Deborah's Journal

Chapter 35 of Jaydium, for your reading pleasure:

For a long moment, Duvach sat immobile and Eril feared it was too lost in its own alien emotions to help them. Then it extended a feathery tendril and brushed Kithri's cheek. A droplet glistened on the silvery strand.

"Water . . . salt water. The water of life."

Behind Duvach's heavy, inflectionless voice, Eril sensed its wonderment. Kithri, beside him, gulped and blinked, more tears streaming down her face.

"My Clan-superior Raerquel was right all along," Duvach murmured. "The light is in each of us, however strange our outer forms. Beneath all differentness, our waters flow as one."

Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium - Chapter 35

Jaydium - Chapter 30

Eril's first impulse was to laugh in Brianna=s face. No one but his sister Avery could rant in such an operatic mode, and he thought Brianna would fare well in the comparison. But one look at Kithri's face convinced him that she, for one, was taking Brianna seriously.

"Calm down, Bri," he said as diplomatically as he could. "There's nothing to be gained by blaming one another. If there was a mistake, it was my mistake, not Kithri's."

"I don't blame her and I am quite calm already." Brianna began gathering the sheets of seaweed-film into meticulous piles, as if to underscore her rationality. "After all, she's had no more education than a herd-beast. Not a shred of decent methodological training. It isn't her fault--"

Kithri had started toward her own cubicle, but now she froze and turned slowly back. Her face flooded with color and her old nose break stood out as a chalky brand. She strode to the table and swept the entire contents--all of Brianna's notes, styluses, and specimens--to the floor. Still without a word, she shoved one fist a hairsbreadth from Brianna=s nose and made an emphatic gesture. Then she spun around and marched out the door.

Brianna looked at Eril, her eyes innocently wide. "What--what did she--"

"Never mind." Eril bent to pick up a pile of films. "You don't want to know what that meant."

Things get more desperate as war looms even closer. Read the latest chapter on my blog.

"I was wrong about you," Lennart said slowly. "What I said before the hearing..."

"We were all swiping at each other. You were just--"

"Shut up and let me apologize! I can't hold you accountable for the crazy things your Federation did, any more than I can blame Kithri--or Raerquel. Even Bri, with all her academic bullshit, she'd stand on her head to save these folks. Protesting all the while that her only interest was as a scientist. Maybe in my time, it was people like you that kept us from destroying it all."

"Hey, don't go making me into a hero," Eril said with an embarrassed laugh. "I'm just your everyday fly-boy. I followed orders, I didn't make policy."

"Maybe things would've been better if you had..."

We're going to die anyway, all of us. You think your little studies of alien architecture are going to save this planet?"

Brianna offered no reply. Kithri looked at the woman and two men who had, in a few days, gone from strangers to people she'd die for. She had no strength to argue with them. She barely had enough for herself. All her instincts, all her experience urged her to keep silent, to stay out of it. There might be nothing she could do, or she might die anyway. She thought again of her father, wrestling alone with his own choices, his own unknown future. How much more difficult it must have been for him with a child, perhaps already knowing he was dying. All these years she=d blamed him for being a coward because he=d run away.

"You do whatever you want," she said, closing the door on everything that had gone before in her life. "Me, I'm going to go out fighting for something besides my own skin."


Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium - Chapter 25

For your Friday reading pleasure...

Raerquel gestured with a delicate upper tendril. "Once all this was part of the sea of life, before the land changed. The mountains pushed upwards and Ocean-of-Home shrank. Much was lost as we adapted to dry living. We built new cities here, on the banks of the old seas, cities like the one we are now leaving, cities of working, dreaming, waiting..."

"To return to the water?" Kithri asked.

"Even now, we must. For eggs to hatch and water-breathing trochophore younglings to grow. The Flesh-Before-Naming. For the dying oldsters, for the sick in spirit. We adults are able to utilize gaseous oxygen, and our integument is tolerant to the dryness of land with the aid of the healing gel. Terrestrial adaptation, although unpleasant, is possible."

"Just because a thing is possible, doesn't mean it's good," said Lennart. Again, some bleak undertone in his voice stung Kithri.

"Wise you are, my human friend. These cities here," Raerquel gestured from the way they had come, "cities of light, and cities of darkness in the mountains, they are not enough for us. Who can say if our present desolation is beginning then, with the loss of our water home, and not with our estranged offspring planets?"


Read the chapter here

It's Jaydium Friday, and Kithri matches wits with the pirates, with surprising results.

Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium, Chapter 15

... haven't gotten to the gigantic silver slugs or the time-traveling spaceman yet, but today there's a touch of romance, not to mention lust...

Deborah J. Ross

I've been reading Katharine Eliska Kimbriel's "Nuala" books and will have an overall discussion of them rsn now. Today's news is that Fire Sanctuary is now available in multi-format DRM-free ebook editions from Book View Cafe. Here's the skinny (click on the title below for the link to download it).


FIRE SANCTUARY (Science Fiction)

Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
$4.99         

Rising like a phoenix from the embers of an abandoned scientific expedition, the people of Nuala are the definition of survivors.  They have fought back against the deadly radiation levels of their beautiful, dangerous world.  Nualans have battled frightening mutations, genetic shift, and the highest rate of infertility in the Axis Republic.  Their reward is a society based on tolerance, compassion, and cultural diversity, descendants who can sense a lie (and a few who can heal by touch) -- and a bonanza of the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy.

Balanced on the border between the Axis Republic and the Fewha Empire, ruled by a constitutional monarchy, the small Nualan system counters its low birth rate by sending out its children to search for mates to expand the planetary gene pool.  Some Axis citizens choose Nuala. One, a decorated soldier named Moran, is about to marry a Nualan princess.

But heirs to power and wealth have enemies, both homegrown and interstellar.  There are those who would kill to keep an Axis warrior from marrying a Nualan . . . and those who think it's the perfect smoke screen to keep anyone from noticing where the border is about to shift.