In a distant future, intergalactic space-travel happens in the blink of an eye. Our protagonist has visited hundreds of planets, yet she has never found that which she was sent to look for: a viable alternative to Earth. Arriving on Terra-II, however, it seems that her luck is beginning to change. But in the city of Carcosa, all is not what it seems...
In a distant future, intergalactic space-travel happens in the blink of an eye. One young astronaut has been tasked with finding a viable alternative to Earth, in order that humanity can be saved. Arriving on Terra-II, things at first seem promising. However, in the city of Carcosa, all is not what it seems...
Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!
Episode #3 out Sunday 21st February 2021 (21.02.21)
Links and Socials:
Original Artwork by Anna Ferrara
Anna's Instagram: @giallosardina
Anna's Portfolio: https://annaferrara.carbonmade.com/
"Supernova Choir 1" by In.Sintesi is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) Creative Commons license. Read more about it here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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Welcome to Stories From The Hearth, the podcast for tall tales and fantastical fiction, short stories the likes of which you might once have heard a wandering bard tell, to a group of villagers, gathered around the fire. Explore the history of storytelling in bonus series The Wandering Bard, or escape your surroundings with a brand-new story, written and performed by me, Calum Bannerman, on the last Sunday of every month. Historical, romantic, science fiction, or fantasy; these are tales to transport you, doorways into another world…
Hi, I’m Cal, and if you’re new to Stories from the Hearth, there’s a few things you might like to know. This podcast is an experimental artistic space, kind of like a painter’s studio or a DJ’s headphones – it is a place where I can try new things, make art, and share it with others in the hope that it might bring some comfort, value, and escapism to their lives. It is also a means to an end; after all, it has been my dream ever since I was wee to tell stories for a living; just like the wandering bards of old, who I read about in my history books and fantasy novels. Each episode of Stories from the Hearth features a stand-alone work of fiction, performed to an immersive soundscape, which allows you to lose yourself in the tale. Usually, the stories are short enough to be contained within one episode, but a handful of them are split over two. If this particular episode isn’t your jam, don’t worry – there are heaps of stories to choose from, and no two are the same. This podcast is also a safe and inclusive space for all, which means that its stories actively embrace queerness and otherness, right alongside more mainstream walks of life. If you’re enjoying it, then please do tell your friends and review it on your favourite podcast app, Spotify, or iTunes. If you’re really enjoying it, then you can support Stories from the Hearth on Patreon and help yourself to early access, behind-the-scenes insights, bonus content, physical copies of the stories, shout-outs and much much more. Just head to patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast or hit the link down below. And speaking of shout-outs, a huge thanks to these fine folks who help make Stories from the Hearth possible: my warmest thanks to Nick, Vivian, Jen, Charlie, Rob, Sandy, Jane, Ruathy and Mully.
Now, come and gather round the fire, for I’ve got a story to tell. This is Episode Two: Carcosa.
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74,970,000 km2 of prime, unadulterated, unpolluted, unoccupied, extra-terrestrial rock.
That’s how her story would begin. It wasn’t a catchy opening line, of that much she was aware. But she was an inter-planetary astrophysicist-cum-intrepid explorer of the anti-matter age, not a writer. More importantly, she was the first Homo sapiens to set foot on Terra-II, so they’d publish her memoirs if she wrote them with a bleeding potato, and they’d like it.
That’s if she survived.
First rule of primary disembarkation on new celestial body: scan for air-borne toxins; oxygen levels; strength of gravity; UV radiation levels; presence of water particles; temperature; general signs of life. The scan would take about five minutes.
Funny, she thought. The United Nations Programme for Interplanetary Refuge (UNPIR) could design vehicles fast and durable enough to transport her here from Terra-I – three-quarters of the way across the known cosmos – in an instant, yet they had still to build a scanner which worked faster than one of those ‘microwaves’ used to take, to heat rations.
At least, she shrugged, it would give her time to admire the view.
