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"This is thinking readers' sci-fi."From the Library Journal review: "Suspense and action combined with four strong and distinct protagonists make this debut a good choice for most sf and mature YA collections."
Here's the first chapter.
One
Mid-Rain: 02
Half the sky tipped into darkness as Aren prepared to leave Wras Grey’s on a run out to the Deltas. He straddled his skitter bike and looked to the east, where a weather system was building canyons of cloud across the afternoon. The City sheltered under a last band of clear sky and a thin gold light fell into the alley, shadows cutting away from the buildings in long angles.
Aren glanced at Wras, leaning in his doorway with a toothpick in his mouth.
“Can’t this wait until tomorrow, Wras?”
A shake of Wras’ head, lank brown hair falling across his brown eye; the blue one regarded Aren. “Sorry.”
“It’s going to pour.”
“You should get a denser charge on your field.” Pulling the toothpick from his mouth, Wras surveyed the debris on its tip.
Aren thumbed the skitter’s power up. Its low, familiar thrum echoed across the alley between Wras’ storehouse and another, both built of Nentesh c-stone, or shaper stone as it was sometimes called. “I can’t afford an upgrade right now,” Aren said. “Besides, Toi’s only got one left and it doesn’t fit my skitter.” He powered up the skitter’s safety field, a model four gens out of date; it wouldn’t activate to rain unless the rain came on winds exceeding crash velocities. At which point it might be of limited use.
“Tell you what,” Wras said, looking at Aren in the speculative way that always made Aren’s insides seize up, “when the ships come this Ingress, I’ll get you one. You can owe me.”
“That’s okay, Wras. Don’t worry it.” Aren shot the skitter out of the alley, leaving Mizuel Wras Grey behind. He gunned the skitter, trying to shed the feeling he usually got when he took a run for Wras, that there was something more involved in the exchange than there should have been.
*****
Lower delta road skirted the edges of the land that had so far been shaped into agriculturally productive ground. On one side the City’s fields, groves and fenlands rolled away from him; on the other, the land fell abruptly into ragged bundles, marsh, swamp, ravine and, in the distance, sudden, mountainous faces of land. The phi-swamp, which ran along the eastern edge of the Deltas, marked the outlying regions of the inhabited nucleus of Nentesh—not counting the tribers living in the high desert beyond the mountains.
The road dipped down into the swamp. Shaggy cypress hybrids closed crooked fingers above Aren, the fingers of generationally articulate hands. Aren passed phos gatherers in tox-suits. They straightened from their work to watch him pass, lifting blue suited arms to wave. Aren waved back. Baskets of phos glowed in the murk of tree shadow around them; shaggy bits glimmed in the branches above.
The phos, unanticipated by-product of the first stages of terraforming, was a glowing, long-lived moss speciate which had become integral to the tech-poor life of Nentesh. It was common phos they gathered, a yellow that ranged from purest citrine to a rougey-gold like good trader’s liquor, or a color that went from turquoise to a dark, water-green. Phos had been found in rarer colors, by explorers in the unstable regions of the landmass: deep red, topaz, indigo.
The phos gatherers were beginning to pack off. Aren passed some walking down the road, baskets bobbing on their backs, wells of colored light. Most of them were deltas, who stayed in the swamp for a ten-day, then went home to the Delta. From there they would go down river to the city market and trade the phos to artisans who would make lamps with it.
The sky boomed as Aren passed the last of the phos gatherers on their way to shelter. The storm broke in a deep, wet wind; huge branches bobbed like twigs as the weather tumbled over and through the swamp. Aren turned the skitter down the unmarked track that went to Haffi’s just as the rain rushed down, drowning and thunderous. It hissed through the safety field, plastering his hair to his face, his clothes to his skin, running coldly down his back and chest. It tasted of lightning and came down thick enough to obscure the trees and turn the track to mud.
Thunder crashed, the air ripping apart somewhere above him. The echo rumbled through the swamp. One of Haffi’s brenner-goats bolted out onto the track in front of him. Aren swerved, the mud sucked; the skitter and Aren pirouetted, then spun on slightly separate axes.
