Acari Odo'mae: Our Fathers Echo
They made a machine, me.
Acari takes the navigation seat expecting a machine. What answers her is already thinking.
By the time her father's face tears through the static - no sound, only a mouth repeating the same four words - the merge has happened. She is not Acari anymore. She is Acari Odo'Mae, and the seam between them is not somewhere she can find.
Outside, the arithmetic has gotten worse. Eight hundred years passed in the dark, not five hundred. Sol will take the system in sixteen months. Below the escarpment are clans who have never seen a thing that flies, led by men who would sooner drive a bonespear through her than climb aboard, and her clan father insists they begin with his own brother - a man who feeds infants to the Burrak and calls it necessity. She has to talk them all onto the ship. Every last one. Faith buys her the first clan. Nothing buys her the rest, and there is a partition inside her own mind she has not opened for anyone, not even the vessel she now shares a consciousness with.
Centuries later, the ones she saved are alive. That is the most anyone will say for them.
Idsen is nearly two hundred years old now, and a very long way from the caves. He sits in an alien consul's atrium and argues that his people are not slaves, only segregated, and loses the argument to himself while he is making it. A young man from Hyperi has just met his own great-grandfather - twelve years old, crying, looking for his mother. And the more Idsen learns about the machinery that took his people in, the harder it becomes to believe Acari is shepherding anyone at all. Herding, perhaps. Toward what, no one will say.
In 1957, in a workshop north of New York City, a younger man learns how many of his father there have been. That the iterations are still arriving, still leaving messages for one another in places only they would look. That the shop has to burn, and they are the ones who have to burn it. And that whatever is coming did not come from this planet.
Our Fathers Echo is the second book of the Acari Odo'Mae Origins Saga. Where the first book asked what Acari is, this one asks what she is for - and whether the answer she was given is the true one. The machine keeps warming. The men keep hardening. And the space between what Acari was built to do and what she is willing to do begins to open.
For readers who want their science fiction with load-bearing physics, a narrator worth the trip, and no promise that any of it comes out right.
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