Alysha's Fall Read online

  ALYSHA’S FALL

  A Stardancer Collection

  by M. C. A. Hogarth

  Copyright © 2000-2014 M.C.A. Hogarth

  Foreword

  My memory of the earliest stories of the Pelted is fuzzy—no pun intended—but in my defense, it’s been twenty years in a few cases. My first serious introduction to Alysha Forrest was “Blood Money,” a story I published in a fitfully-produced small press magazine I edited in the late 1990s. I’d known of the setting before that, but hadn’t really known more about it other than an impression of Star Trek with furries.

  That impression isn’t one you’ll likely get from “Blood Money” or most of the Alysha’s Fall stories—more on that in a bit—but you might well from stories later along the timeline. I mean that as a compliment, though. They’re from a series better than most of the ones we actually got. The world of the Alliance isn’t the polished polyurethane post-capitalist utopia of Starfleet, but neither is it the dreary soul-crushing psuedo-libertarian dystopia of poor William Gibson pastiches. It’s a world of complex race relations and an ample share of dark sides, but—like Star Trek and the best of its followers—still optimistic. And acknowledging life outside the paramilitary was always one of Trek’s weakest suits; with the Pelted stories, even when you don’t see the rest of the universe you always feel it’s there.

  Which brings us to this particular collection, a series of stories that mostly stand alone but form one narrative arc. I remembered some of that arc before rereading it, but—like I said—my memory was fuzzy. These stories are definitively not ones that would ever have been told by Roddenberry and his heirs. As much as the background is one of space opera, these tales are planet-bound, with a pulp sensibility that wouldn’t seem out of place in 1930s magazines. (You will picture Alysha dancing in lurid detail. Then you will feel bad about it.) They’re often brutal, occasionally startlingly intimate, and if you don’t cringe at what happens to our heroine—and possibly at what she does in response—your nervous system isn’t working and you should see someone about it promptly. There are, as they say, trigger warnings ahead.

  To a degree these stories show their age, or perhaps show the age their author was at the time. It’s hard to tell whether the Academy that the plot centers around is a private institution or a public one, the good guys can be naïve and the bad guys psychopathic when that ratchets up tension, and do not even think of telling me that Alastar is not a Vulcan, except feline and thus with +10 to awesome.

  Even so, the author’s voice—especially in some of the scenes foretelling the romance between… well, you may not have read these yet, so I’ll hold off on that. Just say that Hogarth’s ear for the music in language was already developing. She’s painted—that’s the right word—images that will stick with you. This story isn’t comfortable, but it’s compelling.

  Also, in a book filled with beautiful undressed women she somehow made the most sexually charged scene involve fully clothed people talking about earrings. That’s talent.

  —Watts Martin

  Prologue

  “Ah, well, that’s enough for me,” West said, tossing a few fin onto the dark, stained table. The heavy gold coins rolled to the center and fell over, Holly-side up.

  One of Matthew Brighthaven’s dark brows lifted. “Two beers? That’s barely enough to wake up your liver, Mark.”

  The other man grinned. “Yeah, well, I have some paperwork to catch up on. Besides, your cat’s here looking for you.”

  Brighthaven glanced at the entrance. Harroway Sloan’s lithe shape blocked the light slanting into the bar from the street lamps. “That ‘cat’ is my second, you know.”

  “Still looks like a giant stuffie to me, sir.”

  Brighthaven laughed. “Oh, get out of here, West.”

  “Aye-aye, Captain.”

  The commandant of the Fleet Academe at Selnor shook his head and poured the rest of his Tepoli Amber into the stein. When he looked up again, Sloan stood beside the chair West had just vacated, looking past his shoulder at the door.

  “Problems, Commander?” Brighthaven asked with a grin.

  “You know, I can’t shake the feeling that West just doesn’t like me, sir.”

  The human chuckled. “Don’t take it personally. He finds the Pelted a little strange, that’s all. Sit down, have a beer.”

