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    Cultivar: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #25
    Cultivar: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #25
    Cultivar: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #25
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    Cultivar: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #25

    By Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

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    About this ebook

    This chapbook contains two tales from the Liaden Universe®: short story "Out of True," and novelette "The Rifle's First Wife."

    "Out of True" is a first contact story that takes place around the time of Balance of Trade and Trade Secrets.

    "The Rifle's First Wife" takes place soon after Korval's relocation to Surebleak, and explores the necessity for society to adjust to new realities, and a new culture.

    Both stories were previously published in A Liaden Universe® Constellation, Volume 3, from Baen Books, August 2015.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPinbeam Books
    Release dateNov 29, 2017
    ISBN9780996634663
    Cultivar: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #25
    Author

    Sharon Lee

    Sharon Lee has worked with children of various ages and backgrounds, including a preschool, a local city youth bureau, and both junior and senior high youth groups. She has a bachelor’s degree in sociology and also in psychology. Sharon cares about people and wildlife. She has been an advocate in the fight against human trafficking and a help to stray and feral animals in need.

    Read more from Sharon Lee

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      Book preview

      Cultivar - Sharon Lee

      NOTE

      Cultivar is a horticultural term that refers to combining cuttings from the best plants to create a new plant with the finest characteristics.

      A note on the existence of this echapbook. . .

      Those who have been following the Liaden Universe® and/or the career of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller for a time will know that we'd gotten into the habit of producing chapbooks – 8.5x5.5 inch saddle-stitched pamphlets of 40-60 pages.  The very first Lee-and-Miller chapbook was The Naming of Kinzel, collecting three fantasy stories featuring a well-meaning young wizard named Kinzel, which we published (it says here) in a limited run of 300, on June 20, 1987.

      Later, SRM Publisher was formed, for the purpose of publishing chapbooks containing Lee-and-Miller, Miller, Lee, and, later still, other authors, work.  This was in the age of paper; there were no ereaders, and computer screens were pretty rugged, still.  For seventeen years, starting in1995, SRM Publisher produced at least one chapbook a year, at Yule, containing one or two Liaden stories.

      SRM was closed in 2011, and we quickly realized that we weren't going to be able to break ourselves of writing short stories, so we established Splinter Universe (http://www.splinteruniverse.com), where we would occasionally publish splinters, i.e. pieces of stories or books that never came to completion, and also any new stories we happened to write.

      Ever since SRM closed its doors, there had been a call from the readers who had been with the universe and the authors through all the changes, for the return of chapbooks.  By now, technology had caught up with itself, so the authors began to produce echapbooks, on the model of the first paper chapbooks – and also republished all of SRMs backlist in ebook format.

      At that point, the traditional publisher of our novels, Baen Books, suggested that they collect our stories into what was at first to be one volume.  We agreed, realized that one volume wasn't going to be enough – so eventually A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volumes 1 and 2 were published from Baen. 

      And that, should have been that.

      Except – no, we still couldn't break ourselves of the short story habit, and the Constellations had done well for Baen.  As soon as we had published enough short stories to warrant a book, Baen offered a contract for A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volume 3, which took several stories straight off of Splinter Universe.  Those stories were never collected into chapbooks.

      We recently realized that this was the case, and, in the interests of completeness, we have produced two echapbooks, collecting the four stories that were missed.

      This is the first of those two catch up echapbooks, containing short story Out of True, and novelette The Rifle's First Wife.

      This is what we said about each of those stories, in Constellation 3:

      Out of True

      One of the joys of working with a Baen books is their website, Baen.com, where Baen periodically releases stories free for reading to help celebrate upcoming book releases. We've been lucky enough to be asked to contribute on several occasions and when Trade Secret was finally settled into a publication slot, Baen editor Tony Daniel asked for a Trade Secret related story. The problem was that the story needed to 1) have some obvious relationship to the novel, 2) not give away any major plot points of the novel or spoil future novels, and 3) be readable by new readers as well as long time Liaden fans. A close look gave us hope –  Trade Secret had threatened to run away from us since there were places where more story could have been worked in. And, as it happened, we had some universe back-story that readers had been asking about for years. Combining the existing hook to the long-term requests got us to Out Of True, a rather more serious story than we'd first expected.

      The Rifle's First Wife

      Courtesy of a young man we didn't expect to survive his first meeting with Clan Korval, we get to look at the interplay of the suddenly mixed cultures of Surebleak. Needing to meet his new troop's expectations, Diglon Rifle, former enemy combatant, has been studying to become a more independent person. Noticed by Lady Anthora, he gets to work with plants, and to pursue his own individual interests – one of which happens to be card playing. What could go wrong? We had to ask this question because Diglon Rifle, much like the Taxi Driver and the Uncle, became far more of a character in the Liaden story than first expected. Enjoy – we did!

      If this is your first time reading these stories, we do hope you enjoy them.  And, for those of you re-reading, we hope you enjoy spending additional time with old friends found again.

      —Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

      Cat Farm and Confusion Factory

      November 2017

      Out of True

      Squithen was gone from the forest clearing, which was good. The stench of the recent carnage was starting to reach him now and had it reached her she'd been here still, covering her nose as well as her eyes, counting or vocabing, one or the other.

      Klay'd had to yell at her, which he never did, since she was so often cowed into incoherence by even a stern word, but then she'd heard him, flawlessly pilot-signed assent, and dashed like a smart-one into the bush, back the trail they'd followed here from the Dulcimer. Likely she'd really do everything he'd told her.

      "Squithy, go to the cousins and tell them to bring big guns and hurry, because there are so monsters here like Choody said, and I killed one and maybe another. You run and be safe and stay there! Tell them we didn't find the uncles, but I'm trapped. Go!"

      The dead things lay there across the small clearing, two or three of the tiny forms sundered into iron-blooded mess, another half-dozen more just laying there still, with shapes that looked broken and wrong even though he'd never seen any of them before, and the wicket monster mostly between him and the dead, holes in it's hide leaking dull copper. He could see heat or gas evaporating out of the husk, and dark splinters of structural bone where his third shot had struck home, right at eye edge of the thing.

      It must have been that head shot, trying to hit something important, that had worked,  stopping it long enough for them to flee and, in the end, dropping it in a heap. Good thing he'd had his training.

      He'd been at the armorer's on

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