Short fiction complete, p.1
Short Fiction Complete, page 1
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Short Fiction Complete
P.E. Cunningham
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
Title Page
About P. E. Cunningham
Bibliography
Short Fiction Bibliography
Fiction Series
Healer
To Slay the Dragon
The Timeseer
Satisfaction Guaranteed
The Son of Walks Through Fire
Purpose
Mother’s Demon Helper
Circles
If You Can’t Stand the Heat . . .
A Little Magic
Car 17
Monkey See . . .
Snake in the Glass
Pat (P. E.) Cunningham was born in 1957 in New Jersey and grew up in Pennsylvania. She graduated college with a dgree in English and was editor and head writer of a weekly advertising newspaper for several years.
Raised on a diet of Star Trek and Marvel Comics, she naturally gravitated toward a career as a writer. She’s published in the science fiction, fantasy, and romance genres. She lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Slayer for Hire (2013)
SHORT FICTION BIBLIOGRAPHY
Healer, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1982
To Slay the Dragon, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1983
The Timeseer, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1984
Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1987
The Son of Walks Through Fire, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1988
Purpose, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1989
Mother’s Demon Helper, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Spring, April 1994
Circles, Adventures of Sword and Sorcery, August 1996
If You Can’t Stand the Heat . . ., Sword and Sorceress XIV, March 1997
A Little Magic, Sword and Sorceress XIX, January 2002
Car 17, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2007
Monkey See . . ., The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2008
Snake in the Glass, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 1, 2009
FICTION SERIES
Pteros
Healer
To Slay the Dragon
The Timeseer
Purpose
Healer
This is a first sale for P. E. (Pat) Cunningham, who lives in Pennsylvania and writes that she is a 25-year-old English Major, a closet Trekkie, and guardian to a 15-year-old Schnauzer who never learned to like dog food.
He was not in the cave again, nor was he with the other children taking their lessons from the Elders. He was not even at Justin’s clearing, listening to the old man’s stories. “Try the cliff top,” Justin suggested. “A lot of boys like to go up there when they’re ducking out of lessons.”
Dan found him there, up among the rocks where the pteros dozed, their ribbed wings outstretched to catch every scrap of warmth. Amid the surrounding green, gray, and brown hides of the sleeping reptiles the boy’s blond head, touched by sunlight, stood out like a bright beacon. He sat cross-legged with his back to Dan, oblivious to his father’s presence. He held a ptero hatchling’s tail tenderly in his hands.
The hatchling whined anxiously. “Here, it’s just a nick,” the boy murmured. “What happened, your nestbrother bite you?” The hatchling uttered a shrill, angry hiss. “Oh, your sister.” The boy chuckled. Now Dan was close enough to see the shallow triangle gash in the hatchling’s tail.
The boy bent low over the ptero. His hands moved. The tiny hatchling whimpered and sank its head between its jutting shoulders.
Dan stepped forward. “Benjamin.” The boy jumped. The hatchling squealed and bolted for the protection of its mother’s wings. Dan’s eyes flickered after it momentarily. Its tail was uniform green, clear of blemish.
Benjamin got to his feet. His eyes, a clear summer blue, met Dan’s in a steady gaze. His mother’s eyes, Dan thought, and winced. He steadied himself with effort. “And why aren’t you at your lessons?” he said.
“I—” Benjamin darted a glance at the hatchling, now safely hidden beneath a gray female’s wing. “He hurt. I could hear him all the way down at the altar. I wanted to help.”
“Some hatchling’s squawk isn’t reason enough for you to leave your lessons. If his injury is serious enough, the healer will look after him. You shouldn’t—”
“Healer!” Benjamin made a face. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Mother would never have allowed—”
“That’s enough!” Dan rasped. His hand constricted sharply on Benjamin’s wrist. The boy yipped once and fell silent. Several pteros started and raised their anvil heads. Their stares followed Dan as he hurried to the cliff edge, their golden eyes hard and accusing. You should not hurt him so, the voice of the mother ptero touched Dan’s mind. He is only a hatchling, and he means well.
“I know,” Dan muttered. He guided Benjamin to the vine ladder that stretched down the length of the cliff and motioned him onto it. Benjamin dutifully started the downward climb. The gray ptero whistled low thanks to him, and a little squeak of gratitude issued from beneath her left wing. Benjamin waved to them before his head dropped below the cliff’s edge.
Dan waited until Benjamin was well on his way before he began his own descent. He wished he could talk to his son as easily as the boy conversed with the pteros. But at times the boy seemed . . . strange. In some ways, Benjamin was as alien to his own people as the humans were to the pteros.
The last lesson for the day was history, and Benjamin hurried down the forest path to Justin’s clearing, hoping he was in time. He never voluntarily missed his history lessons, not only because he liked Justin, but also because of the role his family had played in the Chosen’s colonization of the Nest.
Doctor Noah Sanderson was the only healer to survive that horrible decimation of the colony of the Church of Progressive Christians, fresh off the starship from Earth. It was Noah who first deduced the secret of the Fever, the alien disease that killed two-thirds of the colonists and opened the minds of the others to the telepathic pteros. Together he and Justin led what was left of “God’s Chosen” to new homes in the cliff-caves, and a new way of life.
