This Alien Shore

343 Pages·2016·2.18 MB·English

by  Friedman C S

SABOTAGE
The Guildsman pulled out a chair and settled into it; his full sleeves fell upon the tabletop as he leaned
forward, his posture stiff with tension. "One hundred and ninety E-days ago, a Guild outpilot was badly
injured while returning to safespace. Analysis of his personal log shows there was a malfunction in his
brainware at the moment of transition. It lasted only seconds, but that was long enough. In that instant he
believed himself to be an alien creature, surrounded by beings whose brains didn't function like his own.
He believed that these beings had fed programs into his brainware which would make it impossible for
him to think clearly, and that they had surgically implanted a mechanism in his arm which would feed
drugs into his bloodstream, altering the very essence of his identity. With only seconds in which to act, he
did what he could to disable the perceived mechanism, and then attempted to smash his skull open so
that he could tear out his wiring. Fortunately for him, the latter effort failed."
"Since his basic assumptions were correct,"Masadasaid evenly, "I find it hard to comprehend your
objection to them."

Novels from
C. S. FRIEDMAN
Available from DAW Books
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Black Sun Rising
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THE CRITICS RAVE ABOUT
THI5ALIENSHORE
"C. S. Friedman borrows some big ideas from writers like Cordwainer Smith, Frank Herbert and
Samuel R. Delaney, and runs with them. Instead of stumbling under the burden, she succeeds in making
the ... material her own ... Friedman has created a potent metaphor for the toleration of diversity—an
ever-evolving society where "the genes of wild genius" are acknowledged as necessary for survival."
—The New York Times
"A wide-ranging, action packed space opera. This Alien Shore is guaranteed to entertain those who like
to be swept up in an adventure with lots of characters, dangers, and revelations."
— Science Fiction Chronicle
"Friedman keeps her tale moving at a vigorous pace that's boosted through an abundance of well-chosen
details ... it is likely to hold readers' interest tenaciously. The ending neither requires nor precludes a
sequel, so readers are left with some hope of again encountering Jamisia and the duel between the Guild
and Earth that backdrops her adventures."
— Publishers Weekly
"Once again Ms. Friedman offers us great richness in both concept and detail, ingeniously weaving
together two strong plotlines and piquant characters into a superior reading experience."
— Romantic Times

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C. S. FRIEDMAN

DAW BOOKS, INC.
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER
375 Hudson Street,New York,NY10014
ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM
SHEILA E. GILBERT
PUBLISHERS
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http://www.dawbooks.com

Copyright © 1998 by C. S. Friedman.
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Michael Whelan.
For color prints of Michael Whelan's paintings, please contact:
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Brookfield,CT06804
DAW Book Collectors No. 1096.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.
Book designed by Stanley S. Drate/Folio Graphics Co., Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware
that this book may have been stolen property and reported as
"unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In such case neither
the author nor the publisher has received any payment
for this "stripped book."
First paperback printing, July 1999
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To have a concept for a great book is a truly exciting experience, and one every author dreams of. To
have a concept for B great book that requires a lot of knowledge you don't have is a pretty
overwhelming experience, and one every author dreads. To have a concept for a great book that
requires a lot of knowledge you don't have, and then to locate people who notonly have that knowledge,
but can communicate it in plain English . . . and who don't mind spending endless hours with you
discussing 28th century hacking, or Inuit linguistics, or whatever else can be fitted in between courses of
Chinese food or rounds of e-mail . . . well, that is what authors live for.
So thanks first and foremost to Paul Suchinder Dhillon, without whom this book simply would not exist.
(Well, it might exist, but all the computer passages would be really had, so no one would enjoy it.)
Thanks for the hours of technical talk and devious plot twists and the virtual tours of hacker trails . . .
couldn't have done it without you.
Thanks also to Anthony C. Woodbury of theUniversityofTexas, whose outstanding knowledge of arctic
languages finally enabled me to find those few words I needed to really make this book come to life.
(Readers please note that the versions used here reflect many centuries of linguistic cor-ruption; if the
spelling is wrong or the meaning has been modified, that is artistic license on my part and not an error on
his!)
Thanks also to Cordwainer Smith for a few precious sparks of inspiration which fans will no doubt
recognize. He is one of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century, and one of its most bizarre
imaginative artists. Yes, there is science fiction stranger than mine. Go read it. And to Oliver Sachs and
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TempleGrandinand all those other writers who struggle to reveal the alien landscapes inside the human
brain. If my fiction is ever half so gripping as their daily truths, I will have accomplished something great.
Thanks to all those folks who kept me sane while this book was being written (or as close to sane as I
ever come), most especially Paul Hoeffer, whose wonderful fan page kept my spirits up when things
were darkest. And to Senji and Lisa and Tina and Fonda and Joan and Larry and Adam and most
especially Chuck, whose generosity of spirit and energetic labor helped me through those last terrible
weeks. There's nothing quite like trying to finish a book and pack up a seven room house full of stuff at
the same time to make one truly crazed.
And thanks to Yann and Matt andPetra. They know why.
Thanks to Cheryl and Stan, for really knocking themselves out to get this book printed on time. It's much
appreciated, guys.
Most of all, thanks to Betsy Wollheim, for being the awesome editor-goddess she is. Not only because
she is brilliant and wise and infinitely insightful, but because she didn't yell at me even once when this was
late. Now that is true greatness.

