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  Turning Point

  Sholan Alliance #1

  Lisanne Norman

  DAW Books, Inc.

  Donald A. Wollheim, Founder

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  DAW Books

  is proud to present

  LISANNE NORMAN'S

  Sholan Alliance Novels:

  TURNING POINT (#1)

  FORTUNE'S WHEEL (#2)

  FIRE MARGINS (#3)

  RAZOR'S EDGE (#4)

  DARK NADIR (#5)

  STRONGHOLD RISING (#6)

  Copyright © 1993 by Lisanne Norman.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 936.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  ISBN: 0-88677-959-6

  Electronic format made

  available by arrangement with

  DAW Books, Inc.

  www.dawbooks.com

  Elizabeth R. Wollheim

  Sheila E. Gilbert

  Publishers

  peanutpress.com, Inc.

  www.peanutpress.com

  For Mum and Dad, who taught me to love words and paint pictures.

  For the members of ASTRA, too numerous to mention, but still appreciated.

  For the many friends who pushed and supported me into finishing this, including Andrew Stephenson, Ken Slater, Anne Page, and Marsha Jones.

  Thank you all.

  Exclusive E-book Introduction

  When Sean Fodera, DAW's Director of Electronic Publishing, phoned me and asked if I would like my series to come out in an Electronic edition, I was extremely flattered and proud and immediately agreed. For myself and many of you readers, books come not only with the printed word but with the associated feel and smell of paper, and of course, the cover art. It is what makes a book a book, something physically comforting to curl up with and read. However, nothing remains the same forever and I firmly believe we must embrace current and future technology if the literature we love is to survive. If you're like me, devouring eight books a week when I can, the thought of being able to take half a dozen tiny cards on holiday with you is appealing in the extreme. There's no longer the need to make difficult choices when packing books for that long-haul flight, you can now take as many as you want in your cabin luggage. As for me, I no longer have to haul out my laptop with its very short battery life on the plane to work on the current novel! Now is that a blessing or a curse, I hear you ask? If I want to still those nagging voices in my head belonging to Carrie, Kusac and Kaid, demanding that I keep on telling their story, then it's a blessing, believe me! I can't believe I actually get keyboard deprivation if separated from them for too long.

  I find it exciting and exhilarating to be part of shaping the reality of a future so often predicted by Science Fiction writers. So I was even more flattered when Sean phoned me again and asked me to write a series of special introductions for my novels for this edition.

  I'm often asked why TURNING POINT is such a slim volume compared to my later novels. The answer's very simple. It was my first novel and I had a lot to learn. There are defining moments in your life that when they come, alter your future forever. Being introduced to Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books by my friend Marsha Jones, her sister, was one such moment. I feel privileged to be part of, and friends with, the talented team that makes up DAW Books.

  A book, any book, reaches you, the reader, as the result of teamwork. In Marsha, who still does most of the copy editing on my series, and in Sheila, my editor, I have been blessed with two people who can walk beside me on my journeys to Shola, who can literally step inside my mind and see my worlds through my eyes. They helped me realize my dream of becoming published. That's part of why I chose the title TURNING POINT for what was to be the beginning of a cyclical series of novels about the Sholan Alliance. The choice of titles for the rest of the series echo this theme by being variations on and expansions of a point, the smallest moment of contact between one surface, or species, and another.

  If you think TURNING POINT is short compared to the rest of the series, you may be surprised to know that it started life many years ago as an even shorter short story when I was learning the craft of writing. I wanted to write a story where I could hide until the end the fact that the main character wasn't a person but a small black kitten. The bulk of this short piece is still in the novel when the badly wounded Kusac journeys through the snow from his shelter in a ruined building down to the village where Carrie lives. All the while he's having this mental conversation with his father. I could never really decide whether he is actually in communication with Konis Aldatan or not, so I left it for you, the reader, to decide for me.

  The story didn't quite work and a good friend who'd had two books published not long before and was helping me with my writing, suggested I make Kusac a person and write a novel about him. I did. Little did I know that Kusac's journey through the snow would change not only his life forever, but my own.

  I started writing the novel in 1978, then in 1980, with it two thirds finished, I stopped. I moved from Glasgow, where I was born, to the lovely town of Norwich in Norfolk where I met my second husband and had my son. It wasn't until 1987 that I went back to the novel and finished it. Why? Well, I got an offer I couldn't refuse from my friend Marsha. She casually mentioned that if I finished it by Christmas, she'd take it over to New York to show to her sister who was a publisher at DAW.

  Marsha and I still laugh about the rest of that year. The postal services between Norwich and Liverpool were working overtime as I sent each chapter to her for editing and she returned it to me to make the changes, then I sent it back again to her. I made it, but only just! I break out in a sweat even now when I think we had two days to spare before her flight to the States!

