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By Root 548 0

before. He believed it was his choice as to when and with whom he would father children, and that no familia woman had a right to refuse him. At the Studium he had heard whispers of a secret women’s group that opposed Franco and the old traditions but they appeared to be nothing other than ginko-incited grumblings.

Marchella climbed slowly to her feet. Her gaze met Trin’s as she retook her seat, dabbed her mouth with the cloth and delicately drank down her small glass of wine. She seemed neither repentant nor cowered. She seemed…satisfied.

This was for me!

The calculation of her act shocked Trin almost as much as Franco’s violence.

A Galiotto entered the silence carrying a large silver platter. Jilda clapped her hands with appreciation. ‘Aaah, polenta dumplings!’

* * * *

JO-JO RASTEROVICH

Jo-Jo Rasterovich was a Cerulean, a blue-planet kid. At least, that was how he thought of himself. The truth was (and Jo-Jo had some difficulty with that concept) that his family hadn’t lived on that world, in that constellation, for a thousand years. Yet something deep in his often-rejuvenated psyche stayed immovably Cerulean. He even still thought of the blue planet as ‘Earth’ although most of the Orion Sentients had never heard the name.

Sole Entity had entered Jo-Jo’s life just in time to save him from a rather unpleasant permanent biological death (or perhaps Sole had caused the death, in which case the point was moot). Adrift on the edge of an uninhabited system due to some dodgy navigational software that he had purchased cheaply from the Spiral Arms swap-meet in Vega and which had bugged his propulsion start-up, Jo-Jo had strayed into an uncharted gas tube.

Instead of low-density X-rays, the space anomaly was crammed with high-density microwaves. The last thing Jo-Jo remembered, as life support faded, was the propulsion bay glowing blue as he tried uselessly to cold-start his ship.

When he regained consciousness the propulsion system was back on line and breathable air flowed sweetly. One part of him felt unhappily as if it had just been tipped out of a freeze-dried sachet and mixed with ice cubes into a lumpy consistency. Another part of him suggested running diagnostics to see what had caused the problem.

Jo-Jo staggered to his bridge-cum-bedroom and lit up a fat smoke of chang-lo hemp. Something BIG had happened. Something WEIRD. Jo-Jo hadn’t run a full diagnostic check since he’d earned his licence. Even then he’d failed to do it properly and had had to bribe the astrogator to pass him.

His mind felt like it had been crapped on, rolled in and dissected.

He toked deeply, hoping that the killer cannabis might reglue things but all it did was activate the smoke alarms. In among the warm fog of the hemp and the unnatural patterns of his altered thinking, he felt a presence enter his mind.

Jo-Jo inhaled so deeply that the butt burned his lips. There’s nothing out there, he told himself sternly, but a big fat bundle of microwave radiation. Oh, and those leech-shaped things. But I imagined them. He fumbled in his utilities bag for a second scoob and sucked noisily until he passed out.

Later, when the narcotic hangover cleared, his mind had two new and persistent voices in it. Jo-Jo was left to confront the fact that he’d discovered another type of life (or it had discovered him, because for all intents and purposes it had killed him and then resurrected him: no sentient species he knew of had the ability to do that) which had altered his mind, and that perhaps he should make the most of it.

So Jo-Jo set about making a living off the story that he’d discovered Sole Entity, a benevolent type of god-thing that had strayed in from the fathomless stretched space between galaxies.

He paid no attention to the nagging feeling that he had forgotten something really important, or the sneaking notion that Sole Entity was not in fact benign but rather more like a cosmic-sized feline toying with a blind, legless lizard.

The