Halcyon Nights

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

Questing.Through canyons of space.The Kubraen Spirit scanned for one remote planet, his telepathic senses guided by crystals stolen from him and taken to that world, his heart more desolate than the measureless chasms between the galaxy's silver arms.

Searching, he brushed the minds of peoples on many spheres, far from where his body lay, enmeshed in the mantle of his own world, a world that revolved with four others around a yellow sun. As though peeling back the layers of the galaxy, he stretched the limits of his tel power and threaded between stars, through swirling nebulae where new star systems emerged, and circumvented the insistent drag of black holes.

There! he thought.

As though retrieving a silver pearl that shone through black depths, a quiver of joy crossed his vast body and softened the bleakness within him as his tel senses brushed the star he had tracked. With the stolen crystals as beacons, he unveiled the system's third planet and scanned the minds of its dominant species.

Among the rare telepaths he probed, he located the two beings he sought. The one he would teach to manipulate the minds of the creature's own race, the other, a young tel, the daughter, would develop that rare ability to move the elements themselves. Both were needed to fulfill his plan.

Alone with the great sadness in his soul, the Kubraen Spirit waited for the man to dream....

Chapter Two

The day Althea married Charles What's-His-Name I rented a fast hovair and headed for Waste Flats, an ideal zone to lose yourself in ways both imaginative and lethal. It was common knowledge that mega-dream dons ran an illegal import-export business from the contaminated Flats. Perhaps I'd find work.

"Al, how could you?" I asked myself in the small aircraft and slammed a fist on the console. My hand came away numb. I rubbed the knuckles, stared through the side window and saw my reflection gaze back.

It was easy, I responded to my reflection. She waited five years for you to come home to Earth before the divorce. Perhaps you were expecting five more to practice astrobiology on planet Syl' Tyrria?

But endings are always difficult. This one was a killer. Bile ate its way up my throat as I flew over Rocky Flats plain, west of Denver, a fitting locale for my dismal mood. The Flats had once been the site of a government lab that was supposed to be processing nuclear material, not fissioning. After the explosion back in the twenty-first that left the land irradiated, the locals christened it Waste Flats.

To the west, the cloud-shrouded Rockies. And memories as sharp and sudden as those jutting crests. I stared at three sun-glazed peaks above mist. The Three Sisters, my kid sister Ginny called them. I closed my eyes and felt a shiver run through me.

The image of my broken hornet cub caught in pine branches on the sheer canyon cliff below those peaks. The terror on Ginny's face as she slides down an outcrop of rock. Beneath her, the canyon floor....

My hands trembled on the wheel as I pulled my gaze from the peaks and exited the air lanes. Below, Lost Vegas.

I banked over shabby plastic-board buildings, dirt roads and gambling houses. The houses are for tourists who like to dress in weekend warrior toughs and spend some time, but not too much, gambling in the contaminated zone, then bragging to friends about the dangerous Flats. But it's no worse than Old Las Vegas, run by the Mafia back in the twentieth, if you're here to spend creds. You have to stay out of the posted areas designated No Trespassing. They mean it! Here there be tigers, in the form of underground warehouses which are heavily guarded at hidden entrances. I've heard that anyone sniffing around those posted areas loses his "tourist" status and ends up as part of the pavement on some new road system.

Well, I wasn't interested in illegal warehouses or in exposing the dons. I'd leave that to suicidal investigative reporters. I clamped my teeth on a gritty taste of sand from the open window and wiped my tongue on my collar.

It's a symbiotic relationship, though, in the flats. Dream Dons need the tourist business as a front to whitewash creds, so non-straying customers are treated with tender loving care.

The real gamble of the Flats takes place in backroom cozies. There, for an exorbitant fee, they'll hook you into illegal crystal mega-dream systems that weave your wildest fantasies into a coherent mind construct populated with tangible phantoms of your choice. The universe is a balanced place, though, and you pay for your tangled web with burnt-out brain cell clusters.

But prohibition never works.

I knew I was being tracked as I lowered the craft, flew past a control tower that loomed beside a dirt runway, and a camouflaged missile launcher. The hovair's wings sliced swirling dust rising from truck and motorcycle trails.

Dangerous Territory, the comp screen flashed. Unpatrolled. Radiation levels high! The buzzer kicked on, calculated, by its insistency, to make me do something about it.

I overrode it.

"Request intentions and clearance code," the control tower squawked.

