Well, it’s been about a year since Cradle Robbers, the last Captain Arlon Stoddard novel, came out, so it’s both a thrill and a relief to get Margin Dwellers into the world.
I always love my last novel most, and I kind of feel this is the best one yet. A glorious mess of action and adventure, set on a unique world, with a unique set of problems.
Ebook available from the website right away, and on preorder, along with the paperback, from Amazon, etc. from February 28th.
Here’s the book’s blurb, and the first couple of chapters.
Margin Dwellers blurb
Mel Oaster loves her twilight room haven. Right at the edges of sunlight on tidally-locked, sun-blasted Planet Talmenica. Half-frozen, half-baked.
People like Mel inhabit the margins between light and shadow. They live unique and peaceful lives.
But when Mel’s lover Talshon vanishes, her haven takes on a whole new meaning.
Captain Arlon Stoddard and his crew plunge in to find the mystery deepening and darkening.
Talmenica holds more secrets.
Secrets it desperately holds close.
Margin Dwellers, extract
Chapter One
There was only one place to be when Mel was angry, and she didn’t know if she’d ever been this angry before.
The twilight room.
It was her favorite place anyway. Angry or not. And even if no one else really liked it. Even if coming out here sometimes meant a deal of mockery.
She could cope with that.
But she shouldn’t be angry now. Not just because Talshon was dead.
But he was–dead–and she was angry.
She was nineteen years old, standard, and she stood close to two meters tall–one ninety eight and a half centimeters!–almost a head taller than most of the people around her. Friends and family, and another source of mockery. Mostly good natured.
Maybe that was why her grandmother called her resilient. A lifetime of those little taunts and jabs had taught Mel a great deal of self-reliance.
The room was dim and small with just slits to admit whatever scant light was left in the air. More of a cabin, really, than a room–wasn’t a room within a building? Inside there was a long bench seat, stretching from the northern wall to the southern wall around three of the octagonal room’s sunward walls. Around nine meters all told. The seat had three white tatami cushions that covered it end to end.
Opposite the seat stood the book racks. Bookshelves. Whatever you wanted to call them. Mostly triple and quadruple and quintuple books in their neat translucent packets little bigger than her flat hand, and thinner. Twenty-two of them, with around a hundred books. She’d given up on more than she’d completed, but that was all right.
Titania and Andronicus and the Lion. Star-span. Little Women. A History of the Human Empire.
Mix and match. Take your pick.
There were so many books to read anyway, there was no sense in forcing your way through something dull.
Besides, her favorites were the books with paper pages that you had to turn.
The Lemontree by Snapper von Wilde. So rich with color and the sense of life that she could almost taste things in her mouth.
Closest by M. Aneith. That one still tore her heart out when she got to the end. Even though, through every moment and every page she knew it was coming.
The paper books were heavy in her hand, as if they had real substance. As if the weight of the stories was conveyed by the very physicality of the volume. Their smell was strange and old, like sweet decaying leaves–which in a way they were. The pages of the books were also called ‘leaves’, and that was also a nice pun, since when you turned the page, you were leaving that part of the story.
Mel smiled to herself. Not that she would ever say that to anyone–that would simply give more opportunity for a little mockery.
Some of the racks held trinkets and ornaments. Things that people didn’t really want, but still couldn’t bear to part with. Wind up music boxes, sensory cubes, projectors with messages from long-dead relatives, trophies, unusual stones, a little box of siltron seeds that still smelled sweet and strong.
The twilight room’s eight walls held aloft a high ceiling. Halfway up each wall–above her head-height even–slits allowed in that soft light. Each slit was two meters long and just a few centimeters high. The sunward slits were glowed with light from Parnassus, just beyond the horizon, and the nightward slits somehow brought in light from the distant, perpetual night.
The peaks of the Angelfire Mountains glowed back at her, their highest point above the horizon and catching the sun’s rays.
Farther around Talmenica’s globe, the night grew icy, deathly cold, but the darkness would be remarkable.
The twilight room stood atop a promontory high, high above the black hollows of Gardonis Gorge.
Behind the ridgeline, so Parnassus’s light only crept over. It was a half hour walk from her home, the little stone cottage a stone’s throw–joke–from her parents’ place. Here in the almost-shadows, she could gather her thoughts and think about what she would do next.
The twilight room’s walls were black, made from artificial slate slabs. Robots had constructed it decades back, milling and reconstituting the stone, installing the bench and the book rack, ensuring that the slots allowed light in the right proportions and air all the time. The door was another piece of slate, hung on brass hinges. The door wall was directly perpendicular to the sun’s rays, so that the door became neither too hot, nor too cold.
Other planets turned, and that was something it took a lot to comprehend.
