The Braided World
Authors: Kay Kenyon
MAXIMUM ICE
“Full-bodied characters, palpable environs, layered mystery and heady suspense combine like the many facets of ‘Ice’ in this sparkling SF novel…. Kenyon is a surprising new talent, and SF enthusiasts will appreciate her imaginative world and characters.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A
vivid cast of characters, some interesting asides on religious authority, and the bleakly beautiful landscape make this a uniquely powerful tale reminiscent of Greg Bear.”
—
Booklist
“Maximum Ice
enhances Kay Kenyon's reputation as a strong new voice in SF. … In a stark and compelling story with a unique twist, Ms. Kenyon delivers a well-written, action-packed SF thriller.”
—
Romantic Times
“Kenyon should be acknowledged by now as a master creator of realistic new worlds. She is also an aficionado of the fantastic, a weaver of fast and exciting stories, a writer capable of creating characters we recognize, characters whom we are happy to let into our hearts and minds. It's very simple: If you want to read an exciting, fast, and thoroughly involving novel,
read Maximum Ice.”
—
Statesman Journal
, Salem, OR
“Kenyon blends science, religion and the imperative to survive in an engaging tale.”
—
The Kansas City Star
“A
top-notch cyberfable that kept me turning pages into the wee hours. Powerful stuff.”
—Julian May
“Kay Kenyon is science fiction's newest master at creating worlds unlike any we've encountered before, but which are so deeply and convincingly portrayed that we wind up feeling as if we've actually set foot in them.
Maximum Ice
is her best yet, an adventure that's also a deep meditation on the interface between the strange and the familiar, and between shadowed pasts and unveiled futures.”
—K. W Jeter
“Kay Kenyon's
Maximum Ice
is superb—an intriguing premise, strong characters, and a gripping plot kept me reading until dawn. I enjoyed it tremendously”
—Kathleen Ann Goonan
“A knockout adventure.”
TROPIC OF CREATION
“Kenyon's vision of a unique universe ranks with those of such science fiction greats as Frank Herbert and Orson Scott Card.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“A rich weaving of science, politics and mysticism. A believable, memorable story.”
—Brian Herbert
“Kenyon draws vivid characters you care about, both human and alien, striving on a harsh and memorable distant world.”
—David Brin
“More proof that Kay Kenyon is a major talent.”
—Mike Resnick
“The real mystery in SF these days is why isn't Kay Kenyon better known? She writes beautifully her characters are multilayered and complex, and her extrasolar worlds are real and nuanced, while at the same time truly alien. An exciting, fascinating, mind-blowing ride.”
—Robert J. Sawyer
“Suspenseful and satisfying … a wholly worthwhile read.”
RIFT
“A grand adventure filled with genuine surprise … rife with new ideas, delicious fears, and compelling events. It has pace, texture, excitement and rock-solid form. Put it at the top of your reading list.”
—
Statesman Journal
, Salem, OR
“In a science fiction market where terraforming has gotten to be a tried-and-true setting, a planet that refuses to be subjugated by human science is a gift and a wonder.”
—
Talebones
“Kenyon has created a powerful book driven by characters with clear moral imperatives, and the stakes are survival of entire races.”
—Writers NW
“Kay Kenyon has done it again. Her third out-of-this-world science fiction novel confirms the quality of her writing skills and quantity of creative leaps of imagination.”
—
The Third Age
“A
great, fast-paced read with all that I could ask of an SF novel.”
—Jacqueline Lichtenberg
LEAP POINT
“An extraordinary genre writing achievement—exciting, involving, chilling, comic, deeply disturbing and altogether enthralling … [Kenyon's] characters are realistic and complicated, her plots are wondrously detailed and beautifully realized, her vision is unique and dead-on startling …
Leap Point
should firmly establish [Kenyon] as among the very finest science fiction writers in the nation.”
—
Statesman Journal
, Salem, OR
“Intricately plotted … The author skillfully blends people and events in an isolated, alfalfa-growing small town with out-of-this-world happenings and galactic beings.”
—
The Third Age
“Not only leaps, this story pirouettes, dances, sings,
grabs you by the collar, and practically
reads itself!”
—Eric S. Nylund
THE SEEDS OF TIME
“A fast-moving plot and a memorable heroine. You couldn't ask for a better first novel.”
—Mike Resnick
“Kenyon has created a winning heroine, a gripping adventure, and a setting that shows some imaginative thinking on current theories of Earth's ecological ruin and of time travel.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A great adventure, a novel that pits believable, fallible characters against each other and against fascinating concepts of time, reality and perception.”
