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Undertow, by Elizabeth Bear
Ebook Undertow, by Elizabeth Bear
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A frontier world on the back end of nowhere is the sort of place people go to get lost. And some of those people have secrets worth hiding, secrets that can change the future–assuming there is one. . . .
André Deschênes is a hired assassin, but he wants to be so much more. If only he can find a teacher who will forgive his murderous past–and train him to manipulate odds and control probability. It’s called the art of conjuring, and it’s André’s only route to freedom. For the world he lives on is run by the ruthless Charter Trade Company, and his floating city, Novo Haven, is little more than a company town where humans and aliens alike either work for one tyrannical family–or are destroyed by it. But beneath Novo Haven’s murky waters, within its tangled bayous, reedy banks, and back alleys, revolution is stirring. And one more death may be all it takes to shift the balance. . . .
- Sales Rank: #2520121 in Books
- Brand: Bear, Elizabeth
- Published on: 2007-07-31
- Released on: 2007-07-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.87" h x .75" w x 4.28" l,
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 368 pages
From Booklist
Novo Haven, a floating city on Greene's World, is a place people go to to escape. Andre Deschenes is a very good assassin but wants to branch out into conjuring, manipulating probability, and changing odds, if he can find someone willing to teach him. The world is controlled by the ruthless Charter Trade Company, which knows of more undercurrents flowing in this backwater than it wants to acknowledge: mining is eroding the native population, the ranids; the material being mined is no ordinary substance; and mining operations are destroying the planet. No one in the company wants to admit that the ranids constitute a civilization, though there are those who want the ranids freed of their servitude to the Company. One such is Lucienne Spivak. When Andre kills her to fulfill a contract, the gears of revolution start turning. Bear's perfectly paced story features fascinating characters, complex plotting, and brilliantly imagined aliens. Thought-provoking as well as entertaining, it further demonstrates the strength of Bear's storytelling. Schroeder, Regina
About the Author
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same say as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with her childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, has led inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. Her hobbies include incompetent archery, practicing guitar, and reading biographies of Elizabethan playmenders.
She is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for best New Writer and the author of over a dozen published or forthcoming novels, including the Locus Award-winning Jenny Casey trilogy and the Phillip K. Dick Award-nominated Carnival. A native New Englander, she spent seven years near Las Vegas, but now lives in Connecticut with a presumptuous cat.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
THE MORNING AFTER HE KILLED EUGENE SHAPIRO, ANDRÉ Deschênes woke early. Before his headset warble ended, he rolled from the bed and landed palms-down on the deck of his bedroom. He slept in loose white trousers; nudity implied vulnerability. The raw breeze through the long windows above his bed roughened his shoulders, scalp, and nape. A clap punctuated each push-up, and he followed the set with five sun salutations to warm up and release his muscles.
He dressed and skinned and was out the door in minutes.
His footfalls chased him through the leaden morning. Roaches and rats scattered before him: humanity's companions all the way to the stars. The air was thick with the promise of rain; André's skin steamed before he'd run five hundred meters. The tide was in, the streets riding high on the pilings, and though he ran through a commercial zone, his filters held. Just one pop-ad penetrated, and he squelched it with an eyeflick.
In André's neighborhood, the streets were wood slat, floating piers independent of the houses and shops moored to them. They echoed under his running shoes, a hollow thump-thump-thump still unadulterated by other sounds.
He might have been the only one awake in all of Novo Haven. If he lived on Bayside, he would have seen the fishing boats and tenders sliding gulfward with the first light of morning. But from here, only thin channels of bay were visible between the floating streets and under the bridges, and the dinghies and scooters and small boats were still moored by the various steps that led up to street level. He passed more shops than houses; above them on the flat-decked, seaworthy cruisers were second-floor apartments with lifts or spiral walk-ups, but the lower levels had shuttered windows suitable for opening to catch sunlight and the attention of passersby. Ladders and gangplanks ran down to the water, where small craft waited and taxi drivers read the news and drank their coffee.
