Spherical Harmonic by Catherine Asaro Read Free Book Online Page B

hearts.
     
     
Eldrin, love, where are you? Now that the memories had begun, I couldn't stop the harrowing images. Taquinil and I were facing Eldrin inside an octagonal chamber. Behind Eldrin, waroids approached, Trader commandos in body armor. Walking fortresses. Taquinil shouted a warning to his father, but his words stretched out in the slow-time around the singularity.
     
     
Singularity?
     
     
Yes. It punctured spacetime in an incandescent column, coming out of Kyle space, existing within that octagonal chamber, then returning to the netherworld from whence it came. That last moment seared into my mind: Eldrin staring at us, caught around the waist by the waroid behind him, his left foot lifted, his arms outstretched, his body straining against his captor's armored limb. Desperation filled his gaze. And love. Terror and love.
     
     
A tear ran down my cheek. Had I lost them both? But I had sensed Taquinil in psiberspace. I had to believe we could recover him. All those extra neural structures crammed in my skull had to be worth something. The thought that Eldrin's sacrifice would be in vain was too painful to endure.
     
     
I swept aside more brush and stumbled forward. With no warning, I came out onto the promontory above the lake. I felt as if I were repeating history, like a wave, coming here over and over, ebbing and flowing against the shores of reality. Except now I knew what to do: find the starport in the brooding land beneath Slowcoal.
     
     
Dawn reddened the sky and Slowcoal spanned on the horizon. Walking to the edge of the cliff, I looked around for a path down to the lake. My steps knocked chunky rocks off the promontory, and they slowly dropped to the water far below. When they hit, swells rolled across the lake, rising high in the low gravity. Their slow crests caught sparks of red light and glinted like rubies.
     
     
A presence stirred in the forest, distant but closing fast. Hajune.
     
     
I dove off the promontory. As I sailed away from the cliff, my mind stretched out and beyond, seeing all my surroundings, even myself arching through the air, a translucent figure silhouetted against the scarlet sky and the great disk of Slowcoal.
     
     
     

4
     
     
Slowcoal
     
     
     
     

I broke the surface and gulped in air. Drops of water rained lazily over me in fat spheres. No, not spheres. Spheres were hollow. These were balls. Elongated balls. They weren't perfectly round even in this gravity. Another memory came, my father-in-law saying, You spend too much time with your equations. But his tone had been fond.
     
     
I swam smoothly to the shore. As I waded onto the pebbly beach, a green bulldozer-bug the size of my foot scuttled into the forest. My shift was plastered to my body, almost transparent, but at least it hadn't dissolved.
     
     
The forest resumed a few steps up the beach. I made my way into that surreal landscape of giant roots and tripods. Nausea plagued me. According to my internal sensors, it came from lack of food and sleep, exposure to the elements, unfriendly bacteria, and impurities in the air. It didn't bode well: none of that was likely to improve unless I found help. Even if I did locate people, they might not like me any more than Hajune did.
     
     
After about an hour, I had to stop. My stomach felt like it was turning inside out. Sitting on a root, I bent over and held my abdomen. Sweat beaded my forehead.
     
     
What had gone wrong? I shouldn't have ended up alone, without recourse, poisoned and hurt. Taquinil and I should have come out in a controlled environment designed to help us recover. We couldn't have gone into that singularity without preparation. Shoving people into a hole in spacetime wasn't something you did on the spur of the moment. Either our plans hadn't been complete or we had been too rushed to do it right. But chances were I had come out near my intended target. If a city did exist where Hajune claimed, I might have contacts there. If I could