So many books mentioned it as if it was nothing more intriguing than a dry biscuit or that gravity would make a stone fall if you dropped it.
Days and Nights on the Serengeti. A fascinating book that she often found herself reading again. Even just snippets.
Old Earth’s sun that moved in the sky. Moved.
Crept up from the east, chugged across the sky. It took twelve hours! And the horizon swallowed it up again. On the other side. The west.
How did people even stand up on a place like that? It would be so disconcerting. You would just feel as if the whole world was tumbling away beneath you.
Far better when the sun just did what it should and stayed in one place.
Talshon had been the one who’d explained it to her, long ago. Talmenica was tidally locked to Parnassus. Other planets weren’t. As if they were just drifting loose and randomly. As if there was no tether.
Talshon.
Gone.
Mel took a deep breath.
It wasn’t right. She needed a way to compose herself. Talshon should be right here with her. They should be able to wander through the fields and philosophize. They should be able to just… to just… just spend time together.
Mel swallowed, mouth dry.
She went to book racks and took down an old volume. The binding was leather–wasn’t that amazing?–and the pages were marbled on the edges. A Book of Days. Three hundred and sixty five articles for meditation, creativity and activities.
One a day.
An Earth year. How very quaint.
The book always cheered her. Open to any page and there was something to center on.
She sat back on the tatami and flicked through the pages, stopping on one randomly.
July 16th–Reflections upon my explorations by Luca Pastore.
In the days before powered transport, the man had walked from his home in a town called Torino in a country called Italia, north through Germania, Danimarca and right to the northern reaches of Norvegia. From the sun to the ice. Mel had read it before and it always uplifted her. It was only a few pages, but Pastore’s travels were fascinating.
The forest thickens about our party as night suddenly draws about us. From the dark depths, an owl cries out, eerie and invisible.
Talshon was gone.
It seemed impossible.
The sight of ice floes crowding into the small harbor is a wonderous thing. They jostle on the tide.
Mel took a deep breath.
The door burst open, releasing a flood of dust. The motes sparkled in the light.
“Mel?” someone said.
Crithen. He’d come to find her.
“I’m here,” she said.
He stepped in. Tall, but not as tall as her. He was wearing a light tunic, knee-length socks and black boots. Similar to her own outfit.
“You need to come. Come back home. The investigators have come. They’re looking through your things. They are not being gentle.”
Chapter Two
Captain Arlon Stoddard ran hard in Saphindell’s workout room. The treadmill was a tried and tested way of keeping in shape. His feet thumped on the slippery surface, microfibers twisting fast to give the illusion of running on grass and making good headway, rather than staying in one spot.
Treadmills came from the ancient days, thousands of years ago, when they were simple machines designed to lift barrels of water, or to grind grain. The idea of staying in one spot to transfer energy from your legs to a mechanism was tried and true.
Back then it had been slavery, really, or serfdom. Or poor animals harnessed to a yoke and made to walk in circles.
Arlon’s treadmill had few mechanical parts. No spinning wheels or sliding mat or gearing to adjust the angle. It was a half-grown, quasi-machine. The fibrous carpet was alive in some odd way he didn’t want to think about too much.
Saphindell didn’t want for energy. The ship was efficient and well-powered. Any time they came close to a star, the skin of her hull sucked up huge amounts of radiant energy and stored it for the leap to the next star.
Still, the energy from his running transferred back into the banks. A fraction of what the ship could collect in a moment. Ultimately inefficient. Using the chemical energy of food to drive the mechanical energy of his movement into electrical energy of the treadmill, back into chemical energy of the storage batteries.
But then, he had to work out, so might as well take a joule or two of his expended energy and send it back into something that might keep a display running for a moment. Or maybe a pump in one of the toilets.
He was aging. Working out was growing harder. Older joints and well-used muscles. Even with all the subtle modern tinkerings with cells and metabolisms, everyone still aged. Not as quickly as those serfs indentured back in the dark ages and earlier, but still. Immortality was a long way off.
Just as well, really.
The big display in front of him curved around in a kind of attempt to immerse him in an environment.
The mountains of Talmenica. An intriguing planet, and their destination.
A cluster of unexplained deaths. The local authorities were at a loss and overwhelmed and concerned about corruption and skewed investigations.
Arlon ran on, puffing and sweating. The band strap holding him to the treadmill shook and shuddered. No gravity on the leap, so tethers were required. He barely noticed it.
The mountains on the curved display were remarkable. Sun-blasted and bare on one side, dark and icy on the other.
Like Old Earth’s moon, and just about every moon just about everywhere, Talmenica was locked to its star, Parnassus. The planet completed an orbit every seventeen months and twelve days, standard, and its rotational period was identical.
