Pre-release excerpt from The Secret of the Urns…
A. B. Carolan liked a short story I’d written long ago called “Marcello and Me.” He asked if he could make it into a novel. Ha! Now he owns it. The following excerpt from his The Secret of the Urns is the same one that appears at the end of his second edition of my YA sci-fi mystery The Secret Lab. You might not have read that new edition, though—you should, especially if you didn’t read the first edition! By the way, A. B. doesn’t have a website or Facebook author’s page and prefers to keep his email address a secret, but he does have an author’s page on both Amazon and Smashwords. He’s a wee bit reclusive, you see, but if you want to send him a message, send it to me using my contact page.
The Secret of the Urns
Copyright 2018, A. B. Carolan
Chapter One
My leg was broken. Way to go, girl!
That wasn’t my only worry. Kids break bones all the time. Hard Fist’s climate would kill me, not the break.
There wasn’t likely to be anyone near, and no one knew where I was. I didn’t even know, and, even if I did, I couldn’t communicate the location to anyone. Nobody within yelling distance, and even radio signals would be blocked where I lay flat on my back in pain.
Although it was still hot, the white sun had just gone down behind the precipice’s edge, leaving me in shadow, except for Big Fellow’s pale light dominating the twilight sky of its satellite Hard Fist. Soon night would fall, temperatures would plummet, and I would freeze.
At least the ubiquitous sounds from the satellite’s rainforest had started up again to provide me with some funeral music. Of course, those sounds would make the dirge a bit primitive; some might even say they were threatening. You could almost hear chanted words to the effect, “Humans don’t belong here!” Yeah, tell my parents that!
My usual cheery thirteen-year-old innocence and positive outlook on life had suffered a major blow along with my leg. I was thinking they’d morphed into stupidity instead. Fact is, I’m not stupid—I’m the child of a triad that had bioengineered my mental and physical attributes as well as they could, given the genetic material they had available, which was AOK considering each member of the triad had the same thing done for them. But I’d just acted stupidly, so I could almost hear old Darwin crowing about natural selection being the better choice.
So far, growing up on Hard Fist hadn’t been easy. The planet-sized moon orbits the gas giant Big Fellow, almost a star itself and about twice the size of Jupiter. This largest planet in the Fistian star system lies at the E-zone’s edge, so its satellite is theoretically habitable, but barely so in practice, at least for Humans. Some of my difficulties growing up there had their origin in the harsh environment. And now it might kill me!
Hard Fist broke all the rules. Tides were huge due to Big Fellow’s proximity. When they combined with strong winds from a storm, lowlands close to the shore flooded, so communities weren’t found close to the shore. Lush tropical forests took advantage of 0.9 relative to E-normal gravity and the greenhouse effect, but all that vegetation also saturated the air with free oxygen while fixing excess nitrogen. The whole atmosphere is in a strange equilibrium that scientists were just beginning to understand. Other nearby but smaller satellites toyed with Big Fellow’s powerful attraction enough to keep our moon from being tide-locked to the gas giant, another precarious equilibrium, although that didn’t matter much because Big Fellow wasn’t a star. These were strange equilibriums that had lasted for eons, though. I’d never wanted to understand their intricacies, but we all suffered from their capricious nature.
Even in the 21st century, Human scientists knew there were many planets in near-Earth space. Turned out many are habitable; in other words, there are many places where Humans can live. At the personal level, though, people don’t have to like living in those places. For my tenure on Hard Fist, I had no choice. I couldn’t leave my legal wardens, my parents, until I was eighteen—or, unless I received their permission to do so, which I’d been on the verge of asking many times recently. Because I was often invisible to them in a manner of speaking, having a chance to ask or receive permission wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon, though. I did the best I could to cope.
