2
dering the country roads around Ottawa.
I have yet another short novel of the Earth Empire (somewhat longer than Zero-Option) that I hope to put on the Internet at a later date. That one takes place during the height of the war, sometime after Zero-Option but well before Choices.
For now, however, I offer you the following short story. Just under twenty thousand words, I hope you'll find it a quick and stimulating read.
Happy reading!
Lindsay H.F. Brambles, Ottawa, 2007
1.
Whenever I see the panai, I am reminded of Kieara. Reminded of how she changed a world. Or worlds--hers and mine. I close my eyes and see her face, and above the chanting of the crowd, I hear her voice. A soft exhalation of words. Calm. Measured and reasoned. Not at all consumed with the impassioned zeal that one might have expected of someone rebelling against a centuries old way of life. A sharp contrast to the shrill and often violent denunciations of those who believed in all that she did not.
Before Kieara I'd never seen a panai--though, as with all offworlders new to Tradur, I had heard the rumors long before I'd arrived. Had heard them, and of course had quickly dismissed them as nothing more than xenophobia. And yet now, because of Kieara, those rumors have become a dreaded reality. I see the evidence of them before me, day after day, hour by hour. They haunt me, appearing before me as one long and seemingly endless chain of enraged humanity moving up the wide avenue like a deranged army, swaying to a music only they can hear as they wave their fists in the air and shout defiance at the guarded buildings of the offworlder embassies. Often, from the windows of the Federation's mission, I have stood and watched as they pause and gather outside the gates, pressing against one another in a suffocating mass, remaining thus just long enough to hurl their vitriol and fling their ineffectual stones against the energy shields that protect the building during each long hour of Tradur's thirty