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    The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha
    The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha
    The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha
    Ebook54 pages40 minutes

    The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha

    By Kate Macleod

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    About this ebook

    Lu McNair longs for nothing more than to earn a solitary posting, something on some remote station somewhere with a crew of one. Just her, observing some really weird alien species. Something not remotely humanoid, like a sentient cloud or the colonial organisms that floated through deep space.

    Ironically, without a high score in interpersonal communications and teamwork, even that modest, lonely posting eludes her.

    Her only chance? Scoring well on her group assignment with three other cadets observing the life of the planet Sowmyatha. Her problem? The other three cadets are more alien to her than any nonhuman species could ever be.

    "The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha", a science fiction novelette about first contact with an alien species, and even more challenging contact with other humans. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRatatoskr Press
    Release dateMar 27, 2018
    ISBN9781946552662
    The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha
    Author

    Kate Macleod

    Dr. Kate MacLeod is an innovative inclusive educator, researcher, and author. She began her career as a high school special education teacher in New York City and now works as faculty in the college of education at the University of Maine Farmington and as an education consultant with Inclusive Schooling. She has spent 15 years studying inclusive practices and supporting school leaders and educators to feel prepared and inspired to include all learners.

    Read more from Kate Macleod

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      Book preview

      The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha - Kate Macleod

      The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha

      THE INSCRUTABLE VISAGES OF THE SOWMYATHA

      KATE MACLEOD

      Ratatoskr Press

      CONTENTS

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      THE INSCRUTABLE VISAGES OF THE SOWMYATHA

      Lu McNair longed to put on her mouse-ear headset even though her drone swarm was not sending her any auditory input, anything to drown out the low-level murmur of chat the other three were incapable of not generating, even when working. But she couldn't do that. She was supposed to be bonding with her fellow cadets, and tuning them out wasn't going to get that done.

      Survey shuttles were the smallest shuttles in the fleet, far too small for the standard crew of six they were designed for. The acoustics inside the shuttle body were bad, amplifying the chatter of three women to sound like thirty. It was no wonder the pilot and copilot kept to themselves in the front end, seldom opening the hatch between the two areas. This was McNair's first assignment on a survey shuttle, and she hoped it would be her last. There was no division between workspaces, just four chairs facing away from each other, each staring at a panel of screens on the outside wall of the shuttle. Their bunks were stacked at the back, two on each side of the airlock, and their gear was stowed at the foot of the bunks. The pilot and copilot had their own bunks in the cockpit, no roomier. For days now they had been moving over and around each other constantly, the space crowded even when freefall gave them an extra dimension to work with. McNair knew she would be going insane if not for the fact that this was the last day. She could make it.

      Their shuttle was in a low orbit over what Planetary Exploration had designated Sowmyatha. Who knew what the inhabitants called their own world; as far as the four of them had been able to tell they had no language. They lived in groups, but their numbers were few and their villages small and remote from each other. It was amazing the planet supported life at all, its parameters were outside the normal range, and even billions of years ago when the Unknown Ancestors had seeded it with life it had been barely inside parameters. The fact the original organisms had survived, multiplied, spread and evolved was not something any sane person would have bet on, but then the Unknown Ancestors did many things that seemed eerily precognitive all these billions of years later.

      Not that these beings looked much like the other descendants of the Unknown Ancestors. Scientists speculated that the seeds that the Ancestors had spread had been evolving even as they traveled about finding places to plant them, so even outside of environmental influences beings from closely adjacent

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