Excerpt: Planet of Lies

Yan strode down the beach road, hands in his pockets, kicking aimlessly at the willoos drifting by, watching each globe deform under the impact and then swell slowly back into its accustomed spherical contours as if nothing had happened. When he was younger, he had dreamed of attaching his cot to dozens of them with thread harnesses, to be drawn through the air and over the edge of the Circle into the Waste, or else far out to sea, but experimentation had shown that even the minutest quantity of additional mass would cause them to sag to the ground and scrape to a halt.

He gave a small shudder. If he had floated out to sea.... From the safe, high deck of one of their largest ships, on the occasion when his cradle-year had won a week-long trip to the Outer Isles as the prize for Best Extrapolation of Facts, he had seen a giant, finned tail flick above the waves--and then the immense icthypod had breached, seemingly more than half the size of their ship, as it flung the bitten-through half of another specimen nearly as long as itself dozens of feet into the air. "We are perfectly safe," Instructor Zevah had remarked as he watched, eyes gleaming with excitement, "as long as the ship's field emitters don't fail."

Yan looked out over the gray-blue water again. It was just past high tide Major and the waves were receding inch by inch, leaving behind a lacy swath of glistening foam studded with the black dots of small shells and flotsam. The seaward view from Great Heights was of endless ocean, all the way to the horizon; the Isles, both Outer and Inner, were too distant to be visible.

Floating up over the Circle would have been equally catastrophic, for multiple reasons: first, the katabatic winds that flowed constantly down the slopes of the mountains toward the sea made unpowered ascent impossible; second, willoos or, for that matter, any balloon capable of lifting him over the peaks would burst in the thin atmosphere at the required height, or so he had been assured by his Planetary Sciences Instructor; third, everyone knew that the Circle Waste itself was utterly barren, toxic to all life, and constantly traversed by hideous flesh-eating monsters.

"Worse than mandragores?" he had asked hopefully. Instructor Hethan (Natural Sciences) kept a preserved mandragore fetus in a jar of fluid on her desk.

"Some of them probably are mandragores--the smallest ones," the old woman had muttered ominously.

"What do they eat?" This was exciting!

"Each other, I should think." Hethan began busying herself with an array of flasks.

"But wouldn't they run out?"

"Certainly. That's why it's barren," she said pettishly, and Yan had realized at that moment that almost certainly neither she nor the other instructors had any idea what actually dwelt in the Waste--and refused to admit it.

He sighed wistfully. The idea of exploring a place no one else knew anything about was enticing--the problem, of course, would be living to tell about it. Or getting there alive in the first place.