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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

  Climb the Wind

  A Novel of Another America

  Pamela Sargent

  To the memory of my father,

  Edward H. Sargent, Jr.

  “The history of the United States would have been very

  different if there had been an Indian Genghis Khan.”

  —Louis L’Amour

  ONE

  Five days ago, White Buffalo Woman’s husband had mounted his horse and gone east, telling her that he would return in two days. She did not begin to worry until the fourth day after he had left her. In the days when she was suckling
her youngest child, and in the time before the visions had come to Touch-the-Clouds, she would not have worried at all when Soaring Eagle was often gone with the other men for many days, but she worried now.

  Her husband had gone alone this time, and after a man had ridden here from the camp of Touch-the-Clouds. Soaring Eagle had gone east to be his chief’s eyes and ears. He had ridden east to be a spy for Touch-the-Clouds.

  White Buffalo Woman scanned the horizon to the east. Outside the circle of tepees near her, other women tended their fires or scraped with their bone chisels at buffalo hides laced to wooden frames. The camp looked much as camps had when she was a girl, but her people were not the same.

  Everything had changed for them after Touch-the-Clouds had seen his third vision. That vision had come to the chief during the great war among the Wasichu, when the white men in the north had been fighting the Wasichu to their south. The whites had already been growing more numerous on the plains, and the buffalo herds were thinning. The Tsistsistas—the Cheyenne—spoke bitterly whenever they camped near the Lakota of the way the Wasichu shot at the buffalo along the Iron Horse trail to the south, of how they left most of the animal to rot.

  In his vision, Wakan Tanka and the spirits had told Touch-the-Clouds that he and his people would have to make peace with others, even with those who had been enemies of the Lakota for generations, if they were to keep the Wasichu from stealing all of their lands.

  In only five years, Touch-the-Clouds had won treaties with the Shawnee, the Cherokee and the other red men who tilled the soil in the manner of Wasichu, and even with the Crow, who did not. White Buffalo Woman had hoped that securing promises of peace and friendship from the Comanche, a treaty even Soaring Eagle had not believed could be won, would be enough to keep the Wasichu from taking more of the land.

  “To fight the Kiowa, to hate the Crow, only makes us weaker,” Touch-the-Clouds had said many times. “Together we can keep the Wasichu from this land.” White Buffalo Woman’s husband had agreed with him, as nearly all of the Lakota had. As for those who disagreed—she did not want to think of them. Touch-the-Clouds demanded loyalty. He had killed his own brother for raiding a Crow village, for forgetting that the Crow were now their brothers.

  Still the whites came to the Plains, more of them now that their war among themselves was over. Even some of the allies of the Lakota had made their marks on the treaties offered to them by the Wasichu, only to find out later that they had promised to give up lands that were never mentioned in the treaties that had been read to them. The visions of Touch-the-Clouds, even the fear some of his allies had of him, would not be enough to hold their hunting grounds. For that, they would need more weapons, more guns, more bullets.

  Touch-the-Clouds had a way to get such weapons. White Buffalo Woman’s own son was one of those who had gone northwest with other men, and with the yellow-haired Wasichu who called himself a friend of the Lakota, in order to secure more weapons. She did not want to think of the tales she had heard, of Lakota and Cheyenne who had begun to scar the land near the sacred Black Hills, the center of the world.

  She looked to the north over the flat grassland and saw a rider. Her eyes were not as sharp as they had been in youth, but she saw that the rider was her husband, and knew that he had ridden north of here to the camp of Touch-the-Clouds before returning to her. Others in the camp, among them her son’s wife, also watched the approaching rider, obviously curious about what news he might bring.

  By the time Soaring Eagle readied their camp and had entered their tent, White Buffalo Woman had a supper of dried meat mixed with wild cherries ready. He sat down in the back of the tepee, opposite the entrance, near their small stone altar.

  “You went to Touch-the-Clouds,” she said as she set out her husband’s food.

  “He heard that there were two red men journeying up the Missouri River, red men wearing the blue coats of the Wasichu soldiers but who call themselves our friends. I went to see if it was so and to tell him what I found.”

  “So that was what he wanted.” She chewed her meat. “And did you find such men?”

  “I did. They have Wasichu names, Parker and Rowland, and they live among the white men and are said to know their medicine. They even fought in the Wasichu war—Parker wears a blue coat with eagles on the shoulders, like one of the Wasichu war chiefs. Yet he calls himself a friend, and says that he wants to help us. That is what I was told—I saw him myself only from a distance.”

  “And how will they help us?” White Buffalo Woman asked.

  “By helping us to settle our differences. By finding out which of the agents on our lands are cheating us and seeing that they are stopped.”

