David's Blague

Okay, here's a go at fiction. This one sprung fully-formed, not exactly sure what made me think of it. Maybe Yom Kippur?

Stan shook his head at the sign behind Lin Wei's desk: "Quality is Job I." He'd gotten a kick out of reading the "I" as a first-person pronoun instead of the number one. Now Lin Wei had neatly printed underneath it, "...and the Siegels are Job II."

Strictly speaking, Lin Wei was not supposed to have any customer contact. Most of the customers didn't even know they were customers, and even those that were aware were completely ignorant of the technology she brought to bear on their behalf from the station in the planet's Lagrange point. But that did not keep her from occasional use (abuse?) of her weather control satellites to send them signals of one kind or another.

Formally, Stan's only job was to make sure that customers who paid in a percentage of their crops to a regional network of collection points were the ones to derive the greatest benefit from weather control. "Assessor" was all it said on his CV. Informally, he was also allowed customer contact, which meant he was occasionally planetside, while Lin Wei was not.

"Have you checked out Siegel lately?"

It was a familiar refrain. Siegel, of course, was not actually named Siegel, but Lin Wei thought that some great-grandparent of the clan looked like her old music teacher on Prime, whose name was Siegel. She had called the tribe "Siegel" ever since.

Due to a long-ago slip by Lin Wei, the clan kept a carefully guarded secret among the planet-dwellers, that they could generate responses by creating atmospheric disturbances. In point of fact, such disturbances triggered a waking cycle for Lin Wei and Stan. They would be brought out of cold sleep to determine a best course of action by a computer that assumed localized traces of burning flesh picked up by satellites were a bad sign. That's how they did it- just piled up carcasses on top of a hill, and let them on fire. The machinery in the Lagrange point station took care of the rest of the waking cycle.

"No, I haven't checked out your beloved Siegels lately." It wasn't true, of course. The way the cycles worked, I always woke up a few days in advance to go planetside and check everything out. As far as I could tell, the head of the clan, an older woman named Viryania or soemthing, had sent up that evil-smelling smoke in the wake of a good harvest as a kind of thank you.

Some thank you. I made sure to turn up the atmospheric pollution thresholds before I left to go to and fro planetside.

"Such great people," she gloated. "Such great people."

"Lin Wei, you've given them good weather for what, a thousand years? You even broke protocol to load them into boats when you fucked up and flooded the place. Of course they're good." She never thought much about it, but it was true. It's easy to be good when you're fat and happy. Especially when all "good" means is that you truck your extra produce to a collection center once a year. Of course, as she pointed out, the Siegels always did it at the start of the harvest, rather than at the end, or not at all, which was becoming more and more common.

"They really are good, Stan. You're too cynical."

"Yeah? Let me run the weather satellites for a year, see how good they are then."



Long story short, Lin Wei was right. I wreaked planetary havoc on the Siegels for a year, resulting in lost crops, lost stock, even a grandkid lost. It was awful to watch, and watch it I did. In between adjustments, I was planetside, trying to see how it affected them. Especially her, the clan matriarch.

The worse things got, the worse her friends got. Neighbors would come by with the ostensible object of commiserating. In reality they were there just to gloat that a thousand or whatever years of good fortune had so abruptly ended. To top it all off, she got sick in the middle of it with some kind of rash that a good dose of antibiotics would have cured, but that would be breaking protocol.

I understand schadenfreude. The gloating friends, I get. My people. Frau Siegel and company, they're Lin Wei's people. I don't get them at all. First harvest, like every good year before the bad one, was brought to the collection center. Lin Wei fixed the weather, and then some, to make up for my year of havoc. Then the old matriarch wrote down her story for grandkids and great-grandkids to remember.

Knowing them, they probably will.

Labels: fiction

Edit: I opened this post up for comments, by request. After five or so years with five or so comments, I turned them off site-wide, but perhaps it's time to revisit. Without further ado...

