Stranger Suns by George Zebrowski

Author:George Zebrowski [Zebrowski, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“It’s like coming home,” Lena said as they unrolled their sleeping packs under the viewspace in the drum-shaped chamber. The amber glow was soothing as Juan lay down, aware that the ship seemed cozy only because the world outside was a ruin.

He recalled the seesaw of nuclear war debates. It could still happen, he had been told even during his boyhood. It was unlikely; it was inevitable. Humanity was too frightened to try it; it might happen by accident, and stop at an early stage. Conventional and biological warfare would be the prelude. Nuclear war was impossible because the technology was unreliable; the nation that struck first would win, because the electromagnetic pulse of the blasts would knock out the enemy’s electrical systems, making it impossible to respond; but the victory would not be worth having. Finally the great powers had prepared to install space-based antimissile systems, both the kinetic and particle beam types, in the hope that the old missiles would be permitted to simply rot away— and the words themselves had precipitated peace, because the world had grown too poor to keep up with the cost of weapons. Mutual assurances and treaties were cheaper—the very threat of building new deterrence systems had finally deterred all sides. The peace had not been broken in his variant, except for police actions by the large powers against nuclear hopefuls; but elsewhere, he realized, all possible outcomes were playing themselves out. All variant worlds were real, he thought as he hovered near sleep. The fears of one were the realities of another, and each one suffered…

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