"Roger, tower." I flicked on the panel's ident switch and saw my brooding countenance stare back from the screen. I needed a haircut again. "Jules Rammis. Zephyr 185. When did you tags acquire a control tower?" I asked.

"Zephyr 185, maintain a holding position at 4,000 feet above ground level."

"Sure. Roger, tower." I climbed, my question unanswered.I guess you need a control tower when you're an active spaceport for contraband. I guess you need a police force or two from surrounding cities on the take. Mostly, though, you need judges too intimidated or too well paid to mete out justice to the most flagrant racketeers.

The dons, under the command of some off-world czar, wheeled and dealed with syndicates all over the country, across Earth, and even on off-world colonies. The virtual technology was old. But the alien crystals, illegally imported to Earth from only the czar knew where, though my police friend Jack said it could be planet Halcyon, were the heart of these new systems. I'd been told it gives the dreams a counterfeit reality more vivid than the waking state, more blissful than the rewards of sex or religion.

I was anxious to find out as I adjusted my console screen for a ground close-up and watched a band of scruffy tags struggle to unload heavy crates from a truck marked Filomena's Specialty Flowers.

More like illegal crystals.Perhaps I'd found my place after all.Perhaps these tags who lifted the bales and toted the barges for the Syndicate, their bodies ravaged by radiation, their minds smogged by mega-brain-char, were my real people. After all, we were each of us projecting an image of bravado, but behind the masks, the rads and I were all losers.

I thought of my auburn-haired Althea with the body and grace of a ballerina, and my six-year-old daughter Lisa, who didn't even know me. Behind the masks, the rads and were all losers. I wondered about the animals inhabiting the Flats, if any still did. By now, they had probably all died of cancer. But others would keep coming in to fill the vacant niches. Kind of a black hole of death for the local life forms.

Anything nuclear had been banned on my former home, the wilds of Syl' Tyrria, which Terrans had christened Tartarus before our encounter with their race of telepathic Loranths. Those rulers of the planet took one look at the workings of things nuclear and said "No way!" though they said it in stelspeak. It's a primal planet, designated Tooth and Claw by Worlds Colonization. The Loranths like it that way. I'd spent the last five years living with the tooth and claws while I searched for mammals emerging from more primitive forms. That's what an astrobiologist does.

"State your intentions, Zephyr 185," the controller barked again.

"Oh, yeah. Tourist. Gold-Preferred compcard. Expiration date, three years, November, 21, 2284."

"State name, age, and Worlds Security Code.

I knew my name and my code. I think by now I'm twenty-seven."

Either I was close in my age or they didn't give a Loranth's silver tail when they found that nice fat seventy thou in my credcount. There were advantages to being acknowledged here on Earth, besides the Worlds Humanity Award, for my part in dealing with Sye Kor, the psychotic Loranth of Syl' Tyrria, who'd tried to kill off all of mankind with his gland-produced plague.

I held the craft in a hover position, rock still, at 4,000 feet, while they checked out my credcount and drooled. "Rock" still isn't easy on manual. But then I'd had a few months to get reacquainted with flying, and loneliness, while I sulked over Althea's refusal to cancel her wedding plans. And while she verbally fended off my efforts to see my daughter Lisa till after the wedding.

"Too traumatic for her now, Jules," she'd insisted. "Sorry," she'd soothed. "After the honeymoon!" she'd demanded when I'd persisted.

Finally I'd given in, on the assumption that Althea might be right. But damn, my little Lisa.... I'd watched her grow, from the photos Althea had sent while I was working on Syl' Tyrria. Maybe I'd done some growing up there too when I was forced to take on responsibility for my race of humans against Sye Kor, because now I really wanted to be part of my daughter's childhood.

The tower came back. "Have you on an auto craft at 4,000 feet, Zephyr 185."

"Negative. Manual,"I bragged.

"JesusChristlotus, look at that tag," I heard the controller tell someone. "He's hovering like a stone, on manual, at 4,000."

I smiled. You get your kicks where you find them.

"Landing approved, Zephyr 185. Proceed with caution."

Proceed with caution, I thought. And search out your Nirvana, I added, somewhere in a designer dream so vivid you'll think you went through the looking glass, brightly. What if you leave a few brain cell clusters behind? Life's but a dream.

But Al, how could you?

"Lost Wages, tag. That's what we like to call it." The grizzled drunk who sat across from me at a table in Uranium Bar and Grill spoke hoarsely against piped-in nature sounds, mostly wind across the flats. "No vids, no kids, no feds, no creds."

