It Comes In Threes (Final) S/F

[Hare]

He'd been nearly right, when the message of their disaster had been sent it hadn't been with much hope that he'd have been heard. The request for the second smaller team with a full restock of life had been a dream. Twenty years they'd said it'd take to get a signal home, then another twenty to even get the group to them. They'd been five years out.

 

The captain had stayed with his now shell of a ship, the working town stretched out in front of him, filled with life and the cries of children playing in the fields and forest that surrounded the small settlement. The days had been a little odd at first, a thirty hour day was something you had to get used to but the first kids had been born to it. And it showed in their behaviour, man was nothing but adaptable it seemed, they napped in the middle of the day instead of sleeping a full night through. Two times of sleep in a thirty hour day seemed the way to go and as such they'd been much more productive as a society. The first few years had been difficult, the arguments and growing pains of a society that had been on it's last legs trying to force itself to continue in the old patterns. But it had been the female crew that had finally convinced the rest of them how it should be.

 

They had a daily meeting in the schoolhouse, when everyone was being taught lessons, so the children learned that each one of them had a voice to be heard. Things were discussed openly and even handedly, it went against his own training where you only said what you needed to, to those who needed to know it.

The breakthrough had come when they'd been setting up the smelting yards, one of the lower IQ men had been implanted with the information of engineering. He'd gone about the work as anyone expected him to but he'd made it more efficient and more friendly to the environment, he strayed from the plans. It had caused a near riot at the time but eventually when they'd discussed the reasons for his actions and heard him out, the result of implanting the knowledge had borne better fruit than the original could have. It seemed as if the melding of the brain types had been the key, that the mans lower IQ hadn't been a handicap but a boon to the information he now used. That he could see possibilities the other engineers couldn't, from then on the implantation of the lower IQ ranges had become mandatory and as a result they'd flourished.

 

People were valued as equals, the old power structure had taken time to erode but it had been piece by piece, every single person had a wealth of things to share and teach. It wasn't the old way they'd all been used to but the second generation of children were brought up with the new idea and it worked. Even the way of learning had been questioned, did they have to rely on the machines to implant the skills they needed? Shouldn't the children learn for themselves through trial and error? Some skills should be implanted they said, like maths and english but everything else?

They'd been relying on the technology for years back home and as such no one learned anything 'new', but here they had a chance to do things differently. To build a new way, a new world, a new lifestyle of creation and creativity. And as such Art was encouraged for the first time in nearly a thousand years, a human hand picked up a pencil and did things with it that weren't all about work. The captain had several pieces of his own Grand-children's work on his walls and he'd been looking at one of the pictures of the 'Orchard' when the signal had come through to him.

 

It had been weak but the signal was real, the support ship had finally got to them, what they'd find when they landed he didn't know. But they were going to get here in the next month or so, and with a heavy heart he'd told them that morning that they were coming. The decision of what to do next was being put to the trees and the final decision would be one for the entire community to vote on. Privately he'd been to the trees of his old friends, their bark shining in the light of the dawn as he'd told them of the trouble about to arrive at their door. He'd seen them shift toward the dawn light and he knew what would happen to their dead and the information they carried if the newcomers were who he thought they'd be.

 

He'd touched his first wife's bark just as the sun hit her leaves and the song of the Orchard rose over the ridge, they did it every morning. A rising of sap to the memory stores they carried, a fluting sound that everyone had gotten used to over the years until it had become a part of their lives. Some could even tell if a tree was suffering an illness because the tone wouldn't be right and they'd be treated to keep their memories and history alive. Thirty-five years of songs and a growing flourishing world-wide community of humans.

 

They'd sent out young colonies of adults, twenty miles out at first, enough to walk in a day if they needed help or something went wrong. The trips were made daily as the new settlements were built to the points of the compass. Soon there were settlements all around the first and they were seeding settlements of their own, the first seedlings of their Orchard's had been put down in the first satellite communities only last year. They'd built a system that worked, they worked as a unit together with the world they'd built from the ball of lifeless rock it had been. And as such they didn't need another world coming to invade it.

 

The old world they'd left had been too rigid, everyone was judged at birth, labelled, programmed to a level and left to get on with being a productive member of the whole society. And look where it had gotten them, sure they'd had a huge universe wide society but it had stagnated, gotten slow, relying on machines and their own technology to progress and programme their minds. So when they'd met the Garen, they'd been pompous, over blown in importance and treated them as a 'lesser species'. Thing was the Garen were nothing of the sort, they took apart the human machine in under twenty years. They didn't programme their children, they taught them free will, to explore the world around them and the universe as well. To ask questions of everything and everyone and the Garen had seen the opportunity to take what the human beings no longer saw as valuable until it was too late.

