This may be the last post including excerpts from
THE DREAM LAND Book III for a while as I turn to promoting
THE DREAM LAND Book I in print and my literary fiction book
AFTER ILIUM also in print. In addition, my early summer plans include making
THE DREAM LAND Book II available as an ebook with print edition coming later. No rest for the overly-napped, as usual!
In our last excerpt, our heroine Gina (a.k.a. Jinetta-d'Elous) was tasked with inspecting the toilets that would be used aboard interstellar spacecraft. That's one of her many hassles as head of the International Aerospace Council. Ironically, she's not even from Ghoupallesz, but she'll never tell. They need her and she likes to have a purpose in life, no matter where life takes her.
Now, however, disaster has struck the Evacuation Program in advance of the approaching comet, with great set-backs. Add to that the onset of menopause and a rebellious teenage daughter and you know she is ready for a vacation....
When
Gina returned to Kobarêl, making her way wearily from the airship terminal
through the dirty streets to her high-rise apartment in the Third Ward compound
where many administrators and scientists lived, guarded and safe from the
mindless masses sucking bôb and
laboring for a steady fix, she was surprised to find her daughter Zaura lounging
at home. Gina was also surprised to find her sitting naked on the learning
chair, wearing only the white scarf that marked her status as an approved
fertility club member with a seat on a vessel.
“You really must wear some clothing,
my dear,” said Gina, dropping her bags on the floor.
“Nobody was here,” Zaura replied, not
looking up from her tablet, quickly dabbing the stylus on colorful buttons on
the screen. The learning chair was more like a chaise-longue with embedded
computer interfaces. They had been allowed for space cadets whenever the environment
was on alert for high pollution levels or there was a riot of the mindless
hordes; school lessons could be maintained that way. “Besides, it’s the trendy
thing for us youth to do.” She glanced back over her shoulder at Gina. “Headmistress
Dero says there’s no harm in looking. We need to get used to it for such a long
journey. Besides, it’s only Latol. You already said he was allowed to sit in
our family one day.”
“I did?” She regarded the screen set
into the wall and saw there a naked boy, sitting on his own learning chair,
playing with his stylus and apparently unaware that Zaura’s mother had returned
home. “Hello, Latol.”
He startled. “Greetings to you, Mother
of Zaura,” said Latol, not at all embarrassed.
“So formal?”
“Yes. You will be a grandmother for
us someday, true?”
Gina grinned. “Not too soon, I hope.”
“Mama, we’re discussing the coupling
specifications for the residential pods’ docking assembly and we discovered
that if they started Design Protocol 431 precisely when Design Protocol 394 was
55.5% completed, the teams could save 14.33 peth
in time, which translates into 1,815 merin
in cost savings—and that would allow purchase of 45 more food processor units,
for example, enough to outfit 86.2% of one V-100 military cruiser—”
“I’m relieved you are actually
studying.” She laughed for the first time since she had left for the conference
in Debrêk. “I worried about pre-marital sex, like my mother always did, yet I
know there’s no marriage now, only state-authorized coupling to maximize
fertility and produce the best of the species. Eugenics returns. I approve if
only ten-thousand can be saved from doom.”
“Mama, you are so dour. Did the
conference go well?”
“No, it certainly did not.”
“I have sorry feelings.”
“You didn’t learn the latest news?”
Zaura looked up. “We have been
manning the Calculus orb, Mama, not slinking the news channel.”
Gina pursed her lips, amused at the
youthful slang, then took a seat by the dining loft.
“My dear, there was an accident.” She
tried to laugh. “I mean, after my keynote address. The launch of the first residential
capsule from the Debrêk spaceworks went bad. There was an imbalance in the
chemical rockets which sent the capsule off trajectory and it crashed nearby.
There were five crew aboard. Fortunately. They were only sending it up to dock
with the transport frame already in orbit.”
“That’s horrible!” Zaura turned to
Latol poised on the screen. “Did you hear my mother?”
“Yes,” he said. “Let me eye the news
channel for video food. Communicate after an interval.” He blinked out and the
screen returned to a static picture of a green valley that could be somewhere
in Switzerland—or Sogoê.
