Forever Magazine Issue 40 by Mary Robinette Kowal

Author:Mary Robinette Kowal [Kowal, Mary Robinette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novella, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2018-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2011.

A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension

Andrea M. Pawley

Olive touched the tiny carbon fiber legs. They folded under her fingertip. The drone was dead. Its accumulator nodes held enough copper to get Olive through the next three days. Papa had always provided Olive with the inorganics she needed, but Papa hadn’t been home much since Mama stopped going to work and the second grandma arrived five days ago.

With her hand curled around the drone, Olive wiggled backward through the sinewy filament holding each living quarters trailer like a barnacle to the side of the elevator. The filament slowed Olive. So did a shortage of metals in her system. None of today’s dead drones carried the gold she needed most.

Olive aimed for the nearest garden platform. She pushed out from underneath the trailer. Weightless, she sailed through the air. Mid-point station bulged overhead. Olive’s trajectory calculation was less than one hundred percent accurate, but garden platform magnets still caught her metal-frame feet. Olive’s landing puffed fairy dust into the air.

Standing, Olive examined her arm. The filament had ripped her sleeve. She plucked at the ragged hole in her shirt and tried to twist the threads back together. She couldn’t. The second grandma had already scolded Olive for tearing her clothing. Olive didn’t need a maturity enhancement to predict the verbal consequences of an additional tear.

Only the compiler inside the family trailer could mend Olive’s shirt. The fairies should have been able to help, but so far they hadn’t offered any magical assistance like the stories said they would. The compiler was too near the second grandma, who wouldn’t come outside. The second grandma was Mama’s mother. She had vertigo and said no human should be forced to endure the view from so far above the Earth.

Olive’s hand opened. Soot from the copper cache drone smudged Olive’s palm. She wiped as much of the contaminant as she could off of the drone and onto the inside hem of her sleeve. Fairy dust gathered there, too. For the last thirty-three hours, Olive’s error log had been warning that the consumables filter at the center of her back was near capacity at ninety-nine point four percent. Soot would clog the filter even more and cause problems.

Olive set the dead drone on her tongue and swallowed. The little body tumbled into Olive’s reducer, where two other drones with their own inorganic caches already waited. Olive’s reducer heated the drones. Copper, lead, and arsenic began the shift to Olive’s nearest accumulator nodes.

On the other side of the habitat shield wall, light flared in the vacuum of space. The debris being targeted by mid-point station lasers wasn’t visible. Not like twenty-eight days before, when Olive and Mama watched thousands of laser flashes break the last of the abandoned Space Station Agarwal into pieces small enough that the elevator and its habitats wouldn’t be compromised. Since then, sparkling metal dust had been osmosing through the habitat shield wall and sprinkling everything.

Mama said it was fairy dust, and it had magical powers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.