  The Asanii man dropped into West’s chair, plucked one of the coins from the center of the table and used it to buy a pilsner. “Don’t you think attitudes like that a little provincial for our staff? What do we want to be teaching the cadets?”

  Brighthaven laughed. “I hardly think he’s prejudiced, Sloan. Finding people different and actively expressing a bias against them because of it are not the same thing.”

  “Still. We have a responsibility—”

  “Commander,” Brighthaven said. “We’re off-duty. Less concern for the job and more for the alcohol, eh?”

  Sloan’s feline ears blushed red at the tips. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I’m just unnerved. I guess you didn’t have a chance to see the news this afternoon?”

  Brighthaven grew still. “What news?” he asked quietly.

  “They found another one. A woman this time.” Sloan’s eyes glinted. “Face-down in her own bed.”

  The commandant closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his forehead. In the silence, his second poured his beer and pulled a long mouthful.

  “It’s unthinkable, is what it is,” Brighthaven said finally. “Damn it, Sloan, things like this aren’t supposed to happen in the Alliance.”

  The Asanii man sighed. “Yeah, I know, sir. It normally doesn’t. Poor girl.”

  In Blue Smoke, a bar frequented by the staff of the Terracentrus Academe campus, they sat: the human commandant and his Asanii feline second. The open windows brought the fragrance of flowering trees outside, a melange of odors both strangely Terran and utterly alien. Brighthaven had been on Selnor long enough to find the smells normal, though the slightly shorter days still unsettled him.

  “It’s what . . . the third?”

  “In almost a year,” Sloan said with a nod. “Still, people do die. Even humans.”

  “It’s just the way they’re dying,” Brighthaven said. “As if they were executed. Do you suppose the League has anything to do with it?”

  Sloan squinted. “The Anti-Humanists? I suppose they could. You’d think they’d be a little more discreet about their murders, though.”

  “In my experience, radicals don’t really care much about discretion,” Brighthaven said. He stared out the windows. “It’s not the kind of thing I thought I’d find here, when I left home.”

  The felinesque Asanii snorted. “As if Earth is any better.”

  “Maybe not, but at least she doesn’t pretend to anything she’s not,” Brighthaven said. Green eyes drifted to the trees shivering in the faint evening breeze. He allowed himself to voice the thought that had become increasingly prevalent in his mind of late. “Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing.”

  “Sir! You can’t be serious. Don’t you find it worthwhile? The cadets, seeing them grow, steering the school?”

  “You promised us something, Sloan, when Earth joined the Alliance. Said you had become more than we’d made you. Said we’d be glad to shelter beneath your wing. That the children had grown greater than the parents.” Brighthaven dragged his eyes back to his second’s, the face almost completely human—save for the light coat of fur, the nosepad, the ears. “And it wouldn’t have been hard to rise above humanity, I grant you, despite our good intentions. But I’ve been here almost two years, and I can’t see the differences. You have better tech—that doesn’t seem important in the great scheme of things. You have greater diversity—we’re only one race, and you’
re over twenty. But no matter how fine you say your utopia in the stars is, I can’t see it as any better when innocents can still be gunned down at point blank in the summer capital of the Alliance. I came here two years ago with open arms, Sloan . . . and I still feel hollow.”

  “It’s just the season,” Sloan said, ears lying against his skull. “Spring makes everyone feel restless. You’re doing good work at the Academe. They need you.”

  “When has need ever been good enough to chain someone to a post?” Brighthaven murmured.

  Sloan’s nose wrinkled. “Sir,” said he formally, “You are a military officer.”

  Brighthaven’s grip on the stein’s handle tightened. He took a long pull at it before replying, “So I am.” But his eyes had drifted again outside, past the heavy boughs of alien flowering trees, to the stars that spangled the cool blue sky.

  Impetus

  THE BOYS CAME OUT TO PLAY,

  but we’d gone too far ahead.

  No satellites—no, no satellites

  to help them tell you to come out, my little,

  come out in the sunshine.

