The Secret of the Urns

by A.B. Carolan

Overview

Set in the same sci-fi universe as A. B. Carolan’s The Secret Lab, this new young-adult sci-fi mystery explores a Jupiter-sized planet’s satellite in a faraway solar system where human scientists are studying local flora and fauna but behaving badly until a teen who wants to study the satellite’s ETs comes along. She shows that cooperation is better than xenophobia. In the process, she discovers that the ETs’ beliefs go far beyond ancestor worship.

What a reviewer said about The Secret Lab:

“On the International Space Station many years in the future, youngsters are growing up and exploring their world. In doing so, they uncover a mystery…an interesting tale, well written, and very enjoyable.”—Debra Miller

Irish author A. B. Carolan is a collaborator of American author Steven M. Moore. They met at Blarney Castle in Ireland. A. B. loves writing for young adults and adults who are young at heart. Some Donegal neighbors think he’s related to that great Irish harpist, Turlough O'Carolan. Others say he was stolen and raised by leprechauns. They do a lot of kidding in Donegal. Connect with him using the contact page at Steve’s website.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940155312161
Publisher:	A.B. Carolan
Publication date:	06/25/2018
Series:	ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries , #2
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	620 KB

About the Author

I am a collaborator of the American author Steven M. Moore. We met at Blarney Castle in Ireland (appropriate, don't you think?). After a wee bit of chatting there and emails to and fro, I signed on to be his collaborator for all his YA books. I love writing for young adults and adults who are young at heart. Some people think I'm related to that great Irish harpist and singer, Turlough O'Carolan, but who knows?--I don't think any of his DNA is around to check. Others say I was stolen and raised by leprechauns. We do a lot of kidding in Donegal, but maybe they know something I don't. For those who want a free introduction to my blarney, check out my free stories found in Steve's blog category "ABC Shorts"; better yet: read my books.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

My leg was broken. Way to go, girl!

That wasn't my only worry. Kids break bones all the time. Hard Fist's climate would kill me, not the break.

There wasn't likely to be anyone near, and no one knew where I was. I didn't even know, and, even if I did, I couldn't communicate the location to anyone. Nobody within yelling distance, and even radio signals would be blocked where I lay flat on my back in pain.

Although it was still hot, the white sun had just gone down behind the precipice's edge, leaving me in shadow, except for Big Fellow's pale light dominating the twilight sky of its satellite Hard Fist. Soon night would fall, temperatures would plummet, and I would freeze.

At least the ubiquitous sounds from the satellite's rainforest had started up again to provide me with some funeral music. Of course, those sounds would make the dirge a bit primitive; some might even say they were threatening. You could almost hear chanted words to the effect, "Humans don't belong here!" Yeah, tell my parents that!

My usual cheery thirteen-year-old innocence and positive outlook on life had suffered a major blow along with my leg. I was thinking they'd morphed into stupidity instead. Fact is, I'm not stupid — I'm the child of a triad that had bioengineered my mental and physical attributes as well as they could, given the genetic material they had available, which was AOK considering each member of the triad had the same thing done for them. But I'd just acted stupidly, so I could almost hear old Darwin crowing about natural selection being the better choice.

So far, growing up on Hard Fist hadn't been easy. The planet-sized moon orbits the gas giant Big Fellow, almost a star itself and about twice the size of Jupiter. This largest planet in the Fistian star system lies at the E-zone's edge, so its satellite is theoretically habitable, but barely so in practice, at least for Humans. Some of my difficulties growing up there had their origin in the harsh environment. And now it might kill me!

Hard Fist broke all the rules. Tides were huge due to Big Fellow's proximity. When they combined with strong winds from a storm, lowlands close to the shore flooded, so communities weren't found close to the shore. Lush tropical forests took advantage of 0.9 relative to E-normal gravity and the greenhouse effect, but all that vegetation also saturated the air with free oxygen while fixing excess nitrogen. The whole atmosphere is in a strange equilibrium that scientists were just beginning to understand. Other nearby but smaller satellites toyed with Big Fellow's powerful attraction enough to keep our moon from being tide-locked to the gas giant, another precarious equilibrium, although that didn't matter much because Big Fellow wasn't a star. These were strange equilibriums that had lasted for eons, though. I'd never wanted to understand their intricacies, but we all suffered from their effects.

