Part I: Exile
Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. —Salman Rushdie
Equatorial Forest, Twilight Valley
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.1.25 Interstellar
Janus Invarian knelt in the gray, pre-dawn light, touching the rich, black soil with his gloved hand. He wore a custom-built hazard suit, its back-mounted environmental unit cleaning the air and cooling him like a void suit, except it wasn’t sealed. It had fabric sleeves and trousers, and the helmet wasn’t locked into the torso. Rain pattered against the canopy, almost thirty meters above, running down trunks or streaming off broad, flat leaves to soak him and the ground below. He could feel the damp around the top of his boots.
There were no defined shifts among the research teams of Cofan, but if there were, they would start in twilight. It was always twilight here. Planet Krandermore was tidally locked, the same side continuously facing the sun, which meant that daylight wasn’t a matter of time; it was a matter of place. Cofan was only a few days from the cloud wall and the terminator where daylight began. Its surrounding jungles were a swath of interlocking canopies hiding thousands of micro-ecosystems so diverse that, even after two thousand years, the majority of them had yet to be discovered and cataloged.
During his first weeks here, being outside an airtight structure without full protective equipment or a NO2 injection gave him short but intense panic attacks. He’d worked through them, gritting his teeth and willing his body to accept the change because his every moment on the surface of Krandermore was a miracle. There was life here, everywhere. It was dense, varied, unrestrained, fiercely competitive, and sometimes deadly. It was an incredible change from Irkalla, the world he’d grown up on, where life was carefully controlled and bottled, lest the void extinguish it or the fierce sun scorch it away.
Even after a year here, he couldn’t get over it. It was a permanent sense of wonder that should have faded by now, and yet it hadn’t.
He tried to draw it all in, to etch the feel of it into memory. Somewhere up there, beyond the canopy, among the unseen stars and orbiting the same sun, his airless planet and his family were waiting.
If there ever was an end to his exile, he wanted to be able to tell his people—especially Callie, his kid sister—what touching a living world was like.
“Hey, Coldsider!” one of the other researchers called, pulling Janus from his thoughts. “We could use you!”
“Coming!” Janus said. He stood and wiped the dirt on his pants leg, grinning behind his visor.
No one here was aware he was from another planet. Space travel was a folk tale for these people, something lost in the distant past. Those who grew up under the canopy rarely saw the stars. As far as the researchers knew, he was from the cold, dark side of the planet. It explained his use of the mask and the pallor of his skin, and as long as he didn’t spend time with actual coldsiders, the cover story held up.
He walked back toward the center of the research camp. There were about twenty of the sun-side gatherers in this team, all of them native to Krandermore, although not all of them were from Cofan. Janus didn’t have his friend Lira’s understanding of the shifting system of regions, clusters, settlements, and families that made up their society, but he understood they were based on a sort of clan honor system. Many of the people here were related through a network of blood debts, feuds, and alliances that were as natural to them as dome societies had been to him on Irkalla.
“Hey, Janus!” one of the researchers said, looking at his suit. “Aren’t you hot in that thing?”
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“It’s got a cooling system,” Janus answered. “Anything good?”
The woman shrugged. Janus hadn’t expected her to say anything. She was in the process of collecting Niranditus beetles—the GC-46 variety, based on its coloring. Ground up and filtered, they could safely be used as an anesthetic, although it was so fast acting that some of the researchers, including Janus, used it in their tranquilizer darts. GC-46 had spread widely enough to be considered a stable variety, one that even Krandermore’s sun-side rate of mutation couldn’t endanger. The bugs were useful, especially in large quantities, but they weren’t special. Collecting them was likely a punishment for some minor infraction.
What was mind-blowing to Janus wasn’t the anesthetic beetles or the woman’s boredom. On Irkalla—like on Old Earth—the taxonomy for animals stopped at the level of the subspecies; Krandermore had varieties of animals! It had an entire additional order! It was a riotous diversity that went beyond what should have been possible through radiation alone, something unique to Krandermore that even the natives didn’t understand.
No wonder their common ancestors had decided to settle here. If humanity was going to reinvent itself and bounce back from its near extinction, what better place?
The research team had gathered around their leader, Dr. Mbari, who was fifty-six and, therefore, old by sun-side standards. “Ah, there you are,” she said. “Come closer, Janus.”
The team parted to let him through with a mixture of goodwill and suspicion. Janus was used to it. He was an outsider, after all, although he came from much farther than the researchers thought.
Dr. Mbari was standing next to what appeared to be a Nyanga Blossom. It was a delicate plant with three long, slender stems that ended in clusters of small, white flowers that gave off a soft glow. “What do you see, Janus?”
He squatted down next to the plant. Using the upgraded ocular implants most sun-siders had, Janus could tell the stem and leaves were a deep bluish-green, as they should be, but there was something not quite right about it.
One of the other gatherers thought so, too, although not for the same reasons. “Doctor, why are we wasting time on the coldsider? Anyone could answer that question. It’s a Nyanga Blossom, the 4V12 variety.”
“It’s not,” Janus said, standing to look at the gatherer.
The other man crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow.
“It’s in the name,” Janus explained. “Variety 4V12 is called ‘subluceat colonialis’—that means colonial underglow. They grow in clusters. This plant is alone, therefore—”
“Not 4V12,” Dr. Mbari said with a grin. “Something to add?” she said, looking at the gatherer who’d spoken up.
“I apologize, Janus Invarian,” the gatherer said, tapping his finger against his forehead.
“All good,” Janus said, dipping his head in the local gesture that meant a lesser family member recognized a kindness from an elder, even though they were likely the same age.
Dr. Mbari liked to use Janus’s naiveté as a way to remind her team not to get blinded by their assumptions. After all, their homeworld was a planet of near-infinite variation and possibility. “I’d like you all to see if you can find more of these. We might be looking at an environmental accident, or at an entirely new variety.”
The gatherers scattered to follow their boss’ orders.
Janus made no move to join them. He wasn’t a gatherer like the others. He wasn’t a leader like the doctor, either, so he generally followed Mbari’s orders, but she had no real authority over him. It was a lot like his old position on Irkalla, where the plant manager had let him play a generalist’s role because he improved the factory’s efficiency. He was welcome—or tolerated—because he was useful. The gathering teams based out of Cofan allowed him to tag along with their expeditions because he saw things no one else did and asked questions everyone thought they knew the answers to.
Sometimes, like today, that led to discoveries. He did his best to leave the credit to others, accumulating favors rather than fighting over royalties or renown, but word got around, and he had managed to patent a few lucrative finds.
“I didn’t mean to show him up like that,” Janus said.
Dr. Mbari slapped his shoulder. “Don’t be so serious. He’d have seen it too if his head hadn’t been stuck up his behind.”
Janus chuckled. Maybe that was true, but he would still make sure he didn’t accidentally find himself alone with that gatherer while they were hours away from Cofan and clan law. The Motragi were more rational than clans Pugarian or Verazlan, but all Krandermorans were touchy when it came to their reputations.
In the augmented light of his Krandermoran implants, the jungle was vibrant, even in the half-light. The gatherers wore special fabrics that appeared bright red, yellow, blue, purple, and white under the enhancing effect of the implants, even though they made the locals almost invisible to local predators.
After a few minutes, Janus noticed a gap in the team’s search pattern, an area they were instinctively overlooking.
He smiled and headed that way.