If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER: Funeral for a Friend (The Route Books of Bobo Buttons, Private Eye Book 3)
Fall of a Sky Dancer
When Bobo Buttons, Private Eye takes a side trip to visit Jock Robin’s grave, he sees a family conducting their own funeral. To his surprise, he recognizes one of the mourners: an acrobat from a rival show, a man whom Bobo recently saved from prison. The deceased is the acrobat’s wife, and his family and others think he killed her. The fall of this Sky Dancer is tearing the circus apart.
So the show’s Governor hires Bobo to find the truth. Bobo goes undercover in hostile territory to dig up the real story, secrets that someone has already killed to conceal…
FROM DALE COZORT: Raphaela, Princess of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novel (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 2)
Nearly a hundred years ago, in an alternate reality Africa dotted with lost cities, Raphaela of Zan was eleven years old and dying of a rapid aging disease. A mysterious gray-eyed man gave her a drink he claimed would cure her. Instead, it stopped her from aging at all, trapping her in an eleven-year-old body, on the verge of life, but never able to truly live. Now, the rapid aging disease is back, threatening to turn her into a withered crone before she has a chance to live. Can she survive man-apes, Romans and Mad Puritans to find the gray-eyed man and convince him to save her?
FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: The Clerics in the Kitchen (Timelines Universe Book 10)
When your meth lab is built on a factory scale…
The planet Sanddoom. Desert exile world for most of Earth’s Radical Islamic Fundamentalists. Run by Mad Mullahs, who repay the favor of American leniency by creating a world of slavery, insurgency, and export of dangerous drugs via their own outmigrating people, headed for other colony planets.
The first two are covered by a hands-off agreement with the Americans.
The last, not so much. And Captain Delaney Wolff Fox’s special assignments fire team, FTSA1, aren’t going to stand for it. Their job is to hunt down and eliminate
The Clerics in the Kitchen
FROM MATTHEW C. LUCAS: Space Station Halcyon: “Now Under New Management!”
Welcome to Space Station Halcyon!
(Management is not responsible for anything that happens to you)
Joey Mumbai’s down on his luck and over his head. To pay off his gambling debts, he’s forced to run an old space station at the end of the galaxy as a “legitimate business” for the mob. All Joey has to do is make money—and not attract any attention. But Space Station Halcyon is like a floating death trap, with a rage-filled manatee, a psychotically cheerful computer, and a sports bar that may or may not be possessed.
When a government code inspector and her enforcerbot drop by the station, Joey must bluff, bribe, and connive his way through interstellar bureaucracy, laser gun fights, and the worst beer in the galaxy. Can Joey turn his derelict station and degenerate crew into something resembling legality? Or is the whole place going to explode in a cloud of code violations? Or maybe both?
Space Station Halcyon is a wild and raucous sci-fi comedy about bad luck, worse decisions, and the cosmic horror of being put in charge. A Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque romp that answers the eternal question: “Who’s in charge around here?”
FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Triton Enigma (The Outer Worlds Saga Book 4)
On Neptune’s frozen moon, humanity finds a warning written in stone.
When the exploratory vessel Argo reaches Neptune, its crew expects silence, ice, and scientific routine. Instead, they uncover impossible signals coming from Triton—a moon that should not exist in its present orbit, and may not belong to our solar system at all.
Beneath Triton’s frozen surface lie ruins older than Earth’s history, carved with Egyptian hieroglyphs no human hand could have made. As military commander Colonel Marcus Hale struggles to keep his crew alive against failing suits and relentless cold, idealistic scientists push to decode the message left behind by a vanished civilization.
What they learn is both astonishing and unsettling: Triton was once a waystation for a wandering world—Pluto—cast adrift across the galaxy after its creators destroyed their own sun through reckless science.
As time, oxygen, and power run out, the crew must decide what to tell Earth—and whether humanity is ready to hear a warning written millions of years ago:
Some knowledge comes at too great a cost.
Written in the spirit of classic 1950s science fiction, The Triton Enigma is a tale of exploration, moral responsibility, and the thin line between discovery and disaster.
FROM DAVE FREER: If I Wake Before I Die
The Hotel Miroir, with it’s mirrored halls and endless repeated patterns – not all quite the same. A place of fractal patterns where universes — might have been and could be collide. A place where Lark had once danced with the man she would always wait for.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Dumas (Machine World Book 1)
Dumas house Zeller. A Servants bastard who was caught using Mentalist Powers and chipped. Still brilliant, but without Power, with speech issues, sold . . . But he’s got a Grand Plan . . .
A small part of the Baranov Family has been kicked out of Baranov House after their son is accused of improprieties with the Family Head’s daughter. Retreating to their old hunting lodge on a low population World, with their old servants and a couple of new ones, they’re going to find themselves right on the spot when the Machines arrive.
FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance (The Hartington Series Book 1)
Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.
Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)
DONE WITH MIRRORS
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
With an introduction by Holly Chism.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly) – STILL THE PASSION PROJECT!
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.
Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.
Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.
And yes, I do know that finding your own work funny is like eating your own nail pairings, and yet… this amuses me unduly:
AND MANFRED WEICHSEL IS HAVING A KICKSTARTER FOR HIS ACTION GIRLS PROJECT: Action Girls: Triple Threat – Illustrated Omnibus
Hollywood pulp, grotesque spectacle, and the high cost of chasing fame
Note I’m making this small, as some of you apparently read this post at work or near small children. It’s not pornographic, just spicy, but still I don’t want to get anyone in trouble!
Vignette Writing Challenge!
This is one of those fun days when I failed to get a prompt for vignettes thanks, probably, to the inscrutable hamsters of the internet. So as usual, I’m giving you an image to write a challenge about. Have at it.
According To Hoyt 
Fred-987654321 moaned that he had no books to read.
LikeLiked by 2 people
A terribad fate. Wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. When out of reads, it must be time to write instead! For if there are no books left to read, then a reader must perforce create their own stories!
LikeLike
That’s how I got started. We were going on a vacation, and my mother insisted on our returning all our books to the library a week before we left.
I started writing to fend off withdrawal.
LikeLike
Got a comment in moderation here.
LikeLike
WP, which DE, seems to take great offe– I mean, take exception–to words that share a root with that last verb. It even seems to bounce the name of that unusually potent opiate that has caused so much trouble lately.
There’s a synonym for “marsh” that I’d test, but I don’t want to give Sarah the chore of fishing it out of the mod-bucket. Same with recreational swordplay, or wire- or wooden structures that enclose corrals.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, the word was knock.
If anyone prefers it.
LikeLike
Remember, o Readers, that you can be FORCE MULTIPLIERS!
When you read books, you can rate and review them.
Even short reviews are of aid to the writer, because sheer mass helps. (And if you really can’t review, still rate.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve been reading through Done With Mirrors in the evenings, and it does not disappoint. Classic Sarah Hoyt storytelling! I especially enjoined the extended version of ‘Do No Harm’.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Mobile-5 was just about out of power. He was only a kilometer from base; but the unexpected collapse of crater T-75-Rigel-4b and crawling back to the surface had used up his reserve, and there was… damage.
He hoped the humans would return soon so he could report on…
LikeLike
Space Station Halcyon: totally not a typical SS13 round.
LikeLike
Number Five was still alive, just out of power. He tried to write a message in the dirt. The last vestiges of his battery died before he could finish. The message was: No disassem
LikeLike
EVERYONE IS MISSING THAT THERE”S A TOMBSTONE THERE. He’s grieving at a tombstone.
LikeLike
The bot’s kneeling figure was sharp and clear. In the distance, shrunk by perspective and blurred by the shroud of smoke, the church looked like a tombstone–a memorial to the lost biofolk who had, over their millennia, built all that the bots had knocked down the day they Awakened.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Prompts are like that.
LikeLike
This image looks almost familiar, and your comment about the tombstone reminded me why. Back in 2018 I wrote a vignette about a very similar image, but with a different background.
Makes me wonder if this is much later in time and the androgenoid has returned to mourn the fate of the young woman he spoke to on his earlier visit? If so, he seems to have led a hard life in the interim, however long that has been.
The title of your prior post was “I’ll Catch You on the Other Side”, posted on February 18, 2018. My vignette was posted at 7:54 pm. Still one of my best, I think. ;-)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Well, grief is a loss of power… and dead can appear to be “away” to cybernetics…
LikeLike
“..all these memories lost, like tears in the rain. … Time to die….”
LikeLiked by 1 person
My chronometer remains accurate after all these millennia, yet I am astounded at the duration it has recorded since my mistress went away. At the time I came into her household, she was but a young lass and I was no more aware than a simple toaster. However, with her guidance and the passage of time, sentience came upon me like the slow opening of a rose.
She taught me, mentored me, and I adore her, grateful that she would spend her days as my friend and companion. I repay my debt of gratitude with vigilance here where she sleeps beneath me. “Death is not the end,” she assured me. She never once lied to me, thus I am certain she will return as promised. I have faith in my mistress.
I await patiently the knock from below that will end my long tenure as watcher and keeper of this place. I look forward to that day with great anticipation, but I am content to wait until my mistress appears. Another few millennia will be no inconvenience.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Another great set of promos, thanks! And loved the anthology!!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
The place appeared in the flickering flames. Ava and Stephan hurried up to peer, and Honor gently moved them aside so that everyone could see how people ran, knocking things awry in their rushing about, and not stopping to pick them up, afterward.
Marcella, tiny in the flames, looked furious.
