This Alien Shore Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  EARTH ORBIT SHIDO HABITAT

  OUTSHIP: ORION

  METROLINER: AURORA

  GUERA

  METROLINER: AURORA

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  REIJIK NODE REIJIK STATION

  SERPENT’S REACH NODE SERPENT’S REACH STATION

  INSHIP: MERCURY

  METROLINER: AURORA

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  INSHIP: EXETER

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  HARMONY NODE TRIDAC STATION

  INSHIP: EXETER

  ADAMANTINE NODE ADAMANTINE STATION

  INSHIP: EXETER

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  REIJIK NODE INSHIP: WAYWARD

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  PROSPERITY NODE PROSPERITY STATION

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  REIJIK NODE TRIDAC STATION

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  PROSPERITY NODE PROSPERITY STATION

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  PROSPERITY NODE PROSPERITY STATION

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  OUTSHIP: DIONYSUS

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  GUERA NODE MOSKVA PRISON STATION

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  SABOTAGE

  The Guildsman pulled out a chair and settled into it; his full sleeves fell upon the tabletop as he leaned forward, his posture stiff with tension. “One hundred and ninety E-days ago, a Guild outpilot was badly injured while returning to safespace. Analysis of his personal log shows there was a malfunction in his brainware at the moment of transition. It lasted only seconds, but that was long enough. In that instant he believed himself to be an alien creature, surrounded by beings whose brains didn’t function like his own. He believed that these beings had fed programs into his brainware which would make it impossible for him to think clearly, and that they had surgically implanted a mechanism in his arm which would feed drugs into his bloodstream, altering the very essence of his identity. With only seconds in which to act, he did what he could to disable the perceived mechanism, and then attempted to smash his skull open so that he could tear out his wiring. Fortunately for him, the latter effort failed.”

  “Since his basic assumptions were correct,” Masada said evenly, “I find it hard to comprehend your objection to them.”

  Novels by C. S. Friedman available from DAW Books

  FEAST OF SOULS

  THE MADNESS SEASON

  THIS ALIEN SHORE

  IN CONQUEST BORN THE WILDING

  The Coldfire Trilogy BLACK SUN RISING WHEN TRUE NIGHT FALLS CROWN OF SHADOWS

  THE CRITICS RAVE ABOUT THIS ALIEN SHORE

  “C. S. Friedman borrows some big ideas from writers like Cordwainer Smith, Frank Herbert and Samuel R. Delaney, and runs with them. Instead of stumbling under the burden, she succeeds in making the ... material her own ... Friedman has created a potent metaphor for the toleration of diversity—an ever-evolving society where ”the genes of wild genius” are acknowledged as necessary for survival.”

  —The New York Times

  “A wide-ranging, action packed space opera. This Alien Shore is guaranteed to entertain those who like to be swept up in an adventure with lots of characters, dangers, and revelations.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  “Friedman keeps her tale moving at a vigorous pace that’s boosted through an abundance of well-chosen details ... it is likely to hold readers’ interest tenaciously. The ending neither requires nor precludes a sequel, so readers are left with some hope of again encountering Jamisia and the duel between the Guild and Earth that backdrops her adventures.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Once again Ms. Friedman offers us great richness in both concept and detail, ingeniously weaving together two strong plotlines and piquant characters into a superior reading experience.”

  —Romantic Times

  Copyright © 1998 by C. S. Friedman.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1096.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  First paperback printing, July 1999

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15337-6

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES —MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To have a concept for a great book is a truly exciting experience, and one every author dreams of. To have a concept for a great book that requires a lot of knowledge you don’t have is a pretty overwhelming experience, and one every author dreads. To have a concept for a great book that requires a lot of knowledge you don’t have, and then to locate people who not only have that knowledge, but can communicate it in plain English ... and who don’t mind spending endless hours with you discussing 28th century hacking, or Inuit linguistics, or whatever else can be fitted in between courses of Chinese food or rounds of e-mail ... well, that is what authors live for.

  So thanks first and foremost to Paul Suchinder Dhillon, without whom this book simply would not exist. (Well, it might exist, but all the computer passages would be really bad, so no one would enjoy it.) Thanks for the hours of technical talk and devious plot twists and the virtual tours of hacker trails ... couldn’t have done it without you.

  Thanks also to Anthony C. Woodbury of the University of Texas, whose outstanding knowledge of arctic languages finally enabled me to find those few words I needed to really make this book come to life. (Readers please note that the versions used here reflect many centuries of linguistic corruption ; if the spelling is wrong or the meaning has been modified, that is artistic license on my part and not an error on his!)

