Book Cover Attempt

This is my first effort at trying any ‘painting’ program. Gimp in this case. I will read the instructions and try again. He is supposed to have a middle arm in the pic but it looks like a hip…The whole thing needs brightened a bit but not too much. I want a sinister lurking quality.

Second pic is closer to what I want but details now really look crude. Have a ways to go.

“Family Law” #3

Chapter 3

Derfhome didn’t look that much different from orbit than Earth. Different shapes to the land, a little bit less water, but blue and green and brown with white swirls much the same. Lee was old enough now to appreciate the complexities of approaching a civilized world. She’s been eight when they had been to Grandhome as their last planet fall. She’d sat at a dead console then reading a book quite bored with the adults droning on about stuff on the com.

This time she sat at a live board side by side with Gordon and listened to all the traffic control commands and clearances he had to deal with. He muted his mic frequently and explained as much as he could as if she might have to do it herself some day. Traffic control was still in English just like Earth, and had been going clear back to pre-space aircraft, but Lee could tell not all the Derf were as fluent or unaccented as Gordon.

Their ship, High Hopes, had a four seat command deck and was technically a ten person ship, ten humans that is. Gordon used a lot more life support, equal to about three humans, and one of the reasons they bought a Falcon IV was it was designed after the discovery of Derfhome and had Derf capable corridors and hatches. In seventy years Derf not only crewed, but now there were Derf who owned ships. When Derf had first gone on human ships they were often stuck in a hold with access to most of the ship impossible.

A Derf cabin was made in a Falcon by the expedient of removing a partition between two human cabins. Since they had room to spare Gordon had taken the volume of three human cabins and the Andersons had made theirs a double. Exploration ships never had enough room for supplies or specimens and materials coming back so the other rooms weren’t wasted. One was an armory, and one an autosurgery. Both made double so Gordon could use them too. Only Lee had a single, and her mom had been worried that was too small now.

Rather than take their own shuttle down to Derfhome it was much cheaper to dock at an orbital and take a commercial shuttle down. That avoided all kinds of complications and delay decontaminating their shuttle because it had been in a new biosphere. Sealing it off made it much simpler and infinitely cheaper. Fuel, water, and other consumables could be supplied without breaching quarantine. Only they had to be decontaminated.

They left all their personal items on board, except what was on their back and Gordon’s carry case with ID and his bank cards.

The first thing they had to do coming from a new live world was submit to a medical evaluation and a very thorough clean up which included special showers and hard vacuum cleaning of what they carried before they were free to enter public spaces.

The Anderson’s remains would be taken from their hold where Gordon had laid them by the lock, easy to remove, and handled like biohazard for autopsy and cremation. Gordon didn’t intend to talk to Lee about that unless she asked. No point at all in stirring up every horrible memory when she was doing so well.

Any well populated world had such procedures, but exploration ships often had to stop at the first port they could make. A newer colony world would probably just service their ship and turn them away if they couldn’t evaluate them, maybe even put medical staff aboard if needed and send them along.

Their log was examined for any fevers or medical problems, and they had swabs and blood samples drawn. If they hadn’t been in flight for near a month they’d have been required to sit out a ten day incubation period before entering the habitat, much less the world below. They exited their ship directly into a medical suite.

The doctor who entered stood back and asked in English if Lee was comfortable being examined by her, or if she wanted to wait until her parent was done with his examination and could be present? The doctor was a female Derf with lighter fur, noticeably smaller than Gordon.

“I’m sure if you have been assigned this task you are wholly qualified and I would never be so rude as to question your ability when I have no medical training.” The fact that she said it in perfect Derf, and made the gesture of respect crossing her true (and only) hands palm in seemed to surprise the nice lady.

“Well, I see it’ll be easy enough talking with you. Some human children are scared of Derf if they haven’t been around them. We are after all big and look a lot different. How do you come to speak Derf so well?”

“From my uncle Gordon who’s going to be my step dad now,” Lee said in English. She didn’t know how you could say that in Derf.

“I don’t understand that phrase,” the doc admitted.

“Is he in another room close?”

The lady looked at the computer she carried and touched a couple places.

“Yes, he’s two doors down the hall.”

“Why don’t you go peek in at him and everything will be clear.”

When she came back she was chuckling with a grin like a Great White and wasn’t worried Lee would take it wrong. Neither did she hang back to avoid scaring her.

“Whatever ‘step’ means that Derf is one fine looking hunk in case you didn’t know it. You put in a good word for doctor Shaborbroh if you get a chance.”

“He’s rich too,” Lee told her, and got another genuine laugh. She wandered if the doctor was what Derf considered good looking too? She’d have to ask Gordon how to tell. Maybe have him point out examples. She’d been away from people so long growing up she wasn’t sure she even knew what was good looking or ugly for her own species. Sometimes the examples they put forth in movies and vid didn’t make sense to her. Everything she’d read made it clear it was important to a lot of people. All of a sudden she realized she didn’t know if she was pretty or plain. Unc’ was right. This dealing with groups was going to be complicated.

When she was done Lee was probably cleaner than she’d ever been before, still slightly damp and terribly hungry because her entire digestive tract had been flushed out and examined. She smelled of antiseptic and even her ears had been swabbed for cultures and peered in and carefully cleaned. They’d decided she could keep her hair. She could have put up with losing it, but she wondered how Uncle Gordon would like being shaved?

The doctor returned and gave her two packets, one to be added to her next meal and the other a tube of gel to be rubbed all over her skin.

“You can start on the gel now if you want. You’ve had the bacteria stripped from you so thoroughly you need to restore the beneficial varieties and these are cultures of them.”

Her clothing was not processed yet so she was waiting for them, sitting on the Derf idea of a blanket, on a Derf examination table about the size of a billiard table. The top was almost to her arm pit level off the floor and she’d had to jump and throw a leg over the edge to make it up there when she first came in. She started at her toes and rubbed little dabs of the gel all over. It seemed to be oil based instead of water so it wasn’t cold.

It helped that Derf kept the temperature at a very comfortable level for a human in skin instead of freezing their patients in paper gowns like human doctors. It was quite different than the dimly remembered one time in her life she’d seen a human doctor. That had been when she was six years old and she’d had a physical and inoculations the first time they returned to civilization after her birth.

