Choices

慴

Choices
by Lindsay Brambles
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
From CHRONICLES OF THE EARTH EMPIRE series.
CHOICES by Lindsay Brambles
Introduction:
Although the events of the following story take place after the novel In Darkness Bound and the novella Zero-Option, this story was actually written before either. At the time I was slowly constructing my "Earth Empire" universe; and though In Darkness Bound ( ISBN: 1-4241-6560-1) was very much on my mind at the time, the idea for this story was committed to paper first. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say "disk."
As with Zero-Option, I wrote this on a Commodore 64 using Paperclip II. The Commodore was the first "real" computer I owned; and all things considered, it was a marvelous little machine. Before that I had cranked out stories on a Smith-Corona Electronic typewriter (including one humongous novel, which for some reason I still hold onto despite the fact that it's an unpublishable monstrosity).
I can't honestly recall the motivations that led to the writing of Choices. Sometimes ideas come spring from events you read in the newspaper or see on TV. Often it'll be some little thing that will then trigger an avalanche of thought and speculation. I do know that a great many of my ideas are fleshed out while bicycling. On my regular two or three hour rides I do some of my best thinking, working out the kinks in a story or novel while wandering the country roads around Ottawa.
I have yet another short novel of the Earth Empire (somewhat longer than Zero-Option) that I hope to put on the Internet at a later date. That one takes place during the height of the war, sometime after Zero-Option but well before Choices.
For now, however, I offer you the following short story. Just under twenty thousand words, I hope you'll find it a quick and stimulating read.
Happy reading!
Lindsay H.F. Brambles, Ottawa, 2007

1.
Whenever I see the panai, I am reminded of Kieara. Reminded of how she changed a world. Or worlds--hers and mine. I close my eyes and see her face, and above the chanting of the crowd, I hear her voice. A soft exhalation of words. Calm. Measured and reasoned. Not at all consumed with the impassioned zeal that one might have expected of someone rebelling against a centuries old way of life. A sharp contrast to the shrill and often violent denunciations of those who believed in all that she did not.
Before Kieara I'd never seen a panai--though, as with all offworlders new to Tradur, I had heard the rumors long before I'd arrived. Had heard them, and of course had quickly dismissed them as nothing more than xenophobia. And yet now, because of Kieara, those rumors have become a dreaded reality. I see the evidence of them before me, day after day, hour by hour. They haunt me, appearing before me as one long and seemingly endless chain of enraged humanity moving up the wide avenue like a deranged army, swaying to a music only they can hear as they wave their fists in the air and shout defiance at the guarded buildings of the offworlder embassies. Often, from the windows of the Federation's mission, I have stood and watched as they pause and gather outside the gates, pressing against one another in a suffocating mass, remaining thus just long enough to hurl their vitriol and fling their ineffectual stones against the energy shields that protect the building during each long hour of Tradur's thirty hour days. It has become a ritual for them. Almost as much as the panai has always been. And for those of us within the embassy, it has become as constant as the rising and the setting of the sun.
I wait and watch in discomfort, knowing that I'm at least partially to blame for this. Because of my relationship with Kieara I've made us all prisoners in these walls until the ship comes to take us away. I think of how things might have been if Kieara hadn't sought me out those many months ago, of how different this moment would be if the first real choice she'd made in her life hadn't been to choose me. Perhaps there'd be no chanting crowds thirsting for the blood of offworlders; and we'd have all remained blissfully ignorant of the true horror she dared reveal to us.

2.
Like all stories, this one has a beginning. But it starts at the end of another story--or perhaps at the end of many. Its beginnings are rooted in the conclusion of a long and bitter conflict from which the Empire is only now slowly emerging.