Realms of Light

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

copyright 2010 Lawrence Watt-Evans

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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

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

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
Prometheus.

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.