Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson

Author:Chris Roberson [Roberson, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612182438
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-05-22T07:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-SEVEN

It was late in the ship’s night, the percentage of the day when the lights in the corridor were dimmed and many of the biologicals in the crew let their bodies rest, and I was propped up in my bed, trying to read.

I’ve always been something of a bookworm. It comes from having a writer for a grandfather and a professor of English for a father, I suppose. Our house in Bangalore was always full of books. When I left home and moved to Ethiopia to start university, I brought a few of my favorite books along, many of them handed down to me by my grandfather—Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet, Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia, Iain Banks’s Use of Weapons. After graduating, when I signed on with the Orbital Patrol, mass restrictions meant that I had to leave all of the books behind, and so I brought digital copies along instead. I included my handheld in my mass allotment on board Wayfarer One, years later, and loaded onto it every book that I could lay my hands on, everything that I’d ever read and everything I’d never found the time to try.

Now, finding myself in the distant future in a rejuvenated body that, according to Maruti, need never age, I had all the time in the world. And since we were still days out from Aglibol and I couldn’t sleep, I saw no reason not to catch up on my reading.

But my damned interlink kept getting in the way.

Perhaps I should explain. I’m fluent in several languages—English, Hindi, Kannada, and Amharic—and the books on my handheld are written in all four of those, with a sizable percentage in other languages I can’t even read but that I thought the other members of the Wayfarer One crew might enjoy.

That night, propped up in my bed on board the Further, with Amelia entertaining herself in some virtual environment inside the ring sitting on the side table, I paged through the handheld’s index, seeing if anything sparked my interest. I thought I might try something new, but then chanced upon something very old, indeed.

I’d been forced to memorize and recite whole stanzas of Goswami Tulsidas’s epic poem Ramacharitamanasa in secondary school, and though I preferred other versions of the Ramayana, there was still something about this 16C Hindi version that resonated with me.

I tapped the title listing on the display, and the first stanzas scrolled on the screen, but I was immediately disoriented as the Hindi characters were completely obscured by glowing roman letters superimposed over them, a precise translation of the text into English.

Puzzled, I called up the handheld’s menu interface but could find no settings that could account for the translation. I scanned a few more pages of Tulsidas’s text and found the English translation superimposed across all of them.

I closed the file and called up a few more texts. All of the English texts displayed fine, but any other languages were obscured by the same superimposed translations.

It wasn’t until I dropped the

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