  “And how can they do that?”

  “I do not know,” Soaring Eagle replied.

  “Does Touch-the-Clouds think that he can help us?”

  Her husband’s mouth twisted. ‘‘Touch-the-Clouds says that he already has a Wasichu who calls himself his brother and does not need red men who follow white ways. But I heard him speak to his yellow-haired Wasichu as I was leaving, and he spoke the name of Parker. I think that he was asking his Wasichu brother about this red man in a blue coat. He will also let the one called Rowland stay in a Lakota camp to learn some of our ways, but he does not want to see this Rowland himself. He doesn’t want him to find out too much.”

  White Buffalo Woman shook herself. “You should not be thinking so much of this.”

  “That is true. I shouldn’t be thinking of it at all, or speaking of it to you. Touch-the-Clouds will listen to the spirits, and to the other chiefs, and I don’t have to know what he is thinking.”

  It was not wise to know or even to guess at what Touch-the-Clouds was thinking, White Buffalo Woman thought. The more allies and treaties he won, the less he wanted others to speak of what he had accomplished to any who might repeat it to the Wasichu. There was some wisdom in that. If the Wasichu felt that one chief was getting too strong, they might send more of their soldiers against the Lakota.

  “Since the yellow-haired Wasichu was in the camp of Touch-the-Clouds, you might have asked him for news of our son.”

  Soaring Eagle looked up, and she saw anger in his eyes. “I do not have to ask about our son,” he whispered, so softly that she could barely hear him, and then he suddenly got to his feet and went to the open tent flap, then stooped to peer outside. He turned back to her, letting the flap fall behind him.

  He sat down next to her and his fingers closed around her wrist. “The yellow-hair saw our son not two moons ago,” he said, still in that same soft voice, “in the place where the sky weapons are made. And I should not be speaking of this to you.”

  That was all he had to say. She knew enough not to ask any more questions. That the place of creating sky weapons was somewhere to the north and west, far from where the Wasichu had made trails for their Iron Horse or put up poles for their talking wires, hidden from any who might try to find it, and that sometimes those weapons were brought in secret to the Black Hills—that was all she had to know. Others knew even less, and everyone knew that to speak of it was dangerous. They would need more weapons, and more powerful ones, than what they had or could trade for or could steal to defend themselves.

  It had come to that, she thought, some of her people keeping secrets from others. That was almost like the evil of telling a lie.

  Soaring Eagle said no more until they were lying on their hides, ready for sleep. “Touch-the-Clouds has had another vision,” he said in a low voice. “He spoke of it after I told him of the red men who wear the white soldier’s coats. He sees another war coming, one in which we will drive the Wasichu from our hunting grounds for good.”

  “And then perhaps we can have peace,” White Buffalo Woman said wearily.

  “If the Wasichu keep to their promises, he won’t fight. But he does not expect them to keep those promises.”

  It was none of her concern. The men decided on matters of war, and Touch-the-Clouds was making himself
the head and putting himself in front of the men. He had grown greater than Crazy Horse, perhaps greater even than Sitting Bull, who turned more and more to Touch-the-Clouds for counsel and who called his vision a true one. The men would not come to her for advice on when and where to fight.

  But she was not a foolish woman, and she saw what her husband refused ever to say openly, what others would not even whisper, although she could sense their thoughts. Touch-the-Clouds was thinking of more than simply holding the Wasichu to their promises, to keeping the hunting grounds of the Lakota. He wanted more than that. She wondered what his next vision would tell him.

  TWO

  Lemuel Rowland left Washington in the night. Grigor Rubalev would be waiting for him at the train. A spring rain fell, making the streets muddy and slippery. The clatter of horses’ hooves over what cobblestones were left in the torn-up streets and the creaking of buggies and wagons was a constant din, even at this late hour. The carriage in which Lemuel rode creaked and swayed from side to side, shook, and finally shuddered to a halt. He heard another carriage rattle past, and then the sound of boots squishing through mud.

  The driver peered in at him and opened the door to Lemuel’s right. “Wheels are stuck,” the driver said. Water dripped from the brim of his hat. “Too many ruts in the road. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way, but it’s close by.”

  Lemuel reached for his two carpetbags, handed one to the man, then climbed out of the carriage. The wheels had sunk into a rut in the road. Lemuel set the carpetbags down on the carriage’s step as he felt for his wallet.

  “Going north or south?” the driver asked.

  “West.”

  The other man shook his head. “Heard tell it’s quiet for now, but that might not last long.” The new commissioner of Indian Affairs had said much the same to Lemuel in his office; it was one of the reasons he was returning to the West. “Good luck to you.”