Eternity's Mind

 

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For more than twenty years, Tom Doherty and Linda Quinton at Tor Books have been supporters of my work—as cheering section, sounding board, and business partners.
Eternity's Mind
is the end of the Seven Suns universe, for now, and this novel is dedicated to them.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I write a big book like this, I dictate chapters at a furious pace, sometimes as many as four per day, nearly overwhelming my typist, Karen Haag, but she keeps up with me and I owe her a special thanks. Also, my gratitude for the work of my editor, Pat LoBrutto; my agent, John Silbersack; test reader, Diane Jones; and, as always, my wife, Rebecca Moesta.

 

THE STORY SO FAR

Even as the mysterious and deadly Shana Rei attack random colonies throughout the Spiral Arm, industrialist Lee Iswander expands his operations to extract stardrive fuel from clusters of bloaters—enigmatic nodules that drift in the dark spaces between the stars. Bloaters seem similar to plankton in space, and since they are filled with the valuable fuel ekti-X, Iswander considers them a treasure trove. He keeps his operations completely secret, to prevent competitors from producing great quantities of cheap stardrive fuel, which would glut the market and cause prices to crash. But many Roamers are desperate to know the secret.

Aelin, the green priest who serves Iswander at the bloater-extraction field, suspects the nodules are something very important. He can tap into the immense verdani mind and all the knowledge there, and he also senses a powerful presence among the bloaters. Occasionally, unpredictable energy discharges ripple through the nuclei of the nodules. In an attempt to understand them, Aelin flies a stolen scout pod out among the bloaters with his treeling and is inadvertently caught in one of the discharges—which sends him into a coma of overloaded thoughts and revelations. He claims that bloaters are filled with the “blood of the cosmos” and that the Iswander operations are causing great harm. Iswander and his hardline deputy, Elisa Enturi, believe Aelin is mad. The green priest tries to escape the extraction field to sound a warning, but he is captured and held, considered a threat. Since the bloater outburst destroyed his treeling, Aelin has no way to communicate with other green priests on Theroc.

Back on the worldforest planet, the green priests are intrigued by the newly arrived Onthos, the remnants of a nearly extinct race of “Gardeners,” who once tended another worldforest in a distant star system. The Onthos and their worldtrees were wiped out by the Shana Rei long ago, and now the last hundred of them request sanctuary on Theroc. With the blessing of the green priests and the worldforest, King Peter and Queen Estarra grant them permission to stay.

Their daughter Arita, who failed in her attempt to become a green priest, is fascinated by the Gardeners. She hovers close and listens to the Gardeners talk about their lost homeworld and how they cared for their immense but now extinct worldforest. Though she is not one of them, the green priests tolerate Arita's presence. More surprisingly, the leader of the Onthos, Ohro, takes an interest in Arita, telling her she is more special than the green priests, that she can connect with something else. Indeed, she has heard strange whispers of thoughts in her head from a distant and immense consciousness, but she never understood them.

Arita's brother, Prince Reynald, suffers from a debilitating disease which will soon cost him his life, a rare illness he contracted from the worldforest itself. The King and Queen have spread the word to all worlds in the Spiral Arm and the Ildiran Empire, searching for a cure, but they have been unsuccessful. Osira'h, daughter of the Ildiran Mage-Imperator and the human green priest Nira, has befriended Reyn and now stays with him on Theroc as his condition continues to worsen. He collapses on the tree canopy, and Osira'h tends him but feels completely helpless.

Meanwhile, Osira'h's father, Mage-Imperator Jora'h, deals with crises in the Ildiran Empire. The Shana Rei and their black robot allies have attacked Ildiran colonies, but the shadows have also infiltrated the Ildiran telepathic network of the
thism.
Though he tells no one, even his green priest lover Nira, Jora'h fears the shadows are inside him as well. A mob of possessed Ildirans recently wiped out an enclave of human settlers in the capital city of Mijistra, and Jora'h announces he will go to Theroc to personally express his regret to King Peter and Queen Estarra. With the Shana Rei continuing their depredations, Jora'h hopes to strengthen the Ildiran alliance with the human Confederation.

Jora'h departs Ildira with an entourage including two warrior women as bodyguards: Yazra'h and Nira's halfbreed daugher Muree'n. The Mage-Imperator leaves his eldest son, Prime Designate Daro'h, in charge, with Nira's halfbreed son Rod'h as his friend and adviser. Rod'h resents the fact that he has become irrelevant since the Elemental War; born as part of the Dobro breeding program to be a savior of the Ildiran Empire, he never got the chance to fulfill his destiny, and feels like he has no purpose. Rod'h tries to help Daro'h in his duties, and saves the Prime Designate when a shadow-possessed Ildiran mob tries to kill him. If the Shana Rei can infiltrate anyone, anywhere, then no place is safe. Fortunately, all of Nira's halfbreed children—Rod'h, Osira'h, Muree'n, Tamo'l, and Tal Gale'nh—seem to be immune.

