Spherical Harmonic by Catherine Asaro Read Free Book Online Page A

sat up stiffly. Gazing across the fire, I saw the tangle of roots where I had been bound. My chronometer said only seconds had passed since Hajune left. Before I made my own escape, I needed food, lest hunger stop me where roots had failed. I used the carapace of a gutted beetle to spoon down half the soup. It was tangy and bitter, with a sweet aftertaste, more palatable than I expected. If I hadn't seen Hajune make it, I would have never dreamed it came from over-sized-bug innards. After I ate, I doused the flames with the last of the water in the pitcher.
     
     
Then I left.
     
     
Outside, tripod trees loomed in a red night. I smelled water in one direction. The lake? I headed that way. The purported city was only thirty kilometers away, "under" Slowcoal. Normally, I could easily walk that far, but here it would be harder. I paused to fashion rough shoes out of plant flags. They weren't the most comfortable footwear, but they made it easier to hike.
     
     
Then I set off again. As I pushed through the underbrush, I pondered this last time I had faded. An odd sense tugged my mind. What? The memory hovered at the edges of my thoughts. Frustrated, I finally gave up trying to catch it and let my mind wander.
     
     
Suddenly the memory jumped into focus. Taquinil! I had sensed him in psiberspace. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but I felt certain he had been real. A mother's joy flowed over me, tempered by the knowledge that it had only been a trace, nothing more concrete.
     
     
As hope buoyed my thoughts, spherical harmonic wavefunctions evolved in my mind. I saw them as shimmering orbs in lavender, rose, and blue. Some resembled symmetrical flowers; others were rings and teardrops. They rotated against a silver atmosphere.
     
     
It had always been this way, my mind forming vivid mathematical images to accompany intense emotions. When I was ten, even before I had any neural augmentation, the doctors told my parents that my intellectual potential was beyond what their tests could measure with accuracy. That didn't stop them from doing test after test, though. I seemed to fascinate them. They ascribed my increased intellect to the extra neural structures that made me a telepath, as well as to genetic and environmental factors. Over the decades, as neural surgeons augmented my brain, its capacity increased.
     
     
Eventually, to support it, I created the psiberweb.
     
     
It had formed around me in Kyle space, a tangle of threads, gold, silver, palest rose, and vivid blue, all shot through with strands the color of a deep forest, rough here, smooth there, knobbed in places, glossy in others. I untangled the threads, creating pipelines where thoughts flowed, darted, and vibrated. Electric blue light pulsed along the strands, leaving swirls of color in their wake, like the rainbows on an oil slick.
     
     
A few decades after I created the web, the evolution of my mind had reached a critical point. Then I changed. I underwent a mental phase transition the way liquid changes to gas. My mind became something else. What? I couldn't say. But after it happened, Eldrin was my anchor more than ever. Lover and beloved: he kept me at least partway human, where I might otherwise have faded from reality altogether.
     
     
Now the Traders had Eldrin. And Taquinil was gone.
     
     
More memories: doctors speaking in low voices, unsure how Eldrin and I would take their news. Someday our son would make the same mental transition I had experienced. Taquinil and I had a great deal of use to our people, enough to make the ruling Assembly define us as "invaluable resources." But we also frightened them, everyone— except Eldrin. Year by year, decade by decade, he had watched our son's intellect grow, a proud father bemused by the luminous genius he had sired. Only Eldrin truly accepted us as we were. Our intellects neither overawed nor put him off. He simply loved us. And so we loved him back, unconditionally, with all our