DEDICATION
This book is for my mother, Nancy Friedman, who died while it was being written.
Sometimes the most impressive acts of courage are not dramatic ones, such as we like to read about,
but quieter, almost imperceptible ones. Sometimes they are not even recognized as such until their time
has passed. My mother was a woman of such courage, and her spirit affected all who knew her.
At age 20 her heart was damaged by disease, and she was told she would not live past 30. She could
have given up then and refused to live, as many do, but instead she chose to go on as though she had no
deadline, as though Death did not dog her every step. Most of those who knew her never knew that
anything was wrong. She would have considered it weakness to tell them.
My father was forbidden to marry her because of her illness. They married anyway.
She was told that if she tried to have a child it would kill her. She wanted a child, and so took the chance
and had me. She lived. Later she risked it again, and had my brother.
Those of you who have read my other dedications know that she went with me toHawaiito see the
volcanoes. What you do not know is that everywhere there were signs warning people away from
various places if they had heart problems, or respiratory distress. She had both, and at that point was
dying of them. Still she ignored the signs. No mere heart disease was going to keep her from doing what
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she had come halfway across the world to do.
She beat the odds and lived to age 67, always refusing to give up, despite the fact that Death was only
one step behind her. Even at the end she told me that one of her greatest regrets was that her illness had
delayed my manuscript, because I had come toNew Yorkto take care of her. Death might threaten her,
but it had no right to disrupt the lives of those she loved.
I wish she could share this book with me. I wish she could see that it came out all right.
Fiction pales before such a life.

In a world where data is coin of the realm, and transmissions are guarded by no better sentinels than
man-made codes and corruptible devices, there is no such thing as a secret.
DR. KIO MASADA,
"The Enemy Among Us": Keynote addressto the 121st Outworld Security Conference (holocast from
Guera)

