Last week, I posted one of my successful query letters as part of the Query Project, organized by my fellow DAW author Joshua Palmetier. Joshua has previously organized The Plot Synopsis Project, in which published authors posted synopses they used to seel books, and now he’s gone and done it again–and I’m pleased to be able to take part.
After DAW picked up Lost in Translation, I and my new agent, Ethan Ellenberg, talked about what I should offer DAW as a follow-up. I prepared two synopses: one for a sequel to Lost in Translation (which will probably never be written, alas) and this one.
This idea began with a single sentence written in the Writing Science Fiction workshop taught by Robert J. Sawyer at the Banff Centre a couple of years ago, part of the Writing With Style program. He asked the participants, one morning as an exercise, to write an opening sentence. I wrote:
Emily streaked through the phosphorescent sea, her wake a comet-tail of pale green light, her close-cropped turquoise hair surrounded by a glowing pink aurora. The water racing through her gill-slits smelled of blood.
As the week went along, I tried to turn that opening into a short story, with little success. But when I needed an idea for a new novel for DAW, I had that aborted short story in the back of my head, and expanded it into the synopsis below. DAW liked it, bought it, and it became my novel Marseguro (one thing DAW really didn’t like was my working title, Baptism).
Here’s how it all started. (Note: if you haven’t read Marseguro, there are spoilers here, although the book certainly doesn’t follow this synopsis slavishly…several things changed with the writing. If you have read Marseguro, you may find it interesting to see how it changed.)
At the end of the synopsis, I’ve posted links to all the other participating authors. Enjoy, and if you’re an aspiring writer, I hope this is helpful. I know it would have been for me when I was starting out!
One more time: SPOILER ALERT! Do not read this synopsis if you’re planning to read Marseguro and don’t want to know what happens…
***
Baptism
By Edward Willett
Synopsis
The Background
In 2178, Earth experienced a miracle.
A 10-kilometre-wide asteroid on a collision course with the planet was struck inside the orbit of the moon by another asteroid of sufficient mass to deflect it just enough so that it missed Earth. Ten million people died worldwide as pieces from the shattered rocks slammed into cities and oceans and farmland–but billions more survived.
In the year and a half between the detection of the asteroid and what most thought would be the end of the world, religion flowered with a terrifying intensity across the planet. Some turned to the old religions, but those had largely been discredited and abandoned in the century of recovery since the bitter, blood-drenched end of the Terror Wars of the 21st century. A charismatic preacher who called himself The Avatar, boasting apparently mystical powers, had begun a new sect, The Purified Body, some years before the asteroid’s detection, a sect dedicated to the proposition that judgment would descend upon humanity unless it rooted out the evil growing in its midst. It was that sect, in the right place at the right time, that took root in the new climate of apocalyptic angst. The Avatar claimed there was still time to act, that the planet could still be saved, if unrighteousness in all its forms were stamped out. His followers proved more than willing to do the stamping.
For The Avatar, unrighteousness lay not so much in the traditional sins of the past (though certainly he frowned on homosexuality, adultery, gambling, and the like) but in hubris: in the ancient sin of the builders of the Tower of Babel, the attempt to bridge the gap between heaven and Earth and gain the power of God Himself. The epitome of such hubris, in his view, lay in the genetic modification of human beings in an attempt to improve them. Why, the very notion that one could improve the pinnacle of God’s creation was blasphemous!
Yet many people saw it differently, before the onrushing asteroid changed everything. For them the modification of humanity by genetic manipulation was the highest form of art, a celebration of what it meant to be human. Most who held this view saw it from a secular viewpoint, as a way to free humanity from the blind forces of evolution and enable it to determine its own genetic future. A few embraced it as a religious duty: if humans were made in God’s image, they reasoned, then surely attempting to emulate God’s creative power over life was an act of worship, not blasphemy.
But religious or secular, both those who had been genetically altered—the “moddies”—and those that supported them were forced to flee in the face of the persecutions unleashed by The Avatar. Before the miracle of the asteroid, they could still find hiding places on Earth; but after the miracle, when The Avatar seized control of the planetary government, no place on the planet provided sanctuary. Thousands died.
Interstellar travel had been a reality for 50 years before the asteroid’s arrival, and half a dozen human colonies established, some of which would have welcomed moddies, or at least tolerated them. But the starships, bearing the wealthy families who owned them, fled Earth early in the crisis, and no starship was willing to land on the doomed planet after that for fear of being mobbed or hijacked.
