One: Book III of Janaforma Trilogy

Elay is a Janaforma lifebearer who is brilliant, beautiful, and deeply passionate. Her surrogate mebr (or lifebearer parent) brought Elay to life from genetic potential stored in a cryogenic vault three hundred years before either of them was born. Elay is now 22 years old and a citizen of the great starship, La Ventana, which is returning from its Square of Pegasus Mission. In the Janaforma timeframe, La Ventana departed Orion space 354 years earlier, but in the Spur timeframe, La Ventana has been gone for 3,000 years. Nobody within the Orion Spur remembers The Janaforma or ever heard of the Square of Pegasus Mission, but all that is about to change when a Janaforma consort, named Bejan, discovers a drug called Regression that allows the taker to explore past lives. At the crossroads of becoming and self-creation the question always comes: Who am I and why am I here? The frigid indifference of space was nothing new to the Janaforma; yet 130 years earlier, something extraordinary occurred that shook the foundations of their mission. La Ventana was as far out in this galaxy as any Spur ship ever attempted to travel. Fifty light-years this side of Enif, roughly 780 light-years from the Orion Spur neighborhood, fear erupted aboard for which no causal link could ever be discovered. The problem hit so suddenly and profoundly that within hours, the entire crew was paralyzed. Premonitions of doom degenerated into a hysterical terror that beyond our galaxy was a vortex capable of sucking La Ventana and its people into the void. Then, in a simultaneous flash of intuitive revelation, every person aboard sensed the physical limits of space. The great starship made a wide 180-degree turn and set course for the Orion Spur. Physicians aboard later diagnosed the crisis as a severe case of space phobia. Later the Janaforma Gathering concluded, “We believe the fabric of rational control is a force exerted from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and the farther out we travel, away from our source, the more profound space phobia will become.”