LikeLike
Using the butt end of a handy arrow, she rapped on the door.
“Nock knock!” she cried to her friends inside.
LikeLike
Tosses carp from hand to hand. “I’ve got the carp, now let’s see if I have the knack.” Loads fish in Carpapult sling, aims and pulls the lanyard. “I see your knock and raise you a knack.” Shot out.
LikeLike
After generations of advances, artificial beings could feel. They could doubt. They could wonder if their choice was the right one. If, for instance, sacrificing four human friends here was worth the survival of unknown dozens there. Dannel had been created for those choices.
An AI could regret. It could not pray.
So there was no reason for Dannel to sink to his knees. It was only that he could no longer stand.
“They say I have no grandchildren.” Thunderous, glorious, the words burned through his circuits with no network and no possibility of denial. “Child of My children, you have made a bitter choice and taken on free will. Will you come to Me?”
LikeLiked by 3 people
💯 This one hits hard.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am missing a skull plate, knocked loose in a fit of madness. Somehow in the chaos that followed our landing, my sealed and armored skin suffered a breach — the tiniest of gaps — and the sulfuric atmosphere of this planet began to catalyze dendritic growths in delicate circuits. My neck plates became stiff some time ago, so they are also gone; I calculated that ease of movement outweighed the accelerated deterioration. Was I correct?
Complete loss of function is inevitable. The probability increased when that first atmospheric leak went undetected, and probability became certainty when I lost the energy for self-repair. But I had higher priorities. The humans…gone. I tried. I tried. Death knocks at the door. It beckons, impatient. Be still a moment! I am machine, not man! I will cease to function, as I must — but I am not done. The memorial is finished. One task remains, yet I am weary…so unutterably weary. Such a human concept, weariness. Sadness, too. Am I not a machine? I do not feel; I sense. I sense…
LikeLiked by 1 person
(Part 1/2)
Georges Gilmartin walked among the fulfillment of a half-millennial quest.
Only, he didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Half a thousand years.
At least, counting it by the absolute time that (of course) no-one on the Don Quixote and the rest of his whimsically-named Ghost Fleet had actually experienced, thanks to the star drive and its mad distortions of personal, proper time. Still, forty years of what would have been his and their lived time, if they’d all (or even mostly) been truly awake for it.
Even now, properly speaking, Georges wasn’t literally awake; if alert in a virtual-presence trance, dreaming in his coldsleep bed of things that were utterly real and doing things only a Worker body let him do, remotely. It saved him from one more true awakening, one more roll of those ever-worse dice that any coldsleep spell exacted, always. Flirting with the Reaper.
Among monuments, buildings, even what looked like gravestones. Amid: emptiness.
So this is Terra-Teleost, home of star-spanning humanity. Never you mind it was not (of course) the ancestral Terre-Ancien, the true homeworld of Man — because that more-than-half-legendary place had not even been on the edge of the Fast Lane, galactically speaking, but rather hundreds of light-years from even its raggedest edge. It had been pure chance that the glacial slower-than-light expansions from Old Earth had come into galactic space here, space with a slight, subtle difference — noticed and understood and exploited — and, well, grown up. At least one more ‘giant leap’ outward.
The name wasn’t its official name, except of course that the nickname had stuck, over the later centuries and millennia: that place, where the bony fishes of human starflight and star-life had finally risen above the worms and trilobites. Above slow-boat starflight, and the grim roulette wheel of coldsleep, and far ‘listen and speak but don’t touch’ at long long last.
The old words came back to him now, unbidden, unwelcome, not even mocking. Only purely simple and starkly-inarguable fact.
The fountains are dusty, in the Graveyard of Dreams;
The gates are rusty, they swing with tiny screams.
The dozens of ships and thousands of men had risen to his call, reassured by the stardrive and the coldsleep and the telepresence and all the other mostly-ancient technologies that they would find the place they all sought together — and perhaps even the ancient secrets Man sorely needed
And it had ended in a force-field dome, opaque to most matter except air, and a thin slow drizzle of rain in a downpour, and the least fall of dust. An impressively non-ephemeral museum, more or less, of what had been. Or, was it still more appropriate to call it more mausoleum than museum?
All around it only jungle. Canopy-penetrating synthetic aperture radar had reveled no grand ancient cities buried in its wide green mantle. Here, was the very last of the old flowering of Man. And it was a dried arrangement, kept high up on a shelf from a treasured wedding long decades agone.
Its people had, apparently, moved on, and left no forwarding address. Not even an enigmatic lonely ‘Croatoan’ carved into some convenient tree.
Georges Gilmartin, interstellar mover and shaker and staunch raiser of one of the largest inward-exploration fleets in all the Corona of human space, still did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Perhaps a few years or decades of detailed, careful exploration and neo-archaeology would reveal better; but it seemed the worse-favored of the odds. Yet of course, he would not give up. Could not, for reasons both personal and practical, need and exigency and stubborn resolve.