Adar Zan'nh, the leader of the Solar Navy, works with Ildiran factories to produce sun bombs and laser cannons, the only weapons that have proved effective against the Shana Rei. Tal Gale'nh, the protégé of Adar Zan'nh, still struggles to recover from the horrific experience of being captured by the Shana Rei. When Gale'nh was held prisoner in a Shana Rei entropy bubble, the creatures of darkness could not penetrate him, and he does not know why he was ever freed. After checking on the sun-bomb production, Zan'nh takes Gale'nh to a Lightsource shrine on the planet Hiltos, where the young tal hopes the lens kithmen can give him insight.

The Adar's counterpart in the Confederation Defense Forces, General Nalani Keah, has also set the CDF weapons industries at Earth to work at full capacity. Dr. Jocko Krieger modifies old Ildiran sun-bomb designs to create even more powerful sun bombs, but the the new bombs are produced in such a rush that safety routines are not followed, and an unfortunate accident destroys one of the major factories in lunar orbit. Back to square one.

Mage-Imperator Jora'h and Nira meet with the King and Queen on Theroc, cementing their alliance. Prince Reyn's health is declining, and Osira'h asks her father to send a message to Tamo'l (also one of Nira's halfbreed children), who tends the “misbreeds,” misfit survivors of the now-defunct breeding experiments on Dobro. The misbreeds are often deformed, barely able to survive, and are considered sad mistakes of the program, but Tamo'l believes that they are not just discards, but possess some special worth. Receiving her sister's plea to help find a cure for Reynald, Tamo'l investigates some of the rare kelp strains on Kuivahr, the ocean world where her sanctuary domes are located.

The only facility that might possess the medical information Reyn requires is Pergamus, a secret library of diseases and cures owned by the wealthy recluse Zoe Alakis, who built the secure facility on a poisonous planet and has no intention of sharing her treasure of data or her cures with anyone. Zoe stays sealed in a sterile environment, afraid to be infected by the outside universe. Her loyal majordomo Tom Rom provides everything she needs and often risks his life to acquire new specimens for her collection. He just recovered from the deadly Onthos space plague, which he accidentally caught when forcibly obtaining a blood sample from Orli Covitz, who was herself infected. The researchers on Pergamus finally found a cure for Tom Rom, and now he continues to complete whatever mission Zoe gives him.

Orli was cured of the plague, too, by immersing herself in the protoplasm inside the bloaters—which the green priest Aelin called the blood of the cosmos. Once she recovers enough, Orli goes with her new companion Garrison Reeves and his young son Seth to settle on the quiet colony planet of Ikbir. As their relationship deepens, Orli and Garrison realize that Ikbir is just too dull for them, and they set off to the Roamer capital of Newstation, where Seth will go to school. On their way out of the Ikbir system, though, they see an astonishing number of bloaters drifting in clusters and chained together like breadcrumbs across vast reaches of space. Because she was once immersed in a bloater, Orli feels a strange connection to them.…

Iswander keeps producing ekti-X, and the main distributors are Xander Brindle and Terry Handon, pilots for Kett Shipping. Rlinda Kett has made huge profits from all the new stardrive fuel, but she, as well as Xander's parents Robb Brindle and Tasia Tamblyn, remains suspicious about where the ekti-X comes from. It seems too cheap and too easy. Xander and Terry make the unpleasant discovery that some of the medical treatments they deliver for Kett Shipping have horrific consequences. The treatments come from Rakkem, a biological black market with an extremely dark track record and a string of corpses in its wake. Concerned, they decide they need to know more about the suppliers who hire Kett Shipping and the products they deliver—which include ekti-X.

Lee Iswander refuses to tell anyone his source, and Rlinda is sure Iswander is hiding something. Xander and Terry do some subtle spying on their own, even deciding to place a tracker on Elisa Enturi's ship the next time they receive a delivery. For his own part, Lee Iswander has been treated with suspicion by the Roamer clans, who snub him and claim he is not a real Roamer. He makes overtures, offering to help, but they simply don't see eye-to-eye. He feels disrespected.

Shareen Fitzkellum, a spunky and ambitious teenaged Roamer, gets assigned with her friend Howard Rohandas to Fireheart Station, where they will become research assistants for Kotto Okiah, the legendary but eccentric Roamer genius who is building a gigantic experiment in the middle of a nebula. Kotto doesn't want any apprentices, especially teens, but Shareen's grandfather, Del Kellum, uses his political clout to get them the position. Del, a former Speaker for the Roamer clans, runs a distillery on the ocean world of Kuivahr with his daughter Zhett and her husband Patrick. They make exotic liquor from the same kelp extracts that Tamo'l uses to treat her misbreeds. Del thinks Shareen has so much potential, he wants her to learn from the best: Kotto. Del delivers Shareen and Howard to Fireheart, and they get to work with the famous but eccentric scientist.