The Shepherd who lost his flock.

It has been a hard year in the backwater worlds. The Alliance troops who had been holding the fort - literally - left a few years ago, and without the regular infusion of hard credits, towns tended to wither.
Shepherd Chiang had seen it, like watching wood bleach in the sun. The settlement that had invited him had been slowly drained of people. The young ones lit out to the terraforming projects, whild the older ones died off or moved in with family else where. One Sunday morning Shepherd Chiang looked out and saw only 3 faces looking back at him from the pews.

The next Wednesday, there were two faces looking at Shepherd Chiang from across a rough grave.

Shepherd Chiang more or less has the run of the town now. A small transport picked up the last two of his flock a week ago. Some nights, he sits and looks at the old fort and wonders if this is what their commander felt like when he watched the last man get on the transport.

Most nights, though, the Shepherd just enjoys the silence.

A band of intelligent gorillas.

The gorillas were gambling, I was sure of it. I wasn't sure of the rules of their game, but the rhythms of toss, wait, pay were clear. I told Dr. Martin of my discovery, but he didn't believe me. "

"Gorillas," he said, speaking as one would to well-meaning mongoloid, "do not gamble. They lack the mental acuity."

The gorillas, though, were gambling. In the course of my observation I noticed at least three different games. One involved throwing rocks in the air and seeing where they landed on a grid. A second involved, as near as I could tell, some sort of betting around pools of water. The third, though, was clearly a variant of craps.

On the last day of my internship at the institute, I unlocked the door to the gorilla enclosure, carrying with me two oversized dice. I attempted to insert myself in their craps-like game, in order to show them how to play the human version.

They broke both my arms and stole my dice. I am, it seems, the first person to run afoul of gorilla etiquette.

A dying city beside tranquil shores, disconnected from trade.

It had been a long time since the great boats last put in. In the dusty streets and still air you could almost hear the shouts of stevedores and sailors, men and mer. No one knew why the city had ceased to be an entrepot. The harbor was still deep and well-sheltered, the farms and mines that surrounded it still produced goods of worthy, if not exceptional, value. But, as surely as the sun lay on the waters, the ships had stopped coming.

There were few children in the city, and the few there were seemed smaller and sicklier than before. The younger sons and daughters of the great merchant houses were gone - the sons to the imperial province to seek their fortune, the daughters married off. The long-lived elves who had once ruled merchant empires nursed their grief; their human counterparts, a sense of anger at good times that dried up before their birth. None of the merchant princes had been crass enough to take his own life, but many had entered premature and sour retirements.

In the alleys by the wharfs, old men played dice or drank wine, while the younger ones tried to scape by on what trade was left. Some embarked on the fishing boats, some raided old factories and houses for stone they could dress and sell. The air hung heavy by the wharves, as if waiting to unload some dread cargo.

The great ships didn't put in, anymore. the glass and spices and silks no longer flowed in to the city, the grain and metal no longer flowed out. Sprawled out on the warm shore, the city bled slowly to death.