Castor

By Shaun Young

Sixteen-year-old James Fisher lives on the distant planet of Castor where he toils for the ruling classes as an indentured servant. He’s a “Half-Adapt”—one of thousands like him who were shipped to Castor from Earth and biologically altered so they could breathe the planet’s atmosphere unaided. As Earth fades in his memory, James resigns himself to life under Castor’s strict social hierarchy. But then he meets his master’s nephew, Vidal Centa, and their strong attraction for each other begins to transcend Castor’s rigid class stratums.

Encouraged by his friend, Femi, to join the defiant Independence Society, which seeks to overthrow Castro’s punishing oligarchy, James faces a difficult choice. As his feelings for Vidal intensify each day, he must wrestle with loving the young man who represents everything the Society hates and fighting for justice. As the civil war threatens to erupt, James fears if he continues to fight he’ll destroy his relationship with Vidal, and perhaps the entire planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harmony Ink Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781634768870

Book preview

Castor

By Shaun Young

James Fisher’s memories of Earth are distant, replaced by the harsh realities of life on the planet Castor. As a Half-Adapt, James is one of many who were biologically engineered to survive conditions on Castor—and to labor for the benefit of the ruling class. Indentured to servitude, James has no way to defy or escape the severe caste system… until he meets Vidal Centa, his master’s nephew. The draw they feel toward each other is instant, powerful, and maybe even enough to move beyond the unyielding regulations of their society. But not everyone blindly accepts the absolute power of the oligarchy. The Independence Society fights for freedom and equality, and since James shares in their ideals, he joins their ranks. Soon he’s faced with an impossible decision: continue the fight against the oppressors or choose the love of the man who embodies everything the Society loathes. With a looming conflict threatening to tear the planet apart, James fears he cannot continue to fight if he wants to keep his relationship with Vidal.

For Tim

ONE

I MET Vidal on the first day he set foot on the surface of the planet. We talk about the war as if it’s this one thing that everyone experienced the same way, but that’s not exactly right. Everyone has their own beginning, and for me it all started with him.

It was hot as hell that day, and I was already worn out from the morning’s work. I lay down among the flower beds I’d been tending and tried to keep myself from dozing off. At the time I couldn’t understand why Dr. Niels bothered with the flowers. They weren’t like his adapted wheat and corn, which is what made him his fortune. They didn’t do anything. But he was meticulous about them, just like he was meticulous about everything, and it was my job to look after them.

I heard someone calling my name.

James!

It was Adam. I lay still, hoping he’d just stumble past me. His anger would burn itself out after a while—or if it didn’t, he’d give up looking for me and take it out on somebody else. Where the hell did you get off to?

He came crashing through the bushes separating one garden from the next, almost falling on top of me. There you are! Did you not hear me shouting for you?

I stood up quickly. I wanted to be on my feet if he went to grab me. Yeah, I heard you. You’re a bit hard to miss.

What’s that supposed to mean? he said.

What do you think?

All right, it wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but I was getting fed up with him. And I wasn’t small anymore. If he wanted to give me a beating, he could expect to get a few bruises of his own in return.

He must have been more drunk than I’d thought, because he just scowled and tried to give me a halfhearted cuff. Don’t talk back to me. And next time I call you, you’d better bloody well come. You hear me? As always he didn’t bother waiting for me to say anything. He was one of those people who got the last word in by barreling ahead before you could reply. The master’s looking for you. He’s got some job he wants doing.

What is it?

Why, are you getting choosy about the work you’ll do? he said. He was one to talk, seeing as how I was doing most of his jobs as well as my own. He asked for you in particular. Just go out to the back of the house; that’s all I was told.

So much for my break. Adam turned around and made his unsteady way to our dingy little cabin at the back of the gardens. It was where I had lived since arriving on Castor. I couldn’t remember a single evening when I looked forward to going back to it.

COMING OUT of the gardens was a bit like stepping into another world. They were right in the middle of Scarborough plantation, just a stone’s throw from Dr. Niels’s house, but even so it felt like they were removed from the rest of it. I unlocked the gate and walked out into the main yard.

It was busier than usual. A couple of the house servants scurried past me, looking stuffy and uncomfortable in their starched uniforms. They were weighed down by heavy suitcases and bags. Someone was visiting, then. Or maybe a few somebodies, by the look of it. I wanted to stop them and ask what was going on, but they were in too much of a hurry and probably wouldn’t have told me much anyway. They hated anybody who worked outside the house, even though we were Half-Adapts just like them, and we hated them right back.

I stopped halfway across the yard and looked up at the roof of the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of my friend Femi. He’d been assigned to a work gang that was patching up the roofs of the house and some of the old barns. There was no sign of him, though, so he must have been taking a break somewhere.

