The Chronicler's Arrival: Alnos Chronicles, #1

By Gilaine Fiezmont

The Alnos Chronicles recount the struggles faced by the Alnese when their frozen home world warms to a more pleasant climate and quadruples their land holdings. A human Chronicler and a visiting scientist detail a conflict brought about by newcomers attracted to Alnos' new wealth. With Alnese family ties and Alnese children, they have more riding on the outcome of the conflict than professional success.

 

Convinced his infant daughter has died, Raymond kills himself on Earth only to be brought back to life on Alnos by his child's Alnese mother. During his recovery, Raymond's preternatural visions about Alnos' frozen past bring him to the attention of the planet's ruler, Lady Ciani. She asks him to become her "Chronicler" and bear witness to her struggle to guide her people through Alnos' emergence from a deep ice age. With the help of his guide Dragon Ashewe, Raymond learns to live again as he chronicles the fallout from Alnos' climate change. Though much of Alnos remains a forbidding arctic expanse, a growing tropical region is attracting immigrants with the promise of new lands and new wealth, and setting the stage for conflict between natives and newcomers. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Altivo Literary Worlds
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393341567

Gilaine Fiezmont

Teacher, researcher, writer, and reader of international literature, Gilaine Fiezmont started writing on a dare when she was twelve. Born in Switzerland in 1960, her first immigration experience brought her to Los Angeles, California, in 1976. After graduating from UCLA, she spent a ‘gap year’ in Mexico, a second immigration experience that crystallized in a five-part poem called “Europe, Too, Came from Somewhere Else”. She returned to Los Angeles for graduate studies in linguistics and has applied what she learned as a researcher and academic language specialist ever since she completed her dissertation in 1991. In addition to literature, Gilaine loves to read science fiction, epic fantasy, romances, and poems from many lands. Octavia Butler, Frank Herbert, and Ursula Le Guin are favorites. She is exploring the worlds of web serials and independent publishing.

Book preview

Chapter 1—The Chronicler

Iarrived on Alnos in a coma after killing myself back on Earth. Grief and guilt pushed me to self-destruction. I’d have succeeded, too, but for my Alnese lover Leila’s interference. She had me put on inter-galactic ice to slow the damage and shipped me to her world.

Alnos.

Home of the former Space Gypsies.

My name is Raymond Díaz, or Raymond Díaz Ruiz, or Díaz Ruiz Raymond, depending on the local convention. Last name first is the Alnese version. Except on Alnos it's not a last name, it's a clan name, or it would be if I were Alnese. I'm not. I'm human. An Earthling. My hosts are not convinced that's all there is to it. They suspect an earlier Alnese connection, an Alnese great-great-great-grandmother perhaps. I haven't lived down to their expectations. But I am a visitor on Alnos, one more traveler hanging with the Space Gypsies for a while.

1676 years before my arrival, a group still known as the Space Gypsies decided to make a half-frozen world their new home, or their bigger, more roomy new star ship, as Lady Ciani likes to put it. Actually, Alnos is more than half-frozen. Everyone assures me the place has become downright cozy in the past hundred years, and I believe them, but I don't have their basis for comparison. To me, the place is still a cross between Alaska and Siberia before Earth’s climate shift.

Alnese legends tell of an almost two-thousand year odyssey before their prophet Pallas saw their promised land. She had a vision about the eighth planet of the next star system on their itinerary. It had a breathable atmosphere and a narrow equatorial strip of livable ocean, islands, and land between vast expanses of northern and southern arctic ice. Eight is a perfect number for the Alnese—they have managed to hang on to some funny little superstitions through all their space travel and technological advances. The Space Gypsies followed their prophet to her eighth planet, and landed between the ice. And they stayed. That's the part nobody else understands.

My arrival didn't make the same splash.

Not that I remember it.

Going through some papers, though, I found a log of communications from the captain of our star ship to the doctor that took me on. 

