Sunless and Nine Diopters (short stories) available at IZ Digital

A reminder that you can read two of my stories, Sunless and Nine Diopters, at Gareth Jelley's remarkable IZ Digital, the webzine companion to Interzone magazine. 

Full disclosure: It's actually "Nine Dioptres" but you're unlikely to die from reading half a dozen words spelled in British English. 

Sunless

Tomey placed his feet carefully on the network of life support tubing, grabbing at handholds as he moved from the cable side of the Rambler’s hull to the outward side. The ship slid upwards, cables screeching.

Soon, the ground vehicles were no longer visible. To the west, green veins of copper ore shot through the orange rock of the treeless Lono Hills. The mangled ground formed a circle near the foot of the funicular, the green, white and yellow squares of farms filled the horizon to the east, and to the south the garden-roofed skyscrapers of the city flourished like a jungle streaked with black crevasses. The cold, hard metal of a liquid oxygen pipe burned Tomey’s hands, and he switched his grip, cursing under his breath.

Nine Dioptres

‘I can’t see that far,’ said Aminah, and bit her lip. Why admit that to the stranger? Suddenly overcome with self-pity, tears came to her eyes. Nuada waited until the black-robed figure was ready.

When Aminah spoke, it was with a sob: ‘I’m going blind, Nuada. Every day I see less and less!’

Nuada led her below. ‘Wait here. I can help you,’ she said, and got her bag. She took out her left eye and fitted a microeye into the socket. She peered into Aminah’s eyes, one after the other. Then she sat back, calculating something. ‘You aren’t going blind. It’s just myopia, which is easily corrected with lenses.’

‘I couldn’t wear a machine on my face,’ wailed Aminah.

 

Cochineal and Prickly Pear

This is less showy than most of my garden photos, but even more botanically interesting. I planted a prickly pear cactus pad a year or so ago and it's growing. It's rooted and has put out new little cactus pads.
It's also growing a bunch of fur-covered insects!
Oh no!
But look - the insects are Cochineal. That's right, they're red food coloring. The red food coloring that is labeled cochineal is made from ground-up opuntia-eating beetles.
I am not planning on making my own food dye, however. The beetle-fur is pretty gross and my finger was stained for hours!

I had not realized it was marketed under any name except cochineal, but Wikipedia says it is also called Carmine and has food dye numbers where approved: "Specific code names for the pigment include natural red 4, C.I. 75470, or E120."

So if you're vegan, watch out for those dyes.

Queen of the Night, queen of the storm

Just over a year ago, a neighbor gave me a cutting of her Queen of the Night cactus. It's an epiphyte, which is to say that it doesn't root in the ground, but spreads out in an attempt to anchor itself in tree branches in (South American) jungles. Its Latin name is Epiphyllum oxypetalum.

The plant flowers just once in summer and is unlikely to bear fruit as it needs a nearby relative for pollination. (Since it's a cutting of my neighbor's, it's genetically identical, and hers, alas, won't do it.) But what a show it puts on for those one or two nights!

The plant is about two meters across at its widest part, for scale.

The flower, like the Dragon Fruits I've mentioned elsewhere, has male and female parts. The many yellow heads on long filaments are anthers, covered with pollen. The structure at the front that looks like a starfish or spider is the stigma, the part that receives pollen. Behind the stigma is a tube called a style, and that leads to the ovule, where the fruit will form. Pollen is deposited on the stigma and grows all the way down to the ovule to fertilize the fruit. 

The reason why everything is soaking is that the photos were taken during Tropical Storm Hilary. It doesn't normally rain three inches in a day in August in Southern California. I don't know why the plant decided to flower on the only day it has ever been indoors, sheltering. I had to take it back out into the storm so they could fully open. 

Khachaturian chilling

 Khachaturian is my Jackson's Chameleon. 

No, they don't change color to match the background. He is cool-looking, though. 

Dragon Fruit plants are bearing...uh, fruit.

 The Dragon Fruit plants both set fruit. Here they are just a few days after pollination. 

I guess the difficulty now is keeping the squirrels, birds and rats from taking the first bites. 

Dragon Fruit plants are starting to pay off.

My Dragon Fruit plants started blooming in August. They flower at night and are closing by the morning. Many are self-fertile, assuming there's something around (like me with a paintbrush) to get the pollen from the male parts transferred to the female parts. Some are self-sterile, and need something (e.g. me) to get pollen from a different species before they'll set fruit. The issue is, of course, that you can't control which plants flower when, so you don't always have a choice.

The flower at the top left is a Zamorano, a Honduran H polyrhizus cross purchased early 2022.  

The others are Delight, H. undatus X H. guatemalensis also purchased as a cutting in early 2022.

There were arguments online about whether either of these were self-fertile. I moved pollen between all these flowers and most of them set fruit. 

Here is a photo of them fully open, with a man's hand for size comparison. The wooden posts are five foot tall 4x4" fenceposts with jute sackcloth around them. Dragon fruit climb trees in the wild and put roots into the sacking to hold on. The plants are in 15-gallon pots of well-draining soil. 

My day geckos

 A couple of lizards in my home brood. Grandis Day Geckos, Phelsuma grandis. (Formerly Phelsuma madagascariensis grandis.)  Unlike the average gecko in a pet shop, day geckos are awake during the day (hence the name) and so are fun to watch. You can't put one on your shoulder and go out to show off. In fact, even if you open the cage you risk losing them. They are nervous and incredibly fast. As pets they are more like exotic orchids. 

Below, Mr. F, the grandis day gecko. He was 28 years old in July. No, they don't usually live this long.

Below, Baby grandis day gecko, born on 7th July 2023.

Mr F is not the dad. He's a bit past it. The baby's dad is a beautiful high crimson grandis called Legs.  He's hard to photograph because he's skittish. Maybe later.