Thursday, July 6, 2017

Book of the Week: NORBRA'S CHILDREN

Commonwealth novel
Khybors story

From Writers Exchange

            Elin hated it when her duty rotation required her to mediate yet again between a Wrinkleship pilot and the spaceport authorities.

The pilots didn’t bother her. They were decent enough people, even the worst of them, even when they acted like elitist snobs. Part of the problem, she knew, was that she did consider them people, while a growing percentage of the officers and officials and technicians she had to pass on her way through security levels to get to the Wrinkleships, did not. Wrinkleship pilots, according to the proponents of the pureblood radical genetic dogma of the Set’ri, were mutants. Mutants had to be destroyed, to prevent them from contaminating the true Human genome, according to the Set’ri. However, Wrinkleship pilots were necessary to the expansion of the Central Allied Worlds, so they weren’t destroyed at birth, or when their mutations manifested at adolescence.

Lucky for them. Or maybe not so lucky.

            
What did it matter that their bodies were so malformed and defective that by the time they entered their second decade, most of them needed life support? According to all the ethics books Elin had studied, and the inherited memories of her ancestors, the mind and soul determined if a life form was Human, not the viability and performance of the body. Elin had enough experience – her own, as well as those imprinted in the Khrystal in her blood – to convince her that the converse of the Set’ri dogma was true, and a great many who looked Human did not qualify for the title.

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