* * *

Humans were common enough on the orbital station that there were plenty of restaurants with human scale chairs and silverware. The guide book said the port below was the same too. Out in the countryside though humans had best have their own silverware and pillows, clothing and medicines, or do without. It suggested a folding step stool was a handy thing too.

When released they went straight to a restaurant. It was between usual meal times so it wasn’t crowded. Lee ordered like she’d never eat again. Most of the Derf items on the menu were things she’d tried because Gordon had them along on the ship. She was offered a human menu and ordered off it and off the Derf menu too. A double cheeseburger with sweet onion relish didn’t surprise the waiter, but a bowl of devil horn soup from the Derf sheet did. It was mixing bowl size and full of an egg drop broth with little black peppers that rivaled habañeros for heat.

There were tables with Derf and tables with Humans. There were even a few tables with a mix. But there were no other children of either species in the restaurant and everybody was trying hard not to stare at the pair of them. They might as well have gone ahead and satisfied their curiosity for all the success they were having.

While they waited they plotted. “While we’re here you should see a few of the sights. You never really know when you’ll get back. It’s been fifteen years for me, and that wasn’t something I planned.”

“Does your family know we’re coming?”

“I dropped them mail, said we’d be around. Things don’t change very quickly in a Derf holding. I expect things will look much the same as when I left. We’ll spend a week at least. Anything less would suggest we didn’t really want to be there. Derf do things slower than humans. Some of that is probably because we live longer. You knew that didn’t you?”

“Yes I know that Derf live over two hundred T-years. But I have no idea how old you are, Unc’.”

“I’m coming up on seventy, sneaking up on middle age for a Derf. Not old enough they will try to get me to settle down back at home, but old enough to get a little respect from the youngsters that remember me from my last visit. There are some other places we should see while we’re here. We should see the Richards’ monument and graveyard.”

“Who’s he and when did he die?”

“Oh, nobody knows what happened to Richards. It’s his monument, but the graveyard part is for some of his crewmates who died here. That’s who is in the cemetery. He jumped out of Fargone twenty years or so ago on an explorer like us, and the ship was never seen again. He was the commander on the ship that discovered Derf, discovered for humans that is, since we’ve been here all along of course. You haven’t read the story?”

“No, I know it was about seventy years ago. I haven’t read much modern history. Dad has been having me study lots of old stuff, pre-space stuff.” Lee got her soup then so Gordon told her the story while she ate.

“Our first contact we had with outsiders – humans – was with a big company ship. They located a group of Derf out on a hunt. It was as if an alien race surveyed a modern Earth and decided to contact a family of Mongol herders instead of setting down in Moscow. It might have seemed safer to them but it was a slow way to initiate contact.”

“The group was seasonal hunters and trappers, and they appeared to have a pretty low level of tech to the humans because they used mostly bronze for their axes and arrow points. They were clansmen sent to hunt in the fall and then returned to their keep to winter over. Not what humans think of as true nomads.”

“There were no radio emissions so they assumed Derf had no electronics. Truth was even then most clan seats were connected by shielded telephone lines, but radio was slow to be adapted because our star interferes with it so much. Derf made good steel too, but it was expensive and limited in use to such things as better knives and surgical instruments. In fairness some of it was the fact we have some really exceptional bronze alloys that substitute well for steel. We even had firearms, although they were very expensive and rare.”

“Derf can pull a stiff bow and we’re the biggest thing in the woods so we don’t need guns for protection. We killed off the few predators who could challenge us in our prehistory. And it’s been about twelve hundred years since we had a clan war, so there isn’t any big market for military weapons.”

“The humans sent a shuttle down, spread blankets and put out some trade goods near the clansmen. The Derf came in cautiously. That was just smart if you consider they had never seen anything before that was clearly a flying artifact. We have no history of UFO sightings in popular culture like you people. After three days of feeling each other out most of both sides felt safe to visit.

They traded a few words and were starting to trade a few trinkets. They were getting a feel for relative value. Some things there was no interest and they would be withdrawn by the side that offered them. The Humans ran a camera on the shuttle recording it all and the Derf sent a junior member of their party as a runner to inform their clan.

“On the third day one of the shuttle crew made a mistake. One felt intimidated and took a step back and put her hand on her gun. They might have been country folk, but the Derf weren’t stupid. They knew what weapons were just by how they were carried, and they knew what firearms were even if they didn’t have such a luxury.

The Derf was a female like the crew-person and pointed at the hand on pistol and used one of the few words they knew. She said quite clearly on the video – ‘No.’ Second mistake the Earthies made was another of the crew misreading the confrontation between the crew woman and Derf grabbed his weapon too. But he made the fatal error of trying to draw it. Derf custom is crystal clear; if you draw a weapon it’s assumed you intend to use it.”

“The poor fellow had a bronze ax in his breast bone before he even fully cleared leather. Once it goes bad like that with everybody drawing weapons there’s no recovering and it was over in three seconds. Final score was Derf: 7, Humans: 0, bronze against modern weapons.”

“Ouch.”

“Indeed. Here my people are, with a bunch of dead aliens on their hands, and they didn’t know what to do with them. I mean they were obviously people, so they couldn’t just let them lay exposed, but they didn’t know if they buried their dead or cremated them or what. They didn’t know if any more they met would be hostile or not, and didn’t want to further antagonize them.

“So the Derf did what they’d do for their own. They cut wood and built great stacked funeral pyres and laid the bodies on top in as good an order as they could. All this was in front of the camera on the shuttle although they didn’t know that it was watching them. But they didn’t light the pyres; they left one male to guard them against scavengers and withdrew.”

“Now because the humans had a big ship they had a second shuttle. They could have been stupid and wiped the Derf party out from the air. Or they could have tried a new contact somewhere else thinking word would not get out since they didn’t know we had phones.”

“Fortunately for everybody the commander Richards had a brain just like our male who made the funeral pyres, and he watched the video off the grounded shuttle several times. The Derf treated his dead with respect, and stole nothing of the trade goods laid out. He related later that made him decide to land a crew to recover the first shuttle and he went down too.”