The few moddies who got off the planet made it no further than the moon, before commercial passenger travel ceased and the moon declared its independence. The Avatar’s cult had never gained a foothold there. But the moon was too close. After the Day of Salvation, with the reins of power in his hand, it took the Avatar only a few months to prepare and launch an assault on the lunar colonies.
The moddies hadn’t been entirely helpless during that time. Two starships were in dry dock in lunar orbit. The moddies and their human helpers had spent the time they were given repairing and modifying them. When the attack came from Earth, both ships were launched.
One was destroyed as it broke lunar orbit. The other escaped. Unmodded humans crewed the ship, but in the water-filled holds were children, the first generation of Selkies, amphibian humans able to breathe in air and in water alike. And at the helm of the ship was the scientist who created them, Dr. Victor Hansen.
He took the Selkies to a surveyed but ignored planet almost entirely covered by water, which he dubbed Marcasero. Marcasero boasted only one continent-sized landmass, smaller than Australia. The Selkies and the unmodded humans who accompanied them began to build a new society.
For the first twenty years, Dr. Hansen led them. Since his death half a century ago, however, certain strains have appeared. The Selkies have spread out across the continental shelf and are beginning to work their way down into the deep ocean. Yet they can also survive for extended periods on land. The land dwellers, on the other hand, though they can visit the Selkie world with submersibles and breathing equipment, are essentially locked into only a small area of the planet along the continent’s shores—the interior has proved barren and inhospitable.
The Selkies have even developed their own language of gesture and sound that the land dwellers, because of physiological differences, can neither fully understand nor speak. And the Selkies were designed by Dr. Hansen to be prolific, regularly giving birth to twins or triplets.
The Story
Chris Keating is a young land dweller who has had enough. When Selkie teens jump him on the Landport quay and almost drown him, even though they claim it was all in fun, he decides to run away. It’s not like anybody will care, he figures: his family are dead or disinterested and he has no friends.
He has steeped himself in the stories and images of far-off Earth. He has convinced himself the Avatar was right—modified humans are not humans at all. And so he hatches a plan: he heads off to the original landing site, where a great deal of equipment has been mothballed since the landing…including a transmitter.
He activates it.
On Earth, Richard Hansen, grandson of the Selkies’ creator, Dr. Victor Hansen, is assistant to Samuel Cheveldeoff, the Arch-Deacon of Intelligence Gathering to the Glory of God. Richard, entirely due to his unfortunate lineage, is on a career track to nowhere, despite the almost avuncular support of Cheveldeoff. It’s not entirely his grandfather’s fault: his father, likewise under suspicion his entire life even though was only a child when Grandpa Hansen took off, finally got fed up and took his own life in a spectacularly unsociable fashion, jumping off a very tall building to land directly in front of His Holiness Avatar Kaiden II’s reviewing stand on Salvation Day.
Hansen was just fifteen at the time. He hasn’t forgiven his father, but he’s beginning to understand his father’s frustration. His family history has kept him as a minor functionary long past the time when others of his age have begun to advance through the ranks of The Body.
Hansen is determined to show that he deserves better, by tracking down the moddies his grandfather created and rescued. If he finds them and turns them over to the Deacons of Holy Destruction…then the stain on his family honor will be expunged, and he can finally begin to reap the rewards of years of labor.
Hansen thus keeps a close watch on communications traffic gathered by various listening stations and Body starships. When a weak distress signal from a long-lost starship is received by a merchant on the edge of known space, Hansen grasps its significance at once and informs Cheveldeoff.
Cheveldeoff is skeptical but knows that Hansen, despite his unfortunate ancestry, has been a loyal and dedicated worker. He decides to send a single well-armed ship and a complement of the Deacons of Holy Destruction to investigate and, if necessary, take action…and, as a kind of promise of better things to come if all goes well, sends Hansen along as an observer.
Back on Marcasero, the young Selkie woman Emily, one of the moddies who terrified Chris Keating on the quay, sees him in Landport for the first time in days and tries to apologize. He acts, and speaks, oddly, as if he knows something no one else does. She puts him out of her mind.
She and her twin sister Amelia meet their parents for lunch at an underwater restaurant. The two young women have just graduated from tertiary education, earning roughly the equivalent of Bachelor of Arts degrees. The dinner is intended as a celebration, but it turns into an unpleasant scene when Emily and Amelia tell their parents—their mother, the eminent biologist, and their father, the underwater architect—that they do not intend to pursue either the pure or applied sciences. Emily is thinking of the visual arts, and Amelia of becoming a sea dancer.
