Fiction

 

The Song That Is and Was and Will Be

 

by Kathy Hanson

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Chava Rosenberg is a microbiologist with a secret advantage: she’s been communicating with her microbiome since she survived meningitis as a child. She’s also the cantor for her synagogue. Her vocations intersect, her microbiome says, because they are commissioned by the Singer—the creative force in the universe. 

Certain the Singer wants her to use her microbiome to find a cure for the fungal scourge sweeping the rain-soaked upper Midwest in the late 22nd Century, Chava resists when she’s recruited to help colonize a life-bearing planet in the Epsilon Indi star system—until she barely escapes a radical organization’s plot to weaponize her research, and a catastrophic super storm takes almost everyone she loves. Chava joins the Epsilon Indi mission and exchanges Earth’s turmoil for a new crisis: the wormhole designed to transport the colonists to the planet dubbed EpsIndi takes them 500 years into the past and pops out of existence.

 

But when native symbiotic organisms merge with her microbiome, Chava taps into the Singer’s plan via EpsIndi’s sapient biosphere. She must convince the colonists to accept the symbionts and evolve or die without progeny. And she must risk loving again to start a family. When EpsIndi’s timeline realigns with Earth’s and the wormhole reappears, Chava’s descendent Saavi Maresh, an astrophysicist, finds a destruct trigger embedded by the wormhole’s designer. Fulfilling Chava’s legacy, Saavi must persuade the rival nations of Earth and EpsIndi to accept humanity’s symbiotic future and collaborate to avert the wormhole’s galaxy-killing collapse..

 

The Journeystone’s Choice

 

by Kathy Hanson

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Humanity is on the brink of wearing out its welcome on the planet Chaalis. The T’holin have waited for 400 years—since the Unfolding steered an Earth colony ship to their world—for the Waker to herald human acceptance into Chaalis’s negentropy-based order. The Waker has emerged, but she’s a flighty teenager and it’s Aleya Gillis’s job to guard her. 

An orphan who can’t remember how she lost her left hand, Aleya has squelched her own hopes and dreams to guard Pavi, the Waker. Raised together by T’holin in backwards Farside, Aleya and Pavi are linked to each other and the T’holin by biological neural nodes called Journeystones that tap into the bat-like sapients’ multi-dimensional space-time and cultural Archive. They suspect the Waker’s role may be more than they’re prepared for when Arden, the son of the Collaborative’s dynastic leader, arrives with his personal guard Davin demanding to probe the Archive for answers about his mother Cinaia who was taken from Farside as a child. Pavi escapes and Aleya bolts in a desperate search leading her to the Capitol.

 

Disguised as a T’holin slave trader, she meets Davin posing as a slave broker but serving Cinaia’s secret resistance. The pair becomes entangled in a henchman’s plot to usurp Arden’s succession and subjugate all T’holin.  Aleya must find Pavi and present the Waker before a radical Tholin faction annihilates all life on Chaalis to prevent humans from dominating the planet. With the Collaborative poised to attack the T’holin seat of power, Aleya finds that Pavi has removed her Journeystone. Aleya must overcome her handicap and master her Journeystone to unite humans and T’holin with the Unfolding or face total destruction.