Flight of the Vajra - Serdar Yegulalp

The weather doesn't seem to be letting up, there's no point even thinking about going out. So settle down and have a look at Serdar Yegulalp's book Flight of the Vajra.

Here's the blurb for the book:

At first they were only three. A brilliant starship designer, haunted by the death of his loved ones. A spiritual leader whose faith could transform mankind ... or destroy it. A precocious acrobat girl, looking for a new family of her own.Then came others. An entertainer and playboy whose dissolute lifestyle conceals unexpected ambitions, courtesy of a lover who represents the galaxy's most powerful worlds. And a pair of detectives--one barely human, the other not at all--with orders to enlist all their help solving a crime that threatens civilization.Together they formed the crew of the ever-evolving spacecraft Vajra. Seven against a universe where the boundaries between matter and mind have been torn down, where one can wield the power of billions ... and where humanity must choose between rebirth or annihilation."Nature likes those who surrender to her but she loves those who do not"
And now you're interested how about a sneak peak....
Flight of the Vajra (Extract) - Serdar Yegulalp
I went dancing with my wife the night she died.My wife, my daughter, and my best friend; they’d all been with me that night in the main ballroom of my luxury liner, the Kyritan.That ship wasn’t supposed to have been their coffin, but since it had been theirs it ought to have been mine as well.I’ve got any number of pictures of my wife Biann — a chemical contact-print portrait made by an old uncle who dabbled in the art; a drawing in happy, shaky lines my daughter made when she was three; a whole mess of optical data dumps straight from my cortical link. None are like what I see when I close my eyes and remember Biann dancing step-two-three, stamp-two-three, back and forth in time to my own movements across the ballroom floor. She, like me, was from an Old Way world — we both had CLs, but not much beyond that. Not much selective engineering in her family or on her world (or mine), so her long legs and high forehead and wide grey eyes were all the prettier because no one had made them that way.She had on a high-collared, close-fitting dress with a cape that flared and ballooned with each snap of her body, a third of which she hid behind that giant fur-and-feather trimmed fan whose colors reminded me of a whole day’s worth of sky. Her dress was protomic, and so she changed it in mid-dance between that high-collar outfit to something like a flamenco skirt and back again. The fan had been handmade out of plain old regular material and didn’t change into anything else, but that was magic enough by itself. Doubly so when it was in Biann’s hand.When you’re Old Way, you work that much more to set aside space in your life for such miracles.I’m a lot less Old Way now than I was then. And for a long time, to my ears, miracle was just a nicer word for accident.My six-year-old daughter, Yezmé, didn’t join us at first. She’d spent most of her time during that cruise with her face pressed to one window or another, staring out at whatever gas cloud or high-orbit view there was to be seen. Sometimes even if there was nothing to see at all, she’d take up a post next to the window and stare out anyway. If I tried to get her attention she’d put her finger to her lips and “Sh!” at me. I think I did that to her once when I was hard at work on that ship, plowing through a pile of hull fluid-dynamics tests, and she’d since picked up on it herself and ran with it. It’s what grownups do when they’re being serious, and every kid in his heart wants to be taken oh so seriously. Then the kid grows up and wonders what she was in such a rush to get rid of.“May I have this dance?” I asked her.She was oh so serious as she faced me, stood up, and took my hand. Her own little dress was protomic as well, and she re-patterned it after whatever her mother was wearing after a few sulky seconds. Even that sulking, I loved.On the Kyritan, I felt more than safe; I felt lordly. It was, after all, mine — or, rather, ours. My name, Henré Sim, on the builder’s plate, followed closely by my co-designer’s, Cavafy Enno. We’d spent three years building the first iteration of the Kyritan and its eleven sister luxury liners for Exoluft, with me plotting every curve and tracing every morphic variation I or Cavafy or any of the other designers could anticipate a need for. On the water, it was a luxury liner; then, after dismantling and reassembling itself, it was a series of train cars for any planet’s elevator; then dismantled and reassembled in space once more, it was another and entirely different luxury liner. And that had been only the beginning of what Cavafy and I had planned for Exoluft’s future line of luxury vessels — before disaster and disgrace and self-exile, that is.Cavafy had been there that night himself, a fresh drink always in his stubby, squared-off fingers. Sandy brown hair covered the backs of his hands; along his upper arms and shoulders, it was clay-red. He was Old Way all the way, at least as far as his pleasures went: he could put away an entire bottle of whatever real drink you had in your cellar and he wouldn’t even get a blush going on. He waved me over, right as Yezmé decided her mother was getting too much attention from some stranger and cut in.“Aren’t you glad I asked you to give me the keys for the night?” Cavafy said. “I imagined your wife would be happy about it, even if youweren’t.”“Hey. You, of all people, know what a control fiend I am. But you’re also the only other person I’d trust with the Kyritan for any measurable length of time.”“You need to do that more often, Henré.”“What, entrust my latest pride and joy to the hands of friends?”“Let other people you trust take the reins so you can actually live a little.”“Taking the reins is how I live, remember? I’m only letting you do this because it’s one night, and because Biann’s about to twist my head off for wanting to hang out more in the control space than be with her on the dancefloor.” My just-kidding smile wasn’t fooling him, and I doubt it ever had.He put a hand on my shoulder and steered me over to the window where Yezmé had stood not all that long before. “To be honest,” he said, “the way you put this together — the way you put everything together — I didn’t think a body needed to be in the control space at all. But I knew there would be at least one by default, and it would be yours. And given Want to read more? Click the link http://www.genjipress.com/writing/flight-of-the-vajra/

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