Consolation Songs

By Iona Datt Sharma

“For a while, we just slept and ate and told stories..."

A radio broadcast unites a scattered people; lockdown throws human and fey reluctantly together; a miner floats alone in the asteroid belt; a living ship rides out a storm.

In difficult times, stories sustain us. These twelve tales of selkies, hockey players, retired systems engineers, monsters, copyeditors and changelings are connected by a thread of optimism, and of hope: that we, too, will ride out this storm.

This anthology features contributions by Aliette de Bodard, Stephanie Burgis, Iona Datt Sharma, Jeannelle M. Ferreira, Rebecca Fraimow, Marissa Lingen, Freya Marske, Lizbeth Myles, Katie Rathfelder, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Llinos Cathryn Thomas. All proceeds will be donated to the COVID-19 appeal being run by the UCLH Charity, the charity supporting the University College London Hospitals NHS Trust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Iona Datt Sharma
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463328941

Book preview

Consolation Songs

Optimistic speculative fiction for a time of pandemic.

edited by

Iona Datt Sharma

A Hundred and Seventy Storms © 2016 Aliette de Bodard

Love, Your Flatmate © 2020 Stephanie Burgis Samphire

St Anselm-by-the-Riverside © 2020 Iona Datt Sharma

Of a Female Stranger © 2020 Jeannelle M. Ferreira

This Is New Gehesran Calling © 2020 Rebecca Fraimow

Upside the Head © 2020 Marissa Lingen

Four © 2020 Freya Marske

Bethany Bethany © 2020 Lizbeth Myles

Seaview on Mars © 2020 Katie Rathfelder

Girls Who Read Austen © 2020 Tansy Rayner Roberts

Low-Energy Economy © 2020 Adrian Tchaikovsky

Storm Story © 2020 Llinos Cathryn Thomas

Cover art © 2020 Katherine Catchpole

Cover design © 2020 Lodestar Author Services

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Contents

Consolation Songs

Introduction

Storm Story

Girls Who Read Austen

Upside the Head

Bethany, Bethany

Seaview on Mars

A Hundred and Seventy Storms

Low Energy Economy

Four

St Anselm-by-the-Riverside

This Is New Gehesran Calling

Of A Female Stranger

Love, Your Flatmate

About the authors

Acknowledgements

Consolation Songs

Optimistic speculative fiction for a time of pandemic.

edited by

Iona Datt Sharma

Introduction

Here are some words I never thought I'd write: this is an anthology in response to a global pandemic. All proceeds will go to the COVID-19 appeal being run by the UCLH Charity, the charity supporting the University College London Hospitals NHS Trust. UCLH is responsible for one of the largest critical care units in the UK, serving an area with one of the highest rates of infection. It supports patients, families and frontline workers, as well as providing funding for new facilities and for research. It's one of many organisations the world over doing this vital work, and it's my hope that this project will make a small but real difference.

But of course there's more to this anthology than just the proceeds. We've all been affected by COVID-19: perhaps we've suffered from the illness, or someone in our family has. No matter what, we all had our lives significantly constrained by the lockdown measures. This isn't the right occasion for fictional doom and gloom. So these stories are hopeful, optimistic, songs of consolation. I hope they provide some balm for these difficult times.

Stay safe, and thank you for reading.

Iona Datt Sharma

30 June 2020

Storm Story

By Llinos Cathryn Thomas

I don't know where's best to start.

I'm just a magician, and not even a very senior one, so you'll understand that my part was very small. But Nenna says we should keep records when significant things happen, so that people can read them later and understand what happened and learn from it.

There's the logbook already, of course, and all the really important information will be in there. That's what I said to Nenna when she said I should write this all down. But she thinks it's better to have lots of different perspectives.

‘The captain only has one pair of eyes,' she said. ‘He can't see everything at once. The more people write down the parts they saw, the better we'll understand it all. Put in absolutely everything you can remember.'

So, maybe this will be useful, and even if it's not, at least it'll make Nenna happy.

I'm going to start with that morning.

I woke at about the normal time, rolled up my hammock, got a mug of porridge from the galley, and when I got up to the working deck everything was normal – sun shining, everyone going about their days. Wim was sitting on the thwart of one of the little fishing boats lined up under the rail, mending a sail.

Nenna says I should explain who people are, for anyone who might read this a long time in the future, so here's a bit about Wim. We're about the same age, so we came through our training together, learning how to use our magic to mend things and make the plants on the garden decks grow faster, and take the salt out of the water so everyone can drink it. Once we were trained I got picked to look after the lightstones, and Wim gets all the odd little mending jobs that can't be done without magic. I'm no good at that stuff since I can't make my magic as delicate as they can, but I'm good at the lightstones.

Anyway, I came and sat down next to Wim – when it's not a fishing day, the boats are a good place to keep out of the way of the sailors. Wim needed the light to see the sail, and I can't do my job properly from down in the hold, but there's nowhere easy for me to work on deck. Every time I think I've found a good corner, somebody wants to put something there or move something through. And of course we can't go up on the recreation deck and get in the way there.

So, I opened up my pack and laid it out on my lap.

