Cover by Rocky Kelley

As we barrel toward the August 29 premiere of Rayguns Over Texas at LoneStarCon 3 (aka the 71st Annual World Science Fiction Convention) in San Antonio, I am presenting book excerpts, one contributor per day.

Today’s selection comes from Jessica Reisman‘s “The Chambered Eye.”

Jessica Reisman’s imaginative coming-of-age tale introduces a truly alien society. Sebira, a mind reader in a traveling show, fears for her future as her abilities go awry.

My flash gear earned looks. I wore colors that ached in the peripheral vision, mirrors and holo-bead designs in my layered rags; the show performers all made sure to be a walking advert for Gamboges Vivant when we hit public places.

A woman walked by me with her gaze down, a worried expression tightening the lines of her face. “It will be today,” I said, easy and just ever so singsong. I can’t really tell you what else I sensed, but I sensed, and I read what I sensed. “Today — and in your favor, don’t worry.” Her wary expression dissolved into a smile as she took in my appearance and what I was saying.

“Tell him,” I said next, to a tall, thick man in the coverall of a maintenance tech, “tell him that you love him.” He colored over and ducked his head.

“Guys, a seer!” a boy called to his pod and three of them gathered round me. Seers is what people call reader-teller performers. We don’t see, though, we sense, and then interpret. I found something in each of them, in their bearing, and in the things that connected them, and gave them the happy news that the fourth member of their pod, back in crèche for tests, would be fine and with them again soon.

Readers, we only read what’s there to be read, but isn’t by most folks. We should just be called understanders, or interpreters, or something. Calling us seers is just to make us grand and magic for the show.

I read a bunch more folks, singles and pods, as they came by, spreading the word about the show as I did. When Gilley came to collect me I was starving and euphoric. It isn’t like that for every reader. Some get sad, or so tired they have to sleep. I love it. Hassif’s like me and Mika gets sad, but in what she calls a luxurious way, so she kind of likes it; Ben, though, always sounds a little insane. It’s like he thinks he’s reading the world, or the air. We use it in the show, but it makes the rest of us nervous.

There are stories about readers — one member or an entire pod — that’ve gone wrong, their genesets a sequence off from stable. Mad, ill, broken — taken back to a sector crèche and never heard of again. Reader pods weren’t common; the geneset was, at that time, one of the most experimental.

Gilley handed me a spiced fish bun. The Wulf-cart, loaded with vegetables, oil-paper packets of fish and seaweeds, sacks of grain and spices, and a big jar of honey, rolled behind her with its rope tail swaying. Something pale swam through the corner of my vision, like a fish tracing a figure in the currents of the air. I brushed a hand over my
eye, pushed my hair back, but my hair is dark, not pale, so it wasn’t my hair I was seeing from the corner of my eye. It came again, a graceful creature of lace and almost-there color describing a figure that tried to say things to me, in that place between my forehead and the back of my shoulders where reading happened.

Then it was gone and I dismissed it as we walked back through the train yard, a maze of inlets, docks, float tracks and seatrains, great hulking supply movers and sleek but ornate hotel cars from out of the east, coral frames and cuttlefish skins, all festooned with seabirds, the sky above full of their flight and cries.

We were coming around one of the scuffed heavy supply engines, rocking slightly at its mooring, when pain pulsed through me, just below my stomach.

I made a noise and Gilley said “What?”

“Hurts,” I said, pressing a palm over the pain.

“You ate too fast,” Gilley said.

“I always eat fast,” I said; another sling of pain down through my middle and into my thighs made me whimper.

By the time we got back to the show grounds, just beyond the main train yard, my thighs and arms were trembling. The show was bright and alive with activity in the full morning light, the sea an endless shifting beyond.

I ignored everyone and everything and headed along the dock to my pod’s train car. Hassif was still there and I just mumbled something to him, feeling like I was going to die as I dove for my bunk and curled into a tight knot.

It didn’t help. Polyps and mollusks, I cursed in my own head, what is wrong with me?

Excerpt of “The Chambered Eye” © 2013 by Jessica Reisman.