Luna - Moon Rising

Luna – Moon Rising

By Ian McDonald

She cries out. She is in Boa Vista again, Boa Vista full of green and life, light and water and warmth. The serene, full-lipped faces of the orixas watch over her as she explores the river, wading barefoot through pools, scrambling up the small cascades and falls, her dress soaked through. A drone floats over her head, her madrinha's watching presence. The detail goes far beyond her own memory; she hears every leaf stir, sees every shadow and ripple, imagines she feels the cool cool water between her toes, smells the warm verdure of old Boa Vista. Noises from a stand of tall, swaying bamboo distract her from her mission: there are paths cut through the canes, irresistible to young explorers. The tracks wind in: she glimpses movement through the screen of wands. The path delivers her to a clearing in the centre of the grove. There is Lucasinho, on the growing edge of kidhood, wearing a long-skirted, flowing sky-blue dress and make-up.

“Lady Luna, Quuen of the Moon!” he cries and curtsies deep to Luna. “Yemenja Queen of the Waters welcomes you to her grand ball!” He bends down to take her hands and half-squatting, half-bounding they dance around the clearing, laughing and laughing and laughing.

“How old was I ?” she asks Luna-familiar.

Three, says the grey-silver ball hovering over her chest. Lucasinho was thirteen.

Now he is fifteen and she is five and they are in his apartment in Xango's eye. He has tasked some long-armed, high precision bots and they are passing a long evening playing with faces. Each programs their bot to spray-paint them a new face: the winner is the one who gets the biggest reaction. She remembers this.  She doesn't want to see it again, in detail that time has dimmed. The animal faces, the theatre masks, the high-fashion make ups and the fight-faces of the martial artists. Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Then Lucasinho turns away from her and the bot arm is busier than she has ever seen it, weaving and dancing and dodging in and out, drawing circles, making sudden runs across Lucasinho's hidden face.

He turns back to her.

His face is eyes. Nothing but eyes. A hundred eyes.

She screamed then. She screams now. She fled then, but she stays now. She can look at the face of a hundred eyes. She has seen worse.

Now she is six and she goes by her secret path to her special pool that is fed by Iansa's tears but Lucasinho has found the secret path to her special pool and he's in it, with a friend, and they're both naked and looking at each other and when she says, This is my pool, they turn round and go “Oh, hey” and step away from each other. Now Luna can understand what they were doing but the all she said was, “Well, I'm going to join you” and they fled like she had poured poison into the water.

The boy's name was Daystar Olawepu, Luna-familiar tells her. He was in Lucasinho's colloquium in Joao de Deus. Luna realises now that the reason they ran was not because she had caught them playing with each other's penises, but because Lucasinho had smuggled the boy through the security grid. And she thinks, “but he didn't get past the security grid, because the security grid checked everyone. Daystar was let through. And she thinks, Daystar is a pretty name.

Now she is seven and Boa Vista is full of movement and music and lights and peuple in wonderful clothes and she is chasing ornamental butterflies between the guests. She is in a white dress with bold red peonies and wherever she goes she is told how pretty she looks.

Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Photo by Elena.

Christina Dalcher

Christina Dalcher - Vox, a novel

I lunge forward on unsteady feet, but Lorenzo catches me by the arm. His grip is fir, almost bruising.

“No,” he says, “If she speaks again, the current will -”

He's stronger than I am, but I break away, flinging myself at the woman on the bench, whose body sags like a lifeless doll under the harsh overhead lights. She's no how I remember her, not in low-riding jeans and a crazily printed paisley blouse, not smiling from under a fringe of color-of-the week, hair while she brewed herbal tea in a crappy Georgetown apartment and cursed at the Ikea table instructions that defied minds with multiple degrees. She's in a gray tunic that matches her hair and the color of her skin, except for the palms of her hands, which have been rubbed as raw as fresh meat from a year of labor that would make even the most stalwart farmer turn his back on the land and find a job pushing paper across a desk. She's wearing a single black hand on her left wrist where a charm bracelet of Chinese horoscope animals used to be.

“Jacko,” I say, placing one hand over her chapped lips. “Jacko, don't say anything else. Don't let them make it worse for you.”

Jackie Juarez, once the woman who I thought would stop the world, slumps wordlessly into my arms, and sobs.

The door behind me slides closed, then opens again. I don't need to turn to check who it is I can smell the bastard.

“Morgan,” I say. Then I hear the slap, the surprised whine, the metallic click of a firearm being cocked.

This is another thing I know about the guns: you don't cock and aim unless you're ready to kill.

“Careful, Morgan,” I say, still holding on to Jackie. “You need him. You need his formula.”

He doesn't, of course; Morgan already has Lorenzo's notes. I'm only buying time.

And then it hits me: Lorenzo, dashing out of the upstairs lab to check his office, coming back and shaking his head to tell me the papers weren't there. Morgan demanding a formula by tomorrow.

“Soldier,” Morgan says, “put it away.”

I turn from Jackie toward Lorenzo, who stands stock-still, ready to take a bullet in exchange for a slap, and I realize Morgan can't possibly have taken the notes.

So, who the hell did?

Loneliness. Photo by Elena.

Vox-Chapter 25

Vox by Christina Dalcher (excerpt, chapter Twenty Five)

My office is something between a cave and a monk's cell, but less luxurious given the pair of desks and chairs crammed inside. Also, it lacks a window, unless you count the glass pane in the door that gives the work space all the privacy of a fishbowl. A scarf and purse, both on the tattered side of wear, site on one one of the desks. I recognize both as Lin's.

Morgan shows me inside and leaves me to get settled. He says he'll come back in a few minutes to take me around the lab, get me set up with an ID tag, and show me where the copier room and the printer are are. I now know nothing I do here will be unseen by other eyes.

Oddly, I don't care. The idea of seeing Lin again, of talking to her working with her, has me as high as a schoolgirl at her first dance. 

“Or, my god,” a wisp of a voice says from the doorway.

Lin Kwan is a small woman. I often told Patrick she could fit in one of my pants legs – and I'm only five and a half feet and 120 soaking wet, thanks to the stress diet I've been on for the past several months. Everything about her is small: her voice, her almond eyes, the sleek bob that barely reaches below her ears. Lin's breasts and ass make me look like a Peter Paul Rubens model. But her brain – her brain is a leviathan of gray matter. It would have to be; MIT doesn't hand out dual PhDs for nothing.

Like me, Lin is a neurolinguist. Unlike me, she's a medical doctor, a surgeon, to be specific. She left her practice fixing brains fifteen years ago, when she was in her late forties, and moved to Boston.

Five years later, she left with a doctorate in each hand, one in cognitive science, one in linguistics. If anyone can make me feel like the class dunce, it's Lin.

