The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5 by Allan Kaster

Author:Allan Kaster [Kaster, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Infinivox
Published: 2015-12-09T06:00:00+00:00

Shall I tell you what I learned from her, Captain? Will that take your mind off the cold, for a little while?

You may as well hear it. It will put things into perspective. Make you understand your place in things—the value in your being here. The good and selfless service you are about to commence.

She was a traveller, too.

Not Teterev, but the original one—the first being, the first entity, to find this planet. A spacefarer. Admittedly this was all quite a long time ago. She tried to get me to understand, but I’m not sure I have the imagination. Whole galactic turns ago, she said. When some of the stars we see now were not even born, and the old ones were younger. When the universe itself was smaller than it is now. Young galaxies crowding each other’s heavens.

I don’t know if it was her, an effect of the magnetic field, or just my fears affecting my sense of self. But as she spoke of abyssal time, I felt a lurch of cosmic vertigo, a sense that I stood on the crumbling brink of time’s plunging depths.

I didn’t want to fall, didn’t want to topple.

Sensible advice for both of us, wouldn’t you say?

The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace.

But for her, so much had already happened! There had still been time enough for the rise and fall of numberless species and civilisations, time for great deeds and greater atrocities. Time for monsters and the rumours of worse.

She had been journeying for lifetimes, by the long measure of her species. Travelling close to light, visiting world after world.

If we had a name for what she was, we’d call her an archeaologist, a scholar drawn to relics and scraps.

Still following me?

One day—one unrecorded century—she stumbles upon something. It was a thing she’d half hoped to find, half hoped to avoid. Glory and annihilation, balanced on a knife edge.

We know all about that, don’t we?

Your finger is moving. Are you trying to adjust that temperature setting? Go ahead. Turn up your suit. I won’t stop you.

There. Better already. Can you feel the warmth flowing up from your neck ring, taking the sting out of the cold? It feels better, doesn’t it? There’s plenty of power in the suit. You needn’t worry about draining it. Make yourself as warm as you wish.

Look, I didn’t say there wasn’t a catch.

Turn it down, then. Let the cold return. Can you feel those skin cells dying, the frostbite eating its way into your face? Can you feel your eyeballs starting to freeze?

Back to our traveller.

We have rumours of plague. She had rumours of something far worse. A presence, an entity, waiting between the stars.

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.