The Given Sea
The sea on Orrun was a gift, and the people who lived beside it never forgot to say so, because forgetting was how you got killed. This is the story of a gift and the interest it charged.
Stories tagged “colonization”
10 stories found
Held in Trust
The hearing to decide who owned the mind had run for eleven days, and for the first ten of them the mind had not been present in any sense that mattered. Then, on the eleventh day, somewhere between one procedural motion and the next, it woke.
What the Ground Remembers
For six winters the terraforming moss did exactly what the manuals promised. That, the botanist would come to think, was the whole trouble.
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.
The Improvement of Ossery
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.
The Last Assay
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 Still Point
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.
The First Sky
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.
Already Home
"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 Last Frequency
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.