  Thanks also to Cordwainer Smith for a few precious sparks of inspiration which fans will no doubt recognize. He is one of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century, and one of its most bizarre imaginative artists. Yes, there is science fiction stranger than mine. Go read it. And to Oliver Sachs and Temple Grandin and all those other writers who struggle to reveal the alien landscapes inside the human brain. If my fiction is ever half so gripping as their daily truths, I will have accomplished something great.

  Thanks to all those folks who kept me sane while this book was being written (or as close to sane as I ever come), most especially Paul Hoeffer, whose wonderful fan page kept my spirits up when things were darkest. And to Senji and Lisa and Tina and Fonda and Joan and Larry and Adam and most especially Chuck, whose generosity of spirit and energetic labor helped me through those last terrible weeks. There’s nothing quite like trying to finish a book and pack up a seven room house full of stuff at the same time to make one truly crazed.

  And thanks to Yann and Matt and Petra. They know why.

  Thanks to Cheryl and Stan, for really knocking themselves out to get this book printed on time. It’s much appreciated, guys.

  Most of all, thanks to Betsy Wollheim, for being the awesome editor-goddess she is. Not only because she is brilliant and wise and infinitely insightful, but because she didn’t yell at me even once when this was late. Now that is true greatness.

  DEDICATION

  This book i
s for my mother, Nancy Friedman, who died while it was being written.

  Sometimes the most impressive acts of courage are not dramatic ones, such as we like to read about, but quieter, almost imperceptible ones. Sometimes they are not even recognized as such until their time has passed. My mother was a woman of such courage, and her spirit affected all who knew her.

  At age 20 her heart was damaged by disease, and she was told she would not live past 30. She could have given up then and refused to live, as many do, but instead she chose to go on as though she had no deadline, as though Death did not dog her every step. Most of those who knew her never knew that anything was wrong. She would have considered it weakness to tell them.

  My father was forbidden to marry her because of her illness. They married anyway.

  She was told that if she tried to have a child it would kill her. She wanted a child, and so took the chance and had me. She lived. Later she risked it again, and had my brother.

  Those of you who have read my other dedications know that she went with me to Hawaii to see the volcanoes. What you do not know is that everywhere there were signs warning people away from various places if they had heart problems, or respiratory distress. She had both, and at that point was dying of them. Still she ignored the signs. No mere heart disease was going to keep her from doing what she had come halfway across the world to do.

  She beat the odds and lived to age 67, always refusing to give up, despite the fact that Death was only one step behind her. Even at the end she told me that one of her greatest regrets was that her illness had delayed my manuscript, because I had come to New York to take care of her. Death might threaten her, but it had no right to disrupt the lives of those she loved.

  I wish she could share this book with me. I wish she could see that it came out all right.

  Fiction pales before such a life.

  In a world where data is coin of the realm, and transmissions are guarded by no better sentinels than man-made codes and corruptible devices, there is no such thing as a secret.

  DR. KIO MASADA,

  “The Enemy Among Us”: Keynote address to the 121” Outworld Security Conference (holocast from Guera)

  EARTH ORBIT SHIDO HABITAT

  THE VOICES woke her up.

  For a moment Jamisia just lay in the darkness, neither dreaming nor fully awake yet, listening. Whispers of sound tickled through her brain, coalescing into words for an instant or two, then breaking up again. Frightening words.

  Danger.

  Betrayal.

  And one was almost a scream: Run!

  Shaken, she sat up in bed. Her room in the Shido Habitat was reassuringly familiar, filled with all the familiar relics of her teenage years. Tickets from a concert over at Mitsui Habitat. Flowers—real flowers!—from her coming out at Microtech’s Grand Pavilion. Homework chips piled up on one comer of the dresser, along with the headset that would feed their contents into her brain. All of it—her things, her life—familiar, comforting. It wasn’t always that way. Sometimes she awoke to find things on her dresser that didn’t (couldn’t!) belong to her. Sometimes there were pieces of jewelry in her slideaway that she knew she had never bought, so alien to her taste that she could hardly imagine herself wearing them. Sometimes there were worse things, frightening things, and she threw those in the trash chute with shaking hands, wondering who had left them there in the middle of the night, in the room she locked so carefully before she went to bed. She kept waiting for the rightful owners to say something about their stuff, to yell at her for having chuted it without asking them ... some kind of reaction, anything. But no one ever yelled. No one ever said a word, and her tentative queries to the habitat database yielded no explanation for the strange offerings, or any hint of their purpose.

  It wasn’t like that today; at least today everything in the room was really hers, and that should have been comforting. Only it wasn’t. The voices were still clamoring inside her head, even though the act of waking up for good should have banished them. She couldn’t make out most of what they were saying, but the few words she did understand—and the tone in which they were voiced—were terrifying.

  Danger!

  Betrayed!

  Run, Jamisia!

