The Contentment Ratio
Once a year the mirrors stand down and Anodyne sees its real sun. Yelen Arbos climbs to the counting house meaning to vote against the sky's owner.
7 stories found
Once a year the mirrors stand down and Anodyne sees its real sun. Yelen Arbos climbs to the counting house meaning to vote against the sky's owner.
Fifty years ago Ossery grew itself a sky, and it worked. A reporter climbs the terrace for four hundred words and meets the man who kept the numbers.
On Sabaea memory is currency, and Mother Enneth Ordoval owes nine years. The Reckoner sent to collect them learns what the debt was really for.
The body would not stay still, and that was the first thing wrong with it. On a station where nothing has weight, an inspector reads a murder in two slow vectors.
Anna had been a ship's engineer for eighteen years and had learned to dread the kind of silence that came over a hull when something was about to be felt. The hull was silent now, in the long curve of approach, and she stood with her hand on the back of her daughter's chair at the observation port, and she waited.
"Tell me again," the child said, "about the ship that arrived late." Ambassador Yuen Set-Amahle settled deeper into the gel-chair on the observation deck of Restful Persistence.
The radio died on a Sunday in October, which was not really October because Mars had no October, but the colonists kept the old calendar the way you keep a photograph of someone who has moved away.