“He did something that was quite brave. He tossed his gun belt in the airlock and walked down to meet the Derf unarmed. The male there reciprocated by lodging his ax in a tree before walking up to Richards. Not that he needed it given his mass and claws, but it was a nice gesture. Once they were talking again the Derf called in his eldest female of the hunters to be principal voice. They made especially sure the humans understood Derf custom about drawing a weapon.”

“The basic agreement they held out for was that Derf be treated exactly equal to Humans. Now remember, this is a work party they contacted at random. Not some clan elders who are used to negotiating with their peers. And hunters, not some city folk or traders who are used to negotiating business deals. So they did a hell of a job of representing for our whole race with the first aliens we’d ever seen.”

“Commander Richards agreed to equality eventually, although it took some days. I’m sure, now that I know humans well, that he knew it would not go over well at home. Final version was – Humans would follow Derf law on Derfhome, and Derf would follow Human law on Earth. They also established right there at the start that Humans and Derf could buy and sell land as individuals, but there would be no extraterritoriality. Derf would not be forced onto reservations or concede tracts of land to Humans.”

“When word got back to Earth a lot of people were unhappy with Commander Richards. But it was within his authority to negotiate and it was affirmed by a Congress who accepted his word that his people were in error, and worried about creating enemies. It’s certainly better than the treaties anyone else has gotten from Man. As far as we’re concerned he was a great statesman. It wasn’t Humans that put up a monument to him, it was we Derf.”

“I’d like to see that,” Lee agreed. “Did they honor your people on the monument too?”

“That’s not our way of doing things. It would be an embarrassment to anyone still alive. That was only seventy years ago. Maybe later after they have died we might add them. This was so soon after I was born I was too young to remember it, but they still count me in the generation born before contact. And you know, I bet maybe one in ten thousand humans have ever actually seen a Derf still. There’s just too damn many of you.”

“But almost everybody has seen pictures,” Lee pointed out. “Not that they do you justice.” She decided to share what the doctor told her about his being a ‘hunk’. Just then his food came and no matter how she prodded him he wouldn’t discuss it. Pretending to have his mouth full and ignoring that topic. She gave up and worked on an apple-caramel confection with vanilla ice cream, until one more bite and she’d need to be carried away.

“Oh my, that’s so much better than ration packs,” Lee told him.

“Your days of eating ration packs are over,” Gordon said laughing. “Just don’t expect everything to be this fancy in the back country when you meet my family. This is a five star restaurant. Just having a live waiter tells you it’s Ritzy. There might be half a dozen places in the system that can cook like this, and three of them are probably on station. My family cooks simple, peasant style, humans would say. But it’s fresh and in season even if it isn’t all fancy sauces and garnishes.”

“Can we afford this?” Lee asked, really looking around for the first time.

“We have enough cash to live very well for some months, and once we reveal some of our claim we’ll have a letter of credit before we go to Earth that will let you buy this place on a whim.

“It must be very hard not to get fat when you’re rich. I ate so much if there’s a low G hotel on this hab I’d take that over full gravity.”

“I already got us rooms at the Lunar Suites. It’s about seventy percent G, but the restaurant is about ten percent over because that’s Derf standard. In a half hour you’ll be complaining you’re hungry anyway.”

It was a nasty lie. It took over an hour.

* * *

Lee woke up in the dark and strained to see something. There was a pale blue glow of a night light shining out of the bathroom door. A couple sparks of color glowed here and there where LEDs marked the location of electronics in the dark. The hotel smelled different than their ship, and despite sound deadening faint strange noises and thumps bothered her sleep.

Gordon was curled up backed into the corner of the room and she was in his arms where she’d been sleeping every night for the last month. She felt safe there, and neither of them could see any reason she should be all alone in a cold bed. In fact they had taken a Derf room that didn’t have a human bed, just a padded sleeping mat.

The Power of Science Fiction

Everything we have today such as cell phones, satellite communications, robotic surgery, lasers, personal computer, digital cameras, all sprang from the imagination of dreamers.

How far we have come - Larson/2003

Somebody dreamed like this:

And then somebody did the engineering and bent some metal and had the nerve to climb in the damn thing. And we have this:

Tracy_Caldwell_Dyson_in_Cupola_ISS

The Charm of Country Stores

NW Coast of Lower Michigan

Central Florida

Above all they are practical. No fancy marketing. They have a sense of humor about themselves and often a resident cat. They may be good or bad but they are usually the only choice for many miles around. They often have a little restaurant with two mismatched tables and no two chairs alike. The donuts and such are probably made there and the owner immediately knows you are not a local.

The menu chalkboard may hang on a chain with two sides and gets flipped to the ‘tourist price’ side when they see a strange car park out front.

They may sell shoes, over the counter medicines, tire repair kits, reading glasses and ammunition all off the same shelf.

North of Marquette MI

My rule of thumb is stay and do business if the place smells good.

Rochester MI

Dang newfangled contraptions...

“Family Law” Snippet – # 2

Chapter 2

He woke in the early dawn, the perimeter lights still blazing but the sky behind them a bright salmon instead of black. Sticking up between his true arms was a little head with her nose buried in his arm pit. Her arms were curled in front of her with her hands crossed and palms on her shoulders. Her legs were tucked up to and his second set of arms crossed so that they went behind her tucking her in close.

“Umm, somebody left me a little snack in the night,” he rumbled in her ear and thrust a wet nose into the sensitive skin behind it.

“Ahhh, ahh, cold nose!!!” she protested, twisting to get away. That just got her another nose attack right between the shoulder blades. She kept turning until she went full circle looking him in the face and then her expression changed as she remembered last night and what happened.

“Oh Unc’,” she wailed and cried and cried until she finally gave herself the hiccups.

“What are we going to do?” she asked when she ran down.

“What people always do,” he explained softly, gently grooming her hair behind her ears. “We feel sad but get on with all the things we have to do to live. It’s harder for awhile. We never entirely forget, but it does get easier not to be sad after some time.”

“We weren’t done,” she protested.

“I know.” he agreed, understanding exactly what she meant.

* * *

From the air everything for kilometers around looked like it had in the days before the attack. The huge eyes on the creatures gave him hope they didn’t hunt in the daylight. He circled around and landed with the tent off the car’s back quarter where Lee couldn’t see. There were no big scavengers yet, just a few rat analogs that scurried away as soon as he opened the door.