An I love her for it. She sets the bar as high as Everest.

Lin steps in and glances down at my left writs. “You too, huh?” The she bear-hugs me,, which is interesting since she's shorter and narrower than I am. It's a little being bear-hugged by a Barbie doll.

“Me too,” I say, laughing and crying at the same time.

After what seems like an hour, she releases me from her clutch and steps back. “You're exactly the same. Maybe even younger-looking.”

“Well, it's amazing what a year off of working for you has done,” I say.

The humor doesn't work. She shakes her head and raises a hand, thumb and forefinger a fraction of an each apart. “I was this close to going to Malasiya to visit my family. This close.” Her fingers fly apart into a starfish as she blows our air. “Gone. Gone in a bloody day.”

“You sound like the queen,” I say. “Except for the bloody part.” 

No one writes a long novel alone (Stephen King). Illustration by Elena.

Gleam in My Eyes

Gleam in My Eyes (from Vox, by Christina Dalcher)

It's been so long since I've used my laptop, I'm worried it might not power up, that a year of nonuse will have sent it into the same dormant silence I fell into. But it's obedient, like an old friend waiting for a phone call, or a pet sitting patiently at the door until its owner comes home. I trace a ginger over its smooth keys, wipe a smudge from the screen, and collect myself.

A year is a long time. Hell, when the FIOS in our house went down for two hours, it seemed like the end of the world.

Eight thousand seven hundred ans sixty hours is a lifetime longer than two, which is why I need a moment before I walk out of this house, start the Honda, and follow Morgan to the lab where I'll be spending three days a week from now until I finish fixing the president's brother.

Also, I need a moment to sift through my files, the ones I copied and kept at home so I didn't have to lug the same shit back and forth to my campus office. There are reports I don't want Morgan to see, not until I can speak to Lin.

The bottom folder is the one I want, the folder with the red X on its front flap. Patrick has already gone to work, and Morgan is out in his Mercedes making phone calls, likely gloating to Reverend Carl about what a fantastic team he's put together, which leaves me here in the paneled room with its humming window air-conditioning unit and – I don't know – about five million pounds of books. They don't weigh that much, but the teetering piles of texts and journals are like academic mesas littering the rec room.

We havent't used the sleeper sofa in a year and a half, not since the last houseguest came to visit. No one really visits anymore. There's no point. We tried it once, a dinner party for some old friends I'd met when Steven was still in diapers, but after an hour of the men talking and the women staring into their plates of salmon, everyone decided to go home.

I pry up the corduroy-covered cushion next to me and slip my red-X folder in among a few cracker crumbs, a stray piece of popcorn, and some spare change.

This “it”, encased in a dull manila folder rubbed shiny by my own hands, is the work that will, when I'm ready, reverse Wernicke's aphasia. I've thought about finding a more permanent hiding place for it, but given the year's worth of crap I find beneath the sofa cushions, I don't see the need.

No one, not even Patrick, knows we had passed the brink from “close” to “finished”, although I believe  Lin and Lorenzo suspected.

The day before Thomas and his Taser-carrying men came for me the first time, I had even been winding down a lecture on linguistic processing in the posterior left hemisphere – the area of the brain where temporal and parietal lobes meet. Wernicke's area, and the language loss that accompanies damage to this complex cluster of gray matter, was the reason most of my students signed on for this seminar, and on that day the room was packed with colleagues of colleagues, the dean, and a few out-of-town researches intrigued by our group's latest breakthrough. Lin and Lorenzo sat in the back row as I talked.

They must have seen the gleam in my eyes... Illustration by Elena.

Gold

Gold

From The final Science Fiction collection by Isaac Asimov

The plants and animals? Well, we control them. We supervise their breeding and we consume any excess. Maintaining the human population at a reasonable level is more difficult. We cannot allow human births to outstrip human deaths, and we keep the number of deaths as low as possible, of course. This makes our culture a nonyouthful one compared to Earth's. There are few youngsters and a large percentage of those mature and postmature. This produces psychological strains, but there is the general feeling among Settlers that those strains are worth it, since with a carefully controlled population, there are no poor, no homeless, and no helpless.

Again, the water, air, and food must be carefully recycled, and much of our technology is devoted to the distillation of used water, and to the treatment of solid bodily wastes and their conversion to clean fertilizer. We cannot afford to have anything go wrong with our recycling technology, for there is little room for slack. And, of course, even when all goes well, the feeling that we eat and drink recycled materials is a bit unpalatable. All is recycled on Earth, too, but Earth is so large and the natural cycling system so unnoticeable, that Earthpeople tend to be unaware of the matter.

Then, too, there is always the feat that a sizable meteor may strike and damage the outer shell of a Settlement. A bit of matter no larger than a piece of gravel might do damage, and one a foot across would surely destroy and Settlement. Fortunately, the chances for such a misadventure are small and we will eventually learn to detect and divert such objects before they reach us. Still, these dangers weigh upon us, and help mitigate the feeling of over-security that some of us complain about.

With an effort, however, with close attention and unremitting care, we can maintain our ecology, were it not for the matter of trade and travel.

Each Settlement produces something that other Settlements would like to have, in the matter of food, or art, of ingenious devices. What's more, we must trade with Earth as well, and many Settlers want to visit Earth and see some of the things we don't have in the Settlements. Earthpeople can't realize how exciting it is for us to see a vast blue horizon, or to look out upon a true ocean, or to see in ice-capped mountain.

Therefore, there is a constant coming and going among the Settlements and Earth. But each Settlement has its own ecological balance; and, of course, Earth has, even these days, an ecology that is enormously and impossibly rich by Settlement standards.

We have our insects that are acclimated and under control, but what if strange insects are casually and unintentionally introduced from another Settlement or from Earth?

A strange insect, a strange worm, even a strange rodent might totally upset our ecology, inflict damage on our native plants and animals. On numerous occasions, in fact, a Settlement has had to take extraordinary measures to eliminate an unwanted life-form. For months every effort had to be taken to track down every last insect of some species that, in its own Settlement, is harmless, or that, on earth, can keep its depredations local.

Earth Ecology. Photograph by Elena.

Marque and Reprisal

Marque and Reprisal

By Poul Anderson

1700 hours in San Francisco was 20000 in Washington, but Harold Twyman, senior senator from California and majority leader of United States representatives in the Parliament of the World Federation, was a busy man whose secretary could not arrange a sealed-call appointment any earlier on such short notice as Heim had given. However, that suited the latter quite well. It gave him time to recover from the previous night without excessive use of drugs, delegate the most pressing business at the Heimdal plant to the appropriate men, and study Vadasz's evidence. The Magyar was still asleep in a guest room. His body had a lot of abuse to repair.

