Taryn has grown up within earshot of the Tower.
Everyone in Alabaster has. The ancient spire at the city's heart hums constantly — managing the weather, enriching the soil, keeping seventy thousand people alive in a desert that should have swallowed them centuries ago. The hum is just part of life. Nobody thinks much about it.
Nobody except Taryn, who has always been able to hear something in it that he cannot explain.
When his eight-year-old brother is called into the Tower's Service, Taryn is tested belatedly — and the testing pillar registers something that hasn't been seen in five hundred years. He isn't just an operator. He's a Commander: the last descendant of the man who built Alabaster, who unlocked its most powerful systems, and who then deliberately locked them away again before anyone could misuse them.
Now an army is marching on the city. The dome that could protect Alabaster hasn't been raised in centuries. The aquifer that feeds the farms has been quietly failing for a hundred and forty years. And the ancient machines — the ones the Tower's Servants tend with something close to religious reverence — have been waiting for someone who could actually hear them.
They've been waiting for Taryn.
Alabaster is the story of a boy who grew up carrying a scrap bag learning to carry something considerably larger — and of a city discovering that the machine at its heart has been trying to say something for a very long time.
Genre: Science Fiction
Everyone in Alabaster has. The ancient spire at the city's heart hums constantly — managing the weather, enriching the soil, keeping seventy thousand people alive in a desert that should have swallowed them centuries ago. The hum is just part of life. Nobody thinks much about it.
Nobody except Taryn, who has always been able to hear something in it that he cannot explain.
When his eight-year-old brother is called into the Tower's Service, Taryn is tested belatedly — and the testing pillar registers something that hasn't been seen in five hundred years. He isn't just an operator. He's a Commander: the last descendant of the man who built Alabaster, who unlocked its most powerful systems, and who then deliberately locked them away again before anyone could misuse them.
Now an army is marching on the city. The dome that could protect Alabaster hasn't been raised in centuries. The aquifer that feeds the farms has been quietly failing for a hundred and forty years. And the ancient machines — the ones the Tower's Servants tend with something close to religious reverence — have been waiting for someone who could actually hear them.
They've been waiting for Taryn.
Alabaster is the story of a boy who grew up carrying a scrap bag learning to carry something considerably larger — and of a city discovering that the machine at its heart has been trying to say something for a very long time.
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Don Jones's Alabaster