Sci-Fi fantasy from an unknown author
Amaranth Rose 001
This is a multi-part work written by my late sister. Her title for this book was This Mortal Coil. Publishing here is an experiment to see how it is received. It is part of a two-volume series. Each volume is over 150,000 words. Each installment will be around 2500-3000 words. Continued publication will depend on readership (demand), after the first few installments.
The initial intent is to publish one or two 2500-3000 word parts per week. Some of the content alludes to sexual activity, though not in detail. The central theme is about changing the culture of a backwards planetary human settlement.
Chapter 1, Part 1 — Rough Landing on Raznack
The shuttle slammed into the atmosphere of Raznack at a bad angle; it bounced sharply at least a dozen times as it skittered and yawed through the upper atmosphere. The heat ablation shields were taking a pounding on this trip. There were only two passengers, and they clung together and to their seats as their transportation rattled them like seeds in a gourd.
“Jerk,” the older passenger muttered to himself, glaring in the general direction of the cockpit as his daughter hastily grabbed for and used a barf bag. Dr. Konstantin Duvarnos, Stan to his friends, seldom used such language. Ordinarily he reserved name-calling for those situations in which no other course of action was fruitful. This shuttle ride was definitely one of those occasions. The turbulent transportation didn’t matter to him, personally; he had a pretty strong stomach ordinarily. His annoyance at the moment was due directly to his daughter Deborah’s misery.
At the moment Stan Duvarnos was inordinately annoyed. He’d been shuttled to many planets, and he knew that there were only two reasons for such a rough ride: incompetence on the part of the pilot, or deliberate intent. Since the pilot had appeared to be a well-seasoned veteran, he doubted very much that it was due to incompetence. That left intent, and he was rather apprehensive. He was becoming concerned about the political climate on Raznack, in light of the pilot’s attitude and actions. He looked out the window, as much to settle his stomach as to have a look at their destination. They were currently passing over a wide stretch of ocean.
He’d had some doubts about coming to this hot, brilliantly illuminated planet from the outset; it was a planet hostile to human life in many ways. Raznack revolved around a binary star pair, a small red star and a large blue one that the humans who’d colonized the harsh little planet had dubbed Tintor and Vigel. It had a small moon, a captured asteroid about a tenth the size of the planet, which the humans who’d settled there had named Bane. It was a pale satellite, not often seen or noticed, excepting when it happened to be in the sky during the occasional periods of darkness that occurred predictably when Raznack managed to be in part of its eccentric orbit where both suns were distant. Then the planet cast a shadowy night upon one side of itself for the space of a few hours during each rotation. Bane served to help stir the oceans a bit, along with Tintor and Vigel, generating tides that periodically swept ashore the carcasses of deep-sea creatures. Stan noted the absence of any ocean-going vessels.
For the most part the seas were useless to the Raznackai; they were a thick mineral soup, poisonous to humans, inhabited abundantly by creatures that were also poisonous to humans. A thick crust of mineral salts rimed its shores, occasionally forming fantastic lumpy forms that somewhat resembled weird sculptures interrupting the hot, scorching shores. The beaches were covered, at least above the tide lines, with a hardened mixture of sand and mineral salts that covered the shoreline like a layer of dirty snow, hard and crusty, squelching underfoot with a sound somewhat like deep, powdery snow. This layer thinned substantially during the extremely rainy season, and thickened again during the opposing dry season. Every disturbance, every footfall, sent up clouds of fine, dry, choking dust laden with toxic metallic salts; ingesting relatively small quantities was reliably lethal to humans. If the arsenic, copper and bismuth didn’t kill them, the lead, antimony and other heavy metals would.
Far off to the south Stan saw what looked like thunderclouds building, and as he watched them they built rapidly. He could see the turbulence in the atmosphere, though they were still far away. With a little luck, the shuttle would reach their destination before the storm did. It seemed to be paralleling their path.
“Oh, Daddy, this is awful!” Debbie said. “I feel like we’re a pair of dice in a cup that someone is shaking hard.”
He patted her back gently.
“Let’s hope it’s over soon,” he said by way of encouragement. He pointed down, out the window.
“Looks like they have something like whales on Raznack.” A large group of creatures swam across their path, arcing gracefully as they leapt out of the water occasionally.
From time to time, marine creatures came ashore to mate, give birth or lay eggs. Occasionally carcasses of deep sea creatures would wash ashore, their mangled remains only a hint of their living form and structures. Indeed, practically the only use the Raznackai had for their seas, which covered over half the planet, was as a source of vital minerals for their animals, plants and themselves, of which the soils were all but devoid, having been leached away eons ago by the massive amounts of rainfall.
The weather was somewhat unpredictable and extreme; there was a great deal of precipitation everywhere, though the suns soon baked exposed ground dry and cracked after a storm. With its twin suns emitting most of their radiation in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges, the native plants and animals had adapted to life in high radiation in a variety of ways. The planet’s biology was unique in many ways, especially when it came to reproduction.
Raznack was lush with verdant growth, a veritable Eden until one realized that ninety-nine percent of the native vegetation was violently poisonous to humans. The native vegetation had adapted to the oddly split spectra of the two suns, using pigments that functioned in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges of the spectrum for their photosynthetic processes. Plants were colorful, with many shades of red, yellow, purple and blue among the green.
