Seeklight
Kevin Wayne Jeter
Barry N. Malzberg
Seeklight is the story of a quest for identity by Daenek, scion of an assassinated thane, or clan leader. The action occurs during some future time on an Earth-like “seed planet,” to which human genetic material, or seed, was transported while shepherded and nurtured by protective robots called priests. The priests’ job was to protect the genetic material until the ships landed on a planet suitable for human life, at which time they initiated the birth and reproduction of the human race, initially through cloning.
Seeklight
by K.W. Jeter
Introduction
In the mail the other morning, from an unpublished writer a little to the west of here, came a letter which took me back ten years to the living room of 143 Avondale Place, Syracuse, New York, where I, the then Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow, was trying to push my failing Dodge and beginning marriage on an income of $250.00 a month while simultaneously applying myself to collected works which then might have numbered all of one hundred and fifty pages.
The Writer (from the west of here that is; I no longer live at Avondale Place) wanted to know what the truth of getting started in publishing was. How did you sell a story? Was it really true as it appeared to him that you had to have connections to place your work? How did writers get going anyway? Was it possible to do your work and mail it out and get in print or did you need contacts? What contacts, anyway? He was pretty discouraged, the young writer went on, but not ready to give up yet. Perhaps I had some suggestions. Markets? Contacts?
Back to the living room in Syracuse where the same questions rattled through my mind and corpus for almost a full year. It is possible that the subculture of professionally published novelists, poets and short-story writers is not a cabal to be achieved only through dark rites of initiation-and-persecution but if this is so, you could not have proven it by me in the academic year of 1964−5, a feeling which to a certain degree persists emotionally even to this day. How indeed does one break into this business?
How can one emerge from the mass of unpublished writers to professional publication? What is the secret?
It is not easy to break into this business and my correspondent from Philadelphia was right, it does appear from the outside as if it were a mysterious cabal with equally mysterious but rigorous social customs; one becomes a writer only by becoming personally acceptable to a formal or less formal board of review. It does little good to advise that this is not the case; that while the medium of the literary novel and short-story is closed nearly tight nowadays, insular and self-limiting, the category market—gothics, westerns, mysteries and particularly science-fiction—remain open to those who can meet the rather stringent requirements of the categories and that science-fiction in particular, if it has been characterized by nothing else for its near-fifty years as a discrete sub-category of fiction, must be praised for its openness, its willingness not only to publish work by newcomers of no prior social acceptability but to welcome that work and to quickly elevate its best talent to the top of the field within a shorter period of time than almost any other category would so do. It is true that Philip Roth won the National Book Award at 26, that Joyce Carol Oates was winning O’Henry Prizes in her early twenties and won the NBA (after two appearances final list) at 31. But Roth and Oates are exceptions, not only exceptional writers—of course they are—but exceptional examples of luck.
Not to digress however, people in early middle age have the habit of running on, sometimes in a disjointed fashion, on issues peripheral to what should really concern them. Let us drag ourselves away from the NBA or middle-aged American literary novelists to the far more vital and salutory matter of this particular book.
I proposed the idea of trying to make the course of new ’s-f writers easier rather than more difficult and Roger Elwood, the energetic and capable editor-in-chief of this new Laser Book program, came right back at me within days asking me to put my time where my mouth was. Let me discover the newer writers, let me develop projects with them, introduce them to the markets. If I felt that the markets should be more receptive to the new than they are at present (although as I have said above, s-f really isn’t that bad compared to most other fields) then take up the cause myself.
So that was the way in which this book was proposed and that was how it began.
K. W. Jeter, whose SEEKLIGHT follows as the first of these novels in whose publication I have assisted, is a twenty-four-year-old Californian, a state university graduate who prefers to keep his persona out of his work, a position which I share in relation to my own and with which I am in hearty agreement. Other than knowing that he is married, widely-read in ’s-f (this would be obvious without testimony simply from the novel) and utterly committed to his work, I know only that he is greatly and diversely talented and that given a reasonable contribution of luck, that luck without which none of us would ever have achieved any success (this is not paranoia; life is luck, breath is luck, love is luck) he may achieve a major career within this field. SEEKLIGHT is one of the three or four best ’s-f novels I have ever read and on any level is a distinguished contribution to the field; it promises to be an auspicious start to an auspicious career but even if it did not it is, on its own terms, a wholly successful and gripping novel which should provide its readers with hours of entertainment and, after the fact and by implication, a rather deeper level of inference which emerges from the book only as the consequence of its full statement. The “statement” however may be taken or more properly left; this is, in my opinion, a work of art but it is first and last and more important a work of craft and delight.
With more pride than it is perhaps seemly to admit, I gladly turn over to you SEEKLIGHT and K. W. Jeter.
—Barry Malzberg
New Jersey
Seeklight
Prologue
It would be so easy to die. He pressed his face against the rain-soaked ground, curling himself into a ball under the storm’s slashing weight. A twist of lightning that shouted through the wind revealed his hands, clenched into the muddy hillside. In the moment of pale light they seemed corpse-like and drained of blood.
