Five Elements Anthology Read online

  Five Elements

  Anthology

  Sci-fi & Fantasy Short Stories by

  Ted Blasche

  Clayton Callahan

  C. J. Jessop

  Sheron McCartha

  Chelsea Nolan

  D. Wallace Peach

  Five Elements Anthology

  Copyright © 2015 Beaverton Evening Writers

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The authors do not have any control over and do not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  ISBN: 978-1-63415-749-0

  Cover Art by D. Wallace Peach

  Made in the USA

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Origin of the Five Elements

  Authors’ Note

  Ghost Ship

  Peace Treaty

  Badges of Authority

  Sacrifice

  The Legacy of Eris

  Toys

  Learned Magic

  Origin of the Five Elements

  The Beaverton Evening Writers Group is a cohesive bunch of sci-fi and fantasy authors. Located in western Oregon, we’ve been meeting for years, rummaging through each other’s words, offering both praise and criticism. Now, with a growing list of published short stories and full-length novels, we invite you to sample our work.

  For this venture, we gave ourselves an assignment: Pen a short story including five elements (tossed randomly into the pot by members on hand). Despite these shared elements, seven unique stories tapped their way to our keyboards. We hope you enjoy discovering how each of us incorporated—

  An alien

  A ghost

  A spaceship

  A conflict with the boss

  And…a fireplace poker

  —The Beaverton Evening Writers Group

  Authors’ Note

  What better way for authors to invest in our communities and careers than to support literacy in our future readers. We are delighted to report that all profits from the sale of the Five Elements Anthology will help support the Willamette Writers’ literacy program, Books for Kids.

  Books For Kids collects and distributes books to underprivileged youth in over 75 agencies and organizations throughout Oregon and SW Washington. Through grants, donations, and partnering with local companies to raise funds for book purchases, we are able to purchase new books. We also collect both new and like new children’s books as donations from a variety of sources, including book drives and other donation programs. To learn more about Willamette Writers and the Books for Kids program, go to willamettewriters.com/booksforkids

  Every Child Should Have A Book To Call Their Very Own!

  Ghost Ship

  By D. Wallace Peach

  Crystal glitters in the firelight, clear Artemisia glazing the sides of twin goblets. The stone room glows warmly, golden compared to the cool opalescence of her body and pinpricks of starlight drifting beneath her skin. She wears the same sheer silk shift of their first encounter. Gossamer as cobwebs, the skirt’s slit panels reveal slender legs and bare feet. Hair, pale as quicksilver, glints in the candlelight as slanted, emerald eyes regard the old captain.

  He lingers at the port, a stooped man dying of old bones, his life years beyond a common span, his hair a thin, white halo over a spotted scalp. How she loves him, this alien, for how many lifetimes, for how many hundreds of years.

  “Caspar?” She joins him for the view, handing him a goblet.

  “Juliette?” he replies with a smile, as if they are newly met strangers, his blue eyes bright despite the pain shredding his flesh. Their goblets chime and they sip the sweet liquor. Outside the ark slowly rotates, the star-swept expanse of space glittering beyond the ship’s outer rings, Earth’s last survivors contained within its sleek, metal hull.

  “I always meant to ask you”—he rests a gnarled hand on the clear visi-glass of the port—“why did you leave the view of the ship, why not mountains or a lake, something befitting your imagination?”

  “So, we’ll both remember where we are and what’s important.” She gazes at the revolving rings, their tiny, round ports like a strand of luminescent pearls in a black sea. “Come sit by the fire, Love.” She takes his hand and leads him to the wide hearth, settling him on the chaise and lifting his feet.

  “You spoil me,” he chuckles as she tucks a fur around his skeletal legs. “Soon you’ll have to find a younger man.”

  “The future isn’t foretold,” she says, trickling a thimbleful of fragrant liquor into his goblet. “Nor is it guaranteed.”

  “I suppose a virus is unencumbered by time,” he says, a slight wistfulness to his voice. “You are as young and enchanting as the day we met.”

  The old reference stings, though she knows he speaks in jest. “And why are Earthlings so invested in time? You are so determined to die.” She sits on the edge of the chaise, her goblet on a small, carved table beside her.

  “The bane and beauty of life,” he replies. “Makes it rather romantic in a poignant sort of way. You would have made a splendid princess, Juliette, wooed by a dashing knight in a castle such as this. I love those ancient legends.”

  “I know.” Gently she kisses him and then rests her shimmering cheek against the sharp bones of his skull, careful that her touch is light. To her, he is still the gallant captain, tall and broad-shouldered, his eyes moon-blue, chestnut hair a long mane of curls in spite of regulations. With a sigh, he closes his eyes, not asleep but resting, his face content.

  Before they first met, she created this room for him, and the illusion has morphed only by small degrees over the centuries. The soaring stone walls and vaulted ceiling are original, as well as the marble columns and floor. The giant chandelier with its dripping, crystal teardrops has lost a measure of sparkle as she slowly dismantles it, but the rest she’s fashioned with exquisite detail: dusky rose drapes with curved swags, the immense hearth, hundreds of ancient tomes in mahogany cases, smoky candlelight and gleaming mirrors, carved chairs and elegant tables, tapestries of bearded men hunting wild beasts, paintings of pink-skinned ladies with golden hair. She takes it all in as her eyes dew and the stars in her arms swirl.