He saw branches, then ground, then branches in a tumbling kaleidoscope framed by the sparking of the safety field along impact planes. He didn’t feel a thing until the last bounce slapped him down into the roots of a banyan and the skitter landed on top of his leg. The right one. He felt that; the safety field had fragged in a flare and scatter of light.
He lay on his back, crooked over what felt like the red giant of all roots, blinking a little, then closing his eyes against the rain. His leg was a white pain ripping a continuous signal through his brain; but he gasped instead of screaming, and only whispered a curse, because the rest of his brain was seriously considering shutting down.
“Ouch,” Haffi observed, some indeterminate drift of time later.
Aren looked up; even lying down, the motion acted like a spray of vertigens. Haffi stood on the track; the brenner goat, its shaggy, dark turquoise coat wet and rank, panted beside him. The goat’s salt-white eyes stared down at Aren. Another indeterminate drift of time seemed to pass before Haffi scrambled down the grade toward him.
*****
Rain shattered forcefully against the high windows and soaked down into the ground around the house, making the cellar room that was Swan’s lab damp and chill. Bent intently over a particularly essential bit of analysis, Swan did not notice. The rumble of thunder and brief splashes of lightning went unnoticed as well.
Eventually, she sat back, drew a breath and stretched, the vertebrae of her long spine cracking. She rubbed both hands over her eyes and then back through her hair. The light of several phos lamps pooled inadequately over her work area. Herbs hung in neat bunches in the darkest corner. Vials and cruets of distillates gleamed in vitreous bunches on shelves. On the tables a variety of equipment that would have bewildered any far-gone predecessors of Swan’s art stood like metal and glass familiars, sheened in their working parts, begrimed from years of use in others. Ought to get bioluminescents in here, she thought. Spare my eyes. I’ll need eye adjustments soon, like Xin did.
She downloaded the data from the analyzer into her handset and shut the processor down. The readings all check; the formula’s right. I’m ready to make Ismenor’s Z variant.
“Swan?” Ula’s voice dropped down from the top of the stairs like a scrip coin tossed wistfully into a deep well.
“I’ll be right up,” Swan called back. She removed the test sample from the processor, re-capped the vial and stowed it, with her handset, in a voice-locked pressure cabinet.
At the top of the stairs she found Ula, leaning in the hallway, arms folded, looking out a window at the rain. She wore a stony expression.
“You know,” she said, “if you don’t want me to come down into the lab anymore, you can just tell me that it’s off-limits.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Swan said, walking past her. “Where would you work?”
Without responding, Ula followed her down the hall to the kitchen, where Swan rummaged through the coolbox while Ula took down two bottles of ale.
“Leftover bassa and sjaskin?” Swan glanced over her shoulder at Ula, who still did not respond. She looked back into the coolbox. “I guess that’s what it’ll have to be. Is there any of that bread that Sol made?”
For answer, Ula took the remainder of the loaf out and set it on the table with a knife. Then she sat down, opened an ale and set it to her lips, watching Swan as she drank.
Swan looked away, got out wide, heavy bowls and utensils and sat down across from her. They ate in silence, Ula relenting, finally, of her scrutiny and her gaze falling away. For awhile she pushed the spicy sjaskin around with a piece of bread and made stacks of bassa peas; then she ate some, drank more ale and sighed visibly, letting her anger go. As she usually did. As Swan fervently hoped she would be able to continue to do, for a little longer; just a little longer.
When her bowl was empty, Swan stretched again and finally felt the achy kinks in her muscles and joints. “Misery, I hate this season.”
“You say that about Copper, Wind and Snake, too.”
“Do I? I guess I’ve never really got used to seasons.”
Ula smiled slightly in response and took a deep gulp of ale.
“Don’t forget,” she said as she set the bottle down. “We’re supposed to eat dinner with Aren mid-fourth.”
Damn. She didn’t want to think about Aren right now. “What’s wrong?”
“I have to meet with someone then, Ula. You go without me. Tell Aren I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” Ula eyed her. “Chinga is playing at Bregan’s tonight. Go with me?”
