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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: On a sandy world far in the future, family wealth is accumulated through the mining of buried marble-sized singularities. When the heir to a fortune built on these power spheres is cheated out of his birthright, he finds that a lonely man's best friend is--a chimerical feline servant with plans for revenge?

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Once Upon a Galaxy, ed. Wil McCarthy, Martin H. Greenberg, and John Helfers, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2003

29 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [138 KB], eReader (PDB) [53 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [42 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [37 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [82 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [115 KB], hiebook (KML) [112 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [71 KB], iSilo (PDB) [34 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [43 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [71 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [59 KB]
Words: 10715
Reading time: 30-42 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The small aircraft swiftly bisected the cloudless chartreuse sky. Invisible encrypted transmissions raced ahead of it. Clearance returned immediately from the distant, turreted manse--Stoessl House, looming in the otherwise empty riven landscape like some precipice-perching raptor. The ever-unsleeping family marchwarden obligingly shut down the manse's defenses, allowing an approach and landing. Within minutes, Geisen Stoessl had docked his small deltoid zipflyte on one of the tenth-floor platforms of Stoessl House, cantilevered over the flood-sculpted, candy-colored arroyos of the Subliminal Desert.

Geisen unseamed the canopy and leaped easily out onto the broad sintered terrace, unpeopled at this tragic, necessary, hopeful moment. Still clad in his dusty expeditionary clothes, goggles slung around his neck, Geisen resembled a living marble version of some young roughneck godling. Slim, wiry, and alert, with his laughter-creased, soil-powdered face now set in solemn lines absurdly counterpointed by a mask of clean skin around his recently shielded green eyes, Geisen paused a moment to brush from his protective suit the heaviest evidence of his recent wildcat digging in the Lustrous Wastes. Satisfied that he had made some small improvement in his appearance upon this weighty occasion, he advanced toward the portal leading inside. But before he could actuate the door, it opened from within.

Framed in the door stood a lanky, robe-draped bestient: Vicuna, his mother's most valued servant. Set squarely in Vicuna's wedge-shaped hirsute face, the haughty maid's broad velveteen nose wrinkled imperiously in disgust at Geisen's appearance, but the moreauvian refrained from voicing her disapproval of that matter in favor of other upbraidings.

"You arrive barely in time, Gep Stoessl. Your father approaches the limits of artificial maintenance, and is due to be reborn any minute. Your mother and brothers already anxiously occupy the Natal Chambers."

Following the inhumanly articulated servant into Stoessl House, Geisen answered, "I'm aware of all that, Vicuna. But traveling halfway around Chalk can't be accomplished in an instant."

"It was your choice to absent yourself during this crucial time."

"Why crucial? This will be Vomacht's third reincarnation. Presumably this one will go as smoothly as the first two."

"So one would hope."