Singer From the Sea
Page 56
“Take me, too …”
“No. You too tall. Too strange looking. They know you!”
“Where? Where shall I go?”
“I sing you Tenopia. Go like Tenopia. By door, your man’s cloak with his sunhelmet, with his needfuls still there, in pockets.” She pulled at the rags that hung from her shoulders, shreds tied together to make a tattered wrapping. “Take this! You tall for woman, so you walk past like man. Malghaste man. Go now!”
In her dream, she babbled something about getting word to the ship, then she went, thrust hard by Awhero’s arms, strong for a woman her age. She fled to the courtyard, to the door through the city wall, a door that stood ajar! She could see directly into the guardpost outside—empty. Never empty except now! It smelled of a trap!
Beside the door hung the outer robe with its sunhelmet hood lining, behind the door half a dozen staves stood below a pendant cluster of water bottles, like flaccid grapes. She shut and bolted the inviting door, snatched the cloak, a staff, a waterbottle, and fled back through the house to the kitchen wing, calling to someone as she went past the kitchens to the twisting stairs that only the malghaste used. Awhero had shown her the hatchway below, and she went directly to it, struggling into the robe as she fled, draping the rags around her shoulders to make it look as if she were clad only in tatters. As she slipped through the hatchway she heard voices shouting and fists thundering at the door she had barred.
She came out in a deep stairwell where coiled stairs led up to the narrow alley. The alley led to the street. She went up, and out, head down, a little bent, the staff softly thumping as she moved slowly, like any other passerby. Ahead of her was the narrow malghaste gate through the city wall, never guarded, never even watched, for this was where the untouchables carried out the city’s filth. The strained and tattered rags marked her as one of them. Outside that gate a small malghaste boy guarded a flock of juvenile harpya, their fin-wings flattened against the heat, and beyond the flock was a well with a stone coping. The area around it was sodden, and she felt the mud ooze over her toes as she filled the bottle, slung it over her shoulder and walked away on the northern road, still slowly, as any malghaste might go. She did not run until she was out of sight of the town.
In her dream she was being hunted by dogs.
She woke to hear them baying, closer than before.
EUROPA STRIKE:
Book Three of the Heritage Trilogy
by Ian Douglas
THE SINGER’S BENTHIC HYMN WAS GLORIOUSLY BEAUTIFUL, with melodies and tonalities alien to Chinese ears … or to Western, for that matter. There could be no possibility that the music, or the message it carried, had’ anything to do with Earth or Humankind. The ocean within which Zhao was now virtually adrift was over six hundred million kilometers removed from any of Earth’s abyssal depths. The sounds filling the black depths around him were being generated by … by something deep beneath the surface of Europa’s global, ice-sheathed ocean.
It was the nature of that something that he was testing now.
“Give me a countdown to the start of the next ping,” Zhao said.
“Twenty-two seconds.”
“And take me lower. I want to see it.”
To Zhao’s senses, he seemed to be descending rapidly, though he still felt only the synthleather of the chair pressing at his back, not the cold, wet rush of the sea streaming past his face. That was just as well; the ambient water temperature was slightly below zero; its freezing point had been lowered slightly by its witch’s brew of sulfur compounds and salts. Even with Europa’s scant gravity, .13 of Earth’s, the pressure at this depth amounted to over a thousand atmospheres … something like 1058 kilos pressing down on every square centimeter of his body, if his body had actually been plunging through the Europan depths.
The light seemed to be growing brighter, and he was beginning to make out the fuzzy forms of walls, towers, domes …
The image was not being transferred by light in this lightless abyss, of course, but by sound. The Song itself, echoing repeatedly from the surface ice around and around the Jovian satellite, reflected from those curiously shaped alien architectures. Microphones at the surface retrieved those reflections, and advanced imaging Als created a rough and low-resolution image of what human eyes might have seen, if in fact they were suspended a mere few hundred meters above the object and not nearly 78 kilometers. The object was twelve kilometers across, roughly disk shaped, but with myriad swellings, blisters, domes, and towers that gave it the look of a small city. Experts were still divided over whether it was an underwater city, built for some inscrutable purpose deep within the Europan ocean, or a titanic spacecraft, a vessel from Outside that had crashed and sunk here thousands of years ago … or more. So far, the evidence seemed to support the spacecraft hypothesis. The thing couldn’t be native; Europa was a small world of ice and water over a shriveled, stony core, incapable of supporting any sort of technic civilization. The Singer had to be a visitor from somewhere else.
“There is no question about it!” Zhao said. For the first time, he was beginning to allow himself to be excited. “The Singer is responding in realtime to the sonar signals transmitted from the surface. Do you realize what this means?”