Swan placed her bowl into the empty bassa dish. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Ula. I can’t. I have an errand to run and then I’ll be in the lab again—until late, most like. I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” Ula finished off her ale and wiped her mouth. “Okay. Well—why don’t you go on, then, and do your errand? I’ll clear up.” Her tone was light and chill. She slid off her stool and started to collect the dishes.
Swan clenched her fingers on the bassa dish. She felt an edge of fear and doubt verging through her, unsettling her dinner. Damn. “Ula . . . there’s something I have to finish. That’s all; please, please—be patient, okay?”
“Swan, don’t worry it.”
Like hell, Swan thought. And, not for the first time, What am I doing? She sighed, shutting the door on things in her mind as she picked up her stack of dishes and took it to the sink. What I have to do, that’s all.
*****
Night followed the storm, slipping on the rain’s leavings like a city chaffer in flash gear. Aren navigated the ailing skitter through water-polished streets to Wras Grey’s, sneezing intermittently and limping. Haffi had given him something that had made a big space between him and the pain, fixed the leg up, then given him and the broken skitter a lift to City’s edge in a groundcar so old and rattling Aren had been distantly thankful he was too drugged to feel the bumps.
In the alley behind Wras’, he stopped the skitter and took Haffi’s package out of the saddlebag. He stood for a moment, holding it, swaying slightly, then examined the package: wrapped in red oilskin and tied with a bit of old freefall line, it seemed innocuous. But it was for Wras. And Wras’d been in a rush to get it. Aren sighed.
He felt so odd, drifting. He looked up from the package and around, with slight vagueness, at the phoslamps, the striated c- stone of the warehouses, the sky, like a glass being filled with Hevanti liquor, going slowly, liquidly dark. He looked at the scratches along his knuckles, then wiped the hair back out of his eyes and looked back up to see Wras leaning out of his door. Wras gave him the once-over.
“Field gave out?”
Aren nodded, handed Wras his package. Everything swam alarmingly for a breath. He felt something hot against his face and realized it was Wras’ hand, holding his jaw lightly. As Wras peered into Aren’s eyes, Aren noticed that Wras’ brown eye had gold and green flecks in it.
“Sleep it off here,” Wras said, releasing him. “I can give you something real nice for the pain.”
“I’ve already called my friend Juven. Anyway, doesn’t hurt.”
“It will in a little while. Come on, a little painkiller’s nothing to fear, Aren.” He reached an arm around Aren’s shoulders.
Aren shrugged away, hard. “No!” He stepped back, swaying. “I mean, that’s—I’m all right.” He drew a deep breath. “Can I just leave the skitter here, get it tomorrow?”
Wras nodded, watching him, amused.
*****
Aren made his way, muddled and drifting, to Juven’s. It was a good deal closer than his place and it was the friendliest haven he’d been able to think of at Haffi’s.
She met him at the door with a round of kellit in one hand, a small pipe of kefa between her lips and a babble of voices in the room behind her. Her red hair was loose and damp with the weather; it hung down all around her and imprinted itself vibrantly on Aren’s senses. Juven eyed him up and down.
“So, what happened? I couldn’t understand a word when you called.”
“Took a dump on a run out to the swamp. Fragged the skitter. Left it at Wras’.”
“What are you luced up on?”
“Don’ know; Haffi gave it to me.”
One of Juven’s aunts—Meffie—appeared at her shoulder.
“Juven, for shaper’s sake, girl, bring him in. He’s hurt. C’mon Aren.” Meffie drew him in, arm around his shoulder.
“Sorry,” Juven said, trailing them. “Sorry, Aren; I’m pretty luced myself. We’ve been drinking.”
“We haven’t seen you in too long,” Meffie said, and set him in a deep chair.
A small portion of Juven’s epic family were there: two of her older brothers, one sister, the aunt, Meffie, and a cousin. Bottles and kellit cards, chips and kefa smoke were everywhere.
“Aren, what happened to you?” That was Kembro, a brother.
“He took a spill off his skitter,” Juven said. “Shh. Leave him alone, he’s hurt. It’s your bid.”
