Solar Max and the Seven-Handed Snake-Mother (short story)

Solar Max and the Seven-Handed Snake-Mother was the third story in the Bernice Summerfield anthology A Life of Surprises. It was written by Kate Orman.

Plot
Benny, Sarger and two other students whom Benny remembers as Thing One and Thing Two study the Terra Roxans' extinct coffee culture and search for the hallucinogenic igo plant. Whilst excavating a coffee-house, the Lifter malfunctions because of the planet being at solar maximum and Thing Two is injured, necessitating Thing One to take her back to al-Shadhili for medical care.

Benny catalogues a number of books found beneath the coffee-house and finds that they are about politics rather than coffee, which Sarger believes is due to communal decisions being made under the influence of igo. He attempts to initiate sex with Benny by slapping her posterior, but she punches him in the shoulder. Later, he lights a campfire and, without telling Benny, puts some igo into it. The two experience hallucinations and he kills a yale when it attacks Benny, making her, in his mind, his property. She runs away and they both see the Snake-Mother and the holes in her hands, scaring Sarger.

In the morning, Benny reaches al-Shadhili, which has been severely damaged by a solar storm. The medical centre is destroyed and the fate of Thing One and Thing Two unknown. With Sarger likely still cowering from the aurora on the plains, Benny sits down in one of the surviving houses and makes an espresso, watched by a child who has emerged from another building.

Characters

 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Thing One
 * Thing Two
 * Sarger E!xhares

Worldbuilding

 * Terra Roxa was found by spaceships escaping the Pavo Abstergence. The Abstergence used a biological weapon on Sarger's planet to ensure that no female humans could survive there for more than a few weeks.
 * Thing One and Thing Two come from al-Shadhili, a small town.
 * Sarger is an ethnobotanist.

Continuity
to be added