SELA: The Abyss

In Sela: The Abyss, shifting dimensions on an abandoned planet fill the mind of a woman who believes she once lived in its thrall across eons of time, as a star warrior.

Yet did she go to the place, an outreach beyond the known universe? Or is the memory a remnant of some random game played by her brain as it senses its own imminent destruction?

What of her memory of Ren, the sarcastic and devious ruler of a starship who insists she explore the planet and find a hidden portal? What of Goren, whose love for her is both twisted and futile? Most of all, what of Randall, her best friend, who tells her what paradise can be before he is taken from her?

The planet carries voices and landscapes that change constantly. Scenes from the past and future emerge out of the air and play out on the flat sand, leading Sela and Goren ever closer to an abyss that lies waiting to open. Yet for Sela there is more, something sensed from childhood, an awareness that what is also waiting can transcend everything, forever.

Is it all true? Or is memory the greatest deceiver?

EXCERPT from SELA: The Abyss

The ship moved slowly past the orphan and she watched the dust storms roll over the barren landscape. She’d been so sure about what they would find, had persuaded the team, insisted she was right. But she had failed.

A single road snaked across the surface of a world they couldn’t access. She wanted to slam her hands against the viewer in frustration, but that wouldn’t do. Containment, love, is the secret, Randall had told her. Let them see only what you want them to see—nothing extra.

Such a good friend to her. Dying so quickly, ravaged in days by the contamination. He kept a smile to the end and she wondered how he could do that and asked him. Oh, Sela, serious Sela—this is only a part of me, not all of it. I’m about to see so much more, don’t you know? It would be their last conversation. She didn’t have his faith, but she welcomed the solace it gave to him, for in the end, in the last hour, even while unconscious, the disease sent his body into convulsions. The pain level was so high it kept his face contorted. She’d seen the scars formed where the skin had split.

“Can’t you help him?” she asked the doctors. They felt insulted, and after that refused to tell her anything at all. She was not family, they said. But Randall had no family, all of them lost to the same disease, a genetic aberration no one could control.

“You lived your whole life expecting this,” she said to him in his hospital room, his body twitching and jerking under the influence of both the disease and the drugs. “I still don’t understand how you could do that,” she whispered.

What had made her remember him now? Yes. It was because she was so angry. He had cautioned her. He had spent so much time explaining why she had to be careful, to reveal nothing. Calinar is your reality. Only you and I know this. Now she held the knowledge alone, and what was she supposed to do with it? She hadn’t entirely known what he meant. What did it matter anymore?

The warning whistle cut through her thoughts, the third and last signal.

Book categories: Metaphysical/Science Fiction and Science Fiction