Friday 9 September 2016

Story: The Glove, XV

( Part XIV , XVI ABORTED )

Megan's Story

"There are things we weren't told when we were growing up. Nor were our parents, or probably our grandparents too. It's not easy to understand, or it wasn't for me, but this world is... crooked. We were one colony once, and then supposedly we split up into two cities to forestall some crucial disaster, which never happened.

Suppose for a moment, that we were wrong, and that crisis did happen, and that it was covered up over time.

There's a town up North called Baleine, where some researchers discovered a buried ship which we assumed to be similar to those that the founders of Ganymede used to get here, but they were baffled by the lack of anything like an engine. Where did the motive power come from? One day, they turned up at the site and discovered that the ship had vanished. Completely. It was nowhere to be seen, with only a smooth indentation in the ground, as if it had been scooped out with a giant ladle. All the records were lost. Even the piper records were wiped.

Six months ago, I encountered a strange man, claiming to be lost and confused. He had wandered in from the countryside, wearing some pipes and traditional Burgh costume. I led him to an inn, and explained the situation to the landlaird, who took him in. When I went in for a drink the next day, the man had departed after spinning tails of space flights on the back of a comet, and being shot around the moon from a giant cannon. They couldn't make head nor tail out of any of it! The landlaird surrepetitiously passed me a book. It was called 'Off On A Comet'.

Later, in the privacy of my own chambers, I looked up 'Off On A Comet' on the colony database. There was no trace of it. It was a ghost form another world, a story by some man called Jules Verne, about a soldier and some companions whose bit of land was knocked off their world into space on a fantastical journey as part of a comet. The book simply didn't exist!

The man was never seen again, but I kept the novel in a secure place. The spaceship was never found, but the people still remembered. Things were being kept from us. Maybe they were small things, and maybe they were large. A few people banded together, or conspired to collect all of these incidents.

This calendar year, to date, we have catalogued one thousand two hundred and seventy incidents of interference and unusual events. Seven hundred were attributed to the Pipers themselves. The shooting here will in all likelihood be one of them. We're accumulating a small library of texts left behind by strange vagabonds which are for all intents and purposes apocryphal.

Something is going on here. Something secret. Are you interested?"

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