Even in the 21st century, Human scientists knew there were many planets in near-Earth space. Turned out many are habitable; in other words, there are many places where Humans can live. At the personal level, though, people don't have to like living in those places. For my tenure on Hard Fist, I had no choice. I couldn't leave my legal wardens, my parents, until I was eighteen — or, unless I received their permission to do so, which I'd been on the verge of asking many times recently. Because I was often invisible to them in a manner of speaking, having a chance to ask or receive permission wasn't likely to happen anytime soon, though. I did the best I could to cope.

I had difficulties with grown-ups in general. Most of these problems could be traced to their not remembering what it was like to be a kid. They were mostly scientists, engineers, and other technical people who were sent to Hard Fist to study that strange moon. While there should have been a law against it, some of them had kids. I'm one of those. My name is Asako Kobayashi, a Human Fistian, the first one. Others followed, but I'm unique, as if that mattered. Write that on my funeral urn, Mom and Dad2. Of course, they might never find my body!

* * *

Humans had found native Fistians on Hard Fist — we didn't know how many exactly, but certainly a lot more than Humans. The Human grown-ups didn't socialize with them. The "official reason" was that they were studying native Fistians and everything else Fistian, the entire biosphere, in other words, so they didn't want to lose their objectivity.

By the time I turned ten (standard years, not Fistian years), I knew the real reason: Humans generally didn't like native Fistians. Some even expressed their prejudices openly, especially recent arrivals. Others never admitted to having them but exhibited them through their actions. Almost everyone considered the moon's natives barely sentient and primitive. I knew better.

My parents were a lot more understanding than some. They allowed me to play with Marcello, my Fistian friend. I needed that playtime because all the other Human kids were much younger, many just babies. I knew most of Marcello's clan too. I named the clan mother, the cultural and political boss, Mama Dora. She's about as ancient and tough as anyone could seem to be for a young girl of thirteen. You don't fool around with Mama Dora.

In many ways, the Fistians were more tolerant than Humans. The name Fistians came from the Human name for the moon, of course. I knew very little of their language, but I knew they called Hard Fist Mother and themselves Mother's People, or just the People. I could barely pronounce the first and gave up on the combination. It was strange that no Human scientist was studying Fistians and their language because language says a lot about culture. They didn't study the culture either.

Marcello, my best friend, is way down in the pecking order in his village and about four or five generations removed from Mama Dora as near as I could tell. Three times my size — still small compared to a grown male — he is gentle and has a great sense of humor. He'd play tricks on me, like the time he jumped out in front of me on the road coming home from school one day and made me scream.

The Fistian young don't go to our school. That never made sense to me either. They pick up languages faster than Humans, for example. While I struggled with the dead but "classic" languages English and Mandarin — ones we only see in computer history files or hear in ancient videos — Marcello spoke them fluently, as well as Standard, that mish-mash of the two languages, with lots of bits and pieces from others, that had developed among Spacers back in the home solar system.

I once saw a drawing of a centaur in a video called "Mythical Creatures of Earth" — yeah, it was in old English. Other Humans on Hard Fist used the word in a derogatory sense, so I'd become curious and queried Einstein, the camp's AI, about it. Marcello looks a little bit like a centaur. He's harder to ride because his back slopes at a thirty degree angle from his butt up to his head — not like a horse's body at all (a few non-mythological Earth creatures had survived the Tali invasion of Earth and were taken to other near-Earth systems, so I'd seen videos of live horses).

You have to sprawl on top of Marcello and hold on to his thick mane for dear life as he gallops through the forest, pawing branches aside with those big hands and strong arms, laughing via snorts and grinning with his dancing eyebrows while I scream for him to slow down. In fact, one time he suddenly did, just to piss me off. I went sailing into a scummy pond. He stood on the bank, swishing at swamp flies with his thick tail, and bellowed out his laughter. A real comedian.

