Send in the Truth Smellers

by Kat Beyer

The two ships hung in the open silence of space as if they were already depicted in a tapestry: the Gaian ship glittering with fretwork and enamel and the perlescent oval of the Free and Independent Peaceful Coalition of Jupiter’s Moons. The Negotiators’ Bubble between them emptied; the negotiators had called it a day (because that was easier than calling it a biorhythmic activity episode).

“Here they come,” said the Fire Keeper as the Gaian team came up the gangway. “Hope your weird plan worked.”

“Me too,” said the Senecan Sachem, holding out a glass of water to the Speaker.

“No deal yet,” she shrugged, and took a long drink.

“Any complaints about the – additions – to your team?”

“They thought we were weird bringing teenagers with us, but figured it was just a cultural thing.”

Behind her the three youngest members of her team traded their ceremonial robes for tattered jeans and buckskin shirts.

“What did you think of the Jupiter people?” said the Speaker, turning to them.

“I don’t know,” said the youngest teenager, and then stood with his mouth open.

The tallest boy shook his head and asked, “Can I say it however?” looking only at the Speaker.

“Just don’t swear in front of the grandfathers.”

“Okay. Frankly, they were kind of full of it.”

The third teenager nodded gravely, carefully restarting each of her seven holotoos.

“They talk like my mom,” she said. “You know, like they learned it out of a blog on how to get what you want without ever really asking for it or whatever.”

The Sachem looked toward the treaty analysts.

“You have anything for us yet, Hannah? Adsila?”

“The kids are basically right. It looks really nice on the surface, but it’s a load of… things you shouldn’t say in front of the grandfathers.”

After dinner, in private, the Sachem said to the Fire Keeper, “I was right, wasn’t I?”

He got a grunt.

“I got the idea when my youngest grandson got upset about something. Those kids are really on alert any time an adult is hypocritical. It’s perfect. They look harmless – at least with the robes on – like what the Speaker said – a Cultural Thing.”

“They’re so eloquent, too,” said the Fire Keeper.

“Oh, shut up. I want to give them some name nobody will bother to translate. What’s Onandaga for ‘truth smeller?'”

From Godmother Python’s Bestiary of Wonderful Flowers: Vice Gardens

by Susannah Mandel

The Vice Garden, as many gardeners know (and many more do not), is commonly found tucked into the corner of a temple or monastery’s vegetable plot.

Unlike the sections put on show to the inquisitive public, the Vice Garden is reserved strictly for the use of the monastic community. While the species commonly found here (e.g., the fameflower, the beauty bush; loosestrife; rue) may seem out of place in such a setting, the abbots have a purpose for everything.

Consider, for example, the fameflower (genus Talinum, numerous species). These plants bear small, star-shaped blossoms of a pleasant, if unassuming, lavender or pink. Their leaves are thick, fleshy, and, in some species, edible. The various cultivars of the fameflower have long been prized in certain kinds of “social magic,” mainly in spells intended to attract renown or to enhance personal prestige. (Effects that have largely, in the past, been handled through summoning demons; the herbal approach is considered more ecologically friendly, and avoids questions of exploitation.)

As one might expect, the cultivars found in Vice Gardens are of the less potent varieties. Most commonly, according to the closely-guarded gardening books of the Abbots (to which, nonetheless, Godmother Python has her methods of access), their flowers, when picked and eaten in salad, create the mere hallucinatory illusion of being famous and well-known.

The theory of the Abbots is this: once the vivid tactile fantasies — which include the usual accoutrements of fame, including its opportunities for sexual and chemical overindulgence — have run their course and worn off, their users will awaken having been reminded why they decided to retire from the world in the first place. The principle, as the informed reader will recognize, is that of aversion via over-indulgence.

There are, of course, some among the cynical who raise questions about the uses to which the fameflower is actually put. On the other hand, in line of defending the monks, one might mention a secondary use of the plant – one with, perhaps, more convincing benefits to a melancholic initiate. This takes the form of a salad composed from the plant’s leaves alone.

When consumed, it invokes no fantasies of overindulgence; no hallucinations tactile or otherwise. Instead, it has the mere and simple property of convincing the eater that — however isolated one’s cloister may be, on whatever far-flung mountaintop or spumey sea island — out there in the world, however far away, somebody, somewhere, knows your name.