’t expect him to love her the way he did his first wife. He is also, in many ways, exactly the sort of man she would have hoped to marry in the days when her family was still alive. Her husband asks her advice on matters where she has some expertise or knows some of the history. She is pregnant with a much wanted child and the peoples she lives among, her husband’s associates, all wish her well. Those associates and her husband, though, are the people who killed her family and destroyed the life she used to have. She has had nightmares with increasing frequency as her pregnancy has progressed. The problem has become so bad that her husband has arranged for her to see a skilled therapist.

“How many people has Moid suborned?” Suohonn drummed his fingers on the table.

“Not that many,” Kalhara, his wife, looked up from her terminal, “but they’re people who can spread his view of the world around. Apparently you’re holding Persis captive.”

“Please, I haven’t even laid a hand on him.”

“I know,” Kalhara nodded, “and, frankly, I think you had cause. I’m very proud of the way you acted when everyone turned against you and I’m still ashamed I was duped like that.”

“You apologised and I accepted,” Suohonn waved a hand dismissively. “As long as I get dessert ever second night, as a minimum, and you help me work it off, we’re good. Mind you, I think we’re good even without the dessert.” He looked directly at her, “I missed you when we weren’t talking to each other.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Kalhara corrected fondly, “or listening. You, on the other hand, never stopped trying to talk to me. Anyway, going back to the subject in hand, it seems the main conduit for Moid’s disinformation campaign is the ‘alternate news service’ run by Breslin. We can’t shut him down but Persis can put limits on him.”

“Well Persis is already auditing every decision Moid made in the last six years. Apparently he’d accrued more delegations than Persis and Hamily realised.” Suohonn grinned at his wife, “Remind me to institute a robust military audit function.”

“Yes, dear.” Kalhara clicked on a few more links. “For a start we can hope that in the audit Breslin loses his priority access to printer ink, now can’t we?”

I wrote this to aldersprig's prompt "Are there people left in Rensa's universe who know why these worlds were colonized?"

Cirian first appears in Return Visit.

Cirian was a week early to the meeting. She had thought to do some sight-seeing first and find out how Firilis had changed in the centuries she’d been travelling the stars. Perhaps do some shopping, she’d never touched her account with the Central Bank so there should be more than enough in there for a few luxury trinkets. Assuming there hadn’t been so much language drift that no-one understood the way she spoke anymore. It could happen, it had happened on some of the colony worlds on her beat.

Things had changed all right. The belt of space stations was still there but only automatic systems answered her hails. She boarded one that still held what was supposed to be a viable atmosphere but the heating had been off for so long she wore a spacesuit to prevent freezing. Some of the station had been carefully closed down with major systems mothballed, while other sections showed the signs of panicked packing and others again looked as if the occupants had just walked out without a backwards glance.

The communication logs didn’t tell her as much as she might have hoped, although she was glad to see that her logons and passwords were still recognised, so she took a copy to set her own computer to deciphering what had happened. Back in her own ship, she began to make the orbital observations she would have made of one of the diaspora worlds if she had just arrived there. She looked for lights at night, smoke plumes, discoloured water from runoff and discharge and signs of agriculture.

The others turned up in the next week, all except Sevan and Durcis. It turned out that Sevan had managed to get a subspace message to Lian, a miracle he’d gotten the temperamental thing to work, to the effect that he was stranded on one of the daughter worlds with a burnt-out drive but was otherwise safe. No-one had heard anything of Durcis and they all found the empty places at their gathering sobering.

It was Lian who raised the subject when they’d covered the agenda set down centuries before. “We were supposed to be reporting in to the central authority here, but it looks like no-one expected Firilis to disintegrate under its own weight. Do we even have a contingency for this?”

“Not that I know of,” admitted Cirian and the agreeing murmur went around the table, “so I suppose we’ll have to come up with something ourselves.”

“It’s not that long before the drift fleets reach the outermost worlds of the diaspora,” pointed out Karl, “barely four generations. Is that enough time for us to bring what’s left of Firilis up to scratch and keep the diaspora worlds on their timelines?”

