9780345455833: The Shadows of God
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345455835 ISBN 13: 9780345455833
Verlag: Del Rey, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

On an alternate Earth where the American colonies are led by Benjamin Franklin and a Choctaw shaman, French noblewoman Adrienne de Montchevreuil's magical and scientific powers reveal a shocking secret that brings her allegiances into question. Reprint.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. Gregory Keyes was born in Meridian, Mississippi to a large, diverse, storytelling family. He received degrees in anthropology from Mississippi State and the University of Georgia before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of the Age of Unreason tetrology, The Waterborn, The Blackgod, and the StarWars New Jedi Order novels–Edge of Victory I: Conquest and Edge of Victory II: Rebirth. Greg is currently working on The Briar King, the first book of a new fantasy series, “Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone.” He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Aus dem Klappentext

;INVENTIVE AND EXCITING, FILLED WITH CLEVER DETAILS AND HIGH ADVENTURE, this brings to a close a sequence that seems likely to establish Keyes as one of the more significant and original new fantasy writers to appear in recent years.
Science Fiction Chronicle

As the ruthless forces of Russia lay waste to the New World, English troops make landfall in the east, determined to reconquer the colonies. Trapped in between are the Native Americans, ex-slaves, and European refugees, led by Benjamin Franklin and the Choctaw shaman Red Shoes. But the balance of power rests with the French woman Adrienne de Montchevreuil, whose grasp of science is the equal of Franklin s, whose magic may be stronger than the Choctaw, and whose shocking secret may call into question where her true allegiances lie. . . .

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.

New Paris Benjamin Franklin crouched low on hands and knees, pressing his face toward the ash gray soil. The forest surrounding him chirped, clicked, and hummed lazily in the soggy noontime heat.

A sudden rattling in the branches made him look up, for the forest had proven deceptive, these last few months. Sleepy it might be, but it dreamed of panther, Indian ambush, rattlesnake, and the corpse of Benjamin Franklin.

But it was only a flight of green parakeets, settling into a live oak. For the moment, the forest was not trying to kill Franklin. A Spaniard, this forest: disdaining to do much of anything between noon and three o’clock. So this was a good time to pry at the land’s secrets. Franklin knelt a little lower, wishing the Coweta hadn’t taken his hand lens when they tried to torture him to death. He needed it now. He continued his work with squinting eyes, sat up briefly, scribbled in his book, then peered back at the dirt.

When he heard the footsteps behind him, it was too late. Or would have been, if it hadn’t been a friend.

“Reading our futures there, Sir Wizard?”

Franklin didn’t turn. “Hello, Voltaire,” he said, the belated tingle of alarm fading. “They fascinate me. Look at them.”

The Frenchman crouched beside him, his long arms folded on narrow knees, a merry grin on a face that was mostly pointed chin. “I take it you mean the ants?” he said.

“Of course. See here, how they form a train to supply their city? I followed this one back—it goes to the corpse of an opossum, some twenty yards in that direction. For ants, that would be a distance of leagues, I should think. And here—these that so fiercely guard the citadel when I threaten it. Like guards or warriors.”

“By ‘citadel’ I assume you mean this little mound of earth.”

“Yes. But, again, if you give an ant the stature of a man, how impressive does his mound become?”

“Modestly so if size is the only quality you note. Even so, it would be only a very large, uneven, unlovely mound of earth. Nothing to be compared to, say, the Louvre or the Sistine Chapel.”

“The ants do not build to impress you, my friend. Given our relative proportions, which would have more space for living and working? This mound, with its tight-packed tunnels, or the Sistine Chapel, with its vaulted ceilings—space mostly wasted in vain grandeur? The ant’s eye is all toward efficiency.”

“Ah. They are perhaps German, then, or English. There are no French ants, I suppose?”

“Butterflies I suppose to be French,” Franklin replied good- naturedly. “Fireflies and lacewings.”

“Would that you were right.” The philosopher sighed. “But it was no horde of butterflies that laid waste Europe, no lacewing that left that hole where once London was.”

