July 2 Weekly Post: Double Feature
On writing fiction/Actually written fiction
How can I write this?/I have to write this
I’ve missed a couple of weekly posts, mostly due to touching grass, being sick, and experiencing a minor dark night of the soul. One of the internal conflicts that intensified during the latter period has been about writing fiction. Namely, it feels like an absurd waste of time—only marginally better for me than scrolling X (formerly Twitter) or grinding Genshin Impact—and yet I feel an exceptionally strong compulsion to do so.
We increasingly live in interesting times—times I should be more actively participating in or at least commentating on—so why do I want to write made up stories instead? It doesn’t help that my particular bent has always been towards writing genre fiction. One of my partners has said on multiple occasions that she regards litfic novelists as something akin to a secular priesthood, the closest thing her worldview allows to a divine vocation. While there’s a certain New Yorker-reading bourgeois absurdity to such a statement, it does resonate with me. Genre fiction feels childish and silly in comparison—a distant second at best. Besides, it’s not like people really read books anymore anyway. A couple of my smartest friends only read blog posts, well-heeled libs buy hardcovers as totemic status symbols, and the most prodigious consumers of “literature” at the moment seem to regard the reading nook as the female gooncave.
Writing fiction is silly, a low-EV use of my time, possibly entirely pointless, and yet I keep doing it. Maybe I’m afraid that if I do stop it will render all the time I’ve spent thinking about and writing my fiction thus far wasted—so much maladaptive daydreaming. Maybe it’s just a generalized creative urge and writing is the only art that I’ve put in enough time to have any skill at—I’ll report back if the urge to write remains when I’ve become more adept at design and it’s attendant skills. Whatever the cause, I seem to lack the resolve to stop, and in that case I think I owe it to myself to at least make the effort to continue improving and to move towards publishing. Nothing of beauty is truly pointless, after all.
So, I’m starting a new project: The Solar Chronicle will be a series of short, sometimes-related vignettes that all take place in the same world, an optimistic science-fantasy setting in humanity’s near future. The project will live on my AO3 and update (ambitiously) weekly. For today though, I’m cross-posting the intro and first chapter here; I hope you all enjoy.
Introduction
99 years ago, the Solar Republic sent its expeditions out into the stars. Equipped with alien FTL technology, their mission was to bring the benefits of extropian civilization to the exohumans—closely related species that wander the ruined worlds of a lost interstellar civilization. The Solar Republic eventually found a rival in the conquistadors of the Fa Ascendancy, and after an inconclusive conflict is now locked in a bitter cold war.
With their certainty of purpose threatened and nothing as it once seemed, the Three Estates of the Solar Republic now struggle to hold their interstellar empire together and to fulfill the promises of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
Chapter I
Clearwater House—formerly The Great Palace of Ko-arak and currently the seat of Solar Governance on Eisul—was resplendent in the light of the exoplanet’s three moons, just hours before they would all align one in front of the other, from smallest to largest. Owing to the coincidence of such an astrologically significant local event, the Republic’s shamans had deemed that Eisul’s Landvættir would not be unduly troubled by the celebration of a foreign holiday, and Governor Mira had thrown open the outer gates of the palace for a grand ball for the Solar New Year. On the highest section of the palace roof columns that in the daytime supported massive sunshades rose up among a lavish garden. Here, an exohuman woodwind orchestra played for a more exclusive—and hopefully more secure—crowd of Solar officials, local elites, and corporate partners, while Gordon Highlanders stood guard in their regimentals. The complex interplay of woodwinds had a mournful quality to it, which struck Liz as perhaps appropriate for a planet that had endured a half-completed genocide at the hands of the Fa before falling into Solar hands. Then again, perhaps it was wrong to cast the sentimental quality of an entire world in light of the worst event of its history. Liz sighed; at times he found himself envious of his ancestors, who had gotten to do all of their colonialism before the advent of postcolonial theory.
“Liz! Liz is that you?” A warm, unaccented voice called in English from a nearby alcove. It belonged to a confident, imposing in figure of a woman which Liz quickly recognized for his old school friend, Nat, swishing elegantly over to his position by a column.
