8 - Laugh or Scream?

 A quick note to readers:  I'm going to be shifting all the first person present bits to third person.  Blogger was out tonight so I will be doing that gradually over the weekend.

_________________

 

Hara put the lin’d note down and stared out through the mist curtain that made everything outside pale and hazy looking.  She wasn’t sure whether to take this ‘Adjon Komeni’ seriously enough to be offended or if she should just laugh.

This man had been using the much despised tech to reach every single person in Lainz and Milar.  The lin had been spreading like wildfire and she was certain that the officials in Hippefrey and Rumon and Nadumon had private boxes all their own already.  This was something that she sure of.

Stepapa hadn’t said anything about having spies, but pa had taught her that everyone had them, so the court was probably full of people spying on each other for various reasons... and stealing ideas and things.

The thing the other countries didn’t realize was that Pa and Stepapa really wanted the lin to spread.  Pa said it’s all a plot.  If they pretended that Lainz were trying to keep it to themselves, that practically guaranteed everyone would be secretly scrambling to get it.

But the lin... this one man with his florid style of writing... it sounded more like he was dictating.  He even said in his letter that he had someone scribe it for him.  Probably so he didn’t sully himself with this awful ‘learning to read and write’ business.  He seemed to be the spokesman for a handful of others, equally awful. There were the Komeni women, also dictating things about how to be properly womenful or some such rot.  It sounded a lot like it was said by him and they just put their names to it.

Hara just could not fathom the depth of deliberate misunderstanding that they had to maintain.  There were other women writing for the lin – one of them was Ky’s ma – and they held very different ideas.  It was easier to read them than to read even one of Komeni’s letters, or anything from that group.  She often felt like she was growing stupider, just listening.

She shook her head and set the page back into the hopper.  She actually had schooling to get back to.  Pa had turned her mandery lessons into assignments focussed on getting a message out to the greater world.

Prime wouldn’t hesitate to try and kill them again, if they came out of hiding, that was clear from the attack that was fading, but fading very slowly, from people’s immediate memory.  There were reports of deaths in the city that could still be from pa’s attempt at eavesdropping.  Shashi had people investigating those.

Outside, she could hear the Rasheem guarding her door, talking to his relief, though the words were indistinct.  She could hear them laugh at something.  It was so odd, to be considered so different that she needed guarding at all. At home she was just another youngster.

The model on her desk was an elaborate mock-up of a gigantic dragon-fly, big enough to carry at least one person.  Her thought had been that since they could obviously put themselves into the air, surely humans could build one like that. Prime owner had flyers.  Flyers that could get them up to the moon and beyond.

She set the parameters to what stresses would be on a full sized machine, putting in the numbers for the lightest metal and the finest silk the bees could lay down. It looked good, sitting on the desk.

Her worker bees flew up and settled in her hair, settling down as if they were jewellry and she took a breath.  “Let’s try this,” she said to herself.  “Half-speed,” and touched the on-pad. The wings began to rise, even as the legs under the craft began to crumple. Her dragon-flyer tipped to one side and both wings folded in half under their own weight.  It tumbled, still trying to fly thrashing and strewing pieces.  She put out her hand just in time to catch the body as it fell off her desk, bits scattered all across the stone surface.

She tabbed it off so that it quit beating itself to pieces against her hand and laid it down gently.  “Hmmm.”  It had seemed like such a reasonable step, to try and fly to the top of the air and then somehow push off from the air toward the moon but she was obviously missing a lot of information. 

“Endarken.  I don’t know whether to laugh or just scream in frustration.”