The Sea Peoples by Stirling S. M

Author:Stirling, S. M. [Stirling, S. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Apocalyptic
ISBN: 9780399583179
Amazon: 0399583173
Goodreads: 33980909
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2017-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

• • •

He climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which he had so often climbed before. . . .

Wait a minute. Who am I? John thought, as he felt his feet on the worn wooden risers. Is this a hallucination, or a dream, or what? Where am I really? What am I really?

The thought was very much like teetering over a canyon, or hang-gliding at Hood River on the Columbia, but without the fun. His parents had once heard of a man who’d gone on a long journey to find himself, and had laughed uproariously together and said that if he couldn’t find himself at home, he wasn’t likely to do it by taking a caravan over the mountains. He hadn’t always been satisfied with who and what he was, but it had never been a matter of doubt.

Dreaming. You often think you’re someone else in dreams.

The thought calmed him; somewhere he could feel his heart slowing and frantic panting turning to deep breaths.

The man he dreamed . . .

And I’m dreaming I’m someone else dreaming I’m this man too. Someone else is dreaming he’s Hildred Castaigne.

. . . knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor.

It opened, pulled so by a mutilated dwarf barely four feet high, and he had only the stumps of ears. They were badly covered by two grotesquely perfect wax prosthetics, strung from a silver wire and painted a blushing pink in total contrast to the jaundice-yellow and fishbelly pallor of the man’s face. His eyes were the pale color of frosted lead cast too hot and let cool, but they smoldered. Fresh deep scratches scored the skin of his face, and others in successive stages of healing or infection; all the fingers were missing from his left hand, leaving only stubs that had healed to ragged lumps.

It wasn’t the injuries that made John’s mind recoil. He knew folk as ugly whose selves made their looks irrelevant. One of his instructors in the lute had been a knight who’d taken a spray of napalm across the eyes from an airburst flame-shell at the battle of the Horse Heaven Hills, and they’d been excellent friends from the first lesson. The thought of the man’s face still brought an immediate association of warmth and shared accomplishment even now, though strangers often gave involuntary gasps the first time they saw it.

It wasn’t even the odd shape of his totally bald head, lumpy and flattened and drawn almost to a point at the rear.

The eyes, it’s something about the eyes.

They gave him an unhinged feeling, as if just looking into them knocked the whole world askew, distorting the angles of things. The second sense of self within him—the man who dreamed he was Hildred Castaigne—felt a fascination mixed with dread. Castaigne himself . . . if that muffled wave of sensation was his . . . watched the dwarf with something not far short of love, seasoned with an odd mix of resignation and terror.

The

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