Carnelians Read Free

in the limb now than real bone, but at least he could walk.
    He paused at the doorway and looked back at Sashia. “Have you finished analyzing the results from your examination of my wife and my children?”
    Her smile faded. “Yes. All three of them.”
    “Are they all right?”
    “Your wife and daughter are fine.” She spoke carefully. “Your son has lived his entire life on Coba, right? It’s a world where much of the food and water is toxic to him.”
    He didn’t want to hear what he knew was coming. “But he’s so healthy.”
    “Now, yes.”
    “His mother’s DNA is from the colonists who settled the world Coba.” Kelric fought back his fear. “It adapts them to deal with the biosphere.”
    “That helps,” Sashia said. “And he told me that he follows the same precautions you took when you lived there: boiling his water, keeping a special diet. But it’s still a strain for his body.”
    “My daughter lives there, too. And she’s fine.”
    “Their genetic make-up is different. Her physiology is better suited to the planet.” Sashia came over to him. “I wish I had better news. But your son has lived twenty-eight years on a world that can poison his body. It nearly killed you, and you were only there eighteen years.”
    “He seems to be doing so well.” Kelric couldn’t believe how calm he sounded. He wanted to shout, as if that could make this go away. His son would never willingly leave Coba.
    “Yes, he is,” Sashia said. “I don’t know how long that will last.”
    “He doesn’t like it here.” Kelric forced out the words. “He was glad to go back home.”
    “He doesn’t have to live here,” Sashia said. “Many places exist where his health wouldn’t be jeopardized.”
    Kelric almost never spoke to anyone about the eighteen years he had spent imprisoned on Coba. But for his son’s sake, he would do anything. “You have to understand. He’s lived his entire life in seclusion. He never sees or speaks to anyone except the queen who rules his estate and the few men in his Quis circle.” He floundered with the words. How did he explain the dice game of Quis that dominated his son’s existence? He didn’t know if someone who had lived a normal life could understand what it meant to play a game that defined a civilization. Every woman, man, and child on Coba played Quis every day of their lives. It created the entire political, social, intellectual, economic, and cultural structure of the colony there. Those who controlled the Quis, controlled the civilization. His son Jimorla was a master at the game. Someday, he would be a legend.
    If he survived.
    “Jimorla has appeared in public only once,” Kelric said. “When I presented him as my son to the Imperialate last year. He can’t operate in normal society. He doesn’t want to. It would kill him to leave Coba.”
    Sashia’s gaze never wavered. “It will kill him to stay there.”
    “Surely you can do something. Give him nanomeds to help his body deal with the toxins.”
    “I’ve given him a specialized replicating species,” she said. “They’ll help. But you had those, too. If the meds started to mutate within your body, they will with him, too.”
    “I was injured when I crashed on Coba,” Kelric said. “No one there knew our medicine. They didn’t even believe I had meds in my body. I certainly didn’t have a doctor who could monitor and update them.” He lifted his hands, then let them drop. “Sashia, surely you can do something. If my daughter can deal with Coba, it must be possible for my son.”
    She spoke carefully. “They don’t have the same mother, do they?”
    Well, that was a minefield. “No, they don’t.”
    “The DNA your daughter inherited from her mother helps counteract the problems better.”
    Kelric knew Sashia wanted to know more. He couldn’t talk about it, beyond what she needed to help his children. He had been married against his will to his son’s mother, a desert queen on Coba,