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    Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters
    Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters
    Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters

    By Aimee Ogden

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A 2021 Nebula Award Nominee!

    One woman will travel to the stars and beyond to save her beloved in this lyrical space opera that reimagines The Little Mermaid.

    Gene-edited human clans have scattered throughout the galaxy, adapting themselves to environments as severe as the desert and the sea. Atuale, the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, sparked a war by choosing her land-dwelling love and rejecting her place among her people. Now her husband and his clan are dying of a virulent plague, and Atuale’s sole hope for finding a cure is to travel off-planet. The one person she can turn to for help is the black-market mercenary known as the World Witch—and Atuale’s former lover. Time, politics, bureaucracy, and her own conflicted desires stand between Atuale and the hope for her adopted clan.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 23, 2021
    ISBN9781250782137
    Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters
    Author

    Aimee Ogden

    Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, was a 2021 Nebula Finalist, and her short story "A Flower Cannot Love the Hand" was a finalist for the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Analog, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She's also the co-editor of Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction. Emergent Properties is her third novella.

    Read more from Aimee Ogden

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    Reviews for Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters

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    • 4/5
      Once upon a time there was a princess who lived under the sea with her father, the king of the sea people. She met a man from the land and fell in love and asked a witch to make it possible for her to live on land. The witch helped and the princess walked the land.

      We all know how that tale ends (well, Andersen and Disney had different ideas but most people know both endings). But this is not a retelling of either version.

      So let's start this tale again. Once upon a time humanity dispersed among the stars, with genetic engineering and technology on a level allowing them to adapt to anything they find out there. Different groups settled on different planets and sometimes in different places on the same planet and changed. Fast forward some time and a princess who lived under the sea fell in love with a man from the land on one of those planet. Add 20 more years and the happy couple and the whole land people clan are in trouble - a plague had struck them and they are dying off. But despite her change and living 20 years with them, our princess, Atuale, is the only one that seems immune - because she is still not the same. And that's where Aimee Ogden opens her tale.

      Atuale resolves to go to the World Witch who helped her change all those years ago. Except that they used to be lovers and they had their own agendas at the time, using each other. Add the 20 years of never meeting and some interesting biological processes happening in the clans (apparently people change gender involuntarily under certain conditions although they can also do that on purpose with technology) and things are a bit more complex than one would expect. The World Witch decides to help of course - but they want their price paid - and part of it is Atuale coming with them to a different world to find the cure.

      Despite the names and the overall fairy tale feeling of these early pages, this is a science fiction tale - the witch works with nannites and other pieces of technology; all of the magically sounding happenings are really tech-related. And once among the stars, the past comes to haunt both of our heroes - in flashbacks and in conversations.

      The end comes a bit too... perfect. It makes sense in the context and it does make sense if you take that as a modern fairy tale but... it misshapes the story a bit - it feels like a balloon getting filled with air and then left to just lose all of it with no attempt to tie it up. I would not have minded it as much if there was a gradual slow down I think but it went from "and now what?" to "and they lived happily ever after" in no time - not abruptly or as if the author did not know what she want to do (it felt planned and it was well done) but it is not how I like my stories to finish. But it works for the story and I cannot be upset that it is not the story I wanted. Part of it I think is that it first lulls you into the fairy tale, then shows you that it is anything but and then throws you back into the fairy tale.

      Aimee Ogden's world (and galaxy) building is fascinating - I wish she had expanded that to a full novel (and I don't say that often for novellas), exploring the multiple threads and hints she just throws out there. Maybe she will revisit the world? The fact that we don't even get proper descriptions of the people we see, not even the main characters (we get elements, you can almost make a picture in your mind and then a new element throws you off) and it still works makes that even more interesting.

      Whatever Ogden does next, I want to read it (and I plan to go back and read her already published short stories).

    Book preview

    Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters - Aimee Ogden

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    Table of Contents

    About the Author

    Copyright Page

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

    Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    For my daughter, for my son: I dreamed of you, too.

    Atuale leaves without saying goodbye.

    Saareval sleeps with his eyes half-closed. She lays a hand lightly on his chest, one more time, to gauge its hitching rise and fall. No better than the day before; no worse either. When she lifts her hand, two of his scales come away clinging to her palm. They fall onto the tectonic ridges of the bedsheet, gray at the growth edge and angry red in the middle—so very different from the cool clay color of her own. She scrapes them into a tiny glass vial and adds it to the pouch strapped around her waist, where it clinks hopefully against more like it: miniature amphorae of blood and lymph.