“No, I suppose not,” Franklin said absently. He bent to watch two ants meet. They seemed to exchange information of some sort, then scurried off purposefully.

“No empty greetings or pleasantries, I’ll wager,” Franklin murmured, “no small comments. It’s all business with them. The food is there, danger is here, the south tunnel needs repair.”

“You admire them, then?”

Franklin looked up at last, his brow furrowed slightly. “They interest me. Each time we stop, I try to find one of their cities, and indeed they are everywhere. It is not so much to say, I think, that below our feet, scarcely noticed, is an empire we are all but unaware of. Seen from the right prospect, the world could be said to be ruled by ants.”

“Yes? And yet now that you have brought them to my notice, I could destroy their great city there. I could bring this outpost of empire to naught.”

Franklin dusted his hands on his breeches and stood. “Four days ago we passed over ground still smoking. Everything green was burned, and all four-footed things had either fled or succumbed. I found ant cities there scorched black by what must have been terrific heat—and yet they were there. Knock down a mound, and it will be refurbished in the space of a day or two. And then there are the million cities elsewhere, scattered over all the world. For all our greater size and knowledge, I can think of no way we could destroy the race of ants, not utterly.”

“Now I see your studies have a more than theoretical bent,” Voltaire said. “Who do you liken to the ants—mankind or the malakim?”

The very word still sent a tremor through Franklin. He wished his old mentor, Sir Isaac, had named them differently—from the Latin or Greek rather than from the Hebrew. The latter held too much of the fear and fire of the Old Testament.

But then, the malakim were fear and fire.

“We are their ants, I think,” Franklin replied, “living beneath their heels, usually unnoticed. Occasionally we notice them—and worship them as gods, angels, or devils. And occasionally they notice us in turn and grind us beneath their heels.”

“But never all of us, no more than we could grind out all the ants. Is that what you’re saying?”

“They’ve failed until now. But we haven’t learned the trick of setting the ants against each other, to pit one city against another and send warriors to the deepest chambers of their catacombs. But the malakim seem to have perfected the science of turning man against man. There are men happily inventing more ways for those aetheric devils to kill us every day.”

Voltaire nodded. “The malakim seem quite determined to exterminate us. More determined than I should be to destroy the kingdom of ants.”

“Perhaps if you had been stung enough, you would have a different opinion. I’ve heard that in the Amazon, there are ants that march as an army and can strip clean a living man in a few heartbeats.”

“The ants turning the tables and destroying the man? Would that we could be such ants, then, so we might pick clean the bones of our unseen enemy,” Voltaire commented. “For—”

“God’s sake, are you two at it again?”

Franklin and Voltaire turned to face the new speaker, a handsome fellow with flowing auburn hair, dressed in buckskin breeches and the shabby remains of a burgundy justaucorps.

“Hello, Robin.”

Robert Nairne leaned against a tree, folding his arms. “The world is all at war, with the angels themselves against us. We wander starvin’ in the wilderness, blood-lusty Indians at our heels, and you fellows are talkin philosophy t’ worms an’ such.”

Franklin shrugged and grinned. “The mind is an insatiate master—it demands substance even when the belly has none.”

“My poor brain has enough to chew on, trying to figure ways to help us come through this alive,” Robert commented dryly.

“And right well you do at it,” Franklin said cheerfully. “But between you, Captain McPherson and his rangers, and Don Pedro’s braves, that’s all well covered, I trust. I don’t know how to follow a trail or find fresh water, and you’ve seen me hunt! I’m best used thinking of our higher problems.”

“So, have the crawlies told you how to defeat all the armies arrayed against us, with our thirty-odd stout fellows?”

“They certainly give me ideas,” Franklin replied, feeling a bit defensive despite his oddly buoyant mood. After all, Robert was right: any sober and...

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Verlag
Del Rey
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345455835
ISBN 13 
9780345455833
Einband
Taschenbuch
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