The house was old. It could look decrepit sometimes, all gray stone and deep, brooding windows, but when the light hit it in just the right way, it had a kind of grandness about it that I always liked. It wasn’t ever a welcoming place, but then it wasn’t supposed to be. Not for me, anyway.

The servants’ entrance was at the back of the house, which was also where all of the deliveries were made. I figured there had been a new shipment of something that needed carrying into the gardens, but there were no boxes or crates waiting for me when I got there—just Dr. Niels, looking displeased behind the clear plastic of his breather.

You took your time, he said. He was a tall man, and dour as well, which made a lot of people afraid of him. Not me, though. You always knew where you stood with him. He wasn’t like a lot of the overseers, who’d make you practically grovel in front of them if you pissed them off. If he was going to punish you, he’d do it, and if he didn’t do it straight away, then you had nothing to worry about.

Sorry, I mumbled. That was another thing: he didn’t like hearing excuses.

He grunted and glanced at his watch. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my nephew has arrived from Pollux. It’s an unexpected visit, otherwise I would have had his rooms prepared for him. As it stands, things are… chaotic.

I was so taken aback that I stared at him a bit more openly than was proper. In the eight years I’d been at the plantation, he had never once mentioned his family—and neither had anybody else.

He’s requested a tour of the orchard. I’d show him around myself, but I have other guests arriving. You’ll have to do. My stomach dropped. Showing some idiot from Pollux around the orchard so he could gawk at all the trees sounded like torture.

Sir… I’ve got a lot of work to do already, I said, which was about as close as I’d ever come to defying him.

I’m sure Adam will survive for an hour or two without you.

I said nothing. He wasn’t looking for a reply. I had my orders, so that was that.

TWO

THE ORCHARD was a late addition to the plantation. Dr. Niels had decided he wanted trees, and so there were trees. He was like some kind of god, able to conjure these things out of soil that was never meant for them. Someday, he said, all of Castor would be covered in his plants. It would be terraformed, so there’d be no more need for people like him to wear breathers outside or keep their homes sealed against the native air.

No more need for people like me either.

The orchard gate was unlocked. I closed it after myself, feeling the same way I would if I’d arrived back at the cabin to find a stranger standing in the middle of the kitchen. I was one of the few people on the plantation who had any reason to be in the orchard. It was weird, knowing that some stranger was poking around in there.

I looked for him among the apple trees. I had to step over all the ripe apples lying on the ground, that’s how many of them there were. Usually I would have stopped to take a few—nobody else would be eating them, right? But I wanted to find Dr. Niels’s nephew as fast as I could. The whole place was too quiet, and too still. If he was walking around, I should have heard him or seen him among the spindly young saplings.

He also wasn’t anywhere around the orange trees. I didn’t have to look very hard there, since they had always been sickly and stunted and wouldn’t hide a person very well.

That left the walnut trees: Juglans regia, if you want to get fancy with it, the closest thing to an unadapted Earth plant on the whole plantation. They were one of Dr. Niels’s success stories. They’d grown faster and stronger than they had any right to, given how little he’d done to their genes. It was just a pity the fruit turned out the way it did.

The nephew was standing underneath the tallest tree. He was turned half away from me and was bent at the waist, like he was picking something up from the ground. He had one hand raised to his mouth, and his breather lay at his feet—along with the discarded skin of a walnut fruit. I put all of that together in a second or two, in one of those moments where you seem to take everything in at a glance and react before the thinking part of your brain knows what it’s seeing.

Stop! I yelled, just before he put the walnut in his mouth and killed himself.

He straightened and turned around in one fluid movement.

I wish I could go back to that moment and see it through his eyes, if only so I’d know what about me surprised him so much. Because this is what he saw: a boy around his own age, a bit on the short side but not short exactly, with unruly black hair and brown eyes and dirt under his fingernails. Nothing remarkable there, and nothing remarkable in the clothes either: overalls and dust-encrusted work boots were practically standard-issue on the plantation.

If I say we were opposites, you’ll probably get a fair idea of him: tall, blond, dressed in a kind of suit thing that just looked stupid to me. Maybe that was why he stared, because I was as strange to him as he was to me.

Hello, he said, when what felt like a very long time had passed. Is there a problem?

You can’t eat that. I was sort of vaguely aware that I might be digging myself into a hole. This wasn’t how you talked to your master’s nephew if you wanted to keep on his good side. I just had this feeling he wouldn’t care if I talked to him wrong.

And he didn’t.

Oh? He looked down at the walnut as if seeing it for the first time. Why not?

It’ll kill you.

Really, he said, calm as anything. I can’t imagine there’s much point in breeding fruit that will kill people.

It wasn’t supposed to. But it takes something from the soil, so it’s poisonous. Actually, I could have explained the problem in a bit more detail than that, but people like him preferred it if you pretended to be stupid.