    She closes her hand into a fist to keep herself from reaching out to touch his face. She longs to wake him, and dares not. He would not stop her from what she plans to do—could not, in the ashes of this all-consuming fever. But if he should open his eyes now, and only look at her with the fear that he might die without her to soothe his slide beneath those forever-waves . . . Atuale is a strong woman, but strength is no barrier to a bone-knife of guilty grief slipped beneath the breastbone. Teluu is gone, she whispers, too softly to wake him. The others will let him know, if he swims up to lucidity later today. Telling him herself is the threadbare excuse she dressed herself in to justify lingering for a last moment here beside him.

    Teluu was the first of the household to take ill. Ten days, scarcely a moment more, and then gone. So fast, so quiet, as if she hadn’t wished to burden the sisterhouse any longer. Saareval is younger than her, stronger too, one of the last to take ill. How long can he hold out, before this fever drags him under its dark surface too? None of the Vo are young enough, strong enough, to fight the plague forever.

    It is not youth or strength that has protected Atuale from illness.

    She slips out of their pairdwelling and through his family’s sisterhouse unnoticed, though the sun casts long shadows through the open windows. Most of his siblings and cousins have taken with the fever now too. Unlike Saareval, they might have tried to stop her, but they lie upon their own sickbeds. Atuale wraps her arm protectively around the case at her waist anyway. A few still-healthy cousins, exhausted from caring for the afflicted, do not stir from their sleep in the common room and the courtyard as Atuale ghosts by on bare, silent feet. Toward a livable future. Toward the bleached-coral bones of her past.

    The plague-stricken town is as silent as the sisterhouse. Not even the tallgrass hung in open windows rustles, for want of wind. A greasy miasma of illness clings to the air, and Atuale takes short, shallow breaths. She walks from the tightly packed sisterhouses of the town center to where the buildings spread farther out from one another and lean gardens can sprawl between one door and the next. Until finally the whole town is at her back and she stands at the top of the cliff-stairs.

    At the bottom, dizzyingly far below, the sea hammers the shore. That stone landing seems a galaxy and more away. Atuale starts walking anyway. At first she tries counting the steps, to numb the pain of the worry that presses behind her eyes. But she loses count time and again. Little clothing drapes her, in the Vo way: only a wide sash that covers her genitals and a shawl to shade her smooth-scaled head and shoulders. Enough protection from the heat for the high-ceilinged sisterhouses, but out here the sun pours its warmth into each and every scale. The steps she takes downward sap the strength from her legs but don’t seem to bring her any closer to sea level—only farther from Saareval.

    Halfway down, she slips on an eroded step and tumbles down three more. Tears clot her vision as she rubs her bruised knees. She picks over her legs, looking for cuts. Looking for infected, color-bled scales. There are none, of course. Guilt flushes her chest, only to be scrubbed quickly away by determination and relief.

    Water from her tin cools the parched salt-tang in her throat and she lies back against the steps, her ribs scraping the stone with each shuddering breath. Halfway down, but the towering cliff has already long since cut her off from any last sights of the silica-sparkling roofs of Keita Vo; even the Observatory has fallen behind the craggy wall. Atuale turns her face away from the empty, stone-split sky.

    Below there is only open ocean for as far as she can see. And on such a cloudless, flung-open day as this one, she can see very far indeed. Atuale balances between two lives, this one and the last, and finds the position more precarious than she would have liked.

    She pushes herself up to a sit, then a stand. Her knees and ankles ache; her shoulders too. This is a small price to pay. She would climb down a staircase as wide as the world is round, if it meant saving Saareval’s life. She would walk the whole way on the points of knives. There will be time to rest when she has secured his safety. Perhaps if she is pleasant, if she remembers the silver-smooth tongue of the Greatclan Lord’s daughter that once she spoke so fluently, she may be able to negotiate a morsel of food, a brief rest of her weary legs before she mounts the cliff-stairs again.

    Or perhaps it would be best to be home sooner. Her throat tightens against tears she has no time to shed. Instead she lets her head fall forward under its own weight to stare down at the green-touched waves that break below. If she leaned forward just a little farther, she would fall.

    She does not think the sea would welcome her return.

    Instead she frowns very hard at the horizon,

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