Spherical Harmonic Read online

  Praise for Catherine Asaro’s

  Nebula-Award-Winning

  Saga of the Skolian Empire

  Spherical Harmonic

  “This latest installment blends dynamic intrigue with theoretical physics to create a story that will appeal to fans of hard SF as well as grand-scale storytelling.”

  —Library Journal

  “This fast-paced entry in the Saga of the Skolian Empire provides a backstory with plenty of battles and political machinations … Asaro, a physicist, weaves scientific descriptions of Kyle space, spherical harmonics and orbitals with fantastic elements of psychic powers and mental telepathy. Underpinning and transcending both are complex interpersonal relationships that center on love and loss.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Quantum Rose

  2001 Nebula Award Winner

  “Bolsters Asaro’s reputation for skillfully putting classic romance elements in an SF setting … The tale’s journey from the atmosphere of quantum physics to that of Wuthering Heights is an odd one, but Asaro makes it thoroughly entertaining, too.”

  —Booklist

  “A treat. Thought-provoking, entertaining and very, very enjoyable. Asaro begins with interesting scientific and cultural speculation, and then draws in the reader by making the story human and personal for a most satisfying read.”

  —SF Site.com

  Ascendant Sun

  Winner of the 2001 Romantic limes Award

  for Best SF Novel

  “Asaro adds another glittering gem to her Skolian collection with Ascendant Sun. Asaro continues to grow in both depth and complexity, seamlessly integrating characterization, plot and scientific conjecture into elegantly developed concepts that both challenge the mind and please the heart. Another knockout display of superlative storytelling.”

  —Romantic Times (4½ GOLD MEDAL Top Pick Review)

  The Radiant Seas

  Winner of the 2000 Romantic limes

  Award for Best SF Novel

  “Catherine Asaro has quickly gained a reputation as a writer of very colorful space operas. Her novels are notable for such typical space operatic virtues as (literally) larger-than-lfe heroes and heroines, truly bad villains, extravagant technology, star-spanning empires and action-filled plots. I hope that description doesn’t seem dismissive: on the contrary, Asaro really does make virtues of each of these characteristics. In addition, her novels feature significant romance subplots … a first-rate rip-roaring adventure story.” —SF Site.com

  Tor Books by Catherine Asaro

  THE SAGA OF THE SKOLIAN EMPIRE

  Primary Inversion

  Catch the Lightning

  The Last Hawk

  The Radiant Seas

  Ascendant Sun

  The Quantum Rose

  Spherical Harmonic

  The Moon’s Shadow*

  Skyfall*

  *forthcoming

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SPHERICAL HARMONIC

  Copyright © 2001 by Catherine Asaro

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 0-812-56882-6

  EAN 978-0-812-56882-0

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001041534

  First edition: November 2001

  First mass market edition: August 2002

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  In memory of Melinda Heifer

  March 14, 1943, to August 24, 2000.

  Her extraordinary glow

  warmed our lives.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Opalite

  1. Partial Waves

  2. The Promontory

  3. Hajune

  4. Slowcoal

  5. City Shay

  6. Search Beneath a Crimson Sky

  7. Skyhold

  8. The Brooding Night

  9. Vazar

  10. Majda Prime

  Part Two: Night of Strings

  11. Nomads

  12. Orbitals

  13. Primary Inversions

  14. Sanctuary

  15. Gabriel’s Legacy

  16. Dyad

  17. Bloodmark

  18. Mists of Loss

  19. Diffraction

  20. Interlude

  21. Mutiny

  22. Radiance

  23. Majda Quandary

  24. Dawn

  Part Three: Transformation

  25. The Roaring Tide

  26. Dialogue of Illusions

  27. World of Legends

  28. Starfall Dreams

  29. Lightning and Sun

  30. Never Home

  31. Queen’s Gamble

  32. Light and Air

  Author’s Note

  Family Tree: Ruby Dynasty

  Family Tree: Qox Dynasty

  Characters and Family History

  Timeline

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my gratitude to the people who gave me comments on Spherical Harmonic. Their comments greatly helped the book. Any errors that remain are mine alone.

  To Michael La Violette, Bud Sparhawk, Jeri Smith-Ready, and Michelle Monkou for much appreciated readings of the manuscript; to the writers who critiqued scenes: Tricia Schwaab, and Aly’s Writing Group, including Aly Parsons, Simcha Kuritzky, Connie Warner, Al Carroll, Paula Jordon, George Williams, and J. G. Huckenpöler; to all those who answered my questions, including Yoji Kondo (aka Eric Kotani), Joan Slonczewski, and G. David Nordley; to Richard Drachman for double-checking the essay. I would like to thank Dean Dauger of Dauger Research for the orbital images and Ray Wilson of Illinois Wesleyan University for his image of the diffraction pattern.