It took me a week to get the stench out of my hair. It took me two to forgive him.

* * *

The day I broke my leg I hadn't been able to find Marcello. A member of his clan told me he'd gone hunting in the high country. I liked the high country — it was a little cooler there in the daytime, which was nice, and much colder at night, which wasn't. I was upset that he hadn't taken me with him, so I went to find him. Big mistake!

There are no volcanoes on Hard Fist, but there are rivers of lava. The huge gravitational pull from Big Fellow kneads the satellite, about the size of Earth, into a wrinkled elastic ball with many cracks all over it. The thermal activity created at its core, so visible from space, more than compensates for being on the E-zone's cold edge. Add the greenhouse effect, and you have a tropical climate, except at the poles, but one with wide temperature swings between day and night.

The lava rivers don't flow like rivers, though, because the cracks in the mantle begin, wander a bit in a north-south direction, and then end. The Fistians work around them. Those rivers are especially beautiful when one terminus reaches out into the ocean, and the crack becomes an angry fjord complete with a crashing kilometers-wide waterfall where seawater turns into steam. That water vapor rises, condenses into clouds, and rains down on the lush forests filled with flora and fauna so varied that our scientists haven't even begun to catalog all the species.

Enter the drooler, the most feared predator prowling under the rainforest's tall canopy. Preying on everything from the large insect-like four-winged creatures to its own kind, alive or carrion, this fellow is a lumbering eating machine. I hadn't counted on meeting one, though. They were solitary beasts and only sociable when you look like food.

We call them droolers because they slobber as they walk. Behind all the slobbers, they have plenty of sharp teeth — that doesn't add anything to their charm. They are nasty, vile creatures that will even take on an adult Fistian to get a full meal, but they'll also eat Humans as appetizers.

Most of the time, though, droolers are slow enough that you can run away from them. That's easy to do because they smell like algae rotting in a 'ponics tank. We Humans don't have a keen sense of smell, but we can still smell a drooler about two or three klicks away. A native Fistian can pick up that odor from an even greater distance. In either case, the strategy is clear: you just make sure you move away from the drooler's stench. Other directions aren't recommended.

I figured local fauna should be able to detect a drooler's stench as well as or better than a native Fistian, so I wondered how the stinky creatures caught anything to eat. There were conjectures about them hunting in packs so their prey wouldn't have anywhere to go as the circle around them closed. Hard to say whether the conjecture had any substance because no Human had seen packs of droolers. On the contrary, they seemed like solitary beasts, so maybe fresh meat was caught by accident, and they mostly dined on carrion.

I wasn't about to go looking for droolers to find out more about them. But this one had found me.

He was a youngster, though, and moved about as fast as I did. (I say "he" because the males have bright blue-green balls that are conspicuous even at a distance — the rest of the tan body is dappled with light and dark green spots.) Junior was also persistent.

The ubiquitous blister vines whipped across my face and body as I fled through the forest, receiving a bloody gash above my eye and on my left breast. Their oily residue stung like hell, and the pain slowed me down. Think of semi-sentient and slightly mobile poison ivy on steroids, live whips that liked to pommel and grab.

Did I mention they sing? Little suckers along their lengths breathe in and out, making a high-pitched humming noise. (Unlike centaurs, poison ivy isn't mythical Earth flora, but it's long gone from planet Earth, thanks to the Tali invasion.) Their whipping action makes a bit of noise too.

The young drooler was just about to sink his teeth into me when I broke out into the clear and flew over the edge of the precipice, right across one of those lava rifts. This one was narrow enough that I didn't fall in and become deep-fried Asako tempura, a fate I thought might still be better than being eaten by this carnivore. I hit a ledge four meters down on the opposite side so hard that I broke my leg and knocked the wind out. My pursuer, moving a bit slower, hit only the edge of the ledge, clawed desperately for a few seconds, and then crashed into the molten lava many meters below.

