The Chinchilla Of Hope

*I really have no excuse for this. Not a single smidgen of a little bit, of a suggestion of an excuse. Except that my fans — you know them, right? — can’t spell (Maybe that’s why they like me?) Back before I gave in and started referring to the slipper I threaten them with as a chancla because everyone knows the Spanish word, I used the Portuguese word. As in, Portuguese moms are experts in the art of the slipper as well, but they call it a chinelo. My fans rapidly started threatening each other with Chinchillas. From this we evolved to threatening people with Chinchillas of hope when they were depressed. And from there, well, heaven help me, the plot bunny Hatchery in my head took over. So, below is the story of the Chinchilla of Hope. This one goes out to Foxfier and Ian Bruene and Amy B. And Holly Frost and a few other reprobates I’m forgetting just now.

I’m writing it in the name of giving y’all something free at least every other day while doing the Winter Fundraiser. It makes it feel more…. organic. Like sitting down in the market place and telling a story, with a bowl for coins upfront. Anyway, this is the fundraiser, and the link, there’s a Give Send Go for the Winter Fundraiser and well, if you need anything else including a snail mail address and the why and all, please go here. And now sit back and enjoy the short story!- SAH*

The Chinchilla of Hope

by Sarah A. Hoyt — Complete Short Story

Some places are not entirely bad to wash up in when your luck finally runs out.

You can do pretty well on no money, no job and no self respect in Far Itravine. No one much cares if you go naked on the beach all the days of your life, and the vegetation runs enough to the kind humans can eat that you’ll be well fed, if you just add a fish or two now and then.

Then there was this place — Gabriel Ciriac remembered it fondly — where you could live like a king while doing absolutely nothing but sleeping and eating. In Moriando in the Deep Sirens Cluster, they held destitute beggars as being sacred. Gabriel had no idea how such a system of beliefs had even come to exist, much less why anyone would believe in it. Except that Moriando was such a prosperous world, they rarely got to exert their imperative of giving charity to the needy. So any needy that washed upon the shores of its massive spaceport became the recipient of everyone’s charity. At once. Had Gabriel gone ashore there, that last time before anyone stopped hiring him, he’d have lived very well indeed. Maybe well enough to forget how useless he was.

But no. Like a piece of space flotsam, he’d washed ashore in the world of Chronydia, in the Weeping Weaver system, in the Lost Io Constellation.

It was a world of granite and iron, a world of dire necessities. Started as a colony to build spaceships for further exploration of the universe, it had been left hopeless, ruined, as the jump points moved on for further discoveries had moved on, and it was no longer viable to build spaceships here. The spaceship yards closed, leaving the landscape littered with half constructed ships, from scouts only ten times the size of any human house to the colony ships that looked like palaces on their side in the snow.

Oh, it snowed all the time. At least in the part of the world near the spaceport. There must be other parts because there was food, at least some of it, so some part of this forsaken planet must be used for agriculture.

Not that Gabriel had ever seen it, or was likely to ever see it. His life was in the city built in the wreckage of the ship yards, and he’d found what jobs he could, to keep body and soul together. It was here, after completing a run, that he’d found himself unemployable by any other ships as a navigator.

It wasn’t the drink, though he’d drank enough at bustling ports, when he landed with a purse full of coins and stories of exotic worlds. And it wasn’t the women, though there had been many, blond and dark haired, short and tall, and all colors of the races of Earth, plus some of the exotics, like the purple of Artmadon in the Far Borneo Constellation. All beautiful, in his bed and on his arm. All delightful. Some delightful enough for him to have half formed plans of maybe, some day, when he retired.

But he didn’t expect a single incident, a bad calculation, and suddenly finding himself denied his one job, the one job he could do. The job that had brought him women and wine, and also a sense of pride and purpose.

He did what he could. Back there, before navigator school, before the complicated calculations of space and time to work the jump points, before he’d been certified and served with distinction in a dozen different ships, he’d been the son of a colonist farmer, on a hard scrabble planet. He remembered his father telling him, “A man earns his keeping.”