I had difficulties with grown-ups in general. Most of these problems could be traced to their not remembering what it was like to be a kid. They were mostly scientists, engineers, and other technical people who were sent to Hard Fist to study that strange moon. While there should have been a law against it, some of them had kids. I’m one of those. My name is Asako Kobayashi, a Human Fistian, the first one. Others followed, but I’m unique, as if that mattered. Write that on my funeral urn, Mom and Dad2. Of course, they might never find my body!
***
Humans had found native Fistians on Hard Fist—we didn’t know how many exactly, but certainly a lot more than Humans. The Human grown-ups didn’t socialize with them. The “official reason” was that they were studying native Fistians and everything else Fistian, the entire biosphere, in other words, so they didn’t want to lose their objectivity.
By the time I turned ten (Earth standard years, not Fistian years), I knew the real reason: Humans generally didn’t like native Fistians. Some even expressed their prejudices openly, especially recent arrivals. Others never admitted to having them but exhibited them through their actions. Almost everyone considered the moon’s natives barely sentient and primitive. I knew better.
My parents were a lot more understanding than some. They allowed me to play with Marcello, my Fistian friend. I needed that playtime because all the other Human kids were much younger, many just babies. I knew most of Marcello’s clan too. I named the clan mother, the cultural and political boss, Mama Dora. She’s about as ancient and tough as anyone could seem to be for a young girl of thirteen. You don’t fool around with Mama Dora.
Marcello, my best friend, is way down in the pecking order in his village and about four or five generations removed from Mama Dora as near as I could tell. Three times my size—still small compared to a grown male—he is gentle and has a great sense of humor. He’d play tricks on me, like the time he jumped out in front of me on the road coming home from school one day and made me scream.
The Fistian young don’t go to our school. That never made sense to me either. They pick up languages faster than Humans, for example. While I struggled with the dead but “classic” languages English and Mandarin—ones we only see in computer history files or hear in ancient videos—Marcello spoke them fluently, as well as Standard, that mish-mash of the two languages, with lots of bits and pieces from others, that had developed among Spacers back in the home solar system.
I once saw a drawing of a centaur in a video called “Mythical Creatures of Earth”—yeah, it was in old English. Other Humans on Hard Fist used the word in a derogatory sense, so I’d become curious and queried Einstein, the camp’s AI, about it. Marcello looks a little bit like a centaur. He’s harder to ride because his back slopes at a thirty degree angle from his butt up to his head—not like a horse’s body at all (a few non-mythological Earth creatures had survived the Tali invasion of Earth and were taken to other near-Earth systems, so I’d seen videos of live horses).
You have to sprawl on top of Marcello and hold on to his thick mane for dear life as he gallops through the forest, pawing branches aside with those big hands and strong arms, laughing via snorts and grinning with his dancing eyebrows while I scream for him to slow down. In fact, one time he suddenly did, just to piss me off. I went sailing into a scummy pond. He stood on the bank, swishing at swamp flies with his thick tail, and bellowed out his laughter. A real comedian.
It took me a week to get the stench out of my hair. It took me two to forgive him.
***
The day I broke my leg I hadn’t been able to find Marcello. A member of his clan told me he’d gone hunting in the high country. I liked the high country—it was a little cooler there in the daytime, which was nice, and much colder at night, which wasn’t. I was upset that he hadn’t taken me with him, so I went to find him. Big mistake!
There are no volcanoes on Hard Fist, but there are rivers of lava. The huge gravitational pull from Big Fellow kneads the satellite, about the size of Earth, into a wrinkled elastic ball with many cracks all over it. The thermal activity created at its core, so visible from space, more than compensates for being on the E-zone’s cold edge. Add the greenhouse effect, and you have a tropical climate, except at the poles, but one with wide temperature swings between day and night.
The lava rivers don’t flow like rivers, though, because the cracks in the mantle begin, wander a bit in a north-south direction, and then end. The Fistians work around them. Those rivers are especially beautiful when one terminus reaches out into the ocean, and the crack becomes an angry fjord complete with a crashing kilometers-wide waterfall where seawater turns into steam. That water vapor rises, condenses into clouds, and rains down on the lush forests filled with flora and fauna so varied that our scientists haven’t even begun to catalog all the species.