Baseball can be played with three people. Dan and Doug and I did it when we were kids, on Spring Creek Farm. One person pitches for everyone, also fields. The other two take turns hitting and fielding. The batter has to retrieve missed pitches, usually from a big tree that is a backstop. Once the hitter gets on base, he shouts "ghost runner on second" and goes back to hit again. Hitting a double sends the ghost runner home, and leaves another ghost runner on second.

That's what I was thinking about the first time I saw the baseball diamond that will eventually become our farm: ghost runner on second. How a baseball diamond came to be there is still fuzzy to me, but there was a semi-professional league that played on Sundays at 3PM, and this was one of their fields. Home plate can still be made out through the grass, and perhaps we'll leave it that way. Other relics include ten or so thousand brown glass bottles, formerly containing beer.

The back of the visiting team's dugout, has names of all the teams tacked up, with one coming off- teams from all over Southern Maryland and DC.

This one was our "home team" until recently, but now I'm not sure who to root for. Ghosts of teams past will eventually be supplanted by, well, plants. A process that has already begun, but not yet in earnest.

The Google map view was our first indication that the place had a baseball field on it, but it's hard to get a feel for just how big it is without stepping out into it. I guess a center field home run would need to be hit nearly five hundred feet, putting us into big-league territory. With that much space, I think fielding a team would take at least four people.

A brief digression: I was terrible at baseball. My brothers were mostly pretty nice about it, but I was the kid who would get stuck in right field, and hope desperately no ball would be hit out there. Amusingly, I now live in a house in right field.

If I listen carefully, I can hear the crack of a wooden bat on an often-hit ball, no throwing it out after a home run, baseballs are expensive. I don't have to listen so carefully to imagine the rest of the festivities, which left more of a mark than the home runs, the triples, the doubles, and the singles.

I guess there were snacks, too. And beer, by the looks of the dump. I imagine the hard liquor bottles that find little ferns growing into or out of them were strictly BYOB. Or maybe they were sold in the concession stand, too.

I hiked down in the canyon at the end of the morning, where I found the ghost of a Volkswagen Beetle, carrying home the ghosts of fans from watching the ghost runners and ghost hitters. I dreamed of fields.

Last night brought a profound sense of deja vu. Our newest addition was not-sleeping in an outfit our oldest wore to not-sleep four years ago. My, how things have(n't) changed. Meanwhile, there's a new farm, a sleepy mama, and two rambunctious kiddos. Took them to the new place to see what fun we could have yesterday.


Started out on the new lawn tractor, mowing a path. Couldn't get a picture on the mower, not even with my newly granted superpowers given to all fathers-of-three, but here's the path's maiden voyage, looking back at the house. The path goes east from the house, into the woods.

Upon inspection, that picture looks a little Hansel-and-Gretel. I'm not trying to lose them in the woods, I swear.

Our oldest got a bit of poison ivy on her foot at this point. I saw it, mentioned it, but should have been supervising a more closely than I was. When we came home, we washed the foot in Tecnu (good stuff, that), and put a baking soda poultice on it for a while after. She was a little freaked out by it, so I put some on my foot, too. That seemed to make things better.

The path, incidentally, does lead somewhere.

When I first walked the property, this was a feature I missed. The second time through, I saw it, and then the third time, I couldn't find it again. I know where it is now, though, and our path shows the way. If all goes according to plan, it's going to be one of my projects this winter. I'm not sure what it was before I found it- a root cellar or an ice house, perhaps, but I've been calling it The Cider House (TM). I imagine planting apple trees on the east end of that meadow, and keeping them through the winter below grade.

The structure appears to have been made of stone originally, with brick and mortar added in over time. As the kids put it,

"The roof went crash, crash, crash!"

In keeping with the whole experiment, I imagine getting another hundred years out of it once I coerce enough family and friends in with spades and buckets, and eventually timber from nearby trees.

For now, though, I've got a couple other projects that will take higher precedence. Getting moved in, for instance.