Or Else the Light by John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey & Christie Yant

Author:John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey & Christie Yant [Adams, John Joseph & Howey, Hugh & Yant, Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07ND38NS8
Publisher: Broad Reach Publishing + Adamant Press
Published: 2020-06-28T23:00:00+00:00

THE weft storm had cut off Islaka for years.

Uli sometimes lost track of how many and by which system of reckoning. Standard Terrestrial Years, Taberan years... it hardly seemed to matter down here. Long enough that he’d stopped hoping to ever see the mainworld again; not given up, but forgotten. The notion that the weft flux storm which had isolated them for so long could be ending had no place in his understanding of how the world functioned. He couldn’t comprehend the possibility.

He helped Harmless step up onto a podium that some of his people had set up outside his tower. A crowd was gathering nearby: a strange display of civic interest, for a people who tended to knot together in clusters of common interests and then go splinter back into their individual lives. Barter or argue, forage for recyclables or swear at failing machinery, make love, herd children, stagger to a medic or glare steely-eyed at the troubled sky… most Islakan pastimes were more solitary. Crowds like this gathered at food dispensaries, not government buildings.

Inasmuch as the Tower was a government building.

Inasmuch as Islaka had a government.

There were fewer secrets on Islaka than there were on the mainworld. Islaka had begun as a collection of miners and the families of miners; people who all worked together. Common-ish property, common-ish knowledge. Common-ish concerns.

So there was, of course, a crowd to greet Harmless when he stepped onto the podium, leaning heavily on Uli’s arm. Harmless held up a hand, and grinned, acting like an upworld celebrity, though the people of Tabera would never have celebrated someone like him. He didn’t even look the part, with his uneven eyes, his uncommon gangliness... and all that was before factoring in the deformations that came with age in the absence of medicine. But he was a focal figure on Islaka certainly enough.

Yet there was no deference in the crowd. One of them yelled out, “What’s the message, Old Man?” Another called, “Mine the uppy bastards,” and a third yelled, “Is it over?”

“My Islakans,” Harmless called. “You didn’t hear? They want us back.”

There was a mutter from the crowd. A smattering of indignant questions and demands.

“Our friends,” Harmless said, gesturing up toward the sky, where the curve of Tabera was still occluded by the twisting weft flux storm. “Our upworld brothers,” and the crowd hissed itself into yet more affront, “recall that we are citizens of the system. They say ‘come back’ and if we do they’ll embrace us. And they say they’ll send their miners down again, but oh, they’ll be careful, very careful, this time.”

Careful enough not to set off another storm like the one that had just ended. No one in the crowd believed that; Uli could see it well enough. Harmless wasn’t sharing good news. He was asking for support for... something.

“Bomb the docks!” someone in the crowd yelled.

Uli jerked back. Itscha’s hand tightened on his arm, half so that the Old Man could support himself, half in a warning. “Is that what we want?”

“We don’t gedda need them!” someone yelled.

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.