When it became obvious no one would hire him to pilot a ship out of forsaken Chronydia, Gabriel had turned his mind and his hands to finding work, well before his money ran out. He’d done the accounting for the barely profitable establishments around the spaceport: diners, and various repair shops, and what were probably brothels, but advertised themselves as companionship clubs. None of them paid very well, because few ships came into the spaceport, but they paid something. When there was no accounting to be done, he’d worked a smelting the glassteel to change the carapaces of never finished ships into makeshift residences. He’d carried packages. He’d cleaned. He’d worked briefly at a laundry.

But now it was five years later. His clothes were in tatters. His savings had run out. As he left his job — an accounting one, in a miserable warehouse on the outskirts of the inhabited district — Gabriel realized two things: one that what he’d been paid wasn’t enough to buy a meal, much less a bed for the night; the other that unless his calculations were very wrong — and they’d never been wrong but once — that tonight was Christmas eve.

The wind whipped icy snow in his face, and he walked as far in the shadow and protection of the glassteel structure next to him — a warehouse of some sort — pulling the rag that had once been a Royal College of Navigators jacket around himself. He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t going to add cowardice and whining to his descent into hell. He was going to find a place to sit that was protected from the bitter wind and ice. It wouldn’t be warmed, and his clothes wouldn’t protect him enough. He’d be dead by morning. But if he could mitigate the bitter weather somewhat, he could maybe fall asleep, and slip quietly into a sleep from which he’d never wake.

The people of Chronydia weren’t unkind. But all of them were losing a battle with inevitable starvation, and there wasn’t anything to spare for a stranger.

He found what he was looking for in a junction between two walls of an enormous abandoned ruin of a ship. It created a niche, and he wedged himself into it, his back to the building. It was cold, very cold, but not so cold that he couldn’t close his eyes and dream of his parents farmhouse. On Christmas his father bought a couple litters of cheap wine, and they’ d spice it and sugar it, warming it over the fire. And his mother made cookies with lard and flour and precious sugar and spices. After their simple dinner, his parents and his siblings would sit around the fire and eat and drink. He wondered if his siblings were alive. He knew his parents had died, within a year of each other. He’d gone back for the funerals but not stayed. He didn’t know if Michael, Paul, Felix, Joanna and little Amelia still lived. It was ten years at least. If they were still hardscrabble farmers in a world that had never been very good at providing for them, they might well have succumbed to famine. He should have checked on them while he had the money to help, see if one of their children qualified for navigator school. He’d always meant to, but he’d been flying back and forth across the universe. And now was too late. And they’d never even know what he’d become of him.

He banished the sadness. In his last few hours, forget the regrets. Instead, he imagined in detail the warmth of the fire, the taste of the cookies, the consolation of the spiced wine.

“Excuse me, I seek a Navigator to hire!” The voice was high, like a little girl’s, but it sounded unbelievably smug.

It took Gabriel a while to open his eyes. They felt as if they were frozen shut. And then when he did, he realized he hadn’t. Not really. He was hallucinating this, and his mind was losing coherence as he died. Had to be.

He had heard of chinchillas once. read about them in an Earth book, that had a picture. They looked like cute little mice drawn by a gifted artist who enhanced the cuteness. Only this one was the size of a ten year old child, and wore a space jumpsuit, with a lot of weird insignias in it.

It twitched its nose at Gabriel, in what felt, somehow, like a smile, “Ah. You’re awake. The honorable spaceport master said that you were the only navigator for hire in Chronydia right now.”

Which was true, insofar as all the other ones either got hired very quickly, or hadn’t been balked of their last payment and had money to get a ticket elsewhere. Anywhere else. Gabriel blinked at the chinchilla. It twisted its little fuzzy hand-paws together in front of itself. “We know we’re not your kind, but please sir. Our navigator died, and we cannot liftoff without one.”

