Flash Fiction Friday! The Power of Poetry

 This week, Chuck Wendig gave us three random phrases to incorporate into whatever story we could come up with.  Fortunately for Xavier Xanthum and Larry the Eyeballs, one of the phrases gave me the idea I needed to rescue them from the fix I left them in last week!  Thanks, Chuck!  I'll let you guess the phrase, or you can cheat and look here.

The Power of Poetry

Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer, watched the alien ship approach.  He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and fought panic.  He didn’t care about the fame that might come of making first contact with a new species.  He’d happily let someone else have that fame and go on exploring uninhabited reaches of space.

There were just so many ways this could go wrong.  For one thing, there was the translation module. The TM had been producing translations profane enough to get a person thrown out of the worst dives in the sleaziest spaceports in the system.  At least, Xavier thought it would.  He’d never tested that kind of language, and stayed out of the sleaziest dives.  He avoided conflict.

“Larry, are you sure the TM is going to be okay with this?  First contact is tricky.  And Space only knows what the aliens might make of a foul-mouthed translation.”  He thought a moment.  “How long until we’re out of this gravity well and can make the jump?”

Larry didn’t answer.  Xavier looked around.  He didn’t see the eyeballs that were the computer’s semi-human manifestation.  “Larry?”

“Um, here, Captain?”

Xavier felt a chill.  Not only did Larry call him “captain,” which he did only only when he had bad news, but he had hesitated as though unsure.  This was no time for Larry to turn human.

“What is it, Larry?”

“At the current course and speed we will be ready for the jump in 21.35 minutes.  We contact the alien ship in five point five minutes.   Assuming the TM can handle the alien language, have you considered what you will say?”

“Isn’t there something in your protocols?”  Larry was the AI, for Earth’s sake!  He was supposed to know things.  Xavier wiped his palms again.

“There are several options.  None seems apropos?”  Larry ended on a rising tone, the way an Earth-speaker would, to indicate uncertainty.  Another human trait.  Xavier suppressed a shudder.

“Lay them on me.”

“One.   ‘We come in peace.’”

“That has promise, though I’d rather go in peace.  Next.”

“’Do not approach any closer or we may—‘”

Xavier cut that one off before Larry even finished.  “Definitely not.”  They lacked significant weaponry in any case.

“How about, ‘Greetings?  Do you want a drink?  Are we—‘ Wait, no, that’s for meetings in bars, not first contact.”

“Different kind of contact.  The opener has promise, though.”

“Then there’s this one.  It’s a list of everything of interest in the local space region.”

“Like a tourist brochure.  That might be good.”

Larry had reappeared at last—his eyeballs, that is.  Until now, he’d remained a disembodied voice.  Now he was a disembodied voice and a pair of floating eyeballs.  “The last one is. . . odd.  I do not understand.”

“What?”

“It begins, ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote.’”

“That doesn’t even sound like English.”

“It goes on a very long way, and there is a notation which says, ‘a poetic pattern retains inertia.’”

“Weird.”  Xavier thought a bit.  “A little inertia on their part might be helpful.  We could try that.”

The alien ship now loomed large on the vid screen.  Xavier studied it, trying to decide if it bristled with weapons, was covered with sensors, or was just a truly ugly design.

The external audio input crackled to life.  The alien language hurt Xavier’s ears.  Even Larry’s eyeballs seemed to flinch, though as far as Xavier knew he didn’t have ears.  Then the TM kicked in.

“’Who the #$%#  @#$%@# are you?’”

Xavier groaned.  “It’s still doing it!”

“We must respond, Captain.  Failure to respond would be worse than a tactless response.”

“Give them the tourist brochure response.  At least it goes on for a while.  It might buy us some time.”  He wondered what a recitation of the local attractions would sound like in the profane language the TM seemed to have adopted.  “At least the TM can handle the alien language.  I always wondered how they do that.”  Xavier’s musings on the miracles of translators were cut short by a long string of speech in the alien tongue, their TM’s broadcast of where to find hotels, bars, brothels, and other necessary amenities.

The aliens put up with it for a full minute before their response came back.  Stripped of the decorative profanity, it amounted to “your mama.”  Followed by something along the lines of “—obliterate you.”

“Holy asteroids, Larry!”  Xavier scrambled for an idea, beyond the notion that maybe the cussing didn’t come from the TM after all.  They needed back-up, and they needed to get away.  “Code message to Gamma Sixteen about this hostile alien.  And hit that poetry thing.  I hope to Hades IV that it’s right about poetic patterns and inertia, because we have got to get out of here.”

“I have adjusted our course for optimal achievement of a moderately safe jump.  Three minutes and four seconds.”

“Accelerate gradually away from them after the TM begins.”

The harsh syllables began pouring from the TM.  Xavier hoped that the poetic pattern translated, if nothing else did.  And he wondered what the Canterbury Tales sounded like in cuss words.  And if the cryptic comment about inertia meant anything.

It seemed it did.  At least, the alien ship didn’t adjust its course this time to follow as they moved obliquely away from it.  Xavier didn’t know if the aliens were inertialized by poetry, numbed by early English verse, or awed by the TM’s obscene vocabulary.  He didn’t care.

Larry monitored their progress, as Xavier strapped into the jump couch.  A minute later, he initiated the jump, and they were in another system.

Just how had the TM translated “And smale foweles maken melodye,” anyway?

###

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2014

Last chance to enter the May I Suggest. . .  giveaway!

