Table of Contents
The Rising Tide
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Map of Forever
PART ONE: RENDEZVOUS, 2171 AD
PART TWO: COUP, 2181 AD
PART THREE: FLIGHT, 2188 AD
Glossary
More from J. Scott Coatsworth
Readers love The Stark Divide by J. Scott Coatsworth
About the Author
By J. Scott Coatsworth
Visit DSP Publications
Copyright
The Rising Tide
By J. Scott Coatsworth
Liminal Sky: Book Two
Earth is dead.
Five years later, the remnants of humanity travel through the stars inside Forever, a living, ever-evolving, self-contained generation ship. When Eddy Tremaine and Andy Hammond find a hidden world-within-a-world under the mountains, the discovery triggers a chain of events that could fundamentally alter or extinguish life as they know it, culminate in the takeover of the world-mind, and end free will for humankind.
Control the AI, control the people.
Eddy, Andy, and a handful of other unlikely heroes—people of every race and identity, and some who aren’t even human—must find the courage and ingenuity to stand against the rising tide.
Otherwise they might be living through the end days of human history.
This book is dedicated to my husband, Mark, who has stuck by me for twenty-six years and countless imaginary worlds. Here’s to many more of each.
Acknowledgments
I WANT to thank my beta readers for the book—Daniel Mitton, John Michael Lander, LV Lloyd, Mary Newman, Amy Leibowitz Mitchell, and most of all Pat Henshaw, who captured what a couple others were feeling and gave it shape and form and helped me fix a glaring issue with the story and the ending.
Thanks also to Rory Ni Coileain for making my first ace character more authentic. Santi wouldn’t be Santi without you.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to Ben Brock and Angel Martinez, who help run Queer Sci Fi and make the market for this kind of work stronger.
And thanks to the great folks at DSP Publications for believing in me and helping me get my work to the readers. I am forever grateful.
Foreword
WE’RE OFFICIALLY in the middle of it now.
The Rising Tide is the second book in the Liminal Sky trilogy, and I won’t go into great depth about the history of the story here since I covered that in the first book’s foreword.
But I thought it would be fun to share the origin of the series title, and to do so, I’ll have to back up a little.
The first book I ever finished and submitted, back in the nineties, was called On a Shoreless Sea. It was also my first foray into this universe, and it takes place at a later date than the current trilogy.
When I came back to Forever in 2014 to explore the history of that world, I initially titled the first book Across the Stark Divide. The title was evocative of the journey about to take place as the generation ship crossed the void between the stars.
The series has undertones of religion and redemption, something that surprised me when it first surfaced in book one. It’s something I think enriches the narrative, and I’ve had fun playing with it in both books.
So Mark and I were at our church one day—a progressive Methodist congregation here in Sacramento called “The Table.” Pastor Matt gave a sermon about John the Baptist, and how he served a liminal population on the edge of society.
I’d never run across that word before, so I looked it up:
Liminal /ˈlimənl/ adjective 1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. 2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
This series takes place at a time of tremendous social and physical upheaval, when the entire course of history changes for the human race. I immediately felt a connection with the word—liminal—but it felt incomplete by itself.
As I was editing the story, one thing kept coming back to me.
One of the defining physical characteristics of the world of Forever s the strange sky-that’s-not-a-sky—the world wrapping up around itself until it meets far overhead. The sky represents in a manifestly physical way the change that humanity is undergoing, and a marked contrast to the skies of Old Earth.
I had my second word. And so the phrase Liminal Sky was born.
Initially, it was going to be the title of the first book. My publisher, who’s a big sci-fi buff, loved it. But she warned me that it might be a little too cerebral for the average reader.
So she suggested I go back to the initial title—Across the Stark Divide—but lop off the “Across.” And so the book became The Stark Divide.
But there’s a happy ending for “liminal.” After a little unabashed begging, I was allowed to keep “Liminal Sky” as the series title, and it’s in book two that this really starts to bear fruit in the story.
I hope you enjoy the result.
PART ONE: RENDEZVOUS
2171 AD
Prologue
ANA CLOSED her eyes, visualizing the seed ship’s current trajectory. They’d rendezvous with 42 Isis in five days, their last stop in the solar system that had birthed mankind. Five years past, it had nearly been the location of its destruction.
The asteroid contained a high percentage of olivine, a mineral high in useful elements like oxygen, iron, magnesium, and silicon—a veritable feast.
Around Ana, the clean white laboratory that was her personal vee space domain was in perfect order, every surface spotless. A swipe of her virtual hand brought up an image of Forever, the long cylindrical generation ship hanging in the dark void of space between Mars and Jupiter.
The world sails had been pulled in, and Ana was in the process of nudging Forever into alignment with the asteroid, firing off excess bits of waste material to bring her into the proper trajectory. If all went well, Forever would end up with enough mass to finish build-out, along with a shield to help absorb space radiation on the journey to their new home.