  “You created all this for me, didn’t you?” he asks as he gazes at her.

  “Yes, over time.” She rises and shifts the logs in the coals with the iron poker’s hooked end.

  “It’s been a magical life, Juliette. Thank you.”

  “We’ve lived many lives together, and I suspect we will again.”

  “Well, my ghost, until the next one.” He smiles, clearly disbelieving her wisdom. Then he dons a valiant face and rises, clutching her arm, his body trembling. At the portal, she kisses him, pours her light into him, once again sensing the young captain of ages ago.

  His hand flutters over the sensor and the panel opens. Light-nodes gleam down the gently arcing hallway, illuminating tan walls and gray carpet with the muted glow of designated night. The distant drone of the ventilation system serves as a backdrop to conversational voices. A pair of young c
rewmen in common blues nod and step aside as their captain shuffles into the corridor and the panel glides closed.

  **

  Two crewmen on his heels, Lieutenant Quinn Morales strides the curved corridor toward the holocell. He runs a hand through his black hair, certain a cut looms in his near future. That and a shave, his stubbled chin against the old dress code he suspects will make a prompt reappearance. A nagging headache forces him to squint, the light-nodes particularly harsh—or perhaps it’s his mood that grates, or the rare foods he didn’t get to eat, or Captain Landry’s hurried assumption of command. Whatever the reason, his blood pounds on his brain and his nerves could use the stability of a stiff drink.

  Caspar Chevall’s remembrance service had scarcely concluded when Landry hustled his officers from the post-assimilation celebration into the amphitheater for his promotion, oath of service, and acceptance speech. A stocky bull with a buzzed, blond top and something to prove, Landry’s first order entails shutting down Chevall’s holocell and beginning a system-wide purge of the virus, a protocol that will require the entire night to complete.

  “The captain’s hardly cold,” Wilton mutters to Longrow, the men trailing, clearly as perturbed about the assignment as he.

  Quinn smiles at the fondness behind the sentiment. The old captain was a hero to the crew, well-respected, even well-loved. Long before most of them were born, he relaxed the ark’s non-operational codes and customs. Rumor suggested he was something of a renegade as a younger man and wasn’t one to apply a different standard to the crew. As captain, he made life comfortable, turned a thousand military stiffs into a functional family with oversight of sixty thousand civilians. Life was good under Caspar, even if he loved his holo.

  “Landry’s going to have us saluting, pressing our blues, and polishing boots,” Longrow grouses, the lanky crewman’s fist absently thumping the wall as he walks. “No one’s had to do that in near eighty years.”

  “Haircuts,” Wilton groans. “Guard duty.”

  “Fitness standards.” Longrow chuckles. “Good luck with that, Ben.”

  “Remember the first time we saw her?” Wilton clears his throat, ignoring the gibe.

  “Who could forget? No wonder he wouldn’t shut the thing down. I wouldn’t either, virus or no.”

  “We have to do it,” Wilton complains. “Caspar probably should’ve done it himself. The program’s infected the ship’s autonomic and nervous systems. That’s pretty serious.”

  “Right, and we know this because nothing bad has happened in four hundred years?” Longrow thumps the wall. “What if the old captain was right? What if we shouldn’t shut her down? What if something terrible will happen if we do?”

  Quinn turns on his heel to face the junior crewmen who nearly stumble into him. He gives them a hard eye that belies the anxiety gripping his own chest. “Caspar Chevall is dead. We’re under Landry’s command, now. Orders are orders. Make sure you remember that.”

  “But Quinn,” Longrow persists. “What if Caspar was right?”

  “Lieutenant,” Quinn corrects him, and then softens his voice, “We better get used to it.”

  The lanky man’s shoulders sag. “Lieutenant, what if he was right? What if the ghost shuts down respiration? If the nervous system goes, nothing will communicate with anything else. We’ll be a floating piece of space junk full of dead bodies.”

  The “ghost,” that’s what the old captain called her. With a sigh, Quinn leans on the wall. He doesn’t trust the assignment any more than they. “If the holo shuts down the system, we purge and reboot.”

  His pudgy face in a frown, Wilton clears his throat. “What if she has a weapon or something? Blows us up?”

  A smile quirks up the corner of Quinn’s lips. “Holos are holos. You’re getting a little carried away, crewman.”

  “Caspar, I mean Captain Chevall,” Longrow persists. “He refused to shut her down. Why?”

  “Maybe he was in love with his holo,” Quinn suggests.

  Longrow scratches an eyebrow. “But—”

  “But this conversation is over. We have orders.” Quinn narrows his eyes, discouraging any further argument, and sets off again down the corridor. He’ll assess, in no more hurry than they to blow himself up, despite the orders.

  Outside the holocell, he motions to Wilton and Longrow to halt. “You’re on the portal.” His hand brushes past the sensor, activating the chime. When the panel slides open, he steps backwards in astonishment.