Benjamin’s mental image of his grandfather was a colorful picture drawn from the Elders’ stories. His actual memories of Noah were misty and unreal, an infant’s perception. Benjamin had not been a year old when Noah died and his healer’s implements passed to his daughter, Jessica.
Benjamin blinked rapidly as he trotted along the path. The memories of his mother, and of his mother’s death, were still sharp and stinging in his mind. Jessica the healer, who had worked with poisons since childhood, struck down by a rock snake’s bite. The bitter irony of it pained him. That, and the choice of her successor.
Her healer’s tools were Jeremiah’s now. Benjamin hissed like a ptero. The man was incompetent. So what if his father had been one of Noah’s aides? Jeremiah was not his father, and had none of his father’s skill. The Chosen could not help but benefit when Benjamin finally reached maturity and demanded to take over his family’s profession.
He scuffed to a halt. Voices rang up ahead.
This was not the chatter of children, but adult snarls and accusations. The voices were Justin’s, his ptero Zurn’s, and a third Benjamin could not immediately place. This voice was close to shouting. Benjamin edged closer and hid himself in the brush.
“Madness,” the voice said, “a senile old man’s rumblings. That’s how the Council will see it.”
“Most of them, maybe,” Justin admitted. “The others will see the possibility. At any rate, I feel they should be warned.”
“Against what? Some irrational fear—”
Not fear. Zurn’s telepathic voice, which had stopped Benjamin on the path, now stopped the unknown speaker. This is inevitable. You remember the older pteros. You saw how we were then: animals with mindspeech and little else, until your human minds awakened us. Our evolution is just beginning. What makes you think yours has ended?
“Evolution!” the man spat. “Our only ‘evolution’ came from the Fever. Now that we’re acclimated there won’t be any further changes.”
“But how can you be sure?” Justin said. “C’mon, Enoch, you know she’s right. Telepathy was just the start for us. God knows what else the Fever did to our genes, or what our minds have done to the pteros. You remember Est’s hatchling, surely.”
“No.”
“I’ll bet you don’t. Makes you jittery, doesn’t it—a hatchling that couldn’t put three words together, moving rocks by thought. We called that telekinesis back on Earth. No ptero’s ever had power like that, as anyone could tell you.”
“The hatchling died,” Enoch said, almost triumphantly.
And if it had not? Zurn asked. Suppose it had lived, and found a human with similar talents, and they bonded. What would we have then?
“A freak,” Enoch growled, “that would live no longer than Est’s damned hatchling. You’re not going to find your ‘new species’ among the Chosen, Justin. Human evolution’s gone as far as it’s going to go.”
That’s wh at the pteros thought, Zurn said, and look at us now.
Enoch was silent. “You disappoint me, Enoch,” Justin said. “I felt sure you’d back us on this.”
“I’m only telling you how the Council will react. We have enough fears already without you adding new ones.”
Bare footfalls thudded on the path, and Benjamin ducked down deeper into the brush. A lean, fuzzily bearded man stormed past. He was dressed in undyed leather; a long knife depended from a loop in his belt. Enoch was leader of the Chosen’s hunters and highly influential in Council. Justin must be worried indeed if he would seek out Enoch’s support.
There were other voices on the path now, and snatches of children’s laughter. Benjamin climbed out of the brush and leaned against a tree. He made a show of searching his boots for stones until his fellow classmates arrived, then ambled into the clearing with the others.
Justin sat on a stump near the remains of his cookfire, muttering nasty things about the Council and rubbing his hands as if they pained him. Benjamin looked at him in awe and thought: this man was born on another world. Justin was all that was left of the Chosen’s original colony. He moved more slowly these days, but his grin was still undimmed. His Hair was solid white now, minus the few gray streaks it had sported last year, and he had given up trying to trim his beard, letting it wander across his face where it would. The confinement of the caves terrified him. So he lived and gave his lessons in the clearing. He was beloved by everyone, humans and pteros alike, a living legend.
Zurn squatted at his side, resting heavily on her triangle-tipped tail. Her hide was a deep, rich gold, only slightly paler than the color of her eyes. Her neck had grown thicker over the past long months, her claws blunted, and she no longer took to the sky as readily as before. She too was growing old.
“About time you thoughtless twits decided to show up,” Justin growled at them good-naturedly. He massaged his fingers again. There was something wrong with Justin’s hands, Benjamin thought, something in the joints. If he could only touch them, he could—
But Justin was ready to start the lecture, waving them to take seats on the ground. The children arranged themselves before him; sharp-eyed Zurn stood by to prod the inattentive. Benjamin took a seat with the rest, but though his mind absorbed the lesson, his eyes were fixed on Justin’s hands.
The Chosen’s history on the Nest was brief. At odds with the government because of their religious beliefs, the Church of Progressive Christians had gotten a charter to settle on one of Earth’s colony worlds. The planet they were sent to was lush and green, similar to Earth in her prehistoric days, before the rise of man. The world had no native intelligent life—or so the scouts believed.
