Zima blue and other stories by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction, English, General, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780575084568
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2009-04-16T01:05:20+00:00

Minla walked with a stick, clicking its hard metal shaft against the echoing flooring of the station's observation deck. Illness or injury had disfigured her since their last meeting; she wore her greying hair in a lopsided parting, hanging down almost to the collar on her right side. Merlin could not say for certain what had happened to Minla, since she was careful to turn her face away from him whenever they spoke. But in the days since his revival he had already heard talk of assassination attempts, some of which had apparently come close to succeeding. Minla seemed more stooped and frail than he remembered, as if she had worked every hour of those twenty years.

She interrupted a light-beam with her hand, opening the viewing shields. 'Behold the Space Dormitories,' she said, declaiming as if she had an audience of thousands rather than a single man standing only a few metres away. 'Rejoice, Merlin. You played a part in this.'

Through the window, wheeling with the gentle rotation of the orbital station, the nearest Dormitory loomed larger than Lecythus in the sky. The wrinkled grey sphere would soon reach operational pressure, its skin becoming taut. The final sun-mirrors were being assembled in place, manipulated by mighty articulated robots. Cargo rockets were coming and going by the minute, while the first wave of evacuees had already taken up residence in the polar holding pens.

Twenty Dormitories were ready now; the remaining eighty would come online within two years. Every day, hundreds of atomic rockets lifted from the surface of Lecythus, carrying evacuees - packed into their holds at the maximum possible human storage density, like a kind of three-dimensional jigsaw of flesh and blood - or cargo, in the form of air, water and prefabricated parts for the other habitats. Each rocket launch deposited more radioactivity into the atmosphere of the doomed world. It was now fatal to breathe that air for more than a few hours, but the slow poisoning of Lecythus was of no concern to the Planetary Government. The remaining surface-bound colonists, those who would occupy the other Dormitories when they were ready, awaited transfer in pressurised bunkers, in conditions that were at least as spartan as anything they would have to endure in space. Merlin had offered the services of Tyrant to assist with the evacuation effort, but as efficient and fast as his ship was, it would have made only a token difference to the speed of the exercise.

That was not to say that there were not difficulties, or that the programme was exactly on schedule. Merlin was gladdened by the progress he saw in some areas, disheartened in others. Before he slept, the locals had grilled him for help with their prototype atomic rockets, seemingly in the expectation that Merlin would provide magic remedies for the failures that had dogged them so far. But Merlin could only help in a limited fashion. He knew the basic principles of building an atomic rocket, but little of the detailed knowledge needed to circumvent a particular problem.

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.