—Donald McQuinn
“A welcome addition to the SF readers’ library.”
—Lisa Mason
ALSO BY KAY KENYON
The Seeds of Time
Leap Point
Rift
Tropic of Creation
Maximum Ice
For Robert Ray
In writing this story I am indebted to a special group of people—friends who love science fiction and think that engaging, scientifically credible stories matter. My special thanks to Louise Marley for her valuable assistance with things musical and literary. I owe a great deal to Thomas P. Hopp for his patient review of the genetics issues in this book; his contributions were immensely helpful. Thanks also to my readers, Gary L. Nunn and David Hobby for their suggestions and corrections. I am indebted to Anne Lesley Groell for her thoughtful and meticulous editing, and to Donald Maass for his unique guidance. As always, I am deeply grateful to my husband, Thomas, for his advice and unwavering support.
All of my stories are the better for early lessons learned from writer, teacher, and friend Robert Ray to whom this work is gratefully dedicated.
It was a time for turning inward, for licking wounds, for looking with suspicion on outsiders. Earth had been under siege from without, and from within. Under such circumstances, it was perhaps understandable that people closed their doors and drew the curtains. Especially if the outsiders weren't human.
It was a time of endemic disease. Despite all that bio-molecular medicine could do, swiftly mutating microbes adapted easily to every treatment. Antibiotics and antivirals only spawned superresistant versions—genetic concoctions with conjugative sharing of resistance factors and virulence genes. Humanity was in thrall to pathogenic microbes, the invisible master race.
Thus it was that people greeted the Message with both hope and dread. Dread that the radio transmission from deep space was a snare set by the virulent universe; and hope that Earth's fortunes might improve. The doubters held that one's neighbors couldn't be trusted—especially if they lived thirty light-years away. After all, humanity's worst cataclysms had come from space: asteroids causing mass
extinctions in prehuman times, and the Dark Cloud calamity in human memory: the killing time that left humanity a tenth of what it had been. The universe, they argued, was not a friendly place.
So, as for the Message, perhaps they shouldn't answer.
The Message implied the need for a long space voyage, not an appealing prospect to the World Council, despite a breakthrough in subspace tunneling as a path to the stars. With human civilization struggling to survive, why divert resources to a risky adventure of dubious value? If the beings who sent this message were so well-meaning, why did they hide themselves? No, the Council would not send out a starship.
But a private group would. One woman lavished her considerable fortune on the mission. She was a singer, a celebrity, but well past her performance years. And so, since she was old and up for a last adventure, she decided to go along for the ride. To bring back the promised thing: human genetic diversity.
For that was the promise of the alien message.
Come find what you have lost.
In truth, it had
all
been lost.
The Dark Cloud had come into Earth's vicinity. Eventually, it departed. Between these two events, information leaked from the world and into the Cloud. Earth lost much of its electronically and biologically stored information. Insofar as human beings could be considered repositories of information—molecular, that is—they lost that information. In other words, they died.
This experience taught people that information can, under some circumstances, be considered a physical entity, subject to universal laws. Such as entropy. The Dark Cloud was deeply information-poor. When in proximity to galactic sites of rich information, the direction of information flow was inevitable—much as warm air moves into colder regions, and order to disorder. The Cloud read the information stored in electronic systems, and biological information
in DNA. And in the process of reading it, transferred it to itself.
The Dark Cloud was a rogue structure of dark matter, a natural catastrophe—nothing planned, or intentionally sinister. Earth survived because of a last-ditch defense called Ice, a fast-spreading shield that protected humans and other information-rich systems from the Dark Cloud's predation.
Even so, the calamity had left too few survivors to sustain healthy populations of Homo sapiens. Lack of biodiversity lowered the immune system hurdles that disease pathogens must overcome. Humanity was a sitting duck floating on a shallow gene pool.
The astonishing claim of the Message was that someone had mined the Dark Cloud, salvaging the deep genetic pool and storing it as coded information. Because the Message was so brief, it contained no explanation, much less proof, of how such a thing could be done, or how it could benefit Earth. Implied was:
It can all be reclaimed.
The skeptics balked. Suppose this was the very race that sent the Dark Cloud in the first place, who now meant to finish off what they started?
Nonsense
, said Bailey Shaw—for that was the name of the woman who was determined to go.
It's our last chance.
Bailey Shaw supervised the building of the interstellar ship, calling it the
Restoration.
She believed in the power of a good name.
Most people called it
Shaw's Folly.