Shortly before 1700 Heim decided he was sufficiently familiar with the material Robert de Vigny had assembled. He clicked off the viewer, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. An assortment of aces still nibbled at him. Once – Lord, it didn't seem very long ago! - he could have weathered twenty times the bout he'd just been through, and made love to three or four girls, and been ready to ship out next morning. I'm at the awkward age, he thought wryly. Too young for antisenescence treatment to make any difference, too old for – what? Nothing, by Satan! I simply sit too much these days. Let me get away for a bit and this paunch I'm developing will melt off. He sucked in his stomach, reached for a pipe, and stuffed the bowl with unnecessary violence.

Why not take a vacation? He thought. Go into the woods and hunt; he had a standing invitation to use Kan McVeigh's game preserve in British Colombia. Or sail his catamaran to Hawaii. Or order out his interplanetary yacht, climb the Lunar Alps, tramp the Martian hills; Earth was so stinking cluttered. Or even book an interstellar passage. He hadn't seen his birthplace on Gea since his parents sent him back to Stavanger to get a proper education. Afterward there had been Greenland Academy, and the Deepspace Fleet, and Earth again, always too much to do.

Shraply before him the memory rose: Tau Ceti a ball of red gold in the sky; mountains coming down to the sea as they did in Norway, but the oceans of Gea were warm and green and haunted him with odors that had no human name; the Sindabans that were his boyhood playmate, laughing just like him as they all ran to the water and piled into a pirogue, raised the wingsail and leaped before the wind; campfire on the island, where flames sprang forth to pick daoda fronds and the slim furry bodies of his friends out of a night that sang; chants and drums and portentous ceremonies; and – and – No. Heim struck a light to his tobacco and puffed hard. I was twelve years old when I left. And now Far and Mor are dead, and my Sindabans grown into an adulthood which humans are still trying to understand. I'd only find an isolated little scientific base, no different from two score that I've seen elsewhere. Time is a one-way lane.

With enough strength, lightweight unclefts can be made to togethermelt. Illustration by Elena.

My Object All Sublime

My Object All Sublime

By Poul Anderson

Once upon a time, a very, very long time in the future, there was a civilization. I shall not describe it to you, for that would not be possible. Could you go back to the time of the Egyptian pyramid builders and tell them about this city below us? I don't mean they wouldn't believe you;, of course they wouldn't, but that hardly matters. I mean they would not understand. Nothing you said could make sense to them. And the way people work and think and believe would be less comprehensible than those lights and towers and machines. Not so? If I spoke to you of people in the future living among great blinding energies, and of genetic changelings, and imaginary wars, and talking stones, and a certain blind hunter, you might feel anything at all, but you would not understand.

So I ask you only to imagine how many thousands of times this planet has circled the sun, how deeply buried and forgotten we are; and then also to imagine that this other civilization thinks in patterns so foreign that it has ignored every limitation of logic and natural law, to discover means of traveling in time. So, while the ordinary dweller in that age (I can't exactly call him a citizen, or anything else for which we have a word, because it would be too misleading), the average educated dweller, knows in a vague, uninterested way that millenia ago some semi-sauvages were the first to split the atom – only one or two men have actually been here, walked among us, studied and mapped us and returned with a file of information for the central brain, if I may call it by such a name. No one else is concerned with us, any more than you are concerned with early Mesopatamian archology. You see?

He dropped his gaze to the tumbler in his hand and held it there, as if the whisky were an oracular pool. The silence grew. At last I said, “Very well. For the sake of the story, I'll accept the premise. I imagine time travelers would be unnoticeable. They'd have techniques of disguise and so on. Wouldn't want to change their own past”.

“Oh, no danger of that,” he said. “It's only that they couldn't learn much if they went around insisting they were from the future. Just imagine.”

I chuckled.

Michaels gave me a shadowed look. “Apart from the scientific,” he said, “can you guess what use there might be for time travel?”

He shook his head. “Think again. They'd only want a limited number of Minoan statuettes, Ming vases, or Third World Hegemony dwarfs, chiefly for their museums. If “museum” isn't too inaccurate a word. I tell you, they are not like us. Af for natural resources, they're beyond the point of needing any; they make their own.”

He paused, as if before a final plunge. Then: “What was this penal colony the French abandoned?”

“Devil's Island?”

“Yes, that was it. Can you imagine a better revenge on a condemned criminal than to maroon him in the past.”

Punishment is a catharsis of society as a whole. Photo by Elena.

Say It with Flowers

Say It with Flowers

By Poul Anderson

Save for a bunk, the cabin was bare. Tiny, comfortless, atremble with the energies of the ship, it surrounded Flowers like a robot womb. That was his first thought as he struggled back to consciousness.

The, through the racking stutter of a pulse run wild, he knew that hands lifted his head off the deck. He gasped for breath, Sweat drenched his coverall, chill and stinking. Feat reflexes turned the universe into horror. Through blurred vision, he looked up at the bluejacket who squatted to cradle his head.

“Flip that intercom, Pete!” the North American was saying. “Get hold of the doc. Fast!”

Flowers tried to speak, but could only rattle past the soreness in his throat.

The other guard, invisible to him, reported: “The prisoner, sir. We heard him call out and then fall. He was unconscious when we opened the door. Come to in a couple of minutes, but he's cold to touch and got a heartbeat like to bust his ribs.”

“Possibly cardiac,” said the intercom. “Carry him to sickbay. I”ll be there'”

Flowers tried to relax in the arms of the young men and bring his too rapid breathing under control. That wasn't easy. When they laid him on an examination bench, amidst goblin-eyed instruments, he must force his spine to unarch.

The medical officer was a chubby man who poked him with deft fingers while reeling off, :Chest pains?” Shortness of breath? Ever had any seizures before?” He signaled an orderly to attach electrodes.

“No. No. I ache all over, but -”

“Cardiogram normal, aside from the tachycardia,” the doctor read off the printouts.

“Encephalogram... hm-m-m, hard to tell, not epileptiform, probably just extreme agitation. Neurogram shows low-level pain activity. Take a blood sample, Collins.” He ran his palms more thoroughly over abdomen, chest and throat. “My God,” he muttered, “where did you get those tattoos?” His gaze sharpened. “Redness here, under the chin. Sore?”

“Uh-huh,” whispered Flowers.

“What happened to you?”

“I dunno. Started feeling bad. Blacked out.”

A chemical analyzer burped and extruded a strip of paper. The orderly ripped it off. “Blood pH quite high, sir,” he read. “Everything else negative.”

“Well-” The doctor rubbed his chin. “We can't do more except take an X-ray. A warcraft isn't equipped like a clinic.” He nodded at Flowers. “Don't worry. You'll transfer to the other ship in half an hour or so, and I understand she's going almost directly to Vesta. The camp there has adequate facilities. Though you look a little better already.”