I felt sorry for him. He wouldn't be able to breed and pass his stupidity on to his offspring.

I then realized that the same could be said of me.

CHAPTER 2

Because Mom and Dad2 weren't studying Fistians, they didn't pay much attention to them. They knew Marcello and I were friends, but they didn't approve or disapprove. They were very focused on their work.

Mom studied the satellite's flora and fauna, so for her Fistians were like Humans — just one species among many surviving in a planetary ecosphere. She'd hinted one time that she admired the way the satellite's most intelligent lifeform took care of the environment, though. My perception was that their religion was pantheistic, if pantheism can be called a religion. As good an excuse as any for being environmentally conscious, I guess. They basically lived off the land, but I knew they hunted and fished sometimes.

Mom had participated in many studies during her career. One of the first was a visit to Earth to analyze how that planet was recovering from the Tali's attempts to destroy all of Earth's flora and fauna and replace it with that from their home world. Humans' last battles against the Tali occurred on Earth. The Tali lost, but now those remaining on our home planet were partners with Humans in restoring the original ecosphere as much as possible. Many species of animals and plants had become extinct, but there'd been some hidden arks where seeds and frozen fetuses were stored. The Humans who had built them were somewhat paranoid to my way of thinking, but now that paranoia was celebrated by everyone who lived on Earth, and by many Humans elsewhere in near-Earth space.

Mom was the most athletic member of my parental triad. She had no special physical characteristics — most Humans looked the same now, although a sharp eye could detect a few differences — but she wasn't a tall woman. Many Humans weren't tall because many of them had descended from the first colonists to leave Earth's solar system, and many of those were descended from Spacers in that home system, who tended to be small. Her short dark brown hair, expressive brown eyes, and tawny skin weren't unique by any means, but she was special to me. Her occasional but sweet hugs almost made up for not paying much attention to me and letting me run wild.

As often happens, Mom had met Dad1 and Dad2 on another scientific expedition.

* * *

Dad2 is an exogeologist, so his scientific field didn't overlap at all with Mom's. Because I have such a biased sample in our little scientific community, I don't know if that's common among Humans or not. It seems to me that romantic liaisons don't depend on what the members of a dyad or triad are doing in their professional lives, but I'm still collecting sociological data about that. Some say that it's better that dyad or triad members don't compete on a professional level. I could understand the reasons for saying that, but you never know.

Exogeology is an oxymoron all wrapped up in one word, of course — a word full of contradictions. "Geology" comes from "ge," meaning Earth. The word has its origin in some ancient Human language called Greek. The word came directly into Standard from English because the Mandarin words are also just a corruption of the ancient Greek. Adding "exo" is supposed to make it more general and apply everywhere.

Exogeology never interested me. Planets and their satellites only did when there were intelligent lifeforms on them with interesting cultures that I could study. I knew Fistian culture better than Human culture because of that. Hard Fist belonged to Fistians, not Humans. We were in the minority; I wanted to understand the majority. Maybe that was a provincial idea because of my friend Marcello and my first home being the same as his. But if you don't understand what you can directly experience, what can you understand?

Dad2 almost looked like he could be my Mom's brother. They weren't related at all, beyond being the modern version of Human, but, like I said, everyone looked very much the same now. He was more muscular than Mom, of course, but liked a more sedentary life as he studied the samples he gathered. He was quieter and less excitable than Mom too. As I lay on that ledge, I was thinking my parents and I had grown apart during the last few years. Easy to understand: I was older, so they thought I could take care of myself better.

It wasn't easy to discover any commonality between Fistians and Humans from interactions with my parents. That's often discounted by saying I wasn't an unbiased observer with respect to my parents, and I was more so with respect to Fistians. Maybe. I was close to them all, of course.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Secret of the Urns"
by .
Copyright © 2018 A.B. Carolan.
Excerpted by permission of Carrick Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Begin Reading: Part I,
Epilogue,
Note from A.B. Carolan,
Notes and Disclaimers,
About the Author,