  Special thanks to my editors Jim Minz and David Hartwell for their excellent insights; to the publisher, Tom Doherty, and to all the fine people at Tor and St. Martin’s Press who made this book possible; to my much appreciated agent, Eleanor Wood, of Spectrum Literary Agency; and to Binnie Syril Braunstein for her enthusiasm and hard work on my behalf.

  A most heartfelt thanks to the shining lights of my life, my husband, John Kendall Cannizzo, and my daughter, Cathy, whose constant love and support make it all worthwhile.

  BOOK ONE

  Opalite

  1

  Partial Waves

  I began to exist.

  A patch of night sky brooded far overhead. Dark red sky. Shadows loomed around me, their distant tops circling that ruddy patch. I lay on my back and gazed up a ragged tunnel of shadows to a smoldering night.

  Sounds crinkled the night: clicks, rustles, whispers. The dark rumbled.

  A mistake had occurred.

  I shouldn’t b
e here.

  I was…

  ?

  I felt myself. Arms. Long hair. Breasts. Human.

  I was human.

  So I lay, dreaming, as my body became solid.

  I became aware of an emotion. Fear. It soaked my thoughts. My teeth clenched. Sweat beaded my forehead.

  Sweet-smelling moss cushioned my body, bumpy and damp, and a cornucopia of smells tickled my nose. As I stood up, the clicks and clacks went silent. A breeze ruffled my shift, which was a gauzy sleep shirt that came to midthigh. Night turned the cloth dark, but my memory stirred: the shift was blue. I recalled nothing else, though. I clenched my fist in the cloth, my heart beating hard.

  Despite the night’s warmth, I shivered. My disorientation went deeper than memory loss. Urgency pulled at me, I didn’t know why. Nothing here had familiarity. I took a step—and ran into a wall. Wincing, I rubbed my elbow where it had hit. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that the “wall” was a root buckling out of the ground. A large root Here, it came as high as my shoulders. To my right it sloped downward, and to my left it rose in shadowed bumps, higher and higher, until the shadows of night swallowed its curve.

  I dragged my hand through my hair, then stopped when I realized my arm was trembling. Never show fear, never let anyone see your vulnerabilities. As soon as that thought formed, I knew it well though I wasn’t sure why. I tried to push down my apprehension. I had to find out what had happened.

  Seeking a vantage point to look around, I climbed the root, digging my toes into the wet, crumbly moss that covered it. I reached the top, but then I slipped and tumbled down the other side. Although the low gravity tempered my fall, I flipped over and landed on my stomach, knocking out my breath. My hip smacked a small root jutting out of the ground.

  Ai! I bit my lip, wincing. Keep the fear at bay. Think. The low gravity probably meant this was a small world, or a spongy one, or maybe a space habitat. I climbed to my feet, rubbing my hip. Then I took a look at myself. Although I didn’t consciously recall my appearance, what I saw came as no surprise: slender arms, soft palms, clipped nails, slight build, firm breasts, small waist, long legs, delicate feet. My hair fell to below my hips, glossy and black. A healthy body. Youthful. But youth and I had long ago parted.

  I had lived 158 years.

  Despite its length, the span of years felt natural. It was a start; I knew my appearance and age. Now if I could just figure out this place. Peering into the dark, I saw more roots. Some were small; others were monstrous, bigger than the one I had climbed. They twisted in eerie shadows, evoking in me a primal urge to seek protection from the dark and the unknown.

  Dark and unknown…

  And unknown…

  Unknown…

  Warm…

  ?

  Warmth bathed my cheek. Coppery sunlight filtered through translucent walls.

  Walls? Sunlight?

  I sat up groggily. What the—? Seconds ago it had been night. A reddish night, yes, but dark. I had been outside. Now I was in an irregular cavity roughly twice my length. Across from me, a chute led upward, twisting out of sight. It looked like I had fallen into a gnarled mass of large roots. In thinner areas, light from outside shone through them, coppery and diffuse.

  Disquieted, I put my palms on my cheeks, reassuring myself I was solid. Had I passed out? I crossed my arms across my torso, as if that could ward off this inexplicable situation. I couldn’t let this shake me up. I would find help.

  It wasn’t hard to climb the chute. My knees scraped off moss, and the root underneath rubbed smoothly against my skin. I came out into a sunlit place surrounded by dark green foliage. Each plant had a tripod base, three legs that came together into a stalk, which rose straight up. The plants were all sizes, from tender sprouts smaller than my thumb to growths so large I could see only their tripod bases. I tilted back my head to look up—

  And up—

  And up—

  “Gods,” I whispered. Just the bases alone of the largest plants stood ten to twenty meters tall. The three legs joined into a gigantic column that rose hundreds of meters, so high I nearly lost my balance craning back my head to see their crowns. The sheer magnitude of their height thrilled me. Plants didn’t grow this large on heavier gravity worlds. Clouds could easily have hidden the tops of these mammoths.

