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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAMELA SARGENT

  “Sargent is a sensitive writer of characterization rather than cosmic gimmickry.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “One of the genre’s greatest writers.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Pamela Sargent is an explorer, an innovator. She’s always a few years ahead of the pack.”

  —David Brin, award-winning author of the Uplift Saga

  “Over the years, I’ve come to expect a great deal from Pamela Sargent. Her worlds are deeply and thoroughly imagined.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “Pamela Sargent’s cool, incisive eye is as sharp at long range, visionary tales as it is when inspecting our foreground future. She’s one of our best.”

  —Gregory Benford, astrophysicist and author of Foundation’s Fear

  “If you have not read Pamela Sargent, then you should make it your business to do so at once. She is in many ways a pioneer, both as a novelist and as a short story writer. … She is one of the best.”

  —Michael Moorcock, author of Elric of Melniboné

  “[Sargent is] a consummate professional [who] exhibits an unswerving consistency of craft.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  Alien Child

  “An excellent piece of work—the development of the mystery … is well done. Ms. Sargent’s work … is always of interest and this book adds to her stature as a writer.”

  —Andre Norton, author of the Solar Queen series

  “Count on Pamela Sargent to write a science fiction novel that is both entertaining and true to human emotion. I wish I had had this book when I was a teen because all the loneliness, all the alienation, all the apartness I felt from my family would have made more sense.”

  —Jane Yolen, author of The Devil’s Arithmetic and Cards of Grief

  “This story of Nita, a girl growing up in an insulated environment where she gradually comes to realize that she might be the last person left on Earth, has conflict and suspense from the beginning. … Vividly depicted.”

  —School Library Journal

  “This finely crafted work never falters with false resolution. … An honest and compelling examination of ‘What if …?’”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An engaging narrative in Sargent’s capable hands. An essence of otherworldliness is present in the gentle guardians, and since Sven and Nita are raised solely by the two aliens, there is a freshness in their perceptions of their own species. … Clearly and simply presented—thoughtful—a worthy addition to any SF collection.”

  —Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA)

  “Sargent does not lower her standards when she writes young adult fiction. Like the best of young adult writers, her artistic standards remain as high as ever, while her standards of clarity and concision actually rise. … The intelligence and resourcefulness she showed in The Shore of Women are undiminished in Alien Child.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “Thoughtful, serious, and written without condescension, the novel contains all of the qualities we have come to expect from this author.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  The Golden Space

  “Pamela Sargent deals with big themes—genetic engineering, immortality, the ultimate fate of humanity—but she deals with them in the context of individual human lives. The Golden Space reminds me of Olaf Stapledon in the breadth of its vision, and of Kate Wilhelm in its ability to make characters, even humans in the strangest forms, seem like real people.”

  —James Gunn, writer and director of the film Guardians of the Galaxy

  “Clearly, The Golden Space is a major intellectual achievement of SF literature. It will not be possible for any honest story of immortality hereafter to ignore it; it is a landmark.”

  —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Brilliantly handled—all of us have got to hand an accolade to the author.”

  —A. E. van Vogt, author of The World of Null-A

  “Sargent writes well, the many ideas are fresh, and their handling is intelligent to the extreme.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “What next, after universal immortality becomes a fact of life? Pamela Sargent’s brilliant book, The Golden Space, shatters the imaginative barrier that has held stories about immortality to a simplistic pasticcio of boredom, degeneration, and suicide.”

  —The Seattle Times

  The Mountain Cage

  “[Sargent] is one of our field’s true virtuosos, and in The Mountain Cage: and Other Stories she gives us thirteen stunning performances, a valuable addition to a repertoire that I hope will keep on growing.”

  —James Morrow, author of Only Begotten Daughter

  The Shore of Women

  “That rare creature, a perfect book.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “A cautionary tale, well-written, with excellent characterization, a fine love story, as well as much food for thought … An elegant science fiction novel.”

  —Anne McCaffrey, author of the Pern series

  “Pamela Sargent gives meticulous attention to a believable scenario. … A captivating tale both from the aspect of the lessons that the author tries to impart and from the skills she has used to tell it.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “How many perfect science fiction novels have I read? Not many. There are at most three or four such works in a decade. Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women is one of the few perfect novels of the 1980s. … Her story of a woman exiled from a safe high-tech city of women, the man ordered by the gods to kill her, and their search for a place of safety, is powerful, beautiful, and true.”

  —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “A compelling and emotionally involving novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “I applaud Ms. Sargent’s ambition and admire the way she has unflinchingly pursued the logic of her vision.”

  —The New York Times

  Ruler of the Sky

  “This formidably researched and exquisitely written novel is surely destined to be known hereafter as the definitive history of the life and times and conquests of Genghis, mightiest of Khans.”