“It’ll have to be,” replied Nirilan arching her hands in front of her while her elbows rested on the table. “So who’ll take the lead and where should they start?”


This is followed by Choosing A Starting Point.

I wrote this to aldersprig's sixth prompt, "Someone else in Rensa's world."

“Faceta Park? Why are we calling it that? It makes it sound like an Imperial Princess.” The speaker was one of the new aldermen; thin and revolutionary with views on the old regime. He was also from one of the newer parts of Malapar.

“It is being named after an Imperial Princess.” The man he was talking to was a local, one of the City’s Works Committee and a more physically robust model of revolutionary.

“Why?” The aldermen was one of those who still wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the new perforce Emperor marrying the last surviving Princess, the man could have sons with anyone after all.

The committeeman said, “You may have heard that members of the Imperial family had an allowance every year that they could allocate to a project of their own choosing.”

The alderman snorted derisively.

“There was the proviso,” added the committeeman, “that the project could not directly benefit them or any other member of the Imperial family. It could be something that was on the projects list or something that wasn’t that they thought ought to be done. The allowance wasn’t that much, 10,000 credits, so it mainly went on little things done although sometimes some of them would club together to do something bigger.”

“So?” The alderman was beginning to survey the proceedings around him with distaste.

“Sometime in her late teens, we have no idea how or why, Princess Faceta became concerned about the water supply and sewerage system in Malapar Old Town. At that time the City Council was concentrating on the New Town and the suburbs and seemed content to let the old town decay into urban detritus.”

“The Old Town was a slum when I was growing up,” commented the alderman.

“It was and much of it still is,” agreed the committeeman. “We’re still not a big item on the Council’s agenda.”

The alderman had the grace to look abashed.

“Princess Faceta put her annual allocation into maintaining and upgrading our sewers and our water supply every year of her life after that for the just over fifty years that remained to her.” The committeeman sighed, “It wasn’t much each year, but it was work that wouldn’t have been done otherwise and it had an incremental effect. There was a study that showed that after a decade her works were having a positive effect on health outcomes.”

The alderman made the connections in his head, “So her choice to do that year after year is why the Old Town had compatible infrastructure to be connected up to the new reticulation and processing systems in the rest of the city?”

“Rather than having to wait for the Council to vote the funds through and do the work?” The committeeman smiled, “Yes. So we decided to name the park that replaced the old sewerage plant in her honour. We thought she would have enjoyed seeing children who benefited from her decisions playing in the sun and fresh air, poor lady.”

“Poor lady?” The alderman snorted. “She was an Imperial Princess.”

“Who spent her life as a sort of housekeeper in the Imperial Palace and who died with all her kin and descendants when we stormed the Palace. There is a certain amount of local feeling that as she cared enough to think of our welfare,” the committeeman’s face was carefully blank, “the least we can do is remember her kindly.”

“Yes, you’re right.” The alderman nodded. “Sometimes the right and wrong of it all is a hard thing to hold certain, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.”

Iphana had a long and lonely winter, despite the microwave link back to town.  She’d read her mail, exercised religiously, made all her microwave contacts and spoken to maybe four people all winter, listened to the plays and music they’d patched through to her, tried hibernating around her schedule for a few weeks, intermittently kept a diary and gazed out an upstairs window into the storm.  Well, peeked through a crack in her bedroom window’s storm shutter.

Peering through that crack, she realised that the stories about a whole different ecology inside the winter storm were true.  Felinoids that could have laired comfortably in her maintenance garage stalked browsers with low centres of gravity across the snow outside as they rooted out whatever delicacies it were that they ate.  Some of the creatures chose to use her outpost as a backscratcher and the building shook with every rub of the larger ones.  Fortunately, it didn’t seem to occur to these great beasts that there could be an inside to the outpost, Iphana didn’t want to try dodging any of these creatures in their own environment.

She asked about them in her daily talks with the town but Sawyl had to tell her that the town never saw the large creatures in winter.  “The grass must be wrong or something,” he added.