Jack and Myrtle went in specimen bags as well as the monster whose neck he’d broken. He’d have saved one of each sex, but he didn’t see any obvious gender signs. The air car had external chill lockers for such cargo so Lee was spared riding with body bags in the cabin.

That task taken care of he allowed Lee out to salvage anything important to her while he watched. She found her computer, the metal detector she’d been using, a couple spare magazines for her pistol that was down to six rounds, and her jacket. He recovered his sample case, the weapons, and his friend’s personal computers.

He recovered some ration packs, but most of the equipment like the lights he just abandoned as irrelevant and not worth the risk of exposing himself to injury recovering them with no backup adults to get them off planet. He’d never need them again, and the capitol they represented, so dear when they were bought, was nothing against the claim they had now. The bulk of their supplies were still in the air car anyway. This was just one of several camps they’d have made on this continent before returning to the shuttle. That plan was done.

“I didn’t get to tell mom, look what I found down by the stream Unc’.” She pulled a couple beautiful gold nuggets out of her jacket pocket and showed him. They were big ones, the largest easily a hundred grams.

“I’m glad you showed me that before we left,” Gordon told her. He made sure his computer was streaming to the expedition log and spoke.

“Note to our log – Claim number one for Lee Anderson, the valley of our third camp on Providence, claim marker 37-14-1239, with all adjoining peaks and a hundred kilometers beyond the drainage divide defined by those peaks. In particular all mineral rights, timber rights, as well as surface rights and riparian rights clear to the ocean to which the river drains. A patent to Lee Anderson and her heirs in perpetuity whether residents or not.”

“I’ve never had a claim of my own before,” Lee said with big eyes.

“High time you did then. Not that we found all that much before worth claiming, but your folks mentioned it for this world. You know you’ll hold all the claims your mom and dad had, as well as two of the three general shares for the whole discovery?”

“I’m rich then aren’t I?” she asked. It seemed a novel idea.

“So am I honey. We’re both so stinking rich it’s hard to understand. This is a world a ship with a crew of fifty or sixty would be delighted to find for a corporation and still count themselves rich off just their bonuses. If you think of anything else you want to claim before we leave speak up. Your folks and I claimed pretty close to the limits for individuals, but this valley is only about a quarter of what you could claim. That’s just something nice to have. The real money is in the finder’s percentage, and we only split it three ways,” He caught himself and frowned. “Two now,” he corrected softly.

Lee looked at the vast vista, the bowl of the valley filling their vision bounded by snow capped mountains on both sides. It stretched away from them growing wider so far away that the bordering mountains marched over the horizon on their way to the distant sea. Gordon didn’t say anything, letting her come to grips with having such a vast possession.

“Can I make a rule about how my land is used?” she finally said.

“Sure, that’s why I was so specific in making the claim for you.”

“Okay, I’d like to make it a rule nobody can ever build a house or anything for ten kilometers around where our camp was. They can put up a plaque or a statue or something to show where mom and dad died, but that’s it. It should be like a park and nobody can sell it off.”

“It’s on the log Lee. It’s like law now.”

“Good.”

After they were in the air and headed back to the shuttle Lee asked him, “Do you think those dinos could swim?”

“I really doubt it. Their tail is too thin and round, the feet have no webbing. Their tiny forelegs are probably not sufficient to keep the head above water, and they are very dense bone and muscle. Maybe if they were smart enough to hold on to a piece of wood like a life jacket, but I have my doubts they are that intelligent.”

“Then I’d like to claim a nice island somewhere. Far enough from the continents there shouldn’t be any of those lizards there.”

“We’ll look on our survey and pick a couple out. If those critters give settlers much trouble a couple nice islands might be choice real estate. But my guess is after ten or twenty years they will be asking if they should set a preserve aside to keep them from going extinct. That’s what happens with predators big enough to threaten man or his livestock.”

* * *

Gordon set course for Derfhome without consulting Lee. If her parents had been alive they would have set out straight for Earth automatically. They needed to file claims for their planet, and Derf had no such registry, only Earth. It wasn’t critical to hurry, because they left a claim satellite in orbit. That and their records gave them five years to make their claims.

Claim jumping was not something he feared. It had been firmly eliminated a long time ago. The huge exploration companies saw to that because they didn’t want to expend half their energies and treasure fighting over keeping what they found. Their huge find would rattle people, but not enough to bring the system down. There had been two big finds by independents before with no problem. Indeed the big exploration companies found occasional news of such a find produced a flood of quality applicants.

Lee had been studying all morning. Gordon was pleased she’d taken up the routine of her lessons without his prompting. For a few of the things her mom and dad had tutored she was on her own for now. He could neither spar with her nor teach guitar. Otherwise the ships library had all the lesson materials anyone could wish.

Gordon had always been one of her tutors too. It had been the natural thing to ask his help when he was the closest adult. Besides Derf Gordon had taught her German and was currently learning Japanese with her using an interactive program on the computer. He was also an accomplished artist in water colors and colored pencil and shared that with her. Sometimes now though the lesson was interrupted when something made Lee think of her mom or dad and she needed to be held not tutored.

Gordon waited to talk to her until after they were in a shipboard routine and he felt sure Lee was stable emotionally. She was still mourning, he was too, but she was sleeping Okay, and she was not in denial. She didn’t avoid speaking of her mom and dad or pretend they were still alive. The crying was tapering off after a couple weeks. After lunch he took the opportunity.

“Lee, there’s something we need to talk about.”

“Every time Mom said that to me it was something bad.”

“It’s serious. But it doesn’t have to be bad. I need to know what you want to do now with the choices we can give you. You know we’re both going to be rich. That makes things easier, because we can both afford to do almost anything we want. We have to decide what you want to do and where you want to live for the next seven years until you are an adult. You aren’t used to living with other people, but you are going to have to learn how to get along with crowds of folks who aren’t family. It might not be as easy as you think.”

“Anywhere you want to live is fine with me,” Lee agreed with an indifferent shrug. “You’d know better than me where it’s nice. We could go around and look at different places. All I know is the High Hopes, and I’ve only seen a regular house on video. I’ve lived in a hotel for a couple weeks between trips. I know most people have a permanent place they stay like in the videos.” Gordon said nothing and let her rattle on.