  “See what I mean,” Wilton whispers and clears his throat.

  The holo is stunning, standing in the room’s vaulted center, waiting for him. Galaxies of blue light in her luminous skin appear to mutate, swirl, and shift into a shade closer to violet. Green eyes glitter softly as the slightest smile edges her lips, welcoming him. “Join me, Quinn.” She moves gracefully, her movements fluid, the silk of her indigo shift rippling against her legs like water.

  “You know my name?” he asks, fleetingly noting her access to the ship’s memory.

  “I’m Juliette.” From a small table she picks up two goblets, one extended toward him.

  Shutting his mouth, he glances at the gawking crewmen and enters the room, waving the portal closed behind him. “This place is amazing.” He accepts the goblet and sniffs the liquor.

  “Artemisia, Caspar’s favorite,” she says, taking a sip. “I created this room from the ship’s memory templates and the captain’s imagination. He possessed a sensory awareness brimming with detail, and he loved Earth’s ancient histories.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” While she watches, he wanders the room, his fingers trailing along chiseled stone, wood scrollwork, rich tapestries, brocades and damasks, an ancient globe he sets spinning on its axis. He gazes up at the glittering crystal chandelier, sweeps his fingers through candle-flame, startling at the burning heat. “I can see why the captain found it hard to leave this place.”

  “There was no need. Your ship is peaceful, this galaxy without threat. You could travel for millennia without strife.”

  “That’s hard to imagine,” he states, though he has no idea why. Four hundred years have passed since they departed Earth, and nothing perilous has occurred in all that time.

  “Though I’ve deeply loved every one of you I’ve encountered,” she explains with a glint in her eye, “Earthlings are still by nature ardently primitive. You’re wonderfully charming, adventurous beings, yet you defy logic to your own detriment. You garb yourselves in your sentiments.”

  “Coloring our every choice,” he says with a laugh. She speaks the truth; he’s made his share of decisions based on a hot head or lusty heart, with mixed results—decidedly more sour than sweet.

  He pauses before a tall, ornately carved tower that looks oddly like a timepiece and cants his head toward it. “A clock?”

  “Time is amorphous, Quinn.” She joins him. “Your construct of time doesn’t exist here.”

  “It has twelve numbers instead of twenty.”

  “According to Caspar, on Earth your days were divided into twenty-four segments, two rotations of these arrows.” Her fingertips touch the glass face. “All based on the rotation of your planet.”

  “We divided the rotation into twelfths?” He chuckles. “That’s so peculiar.”

  “Custom,” she replies. “It appears your early civilization counted finger joints instead of fingers. Each of your human fingers has three joints.”

  “No odder I suppose than a system based on ten fingers and toes,” he marvels, continuing his survey of the room, vaguely aware his headache is gone. He pauses before a stone staircase that curves as it rises from sight. “May I?”

  “Of course.” Appearing content to wait out his exploration, she accepts his goblet and curls on a chaise, tucking her feet under her legs.

  Fascinated by the moss on the stone walls, he ascends the narrow stair, its treads worn smooth as though others have climbed this way for thousands of years. Minute details astonish him, do
wn to the acrid smell of the smoke coiling from fiery torches. At the landing, he encounters a sturdy wood door, ironbound and riveted, set on heavy hinges. He takes a moment to figure out the latch and swings it open.

  The round room is a bedchamber with no ordinary bed. If forced to describe it, he would say it looks like a primordial tree, a colossal version of the arboretum’s meticulous cultivation. Gnarled roots curve outward, cradling a sleeping pallet strewn with blankets of gray fur. Serpentine branches arc overhead, draped with sheer webbing that billows gently in a warm breeze. He rests a hand on a branch and strokes the fur, holding his breath. Outside the open windows, a verdant world borders a silver expanse of sea, twin blue moons rippling on the waves. If the rest of the holo strikes him as Earthly, this is decidedly alien.

  When he returns to the main room, she pats the chaise, inviting him to sit beside her.

  “You know why I’m here,” he says, sinking to the plush velvet, the goblet again in his hands. She smells alluringly of…flowers.

  “Your captain believes I’m a virus infecting your ship. He wishes me eradicated and intends to destroy me even though in all these years I’ve done nothing to harm you.”

  “I’m sorry.” He sips the Artemisia, the heady flavor coating his tongue as he avoids her eyes. His regret feels genuine, though it makes little sense to him. She’s a holo, like all the other programs he’s activated and deactivated, hundreds of times in his thirty years.

  “What would you do, Quinn, if I told you that I am your savior? That in destroying me, you will only destroy yourselves? That all your lives will come to an abrupt end, and you’ll never see a day of the years stretching ahead?”

  His eyes narrow as the muscles in his neck tense. “Is that a threat?”

  “A warning of a consequence over which I have no control.” She rises and glides to the massive stone hearth. From the timber mantel, she lifts an ivory box, its sides carved with roses. When she returns, she sits closely beside him, her thigh and shoulder touching his, the box offered in her palm.