Somewhere at the base of the hill, one of his pursuers’ mounts screamed as it wheeled in fear, goaded by its rider into the face of the storm. An echoing chorus from the other equines, more like sobbing children than animals, came out of the darkness below. It was followed by shouts and curses from the subthane’s men, as they whipped the animals into submission.
He managed to get his hands and knees under himself.
Crouching, he listened to the cries and noises at the hill’s foot. In the dark, with the rain and wind distorting the world, it was impossible to tell if the pursuers were moving away, giving up here and searching elsewhere; or starting to force their mounts up the hill face with its jumble of wet-slick boulders.
His left leg slewed out from under him as he tried to stand.
He dropped back to his knees as he felt the edge of pain slice through the numbness. He rolled onto his right side and felt with his hands for the pain’s source. The wetness that drenched his thigh was thick and hot, welling out faster than the rain could wash it away. He lifted his hands close to his face, and another jag of lightning showed them, stained with blood that looked more black than red. The wound had opened further, the stiff clot on his skin breaking away to reveal the warm interior of this huge, silently screaming mouth, framed by the ragged edges of cloth.
Then this is it, part of him thought, a part that had already seemed to separate from his body seconds—or years, measured in the storm’s time—ago. The part receded a few feet away and looked down at the rest, the arms and one leg tra
cing slow letters in the muddy space between two boulders, the face puffed and masked with fever. Seventeen years old—the thinking fragment was filled with a sad calm—and I didn’t even start to find out.
Another scream filtered through the storm, but this was above him on the hillside. He realized dimly, as if it were no longer of any importance, that the pursuers must have encircled him.
He was no longer listening for the sounds of their movements. The part that had floated free of his body sunk back down to his swollen face, as if for some final departing kiss. It fell back into the flesh, merging, and he opened his eyes to the full pressure of the storm. The rain no longer stung. And it had a voice. Is that a language, too? he wondered, marvelling. The idea enchanted him. Perhaps, if he listened as hard as he could, he would be able to understand, it would thin out and become pellucid as all the other tongues he had heard.
Motionless, he strained, listening to the compound, mingled voice. Finally, like glass dissolving—
“Traitor’s son,” the voice whispered in its own tongue.
He closed his eyes. The words changed, but what was said with them always remained the same.
“Blood of thanes. Traitor’s son.”
Soon enough, his pursuers would be standing around him, and then they would press the points of their weapons against his chest, lean their weight on them and leak the few remaining drops of his life into the mud. Their faces would be hard and shiny under the rain. The feeling of calm turned bitter under his forehead, a throb of hate and despair.
“Traitor’s son.”
He remembered the key. Reaching to his neck with one hand, he drew it out by its long fine chain from beneath his shirt, the fabric plastered right to his skin. His hand enfolded the flat square of white metal—a dull light seemed to seep from between his tightly clenched fingers. The throbbing in his head turned into a vast wave of regret as he realized that whatever door the key was meant to open would now stay closed forever.
“Traitor’s son.” Now that he understood its language, the storm’s voice wouldn’t go away. It seemed as if he had been hearing those words, in all the different tongues, all his life.
He twisted slowly on the ground.
Chapter I
The whispering followed Daenek around the marketplace, the lowered voices seeming to slide between the stalls like the grinning, stark-ribbed canines prowling for scraps on the pavement. Two old village women nodded their shawled heads, their leathery faces even more wrinkled by their mouths curling in disdain as the child passed the stall they tended. His head barely came up to the level of the racks of husk-covered vegetables, so that the women only recognized him by the dark hair, unlike that of any of the village children. “His is the blood of thanes,” whispered one crone. The other nodded in satisfaction at the sneering obscenity into which the last word was twisted.
The boy threaded his way through the market, past the rows of stalls and, behind them, faces with every variation of fear and hostility that had become familiar to him. Sometimes he squeezed past a knot of villagers clustered in the narrow passage as they fingered the vegetables or slabs of preserved meat, extracted a few coins from their sweat-darkened purses and placed their purchases in the stained cloth sacks they swung from their arms. They would look down as he passed between them, and draw away. Then the voices would start again.
“Thane’s blood.” Close-set eyes narrowed on the small figure. “Traitor’s son.”
Daenek stopped in front of one of the stalls. Behind the bins, in a small glass cabinet dangled a tiny model of the great seedships that had come from—his brows clenched as he tried to remember the world—Earth. But that was ancient history, though. Daenek stood on tiptoe and studied the little silver cylinder—he had heard that it used to move up and down inside the glass box, shooting flames from one end, but now it just hung midway on its invisible thread, useless and pathetic—until the stallkeeper scowled him away.
“A hard bunch,” said a voice behind him. He turned and saw a busker squatting behind a battered folding table at the head of one of the streets leading off the marketplace. His hands shuffled a pack of cards, the edges worn to feathers, as he winked and motioned Daenek to come closer with a tilt of his lean head. “A right hard bunch, they are.”