It had led to war, which then had led to the death of millions on both sides, the earth was still under Garen control when he'd been a baby. His parents high enough to go off world to somewhere 'safe', but it hadn't lasted and the sleek silver ships had reached him eventually. In his twenties he'd been given command of a cargo vessel, not bright enough to fight (or so he'd been told) and he'd done it well. Only when the human race was nearing it's collapse was he given one of the last star freighters with the last cargo he'd ever carry. Given a job to go as far as he could and start again with what he had, even the jettisoned cargo hadn't stopped him. But this ship coming had his hands roaming over the countless scars that littered his tanned skin, the things that they'd all had to do to make this world viable running through his memories. Clenching his fist he turned away from the village and went to check on the ships progress.

 

When it came the ship looked as if it had been the back end of a garbage scow, the shields were pockmarked with strikes and the port thrusters were a little flaky. Eventually it made it down, they'd given the co-ordinates to the pilot who'd sounded a little weary but it was to be expected.

The council had sat 'under the trees',a huge picnic of sorts but the talk had all been about the craft bringing who knew what toward them. They'd thrashed the argument about and eventually it had been the young who'd sounded the most calm. They'd wait and see, judge them by their actions not by their words, give them room to change and if not, well there was always room for more in the new Orchards. The knowledge they carried wouldn't be wasted it'd be shared among everyone as would their genetic data, there were no downsides they'd even bring a ship with them as well. So it had been decided, to give them a space to land and a place to be quarantined for a while in case they were carrying something.

 

When the pressurised door opened the face that greeted them wasn't the one the captain had been expecting. A Garen half breed with his ridged skull looked over the small band of humans stood in front of him. A smile on his lips as he walked open handed toward them all, he stood stock still for a moment then salted in the old fashioned way. The voice when it came out of his mouth sounded human, “Ah you must be Captain Torden, I was told to look for your eye colour, grey, rare even back then.” The pilot stood relaxed and still as the eyes of the assembled leaders watched him curiously. “Don't suppose you've got a welcome for a crew of twelve have you? We're a bit mixed but we're all that was left of the colony freighters, just before we left the rest were abandoning the outpost. Basically they didn't think we'd make it through Dark Space to be honest,” he turned to look at his battered ship with a small smile of pride on his face. “I knew she'd get us here though.”

When he turned back his eyes were filled with something that the captain recognised, he was expecting to be shot or tortured as a spy.

Half breeds weren't trusted and it was only when he'd reached out to shake his hand that the rest of the crew made themselves known. Every single one them were different in some way or another, amputees, mis-hatched clones, the unwanted of the old society. Seeing the new additions they let their fears subside as they welcomed the new into their world.

Soon the purple crates were being unloaded and there at the back of the cargo bay was a large blue crate, a new lab filled with all the toys a world builder would need. Taking the crew into the Orchard he introduced their new members to their past and their future, they had a few years yet before they'd be joining their ranks. Seeing smiles as hands touched bark and fingers stroked leaves, it looked like things would work out in their favour after all.

[De Batz]

Right then.

 

Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

 

All three of your pieces seem to be related to the same world. I don't know whether this is because I haven't read them carefully enough or whether there is some connection running through. Is this right?

 

The ideas - especially in the more extended "It Comes in Threes" - are interesting and worthwhile. Do you have any ambitions to develop them into a novel-sized piece of work? Just to flesh out my first thought, I actually wondered if they were three parts of a novel pretty much until I came to the end of this piece, which seems to conclude quite firmly.

 

The writing is unobtrusively good. There were no points where I was struck by obvious clangers - not that I read it with that in mind, and I don't mean that I have proof-read it and found it perfect - but further than that, I felt that the rhythm and voice of the stories was such that I could enjoy it wholeheartedly. I did not feel like I was reading an amateur writer, if that makes sense.

 

My consumption of short stories of this genre is limited to things like Stanislas Lem (if I've remembered rightly) who also plays with this kind of philosophical stuff in his writing. Is he an influence?

 

Anyway, good stuff. If you've got more, get it up so we can read it!

 

Andy

[Hare]

Thank you for your comments Andy! I've been writing S/F for about five years on and off, and yes there was a whole story in those three tales. I tend to over-run on short stories and it was a challenge to myself to try and write something smaller but still fully formed.

 

I'm glad you liked them, the first one with the Captain who finds out a worker has pushed the cargo out of the airlock came from a small piece of trivia found on the New Scientist website. Apple pips apparently keep pieces of dna they don't need and can be programmed to take on different dna of other species and keep it safe through generations, never changing the codes they carry as 'junk'. It just made the whole thought of space exploration so much easier, who needs a huge lab when all you'd need were a few pips and some growing medium? Then using a small lab to extract and grow the dna in subcultures or human hosts....the possibilities were endless.

 

I hope I got across the humanity of the group dynamic, Butterfly Beach is the same kind of system but earlier in their time line, humans are ranked by genetic disposition, the same ranking that is going on now in labs and gene banks.

 

I do have another small piece I'll put up, again written for a writers group but darkly humorous I think.

Thanks again for the comments they are really appreciated Andy.

Yours Hare (Jo)