“Nat! I’d heard you took a posting here—it’s good to see you!” If Liz, dressed in black hakama trousers and a light, off-white silk robe, had strived to appear the picture of an unassuming civil servant, with only the cryptkey at his throat betraying his station, then Nat made her appearance as the equally definitional picture of a Solar Witch. She wore The Big Pointy Hat in black with her coven insignia pinned to the violet ribbon and a trench coat in a flattering cut, which she had clearly disdained to leave with coat check—witches were known to be particular about these things. Below these she was clad in cargo pants of the same color and a white sleeveless tank that could almost pass for a more formal blouse. The ensemble was practical enough to show a bit of expected disdain for the night’s formality, while still remaining within the bounds of the acceptable. Just above Nat’s cleavage hung her own cryptkey, for her coven was old and well resourced enough to guarantee entry into the Second Estate for even its junior members.
“Congratulations on taking your second degree in the craft.” Liz added as they embraced.
“And congratulations to you on getting away from the cult and still getting a clearance afterwards.” Nat replied in the tone of a joke that wasn’t really one.
“The entire colony is hardly a cult.” Liz smiled. “And as to your other point I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about—I’m a cultural attaché to the exchequer, and I’m here to observe the festivities and to accompany Governor Mira to the reopening of the arak-Ē Temple tomorrow.”
“Of course…” Nat smirked. It was an intentionally weak cover—it wasn’t as though you could really conceal a member of the aristocracy working in Republic Intelligence. It worked because that which was assumed to be the cover was, in point of fact, the real purpose of the assignment. Surely—everyone thought—the spy just goes to the exohumans religious events to keep cover, he must be doing espionage elsewhere. In reality, The Company—and to a lesser extent the rest of Republic Intelligence—distrusted Republic Psychosecurity’s reliance on the covens, and wanted its own eyes and ears on such things.
Nat continued, her tone sobering. “But seriously, I haven’t see you since you left school in such a hurry; I know we’ve always written letters but, like, how was living on Eamhain Macha?” There was a tenuousness in the question, a quiet anxiety that the person in front of Nat—even the person with whom she had exchanged infrequent but exhaustively long and heartfelt letters for the last eight years—was not the friend she had spent endless days together with at the Pentagon School, but instead someone else. Something else, really—the creature of a faith that she could never share.
“It was…” Liz trailed off, gazing at his reflection in a facet of the crystal fountain that was the rooftop space’s centerpiece. It felt like Nat had changed so little since school—she had always wanted to be a witch, and her present station was the result of a relentless pursuit of that goal. She looked like she had before, only more complete, like she had filled out the same mould she was always growing into. Liz was less sure about himself. He had retained the old feminine curves of his face, but his vulpine ears had grown into their fullness, and it was all framed with a mane of curly hair the color champagne. His body was longer too—leaner, fewer curves, possessed of a wiry strength he didn’t quite remember coming into. As for purpose, or desire? In most ways he still felt like the aimless fourteen year old who had sat down with the white-haired woman that beckoned that day. I used to work here, you know, before they gutted it and turned it into a school. She had opened, her voice so deep and gravely. Your grandfather wants you to know that you were born for more than this; looking at you, I think he’s right.
“I’ve traveled a lot more since I left.” Liz began. “So I can say with a bit more confidence that Eamhain Macha is like most other border colonies—whole place is a construction site, orbital defense gets the chips and civilian transport has to build steam engines—it’s just all more intense.” Liz sighed, wishing he had brought cigarettes. “There’s the religious thing, which I don’t fully buy into”—that was true at least—“and actually never got that deep in.”—that one was a lie—“But even without that it just feels like people are more aligned in their purpose there.”
“That purpose being Armageddon.” Nat said flatly. “That’s what it is, Liz. Twenty-two years ago Anglican Jihadists set out for a remote moon to re-start the war and immanentize the eschaton. It’s only because the Colonial Office managed to bog them down running the place after the standoff that they have yet to try again.”