Andre ran by greengrocers and tackle shops, a geomancer's, an interface outlet, two brothels, a fixit shop for headsets and other implants, a skin-and-fashion store, a corner clinic, a beautician's parlor, and a Chinese restaurant. The bakery on Seagrove wasn't open yet, but good smells emanated from the back, and the clang of pans on counters rattled through the screen door.
He almost tripped crossing up onto the sidewalk beside the 400 "barge"—actually, a twenty-meter cruiser ringed with boardwalks and lashed to pilings. The barge was lower in the water than code permitted, and loosely moored. The sidewalk dipped alarmingly when his weight hit it, but he skipped a step and kept running. More cooking smells now, the distant sound of engines, lights flicking off over doorways as the landward sky paled gold. Someone ran on ahead, a woman with golden skin and black hair clubbed at the nape of her neck, her small breasts bouncing in a crimson sport top. He magnified her, recognized her, and decided she was a good enough reason to run faster. But she turned to port, down Amaryllis, between the white-and-pastel apartment blocks, and his road lay straight on. He didn't want to look too eager.
He wasn't jogging now but running, hard out, breath whistling between his teeth in misty streamers. His heels hit staccato, the street rocking under his stride. He counted breaths, pulling his elbows back each time his arms pumped, feeling the pivot and snap of each foot as it landed, as it left the slats again.
Running was good. Mornings were good. The wet air scraped his throat, chilled his lungs as he sucked it in, shoved it out again. Running hard, running cold, running over the water as the sun warmed the roof peaks and the streets began to hum.
His route was a circle. Or a ragged ungeometric circuit, which brought him panting back down Seagrove just as the bakery's armored shutters glided up, revealing the cheery blues and yellows of an interior bathed in full-spectrum light. Awnings, also automated, fanned out to shade the street. The light off the water would be brutal when the sun got past the rooflines. The fortune-teller next door wouldn't open until after lunchtime, but his awnings rolled out as well. A public service.
André let his pace drop to a trot, a jog, a stumbling amble. Sweat, and perhaps some condensation, slid down his chilled face, stung his eyes, and scattered off his nose. He slapped his biceps and thighs to get some heat into the skin, which felt like wax fruit. He set his status as unavailable when he ran—he liked the morning clean—but only an idiot would completely drop connex. So it was uncomplicated to check the price of bread on his headset. Citywide, it was a bit lower than the Seagrove bakery broadcast, but this was fresh and here and it smelled good. He transferred credit as he was walking up; one of the bakers, wearing a tall white hat and a skin that made blue and gold sparkles in the depths of her irises, handed him a warm semipermeable bag over the window ledge. "Thanks, Jacinta," he said. She winked at him, that eye flashing for an instant, brilliant gold.
André wasn't wearing a cosmetic himself, so he contented himself with a grin. He wiped sweat on his
bare arm, flicked the droplets over the channel, and watched the ripples as some lurking fish disappointed themselves on the mouthfuls.
Jacinta tapped a golden loaf steaming gently on a cutting board. It made a hollow sound. The scent rose sweetly. "Want a slice?"
It smelled of cinnamon and raisins. "Can't eat until I wash," he said. "But thank you."
Back at his house—the 1100 barge of Redbridge—he walked through the security field, which recognized the hard code access in his headset and let him in without so much as a tingle. He dropped off the loaf of rye, showered, depilated his scalp, trimmed his beard, and dressed. The sharp suit of gold-shot scarlet was Earth silk with an autofit. He inspected his image as rebroadcast into the headset, activated his stock ticker, chat boxes, news scroll, and the standard informational detritus of his daily connex. His cousin Maryanne thought he was weird to leave it off in the morning—she probably reached for her connex the way her great-great-grandfather would have reached for his glasses—but the run with nobody in his head kept him centered. He thought of it as moving meditation, one brief chance to arrive at silence before swimming into the currents of the day.
He patted his house on the door to let it know he was leaving, stepped into his work shoes, picked up his walking stick, and went.
It was early yet, and André was his own boss. But there were messages to be answered, and he had rules about bringing work home.
It took him longer to walk in than he'd anticipated, and not because he strode through morning traffic now. Halfway down Fairview, when the shakes from exertion had finally settled out of his calves, an attention signal pinged at the corner of his field. His heart skipped painfully when he caught the ident.