“If true,” Albert replied, “it means that The Singer is not a recording or automatic beacon of some sort, as current theory suggests, but represents an active intelligence.”
“It means,” Zhao said, excited, “a chance for first contact….”
“It is likely that the CWS expedition has precisely that in mind. The Americans’ sudden interest in submarines designed for extreme high-pressure operations suggest that they plan to visit The Singer in person.”
And that, Zhao thought, could well be a disaster for China.
“We will have to inform General Xiang, of course.” Albert reminded him. “With the current political situation, the Americans are unlikely to grant us access to this find.”
“Of course.”
It was imperative that Great Zhongguo be the first to make face-to-face contact with alien visitors from Beyond. The nation’s survival—as a world power, as a technological power—depended on it. China’s population, now approaching three billion, could not be sustained by the capricious handouts of foreign governments.
And so, China would go to Europa to meet for themselves these song-weaving visitors from the stars.
First, though, the Americans and their puppets would have to be taken out of the way….
FAR HORIZONS:
All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds
of Science Fiction
Edited by Robert Silverberg
Greg Bear sold his first short story at the age of fifteen. A Hugo and Nebula Award-winner, he has published seventeen novels. In “The Way of All Ghosts,” Greg Bear reexplores The Way, the artificial universe that leads to other times and other universes, from Eon, Eternity, and Legacy, and the life of the living myth, Olmy Ap Sennen.
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine, as well as the Nebula Award-winning author of eighteen novels. In “A Hunger for the Infinite,” Gregory Benford ponders the continual war of human and machine in the novels of the Galactic Center: In The Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and Sailing Bright Eternity, and asks one essential question of humanity at the beginning of its decline.
David Brin established himself as one of the premiere writers of hard science fiction with the The Uplift Universe, where humans are not the only sentient race on Earth, or in the universe, and there’s a billion-year conspiracy behind the uplifting of races to sentience … in this new story, “Temptation,” multiple award-winning author Brin shows exactly how perilous it can be to be offered exactly what you have always wished for.
Multiple-award winning author Orson Scott Card is one of sf/f’s most best-known and most-loved writers, and the novels of The Ender Series are his most famous, and brilliant, works. In “Investment C
alendar,” Orson Scott Card tells the last hidden secret of his time-and-planet hopping protagonist Ender Wiggin’s life: the momentous first meeting between Ender and Jane, Ender’s computer-based, soon-to-be companion.
Joe Haldeman electrified the sf/f world with Forever War, the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning novel that brilliantly explored the experience of the Vietnam War, and war as a whole. In “A Separate War,” he relates the unknown story of Mary gay’s separation from William, and offers hints about the new Forever War novel to come …
What would you do if you never had to sleep again? And what would happen when everyone discovered that the same genes that kept you from needing sleep, also kept you eternally young? Nebula Award-winning author Nancy Kress questions the problems arising from genetic modification in her acclaimed trilogy Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride, and now in “Sleeping Dogs.”
A science fiction legend for her multiple award-winning classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin is known throughout the world for her novels of the Ekumen—brilliantly speculative novels that challenge the reader to reexamine their views of the worlds around them. In “Old Music and the Slave Women,” she takes another look at the wars of race and property.
Anne McCaffrey is one of science fiction’s most beloved writers, and in “The Ship Who Returned,” she returns to the intriguing world of The Ship Who Sang. Helva, the sentient Ship Who Sings, goes to warn a colony about invading marauders, only to discover that the colony worships her …
The Heechee … Ancient, alien, unknown, the mysterious visitors dared humanity to come into the Gateway universe and claim the gifts of alien technology, if they could survive. In “The Boy Who Would Live Forever,” the multiple award-winning Frederik Pohl returns to the Tales of the Heechee and the dangerous, enthralling universe of Gateway and its mystifying legacies.
Robert Silverberg is the multiple award-winning author of numerous science fiction novels, and best-selling editor of the fantasy anthology Legends. In “Getting to Know the Dragon,” he returns to the fascinating alternate-Rome universe of Roma Eterna, in which Christianity never existed, and Rome remained pagan, and unconquered throughout time.
Brilliantly-fantastic novels of metaphysical and scientific ingenuity, David Simmon’s The Hyperion Cantos has helped redefine science fiction in the last twenty years, challenging it to move further and faster. In “Orphans of the Helix,” Simmons revisits the award-winning Hyperion universe, and asks more questions about the salvation of the human soul.
AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR
SHERI S.TEPPER
THE FAMILY TREE
0-380-79197-8/S7.50 US/S9.99 Con
EVERYWHERE DORA HENRY TURNS, weeds are becoming trees,- trees are becoming forests. Overnight, a city is being transformed into a wild and verdant place.
