In a far future, humanity is genetically engineered to be perfect, and live clean, useful lives in bureaucratic cities. On the other hand, the travelling bands of raggle- taggle Bideshi are thieves and live in dirty home-ships, inbred and useless. That's the story as taught to schoolchildren, anyway.
Adam Yuga is heading for a new promotion with a planetary mining firm and just has to pass a few standard checks. He is stunned when a medical check fails and he is stripped of job and privileges. Nobody wants to be around someone with any kind of disease. His credits are used up on medical costs but the illness progresses to weakness and tremors. To feed himself he has to steal. But he's a computer engineer, and he can't resist taking too much once he breaks a bank code. An alert is issued and he is saved only by a scruff with dreadlocks who drags him onto a small ship and off the planet.
The Bideshi man, Lochlan, thinks Adam might be useful. However it's quickly a matter of how the Bideshi can help Adam, because their spiritual healer is able to arrest the progress of the illness for a time. Then the official Protectorate fleet comes hunting him down, and it is clear that more than just money is at stake. In LINE AND ORBIT there are obvious echoes of films Silent Running and Avatar, as the Bideshi live in spaceships full of forests and grasslands, programmed to replicate seasons for the plants. The sterile-by-comparison Protectorate consider these gypsy people as little better than animals and intend killing anyone who stands in their way. Adam is so well engineered that he learns to fire weapons and be a fighter pilot almost instantly, and strikes back not just for himself but for Lochlan and his new community. An alien race, the fearsome Klashorg, turns out to have more in common with the Bideshi than their 'pure' cousins.
Adam also learns that the Bideshi are relaxed about alternative sexuality and he starts a relationship with another man for the first time. However this is not a large part of this story by Sunny Moraine and Lisa Soem and need not deter the nervous. While I feel this is an adult novel for several reasons, including language and violence, men and women should equally enjoy it.
What heโs been taught to fear could be his destinyโฆand
his only hope.
Adam Yuga, a rising young
star in the imperialist Terran Protectorate, is on the verge
of a massive promotionโฆuntil a routine physical exam reveals
something less than perfection. Genetic flaws are taboo, and
Adam soon discovers thereโs a thin line between rising star
and starving outcast.
Stripped of wealth and
position, stricken with a mysterious, worsening illness,
Adam resorts to stealing credits to survive. Moments from
capture by the Protectorate, help arrives in the form of
Lochlan, a brash, cocksure Bideshi fighter.
Now the
Bideshi, a people long shunned by the Protectorate, are the
only ones who will offer him shelter. As Adam learns the
truth about the mysterious, nomadic people he was taught to
fear, Lochlan offers him not just shelterโbut a temptation
Adam can only resist for so long.
Struggling to adapt
to his new life, Adam discovers his illness hides a terrible
secret, one that the Protectorate will stop at nothing to
conceal. Time is growing short, and he must find the
strength to close a centuries-old rift, accept a new
identityโand hold on to a love that could cost him
everything.
Warning: This title contains brief
scenes of explicit violence and mild but potentially
triggering homophobia.
© 2003-2026