Ted R. Blasingame's Fictional Life   "Never lose your sense of wonder and imagination."

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What follows are the only existing chapters of a planned sequel to the story you have just read. The manuscript was started in 1993, but never finished. The primary character's name was Merlin Sinclair, and since this story was never completed, I took the name and used it for a later anthropomorphic project I began in 1996 called Blue Horizon that was in production until 2009, spawning over forty serialized tales.  Presented here merely for your curiosity are the first five chapters of…

TREASURE HUNT 2

THE DAUGHTERS OF HERDANTES

©1992 by Ted R. Blasingame

Chapter 1

My name is Merlin. Before conclusions are drawn, let me explain that I was not given the name to honor a famous magician of popular Terran literature. I was named after a bird from a planet that I’ve never seen.

I am a descendant of a colonist who homesteaded on a new world some one hundred seventy-five years ago.  School history says that my homeworld of Roswei is roughly the same size of Earth, but has more land mass. The vegetation and weather climates are said to be similar.

There had been no sapient life forms on Roswei when the first exploration vessel from Earth, the Goldenrod, discovered it, so the similar Earth-like world was tagged for immediate colonization. Merlin Marcus Sinclair was a famous figure in my family line, the ancestor on that first shipload of colonists for whom I was named.

However, there were elements in the soil and air on Roswei that were classified as inert and harmless, but after forty years a transformation took place on a genetic level in the people who were born there. The changes were rather harmless, but enough to alienate them from the people of Earth. To those native-born to Roswei, hair colors emerged as either black or turquoise.  Turquoise!  All eye colors faded to pale white, though eyesight actually improved with the new alterations so that optic disabilities became rare.

The Terrans of Earth still possessed the capability for prejudice, and contact was soon cut off from Roswei for fear of contamination, after the colony had been established a mere fifty years. The new Rosweins were outraged by this, and soon developed a mindset that they no longer needed Earth anyway. There were raw materials in abundance and the first fifty years of their colonization had been enough time for an industrialized civilization to be rooted on their planet with their own government and society.

Without the contact and influence of Earth, they would thrive and progress on their own. In time, the technologies of the two worlds moved onward in similar veins of thought, but branched off into areas of discovery and culture unique to each.

The environment of Roswei influenced yet another genetic change in its children, but it was rare enough that it wasn’t considered normal. In fact, still stinging from the prejudice from Earth, the Rosweins abhorred the new change as freakish and unwanted.  About one person in five thousand developed the undesired condition of psionic abilities. Fictional literature had once called people with psionic abilities “espers”, but in this new world the term was mutated into a word of derogatory slang and those with the ‘curse’ were called “Es-pars”.

Years went by and the hatred of Es-pars grew, so much that anyone known to possess the powers was shunned by society. Es-pars learned to hide their talents and never use them openly, for acceptance into Society was vital to the Rosweins. Then, when Roswei had been an established world for a hundred years, it was marked with a declaration that the killing of a known Es-par had no penalty, as it was ruled to help cleanse the Society of impure blood.

Soon after their centennial, Roswei was contacted by another colony world originally established by Earth, a smaller planet named Rona in a nearby star system.  As with Roswei, Rona had been abandoned by Earth when harmless physical changes took place in the people of that colony. Similarly, the colonists’ hair and eye colors changed to include practically every color of the rainbow. No other genetic side effects were ever discovered in the Ronans, not even the psionic abilities that developed on Roswei.

Feeling a kind of kinship with one another, the governments of Rona and Roswei established trade and constant contact. Both planets flourished and the altered sons and daughters of mankind deepened their roots into their new homeworlds.

On Rona there were no threats against Es-pars, so many Rosweins who developed the abilities applied secretly to immigrate to the other world and intermarry with the citizens there. This caused Espers to eventually crop up within the Ronan populations, but on that world the talents were cultivated and put to good use.  Unfortunately as with all tools, some used their abilities for selfish and even evil purposes, and ultimately the Psion Patrol was created with teams of trained Espers to police these rogues and punish them as they would any other criminal element.

A generation later, representatives from Earth arrived to make peace with its two sister worlds. Those who had been in power during the abandonment were long since gone and the new Terran World Government sought to create trade and relations with Rona and Roswei. It took nearly a decade of negotiations between the three worlds to finally establish the Planetary Alliance, and by then other former colonies of Earth were contacted in similar agreements. 

I’ve given you this history lesson in order to help you understand my predicament. All of these events happened years before I was born on Roswei, but it all bears involvement into creating who I am and that which I became. 

I was born Merlin Marcus Sinclair to Eric Sinclair and Christine Santrojur in the Roswein year One Hundred Forty-Five. Note that the calendar dating system was simply created to reflect the number of years since the Goldenrod first set down on the new world.  I was the first of six children, my siblings consisting of three brothers, Samuel, Wayne and Alan, and two sisters, Marie and Sharon. My father had one brother, Randall, and a sister, Carolyn.  My mother had only one sibling, a brother named Rayce. Randall produced a handful of cousins for me, as did Carolyn. Rayce only sired one son, a cousin of mine named Delon.  Delon Santrojur is the only person I know who might help me in my dilemma. Unfortunately, he has disappeared, with rumors he is an Es-par gone into hiding.