Emily is relieved to be able to leave the dinner and head straight for the home of her friend Delia to depart on a deep-water camping trip. In their shelter far down the slope of the continental shelf, they are completely incommunicado when…
…Hansen and the Deacons of Holy Destruction reach the planet. It takes little observation for them to realize that there is only one city and that it and the waters near it are swarming with moddies. The Deacons attack, while Hansen observes from orbit.
Emily and Delia don’t know anything has happened until one of the boys Delia has invited to join them arrives, terribly wounded. He manages to tell them some of what has happened before he dies. They rush back. They discover the destruction is still ongoing. Landport has been devastated, and the Deacons are locating and destroying Selkie communities along the continental shelf methodically, one by one. The waters teem with robot trackers seeking out individual Selkies. One such mechanical monster finds Emily and Delia. While it focuses its attentions on Delia, Emily is able to destroy it…but Delia is dead. Emily flees into deep water, heading to the only place she can think of, her mother’s research lab, though she has no way of knowing if her mother or anyone else is there.
Hansen is supposed to stay off the surface, but he feels he’s worked too hard to miss out on the denouement of his plan to cleanse his family shame. He wrangles a trip to the surface. The bloodshed disturbs him…momentarily. But he puts that down to squeamishness, and the fact that all the bodies he sees belong to non-modded humans. Where are the moddies?
He finds them down at the docks, where some have been herded together to be interrogated. He tells himself they’re disgusting…but in fact he finds them fascinating. Disturbed by his own reaction, he decides he must kill some of them himself. He takes one of the boats used to launch the robot trackers and heads offshore, where he soon detects, deep below, the telltale trace of a Selkie. He launches a tracker.
Emily, in the water, realizes another of the mechanical monsters is on her tail. She doubles back. There’s a cave she knows in a nearby island…
Hansen is not a sailor, and he manages to capsize the boat. The survival suit he was smart enough to don keeps him breathing, but he’s kilometers from shore…and he hasn’t swum far back toward it before he realizes the tracker he’d launched after the Selkie is now tracking him. The Selkie seems to have disappeared
A tiny, steep-sided rocky island rises within a kilometre of him. He manages to reach it just ahead of the tracker. He can’t climb its sheer, slimy walls, but discovers a cavern he can just slip into…and finds it occupied.
In the ensuing confrontation, Richard comes face to face for the first time with one of his grandfather’s creations. The confusion he felt when he first beheld the Selkies back at Landport is intensified, and his moral certainty begins to crumble as he faces what he has unleashed on Emily and her people…and when Emily not only doesn’t kill him but manages to disable the tracker and tells him which way to swim to reach safety, before disappearing into the depths.
Emily’s own confusion is great after she leaves Richard and resumes her swim to her mother’s laboratory. She’s not sure herself why she didn’t kill him, or at least leave him to die. She just knows she couldn’t.
To her relief, her mother is at the station. Her mother describes what she has been working on for years, and has come to the station to retrieve. It’s a biological weapon, a plague that will kill only land-dwellers, not Selkies. The Selkies have long feared The Body would find them. Once the weapon was perfected, they planned to inoculate their own land dwellers against it, then seed it around the planet so that merely setting foot on Marcasero would mean certain death for non-modified humans from off-planet. Emily is horrified…but then her mother tells her what happened to her father, and to her twin sister. Emily’s horror turns to anger, and disgust that she had one of the invaders in her clutches back in the cave and yet let him go.
The weapon is ready. So is the vaccine, but there wasn’t enough warning before the attack for the land dwellers to be inoculated. Emily volunteers to disguise herself as a land dweller and to attempt to get the vaccine to as many landies as possible before the weapon is deployed.
Meanwhile, Richard has made it back to the settlement. He is promptly imprisoned under suspicion of aiding a moddie…and his name alone is seen as reason to convict him. His attempt to clear his family has backfired badly.
Emily arrives on shore and manages to get into the prison. She distributes the vaccine to the landies…all but Hansen, whom she recognizes. She regrets saving him once: she won’t do it again. She engineers a prison break, but leaves Hansen behind.
One of the landies she vaccinates and frees is Chris Keating, who gets his first good look at what his still-secret activation of the transmitter has wrought as he flees the prison. He’s horrified—not by the results of his action, but by what the Selkies will do to him when they figure out he’s to blame. He sneaks aboard a shuttle full of Deacons fleeing the planet for their ship.
