I finally picked something to share to prove I’m still writing! So, here’s an excerpt from “Sepulchre”, my Leda Calypso story that hasn’t gone off the rails so much as never known what a rail is. Contains Typhon smoking pot and me going the absolute hell with it, then making the gravitational arrangement of Pandora and Elpis even weirder.
Not shown: I made everything a lot weirder.
The timeline for Atlas and co. moving in then getting their butts handed to them by Pandora didn’t add up to me which is why I did this awful thing here and also I hate to admit it but Typhon is kinda fun to write in his element of being a cad.
The next fuel depot came up around the corner while it was still night out, a Dahl-owned place, painted in dingy colors. The door was open and the entryway full of silt and boot tracks, also a handful of gatcha machines.
These were considered Dahl things and only Dahl stores had them. She was about to ask the sleeping clerk to sell her a token when Typhon winked and took out an actual coin she didn’t recognize at all. He put this in and turned the crank and then handed her the bubble that popped out. Leda laughed. That woke the clerk.
Inside was a taffy purple alicorn soldier figure, not something she would have expected from a ring machine.
She stuffed it into her pack while Typhon inspected the dusty racks of candy bars and compasses. He found what he was looking for in a corner of cheap plastic goods, then also bought some flower for his pipe and a couple bags of snacks and since they were there, fuel. Leda applied the last to the van while he lit up and munched and did something with his hands. She couldn’t quite see what by the door light.
She smelled the dead coral on him as he showed her the notebook and the pen and the strator drawing tool.
“See, this planet,” he said. “It’s in this hole. Once a year we go around the sun.” He drew an ellipse with the tool. “Just like most good planets, except oh, we’re not a good planet.”
The tool drew another ellipse, out of alignment with the first. It would take eight before they began to repeat, she saw. That was when it hit her. “Pandora’s in a rosette orbit!” That shouldn’t have been strictly possible. Rosette orbits were supposed to be black hole things.
“Well, I guess if that’s the fancy word for it.” In a couple of swipes, Typhon had finished the eight loops. He began to retrace the first, slipping a gear this time. “Anyway, it’s cockeyed on top of everything else. Like the sun’s over here sometimes, but sometimes it’s over there. But it does take years to get back to where we started, more or less. I think it’s 88.5 Standard or some number with pi in it.”
Leda stared. One of the white-winged insects smelled the dead coral too. It fluttered between them, though neither looked its way, focusing instead on one other’s strange, knowing expressions.
“So your seasons aren’t parts of your orbit,” said Leda.
“Hey, now. I don’t control anybody’s orbits.”
“They’re quarter turns around the rosette.”
“Apparently it depends where Elpis feels like hanging out too. Bottom line, we got a couple more your years of winter for sure and then, well, I don’t wanna be ‘round here when spring hits. I’ve heard stories.”
“You’re not even supposed to have spring according to Atlas!”
“Tell that to spring.”
“Eppur si muove!”
“Yes, the sea moves! You got it, Baby!”
Leda laughed again despite the sudden shudder that came up through her nerves. The rosette orbit should have been obvious to any corporation with satellites, anybody who actually spoke to a native. Atlas had told her a year was ten Standard. They’d told everybody, and now there were millions of people spread here, thin and wide and knowing nothing.
She didn’t want to be on Pandora when spring came and the sleeping things in the corners of the dry reef beds woke, when this planet out of all the Six Galaxies bloomed.
She had to sit down. It put her once again with her legs dangling out the back of the van. Typhon was behind her and she could not gauge his expression.
Her fear was an irrational one. No one would snap their fingers to make it spring. That season would not descend upon them now, any god there might be willing. But the people. But she’d been lied to, she had, and Leda hated that.