“What... might this... a been?” Flowers managed to ask.

“My guess,” said the doctor, “is an allergic reaction to something you ate. That can overstimulate the vagus nerve and produce these other symptoms. You asterites never see a good many Terrestrial foods, and this navy prides itself on its menus. I'll find out what went into your dinner, including seasonings, and give you a list. Avoid those things, till the culprit has been identified, and you may have no more trouble.”

Flowers lay back while they X-rayed him. That was negative, too. The doctor said he could stay where he was, under guard, till transfer time. He stared at the overhead and concentrated on getting well.

I love you enough to tell the truth, but you must be brave enough to accept it (en anglais). Photo by Elena.

Vox

Vox

A novel by Christina Dalcher, excerpt 

Sometimes, I trace invisible letters on my palm. While Patrick and the boys talk with their tongues outside, I talk with my fingers. I scream and whine and curse about what, in Patrick's words “used to be”.

This is how things are now: We have allotments of one hundred words a day. My books, even the old copies of Julia Child and – here's irony – the tattered red-and-white checked Better Hones and Gardens a friend decided would be a cute joke for a wedding gift, are locked in cupboards so Sonia can't get the. Which means I can't get at them either. Patrick carries the keys around like a weight, and sometimes I think it's the heaviness of this burden that makes him look older.

It's the little stuff I miss most: jars of pens and pencils tucked int the corners of every room, notepads wedged in between cookbooks, the dry-erase shopping list on the wall next to the spice cabinet. Even my old refrigerator poetry magnets, the ones Steven used to concoct ridiculous Italo-English sentences with, laughing himself to pieces. Gone, gone. Like my e-mail account.

Like everything.

Some of life's little silliness remain the same. I still drive, hit the grocery store on Tuesdays and Fridays, shop for new dresses and hand-bags, get my hair done once a month down at Iannuzi's Not that I've changed the cut – I'd need too many precious words to tell Stefano how much to take off here ad how much to leave there. My leisure reading limits itself to billboards advertising the latest energy drink, ingredients lists on ketchup bottles washing instructions on clothing tags: Do not bleach.

Riveting material, all of it.

Sundays, we take the kids to a movie and buy popcorn and soda, those little rectangular boxes of chocolates with the white nonpareils on top, the kind you find only in movie theaters, never in the shops. Sonia always laughs at the cartoons that play while the audience files in. The fils are a distraction, the only time I hear female voices unconstrained and unlimited. Actresses are allowed a special dispensation while they're on the job. Their lines, of course, are written by men.

During the first months, I did sneak a peek at a book now and again, scratch a quick note on the back of a cereal box or an egg carton, writhe a love note to Patrick in lipstick on our bathroom mirror. I had good reasons, very good ones – Don't think about them, Jean; don't think about the women you saw in the grocery store – to keep note writing inside the house. Then Sonia came in one morning, caught the lipstick message she couldn't read, and yelped, “Letters! Bad!”

I kept communication inside me from that point, only writing a few words to Patrick in the evenings after the kids were in bed, burning the paper scraps in a tin can. With Steven the way he is now, I don't even risk that.

Patrick and the boys, out on the back porch close to my window, are swapping stories about school, politics, the news, while crickets buzz in the dark around our bungalows. They make so much noise, those boys and those crickets. Deafening.

All my words ricochet in my head as I listen, emerge from my throat in a heavy, meaningless sigh. And all I can think about are Jackie's last words to me.

Think about what you need to do to stay free.

Venus. Photo by Elena.

Epilogue

Epilogue

By Poul Anderson

There was no soil, only sand, rusty red and yellow. But outside the circle which had been devastated by the boat's jets, Darkington found the earth carpeted with prismatic growth, a few inches high, seemingly rooted in the ground. He broke one off for closer examination and saw tiny crystals, endlessly repeated, in some transparent siliceous material: like snowflakes and spiderwebs of glass.

It sparkled so brightly, making so many rainbows, that he couldn't well study the interior. He could barely make out at the center a dark clump pf wires, coils transistors? No, he told himself, don't be silly. He gave it to Frederika, who exclaimed at its beauty.

He himself walked across an open stretch, hoping for a view even vaguely familiar. Where the hillside dropped too sharply to support anything but the crystals – they made it one dazzle of diamonds – he saw eroded contours, the remote white sword of a waterfall, strewn boulders and a few crags like worn-out obelisks. The land rolled away into blue distances; a snowcapped mountain range guarded the eastern horizon. The sky overhead was darker than in his day, faintly greenish blue, full of clouds. He couldn't look near the fierce big sun.

Kuroki joined him. “What d'you think, Hugh?” the pilot asked.

“I hardly dare say. You?”

“Hell, I can't think with that bloody boiler factory clattering at me.” Kuroki grimaced behind his faceplate. “Turn off your sonic mike and let's talk by radio.”

Darkington agreed. Without amplification, the noise reached him through his insulated helmet as a far-off tolling. “ We can take it for granted,” he said, “that none of this is accidental. No minerals could simply crystallize our like this.

“Don't look manufactured to me, though.”

“Well, said Darkington, “you wouldn't expect them to turn out their products in anything like a human machine shop.”

“Them?”

“Whoever... whatever made this. For whatever purpose.”

Kuroki whistled. “I was afraid you'd say something like that. But we didn't see a trace of – cities, roads, anything – from orbit. I know the cloudiness made seeing pretty bad, but we couldn't have missed the signs of a civilization able to produce stuff on this scale.” 

“Why not?” If the civilization isn't remotely like anything we've ever imagined?”

Frederika approached, leaving a cartful of instruments behind. “The low and medium frequency radio spectrum is crawling,” she reported. “You never heard so many assorted hoots, buzzes, whirrs, squeals, and whines in your life.”

“We picked up an occasional bit of radio racket while in orbit,” Kuroki nodded. “Didn't think much about it, then.”

“Just noise,” Frederika said hastily. “Not varied enough to be any kind of... of communication. But I wonder what's doing it?”

“Oscillators,” Darkington said. “Incidental radiation from a variety of – oh, hell, I<ll speak plainly – machines.”

“But - “ Her hand stole toward his. Glove grasped glove. She wet her lips. “No, Hugh, this is absurd. How could any one be capable of making... what we see... and not have detected us in orbit and - and done something about us?”

Darkington shrugged. The gesture was lost in his armor/  Maybe they'r bidding their time. Maybe they aren't here at the moment. The whole planet could be an automated factory, you know. Like those ocean mineral harvesters we had in our time” - it hurt to say that - “which Sam mentioned on the way down. Somebody may come around periodically and collect the production.”

“Where do they come from?” asked Kuroki in a rough tone.

“I don't know, I tell you. Let's stop making wild guesses and start gathering data.”

