Her Scales Shine Like Music: A Tor.Com Original

By Rajnar Vajra

"Her Scales Shine Like Music" by Rajnar Vajra is a moving science fiction novelette about an encounter and budding relationship between two aliens, one human, who are the only living creatures occupying a planet in deep space. The human is assigned to guard a valuable find, while his colleagues leave, to file a report with the company that hired them.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780765391223

Rajnar Vajra

Rajnar Vajra is an American Science Fiction and Fantasy writer with a wide range of interests and education stretching from astrophysics to Zen. He has been a lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter in a professional original rock band; a sound designer and recording engineer; a high school music teacher; a guitar instructor in the Performing Arts Division at the University of Massachusetts; a craftsperson designing and creating jewelry; and involved in doctorate-level biochemistry research. He has been a Hugo finalist and his work has appeared in several anthologies including Visions of Tomorrow and Into The New Millennium, also magazines such as Absolute Magnitude and especially Analog where his writing has been frequently featured, including a full novel serialization. Currently, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and divides his time between writing, performing, composing, and recording music, and providing private lessons for guitar, keyboard, bass, and voice students.

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Humble ice crystals high in the atmosphere often enrich sunsets on this cold world to glory. Mid-twilight, the sky shatters into opalescent shards, painting spectral pastels onto each ripple and wavelet of the vast lake near my shelter.

A strange lake it is: barely salty enough and in just enough constant motion to keep from freezing over. No more than a child’s stride inward from its smooth rim, the edge drops precipitously to a depth of over four kilometers. So sayeth Artist, High King of Scanning and Analysis on Stardancer, the twistship that abandoned me here for my unwanted tour as sentry, placeholder, and legal Vigilant.

Artist suspects the lake is artificial, created perhaps a million years ago. I can’t decide if I want him to be right. It both frightens and inspires me to imagine a species with such grandiose engineering powers. And where are they now?

Pale hexagons, magnified snowflake ghosts, appear on the fine sand around me, heralds of the falling temperature. The air carries a sharper bite.

While setting, the local sun doesn’t radiate enough energy to keep my parka fully charged, so I must be thrifty to stay warm through the next few hours. I stand and jump in place for a time, and then return to my featherweight chair, wrapping my arms tight around me. She’d either come to me or she wouldn’t. Most evenings, she would, but after what happened today, I’m not sure. Still, I think she’s as lonely as me. Not long ago, I only kept watch on the skies. Now I have eyes for the water.

But my past paints specters on my present.

*   *   *

Deep space scouting missions are always a shot in the vasty dark.

Even the immense Skyscreen Array can only suggest the nature of worlds hundreds of light years