SIX MOON DANCE
0-380-79198-6/S6.99 US/S8.99 Con
THE GREAT QUESTIONER, official arbiter of the Council of Worlds, has come to the isolated planet of Newholme to investigate a terrible secret.
SINGER FROM THE SEA
0-380-79199-4/S6.99 US/S9.99 Con
GENEVIEVE MUST FULFILL A FORGOTTEN DESTINY passed from daughter to daughter, or she and the entire civilization of Haven will be swept away.
THE FRESCO
0-380-81658-X/S7.50 US/S9.99 Con
AN ORDINARY, UNWITTING WOMAN IS CHOSEN to act as the sole liaison between humans and an alien society.
THE VISITOR
0-380-82100-1/S7.99 US/S10.99 Con
FATE HAS CHOSEN DISME LATIMER to lead a wasted Earth of the future out of the darkness… with a book written by a courageous scientist ancestor.
THE COMPANIONS
0-06-053822-8/S7.99 US/SI0.99 Con
JEWEL DELIS HAS COME TO THE PLANET MOSS to observe the phenomenon of dancing light and to help decipher the strange musical “language” that accompanies it.
Discover adventure, magic, and intrigue in Robert Silver berg’s
MAJIPOOR CYCLE
“A master of his craft and imagination.” Los Angeles Times
LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE
006-105487-9/$7.99 U.S./$ 10.99 Canada
VALENTINE PONTIFEX
0-06-105486-0/$6.99 U.S./$9.99 Canada
MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES
0-06-105485-2/$6.99 U.S./$9.99 Canada
SORCERERS OF MAJIPOOR
0-06-105780?/$6.99 U.S./$8.99 Canada
LORD PRESTIMION.
0-06-105810-6/$6.99 U.S./$9.99 Canada
THE KING OF DREAMS
0-06-102052-4/$7.50 U.S./$9.99 Canada
Award-winning Author
JOCK MCDEVITT
“The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke …”
Stephen King
DEEPSIX
0-06-102006-0/$7.99 US/$10.99 Can
INFINITY BEACH
0-06-102005-2/$7.99 US/$10.99 Can
MOONFALL
0-06-105112-8/$6.99 US/$9.99 Can
ETERNITY ROAD
0-06-105427-5/$7.99 US/$10.99 Can
ANCIENT SHORES
0-06-105426-7/$6.99 US/$9.99 Can
www.AuthorTracker.com
SHERI S. TEPPER
SINGER FROM THE SEA
“Endlessly inventive … Tepper’s plot moves along with efficiency and panache toward a well-conceived payoff.”
Locus
“Singer from the Sea is an ambitious hybrid that blends (or at least juxtaposes) traits from sources as disparate as Jane Austin, Frank Herbert, and Margaret Atwood … Tepper’s prose is polished, her manner of storytelling practiced and graceful. She has a deft hand at character-drawing and a sharp eye for detail.”
Washington Post Book World
“The storytelling is fluid and captivating … This is a mystical, well-imagined feminist tale with enough hidden powers and intrigue to make it feel like a mystery. The societies that Tepper creates are frighteningly believable; her characters are multi-textured and full of life.”
Publishers Weekly
“She makes an interesting alien world and an absorbing adventure story to go with the message.”
Denver Post
“The worlds of Tepper’s novels are not passive players, and they actively try to cope with the disruptions caused by the unwelcome intrusion of mankind … Tepper is such a gifted and imaginative writer that in her hand this theme could offer limitless potential … I highly recommend Singer from the Sea. Frankly, I have yet to read a book by Sheri S. Tepper that I did not thoroughly enjoy.”
SF Site
Eos Books by
Sheri S. Tepper
THE COMPANIONS
THE VISITOR
THE FRESCO
SINGER FROM THE SEA
SIX MOON DANCE
THE FAMILY TREE
ATTENTION: ORGANIZATIONS AND CORPORATIONS Most Eos paperbacks are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, or fund-raising. For information, please call or write:
Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York 10022-5299. Telephone: (212) 207-7528. Fax: (212) 207-7222.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EOS
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, New York 10022-5299
Copyright © 1999 by Sheri S. Tepper
Excerpt from End of Days copyright © 1999 by Dennis Danvers
Excerpt from Lord Demon copyright © 1999 by The Amber Corporation and Jane Lindskold
Excerpt from Singer from the Sea copyright © 1999 by Sheri S. Tepper
Excerpt from Europa Strike copyright © 2000 by William H.
Keith, Jr.
Inside cover author photo by Charles N. Brown/Locus
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-10231
www.eosbooks.com
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
First Eos paperback printing: March 2000
First Eos hardcover printing: April 1999
HarperCollins® and Eos® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-197638-4
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.