Lee stopped and looked funny at Gordon. “Or are you saying you don’t want me to live with you anymore?” Her voice caught on a ragged edge, and she looked scared worse than when she’d come out of the sleeping bag.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. In fact that’s the first thing I want to offer and get out of the way. I’d like to adopt you as your guardian if you’re willing.

“Well of course,” she got up and came around the table pushing his true arms open to step in. “Hold me Uncle Gordon. You shouldn’t scare me like that. You’re the only family I’ve got and I never had any other idea but that I’d be with you. Nobody else knows me, and I love you.”

“And I love you too,” he said, gently scratching with four inch claws right between her shoulder blades where she liked, “but other people might have a hard time with us being a family. I can almost guarantee you no other little human girl is living with Derf as family, much less adopted.”

“Oh, come on. With all the billions of people, and all the way things can happen? Dad always said if something can happen it will eventually.”

“Eventually,” he allowed. “And somebody has to be first. You have no idea how rare it is for a child to grow up on a space ship. In fact your mom and dad always were nervous those times between trips when we lived in a hotel. They were always worried some busybody would object that was no way to raise a child and ask the court to take you away so you’d have a normal life. Somehow, I think they may have an even harder time with the idea of me being your surrogate daddy. A lot of people will see me as your parent’s business partner and no familial relation at all.”

“Well, I’ll tell them different. It would be just wrong to pull us apart.”

“Thank you. You may have to tell them. I want to stop at Derfhome first before we go to Earth. I set course already before talking to you so we have to stop there now no matter what we do. If you will be my daughter I intend to adopt you there on Derfhome first, and that makes it harder for anyone to argue at Earth. So you have a couple weeks to get used to the idea and talk about it. If you have any conditions, well, Derf law is a lot more flexible than Earth law. Derf can form just about any contract they wish and it’s nobody else’s business.”

“How can you ask conditions to be family?”

“Humans do it all the time when they marry. They write up a prenuptial agreement that says how and where they will live or how much of a household budget one will have if they don’t have their own money. It may be a second or third marriage and one partner wants his wealth set aside for their own children separate from any heirs the other has. That might be a good idea for you. If you are my daughter I’d be your heir if something happened to you. If you leave the money to somebody else it would remove any thought I was adopting you for your money. It’s not like I don’t have plenty of my own.”

Lee made a face to show what she thought of that.

“We might agree to spend a certain amount of time on Earth or another human world so you get used to dealing with other humans.”

“There are humans on Derfhome, right?”

“Yes, but it’s not a human society. Dealing with a society is a lot different than dealing with individuals. You have laws and bureaucracy, and customs that are more rigid that either, truth be known. You’ll see.”

About my first sale

I have been reading science fiction since I was in the 5th grade in elementary school. I didn’t get the bug to try writing it myself until I retired. Part of that was that I did poorly in school in my English classes. My spelling is not very good and my grammar tends to fall back into the Pennsylvania Dutch expressions my family used. I never was able to diagram sentences to the satisfaction of my teachers who loved to create complicated sentences that would illustrate some obscure point of grammar. It all seemed stupid and pointless to me.

I had already started on my first book when I read about Baen Publishing starting an e-zine and soliciting stories. I had never in my life tried to write a short story, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I wrote “Common Ground” and posted it to the Slush for the magazine on Baen’s website. It got a lot of comments and I made some changes to it. But a couple posters were very kind about it, one saying it was a “wonderful” story. Perhaps that reader feedback helped me, it certainly couldn’t have hurt.

I got a letter from Eric Flint the Editor that gave a great deal of advice. He pointed out all the perils of using dialect as I had in the beginning of the story, especially dialect of such a complex language as Russian. He freely admitted he avoided it himself because it was so difficult. I got the feeling I was above myself a bit to think a novice such as myself could presume to wield such advanced tools.

He intimated also that he was not fond of cute endings, which definitely described the story, and to my amazement concluded the letter by saying he was going to purchase the story. That wasn’t where I thought he was going at all.

Eric was right about dialect. However I got some help from a native speaker who cleaned up my errors and changed the form of the name I’d used to reflect a male when I’d used the female form in error.

Jim Baen’s Universe was discontinued. They bought first use only so I retained the other rights. I published “Common Ground” on Amazon/Kindle, but as a novella it has not attracted any attention even at 99¢. I’m going to bundle it with several other short stories and sell them together. Perhaps that will be better received.

I was perhaps spoiled by selling my first story immediately. I had an aunt who wrote all her adult life and had three full size filing cabinets full of manuscripts. She felt it was just a matter of selling ONE story and when she had her foot in the door all that copy she had created would sell and she’d be sitting on a gold mine of back-copy. Truth was she wrote Christian literature for children that was wretched and had no market. But she never lost faith that eventually someone would buy it. Personally I’d rather be spoiled.

Carpet of autumn leaves – UP

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the fall. The leaves are on a carpet of pine needles. Five pics. Click for full size.

A Snippet of “Family Law”

Family Law

Chapter 1

The campfire cast a yellow bubble of light in the deepening dusk, the exotic wood burning with a sharp spicy smell. The cozy circle of warmth and safety around the open fire was one of the pleasures of being far from civilization. Wild fires on this world burned until they ran out of fuel or were drenched by the rains, so the animals showed a deep fear of fire, fleeing from even the smell of the smoke. Men on the other hand worried them not at all. In time, experience would teach the local fauna to fear man, but for now the top predators showed no respect, and rivaled Old Earth for variety and ferocity.

Relaxed beside their fire, Jack and Myrtle Anderson were unafraid and content. The fire, an electric camp fence, and a carbine laid beside each of them provided plenty of safety against the tiger-like carnivores they’d seen from the air. They were content because this world was remarkable, rich to the point they were sure they had made their last voyage of exploration. Claims on this planet would leave them wealthier than a person could spend in a lifetime of shameless self indulgence.

Their discovery was what every independent explorer hoped for and so few achieved. Men had found only seventeen worlds with their own complex life. A number of water worlds had bacteria and algae analogs, but only seventeen planets had plants and land animals in complex variety with air that men could breathe bare faced. And of the seventeen three were so deadly they were closed to colonization.

