Spheres of Influence-eARC Read Online Free

giants, a rush of brightly-colored birds streaking through the branches with song and chattering. It hasn’t changed.
    Of course, why should it? His world lives and grows, but stays the same, too. He chose this, begged for it even. Do I have a right to come here again? I promised to let him stay in the home he understands for as long as he lived.
    DuQuesne shook himself, then glanced around. There…that’s the mountain path.
    The path wound through lush undergrowth; behind him, DuQuesne knew, it ended at a deep pool of a mighty river. In the distance he could hear the sound of a cataract. He might be there even now, fishing. But the slant of the sun is late…I hope…
    He walked lightly, quietly. The forest was filled with life, but all shied away from him when they spied DuQuesne’s massive frame. No animal could mistake his movement for that of any prey, only of another hunter to be avoided.
    Suddenly, a second too late, he became aware that seemingly-random flutters of branches had been nothing of the kind. He started to turn, but too late, as something powerful smashed into his shoulders from behind, sending him crashing headlong into the brush. He rolled, striking out, but his opponent was already gone, vanished, no, behind again! Another strike, this one at his knees, another at his arms as he tried to roll, and he found himself flat on his back, gazing up…
    At a figure with a laughing, slightly-fanged face, hanging head-down from a branch above him by a strong tail, spinning a gold-capped staff idly between its fingers. “DuQuesne? DUQUESNE? Is it really you?”
    He couldn’t help but laugh in return at the simple joy on his old friend’s face. “Really me, Wu. It really is.”
    Wu Kung dropped from the trees above and threw slender but tremendously strong arms around him, lifting DuQuesne and spinning him around like a child. “Marc! This is wonderful! It’s been so long! I have to show you around! There’s so many things for me to tell you!” Wu let go and bounced into the tree again, pointing. “Up this way! I haven’t bothered to make a new path, but if we go straight up, we can get home much faster!”
    “And how many trees do I have to swing through, Wu? You know I’m not exactly as light as you are.”
    The Hyperion Monkey King laughed again. “No, no, just a steep run, no cliffs, follow me, come on, follow!”
    DuQuesne smiled and followed, hammering his way up the slope as Wu Kung bounded from ground to tree to stone with abandon, urging him onward.
    Abruptly they burst from the trees to a clearer space, a steep crest of the hill that afforded a view extending out to the horizon. Massive limestone hills, pillarlike, reared from the plains below, more brilliant and picturesque versions of their karst-born models in Yangshuo on Earth. DuQuesne paused, admiring the view and the shades of the setting sun. Simulation it may be…but it’s his home right now, and the simulation is breathtaking in its own way.
    “Sanzo! SANZO! It’s DuQuesne! He’s here to visit!”
    As always, it gave DuQuesne a major jolt of cognitive dissonance to see a slender, beautiful young woman answering to that name. They put every version of the Journey to the West ever made into a blender and came out with this. It was another jolt—somewhat smaller—to realize that in some ways Sanzo, with her long dark-blue hair and athletic martial monk’s figure, was not at all unlike Ariane. Very much like Ariane, actually. That’s an interesting coincidence.
    Sanzo smiled and bowed a welcome. “It has been far, far too long, Master DuQuesne,” she said. “I hope you may stay and eat with us?”
    “I have business to attend to, Mistress Sanzo,” he answered, “but I may be able to, if time permits.”
    “I shall plan for it, then.” She looked to Wu Kung. “Our sons will not return from the Three Ways until tomorrow, so there is also room for him to stay.”
    “Yes! That would be very good!”
    This is making