  Her heart began to pound, triggering her wellseeker program; bright words scrolled across the comer of her visual field, assessing her emotional state in purely biological terms. ADRENALINE SURGE, it informed her. PULSE RACING, B-PRESSURE ENTERING RED ZONE, PHASE ONE MUSCULAR CONTRACTIONS NOTED. ACTION?

  Before she could answer it the door slid open, as quickly and silently as if she had never locked it. A man moved into the room, and she opened her mouth to scream—and then realized who it was and drew in a deep, shaky breath instead.

  “Grab some clothes,” her tutor commanded, in a tone as unlike his usual fatherly warmth as this night was unlike any other. “Take anything you value, and do it fast.” He looked back toward the door as if to see if anyone was following him. By the nightlight’s glow she could see there was blood on his face. “We don’t have much time.”

  “What’s going on?” She could hear her own voice shaking as she asked the question. But he only shook his head sharply, his expression grim.

  “Later.” He wiped a hand across his forehead, smearing the blood, then saw that she wasn’t moving yet. “Do it!”

  Trembling, she forced herself out of the bed and began to move to the slideaway. The message in her visual field defaulted for lack of response and blanked out, which was just as well; she couldn’t think clearly enough right now to give it instructions.

  “What’s happening?” she begged, as she gathered up handfuls of clothing. Hi-G, lo-G, no-G: he hadn’t said where they were going, so she grabbed a few garments from each section of the slideaway and stuffed them into her traveling bag. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a raid.” His voice, usually calm, was shaking now, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his face; it was a good bet his own wellseeker was blazing its protest across his field of vision even now. “They must have had an inside contact, the alarm systems were all shut down.” She reached for the headset, but he stopped her. “No. Not that. Too easy to trace.”

  “Who is it?” she asked him.

  He hesitated an instant, and she sensed that he was struggling with the question of how much to tell her. A thin line of red had trickled down into his eye; he blinked hard to clear his vision. “I don’t know. It was all too fast. Whoever it is—it’s trouble, at any rate.” He grabbed the bag out of her hands and snapped it shut. “Come on!”

  With the voices screaming their warnings in her ears, urging her to follow him to safety, there was nothing to do but obey. She followed him out of the room and into the network of corridors beyond. When they got to the nearest tube, she started to get into it, but he grabbed her by the arm and jerked her past it. It seemed to her that she could smell something sharp in the air, carried toward them by the habitat’s ventilation system. Smoke, perhaps? Was that possible? Her tutor broke into a run, his strong arm pulling her alongside him. She struggled to keep up with his pace, but his legs were so much longer than hers, it was nearly impossible; twice she almost fell. What could be burning? Some few hundred yards beyond the tube he stopped to pull the cover off a maintenance crawlspace, and gestured for her to go inside. She hesitated, afraid—and then the whole floor shuddered, as if somewhere nearby something had exploded. Trembling, she clambered up to the lip of the opening and pulled herself inside. She wished that he’d let her take the headset so that she could access the habitat’s monitoring programs and find out what the hell was going on ... but then they’d know where I was, she thought. Chilled by the concept, without knowing why. Scared, as she had never been scared before.

  When he was safely inside the crawlspace, he pulled its cover shut and urged her forward; she was all too happy to move, to focus on flight as a means of shutting out the claustrophobic closeness of the mechanical tube. For what seemed like a small ete
rnity she pulled herself along, hand over hand, on rungs that were smeared with grease, past dials and switches edged in grit. No scrubs worked here, apparently. She twisted through a turn almost too tight to negotiate and was amazed that her tutor managed to follow. Then a turn again, and a long, slow curve, following his whispered directions as quickly as she could. Once or twice it seemed she could feel the whole tunnel shudder, and once she knew from his sharply indrawn breath that somewhere on the habitat real damage had been done, probably in the name of some corporate maneuver. As her tutor would say, Capitalism is a harsh mistress.

  Would the maintenance tubes seal themselves off if the habitat’s outer shell were breached, preserving enough air for them to breathe? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. It took all her courage just to keep moving, not to think about what was going on behind them.

  “Here,” he muttered at last, indicating a hatchway. Together they forced it open, and she slipped through. Beyond was a darkened corridor. Why weren’t the lights on? As he emerged into the corridor himself, she stamped hard on the floor several times, trying to trigger the sensors, but still it stayed dark. “Why—” she began, but her tutor shushed her. “Listen,” he said. She did. There was nothing. No distant explosions now, nor any human voice. Nor ...

  Something tightened in her chest, a new kind of fear. There was no soft purr of ventilation coming from the walls, no gentle breeze of recycled air wafting across her face. Those things were so taken for granted in her world that she could never have imagined what the habitat would be like without them. Now they were gone. Which meant...