She’d seen a picture once of a great, grey-green expanse; horizon punctured by pin-prick pine trees and a distant blue mountain-range, cradled by the light of a setting sun. Terra-II reminded her of that very scene; except, without the trees. Granted, there was no sun here either, only the smallest pink moon, which illuminated a land free of mountains. Come to think of it, she’d only recalled that picture for its distinctive grey-green grass – only on Terra-II it was all grey, and the grass was gone but for patches of sickly yellow shrub, clinging to life in patches, four or five yards apart in every direction.
The terrain undulated as you might expect any landmass to, dipping to her left – perhaps ten or twenty miles away (ground-level visibility was excellent) – into a low valley; and on her right rising slightly, before curving with the sphere of gravity.
She bent down, stretched a gloved hand to test the planet’s surface. With a curious, though not entirely surprised raising of eyebrows, she observed the ground ripple at her touch. On further examination, she found that if she hit the earth with a clenched fist, it felt like punching the side of her spaceship; yet with a gentler touch, the earth was reduced to the consistency of damp mud. She sighed. This could prove troublesome.
Then again, she’d discovered less-promising geologies in her time, and at least this mud-rock wasn’t the strangler-vines of TF-III, or its sister-planet’s molten rain. Had she forgotten so soon the gravitational anomalies of 143-Jehanne, which acted like ultra-sensitive trip mines? No. Mud-rock; she guessed she could work with mud-rock.
Lost to the reveries of past voyages, she almost didn’t recognise her scanner’s completion tone, pulsating at her hip. Like something out of a 20th century dial-up-broadband nightmare, the results pixelated into clarity at a painful pace. She held little hope. As confident as UNPIR had been about the planet (they had named it Terra-II, after all), and as overjoyed as she had been to bag first dibs at exploration, this particular explorer of the anti-matter age had engaged in too many failed missions to put much faith in her current one.
She calmed her breathing, and read.
TEMPERATURE ……….…….. 89.6˚F
Good.
UV RAD INDEX ……….….……. 5.4
To be expected, ozone layer’s not been ripped to shreds yet. Good.
H2O PRESENCE (ATMOS) ….. 0.5%
H2O PRESENCE (SURFACE) .. 2.2%
Not ideal, but operable. Get some more plant life in here and it’ll balance out soon enough.
GRAVITY STRENGTH .. 4.314m/s2
Nothing some standard issue anti-grav boots won’t fix.
O2 PRESENCE (ATMOS) ………...
This was the big one, the one which let her down most often.
O2 PRESENCE (ATMOS) ………...
Oh, come the f- on.
O2 PRESENCE (ATMOS) ………...
O2 PRESENCE (ATMOS) ………...
O2 PRESENCE (ATMOS) ………...
O2 PRESENCE (ATMOS) .. 20.95%
Holy Mother of Our Good Lords Gagarin, Aldrin and Armstrong.
She dropped her scanner to the ground. It clunked dully, like the expensive chunk of silicone it was.
Holy shit.
Those were Earth levels of oxygen. Like, perfectly replicated Earthen levels of oxygen gas. This was it. This was her ticket out, her ticket to the stars.
Hands working of their own accord, she heard the hiss of neck-clasps on her helmet let go their suction. Her visor and its breathing apparatus click-click-clacked back, exposing her pale cheeks to the slightest of breezes – it reminded her of a cold autumnal morning back home. She inhaled deeply. The air was so fresh it raged against her athletic lungs. Her head rushed dizzy with the adrenaline.
holy shit
Void of visor, the barren expanse in front no longer looked so barren, nor so far from the beauty of that recollected picture. The light of the pink moon, no longer dulled by the thick Perspex of her helmet, danced across Terra-II’s mud-rock ethereal. Floral and soft, a spritz of perfume. And like perfume, something gently abrasive touched the back of her nostrils, something she’d known before but couldn’t quite place.
Her mind was reeling, now, lost to wild fantasies of fame. She imagined twenty-foot holograms back on Terra-I, advertising her own-brand stim-pax; pre-launch appearances on global talk shows; aeronautical schools of offline colleges named in her honour. And all thanks to this: the discovery of a viable planet – new-found elegance of extra-terrestrial tundra, a speck of impossibly important dust against the ever-expanding universe.
