Souvenirs From Other Worlds

Souvenirs From Other Worlds

A Collection of Short Fiction by Annie Bellet

Copyright 2011, Annie Bellet

All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.

These stories are a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to doomedmuse.press@gmail.com.

Cover designed by Greg Jensen with image from © Mafoto | Dreamstime.com

Electronic edition, 2012

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Thank you to the heroes who made this book and my Clarion experience possible:

Mark and Anges Jensen

Greg Jensen

Neal and Laurie Bellet

Dennis Y. Ginoza

Table of Contents

Story One: On Higher Ground

Story Two: Dusk and Shiver

Story Three: All is Violent, All is Bright

Story Four: A Hunter’s Memory of Winter

Story Five: Delivering Yaehala

Story Six: Counting Down the Stars

Story Seven: Innocence, Rearranged

Submission Story: Pele’s Bee-keeper

Submission Story: The Scent of Sunlight

What this book is and how it came to be:

An Introduction

 When I arrived home from the Clarion Writers Workshop, the question everyone kept asking was how was Clarion? and occasionally they also ask was it worth it?

I didn’t know how to answer then. It was too hard to sum up six weeks of experience, the rollercoaster of stress and elation, the bursts of creativity and production followed by the grind of critique.

Now, as I sit here to write this introduction, I still don’t have much of an answer. For those who don’t know, this is what Clarion is.

It is a six week long workshop for writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy, taught each year by different professionals. My year, 2011, had Nina Kiriki Hoffman for week one, John Scalzi for week two, Elizabeth Bear for week three, David Anthony Durham for week four, and then the fifth and sixth anchor weeks were taught by the joint team of John Kessel and Kij Johnson. Each of us eighteen participants, who were chosen out of a large pool of applicants, had to write a story a week as well as critique everyone else’s work Monday through Friday. This meant that beyond writing a story each week, we had anywhere from eight thousand to twenty thousand or more words to read each night and to be ready to comment on the next day.

It’s a lot of work. Writing a story a week is tough for many people. Writing a story a week while living away from home, being surrounded by constant social opportunities, and having hours of reading and critiquing to do each night plus hours of class each morning? More difficult than one might think.

I learned a lot. I know this, even if I have trouble putting exactly what I’ve learned into words. It’s difficult to describe the effect of living with seventeen other writers, of having their thoughts and opinions shared with you all the time. There were good days and bad days. Days when I was so sick I wanted to crawl into a bottle of cold medicine and never come out. Days when I wasn’t sure it was worth it at all.

Then there were those aha! moments. Times when a fellow Clarionaut would say something that struck a chord, or times when our instructor for the week would point out a tip or a trick that made complete sense to me. Those moments of why didn’t I see that before? and that is exactly how to do that thing I wanted to try with that story.

But it is tough to really sum those up for someone else, someone outside the experience. So often I find myself mumbling something like it was Clarion or you kinda had to be there and leaving it at that.

So why this book of stories? Because I didn’t get there on my own. My husband lost his job right after I was accepted and for a moment Clarion looked like an impossible dream. But thanks to friends, family, and the people who donated to my Kickstarter project (which is how this book came to be), I was able to follow my dream and attend. This book is for everyone who helped me get there, who made the experience possible, who has assisted me on the road to becoming the best damn writer I can be. Clarion was a brick helping pave that road, I can say that with certainty. For better or worse, the workshop and the things I learned there changed me as a writer, even though I can’t sum them up neatly in a few paragraphs.

This book contains the stories I wrote and turned in while at Clarion. Along with those stories are some of my thoughts on writing them and a few quotes from my fellow students and teachers where relevant. As a bonus, I’ve included the two stories that I used in my application, the stories that got me into Clarion in the first place.

I hope the stories will speak for themselves and open a small window into the Clarion experience, or at least my experience while attending. And those stories are all dedicated to my Clarionauts, my narwolves, because you guys kept me sane, kept me writing, and made those six weeks feel not so far away and not so different from home.

Thank you.

Annie Bellet

(aroooo)

* * * * *

On Higher Ground

Story Notes

I wrote this story the first week, the bulk of it on a Tuesday night. It was originally over 11,000 words long, but I cut some parts out due to not wanting to turn in a giant novel book. I got it down to 8400 words and then added a few in revision after class when people wanted some things clarified.

The idea for this story came to me in January of 2011 while I was sick and watching a bunch of Warren Miller skiing documentaries. I sat on the idea of a giant ski race on another planet until Clarion, meaning to write it as my third quarter Writers of the Future contest entry. The story received an Honorable Mention.

This story got me crowned goddess of pacing at Clarion.

* * *

 One moment there was snow beneath Kayi’s skis, the next just sky. Her wingsuit snapped in the sudden wind as she dropped off the south face of Annapurna. Her eyes watered despite her mask and the pressure shift of falling thousands of feet in seconds popped her ears with a painful squeak.

Kayi angled her body, tucking her poles in along the line of fabric between her arm and torso and angling her skis up, fighting the air that wanted to push them down and twist her legs up. The land beneath her was black, rust, and white; snow and stone blurring into one as she gained speed. Proximity flying, going so close to the steep slope that she could almost touch the snow, was dangerous. Doing it with ski equipment on was even crazier.

She was the only one she’d ever known who tried. This wasn’t a filming run, the sky was too grey today for that and the wind too strong for the hoversleds to come up this far. Kayi slid sideways along the cliff face and looked down and ahead. Far below the rocky slope turned to pure white.

Her landing zone. She angled her body up and started to rein in her speed. Seconds fled and she hit the point where her chute wouldn’t do any good. No choices now beyond land or crash and die.