Silence grew between them. The skeleton towers belled. Finally Kuroki nodded. “Yeas. What say we take a little stroll? We may come on something.”

Nobody mentioned fear. They dared not.

Silence grows. Photograph by Elena.

Brave to Be a King

Brave to Be a King

By Poul Anderson (excerpt)

Late that day he was in the hills, where cedars gloomed above cold, brawling rooks and the side road ont which he had turned became a rutted upward track. Though arid enough, the Iran of this age still had a few such forests. The horse plodded beneath him, worn down. He should find some herdsman's house and request lodging, simply to spare the creature. But no, there would be a full moon; he could walk if he must and reach the scooter before sunrise. He didn't think he could sleep.

A place of long sere grass and ripe berries did invite him to rest, though. He had food in the saddlebags, a wineskin, and a stomach unfilled since dawn. He clucked encouragingly to the horse and turned.

Something caught his eye. Far down the road, level sunlight glowed off a dust cloud. It grew bigger even as he watched. Several riders, he guessed, coming in one devil of a hurry. King's messengers? But why, into this section? Uneasiness tickled his nerves. He put on his helmet cap, buckled the helmet itself above, hung shield on arm and loosened the short sword in its sheath. Doubtless the party would just hurry on pas him, but...

Now he could see that there were eight men. They had good horseflesh beneath them, and the rearmost led a string of remounts. Nevertheless the animals were pretty jaded; sweat had made streaks down their dusty flanks and manes were plastered to necks. It must have been a long gallop. The riders were decently clad in the usual full white pants, shirt, boots, cloak, and tall brimless hat; not courtiers or professional soldiers, but not bandits either. They were armed with sword, bows, and lariats.

Suddenly Everard recognized the greybeard at their head. It exploded in him: Harpagus!

And through whirling haze he could also see – even for ancient Iranians, the followers were a tough-looking crew.

“Oh-oh,” said Everard, half aloud, “School's out”.

Hid mind clicked over. There wasn't time to be afraid, only to think. Harpagus had no other obvious motive for hightailing into the hills than to catch the Greek Meander. Surely, in a court riddled with spies and blabbermouth. Harpagus would have learned within an hour that the King spoke to the stranger as an equal in some unknown tongue and let him go back northward. It would take the Chilarch a while longer to manufacture some excuse for leaving the palace, round up his personal bully boys, and give chase. Why? Because “Cyrus” had once appeared in these uplands, riding some device which Harpagus had coveted. No fool, the Mede must never have been satisfied with the evasive yarn Keith had handed him. It would seem reasonable that one day another mage from the King's home country must appear; and this time Harpagus would not let the engine go from him so easily.

Everard paused no longer. They were only a hundred yards away. He could see the Children's eyes glitter beneath shaggy brows. He spurred his horse, off the road and across the meadow.

“Stop!” yelled a remembered voice behind him. “Stop, Greek!”

Everard got an exhausted trot out of his mount. The cedars threw long shadows across him.

“Stop or we shoot!... halt!... shoot, then! Not to kill! Get the steed!”

The Gothic Thoughts. Photo by Elena.

To Build a World

To Build a World

By Poul Anderson

Fifty floors down, the elevator let him out into a lobby, small and empty despite its polished marble. “Blastula,“ he muttered, « I'd hoped this was a hotel.” But no. You couldn't get away with as much in a hotel as you could in a soundproofed apartment. Baccioco probably maintained a number of those, around the planet. Sevigny debated whether to borrow someone's phone here. If he left this exit unwatched, his enemies could get away before the police arrived.

On the other hand, if he hung around they might well find some way to recapture him. And as for their escape, come to think of it, men as prominent as Baccioco and – he supposed – Gupta couldn't disappear. Rashid didn't matter, was little more than a tool. And he found himself hoping a bit that Maura would go free.

Oscar made comforting noises on his shoulder.

He walked out onto the street. It was wide and softly lit, lined with tall residential buildings. An occasional car went by, the whisper of its air cushion blending with the warm breeze that rustled in palm fronds. He was high above the ocean, which he glimpsed at the edge of the city glitter beneath. The Moon was no longer in sight, but he made our a few stars.

Where was the nearest public phone? He chose an eastward course arbitrarily and began striding. His buskins thudded; the slight jar and the sense of kinesthesia helped shake a little tightness out of him. But his skin was still wet, his stink sharp against a background of jasmine, his nerves still taut.

At the end of the block a pedestrian belt lifted him over the street. From the top of its arc he spied some glowsigns to the north, and headed that way. Before long he reached a cluster of shops. They were closed for the night, but even in his hurry he lost a few seconds gaping at their display windows. Was that much luxury possible on an Earth that everyone called impoverished? Wait. Remember your history classes. Inordinate wealth for a few has always gone along with inordinate want for the many. Because the many no longer have the economic strength to resist -

That recalled him to his purpose. There was a booth at the corner. He went in, fumbled for a half dollar and dropped the coin in the slot. The screen lit. He needed a minute to figure out how the system worked. On Venus and Luna they used radio for distance calls, intercoms when indoors. Finally he punched the button marked Directory and spelled out POLICE on the alphabet keys. A set of station numbers appeared. He dialed.

A face and a pair of uniformed shoulder came to view. “Honolulu Central. Can I help you?”

“I want to, report a theft and a kidnapping,” Sevigny said. It felt odd not to be telling his troubles to a clan elder.

The voice and eyes sharpened. “Where are you?”

Sevigny peered out at the signs and read the off. “I don't know where the nearest station would be. I'm stranger here.”

We are strangers here. Photo by Elena.

The Critique of Impure Reason

The Critique of Impure Reason

By Poul Anderson

The robot entered so quietly, for all his bulk, that Felix Tunny didn't hear. Bent over his desk, the man was first aware of the intruder when a shadow came between him and the fluoreceil. Then a last footfall quivered the floor, a vibration that went through Tunny's chair and into his bones. He whirled, choking on a breath, and saw the blueblack shape like a cliff above him. Eight feet up, the robot's eyes glowed angry crimson in a faceless helmet of a head.

A voice like a great gong reverberated through the office: “My, but you look silly.”

“What the devil are you doing?” Tunny yelped.

“Wandering about,” said Robot IZK-99 airily. “Hither and yon, yon and hither. Observing life. How deliciously right Brochet is!”

“Huh?” said Tunny. The fog of data, estimates, and increasingly frantic calculations was only slowly clearing from his head.

IZK-99 extended an enormous hand to exhibit a book.