  Alysha stared at her data tablet, a frown creasing her brow. Her felid ears flattened to her head, the failing sunlight glancing off their golden hoop earrings. After a moment, she smudged out the word “boys” and replaced it with “children.” The formality of the word didn’t fit the rest of the lullaby, but it was a better choice than “kids” or “guys.”

  She let her head rest back against the willow, her spine cracking once in mild reprimand. The wind chased over her short, fine fur, bringing with it the scent of an impending storm. A quick glance at the cloud-smothered sky, and then Alysha returned to her work. Only a few more lines. She wanted to complete the assignment in the shade of the tree she’d chosen for her father’s ashes. He’d sung this one to her, after all.

  Didn’t we tell you, my little

  didn’t we tell you, my little

  there’s no sunlight where we’ve gone.

  Only endless stars and suns,

  and maybe a place to stay at the end.

  But the children that came out to play

  will be too old, too old.

  And our sunshine many hundreds,

  hundreds of years too young.

  Exodus lullabies, Alysha thought in the Meridan of the song rather than the Universal into which she was translating it. That’s what she would title the compilation. She only had seven more to finish and she could hand the collection back to Kera Brittle, the librarian . . . just in time for her graduation in a few weeks.

  She had time to do one more. A short one. Alysha saved “Came Out to Play” and thumbed down to the next on her list.

  It was only after the flash of too-close lightning had bled the contrast from the flat screen of the data tablet that Alysha realized she should be heading home. The sky had been occluded by a shroud of black thunderheads, and as she hastily rose to her feet the firmament rumbled. Tucking the precious borrowed data tablet beneath her arm, she tugged the lapels of her worn short-cape around her neck and jogged toward the park’s entrance.

  The rain made even her tiny, dilapidated house seem welcoming by the time she slid onto the front porch, her fur slicked dark and wet to her skin and her clothing to her body. Ears pressed against her skull in a distaste her genetic feline forebears would have approved, Alysha placed her long palm against the door’s check-panel and squeezed in even before it had fully irised open.

  A man and woman were intertwined in silhouette only four feet from her. Alysha stopped abruptly, her fur on end from the cold inside the foyer. Dripping a puddle onto the tile floor, she summoned her voice from somewhere.

  “Mother?”

  The woman twisted to face her, the strapless blue gown clinging to her body and accentuating the brilliant sapphire of her eyes. “Hello, Alysha. Home late, I see.”

  Alysha raked the man with her eyes: tall, thin . . . one of the Asanii, since he was plantigrade like the humans but still otherwise feline, not Karaka’An like herself and her mother. When she lifted her gaze to his face, his eyes skidded off to the right; she tried to meet his eyes, but they slid to the left.

  Alysha’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” she said at last. “I’m home late. I was working.”

  “He’s a friend,” her mother said, ears flicking sideways.

  The man’s hand was cupping her hip.

  “I see,” Alysha said, and walked stiffly past them.

  “Alysha . . . ”

  She stopped.

  “Remember, it’s your turn to wash the dishes.”

  Alysha stared at the air in front of her, hands clenching and unclenching. “That would require there to be food in the house to dirty the dishes, wouldn’t it, Mother?” Silence. She walked mechanically up the stairs.

  She drew the bath as the storm battered at the windows, the sound far louder than it would have been at school, which had been constructed to the standard building code. Stripping the clammy clothes from her body was an unalloyed pleasure. Alysha ran her fingers down the hard ridges of her ribs, then leaned down and checked the water temperature. A few minutes later she slid into the heat, shuddering.

  The Karaka’An stood there, in the middle of the tiny bathtub in the dark. Her ears strained to make sense of the hard wind, her sharp chin lifted. Her stomach’s complaints mingled with the dizziness as she replayed the image of her mother with the man, the man her daughter didn’t even know. The man who was different from the one she’d been with yesterday. Alysha’s reflection broke into a thousand shards as she slapped it with the flat of her long, gray palm.

  “Alysha!”

