Realms of Light Read online

  Realms of Light

  by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  copyright 2010 Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Books by

  Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The Annals of the Chosen:

  The Wizard Lord

  The Ninth Talisman

  The Summer Palace

  The Obsidian Chronicles:

  Dragon Weather

  The Dragon Society

  Dragon Venom

  Science fiction from FoxAcre Press:

  Nightside City

  Realms of Light

  Shining Steel

  Among the Powers

  Short story collections from FoxAcre Press:

  Crosstime Traffic

  Celestial Debris

  Publishing History

  An earlier draft of this book was presented

  as an online serial by the author.

  FoxAcre Press Print Edition: October, 2010

  FoxAcre Press Ebook Editions: December 2010

  author web page: www.watt-evans.com

  Print Edition ISBN-13 978-0-9818487-7-8

  Smashwords ISBN-13 978-1-936771-03-5

  cover art by Tomislav Tikulin

  www.tomtikulin-art.com

  author webpage www.watt-evans.com

  Takoma Park, Maryland USA

  www.foxacre.com

  Dedicated to

  Edward Bryant

  who accidentally gave me

  the clue I needed

  Foreword

  When I first finished Nightside City, I was very pleased with it. It had taken on a life of its own while I was writing it. This is something that varies from one writer to the next, but for me, it’s rare, especially in novels. I’ve had short stories that demanded to be written, that practically wrote themselves, but novels? They’re usually a long slog, a lot of painstaking work, and the result is usually nowhere near as good on paper as it was in my head.

  Nightside City, though—I’d spent months planning it out, yes, but when I actually started writing it, it just spilled onto the page, picking up speed as it went, until I wrote the last third of it in a single five-day rush. I was happy with how it came out, too; I thought it was good stuff.

  It was under contract to Avon, the second half of a two-book deal—the first half was what’s now called Among the Powers—and I was very eager to get my editor’s reaction to it. Because it had gone so quickly and easily I delivered it months before the contract deadline, but that didn’t matter—my contract said they had sixty days from delivery, not from deadline, to accept it, reject it, or request revisions.

  Sixty days came and went, and I didn’t hear anything. I inquired, and learned that my editor had fired his assistant, and that everything had been delayed as a result—apparently not only were they now short an editorial assistant, but the guy they’d fired had screwed up their record-keeping, and they were months behind schedule on pretty much everything because he hadn’t actually been doing half of what he was supposed to be doing. Which was why they’d fired him.

  I didn’t care. I wanted to know what they thought of Nightside City! I was in a virtual fever of anticipation; I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about one of my novels as I was about that one. I got my agent on the case, nagging the folks at Avon to make a decision; after all, they’d already had the sixty days the contract specified, and they had put that in the contract—it wasn’t my idea.

  They told me that they wanted some revisions. I was fine with that; I knew it wasn’t perfect. They told me a revision letter would be mailed Monday. (This was before everyone had e-mail.) I waited. I waited through half a dozen Mondays.

  No letter. I couldn’t concentrate on writing anything else until I knew what was up with Nightside City, so I nagged my agent, and he nagged Avon, and when we still didn’t get an official response we escalated, working our way up through registered letters to eventually, six months after delivery, informing them they were in breach of contract and withdrawing the novel.

  Russ, my agent, then turned around and sold it to Del Rey for significantly more money than Avon was going to pay. The editor at Del Rey read it, and got back to me with a contract and a revision letter in less than a fortnight. (Yes, they wanted revisions, entirely sensible ones that I happily made.) The contract arrived the same day that Avon sent an acceptance check—they never did send a revision letter, but apparently they thought the money would convince me to change my mind about withdrawing it. They were wrong, and we returned the check. Thus ended my relationship with Avon Books.

  Del Rey was excited about the book. I was excited about the book again. It was finished, though, so I couldn’t work on it anymore.

  But I could write more about Carlisle Hsing, so I did. I contacted Dr. Sheridan Simon, who had designed Epimetheus for me, and got him to design Prometheus, as well. I came up with a plot, based partly on a passing remark Edward Bryant made when discussing movies. And I started writing a sequel, which I called Realms of Light, because Hsing had gone from the darkness of Nightside City to the daylight of Prometheus.

  Nightside City was published, and got good reviews. I was told it came close to making the Hugo ballot.

  But sales weren’t that great. I was primarily known as a fantasy writer, not science fiction. My editors at Del Rey let me know, gently, that they weren’t interested in a sequel. So I shelved Realms of Light.

  I didn’t give up on it, though. I liked it. I wanted to finish it. For years, for decades, every so often I would take out those few chapters I’d written and look at them, maybe tinker a little or add a few paragraphs. I kept trying to think of a way to get it finished and into print. Small presses were interested, but couldn’t afford to pay me enough to justify taking the time to write it.

