Daughter of Elysium Read online

  A modern classic, Joan Slonczewski’s A DOOR INTO OCEAN earned the author overwhelming critical acclaim, and comparisons to such respected science fiction luminaries as Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin. Now, once again, she opens wide the portals into the remarkable ocean world of Shora—and ushers the reader into a breathtaking realm of scientific and ecological wonders…where deathhastening perils hide behind a deceptive veneer of harmony and peace.

  Across the galactic Fold, Raincloud Windclan and her family wend their way toward Elysium—a pristine, technologically advanced city of scientists, teachers, politicians and intergalactic bankers that floats serenely on the surface of a water world. A Clicker “goddess” from an environmentally unstable tribal planet, Rain cloud has come at the request of Elysium’s leaders, who urgently need her linguistic and diplomatic skills to help avert an impending war with the barbaric Urulites. But it is scientific knowledge that attracts her husband, Blackbear, to this strange, incomprehensible city. For he fervently wishes to share with his own people the Elysians’ greatest achievement: immortality.

  For centuries the pleasure-loving Elysians have co-existed with the Sharers—Shora’s enigmatic, compassionate “lifeshapers,” living precariously on natural “rafts” outside the urban limits.

  But greed and complacency have bred among the ageless city dwellers contempt for their treaties and agreements with the true masters of their planet…and for the intelligent machines that attend to their every whim. Yet only a chosen few—the foreigner Windclans included—recognize the internal corruption that is destroying the eternal society…and the devastating resentments and future-threatening hatreds brewing within a dangerous community of nano-sentient “servants” empowered by the awesome might of the words “I am.”

  Other Books by

  Joan Slonczewski

  A DOOR INTO OCEAN

  DAUGHTER OF ELYSIUM is an original publication of Avon Books.

  This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel.

  Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1993 by Joan Slonczewski

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-3104

  ISBN: 0-688-12509-3

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Avon Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

  Slonczewski, Joan.

  Daughter of Elysium/Joan Slonczewski.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3569.L65D38 1994

  93-3104

  813'.54—dc20

  CIP

  First Morrow/AvoNova Printing: August 1993

  AVONOVA TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  ARC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Matthew,

  the star with

  a face.

  Contents

  I

  THE SNAKE

  II

  THE CHILD

  III

  THE DANCE OF FIRE

  IV

  THE IMMORTALS

  I

  THE SNAKE

  Chapter 1

  THE SKY OF THE OCEAN MOON WAS BLUE ENOUGH, impossibly blue, bluer than the eye of a newborn. But its surface was not blue at all, as Doctor Blackbear Windclan had expected from the picture-perfect video brochure. As the shuttlecraft bore him and his family ever closer through the clouds, the curve of ocean appeared dusty green, as if a featureless meadow covered the globe. Could this really be Shora, the Ocean Moon?

  To reassure himself, Blackbear squeezed the ankles of his two-year-old Sunflower, seated on his shoulders, then he touched the hand of his goddess, Raincloud. Raincloud was a linguist whose training in the tongue of a forbidden world had earned her a job on this free one.

  Raincloud returned his look confidently. A goddess of elegant stature, she had the earth-toned complexion typical of their people, the Clickers of Bronze Sky. She carried on her hip their six-year-old Hawktalon, whose cascade of black braids twined in spirals like her mother’s. The braids, full of patterned beads, were works of art which Blackbear spent hours redoing each week. Mother and daughter wore their best rei-gi garments, as did Blackbear: russet linen trousers that flared like skirts, their hems bordered with embroidered volcanoes and fireweed. A belt tied the garment at the waist—for Raincloud, a black belt.

  Blackbear adjusted his turban at his forehead. “This planet looks more like a swamp than an ocean.” Shora, home of the native Sharers and the ageless Elysians, was an ocean world—the only inhabited world covered entirely by ocean. And yet, the closer came the ocean’s surface, the more it looked like a field of vegetation, scraggly green and brown patches with brackish puddles in between. It made his stomach churn, already unsettled from the shifting g-forces of the shuttlecraft.

