Planetfall (A Planetfall Novel, Band 1) - Softcover

Newman, Emma

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425282392 ISBN 13: 9780425282397

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

From the Hugo Award-winning author of Between Two Thorns comes the first novel in a captivating science fiction series where a secret withheld to protect humanity’s future may lead to its undoing…

“Cathartic and transcendent.”—The New York Times

“An exceptionally engaging novel that explores the complex relationship between mythology and science.”—The Washington Post

Renata Ghali believed in Lee Suh-Mi’s vision of a world far beyond Earth, calling to humanity. A planet promising to reveal the truth about our place in the cosmos, untainted by overpopulation, pollution, and war. Ren believed in that vision enough to give up everything to follow Suh-Mi into the unknown.

More than twenty-two years have passed since Ren and the rest of the faithful braved the starry abyss and established a colony at the base of an enigmatic alien structure where Suh-Mi has since resided, alone. All that time, Ren has worked hard as the colony's 3-D printer engineer, creating the tools necessary for human survival in an alien environment, and harboring a devastating secret.

Ren continues to perpetuate the lie forming the foundation of the colony for the good of her fellow colonists, despite the personal cost. Then a stranger appears, far too young to have been part of the first planetfall, a man who bears a remarkable resemblance to Suh-Mi.

The truth Ren has concealed since planetfall can no longer be hidden. And its revelation might tear the colony apart...

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emma Newman is the author of Planetfall, After Atlas, Before Mars, and Atlas Alone and is also a professional audiobook narrator, narrating short stories and novels in all genres. She also cowrites and hosts a Hugo nominated podcast called “Tea & Jeopardy.” Emma is a keen role-player, gamer, and designer-dressmaker.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

EVERY TIME I come down here I think about my mother. I don’t want to; it just happens. My brain has decided it’s a critical subroutine that must be executed when the correct variables are in place: (when time = predawn) + (when physical location = beneath the colony) + (when physical act = opening the door to the Masher) run “unpleasant memory of mother #345.”

My hand is pushing the door open and I’m back at my old lab and she’s following me in, her heels clicking on the tiled floor. I’ve prepped the equipment to run one hour before her arrival so there’s something to show straightaway. She never was a patient woman.

“Is that a printer?” she asked, and I nodded. It started then—I know it now that I’m looking back—that tightening of my gut as I dared to hope I might impress her.

“Yeah.” I smiled.

She didn’t. “Like the one I have at home?”

“Better.”

“What’s it printing?”

“My latest work.”

She went up to the plasglass and peered through, seeing nothing but a few millimeters of tissue. She turned to me with her nose slightly wrinkled. “What is it printing?”

“A new pancreas,” I said. “For Dad.”

“Oh.” She’d hoped I was making something she could hang up in the hallway of her inert home. “I didn’t realize you were involved in this sort of thing. I’ve seen it on the news.”

And that was the moment I knew I’d been stupid to hope for anything. “The gene therapy isn’t working out for him. There’s an unusual base pair sequence in the—”

“Renata—” She holds up her hand. “You know I don’t understand this kind of thing.” The hand lowers to rest over her heart. “I’m an artist.”

I wanted to say that my colleague had called me that when he saw the final model I’d compiled for the print. I wanted to ask her why she wasn’t even the tiniest bit worried about Dad’s cancer. They were married once; surely an echo of something remained. But all I said was, “I’m making him a new pancreas with cells cultured from a cheek swab and it’s actually fucking cool. I’m going to save his life. And thousands of other people who can’t—”

“I don’t think it’s right.”

“How can it be wrong to save a life?”

“Where does it stop? Making a person? Making copies?”

“Actually, they’ve already locked down the ethics on that, after the guy over at Princeton—”

“It’s going too far, all this science. Where’s the beauty? Where is God in all of this?”

“Everywhere,” I whispered. “Especially here.”

She didn’t hear me.