The colonists had indeed thought the pteros were mere animals. The huge, anvil-headed reptiles, named for the long-extinct Terran pteranodon, showed no signs of curiosity or intelligence—at least none that the Terrans could interpret as such. The survivors of the Fever, those with the highest psi ratings, soon learned better. Now the symbiotic sharing of lives with the pteros was the only way of life the Chosen knew. Earth was just a myth to them. Justin, who knew mankind’s history only too well, had taken it upon himself to keep the myth alive, in the hopes of avoiding repeated mistakes some time in their world’s far future.
Today’s lesson was supposed to be on Earth’s history of atomic wars, but the children managed to divert him into telling them about the mysterious mother planet. “Do the Terrans know we’re here?” Naomi asked.
Justin shrugged. “I doubt it. They probably think we’re dead. We haven’t tried to contact them in quite a while.”
“Will they ever come here to look for us?”
“I doubt that too. After all, it’s been sixty years. I think we’re safe.”
Nevertheless, Naomi cast worried glances at the sky, as if she expected to see starships instead of pteros there. Her younger sister, Abigail, timidly raised her hand. “Is it true there were no pteros on Earth?”
Justin grinned at that. “ ’Fraid so. Hasn’t been anything like a ptero on Earth for a couple of million years.”
“That’s horrible!” Naomi cried. “Who did you talk to?”
“Well . . . ourselves, mostly.”
A hellish world indeed, Zurn observed.
The class exploded in laughter. “And on that note,” Justin said, with a raking glare at his ptero, “we’d better call a halt. It’s dinnertime anyway. Go on now, off with you.”
Giggling, the children scrambled to their feet and disappeared through the forest. Benjamin rose last and started toward Justin.
“Hey, Ben.” Cain, a chunky, hard-eyed boy a year older than he, grabbed his arm. “There’s no lessons tomorrow. Let’s go exploring out on the plains.” He tightened his grip. “How about it?”
“Yeah, OK,” Benjamin said absently. His attention was focused on Justin’s hands. The moment Cain released him he went to the Historian. “Justin?”
“Eh? Oh, hello, Benjamin.” Benjamin nodded to him and patted Zurn’s beak in greeting. She purred and offered the side of her neck to be scratched. “You’re getting big,” Justin said. “Shooting up like a weed. What are you now, twelve?”
“Thirteen. I wanted to ask you—your hands—”
“My hands?” Justin held up the offending extremity. “What happened, I grow another finger? The water here does strange things to you—”
“No. They seemed to hurt you. I wondered. . . .”
“Hurt?” Justin’s lips stretched in a grimace. “Yes, they do ache a bit. Touch of arthritis. Nothing serious. Comes from being old.”
“Let me see,” Benjamin said. “I think I can help.”
Puzzled, Justin held out his hand. Benjamin took it between his own. Yes, now he could feel the throbbing in the joints. He pressed lightly, in the manner he had taught himself, and pictured the way Justin’s hands should be. Then he set about correcting the error. The other hand was not as bad; that one took only a minute. Benjamin released it and stepped back. “Better now?”
Justin made a hard fist, first with one hand, then the other. Zurn sucked air with a sharp, inward hiss. “Benjamin,” Justin said. His voice was strange. “What did you do?”
The boy shrugged. “Something was wrong with your hands. I fixed them.” He glanced at the sky and was startled by its dullness. “I’ve got to go; Father will be looking for me. Bye.”
Benjamin waved and raced up the path. The incident had already slipped from his mind. But Justin stared after him for a long time. His hands continued to form and unform fists.
The day dawned brisk and bright, with only a faint foreshadowing in the air of the sweltering heat to come. Cain and his followers, their lunches in leather packs strapped to their backs, set out for the plains. Helpful solos, pteros without a human partner, carried the little expedition over the forest and foothills to their destination. The children thanked them and bid them return to the cliffs. They would have no trouble finding transportation home; there were always pteros around.
Cain’s four companions trailed him as he struck out along a deer path skirting the foothills: Abigail, treading carefully beneath Naomi’s protective eye; nervous, fair-haired Mark; and Benjamin. “Where are we going?” Naomi demanded.
“Hunt for horses,” Cain said, holding up a plaited grass rope. “Bet I can catch one with this.”
“Bet you can’t. They’re too fast for you. Why didn’t you ask one of the solos to stay behind?”
“It’s no fun on pteroback. You have to catch ’em yourself.” He tugged the rope to test its strength, and smiled in satisfaction. “I’ll catch one—maybe two. You watch.”
Naomi sniffed archly, unconvinced. Benjamin kept his own doubt unvoiced. He was familiar with the ponysized, three-toed horses that lived in the forests and plains. They were shy and elusive as deer, but fought like wolves when cornered. He hoped he would not be called upon to fix any bites, or bones bruised or broken by kicks.
Mark stopped abruptly, searching the wind. “Something’s made a kill up ahead. I smell blood.”
Instantly the children froze. Mark was being trained as a hunter, and his nose was especially keen. “What is it?” Abigail asked, trembling. “It’s not an allosaur, is it?”