The Ninja Librarian Speaks!

I recently received a package via very special delivery.  Inside I found the following communique, which I ( thanks to far too much exposure to Geoffrey Chaucer at an impressionable age) have chosen to title. . . 

THE LIBRARIAN'S TALE

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Up to now, I have allowed young Alice to narrate events in our town of Skunk Corners, and for the most part she has done an admirable job.  On deep reflection, however, I have determined to set straight the record on a few points.

Young Alice has an unfortunate tendency to depict me as both mysterious and, there is no other word for it, stuffy.  I confess to the former, as both certain vows I took and long years of habit render me reticent about my personal life and history, and disinclined to explain myself.  The charge of stuffiness, however, I most heartily deny.  I am an educated man, of course, and inevitably I do speak as such.  There is nothing wrong with that, and indeed I believe any attempt to speak and act otherwise would render me absurd.  But to be formal is not to be stiff or stuffy.

That point settled, I wish to recount my experience of my arrival in Skunk Corners, as young Alice has very clearly expressed her own and the town’s reaction to my arrival. 

Skunk Corners did take me very much by surprise.  Rather, on my arrival I saw much what I expected: a collection of ignorant people bent on demonstrating their ignorance.  I responded as I had been taught, withholding judgment only from Alice, of whom I had been told something.  I consider this forbearance to have been fortunate and highly rewarded.

For I did know something of the town before arriving.  And I knew that the school teacher was a young woman who dressed and acted as a boy.  I ought to have assumed her to be coarse and uneducated, and our first meeting certainly did little to change that idea.

And yet.  She went out of her way to warn me of the welcome planned for me, and for that I would give her a chance, despite her coarse appearance and dreadful abuse of the language.

Young Alice herself has recorded the outcome of that decision, and you can conclude that in the end I found something different than the crude collection of cruder individuals I had anticipated.  What Alice has not shared, simply because she does not know it, and I have been disinclined to tell her, is the manner of my passing my first night and morning in Skunk Corners.

I was all eyes and ears when I stepped off the train in this town that was to be my home for the next months.  I have never told Alice, nor anyone else in Skunk Corners, but this was my first time out West.  All my other assignments had been in the larger cities back East, as indeed are most Ninja Librarian assignments.  It is in those cities, with their gangs on both sides of the law, that there is often the greatest need for a librarian who is both educated and skilled in the ways of the Ninja.

It had been some thirty years earlier that the heads of the Society had gotten the idea to build libraries in the new towns springing up out West.  It was only now that they were realizing that some of those libraries needed to be staffed by the Society.

So there I was, after what seemed a lifetime riding trains of ever-shrinking dimensions, walking down the street of my first Western town.

It wasn’t much to look at.  Depot, church, Mercantile, teashop, bank, tavern, school, library, and a City Hall with a fine façade hiding a shoddy pine shack.

I noticed everything that day.  No one was expecting me, but a number of idle men hung about the depot, so I introduced myself.

“Good day, gentlemen.  I have come to serve as your librarian.  You may call me Tom.”  They didn’t, of course, call me any such thing.  Two nodded, which I took as a greeting, and one spat on the platform, which I did not.  A fourth called me something else entirely which I will not repeat here or anywhere.

Somehow, by the time I had crossed the platform and stepped into the dust of what they called Main Street, word had spread through the settlement, and every porch and doorway bore a watcher, not one of whom deigned to offer a greeting.  At the end of the street, the library and school glared at each other across the dusty thoroughfare, just as the school children gazed at me in open hostility.

Of their teacher I saw nothing at that juncture, nor did I much wish to.

When finally I entered the library and closed the door behind me, I sagged with relief.  In other places I had been librarian, a small violent element prevented a peaceful majority from using the library as they wished.  In this gods-forsaken town, it seemed every resident wished me gone.

Or dead.

The thought did not fill me with either joy or hope that I would make a difference, though I would fulfill my vows and make every effort.

The contemplation of the interior of my rooms did little to comfort me.  If the Society had thought to include a stove in their design for the living quarters, there was no indication of such now.  Only an open hearth greeted me as the means to heat both myself and my meals.  A stale smell of untouched books and dead air pervaded every corner.

I am quite aware that many of my new neighbors had lived and possibly even thrived in such conditions all their lives, less the books, of course.  But, as a city man, I had a problem.

I had always boarded until now.  I knew nothing of cookery, and while I felt confident that I could boil water and prepare the kind of simple repast to which I was meant to limit myself, I had no idea how to go about doing so on an open fire.

Thus, when I met Young Alice in the back entry of the library that night, it was not only that I had heard her enter and meant to discover the meaning of the intrusion.  I was also escaping the clouds of smoke I had generated, first by kindling the fire without opening the damper, and then by burning my toast beyond all recognition.  The warning which Alice delivered meant less to me at that time than my fear that I must starve in this forsaken outpost beyond the fringes of civilization.

However, by dint of much effort, I managed to produce boiling water and make a cup of tea.  I made no further attempt to toast my bread, but rendered it edible by dipping it in the tea, and so contrived to still the demands of my interior until morning, when I was forced to do it all again.

Thus, you see, I was in no mood to put up with ill treatment the next day when the townsfolk gathered to send me back where I came from, upright or in a box.  Had I been better fed, I might have been less quick to respond aggressively.

That, I suspect, would have been a pity.  Some towns do require a firm hand.

This narrative was signed simply, "Tom."