In a violent storm, Tom Hark lands his shuttlecraft near a rumbling volcano. He'd been trying to find his crewmates' shuttlecraft, which was downed earlier under mysterious and alarming circumstances during a moon phase the local's radio called Double Nocturne. The mothership in orbit is computer-controlled, operating automatically because no on is left on board. Unless Hark can return to the mothership before the set deadline, it will return to the Homeworlds, leaving the crew stranded.
The crew's mission was to replace the Artificial Intelligence left on the planet seventy-five years earlier. Decades ago the AI had failed, but war back on Homeworlds had delayed this mission until now. No one knew what strange influences the AI might have had on the colony's culture in the years of the machine's decent from intelligence to eventual brain death. Hark soon learns that conditions have changed enormously on the planet. No longer is there a Homeworlds modeled civil authority or a democratic society but instead feudal matriarchies that marginalize men. Everything Tom Hark knew, all the facts of life he took for granted were suddenly dangerous heretical assumptions that might get him killed.
So he had to use his wits and whatever other assets he could make valuable. He knew that somewhere on the planet lived a scientist who had witnessed his landing. If he could find her, he might survive the ordeal he currently endured. But Islands conspired against him: its high gravity, its scheming politics, its barbarian customs that threatened to get him killed. By the next Double Nocturne he would either be dead, or safely away. And strangely, love - in this exotically beautiful yet treacherous place - would either damn him or save him.
108,761 words
330 print pages
Genre: Science Fiction
The crew's mission was to replace the Artificial Intelligence left on the planet seventy-five years earlier. Decades ago the AI had failed, but war back on Homeworlds had delayed this mission until now. No one knew what strange influences the AI might have had on the colony's culture in the years of the machine's decent from intelligence to eventual brain death. Hark soon learns that conditions have changed enormously on the planet. No longer is there a Homeworlds modeled civil authority or a democratic society but instead feudal matriarchies that marginalize men. Everything Tom Hark knew, all the facts of life he took for granted were suddenly dangerous heretical assumptions that might get him killed.
So he had to use his wits and whatever other assets he could make valuable. He knew that somewhere on the planet lived a scientist who had witnessed his landing. If he could find her, he might survive the ordeal he currently endured. But Islands conspired against him: its high gravity, its scheming politics, its barbarian customs that threatened to get him killed. By the next Double Nocturne he would either be dead, or safely away. And strangely, love - in this exotically beautiful yet treacherous place - would either damn him or save him.
108,761 words
330 print pages
Genre: Science Fiction
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