Liz couldn’t help but laugh, to Nat’s clear annoyance. He leaned back against the pillar—white marble flecked with gold and adorned with crystalline imperfections—staring up at the moons through the open arches overhead. “Anglicans aren’t the only people still angry about the peace.” He breathed languidly.
”No, they aren’t.” Nat agreed. “And it was a bad, stupid peace.” She swore under her breath. “I don’t suppose they told you why we signed the treaty when you joined Republic Intelligence?”
“If I knew I wouldn’t say, etc.” Liz sighed again. “But for what it’s worth, no, they didn’t tell me.” Liz touched his cryptkey as he said this, an unsubtle gesture towards the acknowledgment that the bonds of friendship between members of the Second Estate could be assumed to surpass such trifles as a TS/SCI. Here, technically, he was telling the truth.
Nat’s gaze wandered and came to rest on the fountain at the center of the rooftop gardens. “You know they carved that crystal out of a single pillar of stone? It took them three decades to get it just right, and then they built this palace around it.” Liz nodded. Stonework—along with woodwinds—has clearly been a speciality of the Ko Empire, and Liz still couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty of how everything here caught the moonlight. “The Fa really did a number on this place.” Nat went on. “Of course, ADC didn’t do terribly better—just cleared the low, low bar of ‘don’t commit a genocide.’”
“Did you come in with the Colonial Office when they revoked the sole development contract?” Liz asked.
Nat nodded. “Lady Atsuko and I and our dolls, plus some coven retainers. We accepted a commission to do preliminary work on the Great Library. Have you heard of it?”
“Only in passing.” Liz shook his head, inviting Nat to expound.
“An entire language written in watercolor, known only to a specialized scribe caste. Thousands of volumes—delicate, in need of constant, painstaking preservation.” Nat’s voice became notably emotive. “The Fa killed all the scribes and then sealed off the library, which our boys then damaged without knowing, when they were storming the planet in the war. Austin Development Corporation then, in its infinite wisdom, decided to move the surviving volumes to static storage and skimped on microclimate control, so there was some more damage there.” Liz made a noise to signal an appropriate and not unfelt degree of opprobrium before Nat continued. “We fixed the storage situation and now we’re digitizing everything as a backup, but still no luck decoding the watercolor script. My coven”—Liz noted the amount of pride behind the possessive there, even if Nat had clearly worked to suppress it as a sophomoric instinct—“is interested because captured Fa documentation suggests the scribes practiced some fairly novel psychotech, so we’ll keep trying, and maybe sharing the digital scans with some academic partners will lead to a breakthrough as well. There’s actually a volume on display here tonight; did you see it when you came in?”
Liz answered in the negative and allowed himself to be led to an alcove near the stairs. Two highlanders stood guard about a meter away from a glass case on a pedestal, which contained an ancient-looking, wood-bound book. The open page at first glance appeared to be a series of random watercolor blotches, brilliantly pigmented, but hardly what one might discern as writing or even really a picture. Further inspection however gave Liz a strange inkling of a pattern, though not one he could discern at the moment. Beneath, a bronze plaque declared some perfunctory information about the artifact in both English and the local demotic script, also mentioning efforts towards preservation and decryption sponsored by the Solar Republic Colonial Office.
“Two hundred years old?” Liz asked, thinking about what that meant. His father was a hundred and thirty eight, and the oldest humans alive were well over twice that.
Nat nodded. “They had to be copied fairly regularly; we have metadata in Equatorial Eisul Demotic that dates some of the oldest content to our eleventh century.”
So, this was—maybe—a copy of something written at the same time as Liz’s ancestors were taking England from the Saxons. That was fairly impressive, even for someone whose job involved—as his direct report liked to say—‘sifting through a bunch of old rubbish.’ As Liz was still looking at the manuscript they were interrupted by the sound of a young man huffing his way up the nearby stairs.
“Hold on—“ One of the Highlanders stepped out and into the newcomer’s path, only lessening the threat of her stance slightly when she saw the Postal Service pin on the man’s jacket. His face gave him away for a local as surely as the Highlander’s accent marked her as being from her regiment’s home recruiting grounds. Still, even if he had the Eisul People’s red-blue undertones in his hair and their characteristically long fingers, he lacked the brow ridge, and with it any sign of genetic defect or ill health; that made him younger—a product of the Solar Republic’s more benevolent rule. “You have a letter for someone here?”