  —Gary Jennings, bestselling author of Aztec

  “Scholarly without ever seeming pedantic, the book is fascinating from cover to cover and does admirable justice to a man who might very well be called history’s single most important character.”

  —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, anthropologist and author of Reindeer Moon

  Child of Venus

  “Masterful … as in previous books, Sargent brings her world to life with sympathetic characters and crisp concise language.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Golden Space

  Pamela Sargent

  To the memory of John McHale

  Still may Time hold some golden space

  Where I’ll unpack that scented store

  Of song and flower and sky and face,

  And count, and touch, and turn them o’er …

  —Rupert Brooke

  The Renewal

  I

  Josepha looked at the maple tree. It dominated the clearing in front of her small home, marking the boundary between the trimmed lawn and the overgrown field. The tree was probably as old as she was; it had been there when she had cleared the land and moved into the house.

  The other trees, t
he hundreds along the creek in back of the house and the thousands on the slopes of the nearby hills, had to struggle. She and the gardeners had cleared away the dead- wood and cut down dying trees many times. Gradually, she had become aware of changes. The pine trees across the creek flourished; the young oaks that had once grown near the circle of flat stones were gone.

  A young apple tree grew thirty paces from the maple. She had planted it a year ago—or was it two years? Two gardeners, directed by her computer, had planted the tree, holding it carefully in their pincerlike metal limbs. She did not know if it would survive. A low wire fence circled the tree to protect it from the small animals that would gnaw at its bark. The fence had been knocked over a few times.

  Josepha looked past the clearing to the dirt road that wound through the wooded hills. A white hovercraft hugged the road, moving silently toward the field. The vehicle was a large insect with a clear bubble over its top. Small clouds of dust billowed around it as it moved. The craft stopped near the tangled bushes along the road, the bubble disappeared, and a man leaped gracefully out onto the road.

  Merripen Allen had arrived a day late.

  Josepha waved as he jogged toward her. He looked up and raised an arm. She wondered again why she had asked him to come. They had said everything and she had made her decision.

  But she wanted to see him anyway. There was a difference between seeing someone in the flesh and using the holo; even if an image appeared as substantial as a body, that impression was dispelled when one reached out to it and clutched air.

  He looked, as she expected, exactly like his image. His wavy black hair curled around his collar, framing his olive-skinned face. A thick mustache drooped around his mouth. But he seemed smaller than the amplified image, less imposing.

  She was still holding her cigarette as he came up to her. She had been living alone too long and had forgotten how some felt about such habits. She concealed it in her palm, hoping Merripen had not seen it, then dropped it, grinding it into the ground with her foot. She entered the house, motioning for him to follow.

  Josepha disliked thinking about her life before the Transition. But her mind had become a network of involuntary associations, a mire of memories. She had been living in her isolated house for almost thirty years and would not have realized it without checking the dates.

  It was time to pack up and leave, go somewhere else, do something she had not tried. Her mind resonated here. The sight of an object would evoke a memory; an odor would be followed by the image of a past experience; an event, even viewed at a distance, would touch off a recollection until it seemed she could barely get through the day without succumbing to reveries.

  Josepha was more than three hundred years old but she could still feel startled by the fact. She looked twenty-two—except that when she had actually been twenty-two she had been overweight, myopic, and had dyed her hair auburn. She had become a slim woman with black hair and good vision. She was no longer plagued by asthma and migraine and could not remember how they felt.

  But she remembered other things. The events of her youth sprang into her mind, often in greater detail than more recent happenings. She had thought of clearing out the memories; RNA doses, some rest, and the reverberations would be gone, the world would be fresh and new. But that was too much like dying. Her memories made her life, uneventful and pacific as it was, more meaningful.

  But now Merripen was here and the peace would soon end.

  Merripen Allen slouched in the dark blue chair near the window. His dark brown eyes surveyed the room restlessly. He seemed weary, yet alert and decisive. All the biologists were like that, Josepha thought. They were the ones who had made the world, who kept it alive, who had banished death. They held the power no one else wanted.

  Merripen was the descendant of English gypsies. His clipped speech was punctuated by his expressive arm gestures. Josepha suspected that he deliberately cultivated the contrast.

  They had spent several minutes engaging in courtesies; exchanging compliments, describing the weather to each other, asking after people they both knew, making an elaborate ceremony of dialing for refreshments. Now they sat across the room from each other silently sipping their white wine.