  “Maybe it’s Valedon, by mistake,” he added, referring to Shora’s dryer moon-twin. A country doctor from the frontier of Bronze Sky, a world still largely uncharted, Blackbear distrusted all spacecraft and, for that matter, any contrivance that produced light and speech from no discernible origin.

  But he would put up with it. For what he sought on this ocean, countless doctors would give their lives: the secret of immortality.

  Raincloud laughed, eyeing the vast “swamp” some ten thousand meters below. “You could herd a lot of goats down there.” Her voice clicked crisply, in the language that had earned their people the epithet “Clickers.” Clickers farmed the Caldera Hills of the Dark Goddess, beneath a volcanic bronze sky. Twenty light-years distant, yet Bronze Sky was just a rei-gi tumble away from here, through a hole in the galactic Fold.

  Hawktalon’s braids bounced, and she pulled herself up a notch on her mother’s back. “Can we really keep our goats after all, Mother? And have room to let the dogs run? Oh please, let’s send for the dogs—”

  “No,” clicked Raincloud. “I told you, we’ll be indoors the whole time, within a giant Elysian city.”

  “Shaped like a bubble, you said,” Hawktalon added.

  Elysium, the republic of “immortals.” Elysians never aged. They lived a thousand years or more, within their twelve opulent “cellular cities” that floated upon Shora’s ocean.

  “But even in Founders City,” Hawktalon reminded her mother, “people kept dogs.” The capital of Bronze Sky was the only city the six-year-old had ever known.

  Raincloud looked up from the observation deck and turned toward the back of the carpeted oval compartment. “Servo, please,” she called. Raincloud spoke Elysian, the language of the ageless ones, as well as Sharer, the speech of the ocean-dwelling natives who long predated the Republic of Elysium. Most important, she spoke the language of Urulan, the dreaded barbarian world whose missiles threatened the worlds of the Free Fold. Elysian intelligence had recruited her for her knowledge of Urulite. “Servo, please tell us what makes this ocean brown when its sky is blue.”

  The azure sky was no disappointment, Blackbear conceded, coming from a world whose volcanic dust painted its noonday sky yellow, with hours of blood-red sunset.

  “A very perceptive and interesting question, Citizen,” came a sibilant voice from nowhere.

  Blackbear frowned suspiciously. On his shoulders Sunflower bounced and craned his neck with interest, his stuffed wolf cub doll dangling in his fa
ther’s face.

  “The answer, Citizen,” continued the servo voice, “is this. On Shora, by this time of year, the raft seedlings overgrow the entire ocean.”

  So that was it. Living “rafts” like radial tree branches grew out onto the water. Unlike Elysians, the web-fingered Sharers actually lived outdoors upon the larger rafts.

  As the servo spoke, Raincloud murmured simultaneous translation for Hawktalon. This talent had earned the goddess a job as interpreter for the Sharer embassy in Founders City, where Blackbear had studied medicine. Elysium, of course, had Sharer experts aplenty; their treaty with the ocean-dwellers required continual consultation. For Elysian Foreign Affairs, Raincloud would be translating signals from spy satellites at Urulan.

  And Blackbear would do medical research, at the Longevity Laboratory of the famous scientist Tulle Meryllishon.

  “In just two weeks,” the servo voice told the Windclans, “the giant seaswallowers will migrate from the south pole, consuming the overgrown raft seedlings you see below, along with anything else in their path. Despite our best efforts, one or two Sharer rafts are lost each year.”

  “Lost?” Blackbear exclaimed. “But—what about us?” Elysian cities, like the living rafts, floated upon the ocean, each one a great sphere of nanoplast some four kilometers across. The city of Helicon, the Windclans’ destination, lay ahead now, a gleaming pearl set in the seedling-choked sea. The pearl grew steadily larger as they approached. A single dwelling for a million immortal souls; the sight of it took his breath away. Yet even a structure so huge could be swamped by the sea.