Adrenaline sang in her blood and Kayi grinned behind her mask. Screw those assholes who didn’t think she was good enough to compete in their stupid race. She could out-ski the disappointment of being an alternate. The disappointment of never being the first pick. Or the twentieth.

Out-ski? Damnit, she could fly.

Still falling at just over sixty miles an hour, Kayi’s skis touched the snow where the slope leveled out to a fifty degree angle. For a moment she wavered and her poles clipped the thick powder, enveloping her in a thick, cold white cloud.

Then she was down, her wide skis catching the snow and slipping along as they should and only the expanse of the mountain before her. Kayi made wide, lazy turns the rest of the way down, sending up plumes of powder in glistening rainbows as the late afternoon sun finally peeked out of the steely sky.

Andy, her manager, was already waiting with Gem at the hoversled, pacing in the snow. He looked like a dark blot against the bright orange sled.

Why did you turn your com off? he said to her as she skied up and pulled off her hood and mask.

Because I wanted to be alone? Kayi blinked against the sudden cool air sweeping over her hot skin. She grinned at Gem as he leaned out and signed quickly to her, asking if she’d flown, as he always did after each run.

Tossing her poles and mask into the open bay of the sled, Kayi leaned in and caught Gem’s hand, brushing her chapped lips against his bare fingers before sitting on the edge of the sled to undo her skis.

Hell of a day to be alone. Andy had stopped glaring and started to smile, his teeth thick and white in his dark face. Monica Alveros called. Kip Salander drowned while shooting a surfing video out in the Triangulum.

Kayi slid her skis into their case inside the hoversled and turned to face him. She had a momentary pang about Kip’s death, but the guy had been a serious show-boater and a total jerk the two times their paths had crossed. In fact, last time she’d seen him had been at one of the qualifiers for the Great Race. When she’d barely missed qualifying, again, he’d sent her an empty bottle of champagne and a blank note.

Anyone who did extreme sports, especially on a galactic level, risked death. She was baffled as to why Kip’s was so important that someone like Grinder Galaxy’s main PR coordinator, Monica Alveros, would notify Kayi and her team personally. Andy’s grin got wider as she stopped unhooking her wingsuit and straightened up.

Kip qualified for the Asgard race, she said softly. Her mouth felt dry and she ran her tongue over chapped lips. Does that mean. . .?

You’re in, Kayi. You’re going to get to run the most extreme ski race in human history.

* * *

She was still stiff from the cramped trans-galactic flight from Earth out to Asgard and her stomach was punishing her for every drop of the anti-viral and vaccine cocktail they had IV’d into her for the flight. She’d been poked, prodded, and signed about nine-million pieces of legal documents that all boiled down to Don’t Die (which was one of Gem’s cardinal rules anyway) and, if you do die, Don’t Sue (like she had money for an inter-stellar qualified lawyer).

The lodge, tackily named Shangri-la, spread across a valley high in the foothills of the Olympiad Mountains like a giant red birthmark of lacquered steel and plexi-glass. Shuttles up to the cloud of ships orbiting Asgard came and went from the snow field to the east, ferrying those approved to view the Great Race from the hot, plush comfort of the lodge.

Those approved seemed to be all rich ski-TV junkies and overly made-up reporters, Kayi noticed as she stood in the shadows on her narrow balcony. The air here was thicker than she was used to at such altitudes, with an almost smoky aftertaste that clung to the back of her throat.

Her team, being the lowest seed, had been shoveled with little ceremony into one of the bulbous wings of the building, probably as far away from the celebrity contestants as Monica and her people could put them. With the other hill fodder, as the more lurid zines dubbed those not expected to finish the Race.

She shivered in her Insulwool jumpsuit. Andy wanted her to get in front of the cameras, to try for a couple interest pieces. She shook her head thinking about it. The Girl from Earth or, more likely, The Greenlander, will she survive the descent? Like any of these outerworld-born pale-skins knew shit about Earth or could pick out Greenland on a map.

Kayi unclenched her hands. It was still night, the cycle here lasting nearly seventy hours. She needed to check gear, go over the maps and refresh the memorization she’d done on the space flight. She needed to sleep or at least drown out the heady mix of anticipation and adrenaline that always rushed through her right before a competition. Kayi took in a deep, frigid breath, sucking the snow-scented air deep into her lungs.

Screw it. She needed to ski.

She slipped back inside and grabbed her coat and gloves, shrugging into them before snagging the skis resting by the door, waiting for a wax and sharpening. Andy and Gem were camped in front of the screens in the adjoining room, testing her goggle and shoulder cameras. Technically filming by anyone but the approved Grinder Galaxy camera feeds and satellite crews was utterly prohibited but the support people of a Race contestant could have a non-recording monitoring camera in case the forfeit flare was deployed.

Kayi wouldn’t deploy the damn flare. She’d die out there before quitting that way. She tugged on her ski boots and opened the door. This was why she had to get out, stupid thoughts like the ones chasing their tails around in her brain. Finish or die. Finish or die. Finish…

Hey! Andy called out to her, too late.

I’ll be in soon, she called to him and pulled the door closed with her elbow before he could say anything else. The back of her neck prickled the whole way down the hall to the slide car, half expecting him to come out after her.

The slide car was an empty sterile lozenge that vibrated its way up to the main wing. She wasn’t sure where other exits were or she would have avoided the hot crush of reports and prep people that greeted her like a babbling gaggle of geese.

Kayi shoved past a group of women in brightly colored down jackets, keeping her head tucked alongside her skis and poles. She wasn’t too worried about being recognized, but the last thing she wanted to deal with right now were the press leeches. There was the slim chance some might have her picture in their Tell-All tablets.

Sneezing at the heavy citrus perfume one of the women had apparently bathed in, Kayi made it to the doors and