“We stood on the observation platform,”
Gina continued, “and everyone was happy, excited, waiting to see this momentous
event. I cheered for them when the engines ignited. It was only a little way into
the air when it spun sideways and went nose-first into a rocky hillside. The
fire was horrible and everyone ran. Someone threw a fire-cover over me and held
me down. When it was clear, two medical staff helped me up but I was not injured
in anyway.”
“I feel pain in my chest for you.
What an experience!” Zaura went to her mother, embraced her. “Take a black-bôb.”
“Then everyone began accusing me of
setting them up! I did not make the vessel crash. I had nothing to do with it,
nor the Debrêk spaceworks. They have an outstanding work record. They said I
wanted everyone to go onto the vessels so they would be killed and I and ‘my
friends’ could take over the planet. How ridiculous! Evacuation is the only way
to survive the coming catastrophe. I even offered to take a seat on a vessel,
if they wished it, so they would know I had not booby-trapped it.”
“Buubii-turapt?” asked Zaura with a
smirk. “Who would want to design a trick for breasts?”
“An English word,” said Gina in
English and continued in that archaic language: “Like if a bomb were set to go
off. Ah, daughter, you must not forget the language of your ancestral
homeland.”
“I was born in Kipzon,” she replied
in English. “You said it like a truth.”
“But your mother and father were born
on a planet far, far away and long, long ago. The planet is called Earth. Well,
some call it Terra. Others no doubt call it Shithole. It doesn’t matter unless
we go back to it.”
“It exists still?” asked Zaura.
Gina wiped a tear from her cheek. “I
think it does. We need to find it. Staying here is not a good idea. Going
aboard a spacecraft for the rest of your life isn’t much better.”
“You feel distraught, Mama,” said
Zaura, returning to Ghoupallêan. “Pop a black-bôb and sleep deep.”
“I don’t need any drugs!” she snapped
in English.
She threw her hands to her face as
the tears came fast. Many years ago she was happy to take drugs—purely for
recreational purposes, of course. Anything to get through the days and nights
of college life, hanging out with other druggies when it was all so
counter-everything. Now the drug culture had gone mainstream and she was the
old-fashioned witch-mom denying the youth their pleasures.
“You need a vacation, Mama.”
Gina lowered her hands, her eyes red.
“I certainly do. So I quit the council. I promised to stay on to the end of the
year but I did resign at the conference. Right before we watched the
residential capsule crash. If it had launched full, there would have been five
hundred people dead instead of only five.” She teared up again.
“Mama, cut an interval.”
“You should come with me. I don’t
want to go alone.”
“I have cadet training. I cannot quit
or cut an interval from the schedule.”
Gina nodded, realizing that she had
little control over anything now. Only herself. And that was becoming so
maddening as the planet was trying hard to turn its years over into months.
They would soon be under a decade until the end.
“I’ll go then,” she said. “Be good.
Resist the bôb. Stay as happy as you
can. And dream. Everything is perfect in your dreams, daughter.”
Kids, those future days! I can reveal and hope it is no spoiler that Zaura gets herself into trouble, thus adding to Gina's grief. Will all work out in the end? Will she stay on the doomed planet or grab the last seat aboard the evacuation spacecraft? Only
THE DREAM LAND Book III will tell!
Hey, check this out: a report of an approaching comet! Freaky!
AND this one on impact craters!
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(C) Copyright 2010-2013 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog.
Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
So into #NaNoWriMo I dove with an opening scene and some notes of how it proceeds leftover from junior high school. I started off at a good pace, then that day job and its attendant duties reared its ugly head as I knew it would. I struggled to add a few paragraphs between classes. I worked in the evenings to cobble a few pages more. Weekends were all writing time. Suddenly I was hooked on the story and the writing became an obsession. 
Originally, I was setting the story on the same world that I used for THE DREAM LAND Trilogy but in its NaNoWriMo incarnation, I made it an entirely new world, a warm, lush, vibrant planet where the indigenous intelligent life runs around half naked. Too bad for our mild-mannered hero Toog that he is taken to a cold, frozen wasteland to labor with a menagerie of beings taken from many different worlds or kept in a frosty stone-walled prison cell until he is needed--or that he must hide in a chilly cave after he escapes the prison and the work camp. Now how will he get off the planet to return home to his family? 
