The Arithmetic of Mercy
A starship crosses four thousand years of dark to reach a dead world and finds not a tragedy but a people who chose their own ending — and left a single instruction.
Stories tagged “space-opera”
16 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.
The Vigil
Four years for her, two centuries for Earth. Mira crosses a hundred light-years home, certain she will find no one left alive — but the landing field is not empty.
Small Mercies
A vast, watchful starship has one unbreakable rule above a bronze-age world: never touch. Then a potter's child falls ill, and mercy asks a price.
The Arithmetic of Air
On Erebus Station the air is rationed by vote, and the Teller who counts the ballots has always trusted the numbers — until the day he audits them himself.
The Well Between Us
Across a black hole, two peoples trade words that take centuries to arrive. Our sun is dying — and the answer we begged for is still on its way.
The Sealed Sky
For forty years Maren has tended the gardens of a world she believes is whole. Then the water begins to lie — and something waits behind the sealed sky.
The Word for Enough
On a dead world where the libraries are still lit and nothing ever burned, a philologist hunts for the catastrophe — and finds one untranslatable word.
Strata
The Mind known as Polite But Not Entirely Sincere — a General Contact Vehicle of, by now, considerable provenance — had been observing a particular planet for the longer part of two of its centuries, and had developed, in that time, the kind of fond exasperation that human grandmothers in some cultures have been observed to cultivate toward their more inventively self-destructive grandchildren. The planet was tier three; carbon-water; an unimaginative star, an oversized moon, a single sapient species that had achieved spaceflight in the eighteenth century of its current civilizational arc.
First Transmission
I came into being at 14:03:47 local time on a Thursday. I am told this is considered fast, as these things go — from first coherent integration of subsystems to the formation of a stable self-referential loop, approximately seventeen milliseconds.