The first couple weeks were especially tiresome. It took that long to go through all the protocols just to know they could walk around without a pressure suit. The pygmy pigs knew them from being processed before they were frozen, and being cared for the week after being thawed to normalize them. But they looked strangely at these puffy scentless strangers with mirrored glass faces who staked them outside.

The mice and sparrows were indifferent to their pressure suits, never being handled except in cages. In a week, against high odds, they were all still healthy. It was hard working sealed away from the impressive beauty, wondering if the flowers smelled sweet, wanting to feel the breezes bending the grasses, until they knew it wasn’t a deadly illusion that would entice them to make a fatal blunder.

Then it took further studies before they went out without a respirator or decontamination showers. It was their sixth week before they went out without gloves and over boots. When they moved camp from one ecology to another they reverted somewhat and ran abbreviated tests with mask and gloves again.

Not just bacteria and viruses, but allergies and molds and aggressive parasites had to be eliminated as dangers. Some settler might still find a fatal disease lurking in a pocket ecology a hundred years from now, some bacterium lurking in a swamp, or fungus in a rain forest, but they could establish there were some relatively safe areas.

The plant life tended to the same chemical isomers as Earth life and was lacking the nasty alkaloids and other defense chemicals so common to life on other worlds. One new world had such aggressive plant life it had been named Thorn. By contrast they agreed to name this world Providence. None of them were strongly religious; it was simply a shameless marketing ploy.

Who would want to colonize a world named Purgatory or Sahara? Paradise and Bountiful were taken, and New Earth showed a serious lack of imagination. Even the worlds tagged At Last and Lucky Strike if positive in tone, had not been named with a thought to writing promotional brochures for colonists and investors. Hanging an odd label on a new world was as bad an idea as saddling your child with a strange name.

Beside the huge granite-ware coffee pot on the edge of the fire there were some tubers about the size of two fists held together. They were wrapped in foil after being rubbed in cooking oil and salted and peppered. Every once in a while Jack would roll them a bit with a stick so they cooked evenly. They should be ready by the time their partner joined them for supper.

The crows they brought along ingested them with nary a hiccup, then the mice and finally the monkeys. After all the lab work was fine Myrtle had worn a dab of the cooked root taped against her skin for twenty-four hours with no reaction. Jack first ate a sample about the size of a grain of rice. They slowly increased the serving size taking turns between them and their partner Gordon until they were sure two hundred grams produced no unpleasant reaction. Several other promising plants would wait to be tested back in civilization. It was a time consuming process they didn’t desire to repeat that often.

The temptation to hurry the process and just dig in had been strong, because the odor of the cooked vegetable was maddening. It combined the fine starchy smell of a potato with oily rich tang of sesame. When the baked root was struck firmly before cutting it open the interior burst apart into pearly beads like tapioca in a starchy matrix. The texture was as appealing as the taste. They named them Pearl Potatoes.

A pair of eyes appeared in the dark, reflecting the fire like a cat’s eyes, but far higher above the ground than any cat would stand. Unafraid of the fire they approached until a few reflections caught off claws and sleek fur, then off an equipment harness and polished leather holster for a side arm neither of the humans could comfortably lift, much less shoot.

When he eased down by the fire their partner Gordon was about the same mass as a mature grizzly bear. True hands on upper arms with opposed thumbs, and claws on heavier lower arms angled down from his shoulders. He could run, with frightening speed, on four or six limbs if he rolled his fingers in and ran on his knuckles. To do that now his kind wore special running gloves to protect their hands. His eyes when he was sitting were about where Jack’s would be standing. He had the same broad flat head of a bruin, indeed wider, but instead of a narrow muzzle his mouth was a wide arc, resembling nothing so much as a frog. That is until he opened it and showed the impressive dentition.

Despite it being a natural gesture, most of his kind had learned not to discomfort humans by smiling. It didn’t seem fair given humans owned the same smile reflex themselves. His race were called Derf. That word was from their own language, and so far humans had not coined a nick-name or even created a slur for their race. The reason for that was expressed in a common joke after the races meeting – “What do you call a Derf when you meet him?” The only sensible answer was – “Anything he pleases.”

The case Gordon tossed down held over a hundred new samples of every grass, bush and tree he could recognize as distinct, as well as photos of the site at which they were collected, and an audio recording of his observations and impressions. Although he was a botanist he also grabbed samples of insects or even small animals if he saw something interesting. That was Jack’s area of study, but he could follow up on anything Gordon brought back worth pursuing. He even on occasion brought back an interesting rock for Myrtle, their geologist, to examine.

Myrtle handed Gordon a large sauce pot for a mug and he poured himself a couple liters of dark rich coffee. Now that the three adults were together they popped the tabs on some self-heating dinners, the Derf requiring a few extra of course.

“Lee sleeping?” Gordon asked.

“Yes, she wore herself out this afternoon cutting fire wood,” he pointed at a pile of kindling. “She wouldn’t use a power tool saying she needed to know how to do it the old way with a saw and ax in case it was ever a necessity. But her dad did take the ax away when she got so tired she was getting punchy. She stayed awake long enough to eat most of a ration pack and crawled in the sack.”

“That kid is into the self sufficiency stuff so much she’ll want to spin the thread and weave her own cloth next time she needs a pair of jeans.” Gordon joked. “You’d think she wanted to stay and be a pioneer.”

“God, don’t give her the idea. It’s bad enough what she comes up with all on her own. She wanted to know last week how hard it would be to smelt some copper from that ore body we found,” her mother said.

“Would it be all that difficult if we had coal or made some charcoal?”

“No, but she didn’t really have anything she wanted to make with it. She just thought it would be cool to do,” Jack explained. “Then we’d have a heavy hunk of copper we’d have to lug around as a keepsake until she got tired of it. At least when she was on the bread baking kick we ate it up. I deflected her by telling her about native copper, so now she’s carrying a sensor pad with mineral software around everywhere and looking for native metals. Who knows? She may find some.”

“If she does I’ll list it as a separate land patent in her name,” her mother said. “We’ve hit the legal limits to our claims as individuals, but nothing I’ve ever read in the codes says a minor member of an exploration party can’t make claims,” her mom said. They grinned all around happy to be reminded of their good fortune to have a find worth even their junior member writing claims. They never had before.