  I was a teenager in the late '60s when young people first began to take their lives into their own hands. Youth culture was invented in those heady days of the rock music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Girl Power, too, only no one called it that then. Science Fiction was also beginning to have active female heroines instead of being the preserve of macho men and laser guns with any female characters reduced to making the coffee or screaming at the Bug Eyed Monsters like Fay Wray in King Kong.

  I chose to make my main character a Human female who was trapped in the kind of world some of us were still fighting to escape, the world of "Do as you're told," "Don't think for yourself, we'll do it for you," and "You'll marry a man we approve of. Security is more important than love." This was highlighted by making my setting the frontier world of Keiss, Earth's first colony.

  In TURNING POINT, I was looking at issues of prejudice. Being a member of ASTRA, the Association in Scotland to Research Astronautics, a serious science club looking at the possibilities of spaceflight and colonization, I was in an ideal environment to be aware of the many possible variations on how to go about setting up that first space colony, and what could really happen during First Contact, that moment when beings from another world contacted us for the first time. Again, these were main issues in my novel.

  All this was blended with the Kusac story when I began to wonder: What if those aliens resembled a terrestrial animal. Would we see them as beasts, or could we make that leap and communicate with them as people? When you consider how dolphins and whales, the most intelligent mammals next to Man, are still treated, you can see my line of thought.

  Around that time I lived with my first husband in a town called Wishaw, just outside Glasgow, and taught eight year olds at the local primary school. I have always loved small furry critters, cats especially, but had never been allowed one as a child, and the new husband wasn't at all keen.
So my classroom had a succession of canaries and golden hamsters as class pets. There was a local sawmill nearby and I got free sawdust for the hamsters from them. One day, just before Christmas, when I went to collect the sawdust, I saw two black kittens wandering around. They instantly homed in on me, and I could see the smaller one was ill streaming eyes, hacking cough, and you could count his ribs. They were strays who'd been dumped outside the mill by their owners one night a couple of weeks before. The lads working there bought cat food for them when they thought about it. The mill was unheated and was closing for a week for the holidays and no one was willing to do anything about the kittens.

  Absolute sucker that I am, I asked if I could have one. They said sure, glad to have it off their hands. I know you can guess which one I chose. Yes, the sick one. Funnily enough, though the husband allowed him to stay on probation only, he fought like mad with me over my choice of name. I knew then that he was there to stay. He was finally named Tal after some Russian chess player (I lost the name fight) and when I took him to the vet, discovered he was a Burmese/Siamese cross breed. For nearly nineteen years, he and I were constant companions. He saw me through some of the darkest times of my life with his unfailing love and affection and his unbelievable personality. He was so independent that it took him ten years before he would deign to allow me to pick him up and cuddle him. Yet every morning, I'd waken with a bed full of cat toys and him pawing gently at my face in an effort to get me up to play with him. He was Kusac, and now, all the elements had come together for TURNING POINT to be written.

  Right from the start, Kusac's personality dominated the novel, turning it into a love story as he and Carrie built a relationship between themselves that would have far-reaching consequences not only for them, but for me, their chronicler. Since the day I finished their first book, their voices have constantly nagged me to write more. And so, with the end of TURNING POINT, the Sholan Alliance Series was born.

  I bid you well come to the worlds of the Sholan Alliance!

  Lisanne Norman

  March 2000

  http://www.sff.net/people/Lisanne

  Prelude

  Carrie slept lightly, on the edge of wakefulness as always when Elise was working at Geshader, the Alien Pleasure City. Despite the sleeping pill and her sister's mental block, vague images from Elise drifted through her sleeping mind, interweaving themselves with her dreams.

  Once more dwarfed by the size of her parents, she tossed and turned in a sweat-soaked bed, moaning in agony as they and the doctor probed and pressed the livid bruises on her back and arm, looking for a more serious injury that didn't exist... for her. Then they thought to check her twin.

  They found Elise sitting placidly with her right arm at an impossible angle and blood from the lacerations on her back slowly seeping through her clothes into the sofa. She had been the one who had fallen out of a tree.

  Carrie had hardly felt the sting of the hypodermic amidst the fire in her back and arm.

  "It's the damnedest thing. Her sister has no sense of pain," she'd heard the doctor's voice boom as she began to slip into unconsciousness.

  "It hurts," she whimpered, stirring fretfully in her bed.

  * * *

  Monsters lurked in the fever dream, lizards of gray-green on two legs, lumbering slowly after her with a ponderous determination as, utterly terrified, she fled down echoing corridors.