He slowed, turned as if watching a bird dip-glide across the water. He crossed wavering slats and balanced by the rail, the red blooms of a genemod geranium brushing his ankle. The woman who walked toward him through the crowd wore saffron: flowing trousers and an ankle-length open tunic over a white, square-necked blouse. Gold and citrine sparkled along the hollow of her throat; her hair was as sleek and black as it had been when he saw her running, but now it fell forward, framing her cheekbones and chin.
"M~ Zhou," he said, as she hooked the right-side locks behind her ear. "How kind of you to see me in person."
"Let's walk," she answered, taking his elbow and turning him with her fingertips, so he fell into step alongside her. They walked in silence along the awning-shaded street until he cleared his throat and glanced at her sidelong.
"Are we drawing out the anticipation, mambo?"
"Oh, very funny." There were more geraniums, their red as bright as snapping banners. The shopkeepers along this stretch had interplanted the stainless-steel city beautification buckets with kleenexplant and paperwhites, and the sweet aromas mingled with the sharp herbal note of the geranium.
Which made André sneeze. He filtered them out.
"Actually, it was a serious question. You must have thought about my offer." Or she'd not have come to find him, even if she had noticed him giving chase that morning.
"I wonder why you think you want to conjure."
Not an unexpected question, but he gave it a show of consideration. "Why I think I want it? Or why I do want it?"
"That's a question I can't answer for you." Her fingers had gone from resting lightly on the bone of his elbow to threading through the crook. He permitted her to steer him.
The crowds thinned as they walked, but the second wave would emerge soon—those who did not choose to separate their home and work lives but who telepresenced, and who came out for their daily bread and fish and produce after the rush had faded. Or those who worked on other planets, and could do as well sitting in a café under a parasol, uplinked lag-free through a quantum connection, as they could in an overpriced office on Bayside, where you paid for the view and walked sixty barges to the nearest coffee shop because the rents were so high.
"Croissant?" Ziyi Zhou asked him, gesturing to an open-air café with a few lingering customers.
"Maryanne will kill me if I don't eat at the office," André said, excusing himself with a one-shouldered shrug. M~ Zhou was holding his right arm. He rubbed at his beard with the left hand. "But I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee."
She stepped back, but not before she squeezed his arm. "You're good at that."
"Dodging questions?"
A good try, but she gave him not even a quirk of smile back. "Establishing a claim on people."
He shrugged again, acknowledgment this time, and spread his hands. He had to squint at M~ Zhou through the sunlight. Fat biting flies zoomed overhead, hunting in pairs; he swatted them away backhanded. Somewhere back there was a reptile brain that never quite trusted technology. She did smile this time. "Does that mean you're ready to answer the question now, André?"
"I can't imagine an answer that isn't something you've already heard a thousand times, M~ Zhou. Should I tell you that it's because I applied to Rim's Exigency Corps for training as a coincidence engineer when I was twenty, and the god-botherers wouldn't take me? That I never wanted to be anything else? That I grew up on the idea of the corps as the people who were going to save the universe? It's all quite embarrassing when you try to put it into words."
"So you're a romantic?"
He crossed his arms and felt the sun on his shoulders. The biters came back around, but this time zoomed off in pursuit of someone wearing a blue-lavender sunblouse before they got within swatting range. "I have to be."
Eyes wide, she looked up at him. "Would you hand a child a loaded gun, André?"
"Depending on the child—"
"—exactly. Depending on the child. Maybe one in a thousand, you could trust to do more good than harm with such a thing. So prove to me that you're that one in a thousand."
He hadn't expected it to be easy. "A virtuous life by example isn't enough?"
She snorted. "I know what you do. You have your own ways of influencing the future, M~ Deschênes."
A retreat from the first name. Calculated, like everything else about her. "It's a living. And that concerns you? Because I do adhere to certain ethical standards."
The twist of her mouth told him everything he needed to know. There was no point in arguing situational ethics in a society in which skinning, data mining, and routine privacy invasions were a matter of course.