Thank God.
Ana shook her head. That was clearly one of Jackson’s thoughts. She even picked up some of Lex’s thoughts at times. The original world mind veered off into philosophical territory to a degree that often surprised Ana—how an AI had become a philosopher poet.
The three Immortals, as they had jokingly taken to calling one another, were bleeding into each other more and more. It worried her.
This new second life was a gift beyond measure, certainly nothing she had ever expected. A chance to go with her creation across the stark divide, between the stars. But if the ultimate price was her own individuality, was it worth it?
She made a minor adjustment in the world trajectory, then shut off that part of her awareness. If she were needed, the system would let her know.
She slipped off through the conduits of the world mind to find Jackson.
The three Immortals had created a number of virtual worlds in vee space to pass the time when their skills weren’t needed. While it was possible to create AI personalities to populate each of their various worlds, these constructs took a lot of processing power, and the Immortals had quickly grown tired of that game.
The worlds they built now were usually empty except for the three of them.
She found Jackson in Frontier Station, sitting all alone in the gardens. The blue-green ball of Earth, as it once had been, stretched out below him.
“You’re bleeding into me again.” Ana took a seat on the bench next to him.
He glanced up, his face drawn, his nose red and puffy. He concentrated, and the tears and puffiness went away. “Was I? Sorry. I was just thinking of Glory.”
&
nbsp; Even in vee space, we emulate our old human selves.
His wife, Gloria, had just passed away a few days before, after a protracted battle with cancer that the new world’s facilities weren’t set up to treat. So much had been lost in the flight from Earth.
They had agonized over whether to bring Glory into the world mind.
Jackson had requested it, but Ana and Lex, the other two Immortals, had both been against it. Their little team worked well enough together, and adding additional human minds was likely to muddy the waters. Besides, the mind only had so much capacity. It couldn’t hold everyone within its confines. It hadn’t been created for that purpose.
Ana sighed. She wasn’t blind to the human cost of that decision. “She liked it here.” She squeezed his shoulder. Jackson’s vee space was beautiful, though it broke her heart to see Earth once again as it had looked before the Collapse.
Jackson nodded. “This is where we first met.”
He must have been just as annoyed at her bleed-through thoughts. She was being insensitive again, considering all he was dealing with.
Being effectively immortal was turning out to be harder than she’d ever imagined. She put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him. “I am so sorry about Glory.”
He regarded her in surprise. “Thank you. That means a lot.”
“Ours is a lonely path. We must make sure they get where they are going. Nothing else matters.”
He nodded. “I know. But it’s hard. Good Lord, guide me.”
Although she didn’t believe in a higher power, she squeezed his arm gently. “I hope he does.”
Chapter One: A Foul Wind
EDDY TREMAYNE rode his horse, Cassiopeia, along the edge of the pastures that were the last official human habitations before the Anatov Mountains. Several ranchers along the Verge—the zone between the ranches and the foothills—had reported losses of sheep and cattle in the last few weeks.
As the elected sheriff of First District, which ran from Micavery and the South Pole to the mountains, it was Eddy’s responsibility to find out what was going on.
He had his crossbow strapped to his back and his long knife in a leather sheath at his waist. He’d been carrying them for long enough now—three years?—that they had started to feel natural, but the first time he’d worn the crossbow, he’d felt like a poor man’s Robin Hood.
He doubted he’d need them out here, but sheriffs were supposed to be armed.
He’d checked with Lex in the world mind via the South Pole terminal, but she’d reported nothing amiss. In the last few years, she had begun to deploy biodrones to keep an eye on the far-flung parts of the world, but they provided less than optimal coverage. One flyover of this part of the Verge had shown a peaceful flock of thirty sheep. The next showed eight.
The rancher, a former neurosurgeon from New Zealand named Gia Rand, waited for him on the top of a grassy hill. The grass and trees shone with bioluminescent light, and the afternoon sky lit the surrounding countryside with a golden glow. The spindle—the aggregation of energy and glowing pollen that stretched from pole to pole—sparkled in the middle of the sky.
The rancher pulled on her gray braid, staring angrily at something in the valley below. “Took you long enough to get here.”
“Sorry. The train was out of service again.” Technology was slowly failing them, and they had yet to come up with good replacements.
She snorted. “One helluva spaceship we have here.”
He grinned. “Preaching to the choir.” Forever didn’t have the manufacturing base yet to support anything close to the technology its inhabitants had grown used to on Earth. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you asked him. With technology came new and better ways to kill. He’d seen it often enough in the NAU Marines. “What did you find?”
“Look.” Her voice was almost a growl.
Eddy looked down where she was pointing. “Oh shit.” Her missing sheep were no longer missing. They had been slaughtered.
