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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 18, 2010 17:55:09 GMT -5
The Landing
Things are different.
I look around me and I see muddy fields being plowed by hand, I see some grubby green shoots in some fields. I see people carrying firewood down from the woods. Small mud hovels dot the landscape, mud lain down over the thatched huts, provide shelter for us at night.
Everyone is so dirty and very few have any clothing, mostly just men wearing wraps around their waists. Everyone seems very thin as there hasn’t been much food at all since we landed. I suppose I should say, more properly, that we crashed here.
It has been about two months now and every single day has been a struggle. The first days were the worst because nobody wanted to get up and out. They complained about the crash, the lost things, lost people, their luggage, the rain and nobody wanted to work. Many seemed to have given up and were resigned to lie down and die.
Then she was just there. She had found a cargo pod and had rescued some chickens and then she set up their coop from the pre-fab components. Everyone else just sat and watched her and she began to use a metal piece of wreckage to scratch up the wet ground and plant radish seeds, then lettuce and other things.
“We’ll all be dead before those grow” some man had yelled “It is hopeless girl”
“These turnips can grow in a month. We’ll have eggs from the chicken coop. We can find edible roots if we look for them. We’ll have salads in two months” she told them.
She would not give up. She urged them to get up and work and to live! Someone complained about the luggage.
“You would die for lack of clothes?” she asked them throwing her own muddy dress to the ground “Then we shall go without. You men can wrap rags around your waist, women don’t need them. Our bodies are beautiful anyway”.
“If you work, I will share the eggs. If you work you will eat. There is no reason to die, it will be hard for a while but we can live”
One by one we all began to help and she told us what needed to be done. After a month nobody questioned her leadership even in secret. Nobody doubted it.
The wrecked cargo pods we occasionally found usually held something helpful but our circumstances improved but by bit. I can see now that it will continue to improve if we just continue to work hard and listen to her.
No-one has said it out loud but she is our queen. She is still a girl but she is head and shoulders the most able among us.
We are eating salad now, the first tomatoes are ripe and everyone is smiling. Two months and she still eats last, I don’t even think most of us have even noticed this. Sure we still aren’t going to gain weight but we are no longer dying. Things are getting better slowly, just as she told us it would.
The men don’t even look at us when we pass them any longer, the novelty of naked girls have worn off. They also know they would be punished if they molested anyone. Our population is far too small to tolerate ingrates.
At the last meeting someone asked about marriages and our queen said no. There would be no marriages because if the colony were to survive genetic diversity must be part of it. We must have as many children as we could by different fathers. After some thought she decided we would need to owe the future of the colony five children.
When she explained this, nobody could argue against its merits but some of the women are too old to have babies already. The queen said they would be teachers and such, they would raise the kids. Since the men would be working to support the colony and would not know if or who their children were they had no other responsibilities. The mothers who couldn’t take care of many children would be able to let the school raise them.
The Queen’s School, I told myself, would still be around in a century. I wondered if our untitled queen thought about how she was creating precedents. That this society she was making the rules for would stay in place for a very long time. The colony population would grow exponentially with these rules, she had to know. That was their purpose.
She also told us this system would not be in place for the first year because we were obviously not ready for it. It would give us time to prepare and we would see next year. So the men were definitely not happy but we all knew that some of us would get pregnant anyway, it was human nature after all. I thought of that and shook my head ‘thank goodness’ I’m too young to worry about that.
Wait, what did the queen just say? We would start trying to have babies at fourteen?
“This isn’t Earth. We don’t have hospitals or water treatment plants, education will stop at twelve and there will be two years of apprenticeships. I doubt many of us born here in the first few generations will live past forty” she explained. “Our lives will be short and our childhoods will be short too”.
The planet is going to be very different. A Queendom.
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Defiant-Six
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Starship captain and all around good guy.
