The Bloody Herring. Phyllis Ann Karr
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Copyright Information
Copyright © 2013 by Phyllis Ann Karr.
All rights reserved.
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The cover art incorporates disparate elements by from Fotolia
by Laralova, Yuriy Nosenko, and Cohelet 2.
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Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
The Bloody Herring
A Fantasy Historical Romance of the First Decade of Papa’s Pride by
Clea Ortiz Newcome
But Actually a Gilbert & Sullivan Fantasy in Space Opera Framework by
Phyllis Ann Karr
Foreword
Some have told me that the events of Ship Years 8 and 9 were far too terrible to use as underpinning for a light fantasy romance, and one that in any case can appeal chiefly to the hundred or so avid Savoyards in the ship’s population. My response is that light treatment has been among humanity’s most effective defense mechanisms for dealing with disaster, probably since our race became recognizably human back in Old Earth’s paleolithic; and that Savoy enthusiasm is as precious in Papa’s Pride as any other artifact of our Old Earth heritage.
In any case, these things lie more than half a century in our own past, and if half a century does not make them fair game for historical fantasy, what does? Is the past not the past, whether ten or ten thousand years ago, whether back on Old Earth or out here in our great colony starship of twenty-four pylons revolving around a vast central core?
While retaining the names of such entities as the Antique Terra Theater, which had not yet split into the Order-sponsored Old Earth Company and the Committee-sponsored Players to the Stars, with their respective screenplay arms Universal Aspirations and Pride Productions, I have fictionalized the names and other aspects of individuals actually involved in Chuck Wang’s crime—the worst ever perpetrated and, we hope, ever to be perpetrated in Papa’s Pride. I have added some completely fictional people to the cast, omitted many historical figures entirely, and somewhat condensed, even rearranged, certain of the events. There were never any deliberate murders connected with Wang’s outrage, at least as far as we know. Shipnet will make it very easy for interested readers to collate my tale with as much as we have of the truth.
What I have striven to recreate as faithfully as possible are the conditions of “pylon fever” and the restless searching for family fulfillment that hothoused both Wang’s crime and, arguably, the household conditions under which most of us have grown up: the reshaping of the old “Western World’s” so-called nuclear family that makes that situation in The Gondoliers, when the characters all regard two husbands to three wives as a great problem, seem to everyone outside the Order of the Cosmic Christ such an especially quaint piece of museum morality. When we come to pylon fever and social ferment, however, we must deal more, almost, with theories than with hard data; and I believe my own theories to be based on the most plausible ones of our recognized ship social and medical historians.
It should go without saying that anything which may sound like an Old Earth racial slight or slur is purely an attempt to recreate the mindset of the Gilbertian characters within the fantasy. Papa Gadore had already disregarded “racial” and “national” distinctions, so perceived, in recruiting his great ship’s complement; and the Committee’s system of procreational lists has ensured the blending of genes beyond anything even Papa Gadore could ever have asked of chance and natural human promiscuity. Even I, who would never have existed if my parents had not defied genetic morality, who have been happily raised by a two-parent family living in sanctuary in the convent pylon, am forced to applaud genmorality in this regard.
Of course, the means by which my Dr. Chandra Falcon incubates and enters her patient’s fantasy world—thanks to data allegedly obtained in my fictionalized “last download from Old Earth,” are completely my own invention. Pylon 19 has no such devices. As far as anyone not actually employed in that pylon knows.
—Clea Ortiz Newcome
Loneman’s Haven, pylon 13, May 11, S.Y. 63
Chapter 1
The Last Download from Earth
He almost looked like he was asleep. He was actually in coma.
Dr. Chandra Falcon gazed down at him, rubbing her even chin. Robert Lozinski, 23. Among the brightest stars in the musical comedy and operetta firmament of Antique Terra’s repertory company. Specializing in such roles as Ali Hakim, Papageno, and Ko-Ko of Titipu. The only time Chandra had really talked to him for any length of time, he had been pre-miniscing about when he would be old enough naturally to play Sir Joseph Porter and the Duke of Plaza-Toro. (Aging make-up, like almost everything else, was precious in Papa’s Pride.) His friendly rival in the company, Steve Davis, who at fifteen years older was playing those very roles, had quipped that Bob had better enjoy the ones that could be interpreted as juvenile while he could, and why not go for Peter Pan while he still had his youth? Bob had said something about a good role, but…and that was all Chandra had heard before moving along to a different part of the reception. Two thousand colonists and about half a thousand mingling sisters and brothers of the O.C.C. might be a pinpoint population compared to your average small village on the Old Earth they’d left behind, but it was still too many people for anybody to interact intimately with everybody.
She had enjoyed Bob Lozinski’s work in any number of plays, though, since Liftaway, watching him grow up from young adolescent roles (when she hadn’t been much older, herself) to the ones he presently enjoyed. As she’d watched Steve Davis mature from ones Lozinski was playing now to the inescapably older-gentleman ones.
And now Steve Davis was dead and Bob Lozinski in a coma, following the same backstage accident during a rehearsal for The Yeomen of the Guard.
“Deuces,” said Sister Harriet, “doesn’t think it was an accident.”
“What, then? A practical joke that went wrong?”
“Murder. And attempted murder.”
“Murder and attempted murder?” nurse Misaki Lang wanted to know. “Who? And why? Bob himself? Could that be why he went into this coma? Couldn’t cope with the guilt? Or the knowledge of Steve’s having tried something? Stars know we can’t find any physical reason for Bob’s coma.”
Chandra Falcon said, “I’m going out and have a talk with Deuces Osborne. Maybe a good, long talk.”
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Deuteronomy Osborne, called “Deuces,” had been in his twenties at Liftaway, eight years ago. Now in his thirties going on fifties, a lank and craggy hawk of a man, after falling away young from a Bible Belt upbringing, he had jumped at the chance to sign on with Papa Al Gadore as a member of ship security. Osborne’s specialty was sniffing out conspiracies. Not that there had been many to sniff out the first several years, or that they had ever been either large or very serious. Usually two or three colonists at most, more often than not kids plotting to raid the ration baskets before distribution, or sneak marijuana seeds out of the flora ark in the core and raise a little of the stuff in some hidden patch in one of the forest pylons.
But as the voyage lengthened, the downloads from Old Earth grew weaker and stranger, and it became more and more obvious habitable planets were so few and far between in the galaxy that finding one might take several generations—that, in fact, everybody now in Papa’s Pride, and very likely their grandchildren, might live and die in the pylons and core without ever setting foot on a new earth or seeing a real atmosphere sky rather than a simulated one, something like what Old Earth had sometimes called “cabin fever” set in. Papa’s Pride took to calling it “pylon fever,” and for some years it was a very real, if slippery, problem. Among other symptoms, conspiracies started getting worse. Two or three actually managed to plant marijuana, and several groups learned how to cook