Gateway Essentials
3 total works
This is the tale of Earl Dumarest. Space-wanderer, gladiator-for-hire, seeker of Man's forgotten home.
Dumarest's search begins on the ghost-world of Gath, where he becomes unwilling champion of the Matriarch of Kund, and must undergo a fight-to-the-death at stormtime.
Victory could give Dumarest his first clue to the whereabouts of the planet he fled from as a child - an obscure world scarred by ancient wars, which lies countless light years from the thickly populated centre of the galaxy; a world no-one else in the inhabited universe believed exists.
Earth, the birthplace of Man.
(First published 1967)
Far from Earth, on a ship carrying the 13th and 14th generations of descendants from the original crew, life is short. You are born, learn the tasks needed to keep the ship running, help breed and train the next crew - and your death is ordered by the computer in charge.
Gregson, chief of the psych-police, makes sure the computer's death-sentences are carried out quickly and painlessly. His duty is a sacred trust. He knows the intricacies of the system, how it works . . . and how it can be subverted.
He is growing old. Rebellious.
He also knows his name will soon come up in the computer for elimination.
And he has no intention of carrying out his own death-sentence!
There should have been soft breezes scented with entrancing perfumes, the soothing warmth of a golden sun, lakes of wine and mountains of grain, trees adorned with fruit and bud and flower, shrubs bearing a profusion of glittering gems. Herbs and spices to provide freedom from pain, a return to youthful zest, an end of aging and decay. Salves and ointments and natural fungi to cure all physical ills. . .
For this was Earth, that planet of legend, the paradise for which all yearned and hungered to find. The world of joy and beauty and riches beyond the wildest dreams.
Instead Earl Dumarest found a landscape of unremitting hostility. Could this really be the fabled home world for which he had spent his entire life searching . . . ?
(First published 2008)