  "Stop!" The voice was low and sibilant, the English distorted by a tongue not made to form the words.

  She hesitated, every muscle still poised for flight, staring back to where her pursuers waited for her.

  "Tell us where they are hiding," one demanded.

  An invisible hand closed viciously on Carrie's wrist, non-retractable claws pressing into her flesh. She jerked free, her other hand pressed to her mouth as the scene blurred.

  "Valtegans," she moaned, drops of blood pearling on her wrist and dropping to the coverlet.

  * * *

  She dreamed again of standing shivering in her underwear as she stowed her clothes in the small locker beside the coffin-shaped sleep pod, the chill caused by more than the lack of heating in the cryo level. Then lying down on the form-shaped interior, waiting for the medic to come and attach her to the life-support and cryogenic systems.

  Carrie glanced at her brother Richard before turning to grin nervously at Elise through the clear perspex sides as sensor pads were attached. Their parents hovered at the ends of their pods, anxiously waiting until all three children were safely asleep.

  She jumped as a hand touched her.

  "Don't worry. It's only a sedative to help you relax," smiled the crew woman, fixing the small adhesive patch to her arm. "Next thing you know, you'll be waking up in orbit around our new home."

  "Just to remind you, the system is automatic so there is very little you have to do. If you turn your head to the right, you'll see it's printed on the plaque there."

  "The main thing to remember when you wake up is to press that red button to release the pod cover, then take off the sensors. After that, you'll hear the instructions on the speakers."

  Already she could barely make out the woman's voice.

  "Sleep soundly, children. I love you," was the last thing she heard her mother say.

  The cover slid into place over her and she began to drift gently, imagining herself surrounded by a soft, warm, gray mist.

  * * *

  Suddenly she was jolted to awareness by the sting of the hypo on her sister's arm.

  The drug swept through Carrie's system, burning its way along her nerves, setting them on fire until her whole body was convulsed with spasms. She tried to fight it, to open her eyes, but all she could see were colors swirling around her until her stomach was heaving with vertigo. She felt herself slipping... slipping...

  * * *

  "Mother!" she had screamed, her mind and body trapped in the slow time cold hell of cryogenics, unable to do anything as she felt at last her mother's blind terror at waking too soon.

  She could sense her beating futilely at the walls of the cryo pod, trapped like a butterfly transfixed by a pin as she tried desperately to activate the release mechanisms that were locked in stasis.

  Her mother's movements quickly grew sluggish, finally stopping as the limited air supply in the pod ran out.

  "Mother! Don't leave me!" Carrie screamed, desperately fighting the effects of the drug that this time dragged her down into darkness.

  * * *

  Carrie felt herself pushed and pulled in every direction. Scaled faces loomed at her out of the dim light, clawed hands grasped at her, pawed at her, making her flesh recoil from their sharp, cool touch. She stumbled against bodies that thrust her away to fall to the ground, only to be dragged to her feet again. Noise surrounded her, loud, sibilant voices shouting. Like the images, the sounds faded in and out with her consciousness.

  * * *

  "We have to fight them, Carrie. I can't do it passively like Dad. I'm leaving to join the guerrillas. The Valtegans are soldiers, not civilians, and they're Alien. We can't appeal to their better nature because they haven't got one."

  "I'm leaving now, tonight, for Geshader."

  "Geshader? But..."

  "Don't try to change my mind, Carrie," Elise warned quickly, "it's made up. As one of the women in their pleasure city, I can get close to the officers, a thing no man can do. And once I'm with them, I'm sure I can get access to all sorts of useful information."

  "But to become one of the prostitutes... and with them! How could you?"

  Elise gave her a wry grin. "Come off it, Carrie. It's the oldest profession going, and the women from Geshader that I've talked to say it isn't that bad."

  "It isn't as if we can't keep in touch. There's our link after all."

  "You just take care, for both our sakes!"

  "Do you mind too much? You know the risks we face, don't you?"

  "I know," Carrie nodded, "but you're the one taking the real risks. I'll cope someh
ow. Jack Reynolds is used to us by now."

  "At least you didn't pick up much when I was with that lad from Seaport this spring," her twin grinned, "so with any luck you'll be spared my 'working experiences.'"

  Her voice faded, leaving only the impression of the grin behind.

  "It's the only way I could fight them, Carrie."

  * * *

  Figures jostled her again, dark red light on pallid skins, rough claws digging into her arms, drawing blood. Again, every nerve flared with excruciating pain and she tried to arch her body away from it, but she only succeeded in cracking her head against the wall. Stunned, she heard her own scream as if from far away as her hands tried to grasp for something concrete— anything— to help her hold onto reality. She was aware of a sudden warmth running down her right arm. Blood.