“Don’t be sorry,” Iphana told him, “some of these things are big enough to shake the building when they rub against it.” She paused then asked, “Could that be the reason for some of the unexplained winter damage on outpost buildings I was reading about?”

“I can just imagine,” the voice of Auditor Carvell came over the feed, “the expressions on the faces of the engineers back in Central when they’re told that their buildings are inadequately braced for their secondary function of scratching post.”

I wrote this to aldersprig's prompt "The city that learned hibernation, and why."  It's set on the same planet as the stories about Iphana.

The Colonial Development Plan called for a city there to supply services to the surrounding towns and settlements.  It would be an underground rail nexus and there was, of course, a long term plan for the deep residential, storage and work bunkers to dug down into the bedrock underneath it but for now it was going to be a surface city and that was the problem.  On the surface it was open to the weather and the weather here meant the winter storms.

Not just an occasional storm but a constant maelstrom of wind, snow, driven ice and cloud that expanded and contracted with the seasons.  Winds so strong that a heavy cargo hawler wasn’t safe in them.  Settlements and towns had developed successful strategies for coping with the winter storms so the planners examined those and selected what they thought would work.  Domes were rejected and tunnels were chosen.

“So,” clarified Maika, “the apartment building has two entrances, the ground floor one that goes onto the street and the lower ground floor one that goes into the boulevard underneath.”

“That’s right,” confirmed the building superintendent, a boy called Callow.  “You can use either but once the winter storms move in the ground floor door will be automatically locked so we have to think before we go out onto the street. At the same time the windows will automatically seal and we’ll be on air conditioning till spring,” Callow nodded in approval .

“That seems a bit extreme.”  Maika liked fresh air.

“Ma’am, the wind from the winter storms is fresh, but it’s not nice.  You don’t want it getting inside your apartment, the wind chill can bring the external temperature down to forty below.”  He sighed, “And it doesn’t just affect you, it increases the load on the apartments around you to keep warm too.”

“So we hibernate for winter?”  Maika had been expecting life in her new home to be different but this was more different than she’d realised.

“Yes ma’am, for six and a half months we need to be cave dwellers and tunnel lovers.”  Callow smiled, “I’m sure you’ll get used to it.  I’ve got some pamphlets here on decorating advice to help avoid seasonal depression and some on interest groups you might like to join to avoid cabin fever.”

“Thank you,” replied Maika faintly and took copies of them all.

The world known to the organisers of the Defensive Diaspora as Aberxhad 453.4 underwent a revolution and social inversion during the third generation of the colony.

Dissatisfaction among the general colonists with the political organisation of the colony, the tasking system, rationing and the perceived level of control over their personal lives by the Central Unit and the guides led to this.  The rebellion was successful in that the Central Unit and its security drones were destroyed while the surviving guides and their descendants were forced to flee for their lives.  As the rebels seemed to be smashing every piece of advanced technology they could get their hands on, the refugees had no qualms about taking everything they could get their hands on, and carry, with them.

The current population of the planet is made up of two societies with their origins in this event:

1.      The descendants of the revolution are confined to the southwest corner of the largest continent on the planet.  Native soils need to be ‘naturalized’ with appropriate microfauna and fungi to allow human crops to grow and the majority of the local plant life is unsuitable for extensive consumption by humans.  A near feudal system of landholding has evolved based on ‘proving’ new land with a series of tiered land holders, with first land holders having the most power, third land holders being tenant farmers and anyone below that being sharecroppers.  Theoretically anyone can prove land and become a first land holder but in practice the existing first land holders have restrictions in place to ensure that only they can do so; they have the power and so they make the law.  Essentially, all land in this area is now in the hands of three families and they are working to consolidate their holdings through little skirmish wars between distaff and main bloodlines.  The southwest corner is crowded and tightly held under their control and they don’t see a problem with that.

