Cordell Scotten - Renegade

The two aliens took to their wings and seemed, thereby, to sail gracefully out of Ariel's life, but not without leaving her severely disturbed: by the good feelings as they departed; by the knowledge that the wild one had contributed, no matter how unknowingly, to Jacob's death; by the pain of having to remember Jacob so publicly; and now that it was all over and the letdown began to settle in, by the realization that she had been neglecting Derec for a long time.

She turned to him then, pulled his head down, and gave him a kiss and a hug. When he responded with equal ardor, she felt the mantle of leadership slip from her shoulders, and the relief from that burden was so great, she felt that she would never again grouse over its lack, nor begrudge Derec the privileges of the office whenever he chose to assume them.

She had been neglecting someone else, too. She released Derec with her left arm and reached over to get a handful of Wolruf's fur, pulling her into a three-way embrace with Derec.

“We have pulled it off,” she said. “You guys are something else.”

Looking around Derec's shoulder, she winked at Adam SilverSide. He would know that was meant to include him in the embrace. It was her painless way of thanking him-without his knowing it and feeling smug and superior-for his last ditch effort at The Cliff of Time. It was he who had first jeopardized and then saved the whole show and strengthened the bond between Synapo and her in the process.

They were a strange pair: Adam and Eve SilverSide. Whence did they come? If they didn't profess to obey the Laws of Robotics, she would have been inclined to term them alien robots. What did the future hold for them-and for that matter, what did the future hold for the rest of them, having to deal, as they must, with Adam and Eve?

[Synapo: Because of his dominant personality, the leader of the Cerebrons is also the unofficial leader at this particular time of all the superintelligent organisms called Cerebryons. He plays a dominant role in the activities of both the Cerebrons and the Myostrians, the two tribes which constitute the race of Ceremyons (or Mycerons, from a Myostrian point of view).

The Cerebrons are the mediators and deep thinkers of the race, spending their time in cogitation of philosophical problems while pursuing a nomadic life drifting over the Oyster world.

The Myostrians are the active doers, responsible not only for predicting the weather-and guiding the Cerebrons to locations of optimal conditions-but responsible also for controlling the weather. They tend to stay at fixed locations for relatively long times, but move around as necessary to set up or construct the various tools and structures used to control the weather.]

The author-a chemical engineer and designer of computer systems for process control-left Dupont, Atomic Energy Division, in 1982 to spend full time writing fiction and practicing amateur theoretical physics. He sold a short story and a novelette to Analog , and between the two, took time out to pursue ideas concerning the nature of space and time by taking graduate courses in quantum mechanics, general relativity, and related subjects at the University of South Carolina. He has now expressed those space-time ideas mathematically in a paper-a conjecture-which is currently being considered for publication in a technical physics journal. The weather node compensator in this book and a novel nearing completion are based on fantasized extrapolations of that conjecture.