Tunny read “The Straw and the Bean: a Novel of Modern Youth by Truman Brochet on the front. The back of the dust jacket was occupied by a coloripic of the author, who had bangs and delicate lips. Deftly, the robot flipped the book open and read aloud:

“Worms”, she said. “That's what they are, worms, that's what we-uns all are, Billy Chile, worms that grew a spine an' a brain way back in the Obscene or the Messyzoic or whenever it was.” Even in her sadness Ella Mae must always make her sad little jokes, which saddened me still more on this day of said rain and dying, magnolia blossoms. “We don't want them”, she said. “Backbones and brains, I mean, honey. They make us stiff and topheavy, so we can't lie down no more and be just nothing ay-tall but worms.”

“Take off your clothes,” I yawned.

“What has that got to do with anything?” Tunny asked.

“If you do not understand,” said IZK-99 coldly, “there is no use in discussing it with you. I recommend that you read Arnold Roach's penetrating critical essay on this book. It appeared in the last issue of  “Pierce, Arrow!” The Magazine of Penetrating Criticism. He devotes four pages to analyzing the various levels of meaning in that exchange between Ella Mae and Billy Chile.”  

“Ooh,” Tunny moaned. “Isn't it enough I've got a hangover, a job collapsing under me because of you, and a fight with my girl, but you have to mention that rag?”

“How vulgar you are. It comes from watching stereovision.” The robot sat down in a chair, which creaked alarmingly under his weight, crossed his legs and leafed through his book. The other hand lifted a rose to his chemosensor. “Exquisite,” he murmured.

“You don't imagine I”d sink to reading what the call fiction these days, do you?” Tunny sneered, with a feeble hope of humiliating him into going to work. “Piddling little experiments in the technique of describing more and more complicated ways to feel sorry for yourself – what kind of entertainment is that for a man?”

The race needs love, to be sure. Illustration by Elena.

Brake

Brake

Poul Anderson, excerpt

Many hours later, using orbital figures modified by further observation, a shuttle-boat from Ganymed came near enough to locate the Thunderbolt on radar. After maneuvering around so much, it didn't have reaction mass enough to match velocities. For about a second it passed so close that Devon's crew, working out on the hull, could see it – as if they were the damned in hell watching one of the elect fly past.

The shuttle-boat radioed for a vessel with fuller tanks. One came. It zeroed in – and decelerated like a startled mustang. The Thunderbolt had already fallen deeper into the enormous Jovian gravity field than the boat's engines could rise. 

The drifting ship vanished from sight, into the great face of the planet. High clouds veiled it from telescopes – clouds of free radicals, such as could not have existed for a moment under humanly endurable conditions. Jupiter is more alien than men can really imagine.

Her orbit on reemergence was not so very much different. But the boats which had almost reached her had been forced to move elsewhere they could not simply hang there, in that intense a field. So the Thunderbolt made another long, lonesome pass. By the time it was over, Ganymede was in the unfavorable position, and Callisto had never been in a good one. Therefore the ship entered Jupiter's atmosphere bor a third time, unattended.

On the next emergence into vacuum, her orbit had shortened and skewed considerably. The rate at which air drag operated was increasing, each plunge went deeper beneath the poison clouds, each swung through dear space took less time. However, there was hope. The Ganymedeans were finally organizing themselves. They computed an excellent estimate of what the fourth free orbit would be and planted well-fueled  boats strategically close at the right times.

Only – the Thunderbolt did not come anywhere near the predicted path.

It was pure bad luck. Devon's crew, working whenever the ship was in a vacuum, had almost cut away the after section. This last plunge into stiffening air resistance finished the job. Forces of drag and reaction, a shape suddenly altered, whipped the Thunderbolt wildly through the stratosphere. She broke free at last, on a drastically different orbit.

But then, it had been unusual good luck which brought the Jovians so close to her in the first place. Probabilities were merely reasserting themselves.

The radio said in a weak, fading voice: :Missed y” gain. Do know if we d'n come near, next time. Your period's getting' very short.”

“Maybe you shouldn't risk it.” Banning sighed. He had hoped for more, but if the gods had decided his ship was to plunge irretrievably into Jupiter, he had to accept the fact.

“We'll be all right, I reckon.” 

Outside, the air roared hollowly. Pressures incomparably greater than those in Earth's deepest oceans waited below.

On his final pass into any approximation of clear space – the stars were already hazed – Banning radioed: “This will be the last message, except for a ten-minute signal on the same band when we come to rest. Assuming we're alive! We've got to save capacitors. It'll be some time before help arrives. When it does, call me. I'll respond if we've survived, and thereafter emit a steady tone by which we can be located. Is that clear?”

A space-boat lost in space. Illustration by Elena.

The Longest Voyage

The Longest Voyage

By Poul Anderson

At length we saw weeds floating on the sea, birds, towering cloud masses, all the signs of land. Three days later we raised an island. It was an intense green under those calm skies. Surf, still more violent than in our hemisphere, flung against high cliffs, burst in a smother of foam and roared back down again. We coasted carefully, the palomers aloft to seek an approach, the gunners standing by our cannon with lighted matches. For not only were there unknown currents and shoals – familiar hazards – but we had had brushes with canoe-sailing, cannibals in the past. Especially did we fear the eclipses. My lords can visualize how in that hemisphere the sun each day must go behind Tambur. In that longitude the occurrence was about midafternoon and lasted nearly ten minutes. An awesome sight: the primary planet – for so Froad now called it, a planet akin to Diell or Coint, with our own world humbled to a mere satellite thereof! - become a black disk encircled with red, up in a sky suddenly full of stars. A cold wind blew across the sea, and even the breakers seemed hushed. Yet so impudent is the soul of man that we continued about our duties, stopping only for the briefest prayer as the sun disappeared, thinking more about the chance of shipwreck in the gloom than of God's Majesty.

So bright is Tambor that we continued to work our way around the island at night. From sunup to sunup, twelve mortal hours, we kept the Golden Leaper slowly moving. Toward the second noon, Captain Rovie's persistence was rewarded. An opening in the cliffs revealed a long fjord. Swampy shores overgrown with saltwater trees told us that while the tides rose high in that bay, it was not one of those roosts so dreaded by mariners. The wind being against us, we furled sail and lowered the boats, towing in our caravel by the power of oars. This was a vulnerable moment especially since we had perceived a village within the fjord. “Should we not stand out, master, and let them come first to us?" I ventured.

Rovic spat over the rail."I've found it best never to show doubt," said he. “If a canoe fleet should assail us, we”ll give them a whiff of grapeshot and trust to break their nerve. But I think, thus showing ourselves fearless of them from the very first, we're less likely to meet treacherous ambuscade later."

He proved right.

In the course of time, we learned we had come upon the eastern end of a large archipelago. The inhabitants were mighty seafarers, considering that they had only outrigger dugouts to travel in. These, however, were often a hundred feet long. With forty paddles, or with three bast-sailed masts, such a vessel could almost match our best speed, and was more maneuverable. However, the small cargo space limited their range of travel.

