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