Richard knows he faces renewed suspicion and a verdict of death once he is returned to Earth…but then, within two days of Emily’s visit to the prison, the Earth humans begin to die, swiftly and unpleasantly, of some kind of hemorrhagic fever. Hansen waits for the disease to take him…but it doesn’t.
Instead, it seems most likely he will die of hunger or thirst.
Chris Keating faces the same situation. Found and imprisoned when the shuttle reached the ship, he is now the only living thing on it…and he’s trapped.
The Selkies and surviving landies, Emily among them, retake the town. Emily comes back to the prison, and discovers, to her astonishment, that Hansen is still alive. Emily’s mother is worried by his apparent immunity. She conducts tests…and discovers that he is immune because he carries a genetic sequence that she designed the virus to look for and render itself inactive if found. It’s a sequence specific to Victor Hansen.
The original Selkies, Richard discovers, were modified clones of his grandfather. And he himself is a clone of a clone—rather than his mother having died in childbirth, as his father always told him, he never had a mother. Or a grandmother. And the Selkies are, in every way, his brothers and sisters.
Richard realizes he can never go back to Earth. Not only would he be executed, he is also a carrier of the deadly virus Emily’s mother engineered. And knowing the truth—and having seen what “Holy Destruction” really looks like—he cannot wish more death on the Selkies, who all in all have treated him better than his own people. He decides to help them in any way he can.
On Earth, Cheveldeoff becomes alarmed when communication from the planet and its orbiting vessel ceases. He orders up a follow-up vessel—and heads out with it. When they arrive, he broadcasts a message…and receives an answer from the last person he expected to hear from: Richard Hansen.
Richard warns his old mentor that there is a plague on the planet and everyone has died. Cheveldeoff is not that easily frightened off. He sends an armed squad in space armor. The people on the planet have weapons from the first assault. They attack the squad on landing and kill them all.
Now the Selkies have a shuttle.
Cheveldeoff’s ship does not have any capability of attacking from orbit…but the first ship does. He sends armored troops to reclaim it. They find Chris, and put him in quarantine, then set about decontaminating the ship…and preparing for orbital bombardment.
But the Selkies and their allies have their own designs on the ship. Richard suspects his access codes have ever been revoked. They take up their shuttle. The Deacons in the ship can’t fire on it because the ship’s computers recognize the shuttle as friendly and the Deacons don’t yet have access to the locked-down systems. But they can, and do, prepare a warm reception…except, when the shuttle docks, it’s empty.
Outside, in space, Richard, Emily, and a few companions cling to the ship’s hull, working their way in through an access hatch. (The Selkies, not surprisingly, are much more adept in zero-G than Richard is.) Their plan is to disable the ship and drive it down into the atmosphere.
While they’re working on that, Emily discovers Chris, imprisoned in quarantine. She frees him, but rather than stay with them, he runs off.
They succeed in disabling the ship. As the atmosphere reaches for it, the Deacons are forced to flee. Once they are gone, Richard and Emily are supposed to get into escape pods. But Richard, working with the ship’s computer, discovers an automated landing routine and decides to ride the ship down. He wants Emily to leave, but she won’t. They’ll ride it down together.
Meanwhile, the shuttle reaches Cheveldeoff’s ship. He talks to the commander of the Deacons who were aboard it, and, furious, admits defeat…this time. Once he’s returned to Earth for reinforcements, though…
But then Chris emerges from his hiding place and walks up to the shocked Cheveldeoff. “Pleased to meet you,” says Chris, and shakes Cheveldeoff’s hand.
Richard and Emily endure a terrifying descent, but both they and the ship survive. Selkie and landie engineers swarm over it. Combining parts from it and the original colony ship, they hope to cobble together a working starship to take them…elsewhere. They know a more substantial assault from Earth is only a matter of time.
But then they receive a final message from Chris, light-speed delayed by several hours. “They’re all dying!” he cries. “I’m all alone again…but at least I’m heading home.”
Emily’s mother turns white. Chris is heading to Earth…and so is the plague she engineered.
The Selkie starship will have a new destination, it seems: Earth. But what will await them there only time (and a possible sequel) will tell.
****
There you have it! And here are the others taking part in The Plot Synopsis Project II:
Alma Alexander (Will post on the 20th instead.)
Sam Butler
Diana Pharaoh Francis
Daryl Gregory
Simon Haynes
Jay Lake’s comments and his synopses
Kelly McCullough
Jeri Smith-Ready
Jennifer Stevenson
Joshua Palmatier