From Captain Druhv, Kobran Transport Q’ron to Tzalque Peg, Chief Physician of Pallas House:

I feel it incumbent upon me to inform you that Pallas Leila has requested we take on a second medical transport. Your first patient remains Pallas Socorro. We have stabilized her condition and are confident no further deterioration will occur. Your second patient is a human male, still relatively young, suffering from kidney and liver failure due to severe multi-agent poisoning, and already in a deep coma by the time we got to him. The only course of action left was to put him in stasis for the transport. Our physician recommends you maintain stasis to clean out his system and prepare replacement organs. He thinks it unlikely that the original organs can be saved, but was able to reverse some of the other damage. 

Pallas Leila is sending along lab reports she obtained from Pallas Socorro’s stay in an Earth hospital. According to our physician, you will find some useful information despite the limitations of their equipment. 

From Tzalque Peg, Zyss, Alnos, to Pallas Leila:

Regarding your lab reports, which snow dervishes helped you get these Earth materials? Have you invented a new subspace Earth-Kobran telemetry? Out with it, then, I can think of a million uses! Looks to me like your second patient really meant it. You have no doubt figured that out for yourself. I don't know how it occurred to him to down that bottle of aspirin on top of his drug cocktail. Thank God for Kobran dialysis! Or is it just the experience? Do you realize that I don't see this sort of thing unless I travel? I ought to thank you for a great training exercise! If you get him to me soon he might just make it, but no guarantees. Am expecting you then.

I awoke on Alnos, in their 1676th year, right at the onset of their summer. Three needles threaded into one arm. Saline solution, dialysis, feeding line. I didn't feel any of them, though. I felt as if I were resting on a cloud. I stirred, and I could feel the cloud moving with me, adjusting. The lights brightened a little. 

I threw in extra, well, let's call them vitamins, to rebuild what little brains you've got left, dear boy.

The good Doctor Tzalque looked fascinated, and didn't try to hide it. I could have sworn her skin had a bluish undertone, but in all other respects, she looked like my grandmother la India—cinnamon skin and black hair framing lively black eyes. I hadn't expected that. I thought they would all look like my Alnese lover Leila. 

Much to my surprise, I found that I still had a voice, though not a very substantial one, Some people never gave me even that much credit.

Humans are often perceptive. The English-Alnese translation was so well choreographed and the doctor’s translated reply so fast that I didn’t even realize it was a translation initially. A little unsure, she touched her hand against mine. I'm Tzalque Peg. The Pallases have this bad habit of calling on me when they get sick.

I'm sorry.

Oh it's all right. You break my routine.

Over the next few days, as my waking and sleeping started to approximate a normal cycle, the good doctor got to indulge herself. She stuck another of her mysterious little probes into me every chance she got—blood, brain fluid, more blood—and returned beaming over her results.

You can do whatever you want. You can rip all these out of your arms, go to the nearest cabinet and down another set of pills, I won't stop you.

She thought she had me psyched out.

Sounds distinguished my new medical experiences even more than the cloudy comfort of my not-exactly-hospital-bed. The time I odeed in Berlin, voices and moans mixed with shrill whistles and beeps. More than anything, the aural stew of misery had turned that experience into a nightmare. On Alnos, I was drying out mostly in silence, with occasional quiet blips breezing over my consciousness.

One more contrast lay in the leisurely pace kept by the good doctor. She even had time for conversations.

Do you like our stuff?

What is it? Methadone?

I heard you used that. No, ours is just a different poppy. People grow it in their greenhouses. I think it's originally from Kobra, but of course the climate there is totally different, so ours is a hybrid. A cross between an indigenous opiate, as incredible as that may seem, and the Kobran plant.

Kobra?

One of the twin jewels, Kobra and Ko. God's cradle. Or so they say. I have yet to visit a planet where the residents don't claim godly qualities, but Kobrans may have a point. Almost all of us visit Kobra. I stayed two years to learn from their physicians. It was lovely.