  Then Tor, my publisher at the time, dropped the Ethshar series, and fans on the net told me they’d pay me to write more Ethshar stories, and I challenged them to put their money where their mouths were, and to my astonishment they did. The web-based serial of The Spriggan Mirror brought in several thousand dollars—not as much as I’d get for a novel from a major publisher, but far more than I’d get from a small press. I’d found a way to make some money writing the books I wanted to write, but that the New York publishers didn’t want to publish—at least, if I could repeat my success.

  I did a second Ethshar serial, The Vondish Ambassador, and got the same result.

  Then I decided to see whether it would work with something that wasn’t Ethshar, and the only serious candidate for that was Realms of Light, the novel I’d been waiting almost twenty years to write.

  It didn’t actually do that well as a serial—not enough readers remembered Nightside City after the long delay—but once I started work I didn’t care; I was finally writing the book I’d wanted to write for so long. I couldn’t stop. I had to finish it.

  So I did, and here it is.

  I hope you like it.

  — Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Takoma Park, 2010

  Chapter One

  I’m a creature of the night, born and raised in eternal darkness—except the darkness on Epimetheus wasn’t as eternal as I might have liked. That was why I left Nightside City, where I’d lived my entire life up to then, and came to Promet
heus.

  And on Prometheus the darkness isn’t even close to eternal. What little darkness there is ends every eighteen hours at sunrise, then comes back again at sunset.

  What’s more, the normal Promethean business hours are during daylight, two days out of every three. Some people go as far as adjusting their circadian rhythms to an eighteen-hour cycle, but most people use a twenty-four hour day, where three days equal four cycles. Office hours come when daylight coincides with the normal waking cycle, on two of those three days.

  I didn’t like it. I’d had bad experiences with daylight, and didn’t care for it much, even when the sun was so small and dim compared to what almost killed me back on Epimetheus.

  And this whole optical illusion of the sun moving across the sky made my skin crawl. I knew Eta Cass A wasn’t really moving any more than it ever had, that it was the planet’s rotation, but that didn’t help; it made me dizzy to think about it. I couldn’t handle working with the sun overhead, so just about as soon as I’d found myself a residence office I liked I bought a nice piece of software to play receptionist, and figured I’d do my work at night, when everyone else was off. I slept away as many of the daylight hours as I could, and stayed away from windows as much as possible for the rest of them.

  At least I’d landed in a city that wasn’t right under the moon; I don’t think I could have lived with that thing hanging directly above me every time I went out in the open.

  A lot of offworlders complained about the earthquakes, but they didn’t bother me; we’d had a few on Epimetheus, too. You get used to them. And the lava glow in the distance wasn’t any worse than the dawn above the crater rim back home.

  The heavier gravity was tiring, and the air smelled strange at first, but I got used to those things, too. There were other ways Prometheus differed from Epimetheus, dozens of them, the algae and the oceans and the rest, but the only one that seriously glitched me was daylight.

  One thing hadn’t changed. I was still calling myself a detective, a private investigator; it was all I knew. Having office hours that didn’t match anybody else’s had its good points and bad, in that line of work.

  Being on an unfamiliar planet, though—that was all bad for my job. I didn’t know my way around the urban software, didn’t have any contacts, had no word of mouth bringing in work. I had enough money to live on for a while—about the only pleasant surprise I got when I landed on Prometheus was the lower prices—but I needed an income.

  I put notes out on the net, looking for work, of course; I billed myself as an expert consultant on my home world of Epimetheus as well as pitching the investigative work. I talked to some of the software in city hall—this was in Alderstadt, near the north end of Terpsichore in the Nine Islands, which was where my flight in had landed—and tried to learn the circuits.

  Strange set-up they had there. The policy software wasn’t permanent; every few years they ran a sort of popularity poll called an election, and whoever won got to plug her own software in until the next election. It was something like a referendum, except instead of asking a question they asked you to pick a person. And chances were the only names on the ballot were people you didn’t even know. Seemed like a stupid system to me, but the people I asked about it argued that it acted as a sort of automatic debugging.

  Nightside City always did fine with traditional debugging—you catch a mistake, you rewrite it. You don’t pull the whole system off-line and put in a new program.

  This election thing confused me. What was the point in learning my way around the master program when in a year or two it might get pulled and replaced? It took away some of my incentive, and I didn’t really get the hang of Alderstadt city services beyond the basics.

  Banks and corporate data and nets are pretty much the same everywhere, though. So are people. I figured I could function, even in Alderstadt.

  Then I got my first case, tracking down a data pirate for an off-planet shipping line that picked me because they were in a hurry and my name came up first in a random search. I pulled it off—not as easily as I could have back in Nightside City, but well enough. This artist in margin retailing had figured that knowing what cargos went in and out would give her an edge in pricing, and I found her for the shippers.