André dated an archinformist. Personally, he thought what he did was more ethical. He just killed people. Cricket took apart their lives, everything they might have backed up, relegated to hard memory, recorded on their headsets or in the data holds. Only wet memory was safe from her and her data-mining fellows, both those who worked for Rim and Core—the Rim and Core of the Earth-settled territories, not the rim and core of the galaxy, though to judge by popular entertainment broadcasts a lot of people didn't know the difference—and those who went freelance.
And without people like her, without the absolute knowledge of the stuff of people's lives, the kinds of manipulations conjures like Ziyi Zhou and licensed coincidence engineers performed would be impossible.
Never mind skinning your boss into an anteater, or secretly holocording the girl in the next cube so you could take her home and do whatever you wanted to her avatar . . . Compared to what M~ Zhou did in running people's lives for them, determining their fates, André's professional modus operandi of a quick, untelegraphed, painless death was as humane as it got.
For one thing, if his subjects ever so much as knew he was coming, he had erred badly. He didn't take cruelty jobs. And an encounter with him was the best most of his subjects could have hoped for.
If he came looking for somebody, they'd earned the visit.
It was a more honest trade than conjure, he thought bitterly. How dare Zhou hold that over him?
But there was no way to say that, not when he was asking her to teach him. Because he knew what the next question would be, then—a reiteration. So if you think it's wrong, why do you want to do it?
And he knew the answer, too. Not just passion, though the passion was there, and he would have sold himself to Core to get it and taken their damned destiny lock, let himself be chained to their service forever. But something else, the thing he was scared of losing. And yes, he was aware of the conflict implicit in that as well, though he wouldn't call it—quite—hypocrisy.
Maybe bargaining.
What André wanted was control. And self-defense, of course, but to pretend that was all of it would be self-deception. He gave her the second half.
"I want to be able to take care of myself," he said. "I'll run up on people who have the mojo working for them. Who've paid somebody like you or Jean Gris or one of the others"—one of the lessers, because every other conjure in Novo Haven, hell, every other conjure on Greene's World, was lesser than Ziyi Zhou or Jean Kroc, who they called Jean Gris—"or who've sold themselves to Rim for the protection. And I need a little mojo of my own."
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Keeps your eyeballs popping!
By Kristin L. Lundgren
Elizabeth Bear's Undertow (a Philip K. Dick award finalist) is the book that fulfilled what I want in a book - it crystallized my amorphous ideas about what I wanted and literally showed me - it's eyeball-popping finale really melded the book into a cohesive whole, tied up the loose ends, and gave me the thrill I needed. As an author, she has always satisfied me (her Jenny Casey trilogy), but in this book she was in top form - it's semi-mystical beginnings, unsavory characters, and odd, Louisiana Bayou Company Town setting, plus a very unusual alien species, made the beginning questionable - what have I gotten my self into? Were Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired a fluke - was that all she had? Well, Undertow answered that with a resounding NO!
One thing that stood out was that she used a different type of future - a non-Singularity future, which I enjoyed. So much SF these days, when dealing with the Far Future, uses that. But it is filled with lots of high-tech - wearables, the connex mentioned. Basically everyone, except a few who chose to live "off the grid" so to speak, are completely wired in - they get instant news, houses are responsive and security runs high. And the way the whole city/town can just pick up and move is sooo different. Even the aliens are (the information is dribbled out over the course of the novel) inventive and use all the possible elements that can be done - nothing about them are giant lizards, or talking trees.
There has been some negative comparisons to The Secret, because, as she is not a quantum engineer, her explanations of some of it's aspects used in the book are minimal - but as both a Hard SF nutcase, AND an under science-educated reader, it hit a chord - I loved not being overwhelmed with technical detail, but still be able to "follow" the idea behind the quantum theory, which is one of the reasons I got into Hard SF - Baxter's Manifold: Space was full of mind-boggling stuff, and although I didn't understand it all, I didn't have to - the mere idea that these things exist, or are theorized to exist, is enough to set your world on end.