The postal courier initially seemed puzzled, but then nodded, as if it took him several seconds to decipher the Highlander’s accent. “Jean-Michell Elizabeth Mountbatten, Lady Braddock.” He belted out in his own accented English. “Sender requests top priority and cryptkey authentication.”
“That’s me, actually.” Liz piped up, unclipping the cryptkey from his necklace and nodding to the soldier. “Thank you, corporal.”
The corporal stepped back and snapped to attention—broken chain of time or no, many regiments maintained a strong affection for the descendants of their former sovereigns, even members of a minor offshoot house such as Liz. The postal courier produced a portable decryption device which accepted and promptly authenticated Liz’s key—postal protocols rarely required password and genetic confirmation. “Thank you.” Liz said when the courier handed over a dirty, cheap paper envelope practically covered with secure stamps and seals. “If you’re no longer on duty after this, feel free to stay and enjoy the governor’s hospitality.”
The young man answered affirmatively and thanked Liz in turn, taking his leave in the direction of the refreshments. It was of course illegal to tip postal couriers—at any rate exhaustively selected and quite well paid—and for this and many other reasons the Postal Service was one of the few organs of the Solar Government that remained universally trusted and loved. Still, people wanted to show their appreciation, and access to the good champagne was perfectly situated within the bounds of propriety, no different than if Liz had invited him in for a glass of water at midday.
“Impressive…” Nat commented quietly as they both retreated to a secluded bench, protected by potted trees on three sides. “Here I was under the impression that the Postal Service and Republic Intelligence were still on bad terms after the McQueen Incident, and yet you get after hours service…”
“They are.” Liz affirmed absentmindedly, using his ocular implants to decrypt and authenticate the stamps and security seals affixed to the envelope. It was marked with a restricted source code, one of the ones that The Company used for its exclusive network of informants. It had then been sent to a covert drop point picked up by Republic Intelligence’s planetary office. “But the Post Office likes the Court, especially the old families, so I don’t get shafted. Speaking of bonds between the Second and Third Estates, will you get on your implant and have three bottles of the best Earth-Origin vintage you can get on this planet sent to those Highlanders’ barracks? Charge me, I’m good for it, and have my name put on it—yours too, it’s good for you to start doing this stuff.”
“Sure thing.” Nat agreed bemusedly. “I take it you’re not going to tell me what’s in that thing?”
“Probably not, no.” Liz said. Regardless of urgency, a restricted source document would have to be sent further up the clearinghouse chain until someone with the appropriate codes was available to read it. Normally that would mean off-planet for this code, since The Company didn’t have any trusted agents stationed here permanently, but Raj, the effective if rather bookish man running Republic Intelligence’s planetary station, had the clearance to know (some of) Liz’s codes, and knowing that she could read this would send it on to her with all haste. The postal courier made sense, even without knowing that The Company had ways of ensuring goodwill for its agents when the wider intelligence service could not. Liz was still an aristocrat, and one of those getting a letter delivered by hand was the most ordinary thing in the world.
It required all the local compute stored in Liz’s implants to decrypt the ciphertext in the letter itself—scrawled with a irregular hand and covered in dusty, fingerprintless marks—but the meaning was clear enough when it was done. Liz weighed his options; Malcolm had warned him that no one on this planet was properly vetted beyond Raj, and that everyone was suspect. He could take his chances with the highlanders—he liked the odds—but the movement of men and matériel might tip off the quarry. Same issue if he asked Nat to come along. It had to be alone. “Do me another favor?” He asked Nat.
“What is it?” She replied, skeptical.
“Get drunk later and drop hints that I’ve been caught cheating on my secret polycule with a different lover.” Liz smiled.
“You have a secret ploycule?” She pressed.
“Of course not.” Liz went on. “But people love to talk. Also, if I don’t contact you in three local days, drop an SOS note at the address I’m pushing to your implant now. Looks like I’m going to miss the rest of the party after all.”