Well, I’ve had a conference with my editor, and as Becoming Terran is not merely eligible for both the Hugo and the Nebula, but is being submitted for a couple of other big-name awards, I’ve been given my marching orders. More social media presence, and… I’ll be blogging far more frequently. Tuesdays, I’m starting to post from the beginning of Becoming Terran; Thursdays, I’ll be doing the same for 11,000 Years.
I think I’m supposed to say enjoy, and do tell your friends.
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Becoming Terran
Francoise
Chapter: Foundlings
The sky was a hard, hot blue with nothing more than faint haze on the horizon, the air dry and dusty to match, and the grass around the hotel brown in patches, the water supply having been irregular for weeks. The young Fulani woman stood near the locked chain-link fence, looking across fields to the distant hills, and smelled the occasional stink of the oil pumpjacks from the fields. Her sister, five years younger, had been brought out with the other laundry workers, and the girl held onto her trying to be brave, only the occasional sniffle revealing her fear. Behind them the crowd, a few oilfield workers scattered among the rest of the hotel staff, stood closer to the building. They smelled of sweat and fear as well, the occasional burst of gunfire echoing in the air. Rebel troops had come in first thing in the morning, having taken the oil field and the services, as well as the hotel, herded them all together and out, locked them into the fenced area, then ignored them. They had been standing or sitting for hours and the north African sun was hot, even in the winter.
The shooting quieted down late in the morning. Another few hours, and she saw a white man being shown around by one of the rebel officers, and was flanked by another white man and an Asian, clearly with him, and a rebel trooper. His clean, dark hair was neatly cut over a thin face with a pencil mustache, a face that was neither kind nor gentle, with hardness inevery line. They came close, and the rebel officer pointed at the people behind the fence. “What shall we do with them?”
She had seen men in the hotel who were hard, who had let greed lead them to accept offers they should not have, and took a chance. She stepped to the fence, leaving her sister behind. “Please, m’sieur, water? Toilet?”
The man looked at her dismissively, began to turn back to the rebel
officer, then did a double take, and stared at her, a tall, slender African woman with a classical oval face and high cheek bones. Finally, in badly accented French, he said, “You can pee in the dirt.”
He didn’t move. Staring back, she realized that she had only once or twice seen someone dressed in clothes that fit so perfectly, and both of them were important people. With that, she bent and reached under her hotel uniform skirt, pulled down her panties and dropped them, stepping out carefully. Then, carefully, deliberately, she pulled up her skirt, exposing herself to him, and incidentally to the men around him, thrust her pelvis forward and pissed through the fence, forming a crude heart in the sandy ground, then let her skirt fall back to her knees. There was some murmuring behind her, but the man ignored the officer, the rest of the crowd, and kept staring through her performance. Finally, a minute or two later, he broke eye contact with a clear effort. “Get the hotel people back in, they’ll be needed. Secure the oilfield workers,” he told the officers. “Clean her up, and bring her to me in the hotel office.”
Two hours later, dressed in a businesswoman’s suit found in a suitcase from the checkroom, she was led into the office.