Floating Worlds

jagged glassine edge at the shore. They flew low over the choppy water and passed the broken shell of a dome, rising a thousand feet above them. Sand was drifted like a tide along its sheer flank. Sand was filling the lake.

“Alm’ata,” Paula said.

Junna took the ship up steeply over the ring of mountains. They flew on above ridges of high rock, bleak as iron bones. The window was cold against her cheek. The two Styths complained of the bright sun and put their helmets on. They passed the ruin of another dome. Night covered them. Paula sat back. She looked up at Luna like a silver mask in the sky.

“Go around to the light side again,” Tanuojin said. “Paula, put your helmet on.”

They climbed and raced around the Planet into the day. Junna took them along a northerly coastline. Paula looked out over the shore, deeply embayed, into the hills in the distance. The air along the horizon was brown with dust. Below the ocean laid an edge of foam along the narrow beach.

“Junna, take her down,” Tanuojin said. “At the water’s edge. Do you see that lump of mineral down there? Sit down, Paula.”

The needle ship dropped its nose toward the ground. She sat down, craning her neck to see over the bottom edge of the window. Below, the water foamed along a strip of beach. A boulder broke the surf, weed streaming green along its base. The ship upended smoothly and settled down on her tail, so that Paula was lying on her back in the deep seat. Tanuojin climbed up next to her in the vertical lane between the seat and the wall.

“Watch out for the radiation,” he said to Junna.

Paula got to her knees on the flat back of her seat. Junna swung the hatch out, and a burst of cool fresh air swept in over her face. A bird shrieked just outside. The sunlight was brilliant. Tanuojin took her by the arm and helped her to the hatch and lowered her down to the sand of the beach.

The air smelled of salt. It was warm, and she pulled open her pressure suit. Two brown gulls were floating in the air above the ship. Junna ran off along the line of the breakers, away down the beach.

“Here.” Tanuojin handed her flute to her in its case.

She pulled off the sleeves of the suit. “Why is the air fresh here?”

“All this grass is making the oxygen.” He waved his hand toward the inland. On the dunes blades of sawgrass sprouted out of the loose sand. “But it’s only this stretch. Twenty miles that way the air’s foul again.” He nodded down the beach after his son. “Ten or twelve miles the other. Three miles inland.” He stood over her while she tugged her feet up out of the boots of the space suit. “There’s sweet water, and if you work, you can find enough food to live. But you don’t get off this beach until you realize where your place is.”

She stepped out of the pressure suit. “You’d better call your son before he swims to China.”

Tanuojin looked up. Junna’s head bobbed in the ocean, forty feet beyond the breakers. His pressure suit and uniform lay in a heap on the wet sand. Paula took her flute and walked away along the beach. She stopped once and looked back. Tanuojin stood there staring down at the sand at his feet. He would not look at her. Perhaps he could not. She turned and went on her way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An American novelist, Cecilia was born December 31, 1943 in Henderson, Nevada, and began writing at the age of twelve, recording the stories she made up for her own entertainment. From the beginning, her focus was on history because “being twelve, I had precious few stories of my own. History seemed to me then, as it still does, an endless fund of material.”

She attended Pennsylvania State University for a year, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965 from Connecticut College, where she took a course in creative writing and was encouraged by poet William Meredith and short story writer David Jackson. Jackson took Holland’s first effort to his editor at Atheneum and her first novel, Firedrake, was published in 1966. She had just dropped out of graduate school at Columbia University to work as a clerk at Brentano’s in Manhattan. She has been a full-time professional writer ever since. (Firedrake was actually the fourth novel she had written; Jerusalem is the final, mature version of one of the earlier ones. Pieces of the other two also have made their way into her published work.)

Most of her novels are based on historical subjects including her first, The Firedrake (1966), which explores past history from the fall of Rome onwards. The Death of Attila (1973) and The Belt of Gold (1984) encompass the Dark Ages; Until the Sun Falls (1969) is set in Mongol Asia; The Earl (1971) and several companion volumes deal with medieval Europe; and Home Ground (1981) is set in the contemporary world, as is Pacific Street (1992).

Even her first science fiction tale, Floating Worlds (1976), unfolds an environment which seems to reflect some actual domain.

She lives presently (2004) in Fortuna, California, a small town in rural Humboldt County, California. She is married with three daughters. Once a week, she teaches a two-hour creative writing class at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. She was visiting professor of English at Connecticut College in 1979 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981-1982.