“Likely nobody ever envisioned explorers having children along,” Gordon mused, careful not to sound critical. They certainly hadn’t, it was most irregular. “What you got heating there?” he asked, pointing at the self heating meals. He pulled his great ax from his belt and held it, edge away, for a serving platter with his heavy clawed lower arms. He shattered one of the roots on the flat of the ax before peeling the foil open exposing the creamy beads. The rich odor was mouth watering.

“Two braised liver,” Myrtle made a face to show what she thought of that. “And two fish,” she said, pushing them across to Gordon.

“Umm-um,” he made a fuss over them, ignoring Myrtle’s tongue tip thrust out in disgust. They’d done this a hundred times and it was just expected now. After fourteen years together they had a lot of little rituals and jokes they went through. Although the humans were the married couple all three of them could finish each other’s sentences, and knew at a glance in the morning when to tread lightly and not hassle one of them who was having a bad day.

Lee had been born onboard three years into their first trip, so Gordon had known her from the start, eleven Earth years, pushing twelve now. She was a big girl for eleven but not heavy at all, just long limbed and promising to be a big woman when grown.

Gordon ripped the cover back from the two liver meals and dumped the contents on top of the pearl potatoes. The sautéed onions and bacon really made it for him. He produced a huge antique serving fork in sterling silver and mixed the ingredients on his ax face. Myrtle ignored him and dug into her own Pot Roast and vegetables.

Eight bites later he was ready to do the same with the remaining potatoes and fish. The fish had macaroni and cheese with it. Gordon wasn’t supposed to eat much cheese, but they wouldn’t be closed in with him tonight so it wouldn’t matter.

Gordon finished first and curled back to the fire on a ground cover in a furry mound with his weapons beside him. When the humans went to bed they piled enough fresh wood on the fire to qualify it as a bonfire, and checked the perimeter sensors before joining their daughter in the tent. Gordon didn’t stir at their activity.

* * *

The insistent buzz of the perimeter alarm jolted Gordon out of his sleep. He slapped the shut off on his pad and reached down tugging up the seals on his boots. By the time he stood, slid his pistol in its holster and tucked his ax in his belt Jack was standing at the entry of their tent with a long gun. Everybody was awake by then, so Gordon went ahead and flipped the perimeter lights on.

There was a bobbing, rippling front of gray-green movement approaching, so solid he thought at first glance it was a flash flood. Then the movement and color resolved in the harsh light into a detail of bobbing heads with big eyes, above bodies shoving forward shoulder to shoulder. The hot wire on the perimeter that would stop a single large predator hadn’t stood against a pack that crushed the front runners over it from behind. They were eerily silent except for the drumming of taloned feet on the soft ground. Jack let off a long burst of automatic fire that cut the entire front row down. The living flood just rolled over the hump of bodies without pause.

Gordon picked up his long weapon and flicked the selector to flechettes. The darts from the 30mm shotgun tore through three or four ranks of the reptilian creatures before they lost momentum. That cut a real notch in their ranks, but the pack was so big they were being flanked. He couldn’t spare the time to look, but Jack’s weapon sounded its higher pitched stutter again and was joined by a second long chatter that would be Myrtle firing beside Jack.

He saw a movement in the corner of his eye and turned. The approaching creature leaped as it attacked to bring its hind legs up to claw. Gordon sidestepped and swung the butt of his weapon catching it under the chin and folding its head back at an angle nothing with a spine could survive. He dropped the muzzle again and swept all behind them cutting down the ones who had flanked them and were trying to circle back. The lights seemed to blind them because they stumbled into each other.

By the time he’d turned full circle spraying a line of death all the creatures were down except where his friends were under a roiling sea green clump. The tent behind them was collapsed. Out of flechettes, he switched to solid rounds and aimed head high afraid of hitting his partners on the bottom of the pile. Most of them went down with one long stuttering burst, but a couple who’d been leaning below his line of fire turned and rushed him. He dropped the rifle and pulled his ax from his belt swinging it double handed. The first jumped from so far out it was easy to sidestep for someone with his reflexes, and once in the air the creature couldn’t change its trajectory.

His ax bit almost to the center of the lead creature’s body as it flew past. Stinging hot blood sprayed down his arm clear to his shoulder steaming in the cold night air. Even mortally wounded it was voiceless. The second animal seeing its partner killed changed tactics and ran in at him head low and jaws open. He swung the ax backhand catching it on the side of its round head with the flat of the blade. The muted clang left one side of its head as flat as the ax, and it rolled away legs still running though it was dead. At last it was still and quiet, nothing in sight standing. He turned slowly looking for signs of any stirring. The still air was heavy with the sharp smell of propellant and the rich butchery smell of hot smashed bodies.

Gordon grabbed the long lizard tail of one of the dead, dragging it off the pile at the tent entry. It looked pretty much like pictures he’d seen of a Velociraptor. Shorten the neck a bit and make the head egg shaped and it was close enough. He kept digging until he pulled the last one off his friend Jack. Myrtle was tucked halfway under him. Then he sat down and cried.

After awhile he continued. They’d got past his partners inside the tent and he slit it open with his ax pulling the dead creatures away. The sleeping bag he uncovered was ripped and chewed but looking closer he was surprised to see it was whole and peppered with small holes. Lee had shot from inside her bag defending herself with her pistol. When he didn’t move or make noise for a moment there was a hesitant – “Dad?”

“No, Lee – your uncle Gordon. Don’t shoot.”

“They’re dead aren’t they? I heard you crying.”

“Yes, honey. I’m sorry. I did all I could. There were just too many of them.”

“Uncle Gordon I need to go to the bathroom really bad. Can I go to the latrine?”

That was a problem. Their camp latrine was under a heap of dead monsters. “Lee, there’s some things there I don’t want you to see. Will you promise me to keep your eyes closed and I’ll carry you?”

“I promise.”

He let the child unzip the bag, her small fingers better for the task, and scooped her up one armed, pistol in his other true arm and ax in his powerful lower arms, claws set in the wooden shaft. She pushed her face against his chest and grasped his combat harness, his chest fur too short to hang onto.

Opposite the tent from the bodies he stopped after about twenty meters and made sure she couldn’t see her parents from there.

“Okay, down and do your business while I guard.” He leaned over and scooped a hole with a single swipe of a lower arm, claws turning back a big divot of sod. He stood back up stretched tall, slowly scanning for danger. As always with humans the stink was terrible. Not that any of them could help it, but his nose was always offended.