2.      The descendants of the refugees mainly live in an area that was being naturalized prior to settlement at the time of the rebellion and is sufficiently distant that the first land holders are not going to stumble on them accidentally but was close enough to get to easily with the transport they had available.  They have a much higher ambient technology level than the land holders but their population is smaller with a higher risk of inbreeding.  They also have more information available to them than the land holders because their ancestors managed to rescue most of the colony’s databases, mineral deposit maps is an example, and the equipment to access them.  They have a program of sending agents into land holders’ area to spread medical and technical information at a grassroots level but this is a dangerous task as if caught they will be killed.

A complicating factor in this is ‘fire stuff.’  This is heat-affected metallic and ceramic debris which can be found over large portions of the southwest corner of the continent and, to an unknown extent, other areas of the planet.  It predates the colony but the lettering found on some pieces appears to indicate human origin.  Its value to the landholders is that it is a source of useful metals: copper; gold; lead; and silver.  Naturally, as it is a valuable resource, there are tight rules in the land holders’ area about who can collect it and where from.

I wrote this to aldersprig's first prompt, "More Rensa, esp. Involving clothing."

“My clothes are starting not to fit,” Rensa announced to Mirren.  “Do I have a budget for maternity clothes?”

“Of course you do.”  Mirren’s pregnancy wasn’t that much more advanced than Rensa’s but she looked further along.  “Mind you, once I started shopping for my own maternity clothes I had them double it.”

“They’re more expensive than ordinary clothes?”  Rensa thought for a moment.  “Well, they do need more fabric.”

“I think it’s more that they see you coming when they either think you’re desperate or floating in a la-la land of happy hormones,” was Mirren’s tart response.  “I think we should start with the people you brought from last time and then expand from there.”

Everyday clothes and underwear for pregnant women were relatively easy to get although pricier than clothes for the not-pregnant.

The store that had reminded Rensa of her sex education lessons provided two made-to-measure coatdresses with frankly military styling.  The tailoring, as always, suited Rensa and the pleats below the high bust line allowed for her expanding belly.  The other stores she’d purchased from before didn’t have maternity clothes but they were prepared to suggest things and modify designs.

Rensa almost had everything she needed when they decided to try one of the stores that hadn’t let them in the door when they’d first been buying her clothes.  At this time of year it apparently didn’t need a security guard or a doorman.  Inside there were a few artistically arranged racks of clothing, two shop assistants and a woman with garishly dyed, multi-coloured hair who could only be described as difficult.

“Why are you offering me that size?  I’m obviously a 14, not an 18!”  Her hands telegraphed her indignation as loudly as her voice.

“Madam, you tried on the 16 in the green and it was that fraction too small,” the darker haired girl reminded her.

“That was a very tight cut,” the woman harrumphed, “and sewn even tighter.  It should have been relabelled as a 12 or something.  Get me a 14!”

“As you wish.”  The dark haired girl put the garment she was holding back on the rack and pulled out an identical but smaller one.  She turned to the lighter haired girl and asked, “Hellen, could you please see to the ladies who’ve just come in?”

Hellen turned but the customer grabbed her arm.  “No you don’t, I need both of you.  I’ll have a word with them while you get me that pink thing and in a 14 mind you!”

The woman walked over to Rensa and Mirren, oblivious to the fact that the shop assistants were following her with worried expressions.  Both young women looked bemused when they flicked their eyes over the two security men who had taken up stations inside the shop’s doors.  “I’m sorry,” the customer told Rensa and Mirren, “but the staff will be busy with me for some time.  You and your husbands should go get coffee or something, then come back.  If you think this store would have anything for someone in your condition.”

“I have found people to be very accommodating about our current condition.”  Rensa looked the woman up and down.  She could see how the other customer’s hair style had been inspired by her own but those colours had no place in nature.  “They’re not our husbands and who are you to chase other paying customers out of this shop?”

The other woman returned the up and down treatment.  “You look vaguely familiar, perhaps you were some minor hanger-on at one of my parties?  Don’t you know who I am?”  The blue, pink and green hair on her head practically bristled.

“No.  Why should I?”  Rensa was calm.

“Majesty,” Hirroc, one of her security detail, was deploying his ‘early warning system’, “is this woman annoying you?  Do you wish her removed?”

Rensa and Mirren thought the other customer might be about to faint.