"Could you eat it?" he said. He was looking at me again, calm and expectant—the kind of person who knows they’ll get an answer when they ask a question. He reminded me a lot of Dr. Niels, just then.

Yeah. I guess. I left the rest unsaid: because I’m a Half-Adapt.

I see. He tossed the walnut away as though he’d lost interest in it. His hands were really pale, just like the skin on his face. It made him look weak, that paleness and his light hair and the roundness of his cheeks. I wondered what he’d look like under his clothes. Not like Femi, who was all hard muscle from the work he did, and not skinny like me either. He’d be softer, with a bit of fat on him from all his easy years on Pollux.

I liked that idea.

What the hell are you doing? I thought, catching myself too late. I looked away from him, silently furious at myself, and settled on the first thing I saw that would work as a distraction: his breather, still lying in the grass where he’d left it.

You’d better put that on, I said, certain he could somehow tell what I was thinking just by looking at me. That was always my biggest fear, that I’d give myself away through some sign that everybody except me knew to look for.

Oh. Yes, that would be the smart thing to do, he said. He walked over to it and picked it up nonchalantly, like it was a hat that had fallen from his head rather than something he needed to stay alive. Most unadapted people from the surface could handle Castor’s air for ten minutes before they started to get light-headed, but I wasn’t sure what it would be like for someone who had grown up on Pollux.

Well, he said, when he had it back on. I suppose I owe you my thanks. My uncle must have forgotten to warn me that some of his plants are less than edible.

I shrugged, embarrassed. It wasn’t as if I was going to let him die. Just be careful what you eat around here. Not everything is safe.

I’ll remember that.

When people talk, they don’t keep staring at each other. Not usually, anyway. But I don’t think his eyes left me once the entire time we were in the orchard together.

I’m Vidal, by the way, he said. Vidal—it sounded arrogant, as though the word itself had taken on something of his personality. Or maybe I just thought that because I knew where he was from.

I’m James, I said, more curtly than I’d meant to.

My uncle mentioned a gardener. Is that you?

No, I’m his apprentice. I was supposed to show you around….

Oh, don’t trouble yourself, he said. I think I’ve seen everything I came for. The trees are remarkable, aren’t they? We have some on Pollux, but they’re in tiny arboretums. I imagine this is closer to how they grow on Earth.

That was enough to shock me into looking back up at his face. We didn’t talk about Earth—not openly, anyway. It was dangerous territory. You never knew who would be listening, and how they may take it if you started going on about the good old days or whatever. I thought for a second that he was trying to goad me into saying something that would get me in trouble, but his expression was completely innocent.

I don’t remember, I said.

Ah. You must have been here a long time, then.

I couldn’t believe he was asking me that. And he was so genuine too. That’s what really took me by surprise, the way he talked as if there was nothing strange at all about us standing there having a little conversation for ourselves. And I didn’t think any better of him for doing it, either, since I’d be the one to get in trouble if I said something wrong.

It’s been a while, yeah. I said it in as wooden a tone as I could manage.

I’ve always wondered how it would have felt, to be born on another planet. It must be strange.

This time I said nothing at all. There was no way I was going to go down that road, thanks all the same.

Well, you probably have to work to do, he said, finally releasing me from his gaze. And my uncle will be wondering where I am.

Right.

He smiled at me through his breather, gave me a nod that was almost deep enough to be a bow, and—mercifully—started to leave.

Then stopped again.

My uncle is having a party in a few days, he said. Well, not a party exactly but a meeting. Plantation owners, businesspeople from the town, you know.

I waited. And? What did this have to do with me?

He mentioned he has a few Half-Adapts who work inside the house. Servants, that is.

Another pause. And then it dawned on me; he wanted to know if I was going to be there. God only knew why, but he was trying to ask if I happened to split my time between digging up weeds in the garden and serving wine at Dr. Niels’s get-togethers. Right. But I work in the gardens, so….

Of course, of course. I just thought… well, never mind. See you.

And he left.

I DON’T know how long I stood there in the orchard, completely forgetting that I had work to do back in the gardens.

He had asked me my name. Now that he was gone, that’s what stood out for me more than anything else. He’d wanted to know my name. He’d introduced himself. And had he really wanted to know if I’d be at that party, or was I just so clueless that I’d misunderstood him?

I should have been flattered at the idea of someone like him deigning to even be civil to me. It should have been a compliment.

So why did I feel as if I’d just avoided some catastrophe?

THREE

I WAS just finishing up later that evening when Femi came walking along the garden path, grinning and waving to me. He wasn’t really supposed to be in the gardens, but Dr. Niels turned a blind eye as long as he was careful around the plants.

Hey, he said, standing with his hands in his pockets. His bare chest was damp with sweat, as was his hair. That roof-fixing business was hard work.