  “The city of Helicon could be lost, Citizen,” the voice added. “Its surface was breached, once, forty years ago. If the leak had not been fixed, the city would have filled and sunk in fifty-three point six days.”

  Sunflower bounced happily on Blackbear’s shoulders. “Snake, Daddy,” he clicked. “Ss-ss, I hear snake.” The sibilant Elysian voice, which the child could not understand, sounded like hissing.

  Blackbear asked, “But what happens if—”

  “Snake, Daddy.”

  “All right, it’s a snake. Now be quiet, Sunny.” The child insisted on hearing his pronouncements repeated, to make sure their wisdom had sunk in.

  Hawktalon laughed. “Sunny thinks he heard a snake. What a baby. It’s not even Snake Day yet.”

  The servo added, “Does my vocalization fail, Citizen?”

  Blackbear said, “No, but—”

  “If so, please report my defect to Service Sector Oh-three-twenty in the Nucleus of Helicon, for training. Actually, Citizen, the sinking of Helicon or any other Elysian city is most unlikely; no such event has been recorded in nine centuries since the founding of the Republic. The city’s compartments are pressurized at all levels, and a buoyant fluid fills its transit reticulum, like a great living cell. Attention: Helicon’s surface lies just beneath us. See the sunlight sparkle on its shimmering dome? Prepare for landing.”

  An indentation appeared in the city’s surface, as if an invisible giant had pressed a thumb into it. The thumbprint deepened and widened, and the shadow of the shuttlecraft fell across it.

  At his side, Raincloud clicked, “Strap down again.”

  The four of them returned to their seats, which automatically strapped them down for safety. Blackbear zipped Sunflower’s empty juice cup into his travel bag.

  Hawktalon announced, “I’ll carry my own bag off the shuttle.”

  “Sorry, you’ll ride for now,” her mother insisted. No respectable Clicker adult would walk in public without a child on her back, or his.

  Hawktalon pouted, and her much-worn stuffed fruitbat hung listlessly. A bit old to be carried, she would have to put up with it until Raincloud conceived another child. Back home in Tumbling Rock, the clan always had a number of little ones to hold; but here, of course, they had only these two. Clicker goddesses spaced three or four years between children, to prolong the nursing of each.

  The craft shuddered to a halt. “Thank you, Citizens, for enjoying my service. A reminder: You will be met at the transit node of Octant Six by your host, Alin Anaeashon, mate of Tulle Meryllishon…”

  Tulle Meryllishon was the lab director. Meryllishon was not a clan name, for Elysium had no clans. The shon name referred to the nursery of birth. Each city had its central shon, where the children were born and raised in common.

  This arrangement was incomprehensible to Blackbear, for in Tumbling Rock even orphans had extended families. But then, the Elysians could have no children of their own. Immortality came at a price.

  The Elysians were sterile. Their lack of germ cells was a side effect of the genetic treatment of their embryos, in the artificial wombs of the shon. The embryos, all derived from non-Elysian sources, had to be grown in culture.

  What was the link between aging and fertility? No scientist had yet cracked it, but Tulle Meryllishon was trying. That was the Fertility Project, which Blackbear had come to work on. There were frontier worlds to populate, new fertile hills to fill with growing families. Few non-Elysian parents cared to produce children who could expect no children of their own. But if the Fertility Project succeeded, every child in the Fold could be born immortal.

  OUTSIDE THE SHUTTLE, THE CHILL AIR BROUGHT A SCENT of orange and salt from Shora’s ocean. A wind shrieked overhead across the lip of the cavity which held them in the surface of the Elysian city.

  Hawktalon winced and covered her eyes. “The sun—it burns, Mother.”

  “Look away from it, dear,” Raincloud reminded her. This sun blazed without mercy through the clear blue sky, untempered by volcanic haze.

  The lip of the cavity rose around them and constricted, blocking the sun. Now the lemon-colored disk of Valedon, Shora’s moon-twin, appeared against the blue. Then the shuttle lifted off out of the cavity, and the lip soon closed overhead.