He urged Cassiopeia down the hillside to the rocky clearing. A small stream trickled down out of the mountains there. He counted ten carcasses, as near as he could tell from the skulls left behind. Someone had sheared a couple of them and given up. It looked like they had skinned and cut the rest up for meat, the skin and bones and extra bits discarded.
Gia rode down the hillside behind him.
“Didn’t you report twelve sheep missing?”
She nodded. “Bastards took the two lambs. Probably for breeding.”
“That actually might help us.”
“How’s that?”
He dismounted to take a closer look at the crime scene. “They’ll have to pasture them somewhere. May make it easier to track them down.”
“Maybe so.” She dismounted and joined him. “This was brutal work. Look here.” She picked up a bone. “Whatever cut this was sharp but uneven. It left scratch marks across the bone.”
“So not a metal knife.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe a stone knife?”
He laughed harshly. “Are we back to caveman days, then?” It wasn’t an unreasonable question.
She was silent for a moment, staring at the mountains. “Do you think they live up there?”
“Who?” He followed her gaze. Their highest peaks were wreathed in wisps of cloud.
“The Ghosts.”
The Ghosts had been a persistent myth on Forever since their abrupt departure from Earth. Some of the refugees had vanished right after the Collapse, and every now and then something would end up missing. Clothes off a line, food stocks, and the like.
People talked. The rumors had taken on a life of their own, and now whenever something went missing, people whispered, “It’s the Ghosts.”
Eddy didn’t believe in ghosts. He personally knew at least one refugee who had disappeared, his shipmate Davian. He guessed there must be others, though the record keeping from that time had been slipshod at best. He shrugged and looked at the sky. “Who knows?” It was likely to rain in the next day or so. Whoever had done this had left a trail, trampled into the grass. If he didn’t follow it now, it might be gone by the time he got back here with more resources.
Gia knelt by one of the ewes, staring at the remnants of the slaughter. “Could you get me some more breeding stock? This… incident put a big dent in my herd.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” He took one last look around the site. It had to have taken an hour or two to commit this crime, and yet the thieves had apparently done it in broad daylight. Why weren’t they afraid of being caught? “I’m going to follow the trail, see where it leads.”
Gia nodded. “Thanks. We’re taking the rest of the herd back to the barn until you get this all figured out.”
“Sounds prudent. I’ll let you know.”
Slipping on his hat, he climbed back up on Cassie and followed the trail across the stream toward the Anatov Mountains.
ANDY STEPPED back to look at her handiwork.
The wooden trellis climbed about forty feet, interlacing with three others high above, each “arm” as thick around as her leg. She’d been working on this monument for weeks, crafting each part by hand, her mind reaching deep into Forever to touch the world mind and its latent routines. Each of the trellises was shaped as one of the six continents back on Old Earth, a memorial to where they had come from. Though she had never been there, she had seen it often enough, and one of her friends at the South Pole station had printed out a map for her to work with.
The Darlith Town Council had commissioned her to do the work, transforming a sparse square into a work of art and a gathering place for the town. She had two more pieces of the sculpture to grow, but she was about done for the day. The work took a lot out of her.
Once it was done, she’d apply a sealant and polisher to help preserve it against Forever’s limited elements.
Around her, the city bustled. The All Faiths Church had just let out, and congregants were on their way home or out to lunch in o
ne of the cafes that dotted the riverside.
“It’s beautiful,” one of the women said, stopping to stare up at it.
Others frowned and hurried on. Not everyone wanted to be reminded of what they had lost.
There was a pile of waste she’d trimmed from the sculpture and would have to haul over to one of the town dissolution pits when she was done, where it would be dissolved and repurposed. Nothing went to waste in a closed ecosystem like Forever.
Andy wiped her brow with the back of her hand and took a sip of water from her canteen. It was standard-issue, made from metal extruded by the world mind and stamped into shape. Forever’s production had taken on a decidedly utilitarian cast since the Collapse, as the colonists had suddenly had to do without any supplies from Earth. The world was not ready to be self-sufficient, and yet here they were. Andy saw it as her duty to bring a little beauty into a world that was basically operating at a subsistence level.
Call from Colin, the world mind whispered in her head.
“I’ll take it.” She tapped her temple to accept the call and wondered what Lex, Ana, and Jackson thought of her little art project. “Hey, kiddo.” Colin’s jovial voice through the loop connection made her smile.
“Hey. Where are you?”
“We’re coming down to Darlith today to sell some produce at the market. I heard you were in town.”
Her father, Aaron, asking Colin to check up on her. Andy grinned. “Yeah, working on the art thing.” It had been a hard sell with the Darlith town council, until she’d offered to do it in exchange for room and board. “It’s coming along nicely. Here, take a look.” She sent him a capture of her own vision.
“Oooh, that’s beautiful. Pretty good for a girl who never made it down to Earth.”
“Thanks. I have a good map. When are you arriving?”
The Rising Tide Page 1