  Dizzy from staring, I lowered my head and rubbed my neck. Such strange foliage. Overlapping plates covered everything, supple on smaller plants, thickened into armor on the larger. Flags made from a similar material unfurled from the stalks, spread flat to the sky. They grew huge on the trees, supported by struts, facing the sky like giant hands extended in a plea for money, as if each photon they caught was a beggared coin.

  The flags were spaced far enough apart for me to see a patch of sky, possibly the same one I had gazed at last night. Centered in it, a tiny sun shone like a sharp white bead. It was hard to see how that measly orb could provide the light that saturated this forest. As soon as I had that thought, lenses in my eyes recorded the spectrum of the star, and my brain toggled one of its analysis nodes.

  Lenses? Nodes?

  Until that moment, I hadn’t known I had enhanced eyesight or nodes in my brain. But yes, I remembered. The nodes were biochips that augmented my thoughts. Apparently something had disrupted the neural pathways in my brain. As my neurons reconnected, my memories seemed to be returning.

  I touched my face, wondering. What color were my eyes? Green. Yes, they were green. The lens enhancements made a translucent film on my eyes, the palest rose and gold. Sunrise eyes. My father had called them that. I couldn’t remember him, except for a sense of love that transcended details.

  According to my lenses and nodes, that “tiny” sun overhead was actually a large star. It looked small because this planet orbited at a great distance. But that made this world even more of a puzzle. From so far away, that star couldn’t provide enough irradiation to nurture this fertile biosphere. The planet ought to be a ball of ice.

  Besides, sunshine from a star of that spectral class should be white, possibly blue-tinged, but not the smoldering red that bathed this forest. Although the air had an unfamiliar tang on my tongue, I could breathe it well enough. Such an atmosphere would scatter longer wavelengths of light everywhere, making the sky blue. Instead it glowed lurid red-purple, lightened only in a halo around the sun, which shone off to one side overhead.

  To one side?

  I blinked. In the few moments I had been staring upward, the sun had moved. A chronometer in my brain recorded how long the shift had taken. My lenses marked how it had shifted. My nodes estimated that it took this world 240 minutes to rotate, probably about two hours of light and two hours of dark. The planet had a four-hour cycle.

  Pah. That knowledge left me no less bewildered. The short day didn’t explain why the night had just switched off earlier. Even with only two hours of night, dawn wouldn’t come that fast. I had lost at least an hour, maybe more.

  I wrapped my arms around my body, chilled from inside. Mist steamed off the dark plants. Roots buckled in curves and rolls, my height and more. Cavities within them showed everywhere, above and below ground, a network of living caves. As the sun moved out of the patch of sky, shadows filled the forest.

  My hunger stirred. I hadn’t eaten since … I wasn’t sure. Could I eat the plants? Their green color suggested they used photosynthesis. But no, that would make them a much brighter green: These were almost black. Perhaps they had an unusual chemistry that let them absorb more light. It would explain their dark color. Unfortunately, it also increased the chance that they might poison me.

  The rich, bittersweet smell of the forest saturated my senses. The curving roots resembled waves, green swells in a surreal ocean, breakers rising, rising in great crests …

  Rising…

  Undulating…

  Out to infinity…

  Rippling out to infinity…

  With a conscious effort, I pulled back into my body. What the hell?
Part of me was here. But another part was there. Where? What nightmare had caught me?

  Ah, no…

  2

  The Promontory

  Awareness returned like waves washing the shore of my mind—and I understood that I had almost ceased to exist. With shaking hands, I pressed my palms against a tripod tree, assuring myself I was solid. Is that what had happened when night jumped into day? Had I just stopped existing!

  I straightened up and touched my face, my shoulders, my stomach. Solid. I took a long breath. I had to take action. But before I could go anywhere, I needed to see where I was. The large root next to me looked familiar. I clambered to the top and sat with my legs dangling over the other side. The clearing where I had awoken last night lay below. A human-sized dent flattened the moss and footprints led to this root. But I saw no indication I had entered the clearing. Either something had lowered me from the air or else I had come into existence here. How? And from where!

  I rubbed my arms, trying to warm them. My shift had no sleeves, just ribbons tied over the shoulders. Mist, curled around my legs, damp on the skin. The heavy foliage made it difficult to see, but in one direction the land appeared to slope upward. If I hiked to higher ground, I might get a better idea about the area. That gave me a surge of hope. I might find a landmark I recognized or an outpost with people.

  So I set off into the forest. My optimism soon faltered. The buckled terrain made the hike painfully difficult. Hidden twigs poked my feet through the moss, making me limp, and underbrush scratched my legs. Apparently I wasn’t used to the gravity; I had trouble timing my steps and stumbled often.