  The cavity now became an enclosed vesicle, diffusely lighted. Within the vesicle, so small after the expanse of sky and ocean, Blackbear felt trapped. But Sunflower caressed his forehead and leaned forward with interest. “Going downstairs,” the child clicked softly.

  “Yes, Sunflower, ‘downstairs.’” The vesicle was floating downward at about a sixty degree angle, along a fluid-filled branch of the transit reticulum. The flow of liquid carried the vesicle in its path.

  “Welcome, Citizens, to Helicon, capital of Elysium, home of butterflies for a thousand years.” Another disembodied servo voice. Blackbear’s hair stood on end. “Would you be seated, Citizens?” the voice added.

  Raincloud said, “Yes, thank you,” in faultless Elysian.

  Behind Blackbear, a lump of nanoplast pushed up and molded itself into a chair. The entire vesicle must be made of nanoplast, an “intelligent” material. But how could that stuff form such intricate shapes? Similar chairs took shape for the four of them. Hawktalon exclaimed with delight, and the beaded braids jangled about her face.

  “If I ever fail to serve promptly, please report my defect to Service Sector Oh-three-thirteen. Now, the latest news. The Urulite Imperium claims that the Valan freighter Sardonyx entered Urulite space before it was destroyed. Urulan threatens Valedon itself with interstellar missiles…”

  Ghostlike figures sprang up on a little holostage, before the incurving wall of the vesicle. Hawktalon shrieked and clapped her hands. Blackbear shuddered, wondering where such a backward planet as Urulan could have gotten interstellar missiles. What if they hit Shora as well as Valedon? At any rate, the news was bad enough without showing it in three dimensions.

  The chair oozed to fit his shape as he stretched. Was there anything in Elysium not “alive,” responsive and motile? Or rather, were there any live Elysians, other than holo figures?

  From the left, another vesicle entered the stream and approached alongside. Its surface touched and seemed to melt in. The two vessels fused, their walls joined and widened to reveal several passengers.

  Elysians were small, compact people, rarely taller than Blackbear’s sho
ulder; they were designed to make the most of their living space. Their complexions ranged from pink to brown, one of them pale as cream; their genetic stock, Blackbear knew, included sperm and ova from all worlds of the Free Fold, even Bronze Sky. They wore Valan talars with long patterned trains, now bundled up by pairs of “trainsweeps.” Trainsweeps were beetlelike servos, with their six legs poking out beneath their polished shells, scurrying behind their masters to keep the trains in order. Their Elysian masters did not speak or even smile in greeting; a custom common to cities, Blackbear had learned during his medical training at Founders University. Back in Tumbling Rock, however, in the Caldera Hills, if one failed to recognize a passerby, one immediately said hello to make the acquaintance.

  The nearest of the seated Elysians wore a train of unusual length, requiring two pairs of trainsweeps to carry the folds of pale green silk. He must have been at least five hundred years old, therefore; she or he, Blackbear could not tell which, he realized with a shock. A goddess, after all, he decided, much embarrassed, adjusting his turban self-consciously. A “woman,” an Elysian female, though the Elysian word did not connote all that the Clicker “goddess” did. Her hair fell unbraided to her shoulders, and her talar reached to her sandaled feet. The portion of her train that clasped her back was embroidered with butterflies, deep blue heliconians, their long wings marked by red bars and edged with white.

  Each of Elysium’s twelve cities took a different butterfly as its emblem; heliconians, for Helicon. Blackbear had forgotten why this was so, but nonetheless he sighed to see something familiar. Bronze Sky, like Valedon and most other inhabited worlds, had been terraformed long ago with stock from ancient Torr. Shora had not; thus the native rafts and seaswallowers remained. But the first Elysians had brought butterflies from their terraformed home world.

  “And now—trainsweeps and housekeepers on sale,” the servo voice continued. “The very best from Valedon.” Shora’s moon-twin was well known for the manufacture of servos. “All at The Golden Fritillary…” The shop address went beyond his grasp of Elysian.