With relief, Aren let everything go. The voices and clinking of bottles, the smoke and motion around him patterned the air at a distance, as his consciousness slid into a dark, weightless place and hovered there.
Sometime later, Juven slipped an arm, then a shoulder, under his, hauled him to his feet. The room seemed to have emptied of relatives. Juven led him to her tiny bedroom and laid him down on the bed. It was dim, with only one shaded phoslamp throwing flakes of ochre light through its screen. Most of one wall was a window, looking out on a bit of yard and garden surrounded by other rooms and a cobble of decks, here and there a phoslamp delimning the whole thing, Juven’s family compound. Beyond the yard, he could see a bit of M’tsubiin Walk, a quiet, elegant street. The sky had cleared somewhat and Nentesh’s satellite blinked down from between drifts of cloud. Aren gazed at this for a while, barely aware of Juven or her movements. The window’s semiperm breathed sweetness from the rain-fed night. He felt Juven settle on the bed, looked over vaguely. She dragged the phoslamp over and unshaded it a bit, pulled his boots off and took a hold of his leg.
“It’s all right, Venny. Haffi doctored it.”
“Haffi? Never met him. Hold still. I just want to look.” Her hands were warm and sure. She grunted. “Huh. Nasty gash. But it looks clean.” She resealed the synth, then slid up next to him and examined his face, lightly turning his head, touching the cut over his eye. “Sorry I didn’t bring you in here earlier. Wasn’t thinking well; we all had a lot to drink.”
“It’s okay.” He sighed under her light touch, closed his eyes and nestled into the bed.
“You’re still floating, huh?”
“Mmm.”
She started to pull off his clothes. “And you never do rec substances,” she murmured.
“I was too out of it to stop him. ‘Sides, it hurt.”
She grunted again, examining the beginnings of massive bruising on his hip and back. Then she slid her arms around him. Aren shifted into her a little closer and fell quickly asleep.
*****
When Swan returned from her errand, Ula was not home. Just as well, she thought, heaving a sigh. She was tired, a weariness that drove beneath the bone.
She went straight down to the lab and took out the package she’d gone to pick up from Wras Grey. Wras always made her tired. But he was the liaison for the deal. A deal Ismenor had struck twenty-six years ago, last Ingress.
Twenty-six years.
She sat in the dark for a while, then unshielded a phoslamp and looked at the package. It was hardly ominous, wrapped in glossy red oil-cloth. She fingered the stained and frayed free-fall line it was tied with, tugged idly on the knot.
Well. Now she had the formula and the seed ingredients. Time to begin the processing.
*****
Aren woke after several hours, realized Juven had just gotten up. He heard water running, and she came back with a glass of it. She stood in the doorway a moment, sipping the water, looking out the window. Her hair was dark against the paleness of her body.
It was getting on to morning. The clouds had regrouped; rain sifted quietly down from a muffled sky.
Aren yawned and stretched. His leg shot pain, and his hip and back; the cut over his eye throbbed. He lay still and groaned.
“Everything hurts.”
Juven climbed back into the bed. “Did this Haffi give you any rejuvers?”
“Yes.”
“Well; the bruised parts should heal pretty quick, then.” She laid a palm over his hip, then slid it over his stomach, up to his chest, lightly over his nipples, back down.
“Juven, I hurt.”
“So . . . it’ll distract you.” She slid a leg over his unhurt one. He caught her hand, holding it still. She glanced around suspiciously. “Or is my family here again?”
“That’s not funny, Venny.”
“No? How about this?”
“Venny—” They wrestled a moment, gently, and the wrestling moved easily into deeper, longer motions. It did distract him. And, as it had mostly been since they were thirteen and fourteen, sex with Juven had both edge and warmth, was both stimulant and comfort.
When they again lay still, in the kindly space of calm they’d wrought between them, Aren’s head had cleared. And it troubled him, her reference to that other time, the last time he’d done any rec substance in quantity.