Lost in thought for a second time that day, she heard the crackled siren call of her scanner a fraction too late.
In short bursts of whining bleeps, the grounded scanner called to her. Now here was something she could place: that sound, she’d heard it before.
With a sharp exhale she blew the clinging dust from the screen and strained to read against the moon’s reflection.
!!! WARNING !!!
PRESENCE OF AIRBORNE TOXINS (ATMOS):
HYDROGREN CYANIDE (HCN) ………2900 mg/m3
!!! WARNING !!!
The scanner fell once more from her hand. She had not meant to drop it, but she no longer had the strength to grip. The something that had burned softly at the back of her nostrils now coursed through her bloodstream, smothering cell after cell as it went. Cyanide, melting and remoulding her haemoglobin like a demonic scientist, constricting her breath; one final sliver of oxygen consumed at the last to feed her optic nerves a rapidly distorting image.
From the horizon to the pin-prick of pink light where the moon used to be, the night sky erupted in white – scorched by the heat of two giant suns, rising above the face of the planet. And above their magnificence – directly above the point at which she stood, now slumping, slumped, now fallen – emerged, as a mirage from a heatwave, a murder of black stars.
She could feel a lump of twisting grey matter writhe about her skull, pulling from the bone with a scream; and before the whites of her eyes eclipsed her pupils, she witnessed one last transformation in the landscape.
Out across the plains – as far as one might go before slipping off the edge of this second world; along the line where pine trees should have stood – rose one-hundred-feet-tall the walls of a gated city. Above them, the towers and rolling terraces of royal palaces soared, surrounded by churches, courtyards, houses. It was beautiful. It was all that could have been. All that should have been. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Her cheeks blossomed cherry red, her eyes collapsed; she let out a last rasp of strangled air. Inside closed lids she saw the words she’d come to dread, clear as day, bold in that oh-so-patronising red-on-black. They read:
GAME OVER
*
The UNPIR standard-issue Hyper-Reality Exploration headset hissed, as seamlessly it folded back into the wall compartment. The girl on the bed swept sweat-damp hair from her forehead. Using the nubs of her knuckles, she wiped her cheeks dry. She was crying, quietly, yet heavily enough that her face was wet again in seconds.
Outside her one window she watched fires rage across the city. They were perpetual, exuding toxic fumes and minimal heat, day in, day out. Infrequently one might glimpse the blue flashes of UNPIR launches – streaks of unattainable hope scarring the sky, reminders to the city-dwellers of their place in this world. Indeed, as the girl wiped her eyes again, and peered into descending night, another launch was made east of the city walls.
That should be me, she thought, willing away the voices in her head: mocking, teasing, disappointed.
As it flew, trace magnesium from the rocket thrusters illuminated big, black graffiti letters sprawled across the concrete boundaries. They were the same as those she saw in her dreams:
WELCOME TO CARCOSA
She shivered, recoiling at the memory branded against her frontal lobes. A city, newly constructed, on a world, newly discovered.
A noise from next door broke her concentration. In the room directly adjacent to hers, her younger brother swore angrily. He was seven. Sharing sounds of despair or short-lived victory through thin plasterboard walls was pretty much the only thing they shared, the only contact they enjoyed. She couldn’t even picture his face anymore, though she remembered how he looked with an HRE headset on. She missed him.
It was improbable that such a feeling was reciprocated, however. He had been born after Lights Out. Never known community, nor family – not the way she knew them. Why should he miss me? she thought, with a feeling like pinching numbed skin.
The girl curled up against the draft, seeping in through cracked glass. She drew a coarse blanket around her, clamped one side of her face to the pillow, and finger-plugged her other ear to drown out the wails, crawling jungle-like from the streets below.
The nights on Terra-I were long. After the broken promise of Terra-II, tonight would surely prove longer.
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Thank you for listening to this month’s Story From The Hearth. Thanks also for bearing with the poorer audio quality of these early episodes. I was younger and a podcasting noob, what more can I say? If you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, and website via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Additional episodes in The Wandering Bard historical mini-series will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.