Did Chinchillas cry? Because this one looked like it was going to. Of course, it wouldn’t be a real chinchilla, not even an uplifted one. Just an alien who looked like a Chinchilla.

“Navigator died of a heart failure,” the Chinchilla said, and his hands twitched around each other. “It is not our doing. We’ll pay well. Please sir!” And it named an amount in Korythan florins that made Gabriel’s teeth ache. It was more than he’d ever been paid for a single trip. It was weird of the chinchilla to mention that they surely hadn’t killed their navigator, but then he didn’t know their culture, and anyway if they killed him, it was likely to be less harsh than dying of cold here. If this wasn’t all a dream anyway.

Gabriel sighed. He dragged himself up, though his joints seemed to be frozen, and then despite himself, heard himself tell the poor chinchilla the mistake he’d made, bringing an entire ship cargo of rare candies to this backwater planet, and ensuring they had to jump five times to get back on track, thereby wiping out all the profit from the trip for the owners of the ship. He told it all even as he heard himself rage inside his head, and ask himself if he was an idiot who wanted to die. The chinchilla listened, quietly, and seeming attentive — how did you know if a chinchilla was attentive anyway? — and then twitched its nose. “Ah, but everyone makes a mistake once. It doesn’t mean it will happen again. How many times did you not make a mistake before? And you’re our only hope. we can’t stay here while we wait for another navigator. The spaceport master said it could be months before a ship lands with a spare navigator, and my people have very specific food, a berry that only grows on our planet. We’ll die in two weeks. Please sir!”

What was Gabriel to do? If they wouldn’t be deterred by his appearance, or his history, he’d have to take the job.

He found himself going with the chinchilla, whose name was Sylfarian Poppyran De Toratim, to the ship her family group owned. The ship was small. No. The ship was short. It was designed for chinchilla height, which meant about half his height. So he had to walk everywhere bent in half, and decided it was easier to kneel on the command room floor, rather than sit in the tiny chair. But the chinchillas — there were twelve of them, and they were all very cute and sweet and tried to make him feel welcome — had gone to the trouble of getting his food. And they had the data, and told him where they needed to go. It was three jumps in five days. It would be easy.

The fact that it was easy was his clue that he was really still dreaming.

But when he got them to the Chinchilla world, he was acclaimed as a conquering hero, given a truly amazing amount of money. And what was more, a glowing recommendation.

And because the Chinchilla world was a hotbed of commerce — apparently the Chinchillas berry-food was a pleasant hallucinogenic for other species — he had immediate offers for several other jobs, should he wish to take one.

He’d tried to confess his miscalculation, but strangely no one had heard of his other ship or anything bad about him. Given how small the navigator community was, the only way no one would have heard was if the company itself had kept it quiet. And the only reason they’d have done that is if they’d fed him the wrong coordinates and wanted to go to Chronydia. He’d dropped some of his fantastic fee on an investigator to track the outfit on, and still dubious and a little afraid of a miscalculation somewhere, had taken one of the jobs.

Over the next two jobs, he’d worked close to Ceres his planet of origin, where he’d found his entire family thriving, and met all his nephews and nieces, still too small to go to navigator school. But he’d brought them gifts, and left his family a fund for emergencies, and a way to reach him should they need him.

While there, he heard from the investigators. The outfit who’d claimed he’d miscalculated had been trafficking in illegal drugs which sold better in places like Chronydia. They wanted an excuse to stop there, unnoticed and needed a Navigator who didn’t know better, and whom they need not pay.

And then he got on his next ship, and the next.

Eventually he did retire, and married a beautiful woman who had become his friend and understood him and what he wanted to do. Which was good, because by living far more frugally than they could afford to, they could put money aside into a fund, to save stranded navigators and to pay the way to navigator school for hopeful young and talented kids from the outer worlds.

The symbol of the organization showed a happy little Chinchilla alien. And the name was The Chinchilla of Hope.