Have you gone to Earth?

No.

What do people call Earth? The sewer?

She chuckled, The survivor.

I have landed among optimists.

She threw her head back for a full-throated laugh, then, she commented, Actually, humans have a knack for survival. The odds have been against you for the longest time and you’re still around. Quite amazing. Well, how do you like our stuff?

I feel . . . good.

She nodded, I’m weaning you off, actually. Shouldn’t take much longer, unless you prefer to-, She cut off, raised one eyebrow, then asked, Do you want to be put on maintenance?

You need my consent for that?

Yes.

Doctor Peg, have some fun! Do what you want.

Don't tempt me! 

She slapped my cheek lightly, then continued in a more earnest tone, I wasn't just joking when I said you could do it again. Do you still want to die?

I smiled at her. I noticed once again that we had the same eyes, almost black, almond-shaped. You would let me do what I want, but Leila wouldn't. She hasn't.

Is there a debt between you two?

You could put it that way.

I had managed to damage myself so badly that it took several Alnese weeks for me to mend. Alnese weeks last eight days, one more than on Earth. Everything on Alnos comes in fours or eights, eight days in a week, eight months in a year, and strangely enough, four periods of six hours in a day, a close match to what I am used to. Doctor Peg kept me apprised of all the parts she was replacing, but I couldn't keep track. Didn't seem like much of the old me would be left.

Rather appropriate, really.

A new Ray for a new world.

Chapter 2—Dragon

When I was a child , I had a dream. My holy dragon curled through the night sky, her tail sparking little suns into existence. Her breaths swept across a panoramic darkness and left behind clouds of nebula. Then she directed her gaze at me, blew a rainbow over me, and my skin turned lime green, yellow, blue, purple, magenta, red.  Each wave of color felt like a precious jewel. The colors twirled together, six bracelets of pure light that I slipped on my arm, where they glistened like scales.

I told my grandmother about the dream. Later that day, while collecting some of her hand-scribbled lab-notes, she said quite nonchalantly, Azetmir Dragon Ashewe, you will use your dragon-sight as a traveler. It did not make any sense to me at the time, but since she used my full name, I knew it was a serious pronouncement. Maybe that's why I still remember the dream, or maybe my crone got it right and it was a prescient dream, a message from my name-sake that she only elucidated for me. What I can't figure out is why Ray should remind me of that dream.

It has come to pass as my grandmother pronounced all these years ago: I have become a traveler, embodying the O'bonne saying, Some knowledge can only be gained through reflection following experience. My home planet O'bonne is famous for the pursuit of knowledge in all its forms, and measures wealth by libraries and data banks. As a community of scholars, we are sought out by just about everybody in our known circle of planets, and we often provide the requested analytical work. Yet this wealth of accumulated information is only our superficial glory, for our true strength lies in our continuous meditation on that knowledge. We push forward by asking questions that we cannot answer, and by pursuing these questions wherever they may lead. Travelers like me go the farthest. We travel into the unknown of other worlds and other people to find fresh sights and new insights, to mesh the known with the unknown. 

I apprenticed early, accompanying my mentors in my adolescence to Danyx, a beautiful lush tropical world we’ve studied for centuries, then to Earth, where I eventually completed fieldwork on my own. Earth has a tradition of sending scientists out to study unknown people, a tradition that can be likened to what I do. O’bonne travelers are really not unlike interstellar anthropologists, if one just sets aside the fact that anthropos refers to humans and we of course study many different sentient species. My third destination and first independent assignment, Alnos, is a planet colonized by an interesting group of interstellar migrants after an odyssey of almost two millenia.

The O’bonne Institute of Cultural Studies has sponsored Alnese fieldwork since shortly after the migrants colonized their new world. I was assigned to continue our work on Alnese society’s legal systems, and the Institute negotiated suitable agreements with a number of Alnese legal institutions. More recently, I had struck up a deal to shadow an Alnese judge and his staff for a year, possibly longer if