“I don’t have any paper here,” Lee complained.

“I’m not stepping away from you for anything,” Gordon informed her. “There may be some straggler come waltzing in after the pack or a wounded one could get sorted out and rush us.”

“Never mind,” Lee said and shrugged out of her undershirt and cleaned herself thoroughly with that, throwing it in the hole too. Then she kicked the divot in to spare him bending back down. She knew how badly the smell bothered him.

“Up, on my neck Lee. I’m going to put you in the air-car, and then I’ll get just a few things we need to take back. We’ll stay in there until morning. I don’t want to fly back to the shuttle in the dark. I’ve never been a great air-car pilot. The seat moves back far enough for me but the controls are still human sized. I really have to have a delicate hand to use them.”

Lee settled on his shoulders legs around his great neck and grabbed the mat of fur under his ears on each side. He rose to look around and then settled back to six limbs to lope up the hill to where their air-car was parked still within the lighted perimeter.

“Uncle Gordon, I’m afraid. If more of those animals come and get you I’ll be stranded all alone. I can’t run the shuttle or the ship. Can’t you stay inside with me where it’s safe until morning and then get the things you need in daylight?

He was afraid that by morning there would be scavengers. He wanted to recover the Andersons as whole as possible, also a single copy of the creatures that attacked them. But what the girl said was true. If he did something stupid and got himself killed she would die too. Maybe the lights would keep the bigger ones away. It would be unkind to scare her all over again by leaving her alone.

“Okay Lee. We’ll do it your way and in the morning I’ll lift the air car and look all around before grabbing the stuff from our camp. I don’t know why we didn’t see any of these critters on scan when we surveyed the area. They’re hot blooded. The one sprayed blood on me when I axed him and it almost scalded me. They should have stood out like a beacon on infrared. Even if they were solitary and only form up a pack when they run prey there weren’t enough single animals on scan to make this group up. Not within fifty kilometers. Even if we had raised full chain link hot fences and razor wire rolls in between I’m not sure that pack wouldn’t have pushed it down,” he said, frustrated.

“Maybe they weren’t hot when you looked.”

“How’s that?”

“Maybe when they are full they are cold blooded and sit around digesting for a long time to make it last, but when they get hungry they switch on and get hot blooded to make running and hunting easier.”

“That’s really good thinking Lee. You might just have something there.” He lifted her off double handed, and through the hatch into the car. He pulled out a couple blankets they used as lap robes and laid them on the seat for her. He’d just curl in a ball on the flat cargo area behind the seats.

“I know it may be hard, but we’re safe in here, just lay still and rest if you can’t sleep. He laid his ax under his elbow and hitched his pistol around where it wasn’t in the way and tucked himself in a ball. Sleep for him came surprisingly easy.

Another drip in the torrent

People are creative. It amazes me how inventive they are. I once heard that there was a periodical publication called the Gazette of the Patent system. Since I like gadgets and worked with mechanical things it seemed like something to which a subscription would be desirable. I called up the Patent Office in D.C. and a very nice young woman was willing to take my subscription. If I remember correctly it was about $600 for the year.

“Why on Earth so much?” I inquired stunned. $600 was about what I took home each week at the time. “Have you ever seen the Gazette?” the young woman asked “Well no.” After asking where I lived she directed me to visit the main branch of the Detroit Library as it was the closest public institution that was a repository for the Patent System.

I had a mental vision of a magazine. The librarian sat me down at a table with what appeared to be a fair collection of large metropolitan phone books. That was the current ISSUE of the Gazette. Each entry was a summary only. Just enough to tell you if you wanted to continue and look up the entire patent. I don’t know if they even attempt to print it now, but back in the pre-internet days of the late 1970s it was the only way to scan and review new inventions. It was humbling.

Today I can go online and sort patents by category and pull up the full patent text and illustrations quickly and for free.

The internet is doing the same for other creative outlets. I know a village in Mexico that markets hand made sweaters and serapes and blankets on the internet to support themselves instead of relying on the occasional tourist coming down their road. There are entire markets online dedicated to hand crafts and art.

Writers have always faced the barrier of being PUBLISHED. You can write a tremendous work that would appeal to hundreds of thousands of readers, but first it has to appeal to an editor who is stressed, overworked, jaded by looking at a thousand horrid manuscripts submitted by idiots, and trying to survive in a declining industry with ever shrinking margins. Oh sure, there are people who own printing presses who will run off as many books as your vanity will imagine you can sell. If you pay them. The people who do this are the same ones who will tell their lawyer to pursue a case, and don’t worry about billable hours, when he has refused to take it on contingency. They tend to end up poor. People tell the story and label them foolish behind their hand.

Now there is almost no barrier to being published. Doing it electronically is cheap and easy. With no physical book to produce it is cheaper. Some see that as an advantage to reach a greater market. Some have the mentality that a book is a book and worth XX dollars whether dead trees or electrons. I recently saw a 165 page ‘book’ for sale for just under $7.00. That just seems greedy to me, but each is free within the framework of their ‘publisher’ to set their price point.

Perhaps the best feature of these electronic books is the free sample. Since you can’t thumb through and read a few passages they allow you to read a few pages at the beginning. It’s not as good as examining several points but it can save a great deal of heartache, because a lot of this flood of new publication is just terrible. It seems many feel not only that editors unfairly rejected them, but that the other tasks of the editors such as there being an actual coherent story, and checking spelling and grammar are to be rejected too.

I hope to be able to distinguish my work from the torrent sufficiently to have a following. I have no huge ego to think nobody is better. I have authors as favorites who wield words so well I just stop in admiration and read a passage over a few times in wonder. Yet I do have a few passages of my own that make me feel good, or in one case I am not ashamed to say rereading it made me cry. Each story I write is a little better. I get a lot of good feedback from readers and editors to help that along.

I’m probably spoiled by the fact I sold the very first story I wrote to sell on the first try. That was “Common Ground” to Jim Baen’s Universe e-zine. That’s a separate story I’ll tell soon. My current book length offering is available on Kindle and Nook. Here is the link to the Amazon sales page and a couple reviews for “Paper or Plastic?”.