Spherical Harmonic

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-Reading, 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 Nancy Berland and her associates for their 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

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.

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.

I rolled onto my side. 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.

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—

"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.

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