  When I gave them her name and com code I’d suggested that they just make a deal with her and split her take, but they were having none of it. I got the impression they didn’t think much of my morals. Anyway, they got all flashed and turned her in to the Procops, and the whole thing got out on the net.

  I figured that wouldn’t hurt me any, though it didn’t do the margin artist any good and she only missed reconstruction by about half a stop-bit. Yeah, my name hit the net—and it was big enough news that IRC caught it.

  The Interstellar Resorts Corporation has been pissed at me for years, ever since I let a welsher skip out, and they put the word out on the net that I was still on their gritlist. IRC isn’t as big on Prometheus as they were back home, where the casinos owned about half the planet, but they’re big enough that people don’t like to annoy them. I’d thought I’d got away from them when I left Epimetheus, but now it looked as if I hadn’t.

  I was back in the detective business, but I wasn’t exactly top of the market. Just like old times.

  I got work, though. Sometimes I got people who figured that if IRC was warning them away from me, then that was a point in my favor. I kept eating, and a lot better than I did back in Nightside City, thanks to the lower prices, and I did it without even bleeding my savings, such as they were.

  I’d been in Alderstadt for almost a year, gotten myself settled in pretty well, gotten to know the locals, made a few friends, when I got this call. I was there and awake and not doing much of anything, so my software put it through.

  “Carlisle Hsing?” a voice asked, and I knew from the sound it was synthesized, which meant I was dealing with software or with someone who wasn’t interested in being recognized—and in either case they didn’t mind if I knew it. You can synthesize undetectably if you want to pay for it.

  “Yeah?” I said, leaning back in my chair—a floater, a nice one. Came with the office. Beat the hell out of the place I’d had back home on Juarez Street.

  “I represent someone who wishes to hire your services. Would it suit you to be in the lobby of the Sakai building on First Street in American City at 22:00 tomorrow? Your expenses will be reimbursed.”

  I reminded myself where in the cycle we were and where on the planet American City was, and figured that 22:00 would be comfortably dark, not to mention well after business hours.

  That part sounded all right.

  “Do I get a name?” I asked.

  “No,” it said.

  “Then I’ll need an advance,” I told it. “Buzzfare to American City’s gotta be four hundred credits, easy.” I was guessing, but since American City wasn’t on Terpsichore but on one of the little collateral islands out to the south, it was an easy guess.

  “One kilocredit will be posted to your account immediately,” it said, without missing a tick.

  I smiled. I liked that. I never got this sort of thing back home, and although I’d had a couple of respectable clients in Alderstadt, I wasn’t really used to it.

  A kilobuck wasn’t exactly going to let me retire, or even take a vacation, but it would cover round-trip fare to American City, I was pretty sure.

  “Any conditions?” I asked.

  “You must come alone,” it told me. “It would be appreciated if you would allow the installation of a watchdog program in your office com, but this is not an absolute requirement. You must be punctual and discreet.”

  “No watchdog,” I said, and my smile wasn’t there any more. This was beginning to sound dangerous. “I’ll be there.”

  “Alone,” it reminded me.

  “Alone,” I agreed.

  I meant it, too, if you only counted humans, but I wasn’t going to walk into a completely unknown set-up without a little back-up
. I intended to have plenty of hardware on me, and of course I carry a symbiote, like everybody else, but mine’s a good one, with optional intelligence, and I figured I’d wake it up and have it on the lookout while I was there.

  I’d had another symbiote back on Epimetheus, a dumb one. It saved my life and died in the process, so when I got to Prometheus I’d spent a good piece of my savings on getting a better one to replace it.

  That was something else that cost about half what it would have on Epimetheus. There were serious advantages to being on a primary colony instead of a secondary one.

  “You will be met,” the voice said, and then the connection broke.

  I sat and I considered that.

  Somebody was going to a lot of trouble to deal with me. Somebody in American City, presumably—but I’d never been in American City, never met anyone there, knew nothing about the place beyond the standard stuff in the Prometheography programming I’d jacked in aboard ship.

  Why would anybody want me to come to American City?

  When somebody wanted to meet me somewhere, it was usually because she wanted privacy—unless it’s a closed system, totally closed, anything you do over the com can be tapped, and anyone with any sense knows that. But even so, most people came to my office in that case.

  When somebody wanted to meet me somewhere else, it was usually because he was seriously worried or scared, afraid that he’s being followed or that I’m being watched—and what the hell, maybe I was being watched. I wouldn’t have put it past IRC to have had an eye on my office, a high-altitude one I couldn’t spot, or maybe a bunch of microintelligences reporting back. Or if not IRC, which after all has bigger programs to run, then maybe one of IRC’s competitors or subcontractors, trying to figure an angle.

  And when somebody insisted on complete anonymity and insisted on meeting me not just outside my office, but in another city a thousand kilometers south of Alderstadt, at the other end of the archipelago, then we’re talking about someone who was downright paranoid—or else, just possibly, somebody who was concerned with something other than privacy.