It kept one hemisphere facing Parnassus, and the other facing out into the void. Permanent day and night, depending on where you stood.
At least with moons, they orbited their planet, so brought their faces around toward the star. Day and night.
Talmenica had no changing day and night.
Heck of a place.
Uninhabitable for the most part. Either it was scorching or just plain frozen. Its atmosphere seethed and roiled. Some of the storms would be remarkable. The temperature gradients were phenomenal.
Parnassus was a big old star. Plenty of energy to pound at the planet, but cool by most standards. A planet with a twenty-four hour rotational period–more or less–would be icy all over at that distance. Not really Goldilocks. Perhaps not even the equator would be inhabitable.
Selemenica’s population essentially lived in a narrow band just a few hundred kilometers across, stretching from the north pole to the south pole and back. The band that divided the sun-beaten eastern hemisphere from the frozen western hemisphere.
Arlon couldn’t wait to get down to the surface. It would have been great to have visited under better circumstances. It would be remarkable to stand in the fields or the forests with the sun low to the horizon and never, ever moving.
“Cap?” a voice said from somewhere in the mountains. “Arlon?”
Holly. His first officer. The best foil he’d ever had.
“Running,” he said. The mountain trail seemed narrow and treacherous. Cliffs dropping away off to the right, a sheer scarp rising to the left, a long, jumbled rockfall ahead. All built from survey photography and resonance. Extrapolated into a kind of fake trail. Perhaps somewhere on the planet there really was a place like this. A twilight, sheltered from the sun by the shadow of the mountains, even while the peaks of other mountains to the west showed bright and stark.
“Good. I’ve got some ideas about what we might be dealing with when we arrive.”
“Go ahead.”
“How about over a meal? With crew? We won’t even be out of the leap for another two hours.”
Leaping between stars took some pretty fine calibration. The leap drive would put them pretty close to the planet, but it still might take hours to effect a landing.
“Give me the precis,” he said.
“It’s time to eat.”
“Now you’re just baiting me. What’s on the menu?”
“Comfrey taqs.”
“Mmm, that’s great.” They’d spent a week on planet Lockley, reviewing some scandalously falsified university research and the crew had discovered comfrey taqs which were now a favorite in the mess. Tightly-rolled flatbreads filled with a complex mix of soft seeds, leafy salad and strips of vatbeet, and baked almost rock hard. They were becoming almost a staple aboard Saphindell.
“Talmenica has an awful lot of clades and divisions,” Holly said.
“I read that.”
“What wasn’t clear, to me at least, was that there is an awful lot of separation between them. Physical gaps with a lot of unoccupied and unclaimed land.”
“I imagine huge swaths of the planet are somewhat unpalatable.” The population was somewhere north of two million, but less than ten percent of the surface was uninhabitable. And plenty of that was water. An ocean just about boiling at one end, and frozen at the other, across a length of less than fifteen hundred kilometers.
“They keep themselves to themselves,” Holly said. “There are administrative relationships, of course, but little contact otherwise.”
“Clear.”
“But here’s what I’ve spotted. There are family links throughout the place.”
“One would assume so.”
“Yes. But in the four clades where the unexplained deaths occurred, there are individual high-level administrators–elected officials–who are direct family. Cousins, and a pair of sisters.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought so. The links aren’t clear just yet.”
“As always, we’ll multiply our knowledge once we land on the planet.”
“Yes we will. Now. Come eat.”
“Let me run another thousand meters and I’ll be with you.”
“Shower first.”
“Thanks for the reminder. Sometimes I forget.”
Holly laughed and the connection ended.
Arlon kept running along the virtual mountain trail. Cousins and siblings. Perhaps it was nothing. That happened from time to time. Things that looked very much like useful clues proved to be nothing more than distraction.
Ahead on the path a small building came into view. Partially lit. Octagonal, two stories high, and with a single door facing him.
He smiled. It was a nice reminder that this odd planet actually was inhabited.
It would be good to get on the ground and see some of it for himself.
He slowed as he came up to the building. There were slots in the walls halfway up, and a kind of vane sticking up from the roof. He couldn’t go inside, of course, since this was just a simulation, but the place seemed peaceful and restful.
Almost at odds with why they were here.
“Arlon,” Holly said through the comms. “Remember to finish.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, and shut off the treadmill. He slowed to a stop and stared into the display for a moment longer.
This was going to be an interesting mission.
Check out the full book available from your favorite retailer from February 28th, $5.99 for the ebook, and $16.99 for the paperback. Available directly from the website now.
As a special celebration of the launch, use the code MarginDwellersLaunch at checkout to get a 50% discount. Valid through until March 7th 2025.
Thanks for reading.