  The Karaka’An’s ears flattened against her head. She stopped, listened to the wet slap of the slick leaves in the hands of the wind. She looked over her shoulder.

  Meriisa skipped up to her. The little Asanii girl wore a sienna brown jumper that leaped out against the dull green-grays and slate silvers of the world around her; it matched her soft, mottled tawny fur. A fluffy blue bow perched between her pointed ears, matching the larger one tied around her tail base. “Hi, Alysha!”

  Alysha drew in a long breath. “Hello, Meriisa.”

  “Where’re you going, ah-ah? It’s lunch time, how come you’re not eating with everyone else?”

  “I wanted to walk a bit,” Alysha answered.

  “If you walk ennymore, you’ll be nothing but bones and fur,” Meriisa said, bounding up beside her.

  Alysha shrugged her bag back into a comfortable position and continued walking away from the meld where the other students were eating. The rain last night had left everything cool and wet.

  “So issit fun to be a senior? You’re leaving soon, are you glad, sad?”

  “Both,” said Alysha, not looking down at the girl skipping alongside.

  “That must be confusing,” Meriisa said. “You’re heading for that tree again, aren’t you.”

  Alysha stopped and looked down at the girl. “You know about that?”

  “ ’Course I do. I’ve watched you.”

  One dark brow lifted over her pale eye. “Watched me?”

  The girl shuffled her feet. “I wanna be like you. I like you lots.”

  Alysha rubbed her forehead. “I would prefer to go to the tree alone, Meriisa.”

  The girl nodded. “Like your mom. Okay.” She blushed. “Umm, you’re not angry at me, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Alysha said automatically, and then stopped so suddenly she almost stumbled. “My . . . mother?”

  “Oh yes. She goes to that tree pretty often. She just leaves in a different direction.”

  The image of Selina Forrest, wrapped in her bedraggled finery while standing beneath the tree her father’s ashes had been melded to—it chilled her with a fine frost of disgust and regret. And then—“The opposite direction?”

  Meriisa blinked owlishly, ears canting forward. “Oh, yes. You go back through the park, past the statue of Holly. She goes the other way.”


  “The other way? Can you show me?”

  “Sure!”

  The little girl skipped before her, bag bouncing on her back and pony-tail bobbing on her neck. Alysha stalked behind, her short-cloak tightly furled to her body. Her claws threatened to push past the fabric, punctuation to her racing thoughts as the two passed off the school campus into the adjacent park. Clammy leaves skidded and hissed against each other, and gray shadows clustered thickly beneath the eyriepones and oaks. Puddles the color of lead gathered in the hollows of the uneven ground on either side of the path.

  Meriisa followed the trail to the gray brook until she reached Alysha’s willow tree. She climbed onto a rock on its lee and pointed to the south.

  “That way.”

  Alysha stood beside her, eyes crimped. “Do you follow her?”

  “Would you be mad at me if I said ‘yes’?” Meriisa asked, ears sagging.

  Alysha’s tail lashed once, torn between amusement and numb anger. “Do you follow her, Meriisa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  The girl swayed, hooking her thumb under her bag strap and chafing it. “It’s not a good place to go.”

  “Show me.” It came out harder than Alysha had intended, but Meriisa looked up at her, shivered, and hopped off the rock. Moments later they were back on the brook-side trail. They paced the water for several minutes, slick pebbles skidding away from beneath their feet, before Meriisa led her away from it toward a copse of tired gray trees.

  Alysha didn’t mark the time or the trail, though she was aware of her own labored breathing. The youth who’d entered school singing Meridan lullabies would have been able to run the length of the park without losing her wind. Alysha touched the cramp beneath her ribs and wondered if that youth would have recognized the gaunt creature she would become.

  The edges of the park withdrew from them as they walked until they reached a ramshackle fence. Meriisa leaned up and unlatched it; it shrieked when the girl pushed it open into the back of an alley, slick crete floors littered with trash twisted into strange shapes by the weight of the rain.