Some reviews have focused on the use of the probability futures, and it's cursory explanations - they want more detail. I, on the other hand, don't need that - I just need the author to set me on the path, and get me fired up, and off I go. I LIKE not being in a lecture hall, but instead, given ideas that make me THINK, and want to run to my nearest Hawking book, or other QM one, and do some research on my own. Too much detail strays the story off it's path, IMO.
Undertow set the bar quite high for me, which is probably why I've been so hard on A Fire Upon the Deep by Vinge. This book makes the others look amateurish, dull, wordy and unimaginative. Undertow accomplishes in it's short (368) pages, what AFUTD (624) couldn't do in almost twice the length.
I urge you to give it a try - if you've read the Casey trilogy, it's nothing like it. This is NOT your grandmother's book. It's cool, mysterious, shadowy, full of fun, capers, plots and counter-plots, treason and treachery, and all set within an incredibly complex setting, more so as the book goes on, and as I have repeatedly said, the push to the ending is enough to make you think your trippin'.
So, do me and yourself a favor - if you like fresh, new, exciting, genre -bending SF/Fantasy (SFF), then read it. Support your local SF writer! If you prefer your SF to remain in it's cozy, set genre, then don't.
Have a wild ride (and stay on the horse - it might want to buck you off at first, but if you persevere, and are the kind of reader I mentioned, then the ride will be one worth all you've given it).
This is from my blog and stripped off all references to other reviews, and interviews, etc. You can read the whole thing at [...]
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Hard SF with a conscience
By lb136
"Undertow," the latest novel from the amazingly creative Elizabeth Bear, packs sin, redemption, virtual reality, probability and statistics, quantum physics, and Borgesian forking paths into its 332 pages. There are floating cities, intelligent amphibians, killers who want to learn to manipulate reality, and, oh yes, instant transmission of matter, but not living matter--or is there? And did I mention the clones?
Its nominal hero, Andre, is a hired assassin who kills the best friend of his girlfriend Cricket in a contract hit. She knows it's him, but nevertheless she and her male colleague, Jean, help the ambitious Andre learn to be a "god botherer"--somebody who can manipulate probability. That's easy enough to do on this planet. What's harder to do is instill some sort of conscience in Andre. The story's plot revolves around whether he will in time acquire one.
The author, as is her style, uses multiple povs to develop her story. We view things at different times through the eyes of Andre, Cricket, Jean, the amphibians known as ranids or "froggies" (think "wogs"), and agents of the vicious corporation that controls the planet (think the British East India Company of the 19th century).
In lesser hands, a tale like this could easily spin out of control, but fortunately Ms. Bear doesn't let this happen, and the last quarter of the book is quite astonishing. It isn't all that much of a stretch to compare some of its passages with Joseph Conrad's.
A must read.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Impressive!
By April
I had been wondering if hard SF was dead, but it seems alive and kicking into new worlds and futures in this book.
There is a LOT going on, packed into non-stop action. There's Andre who makes a living as an assassin (someone has to do it--it's just a job, no worse than most). There's Cricket, Andre's girlfriend, an archinformist (a data-miner of the ubiquitous headsets and data holds). There are conjures and licensed coincidence engineers, those who can manipulate probabilities by observing them in a certain way, something that runs in Andre's family and something he aspires to rather than his job. There is the instant transmission of matter, but not of living things (since being able to observe it messes up the transmission). There's Earth and the Core worlds and then the wild Rim, where Green's World is located--absolutely ruled by the Charter Trade Company with a vested interest in exporting a resource that is mined by the no-tech (and therefore exploitable by law) natives, the water-based ranids or "froggies." There is the floating city of Novo Haven, with its lashed-together barges and wired inhabitants. There are the wild bayous with the ranids and perhaps some ranid revolutionaries and the Greens and humans who are pro-ranids. There is ranid physiology and communication and society. And there is the situation where the Company wants someone with sensitive information to be killed and Andre figures he should do it since it'll be either him or someone else--even though the target turns out to be his lover Cricket's friend, Lucienne, who is the girlfriend of a conjure who Andre had hoped to convince to teach him...
If that's not enough to begin with, then don't read this book. It just gets crazier from there. Add in explosions and agents and rebels and retaliatory massacres and possible genocide and probability storms... There is not a dull minute in this book.
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