Hey. Did you just finish?

Nah, two hours ago.

I wondered if he’d spent that time hanging out with the other workers instead of me—and yeah, I know how pathetic that sounds. But I couldn’t help it. He was my only friend on the plantation, and I sometimes felt that I was living off whatever crumbs of attention he could spare for me.

Like I said, pathetic.

He took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth, raising his eyebrows at me.

I haven’t got any on me, I said. He laughed and handed me one of his. Cheers.

We were both sixteen, which wasn’t really old enough to buy tobacco, but the shopkeepers in town didn’t care. As far as I could tell, it had always been that way. The local laws said you have to be however many years old before you could do it, and everybody started well before that anyway, like clockwork. Same with drinking.

So I hear we’ve got a visitor, Femi said, while I tried not to cough up the smoke in my lungs. He had gotten the hang of it a lot faster than me.

I know. I had to show him around the orchard.

Yeah? What was he like?

Good question. I dunno. Strange. He was about to eat one of those poison walnuts when I found him.

Femi snorted. Idiot.

Definitely, I said, grinning.

We smoked in silence for a minute. While he was gazing off into the distance, I snuck a glance at his bare torso. It always amazed me that he had no problem with showing off his scars. They were, if anything, even more obvious than mine, a series of straight, pale lines against his dark skin.

I wouldn’t say I was squeamish about it, exactly, but after nine years on Castor, I’d still hesitate before I took my shirt off where anybody could see me. Mine weren’t even that bad, just a few neat, pink lines on my chest and stomach, but I still hated the way they looked. But not Femi; he’d even said once that we should be proud of them, because they were a mark of what we’d given up for Castor.

He had some pretty grand ideas.

So, he said after a while. There’s a thing on in town in a few days.

A ‘thing’?

Yeah. A meeting, club. Whatever you call it. There’ll be drink, music. Girls, he added, nudging me in the ribs. Girls, I thought. Hurray.

Who else is going? I said.

Just me. And you, if you want.

I won’t say I wasn’t a bit relieved at that. If we went with the others, it would be all the old stupid jokes and bragging and nobody able to shut up for longer than ten seconds. And then, when everybody started to get a bit drunk, they’d start on the inevitable stories about all the girls they were supposedly doing it with, and where they were doing it, when they were doing it, in what bloody stupid way they were doing it. And I’d spend the whole time sitting there, bored out of my mind and thinking how they’d despise me if they knew I’d never even looked at a girl the way they did.

But I couldn’t tell Femi any of that. I wasn’t naive enough to think he’d take it any better just because we were friends. All of that went through my head in a second or two. It was always there, that kind of worry, always in the background.

All right, I’ll go.

I knew you’d be up for it! Here, you need this to get in…. He took a folded rectangle of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. So now it was some kind of secret club? I was about to make fun of him for that, until I opened up the paper and saw what was written on it: An Invitation to the Independence Society of First Landing, and then beneath that, WE ARE THE INHERITORS OF CASTOR.

Jesus, Femi! I said, looking quickly over my shoulder even though I knew we were alone in the gardens. What the hell are you doing with something like this?

It’s not breaking any rules. The Society just talks. They make speeches. They can’t touch you for that.

I wasn’t so sure. Every now and then we’d hear about people being hanged on other plantations, always for some frighteningly vague crime. Oh sure, they’d say it was for stealing or assaulting an overseer or whatever else, but there’d be an undercurrent of rumors that the poor sod had it coming for a while—talked back one too many times, never worked hard enough, didn’t know his place.

And now Femi wanted me to go to something called the Independence Society.

Come on, he said, when I didn’t reply. I asked you because you’re not gonna go around telling everybody. And I don’t want to go on my own.

I felt a surge of gratitude at the thought that he’d asked me in particular. It wasn’t just some random invitation. He wanted me to go, over anybody else. I know, I know. Pathetic.

Okay, I said, fervently hoping that the heat across my cheeks didn’t mean they were going red. But if we get arrested, I swear I’ll kill you before they hang us.

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. Deal. I thought you’d already know about the Society, though. Adam’s been going to the meetings since they started.

"What, my Adam?"

Femi gave me a skeptical look, like he couldn’t quite believe I didn’t know all of this already. He helped bring it here. Did you really not know?

We don’t really talk much, I said, stunned. That was an understatement. We could go days and barely say a word to each other, and when we did talk, it usually ended up turning into an argument. Or a fight.

We talked for a bit longer, but as soon as I was done with my cigarette I made some excuse and left. I think it was the only time I ever said my good-byes before he did.

THE CABIN, which Dr. Niels insisted on calling a cottage, was in the wildest part of the gardens. The plants that grew there were castoffs from the neat little plots nearby. They grew untended wherever their seeds happened to fall, and