Did I already write that it was sunny? I can't read what I wrote up there. In case I didn't, it was sunny, so I thought it would be a good day. I'm supposed to fill up lots of lightstones every day. On rainy ones of course I can't do many, but on sunny ones I can do more, so it averages out.

Nenna says to add a bit explaining how I do the lightstones, because lots of people don't know that much about it, so I'm writing this on another piece of paper and she can put it in at the right place later. Putting it simply, the lightstones are like pebbles charged with magic. We had a lot of them back when the journey began, and they've lasted us all that time. In more than a hundred years we've only ever lost a few, which is something to be proud of, I think. We can't get any more until we reach Land, so I'm always really careful with them.

The way it works is, once a lightstone has been made – like ours were by the magicians who helped get everything ready for the ship to launch – you can fill it with light anytime and speak a spell once you're ready to activate it. Then once it's dark the light will come out gradually until it runs out again. We use them in lanterns nearly everywhere on the ship, from the top of the main mast to the stores right in the bottom of the hold, all over the recreation deck, and in the council's cabins and our berth deck and everywhere. To fill them up, you need natural light and some magic. (When I was doing my training I learned that if you really need to you can fill a lightstone from another lightstone, but I was told never, ever to do it, because sometimes it breaks them so that you can't use them again. We can't take the risk.) The natural light comes from the sun, and the magic comes from me. I do one stone at a time – I gather the light to me, until I'm full to the brim with it, and then I pour it into the lightstone and seal it.

It looks a bit like I'm doing nothing, but it's hard work – it makes my heart race, and normally my legs are tired and my head hurts by the end of the day. Overcast days it's harder – if I want to make the same amount of light, I have to use more magic, or else I have to just do fewer and make it up the next sunny day.

I'm the only one who does the lightstones full time, but a few of the other magicians know how. So if anything ever happened to me we'd be all right.

Most of the morning was just like any other day. I filled the first few stones. I knew they'd be good and bright because the sun was so fierce that I had to close my eyes when it jumped off the water. Wim mended the sail, and we talked a bit but not much because magic takes a lot of concentration. We stopped for lunch and went down to the aft galley. That's the one for all of us – magicians, ordinary sailors, deck hands, people like that. More important people, like the captain and the officers and the scholars and the council, go to the fore galley. I went there once, it was shiny clean and it smelled wonderful. Our galley's not bad either, though.

It was when we got back up on deck that we realised something was wrong. The wind had changed. I know what the sailors say, but it's not just them who can read the wind – the rest of us grew up on the ship just like they did and we can taste the change in the air like they can.

I looked at Wim.

‘Smells like a storm,' they said, and I nodded.

The sailors were quieter than usual, watching the sky. It was greying a bit, not even that much yet. Some of them were securing the boats, and lots of them were climbing all around the sails, adjusting things.

We weren't worried then. We've all seen lots of storms and done even more storm drills. Wim and me went to sit again – the sail was finished but Wim had a rope to mend – and got back to work. We expected to hear the storm siren any time in the next few hours, but there'd be plenty of time to get belowdecks before it started. No sense missing out on the fresh air while we could get it.

We were right, too. It went just like normal – the siren wailed, and we went down to the berth deck to help make everything fast and then wait it out. Wim could keep working, but I couldn't really, so I got out my knitting and Wim and me sat in a circle with some of the other magicians we know, and a couple of the deckhands and galley hands, and we chatted while the storm got started.

The wood creaked, and we could hear the roar of the wind and the waves outside. We shouted over it to tell stories. One of the older magicians remembered the big storm from forty years ago, the one they thought might sink us, and he told us about it.

‘We thought that would be the one,' he said. ‘You know they say there'll be a great storm just before we find Land, a storm like nothing we've ever known before. We thought that would be it. When the clouds had gone, we thought we'd see it there on the horizon.'

Everyone tells storm stories, in a storm, but we didn't think this time would be anything like as bad as that one. But we talked about finding Land for a bit, anyway. Someone said about how there'd be trees – not little ones like on the garden deck but ones tall enough to climb – and everything would be green, and you could run and run without coming to the end of the deck.

I couldn't really imagine what it would be like, but talking about it was a good way to pass the time.

It got to evening by the clock, and someone from the galley came swaying in to hand out cold rations. They won't light the stove when it's too rough, for fear of fire. We ate, and we kept telling stories. I was getting tired, but I didn't want to sleep.

The wind was getting louder, and it seemed like we were being flung around more. It was hard to keep my spot. I had to hang on to a hammock hook to keep from sliding.

It must have been early morning when word came down that some of the lightstones on deck needed replacing. They burn out faster the darker it is, trying to make enough light to see by.

‘You could activate some down here,' said Wim. ‘Give them to the sailors to take up and put in the lanterns.'

I thought about it for a minute. The thing is though, those lightstones are my responsibility. All the magicians before me kept them safe. Not everyone understands how precious they are. And the sailors had enough else to worry about.

I went to the locker and grabbed the bag with all the stones that were ready and went up.

Right when I got up on deck, I didn't think I would be able to do it. It's not that I was scared, even though I was. It just seemed impossible – there was so much rain I couldn't see anything past it, and the wind was so loud it made me dizzy, and the deck was tilting and rolling and my brain just couldn't make my body understand