Posts: 11
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Post by Defiant-Six on Apr 18, 2010 18:32:38 GMT -5
I'm interested to see what conflict is introduced into this Eden at this point.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 18, 2010 18:57:07 GMT -5
Eden isn't the word I'd use. A lot of this would conflict with my morals, good thing its not on Earth. heh. The men become like second class citizens, a lower caste if you will. That is one obvious source of tension and conflict.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Apr 19, 2010 6:46:33 GMT -5
I hope you add more to this story. It is a very interesting concept.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 19, 2010 7:34:38 GMT -5
This is a lost colony, its been written off by Earth since all signals indicate the colony ship broke up.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 19, 2010 8:45:49 GMT -5
II (2 and a half months after Landing)
Something went wrong during the folding and we ended up far away from our destination our desperate crew managed to find another habitable world. Unfortunately the vessel had sustained damage somewhere along the way and chose that moment to break apart.
Most of the passengers and crew died, some of us managed to survive because many of our berths were also escape pods. Some of the cargo had also been pre-packed to survive their journey through an atmosphere. Some of those were buried in the mud still.
The rainy season ended and the summer was hot, bugs came out in force. There was still a lot of water coming into the flat shallow valley from the mountains. The queen was certain we would have to build a canal to channel all that water and to use it. They learned to make mud-baked bricks and they have fields of them lying in the sun now.
They also had many fields of grapes. Grapes! They were going to use them to produce wine because they still weren’t sure the water would be safe to drink without boiling. Not very many people seemed to have gotten sick from the water as far as anyone could tell. They had found other things in the cargo pods but they weren’t yet sure about growing them. Wheat, amaranth, beans of various kinds and a lot of different fruits and vegetables.
I had some watermelon and cantaloupe growing on one of the small side-fields near my mud-thatched hovel. They were going to be a treat for everyone. As I was weeding the field one time I saw the queen putting something into one of the escape pods they used for storage. Apparently she was trying to keep as much of the electronics as she could find.
Surely she had given up hope of contacting Earth? It would be impossible wouldn’t it? Even if you could build a device and I am not sure any of us could, where was Earth in our sky?
The colony was now stable enough that the queen sent teams to explore the region from time to time and to bring back anything interesting. On one trip they had somehow captured an animal that looked remarkably like a small horse. There were rivers and lakes with fish to the east of us. Another trip, to the west, had found other flat valleys that had forests and green fields of grass.
Maybe we should move the colony? No, it was decided we would stay here but that the other valleys could be used for farming.
The chicken population was getting big since we now had other food and the eggs were hatching. The bumper crop of corn and maize didn’t hurt either.
The bricks were first used for a smaller building but soon they had gotten the confidence to try and build something larger. A walled compound with bunk rooms, cafeteria, classrooms and other things. It was to be the first school and some of the older women were put in charge and simply moved in.
Storage buildings for food and other things were also constructed. Someone soon figured out how to sun-fire clay pipes and was given space and a building to produce them in large numbers.
Meanwhile the captured equines were pulling wagons as most of the men began digging the canal. The Canal was to be twenty feet across, eight feet deep and meander south like a snake so that irrigating all of the fields would be possible. The sides and bottom would be lined with the bricks and they could still connect pipes to get water or to put things into the canal also, at least much farther south.
It was grimy work. The males grumbled and complained but they worked and it was hard work. I helped bring them cleaned water and food during the day, like other girls, but I could not help feel a little sorry for them. Especially since it had become very clear our queen didn’t have a lot of use for them besides labor and reproduction.
Most of the other girls were sleeping with the males, I wondered if there would have been a revolt without that? The year was over, there was enough food even if the variety was still not there and the school had been built. They still kept looking at me like I was breaking the rules or something, but I was counting the last few days of my shortened childhood.
Was I being selfish? The colony needed a lot of children if it was to survive and I was, I guess, in my childbearing years now. It just seemed a bit off, somehow. I heard one of the other girls whisper to another that I thought I was special or something. That is not true, I told myself over and over as I slept on the grass-weaved mat in my hovel.