Just sleepwalking radbrains, I thought. The derogatory term for these lost people. By now word had come down from the control tower that there was a tag in town with mucho creds. I was surprised they hadn't sicced someone classier than this ancient tag on me and my stuffed credcount.

"Best godforsaken nation off the map!" The drunk hiccupped and drooled beer. "Long as you manage to keep your prairie oysters attached." He ran a dirty sleeve across his mouth. "Founded by the Biker Fathers way back in the late twenty-first."

I didn't stop him by saying that I already knew.

"Started when bikers needed a place where the damn spikers wouldn't follow," he informed me, referring to officers of the law. "Of course the tourists followed them, acting all macho and boasting that they weren't no way scared of radiation. Looking for fun, they were, gambling, dancing girls, willing women, not always in that order." He chuckled. "Now some of 'em come to dream instead." He gingerly touched a lump on his upper chest. "Dumb bastards," he muttered and peered at me. "But it's still the best nation on planet Earth. Right, tag?"

I hate to lie. Sometimes not lying gets me into trouble, though. I swirled my glow burn on the rocks.

"Well?" he demanded when I didn't respond.

"Well what?" I sipped the drink and felt liquid scrape down my throat like sharp tacks. From the gambling room across the hall there came the rusty rasps and rattles of worn gaming machines, and an occasional shout or loud moan.

"Well ain't it the best godforsaken nation?" He raised his voice and his glass. "Mebbe you saying we ain't?"

Someone lowered the nature sounds and I heard bar stools creak as men turned to watch us, their forms heavy and slow in the murky light. Two bare-breasted dance girls on break picked up their drinks and moved away. The clink of glasses and the murmur of voices faded, till only old country tunes wailed softly from floating holos.

I folded my hands around the glass, squeezed it and studied the men. There was a rage in me that would have welcomed the hard shock of my fists against bone. Even carbide knuckles, if that was their way.

"Listen, tag." The drunk pushed back his floppy hat and thrust his stubbly jaw forward. There was a lump on his chin, too, and another on his cheek. I felt cold inside even against the liquor burning through me.

His eyes widened. The whites were yellow. So was his skin. That hoarseness in his voice was not from age alone. I stared at my empty glass and felt suddenly drained myself.

Was I also out to self-destruct?

He tapped the table with a horny-nailed finger. "Whether you come to our nation to drink, gamble, or whore your worm off, you better have a good word for it."

I filled my glass from the bottle on the table and watched a scrawny Australian sheepdog with exotic blue eyes and matted fur that was dotted with blue. He wagged his wet tail as he trotted, ignored, from table to table. "Well," I said, "the people give off a nice warm glow."

The drunk grinned. "Well, all right." He threw back his head and laughed. "Well, that's all right! That's our motto, brother. Fireflies with stingers!" He looked at the men at the bar and belched. "Ain't it, brothers?"

Bar stools creaked as men turned back to their drinks.

The dog approached our table. As I petted him, he licked salt off my fingers from the pretzels I'd been eating. He was bony beneath long soft fur and his back legs trembled. They treated their animals almost as bad as their people here on the Flats. I reached for a pretzel.

The drunk kicked him. "Get outa here, ya tickbag!"

The dog yelped and scurried away, then stopped to look back, his tail tucked.I don't mind so much when people treat each other badly. I expect it. But I hate it when they treat animals like that.The drunk chuckled. "That's how you sting ass!"

I drew in a breath through teeth. "Which makes you a nation of pricks," I said.

The drunk peered at me. He scraped his chair back and gripped his left arm with his right hand. A grimace of pain twitched across his face as he turned to look toward the bar. I realized that not even the hard liquor had dulled the agony of his growing tumors. It was getting difficult for him to hide the pain. A sense of numbness replaced my anger and I stood to leave.

A hand on my shoulder! I pushed it off, turned quickly.

"Want to buy a dream, tag?" The woman's tone was soft. She was young only in smooth skin and a firm body. There was a lot of experience behind those green eyes, so wide and innocent, behind that pallid night-time complexion and the practiced languid smile, as though she'd just had sex. Long red hair, almost the color of Althea's, but brassier, was piled on her head in a loose braid. Her perfume smelled thick and sweet as a Denebian's sweat.I scraped at a sticky stain on my shirt sleeve and offered the lady my arm. "Why not?" I had brain cells to spare and memories to annihilate. "What's your name?"

"April Flowers."

"Isn't May Flowers more appropriate?"