Much of the plant life was dioecious and showed extreme sexual dimorphism. In many species the male plant was found only as a small, spindly, pale specimen growing near or on the female plants, in some cases resembling a parasite like mistletoe, carried high in the branches to stave off grazers and help spread pollen by wind or rain. All faced the never-ending problem of acquiring the minerals essential to life.
Some plants encouraged animal visitors by producing dense canopies that resisted water, providing shelter for the animals during torrential downpours or while giving birth or seeking respite from the fierce light of the twin suns. Others produced large fruits or edible masses of fibrous tissues that enticed grazing animals, in exchange for the minerals to be gleaned from the droppings they left behind. Lovely to look at, they were deadly to humans in the smallest quantities, though they could be used for their timber or fibers or as a source of chemicals for Raznack’s industrial processes. A very few yielded useful medicines and dyestuffs. Most native vegetation was simply too dangerous to warrant its disturbance.
Some plants even had elaborate adaptations to prey upon the grazers and their predators, actively securing minerals and nutrients. They made no distinction between native fauna and the humans and their stock when it came to satisfying its needs. For example, if a snare-vine needed calcium or iron, it did not care what species it came from. If it detected a source of motion with its flat green sensory tendrils that projected from the ground like blades of grass, it produced a sharp-pointed probe that was heat sensitive. The lancet-like tip jabbed at anything warm; if it found a rich source of a mineral it needed, the snare vine burst forth explosively, and could entangle, trap and drag beneath the roiled ground an entire cow, horse or human in a matter of minutes. It kept its victims alive for quite some time as it slowly grew into and through them and harvested their mineral riches. It was a protracted and tortured fate, as evidenced by the helpless, agonized cries of the victims that could be heard for many days as they slowly succumbed. It was a horrible fate. Even so, it was less harrowing than what happened to those rescued from the snare-vine’s clutches, for it continued to grow very slowly inside their bodies and eventually consumed them after many years of horrific torture. It preyed indiscriminately on anything that crushed or broke its sensory tendrils, alerting the snare-vine, provoking its sensory probes. It spread rapidly underground in the direction of any concentration of resources it detected. If it took one animal in a herd, it soon spread to encompass an entire pasture.
Conquering the snare vine had proven to be one of humankind’s greatest challenges in the course of settling on Raznack, close to conquering the fierce radiation. In the end, they achieved an uneasy truce, the snare vines driven back from the edges of human habitation and appeased with regular sprinklings of mineral salts from the ocean’s shore.
In sharp contrast, many of the native animals were true hermaphrodites, both male and female in the same individual, although self-sterile. From the aptly named bright green, bumpy skinned, ill-tempered wart horses in Raznack’s swamps and the brown buffalo-like girtslangers on its plains through the many denizens of rock and rill to the swamp lions and rock tigers that preyed on them and the wyverns that inhabited its highest crags, Nature had shaped this world to make each individual both male and female. It was a fascinating planet for its biology alone.
However, Stan’s interest was in what lay beneath its alternately scorched and flooded crust. Raznack was a world desperately in need of refined metals to further its economic development. Stan had made his name famous on many planets as a Metallurgist. What Konstantin Duvarnos did not know about extracting and purifying metals from their ores, blending them into alloys, and working the resulting metallic substances into useful objects, whether it was a delicately fluted wine goblet or a ball bearing hard enough to penetrate a starship’s hull, was probably of very little interest to anyone. He’d become a Consultant widely sought after for both his enormous knowledge in his field and his skill in handling difficult people and situations. In his field of expertise, his services were usually very much in demand, and his clients generally accorded him a level of courtesy befitting that of at least minor nobility.
Still on the shy side of fifty, he lived very comfortably, picking and choosing as he liked among the many contracts constantly being offered to him. He was beginning to wonder if he’d been wise to agree to come here for a year, if the pilot’s actions were any portent of things to come. He’d hoped for a relatively calm, settled environment for himself and his daughter for a while; especially for Deborah, considering her current mental state. The rough shuttle ride did not bode well. He clenched his hand tightly on the tired upholstery of the seat back before him, his knuckles white as he sought to steady himself and the young woman he clung tightly to in the seat beside him.
He patted her on the back gently as she heaved once more. He was coming near to losing it himself. Finally the spaceport hove into view; the end was in sight. A rough, bouncing landing, and the shuttle was tractored into the depths of the huge concrete bunker-like structure. Blast doors closed behind them, entombing them in total darkness for a few moments. As the ceiling lights came on in the hangar and shuttle, dim by comparison to the outside atmosphere, the pilot’s sarcastic voice came over the intercom.
“Welcome to Raznack, Dr. Duvarnos. I hope you enjoy your brief stay. I’ll be very happy to take you off when you decide to leave.”
“Stay? This is beginning to look more like a sentence,” Stan muttered. “Come on, Debbie, let’s get off this rust bucket before they decide to take off and land again.” He shot a long-suffering look toward the cockpit. “I hope he didn’t break any of the equipment.”
If the story so far has captured your attention, leave a response to encourage the publication of more installments. This is the first part of Chapter 1, of a 150,000 word novel, the first of a series of two full novels.
READ ON! Part 2 is published here: https://gjsittler.medium.com/amaranth-rose-002-41f4bf1204d7
NOTE: Comments and claps are encouragement to publish more. Since the author is deceased, there won’t be any edits, other than spelling or punctuation correction.
