Ken MacLeod - Cosmonaut Keep
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Table of Contents
S ome of the ideas in this book were inspired by those on the website of the late Chris Boyce, http://www.etpresence.ndirect.co.uk .
An earlier version of Chapter Two was published as a short story in IT@2000, a special supplement to Computer Weekly , 25 November 1999.
Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael, for everything; to Tim Holman, for editorial patience and plot-logic debugging; to Tim Adye, for some speculative physics; to Farah Mendlesohn, for reading and commenting on the draft; to Ellis Sharp, from whom I stole a ships name; and to the Marine Biology Station on the Isle of Cumbrae, for a happy and busy week long ago and one of the chiefe trees or posts at the right side of the entrance had the barke taken off, and 5 foote from the ground in fayre Capitall letters was graven CROATOAN without any crosse or signe of distresse.
THE STAR FRACTION
THE STONE CANAL
THE CASSINI DIVISION
THE SKY ROAD
THE STONE CANAL
THE CASSINI DIVISION
THE SKY ROAD
ENGINES OF LIGHT
COSMONAUT KEEP
DARK LIGHT
ENGINE CITY
Ken MacLeod graduated with a BSc in Zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research in biomechanics at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an M.Phil thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He is the author of six novels, three of which, The Star Fraction, The Cassini Division and Cosmonaut Keep have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His fourth novel, The Sky Road , was winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for the best novel of 1999 and was also nominated for a Hugo Award. Ken MacLeod lives in West Lothian with his wife and children.
Find out more about Ken MacLeod and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.co.uk
Ken MacLeod
The Second Sphere is thousands of light years from
Earth if Earth still exists. For Matt Cairns and the
cosmonauts of the Bright Star, this distant corner of
the galaxy is their new home.
But the Second Sphere is also home to other civilisations,
lifted from their worlds by a race of god-like aliens.
On Croatan, two of these civilisations live a precarious
co-existence, separated by eons of technological advance.
The arrival of the Bright Star is an event that may trigger
disaster, for this is the first human-crewed starship to
arrive at the ancient colony.
And all the time, hidden among the stars, the gods
are watching. They have always been watching.
Ken MacLeod
In a newer world order where the peace process is deadlier than the wars
Moh Kohns a security mercenary with a smart gun, reflexes to die for and memories he doesnt want to reach.
Janis Taines a scientist with a new line in memory drugs, anti-tech terrorists on her case and the STASIS cops on her trail.
Jordan Browns a teenage atheist with a guilty conscience, a wad of illicit cash and an urgent need to get a life.
Between them theyve started the countdown to the final confrontation, as the cryptic Star Fraction assembles its codes, the Army of the New Republic prepares its offensive and Space Defense lines up its laser weapons for the hour of the Watchmaker
Formidably intelligent and extraordinarily original New York Review of Science Fiction
A god stood in the sky high above the sunset horizon, his long white hair streaming in the solar wind. Later, when the skys colour had shifted from green to black, the white glow would reach almost to the zenith, its light outshining the Foamy Wake, the broad band of the Galaxy. At least, it would if the squall-clouds scudding in off the land to the east had cleared by then. Gregor Cairns turned his back on the C. M. Yonges own foamy wake, and looked past the masts and sheets at the sky ahead. The clouds were blacker and closer than theyd been the last time hed looked, a few minutes earlier. Two of the luggers five-man crew were already swinging the big sail around, preparing to tack into the freshening wind.
Much as hed have liked to help, he knew from experience that hed only get in the way. He turned his attention back to the tanks and nets in which the days haul snapped, slapped, or writhed. Trilobites and ostracoderms, mostly, with a silvery smattering of teleostean fish, a slimy slither of sea-slugs, and crusty clusters of shelled molluscs and calcichordates. To Gregor this kind ofassemblage was beginning to look incongruous and anachronistic; he grinned at the thought, reflecting that he now knew more about the marine life of Earths oceans than he did of the planet whose first human settlers had long ago named Mingulay.
His wry smile was caught by his two colleagues, one of whom smiled back. Elizabeth Harkness was a big-boned, strong-featured young woman, about his own age and with a centimetre or two of advantage in height. Under a big leather hat her rough-cut black hair was blown forward over her ruddy cheeks. Like Gregor, she wore a heavy sweater, oilskins, rubber boots and gauntlets. She squatted a couple of metres away on the laden after-deck, probing tangles of holdfast with a rusty old knife, expertly slinging the separated molluscs, calcichordates and floatwrack into their appropriate tanks.
Come on, she said, back to work.
Aye, said Gregor, stooping to cautiously heave a tenkilogram trilobite, scrabbling and nipping, into a water-filled wooden trough. The faster we get this lot sorted, the more time for drinks back at the port.
Yeah, so dont stick with the easy stuff. She flung some surplus mussels to the seabats that screamed and wheeled around the boat.
Huh. Gregor grunted and left the relatively rugged trilobites to fend for themselves in the netting and creels while he pitched in to deal with the small shelly fauna. The vessel rolled, slopping salt water from the troughs and tanks, and then freshwater from the sky hissed on to the deck as they met the squall. He and Elizabeth worked on through it, yelling and laughing as their sorting became less and less discriminatory in their haste.
As long as they dont eat each other
The third student on the boat squatted opposite the two humans, knees on a level with his broad cheekbones, oblivious to the rain pelting his hairless head, and to the rivulets that trickled down his neck then over the seamless collar of his dull grey insulation-suit. The nictitating membranes of his large black eyes, and an occasional snort from his small nostrils or spit from his thin-lipped, inchwide mouth were the only indications that the downpour affected him at all. His hands each had three long fingers and one long thumb; each digit came equipped with a claw that made a knife, for this task, at least, quite unnecessary.
Gregor eyed him covertly, admiring the machine-like ease with which the long fingers sorted through the heaps; tangles ahead of them, neatly separated columns behind; the butchering strength and surgical skill and clinical gentleness of thumb and claw and palm. Then, answering some accurate intuition, the saur rocked back on his heels, washed his hands in the last of the rain, and stood up with his part of the task complete.
Elizabeth and Gregor looked at each other across a diminished area of decking on which nothing but stains and shreds of wrack remained. Elizabeth blinked wet lashes.
Done, she said, standing up and shaking rain off her hat.
Great. Gregor heaved himself upright and did likewise, joining the other two at the stern rail. They leaned on it, gazing out at the reddening sky in which the god glowed brighter. The highest clouds in the sky far higher than the squall-clouds shone with a peculiar mother-of-pearl rainbow effect, a rare phenomenon that had even the sailors murmuring in amazed appreciation. Behindthem the big sail came rattling down, and the engine coughed into life as the steersman took them in towards the harbour. The cliffs of a hundred-metre-high headland, crowned with a craggy castle, the Keep of Aird, rose on the port side; lower green hills and fields spread out to starboard. Ahead the lights were coming on in Kyohvic, the main port of the straggling seaboard republic known as the Heresiarchy of Tain.
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