“I don’t like them,” said Daenek matter-of-factly. He watched the cards slither through the long fingers.
“Can’t blame you,” said the busker. “They’ve been no blessing to my pockets, either.” A sigh. “I’m right afraid I must be soon to my own village again.”
“Where’s that?”
The busker fanned the cards out on the table. “Where it is,” he said without looking up. “When I get back I’ll send a troop of my brothers out to see what good they can do with these stone-hearted stone-cutters.”
Daenek stepped away and looked down the narrow street. In front of the cramped buildings women were sitting with the tops of their coveralls spread open to reveal their pale shoulders, even though there was no sun to catch this early. Quarry-workers, too young or slack to have saved up the brideprice needed to take their choice off the street for good, sauntered in the middle of the road, jingling the coins in their pockets. Doors opened and closed with small sounds, couples going in and out of the low houses.
A priest stood in one of the marketplace’s maze-like aisles. Its heavy brown robes hung in folds over its’ tubular metal arms as it attempted to pass out its little pamphlets to the ignoring villagers. Daenek took one from the shining, oddly-jointed hand, and thought he saw the photocells in the expressionless face grow brighter beneath its cowl. THE VOICE THAT IS GREAT WITHIN YOU read the pamphlet’s outside in crudely printed letters. It fluttered to the pavement as Daenek dropped it and walked on.
At one end of the marketplace a canine crouched and giggled beneath one of the stalls. Its hairless skin was mottled with pink and liver-colored spots. The loony eyes rolled in pleasure as the boy squatted down and scratched behind its round, human-like ears.
“Hey. Git ’way from there.”
Daenek looked up and saw a man’s face, flushed and coarse-grained as a chunk of meat on one of the butchers’ racks, glaring over the edge of the stall. “You’re drivin’ everybody away,” the face growled through its thick lips.
The canine moaned in fear and ran off, its back bowed, the thin tail wrapped against its belly. Daenek stood up and backed away from the stall, watching the man behind it as he returned his sour attention to his trays of fruit. The little green spheres that had turned brown and pulpy were picked out one by one and thrown onto the ground.
Daenek turned away, bored. The crowd’s heat and the high-pitched buzzing of flies made his head ache. Maybe—he looked back into the knots of people in the marketplace, trying to spot one person in particular—maybe it was almost time to leave. He scraped a ridge of dust along the pavement with his shoe, then felt something that was both hard and wet crack against the back of his head.
He spun around—there was no one behind him. He touched the stinging spot on his skull, then looked at his hand. A tiny spot of red mingled in something sticky. At his feet was one of the rotten fruit from the stall opposite him, the hard stone visible through the shattered pulp. The stallkeeper’s eyes were bent on his own hands as they fussed over the trays.
A second passed as the boy stared at the coarse-faced man.
Suddenly, a tall woman, her face rigid with anger, appeared, striding out of the marketplace’s center. One hand clenched the silver handle of the slender black rod she used to point to the items in the stalls that she wished to buy, and to pick her way along the narrow path that led through the hills above the village. She and Daenek lived in the small house at the end of the path, and the silver-headed stick would be laid in the corner beside the door when they arrived back home, in readiness for the next trip to the marketplace. But now the stick had another purpose.
The man behind the stall looked up in time to see the stick come whistling throug
h the air and land with a sharp crack on his forehead. “A child!” the Lady Marche said fiercely, landing another blow above the man’s ear. “Not yet seven! For shame!”
The stick flew again, hitting across the man’s wide back as he crouched behind the stall.
“Naaaww!” howled the man, covering his head with his hands.
“Fer God’s sake, I didn’t chuck the damn thing at the kid!”
“Shame enough that it should be done in front of you.” The stick’s point jabbed into the pavement.
A snickering laugh sounded from a few feet away. A boy, three or four years older than Daenek, stepped into the path from around the corner of another stall. A grin seemed to almost divide his broad, pale face in two. Another of the rotten fruits was cradled in his hand.
The older boy stared boldly at the woman as she strode towards him, his confident expression not changing until a second before the stick whipped across his shoulders. He shrieked, his face rushing full with blood as he fell and scrabbled on the pavement.
“Think better,” said the Lady Marche, giving a perfunctory rap for the stick on the bobbing head, “of flinging refuse at anyone, let alone a ward of the throne.”
“A traitor’s son,” muttered a voice from the crowd of villagers that had gathered from all over the marketplace.
She turned around, sweeping her cold gaze across the sullen faces. “A protectee of—” Her voice hesitated, then continued at a lower pitch. “—of the Regent.”
A few of the faces in the crowd bent into smirks, as if a small triumph had been acknowledged.
“And a child,” she said, her voice sharp with authority, “like other children. Pity those who could fear one!”
“Yahhh,” screamed the older boy, now crouching on his knees.
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