The Spacetime Pit Plus Two by Stephen Baxter & Eric Brown

Author:Stephen Baxter & Eric Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories, science fiction, aliens, sci fi, contact, exploration, collaboration
Publisher: infinity plus

Sunfly

Onara slipped from the shuttered darkness of the dormitory when she judged that her fellow apprentice Scholars were asleep. She emerged into bright daylight. The sun—as always—was directly overhead, a kernel of yellow light in the sky’s blue bowl.

She was aware of her heartbeat, its frantic drumming accompanying the small voice in her head that told her that what she was doing was forbidden. She crept down the west wing of the Scholars’ manse, along the path that passed her teachers’ common room. She ducked and hurried beneath the flung-open shutters. A few teachers had still not retired, and she heard the deep voice of Sch. Malken, her own tutor.

She paused on the border of the garden, hidden now by a stand of sweetcorn. Before her, the land to the south rose in a broad sweep of greensward. As she left the cover of the corn and ran up the hillside towards the forest, she knew that all it would take was for one Scholar to glance through the shutters and she would be seen. The consequences of being caught spurred her on: solitary confinement for a week, or, worse, the whip. She dashed into the custody of the forest and collapsed behind the bole of a tree, breathing hard.

She gazed back down the hillside, following the curve of the land to the north. From her place of shade, she could see the Vale with the sprawling timber edifice of the manse cupped in its palm, and the patchwork design of the crop fields surrounding it. The sunlight beat down, flattening the panorama; the only shadows were tiny pools of darkness beneath the larger trees.

As she followed the lie of the land further to the north, she saw how the fields and copses at the far side of the Vale merged into a fine band of blue and green, and were finally lost in the mist at infinity. And beyond the horizon, the land leapt upwards to become a great wall plastered with sun-glistening lakes and rivers, a wall which reached into the sky, narrowing as it rose.

She lifted her head back and squinted to shut out the sunlight. She could just make out a fine, perfect line crossing the sky and piercing the disc of the unmoving sun. The World was a hoop, suspended around the sun, and that line across the heavens, bluer than the blue of the sky, was a strip of landscape beyond the sun—a land perhaps peopled by humans as was her own Vale, or perhaps inhabited by monsters, like the Foe which had haunted her childhood nightmares.

But now a shadow fell on her face, and she felt the air grow chill. Clouds crossed the sun, and a flock of birds—high and tiny—fled with them to the south. Such migrations were a new feature in her World; nobody knew what they meant—or rather, nobody would tell her.

Again she studied the arch of the landscape which rose beyond the northern horizon. She scanned down the column of land, until she found the point where it almost thinned to invisibility.

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.