Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
The Tale of the Song
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
I’m taking requests for my January stories. If there’s a person, place, or thing that you’d like to see appear in a Daily Cabal story, please leave a note in the comments. (Be forewarned, though, suggested story elements may be transformed a bit in the writing…)
–Rudi
A swordswoman hiking up a ravine toward the besieged city of M. heard a bird’s song. Not even the whole song, just a string of notes, falling quickly down then rising slowly up. It stuck in her head the whole march, through the silence when they couldn’t even whisper, and she found herself singing it under her breath to the beat of the battle’s parry and lunge. When they’d won and the city was free and the wine was plentiful, she sang it until she was hoarse, and her comrades sang with her.
By the next time they were hired into battle, the song had found words and an air of bravado. A song of attack and a song of victory. Twenty years later, when her war-band had become an army and then an empire, the tune slowed to an anthem, gathering about itself trumpet-glints and timpani-shadows on the morning of her coronation.
In the border-expanding years of the second empress’s reign, it was sung by schoolchildren and marched to in parades that seemed to happen twice a week or more.
When rebellion years sent the fourth empress into hiding, it was sung softly, almost prayer-like, behind drawn curtains late at night.
When the twin empresses eleven and twelve commissioned fleets of exploration, the song was transcribed for hundreds of foreign instruments in a score of unfamiliar scales.
When twenty-third empress abdicated by disappearing into the noonday crowd on the grand plaza, it attained a melancholy grandeur, sung in snatches as a kind of password — until the fifth regent banned it in the course of an anti-royalist purge.
And when, several tens of thousands years later, an explorer from shores more distant than the empire’s furthest borders picked up a music box that had just enough twist left in its springs to play the song (nearly as much of it as the barbarian swordswoman had heard that distant afternoon), it tingled in the explorer’s tentacles and lingered in her peripheral brain’s deeper nodes all the way back up to the comfort of the limit ship. With the rest of her planetside experiences, she loaded it into the memory pool. Next time they slipped through a particle/wave inversion, the ship merged the pool into the wider aether. Then the song quavered to life in trillions of minds on thousands of worlds and, this time, it would not be forgotten.
Chosen
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
The mail cart wouldn’t fit through the doorway to the benighted section of accounting where Brett had to go, so he left it behind. He felt naked and suspect among the cubicles, his eyes involuntarily drawn to people’s private, personal effects: a hula dancer bobblehead, a collection of Diet Coke cans that filled an entire cubicle wall, a collage of Eric Estrada photographs.
Here was the cubicle: Wilma Dawson. Brett silently said a prayer of thanks to the Miraculous TV, a junked 19″ console model that had inexplicably started working the day his friend Ed had accidentally hit the flatscreen with a baseball bat (long story) right in the middle of the Moonlighting marathon. He and Ed had started the prayers as a joke, but they always made Brett feel better, so he hadn’t stopped.
Wilma was a fifty-something woman with a dangerously cheerful expression and a starchy magenta dress. “Here you go,” Brett said, handing her the package. He added in a whisper, “It’s a pony.” It was his standard joke.
“The Chosen One!” she whispered. Immediately, whispering spread to the adjacent cubicles, then on through Accounting and possibly as far as Compliance.
“‘He will come speaking of horses,'” she said. The whispering intensified.
“I’m chosen?” he said. The idea was crazy–but flattering. And who was he to balk at craziness? He worshipped a console TV. He was in no position to throw stones. “Chosen for what?”
Wilma spreading her arms ecstatically. “He will come speaking of horses, and he will reconcile the third quarter numbers!” she cried. Throughout Accounting, there were cheers and applause. Brett was pretty certain he heard weeping.
Wilma lifted an old-style paper ledger emblazoned with “Q3” in permanent marker and held it out to him. “Take this,” she said worshipfully, “and finally, finally bring the third quarter numbers into harmony!”
So “chosen” was potentially good–but Brett wasn’t at all sure about the accounting part. He prayed to the Miraculous TV for guidance, and where in the past he had never had gotten more a vague feeling in response to his prayers, now it was as though trumpets rang out (in mono) through his brain, and a voice like a fifties newscaster said: “My child, fulfill the prophecy and take the mantle of Great Accountant. Or if you’re not interested, you’d better run.”
Brett thought about it half a second … and ran.