He’d been fifteen; it had been his designated birthday, early third of Copper. He and Juven had managed to get two bottles of swamp gin; they’d gone downriver to the remains of an abandoned, fourth-gen testing plant, a rambling lot of pre-form cubes, doorways without doors, walls without ceilings, and bare scaffoldings sketching open angles against the sky, all in the cheerful, overwrought colors favored by third and fourth-gen designers and all overgrown, welded to the earth by vine, root and branch.
They’d been well away through the first bottle, secure in the unobserved and empty nature of their retreat, when suddenly Juven’s whole family was sitting there with them: all her many sibs, her parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Juven went right on, not aware of them, but they were there: the smoke from her gran’s pipe-herbs rising blue and pungent as ever, her older brothers’ voices involved in some deep discussion, the younger cousins’ shrill as they tumbled about. When he and Juven got up to walk, the whole brood came with, the ground so thick with activity which couldn’t be there that Aren walked into a wall which was and then huddled there, afraid to move. When he tried to tell Juven about it, he sounded like a remphobe with a broken brain. Juven listened intently, swaying slightly, sipping from the bottle, frowning. She looked around, blinking. Her family gathered in a circle and stood listening with her, intent and solicitous. She didn’t see them, of course.
A little later they went swimming; Aren floated, his eyes firmly closed. Juven had swum close to him and whispered in his ear, They still here, m’family? He opened one eye. The banks were draped with uncles, aunts and grandparents, the water littered with her younger relatives. He nodded, so frightened by the peaceful gathering he couldn’t speak. Juven slid a hand up over his leg and leaned closer, nuzzling. Let’s do it with them here, she whispered, half serious, half laughing, thoroughly luced.
He’d stayed away from all mind warpers ever since.
Beside him, Juven shifted; her hand trailed idly over his body. He ran a strand of her hair, colorless in the dim, between two fingers. Whatever Haffi had given him had detached him quite thoroughly from his senses; but nothing had happened. He hadn’t seen anything that wasn’t there. So maybe it was all right. Aren let out a breath.
“Aren?”
He turned his head and found Juven looking at him. Her eyes were big, all pupil; one brow had always arched higher than the other. “What?”
“Aren—I’m going to sign onto an outsystem ship this Ingress; if I can.”
Oh. Should have seen that coming, he thought. And then, Maybe I did. It didn’t feel like that much of a shock. She’d always meant to, always talked about it. He didn’t say anything, just wrapped two fingers in her hair, twirled it, let it go.
Juven touched his face. Her fingers were lean and strong, callused with the work she did in her parents’ restaurant and gardens. She appeared to change the subject. “Aren . . . how’s Sol doing?”
“He’s okay.”
“What’s up with you guys?”
“What do you mean?”
“Aren, Sol’s always had a thing for you.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Yes, Venny, but what can I do about it? He’s never . . . he doesn’t really want to do anything about it. Anyway, that’s how it’s always felt.”
“Well. Maybe you should make the first move.”
“I don’t feel that way about Sol. What I mean is, with him it would have to be the serious thing. It couldn’t be casual.”
“Maybe that’s why he’s never done anything about it; he knows you feel that way and doesn’t want to fuck up your friendship.”
“Venny—” he figured out what was troubling her, finally. “Venny. It’s okay. I’ll be all right.”
“You need someone; you need a family.”
“I have Swan.”
Juven made a noise.
“Well. I do, sort of. And Ula. And Sol.”
“Aren, could you be with Sol as more than friends?”
“Venny, what is going on in your brain?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Aren, if you don’t, well, it shouldn’t come from me. But I think Sol will leave, too, if you can’t give him a reason to stay.”
“Juven!” He pushed her hands away, held them. “Look—Sol can’t leave; he has to look after his granddad.” He stopped, then said more quietly, “I’ll be okay. I’ll miss you; but I will be okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” He said it firmly, for her, though at that moment he felt nothing very surely or clearly.
Juven sighed then. Her trailing fingers rested on his cheek. After a while they slid down and her breathing deepened into sleep.
Aren stared into the bituminous dim over her head. He felt her warmth against him and tried to focus on that instead of on the throbbing aches and shivery sickness of his hurts. The future slipped cold fingers into his gut, biting at his nerves and casting uneasiness like bad light and disorder through his thoughts.
