When they finally sprouted in the self-watering window box he kept in his office, he was mildly disappointed. Hoping for something exotic, he found himself caring instead for a dense fresh growth of jugla. A common roadside weed, jugla at least had somewhat attractive, small yellow flowers. The upside was that they wouldn't require much attention to thrive. That quality would help them survive in the office of a man who very often was not there.
He had spent the morning dealing with the inevitable endless flow of paperwork, a river of reports as long and wide as the Ganges. Now it was time to go out into the field and try to follow up on half a dozen ongoing cases, not to mention the usual riots, political protests, and preholiday confrontations. His driver today was a Corporal Abuya; young, attractive, and puppy-dog eager. He smiled thinly to himself. A few days tramping through the underbelly of Sagramanda would put a damper on that just-out-of-the-academy enthusiasm. Seasoning, it was called. He wondered at what point he had stopped being seasoned and had started being aged.
As soon as he seated himself in the cruiser, pleasantries were exchanged and the corporal efficiently guided the fuel-cell-powered patrol car out of the underground motor pool garage and up into the barely controlled chaos of the city streets. Its clean-burning hydrogen-fueled engine emitted no pollutants into Sagramanda's brown but increasingly tolerable atmosphere while pushing the car along at more-than-adequate speeds.
High above the street, a miniature forest of unassuming roadside weed prospered in its window box. Looking just like any other batch of unpretentious jugla, the plants growing outside the window of Chief Inspector Keshu Jamail Singh's office were in fact slightly different from their commonplace country cousins. The end product of decades of research that had in its most recent stage been supervised by a brilliant and now-vanished biochemist, this particular variety of jugla had been genetically engineered so that, without any extra effort or special nutrients or additional attention, it emitted not one but two gaseous by-products. The usual oxygen, and most unusually and remarkably, free hydrogen.
In secret fields somewhere in central Asia, tens of thousands of acres of cotton and wheat had been plowed under to allow for the planting of a new cash crop. Much to the puzzlement and amusement of the local farmers whose lands had been bought out for the new project, the disciplined agriculturalists who had been brought in to take their place had sown neither of those traditional crops, nor millet, nor sorghum. No, the newcomers had spent a minimal amount of money and had put in place the most simple, basic farming equipment to raise—weeds!
Over tobacco and strong, heavily sugared tea, this outlandish development was much discussed on the streets and in the bazaars of neighboring towns. What did the investors expect to get out of such a planting? How could they possibly hope to recoup their investment from dirty, worthless weeds?
The investors were not worried. In fact, they were much pleased when their first crop came in. Requiring virtually no water and practically no fertilizer, the visitors gazed proudly at the sight of the billions of little yellow flowers that soon covered their extensive fields, the slender green stems erupting from even the poorest soil. With the success of the project speedily proven, plans were already in the works to greatly expand the plantation and to export it elsewhere. Multiple crops of such hearty, naturally disease-and insect-resistant plants could be raised all year beneath the specially treated impermeable plastics that protected them from the weather.
Protected them, while also channeling to collection reservoirs the millions upon millions of cubic meters of virtually free hydrogen fuel being generated by the weeds whose natural photosynthetic process had been genetically modified to emit the precious gas.
At the cost of a hundred million dollars, the consortium of investors reckoned the purchase of the jugla's genetic code to be something of a bargain.
Khatm karma
Born in New York City in 1946, Foster was raised in Los Angeles. After receiving a bachelor's degree in political science and a master of fine arts in cinema from UCLA (1968, 1969), he spent two years as a copywriter for a small Studio City, California, advertising and public relations firm.
His writing career began when August Derleth bought a long Lovecraftian letter of Foster's in 1968 and, much to Foster's surprise, published it as a short story in Derleth's biannual magazine The Arkham Collector. Sales of short fiction to other magazines followed. His first attempt at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was bought by Betty Ballantine and published by Ballantine Books in 1972. It incorporates a number of suggestions from famed SF editor John W. Campbell.
Since then, Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all the major SF magazines as well as in original anthologies and several “Best of the Year” compendiums. His published oeuvre includes more than one hundred books.
Foster's work to date includes excursions into hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, Western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He has also written numerous nonfiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as having produced the novel versions of many films, including such well-known productions as Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, computer games, and the story for the first Star Trek movie. In addition to publication in English, his work has appeared and won awards throughout the world. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first work of science fiction ever to do so.
Though restricted (for now) to the exploration of one world, Foster's love of the faraway and exotic has led him to travel extensively. After graduating from college he lived for a summer with the family of a Tahitian policeman and camped out in French Polynesia. He and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, of Moran, Texas, have traveled to Europe and throughout Asia and the Pacific in addition to exploring the back roads of Tanzania and Kenya. Foster has camped out in the “Green Hell” region of the southeastern Peruvian jungle, photographing army ants and pan-frying piranha (lots of small bones; tastes a lot like trout); has ridden forty-foot whale sharks in the remote waters off Western Australia; and was one of three people on the first commercial air flight into Western Australia's Bungle Bungle National Park. He has rappelled into New Mexico's fabled Lechuguilla Cave, white-water rafted the length of the Zambezi's Batoka Gorge, driven solo the length and breadth of Namibia, crossed the Andes by car, sifted the sands of unexplored archeological sites in Peru, gone swimming with giant otters in Brazil, and surveyed remote Papua New Guinea and West Papua both above and below the water. His filmed footage of great white sharks feeding off Southern Australia has appeared on both American television and the BBC.
Besides traveling he enjoys listening to both classical music and heavy metal. Other pastimes include basketball, hiking, body surfing, scuba diving, collecting animation on video, and weightlifting. He studied karate with Aaron and Chuck Norris before Norris decided to give up teaching for acting. He has taught screenwriting, literature, and film history at UCLA and Los Angeles City College as well as having lectured at universities and conferences around the country and in Europe. A member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the Authors Guild of America, and the Writers Guild of America, West, he also spent two years serving on the Planning and Zoning Commission of his home town of Prescott, Arizona. Foster's correspondence and manuscripts are in the Special Collection of the Hayden Library of Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.
The Fosters reside in Prescott in a house built of brick salvaged from a turn-of-the-century miners’ brothel, along with assorted dogs, cats, fish, several hundred houseplants, visiting javelina, porcupines, eagles, red-tailed hawks, skunks, coyotes, bobcats, and the ensorceled chair of the nefarious Dr. John Dee. He is presently at work on several new novels and media projects.
Visit him online at www.alandeanfoster.com.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
About the Author
Sagramanda Page 28