  Josepha wanted to speak but knew that would be rude; Merripen was still savoring the Chablis. He might want another glass and after that there would be more ceremonial banter, perhaps a flirtation. He would pay her compliments, embellishing them with quotations from Catullus, his trademark, and she would fence with him. She had gone through all this in abbreviated form with his image. A seduction, at least in theory, could last forever. Sex, however inventive, and however long it went on in all its permutations, grew duller. It was too much a reminder that other things still lived and died.

  Merripen finished the wine, then gazed out her window at the clearing, twirling the glass in his fingers. At last he turned back to her.

  “Delicious,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll have another.” He rose to his feet. She motioned to him to sit, got up, and walked slowly to the oak cabinet in the corner where the opened bottle stood. She brought it to him and poured the wine carefully, placed the bottle on the table under the window, then sat down again.

  Merripen sipped. His visage blurred as she focused on the red rose in the slender silver vase on the low table in front of her. As she leaned back, the rose obscured Merripen’s body. The redness dominated her vision; she saw a red bedspread over a double bed in the center of a yellow room. She was back in her old room, in the house of her parents, long ago.

  She was fourteen and it was time to die. She locked her door.

  She gazed at the small bottle, fumbling with the cap, suspended in time past, vividly conscious of the red capsules, the red bedspread, the cheerful flowered curtains over her window. The pain these sights usually brought receded for a moment. A voice called to her, the same soft voice that had called to her before, the disembodied voice she had never located.

  She had been dying all along. The black void inside her had grown while the pain at its edges quivered. It would end now. As she swallowed the capsules, she was being captured by eternity, where she would live at last.…

  She had emerged from a coma bewildered, uncomprehending, connected to tubes and catheters, realizing dimly that she still breathed. She tried to cry out and heard only a sighing whistle. She reached with her left hand for her throat, touched the hollow at the base of her neck, and felt an open hole. They had cut her open and forced her to live as they lived.

  At night, as she lay in the hospital bed trying not to disturb the needle in her right wrist, she remembered a kind voice and its promise. Someone had spoken to her while she lay dying, while she hovered over her drugged body watching a tube being forced into her failing lungs. The voice had not frightened her as had the voice she had been hearing for months. It had been gentle, promising her that she would live on, that she would one day join it, and then had forced her to return. She was again trapped in her body.

  Perhaps her illness or the barbiturates had induced the vision. Yet it had seemed too real for that. She knew dimly that she could not discuss it, could not make anyone understand it, could not even be sure it was real. She felt she had lost something without even being sure of what it was. But the promise remained: not now, but another time.

  Josepha touched the rose and a petal fell. Her death was still denied her. She had lived, coming to believe she should not seek death actively, that three hundred, or a thousand, or a million years did not matter if the promise had been real.

  Merripen spoke. She looked away from the rose.

  The evening light bathed the room in a rosy glow. Merripen’s skin was coppery and his tight white shirt was pinkish. “You are still with us,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You still want to be a parent to these children.”

  “Certainly.” Josepha had decided to become a parent two years earlier and had registered her wish. Her request had been granted—few people
were raising children now. Her genes would be analyzed and an ectogenetic chamber would be licensed for the fetus. She had been surprised when Merripen Allen contacted her, saying that before she went ahead with her plans he had a proposal to make.

  He and a few other biologists wanted to create a new variant of humanity. They had been consulting for years, using computer minds to help them decide what sort of redesigned person might be viable. Painstakingly, they had constructed a model of such a being and its capacities, not wanting to alter the human form too radically for fear of the unknown consequences, yet seeking more than minor changes.

  Merripen sighed, looking relieved. “I expected you wouldn’t back out now. Almost no one has, but two people changed their minds last week. When you asked me here I thought you had also.”

  She smiled and shook her head. It was Merripen’s motives she wished to consider. She had worried that she might change her mind after seeing the child, but that was unlikely. There were no guarantees even with a normal child, since the biologists, afraid of too much tampering with human versatility, simply ensured that flawed genes were not passed on rather than actively creating a certain type of child.

  Even so, she had wondered when Merripen first made his offer. They had argued, he saying that human society was becoming stagnant while she countered by mentioning the diversity of human communities both on Earth and in space.

  “We need new blood,” he said now, apparently thinking along similar lines. “Oh, we have diversity, but it’s all on the surface. I’ve seen a hundred different cultures and at bottom they’re the same, a way of passing time. Even the death cults …”

  She recoiled from the obscenity. “In Japan,” he went on, “it’s seppuku over any insult or failure, in India it’s slow starvation and extreme asceticism, in England it’s trial by combat, and here you play with guns. For every person we bring back from death, another dies, and the people we bring back try again or become murderers so that we’re forced to allow them to die for the benefit of others.” He glanced apologetically at her, apparently aware he was repeating old arguments.