This is where I take a deep breath and look at the Masher instead of the lab in my past. I run a hand over the alloy and rub my fingers together. I know from patching into the environmental sensors and the color of the walls that the humidity levels are within satisfactory parameters, but I still do it. The alloy is the same gray-blue as my mother’s eyes. That must be the memory trigger. I used to wish I’d inherited them, but thank the Lord I didn’t. I wouldn’t want to see my mother’s eyes looking back at me in the mirror. I have my father’s dark brown eyes and his tight curly hair and his flat nose. It was genetically inevitable, but it was still a disappointment to her. It’s obvious in the postbirth footage I lifted from the family server. It’s the only time you see her. Days later she was the one doing all the filming. Drawn back. Getting the composition right, one step removed from her own retinal cam.

I walk from one end of the Masher to the other, peering through the plasglass at the sorted discards from the homes above instead of human tissue. I feel just as excited now as I did back then.

“What have you got inside you today, Mash?” I ask. I don’t know why; there’s no voice recognition or synthware or any kind of UI. There’s no point; the sorter is the only part with any AI and it’s not that clever. It doesn’t need to be to sort materials.

In the ceramics section an interesting curve in the collected pile catches my eye. I press the nubbin at the bottom corner of the door and it slides open. It’s a vase, I think, the design riffing off a Möbius strip aesthetic. The bacteria are destroyed by the household chute on the way down, so I know it’s sterile and safe to take out.

I turn it over a few times and rub my thumb over the shiny white surface. It tells me two things right away: the creator is a learner—they always want to play with Möbius strips when they get to a certain phase of the CAD training program—and their printer is going to break down soon. The imperfections in the surface are obvious to me; if it were my printer it’d be stripped down and cleaned right away, but these people don’t notice the signs. They know I’ll turn up and fix it when it breaks and that’s enough for everyone. Except the Ringmaster.

Even though the design is crude and the vase flawed, I rescue it from its fate. Someone with the potential to be a good visengineer tried so hard to make it an interesting shape. I need something to remind me there are still people creating for the love of it. I put it on top of the unit and rummage through the rest of the abandoned ceramics, but nothing takes my fancy, so I slide the door shut and move on to the plastics compartment. I’ve had time only to open its door when a message marked “urgent” arrives for me.

I don’t even question who it is from; only the Ringmaster has manners bad enough to tag any message that way. I decline voice contact—the acoustics would give away my location—and indicate that I’ll accept only text. He’ll think I’m on the toilet or having a shower. The only other times most people accept text-only is if they’re making love with someone boring, and he knows there’s no chance of that.

Ren—come to the west gate. Now.

I close the Masher compartment, actually interested. What’s Mack doing there? He never goes to the western edge of the colony.

With a simple thought command, a virtual keyboard appears in front of me, overlaid across my visual field. What’s going on? I type back.

Someone’s coming.

What’s that supposed to mean? You want to have a meeting at the west gate?

No. Someone’s coming toward the colony. From outside.

The v-keyboard disappears, my implant thinking it’s not needed anymore when the words fly from my brain and I stand there, motionless, too stumped by what he’s sent to respond.

Ren? What are you doing? Come now!

I think of the Masher and call up the menu, starting the machine off as I struggle to process what he’s said. I watch as the contents on the other side of the plasglass are rendered into the base powders they were printed from. By the time the last specks of it all have been sucked back into the communal feeds, the Ringmaster has sent three more messages and is starting to swear. He never swears.

Abusing my privileges, I access the cloud and look up what patterns he’s downloaded in the past twenty-six hours. When I see the one for the automatic pistol delivered to his home printer less than twenty minutes ago, my mouth goes dry.

I call up the v-keyboard again. Sorry. Getting dressed. On my way.

I can’t help but...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0425282392
• ISBN 13: 9780425282397
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: ACE; https://www.penguin.com/; ; Bachstelzenweg 10; Ibbenb?ren; 49479; Deutschland