EARTH ORBIT
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SHIDO HABITAT
The VOICES woke her up.
For a moment Jamisia just lay in the darkness, neither dreaming nor fully awake yet, listening. Whispers
of sound tickled through her brain, coalescing into words for an instant or two, then breaking up again.
Frightening words.
Danger.
Betrayal.
And one was almost a scream: Run!
Shaken, she sat up in bed. Her room in the Shido Habitat was reassuringly familiar, filled with all the
familiar relics of her teenage years. Tickets from a concert over at Mitsui Habitat. Flowers—real
flowers!—from her coming out at Microtech's Grand Pavilion. Homework chips piled up on one corner
of the dresser, along with the headset that would feed their contents into her brain. All of it—her things,
her life—familiar, comforting. It wasn't always that way. Sometimes she awoke to find things on her
dresser that didn't (couldn't!) belong to her. Sometimes there were pieces of jewelry in her slideaway that
she knew she had never bought, so alien to her taste that she could hardly imagine herself wearing them.
Sometimes there were worse things, frightening things, and she threw those in the trash chute with
shaking hands, wondering who had left them there in the middle of the night, in the room she locked so
carefully before she went to bed. She kept waiting for the rightful owners to say something about their
stuff, to yell at her for having chuted it without asking them . . . some kind of reaction, anything. But no
one ever yelled. No one ever said a word, and her tentative queries to the habitat database yielded no
explanation for the strange offerings, or any hint of their purpose.
It wasn't like that today; at least today everything in the room was really hers, and that should have been
comforting. Only it wasn't. The voices were still clamoring inside her head, even though the act of waking
up for good should have banished them. She couldn't make out most of what they were saying, but the
few words she did understand—and the tone in which they were voiced—were terrifying.
Danger!
Betrayed!
Run, Jamisia!
Her heart began to pound, triggering her wellseeker program; bright words scrolled across the corner of
her visual field, assessing her emotional state in purely biological terms. ADRENALINE SURGE, it
informed her. PULSE RACING, B-PRESSURE ENTERING RED ZONE, PHASE ONE
MUSCULAR CONTRACTIONS NOTED. ACTION?
Before she could answer it the door slid open, as quickly and silently as if she had never locked it. A
man moved into the room, and she opened her mouth to scream—and then realized who it was and drew
in a deep, shaky breath instead.
"Grab some clothes," her tutor commanded, in a tone as unlike his usual fatherly warmth as this night was
unlike any other. "Take anything you value, and do it fast." He looked back toward the door as if to see if
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anyone was following him. By the nightlight's glow she could see there was blood on his face. "We don't
have much time."
"What's going on?" She could hear her own voice shaking as she asked the question. But he only shook
his head sharply, his expression grim.
"Later." He wiped a hand across his forehead, smearing the blood, then saw that she wasn't moving yet.
"Do it!"
Trembling, she forced herself out of the bed and began to move to the slideaway. The message in her
visual field defaulted for lack of response and blanked out, which was just as well; she couldn't think
clearly enough right now to give it instructions.
"What's happening?" she begged, as she gathered up handfuls of clothing. Hi-G, lo-G, no-G: he hadn't
said where they were going, so she grabbed a few garments from each section of the slideaway and
stuffed them into her traveling bag. "Where are we going?"
"It's a raid." His voice, usually calm, was shaking now, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his face; it
was a good bet his own wellseeker was blazing its protest across his field of vision even now. "They must
have had an inside contact, the alarm systems were all shut down." She reached for the headset, but he
stopped her. "No. Not that. Too easy to trace."
"Who is it?" she asked him.
He hesitated an instant, and she sensed that he was struggling with the question of how much to tell her.
A thin line of red had trickled down into his eye; he blinked hard to clear his vision. "I don't know. It was
all too fast. Whoever it is—it's trouble, at any rate." He grabbed the bag out of her hands and snapped it
shut. "Come on!"
With the voices screaming their warnings in her ears, urging her to follow him to safety, there was nothing
to do but obey. She followed him out of the room and into the network of corridors beyond. When they
got to the nearest tube, she started to get into it, but he grabbed her by the arm and jerked her past it. It
seemed to her that she could smell something sharp in the air, carried toward them by the habitat's
ventilation system. Smoke, perhaps? Was that possible? Her tutor broke into a run, his strong arm pulling
her alongside him. She struggled to keep up with his pace, but his legs were so much longer than hers, it
was nearly impossible; twice she almost fell. What could be burning? Some few hundred yards beyond
the tube he stopped to pull the cover off a maintenance crawlspace, and gestured for her to go inside.
She hesitated, afraid—and then the whole floor shuddered, as if somewhere nearby something had
exploded. Trembling, she clambered up to the lip of the opening and pulled herself inside. She wished
that he'd let her take the headset so that she could access the habitat's monitoring programs and find out
what the hell was going on ... but then they'd know where I was, she thought. Chilled by the concept,
without knowing why. Scared, as she had never been scared before.
When he was safely inside the crawlspace, he pulled its cover shut and urged her forward; she was all
too happy to move, to focus on flight as a means of shutting out the claustrophobic closeness of the
mechanical tube. For what seemed like a small eternity she pulled herself along, hand over hand, on rungs
that were smeared with grease, past dials and switches edged in grit. No scrubs worked here,
apparently. She twisted through a turn almost too tight to negotiate and was amazed that her tutor
managed to follow. Then a turn again, and a long, slow curve, following his whispered directions as
quickly as she could. Once or twice it seemed she could feel the whole tunnel shudder, and once she
knew from his sharply indrawn breath that somewhere on the habitat real damage had been done,
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probably in the name of some corporate maneuver. As her tutor would say, Capitalism is a harsh
mistress.
Would the maintenance tubes seal themselves off if the habitat's outer shell were breached, preserving
enough air for them to breathe? She didn't know. She didn't want to know. It took all her courage just to
keep moving, not to think about what was going on behind them.
"Here," he muttered at last, indicating a hatchway. Together they forced it open, and she slipped through.
Beyond was a darkened corridor. Why weren't the lights on? As he emerged into the corridor himself,
she stamped hard on the floor several times, trying to trigger the sensors, but still it stayed dark. "Why—"
she began, but her tutor shushed her. "Listen," he said. She did. There was nothing. No distant explosions
now, nor any human voice. Nor . . .
Something tightened in her chest, a new kind of fear. There was no soft purr of ventilation coming from
the walls, no gentle breeze of recycled air wafting across her face. Those things were so taken for
granted in her world that she could never have imagined what the habitat would be like without them.
Now they were gone. Which meant. . .
"No life support?" she whispered.
"Bastards," he muttered, and he grabbed her again by the arm and pulled her forward. "Come on!"
They ran. Long steps, leaping steps, made possible by the lo-G of the docking ring. Ahead of them two
air locks yawned wide; he motioned her past them. "Not those." It seemed to her that over the pounding
of her heart and the slap of her feet on the metal mesh flooring she could now hear something else:
footsteps behind them, coming closer Voices. Corporate raiders?
Run!her own voices urged, terrifying in their unity.
She ran.
By the time they reached the place where the pods were docked she was out of breath, and her legs
ached from the unnatural strain of the lo-G run. She watched as her tutor readied the nearest pod for
flight, noting with cold misgiving that it was a singler. He was sending her off alone, then. To where? For
what?
Not alone. She wouldn't do it. She wouldn't go.
Trust him,the voices urged.
"Get inside, Jamie."
He was her tutor, her friend, the closest thing to a father she'd ever had. She wanted to trust him. But to
go out there alone, without a word of explanation . . . "Where are you sending me?" she begged. "What's
happening?"
With a muttered oath of frustration he grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. This
close, she could see that the wound on his face was some kind of burn. Blood dripped from the edge of
it down the side of his face, soaking into his collar.
"Listen to that!" He nodded back the way they had come, toward the voices that were steadily
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