Limitless. Photo by Elena.

Operation Afreet

Operation Afreet

Poul Anderson

I was nowhere and nowhen. My very body had departed from me, or I from it. How could I think of infinite eternal dark and cold and emptiness when I had no senses? How could I despair when I was nothing but a point in spacetime?... Not, not even that,f or there was nothing else, nothing to find or love or hate or fear or be related to in any way whatsoever. The dead were less alone than I, for I was all which existed.

This was my despair.

But on the instant, or after a quadrillion years, or both or neither, I came to know otherwise. I was under the regard of the Solipsist. Helpless in unconsciousness, I could but share that egotism to ultimate that it would yield no room even to hope. I swirled in the tides and storms of thoughts too remote, too alien, too vast for me to take in save as I might brokenly hear the polar ocean while it drowned me.

- danger, this one – he and those two – somehow they can be a terrible danger – not now (scornfully) when they merely help complete the ruin of a plan already bungled into week – no, later, when the next plan is ripening, the great one of which this war was naught but an early leaf – something about them warns thinly of danger – could I only scan more clearly into time? - they must be diverted, destroyed, somehow dealt with before their potential has grown – but I cannot originate anything yet – maybe they will be slain by the normal chances of war – if not, I must remember them and try later – now I have too much else to do, saving those seeds I planted in the world – the birds of the enemy fly thick across my fields, hungry crows and eagles to guard them – (with ever wilder hate( my snares shall take you yet birds – and the One Who loosed you!

So huge was the force of that final malevolence that I was cast free.

I opened my eyes. For a while I was aware entirely of the horror. Physical misery rescued me, driving those memories back to where half-forgotten nightmares dwell. The thought flitted by me that shock must have made me briefly delirious.

A natural therianthrope in his beast shape isn't quite as invulnerable as most people believe. Aside from things like silver – biochemical poisons to a metabolism in that semifluid state – damage which stops a vital organ will stop life, amputations are permanent unless a surgeon is near to sew the part back on before its cells die; and so on and so on, no pun intended. We are a hardy sort, however. I'd taken a blow that probably broke my neck. The spinal cord out being totally severed, the damage had healed at standard therio speed.

The trouble was, they'd arrived and used my flash to make me human before the incidental hurts had quite gone away. My head drummed and I retched.

On Imaginary Science. Illustration by Elena.

The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Queen of Air and Darkness

One lightyear is not much as galactic distances go. Your could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day when spaceships cross even greater reaches. But stars in our neighborhood average some nine lightyears apart, and barely one percent of them have planets which are man habitable, and speeds are limited to less than that of radiation. Scant help is given by relativistic time contraction and suspended animation en route. These make the journeys seem short, but history meanwhile does not stop at home.

This voyages from sun to sun will always be few. Colonists will be those who have extremely special reasons for going. They will take along germ plasm for exogenetic cultivation of domestic plants and animals - and of human, in order that population can grow fast enough to escape death through genetic drift. After all, they cannot rely of further immigration. Two or three times a century, a ship may call from some other colony. (Not from Earth. Earth has long ago sunk into alien concerns.) Its place of origin will be an old settlement. The young ones are in no position to build and man interstellar vessels.

Their very survival, let alone their eventual modernization, is in doubt. The founding fathers have had to take what they could get in a universe not especially designed for man.

Consider, for example, Roland. It is among the rare happy find, a world where humans can live, breathe, eat the food, drink the water, walk unclad if they choose, sow their crops, pasture their beasts, dig their mines, erect their homes, raise their children and grandchildren. It is worth crossing these quarters of a light-century in preserve certain dear values and strike new roots into the soil or Roland.

But the star Charlemagne is of type F9, forty percent brighter than Sol, brighter still in the treacherous ultraviolet and wilder still in the wind of charged particles that seethes front it. The planet has an eccentric orbit. In the middle of the short but furious northern summer, which includes periastron, total isolation is more than double what Earth gets; in the depth of the long northern winter, it is barely less than Terrestrial average.

Native life is abundant everywhere. But lacking elaborate machinery, not yet economically possible to construct for more than a few specialists, man can only endure the high latitudes. A ten-degree axial tilt, together with the orbit, means that the northern part of the Arctican continent spend half its year in unbroken sunlessness. Around the South Pole lies an empty ocean. Roland

Other differences from Earth might superficially seem more important. Roland has two moons, small but close, to evoke clashing tides. It rotates once in thirty-two hours, which is endlessly, subtly disturbing to organisms evolved through gigayears of a quicker rhythm. The weather patterns are altogether unterrestrial. The globe is a mere 9500 kilometers in diameter; its surface gravity is 0.42x980 cm/sec2; the sea level air pressure is slightly above one Earth atmosphere. (For actually Earth is the freak, and man exists because a cosmic accident blew away most of the gas that a body its size ought to have kept, as Venus has done).

(By Poul Anderson).

Between horizons of the sky deepened from purple to sable. Both moons were aloft, nearly full, shining frosty on leaves and molten on waters. Illustration by Elena.

Persepolis Rising

Persepolis Rising

By James S.A. Corey (excerpt)

He didn't see the catastrophe coming. Even when the scope of it became clear, he struggled to understand it. Blindsided.

The talk in the station – the talk everywhere – was about Sol system and the surrender. Singh watched it play out in newsfeeds and discussion forums, taking the role of official censor more for the joy of being present in the unfolding of history than from any immediate need. The combined fleet of the Transport Union and the EMC beaten and standing down. The newsfeeds from the local sources in Sol System were anguish and despair, with only a few outlets calling unconvincingly for the battle to continue.

For their own side, Carrie Fisk and the Laconian Congress of Worlds proved to be an apt tool for the job, praising the Transport Union's capitulation as a moment of liberation for the former colony worlds. The rules and restrictions on trade are no longer being dictated by the generational politics of Sol. By being outside the system of favoritism, nepotism, political horse-trading and compromise, Laconia is positioned to bring exactly the reforms that humanity needs. He noticed that she shied away from mentioning High Consul Duarte's name. It was always just Laconia.

Which was fine. The two were essentially the same.

But it was the conversation beyond her and other specifically recruited allies that made him feel best. Governor Kwan from Bara Gaon Complex issued a statement of support for the new administration so quickly that Singh was almost certain it had been recorded in advance. Auberon's local parliament also sent a public message to put themselves in place as early supporters of the new regime. New Spain, New Roma, Nyingchi Xin, Félicié, Paradiso, Patria, Asyum, Chrysanthemum, Riocht. Major colonies, some with populations already in the millions, had seen the battle at Leuctra Point and drawn the only sane conclusion. The power center of the human race had shifted, and the wise were shifting with it.

