Halfling Moon Read online

  Boss Conrad himself stood in a crowd of cats -- several dozen by his estimate. He'd been warned that the proximity of the Clutch drive might have unexpected effects, and certainly the sudden appearance of so many cats, streaming from the fields, from the sheds, from the rocks -- was unexpected.

  Also unexpected was the absolute calm Yulie Shaper exhibited, as if whatever demons he usually had to deal with were exorcised by the drive's beneficent fields.

  Pat Rin, for his part, was well-traveled; as passenger and pilot he'd been shipboard many times when approaching foreign worlds, satellites, and stations, and he found the experience just barely containable: there were no walls, no comforting calls of station managers, nothing ordinary whatsoever about this vision. He knew more than most what the size of things were and the size and expanse of this was beyond his knowledge. Something that size should not move, that was what he knew. The moon nearly touched the planet's surface, the wind rushed and carried odors of space and time and strangeness with it.

  Whatever downward progress had been made, it all paused at once, though stones and ice, dust and clouds continued to fall. Something very strange was happening now, as the bottom surface of the moon appeared to vibrate and -- but there was no human word for the process, which occurred within their sight over the yawning chasm of the place they both now called World's End.

  An earthquake's worth of sound beat at them, the ground shook, trembled, bellowed, vibrated -- and was calm.

  For a moment or two the only sound was that of cats, huddled now near the people in as much awe as they were, and then a hiss, and more wind, and the surprisingly familiar odor of wood and leaf.

  Almost imperceptibly, the moon-thing that filled their vision and covered the land rotated, spinning very, very slowly on an axis and then it was rising . . . rising, rising, the sounds of falling dust and noisy birds and earth trembles giving way to a rush and almost a thunderclap as the moon, disgorging the impossible thing within it, lifted, and spinning more strongly, wafted away.

  Amid the haze and winds stood a massive new tower of green, the upper fronds of the tree catching the failing light as the base was in shadow, the whole seeming now to have been too big to have landed within the moon, far too alive to have come through space. The birds, still alight from the rising of the moon, swirled toward it, their calls echoing from the land and sky.

  Pat Rin yos'Phelium, Clan Korval, bowed to the clan's still astounded new neighbor.

  "The tree's roots grew with the bounds of the house, you see, and so we brought both. Necessity, sir, necessity."

  Using his chin, Pat Rin indicated the low structure beneath the branches . . . "The house is there, where the dust settles even now."

  Pat Rin sighed, waved his hand toward the lip of World's End, now full to within paces of Shaper's land.

  "I believe that, if we start walking now, we can explain the rules of the contract to my kin very soon. As a clan, we're somewhat familiar with contracts."

  About the Authors

  Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are the celebrated co-authors of the best-selling Liaden Universe® series and have been writing together since the first "Kinzel" stories hit Fantasy Book in the early 1980s. They started the first Liaden story in 1984 and have published a dozen novels and several dozen short works in that series alone.

  Along the way they've become fan favorites at SF conventions from California, USA to Fredericton, Canada, with Guest of Honor and Special Guest appearances at PenguiCon, COSine, AlbaCon, Trinoc*con, ConDuit, MarsCon, ShevaCon, BaltiCon, PortConMaine, SiliCon, Second Life Library, and elsewhere. Upcoming Guest of Honor apperances include Oasis 23 in Orlando, Florida in May 2010 and DucKon 19 in Napierville, Illinois in June 2010.

  They count Baen, Del Rey, Meisha Merlin, Ace Books, Phobos, and Buzzy Multimedia among their English language publishers and have several foreign language publishers as well. Their short fiction, written both jointly and singly, has appeared in Absolute Magnitude, Catfantastic, Dreams of Decadence, Fantasy Book, Such a Pretty Face, 3SF, and several incarnations of Amazing.

  Their work has enjoyed a number of award nominations, with Scout's Progress being selected for the Prism Award for Best Futuristic Romance of 2001 and Local Custom finishing second for the same award. Local Custom was published by Buzzy Multimedia as an audio book read by Michael Shanks --Stargate's Daniel. Balance of Trade, appeared in hardcover in February 2004 and hit Amazon.com genre bestseller lists before going on to win the Hal Clement Award as Best YA Science fiction for the year.

  Their most recent Liaden novel is Fledgling, published in September of 2009, with Saltation (sequel to Fledgling) and Mouse and Dragon (sequel to Scout's Progress) due in 2010. Baen will also be reprinting the original ten Liaden novels in four omnibus editions starting in 2010. The authors have several other works in progress.

  Steve was Founding Curator of Science Fiction for the University of Maryland's SF Research Collection as well as Vice Chair of the Baltimore in 80 WorldCon bid, while Sharon has been Executive Director, Vice President, and President of the Science Fiction Writers of America; together they were BPLAN Virtuals, an ebook publisher in the late 1980s. These backgrounds give them a unique perspective on the science fiction field.