There were two hundred men working on the canal and they represented most of the males in our colony. All I had to do is to pick one and they were not allowed to refuse me. Not that I thought that a male would ever refuse a woman, it was not really in their nature was it? That is why the queen made it our choice and not theirs.
I was scared stiff but I tried not to show it. Their work day was ending and the sun would be setting soon afterwards. The men all looked so tall and strong I was intimidated. Maybe I should go to the fields and bring one of the old men back to my hovel instead? I was just about to try doing that when I noticed a younger male among the canal diggers. Probably not much older than me, the other girls seem to like the big tall guys and had ignored him.
“Hi, I’m Kaida” I said after I stood there for a moment waiting for him to look at me. For future reference we were supposed to simply grab their hand. I seem to get everything wrong the first time, story of my life.
“My name is Varty” he said. Then we both grinned because we were acting as if it mattered, it was not like this was a long term thing. So there I was holding this boys hand and walking him to my hovel, feeling as if everyone were staring at me. They weren’t, they didn’t care at all.
Varty stopped and I turned to look at him. He wasn’t try to weasel out was he? Please let him weasel out, a big part of me hoped. Instead he opened a small pouch on his leather belt and put out a small white object and handed it to me.
It was some type of fossil. A small segmented creature had curled into a ball and apparently turned to stone that way. It was about the size of an old nickel on Earth, not that we had any of those around. I was speechless, a gift?
“It would make a good necklace, I think” Varty said “I found that while we were digging. I’ll bring you a leather cord for wearing it. I already made a hole in it for that, see?”
“Varty, I don’t think I can accept this”
His eyes opened wide and then he shook his head. “It’s okay to take it. I don’t mean to imply anything by giving it to you. Really, I understand how things work around here.”
Oh, Varty. It wasn’t you I was worried about.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 19, 2010 8:46:31 GMT -5
OK, that scene fades to black.
Do you think I handled the sex okay?
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 19, 2010 19:28:42 GMT -5
III (1 Year after Landing)
Along with everyone else I went to the Canal for the grand opening, they were going to open the flood gate and let it fill with water. I was holding little Juni, although it was doubtful that a newborn was going to remember anything about this day.
Small boats were tied to stations up and down the canal and already there were a couple of bridges were could use to cross it. It had been a very busy ten months and a couple of the males had died of exertion. None of the ones I had known while trying to conceive.
I watched the water flow and then rise but I didn’t bother trying to rent a boat, instead I went to see them working on the Palace. The queen would live like, well, royalty and she had already hired a troop of female soldiers, plus a phalanx of young apprentice girls.
They wore armor “bowls” over their shoulders and metal helmets, belts crossing from both shoulders and a short sword in a scabbard at their sides and a spear in their hands. It was a very impressive sight when two dozen would march by or go by at a jog.
I also noticed those electronic things were all over the roof along with the solar collectors from the escape pods and I wondered again whether she would ever be able to send or receive anything from Earth. I very much doubted it unless she was able to actually find a communication device in one of the cargo pods. Her “cabinet” met occasionally in the eastern chamber of the Palace.
The palace is surrounded by a wide road-path made of flat bricks that did not feel good to my feet. It hurt and caused bruises but I hadn’t been able to get a pair of the leather sandals that some people were wearing. They couldn’t keep those in stock.
There were a lot of people in workshops. Someone was trying to figure out how to turn corn into whiskey, someone else was trying to make larger wine bottles instead of the small jar-like ones we were all using right now. They were trying to learn how to preserve all sorts of food, it was winter but it wasn’t harsh, yet.
The best of the inventions so far is soap and perfumes. Those expeditions to the farther valleys were paying off, everyone wanted soaps and perfumes. They had already produced a dozen varieties of different scents. It was still odd to see people bathing in the canal but I guess those steps down were there for a reason. They did plan to build a couple of public baths, one of those would be in the “men’s quarter”.