Enter the drooler, the most feared predator prowling under the rainforest’s tall canopy. Preying on everything from the large insect-like four-winged creatures to its own kind, alive or carrion, this fellow is a lumbering eating machine. I hadn’t counted on meeting one, though. They were solitary beasts and only sociable when you look like food.
We call them droolers because they slobber as they walk. Behind all the slobbers, they have plenty of sharp teeth—that doesn’t add anything to their charm. They are nasty, vile creatures that will even take on an adult Fistian to get a full meal, but they’ll also eat Humans as appetizers.
Most of the time, though, droolers are slow enough that you can run away from them. That’s easy to do because they smell like algae rotting in a ‘ponics tank. We Humans don’t have a keen sense of smell, but we can still smell a drooler about two or three klicks away. A native Fistian can pick up that odor from an even greater distance. In either case, the strategy is clear: you just make sure you move away from the drooler’s stench. Other directions aren’t recommended.
I figured local fauna should be able to detect a drooler’s stench as well as or better than a native Fistian, so I wondered how the stinky creatures caught anything to eat. There were conjectures about them hunting in packs so their prey wouldn’t have anywhere to go as the circle around them closed. Hard to say whether the conjecture had any substance because no Human had seen packs of droolers. On the contrary, they seemed like solitary beasts, so maybe fresh meat was caught by accident, and they mostly dined on carrion.
I wasn’t about to go looking for droolers to find out more about them. But this one had found me.
He was a youngster, though, and moved about as fast as I did. (I say “he” because the males have bright blue-green balls that are conspicuous even at a distance—the rest of the tan body is dappled with light and dark green spots.) Junior was also persistent.
The ubiquitous blister vines whipped across my face and body as I fled through the forest, receiving a bloody gash above my eye and on my left breast. Their oily residue stung like hell, and the pain slowed me down. Think of semi-sentient and slightly mobile poison ivy on steroids, live whips that liked to pommel and grab.
Did I mention they sing? Little suckers along their lengths breathe in and out, making a high-pitched humming noise. (Unlike centaurs, poison ivy isn’t mythical Earth flora, but it’s long gone from planet Earth, thanks to the Tali invasion.) Their whipping action makes a bit of noise too.
The young drooler was just about to sink his teeth into me when I broke out into the clear and flew over the edge of the precipice, right across one of those lava rifts. This one was narrow enough that I didn’t fall in and become deep-fried Asako tempura, a fate I thought might still be better than being eaten by this carnivore. I hit a ledge four meters down on the opposite side so hard that I broke my leg and knocked the wind out. My pursuer, moving a bit slower, hit only the edge of the ledge, clawed desperately for a few seconds, and then crashed into the molten lava many meters below.
I felt sorry for him. He wouldn’t be able to breed and pass his stupidity on to his offspring.
I then realized that the same could be said of me.
***
Did you miss Rembrandt’s Angel? Both that novel and my novel The Collector present my unique thesis that stolen artwork can be used as collateral for other nefarious criminal activity. In Rembrandt’s Angel (Penmore Press, 2017), Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent, has to manage Scotland Yard Inspector Esther Brookstone’s obsession with recovering the Rembrandt, “An Angel with Titus’ Features,” stolen by the Nazis in World War Two. Esther’s mission becomes deadlier and different from her usual cases in the Art and Antiques Division of the Yard. The duo takes readers on a wild tour of Europe and South America before the story reaches its thrilling climax, as they find out what the stolen paintings are used to finance. In the process, the couple’s romantic interludes become a full-blown romance. Available on Amazon, Smashwords and its associated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc), and in most bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it).
The earlier novel, The Collector, also features Esther and Bastiann in cameo roles, and he also appears in Aristocrats and Assassins and Gaia and the Goliaths. These three ebooks are available on Amazon and Smashwords.
All of these books can be read independently.
In libris libertas!
