5 stars
First Sentence: The little boy was frightened.
Thoughts: After the apocalypse, things were, as one would expect, in a state of upheaval. The people who lived in the nuclear blast zones were dead. The people who lived near them became nomads, eking out a primitive existence in the new deserts while avoiding the radioactive craters. The people in the mountains were so afraid of mutations they placed ever higher value on physical attractiveness. The people who lived in the big city sealed themselves off in a dome and refused to let outsiders in. Except the aliens, but they wouldn’t let any non-city dweller see or speak to them.
Obviously it was hard to get proper healthcare and vaccinations. The healers banded together and created a school in the mountains. To get in, you had to prove you were adept at genetic manipulation. When you were accepted you learned how to manipulate snake venom to make needed medications and inoculations while simultaneously building up a tolerance to said venom. When you graduated you were given a cobra, a rattlesnake, and a dreamsnake and sent out to heal the masses.
What is a dreamsnake? An alien snake with hallucinogenic venom. They weren’t poisonous, but their bite was used to calm patients down and either give them good dreams or ease them into a peaceful death. Since the dreamsnakes were alien, it was almost impossible to breed them. Most of the ones the school had were clones and there was a very limited number of those. Which is why it was such a tragedy when healer Snake’s dreamsnake Grass was killed by the panicky parents of a nomad child she was treating.
Now Snake has a real problem. She can do her job without a dreamsnake, but not well. Also she has to report Grass’s death to the powers that be at the college and that means she’s going to be out of a job as a traveling healer. Also Grass was one of the dreamsnakes that she had personally raised and losing it hurt. Still, nothing else to be done but to head back home and face the music.
But maybe the people in the city could help her get a new dreamsnake. That’s what a paralyzed miner told her. The miner’s partners had brought Snake to their camp from the oasis she was camping at after Jess* fell off her horse. Jess was originally from the city and thought maybe they could get a snake from one of the aliens. Snake began to take Jess home, but it soon became clear that Jess was suffering from more than a broken spine. She fell in a radioactive crater and she had a nasty case of radiation sickness. After Jess died, Snake when back to the oasis only to find that a “crazy” had come along and wrecked most of her belongings.
After gathering her broken belongings back together, Snake restarted her journey to the healer’s college. Along the way she stopped in a mountain town where she briefly got entangled in a fight between the mayor and his son. She also befriended Melissa, the girl who lived in the stables. No one else talked to Melissa, mainly because she had been badly burned in a barn fire and she wasn’t pretty anymore. When Snake found out that the stablemaster was abusing Melissa in every single possible way, she exposed him for the perv he was, adopted Melissa, and left in cloud of righteous indignation. As well she should.
Maybe now she can get to the city. Or maybe not. Or maybe the crazy would catch up to her and lead her on an even weirder journey that reveals much about the dreamsnakes.
Meanwhile, Arevin, a man from the nomad tribe that killed Grass, is following Snake. Not for any dastardly purposes; he merely fell in love with her when he was helping her control her cobra while its venom was being adapted and wants to travel with her. It takes him a while, but he finally catches up to Snake and Melissa for one of the “just in time” rescues that science fiction is noted for. The last minute is the best minute.
*I think that was her name. If not, that’s what I’m calling her.
The Eclectic Reviewer 