Then there was my hovel which was almost the same if a bit larger. Next to my mat was the crib and I had a short table against the back wall. On it were a few things, the few things I owned. I laid Juni down, she had suckled while I toured the growing city and she would nap for a while.
Meanwhile I opened one of the jars and sipped some of the wine it contained. I sure hope the next batch tasted better and I was convinced not to try the first batches of whatever whiskey they came out with. Anyway the men would probably be the main customers for that, like the beer they were trying to brew.
They still had not found the artificial womb to reconstitute the main animal life we brought with us, but they had artificially inseminated the equines with goats. Those goats produced milk that became cheeses and butter. The equines were everywhere now, used as the main beasts of burden by the colony.
The queen told us that water power from the canal could power factories, flour mills and saw mills and stuff. The water moved fast enough to provide water pressure to the planned apartment blocks and another pipeline would remove the sewage to swamps far south of the city. Everyone knew the canal was going to be very important to the future of the city. Already the clay-fired pipes were used to build several “public wells” at various points around the city. Several public sewer lines joined larger pipelines south of the city and in other canals to the swamps.
When Juni was grown up this city was going to look vastly different, the hovels will have been replaced with houses and apartment blocks. Many people will have their own baths and clean water right in their residence. Maybe not a lot of households would have running water, but there would be some.
Within another year they planned to introduce a real monetary system to the colony, they were already building a Queen’s Bank not far from the Palace. The males would pay a high tax rate so that they would never need to worry about raising children or whether their spouses are being honorable while they worked.
Still I worried, high taxes while they lived in crowded barracks while we women were soon to start receiving luxurious flats. That could cause problems down the road, the whole thing seemed quite artificial but it was still working so far.
Ash said he believed that he could build some type of steam engine that might be able to make ice. An ice house would be nice, but Ash didn’t know how to get started on this idea. Forging that much metal and getting it all in the right shape would take forever, he might never figure out the design. Ash is a nice man but he’s quiet and far from a motivational speaker.
He never said a word when I took him home.
He was an older, balding gentlemen and he squinted a lot. He said he had worn glasses but they were lost in the Landing, when I first met him. He also figured they’d not be able to replace them in his lifetime. Dang, I took him home out of pity didn’t I?
I look down at my sleeping Juni and I know Ash isn’t the father.
He was asian and she has no asian features at all. Not that I was an expert in that kind of thing, all I knew how to do was tend a plot of melons. The school would take her in a few months when she was weaned from my breast. I didn’t know how I was going to handle that, the queen counted on us wanting to have another child immediately.
In a few years there would be at least twice as many children as original colonists and they would have enough children to more than double the population again and on and on. That was the plan the queen had decided upon. Whether it worked or not for the long haul was another question.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 19, 2010 20:35:27 GMT -5
I keep checking. I'm eager for a reaction.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Apr 22, 2010 2:12:04 GMT -5
OK, that scene fades to black. Do you think I handled the sex okay? That was done well. You also did good writing from a female point of view (hard to do).
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Apr 22, 2010 2:22:33 GMT -5
I keep checking. I'm eager for a reaction. I have been busy for the past few days but I just got done reading the third chapter. You do an extremely good job how a feminist-ruled world would be, and its implications.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 22, 2010 7:50:02 GMT -5
Thanks. I've been working on writing from a "female" perspective since I wrote "Nightmares of Command" with Tara Simmons as the main character. It seems I might be getting better at it.
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Post by Floyd Looney on May 11, 2010 22:25:12 GMT -5
I am going to have to rewrite the next part it doesn't make a lot of sense.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on May 12, 2010 2:10:31 GMT -5
I look forward to seeing it.
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Post by Floyd Looney on May 13, 2010 19:27:20 GMT -5
Yet another wandering chapter on the way... 14 years later! (might have to rewrite earlier chapters, especially in my Word file)
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