The imminent arrival of the Typhoon also helped. He had known Rear Admiral Song since he'd entered the service. Not that they'd ever been close, but she was a face and a name that carried a weight of familiarity. He'd only traded a handful of messages with her, mostly to arrange the piece for the newsfeeds, but speaking to her had reminded him powerfully of home. The routines he'd had on Laconia, the taste of the tea, the little part where he would sit with Elsa when she was newborn and Natalia was sleeping. Watching sunbirds dive into the pond. Sending James Holden back had begun it, and the coming of the Typhoon would complete it. Traffic to and from Laconia. Proof that the great roads of space were open.

The longing it called forth in him was vast and complex. The open sky that he wouldn't see as long as he remained governor of Medina. The touch of his wife's skin against his, which he could look forward to. His daughter's laughter and the soft sounds she made at the edge of sleep.

There was a way in which every day since he'd stepped off the Storm had been a pause, like holding his breath. And soon, soon, his real work could begin. With the Typhoon in place and Sol system conquered, the empire would be unassailable, and humanity's future assured. He'd ignored his own anxiety and impatience, and now that he could almost relax, he felt them straining for the release.

Taken together, all the good news nearly made up for the bad.

This is the future the way it's supposed to be. Illustration by Elena.

Luna - Moon Rising

Luna – Moon Rising

By Ian McDonald (excerpt)

(A hundred years in the future, a was has broken out among the Five Dragons – five families who control the moon's leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in its power to claw its way to the top of the food chain – marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations).

The rule is this: women of a particular status, in their ninth decade, do not hurry. The do not scurry. A fussy bustle is permissible but it is the limit. A lady never rushes.

Lady Sun rushes, heels clip-clopping in and undignified trot down the palace's curving corridors. Caught between walk and run, here entourage struggles to keep pace with her. The message on Amada's secure channel had ordered her to come at once. Her granddaughter's suite is too near for a moto to arrive in time, too far to avoid the shame of haste. A palanquin, like the dowagers of old China. That would be the very thing. Like the Vorontsovs use to gad around St.Olga, powered by Earth-muscle and youthful enthusiasm. Perfidious Vorontsovs. Lady Sun will not soon forgive the humiliation of the Battle of Hadley, Marooned by VTO, taken in an upholstered cage to Hadley. The smirking politeness of the Mackenzies. Denny Mackenzie grinning his ghastly gold teeth. Grin while you can, golden boy. The power rests elsewhere and when you have served their purpose, the women of Hadley will arrange a boardroom coup, and it will cost you more than your finger. The ransom was insultingly low; Taiyang will recoup it through the breach of contract case against VTO, but it is another unforgivable offense.

Lady Sun instructs her sharp young women and men to wait outside Amanda Sun's appartement. Zhiyuan is present, Tamsin. The whole board. The surprise is Mariano Gabriel Demaria.

“Is it Darius?” Lady Sun asks at once. “What has happened to him?”

“Darius is well,” Zhiyuan says. “Mariano brings information about the Eagle of the Moon.”

“Lady Sun.” Mariando dips his head in respect. “Now that I have the board in full, I can deliver my information. Lucas Corta serves Amanda Sun, plaintiff in the case of Corta versus Corta, Sun and Luna Corta as an Academic Ward of the University of Farside, with a summons to satisfaction at the Court. The time and location of this satisfaction to be mutually agreed, but within one hundred and twenty hours.

“Satisfaction?” Amanda Sun says.

“Trial by combat,?” Lady Sun says.

“I know what it means,” Amanda Sun snaps.

“Ridiculous,” Zhiyuan says. “There hasn't been a satisfaction by combat since...”

“Since Carlinhos Corta opened up Hadley Mackenzie balls to voicebox,” Amanda Sun says. She twists open a vape, inhales deep, exhales slow. “The Cortas have form here.”

“He knows he was a weak case,” Lady Sun says.

Fascinating, ruthless. Every moment with his characters makes them precious, real, and alive. Illustration by Elena.

Halo Cryptum

Halo Cryptum: The Forerunner Saga

By Greg Bear

Truly, the Deep Reverence seemed like a great tree riddled through by the wandering whimsy of a single, awful termite. The higher we progressed with the fortress – and progress is not the correct word – the deeper the sense the sense of undisciplined decay. I wondered if the Confirmer had for the last thousand years spent his time building useless follies throughout the decks, above and below, draining the ship's resources and perverting its original design.

We came finally to a space warm enough and with sufficient oxygen to relieve the burden of our armor. This hiss of replenishment was like a gasp as our ancillas sucked in reserves for what they, too, seemed to think might be a desperate time.

The Confirmer's command center was hung with tattered draperies of a design I could not recognize. Within the drapes, pushing up through or rising between, were dozens of sculptures made of stone and metal, some quite large, and all wrought with a grace and skill that was evident whatever their subjects might have been – abstractions or representations, who could tell?

But as a command center, this space was no more functional than the empty vault we had first entered. Clearly, the fortress had become a cluttered ghost of its former might.

The Confirmer ordrered up seatin arrangements. With creaks and groans, the deck produced only two chairs suitable for Prometheans, plus a small bump that might have been meant for me. Some of the drapes drew aside, rpping and falling in dusty shreds... and three sculptures toppled, one of them nearly striking me before it landed on the deck with a solid thunk and split in two.

The Confirmer carried bottles from a broad cabinet half-hidden in the drapes, walking with a left-leaning lurch. “The best I have to offer,” he said, and poured out three glasses of a greenish liquid. He sat and offered a glass to the Didact and one to me. Neither of the glasses were clean. “You remember kasna,” he said, lifting his own glass in toast. The liquid inside smelled sweet and sour – pungent – and left a stain on the glass. “The San'Shyuum have always excelled in the arts of intoxication. This is from their finest reserve.

The Didact looked at his glass, then downed it in a gulp – to the Confirmer's dismay.

“That's rare stuff,” he chided.

“You allow the San'Shyuum to travel between their two worlds?” the Didact asked, returning the glass to the dusty tray.

“They are confined within the boundary of the quarantine,” the Confirmer said. “There's no reason to hold them fast.”

“In many ways, there were worse than humans,” the Didact said.

 “You've not had contact with any other warrior in how many years?”

“The living? Centuries, centuries,” the Confirmer said. “The last shipment of...” He stopped himself, looked about with curtained chamber with eyes that had lost nearly all focus. “Many colleagues are brought here, you know. Exiled with less dignity than the Council allowed you. They've fought, and lost, many political battles since you vanished.”

“Where are they?”

“A few were allowed their own Cryptums. The rest... the Council shipped us their Durances.”

“The Deep Reverence has become a graveyard?” The Didact asked, the last color departing his already pale features.

“Missed and misguided, they now claim.”

Space ships. Illustration by Elena.