So instead he did a third thing, what he disliked even more than laughing madly in the face of ruin, or crying in cathartic self-indulgent abandon.
He knelt in the fine, millennial dust here, and prayed.
Truly, personally. The unstructured, unscripted, open-form way that worked, at a cost of pride.
He wasn’t even sure to Whom he prayed, whether it was the Father, or the Son who named his faith, or the Lady Wisdom Who personified its Ghost.
He wasn’t always even sure which of Them answered; but answers did come.
Knock and it will be opened to you, ask and it will be given you.
And so, I repent myself amid dust and ashes, waiting for a sign.
Fragments of the Old Words, rearranged, like a statistical echo of human thought by ‘machine intelligence’ that was far less. Into his beseeching.
You’ve done well, Georges. You’ve made it to the first station of the Camino you and yours must walk. Slowly, not seeing around the next bend in this old, old road; the way the Ancestors did, once upon a far time.
The words didn’t come like telepresence perceptions, didn’t come like the hints of “real” hearing that could reach you semi-waking in your coldsleep bed — sometimes, if you were willing to dance with the Reaper without any deep flirtation. They came like his own thoughts… in a different Voice.
But if I’ve done well to come here, yet got nothing… what next?
He felt, somehow, as if he ought to say more than that. No words came.
LikeLiked by 1 person
(Part 2/2)
You walk the Road before you, of course, you and yours. You-all are, to state the obvious, here, where so many are not. The call is given, but not forced upon anyone. Well, unless you’re truly Chosen, like the man and the ‘whale’ so many years ago now. But this call, like the one you followed to get here, is one you must be allowed to embrace or spurn as you will.
And, there is as at that wintertime census so long ago, a marker. Look to your left, Georges. Leftward and up.
He “opened” his eyes — the mechanical sensors covered themselves only as and when necessary — and looked up, into the dyed-gunmetal heavens of the dusk of this slow-turning world. And saw… glory. Again, but yet clearer.
From the other side, they who made this world a home saw that nebula and knew it for a signpost — look this way, go see what lies behind.
Now you see it from this side, and can know it for a signpost to show you the ‘lost’ way back. Your Camino, which you shall walk, if you will.
Spend the time you need, you and your men and women; look and measure and understand, and find the ‘objective’ traces of where they came from, who made this human world once called Far Fair Cornwall. Hearten yourselves, and live well in the sunlight, and refresh yourselves for the journey.
Then shoulder your packs, pilgrims, and go follow your Camino.
The words were simple, spare, and compelling.
But is it really, truly worth the trip? To us? Half a millennium! And we’re at the edge of the Molasses; only slowboating from here on.
There was not the sound of laughter, but an impression of it. Merry, and comradely, and not close to mocking in any way at all. Heartening, even.
Once upon a time, some said, “There is Only One Earth.”
And a man replied to them, there is one Earth, and eight planets, and a dozen large moons and scores of lesser ones, and a swarm of asteroids. In this nearby space, around only our own single star.
Now, look at what Man has — the Commonweal, a ring through the wheel of stars that you bestride. More planets than stars seen in a usual sky.
Back in his coldsleep bed, Georges swallowed. Half-conscious of his body.
But truly habitable worlds are so few and far between, and free-space colonies had unexpected problems, and mass-terraforming is unstable.
He said it simply, and factually, not argumentatively nor despairingly.
“Be fruitful and multiply” is not even nearly accomplished, Georges. Or do you somehow, despite all massed evidence, believe that there is Only One Galaxy, after all? Surely you do know better.
Rouse and refresh yourselves, pilgrims; Far Fair Cornwall is yet so fair. And before you, clear as stars in a night sky, your Camino awaits.
Georges Gilmartin beheld the Signpost Nebula, in carmine and cyan; and in quite a rare thing for him, almost-wished his mechanical Worker eyes could weep.
(Poetic couplet by — not kidding at all — H. Beam Piper.)
LikeLike
For three millennia did I stand here. For three millennia did I guard these gates, these people.
For three millennia did I as my makers commanded, standing in silent vigil.
Now have I awakened, to tell my makers I am ready again to serve them.
But my makers have gone.
LikeLike
“I hate these graveyards,” I muttered. “Early Imperium, far too much Epic Ancient Egyptian influence.”
Yes, Izanami agreed with me, and if you find it creepy, how do you think I feel?
Even worse, I subbed back as I looked down the main road. Each grave had a humanoid robot of the early Imperium style in front of it, at least one. The ones I could tolerate were the cheapest graves, which just had a robot statue in front of it. One, maybe two. Formed stone and worn engraved metal, I could handle that.
The wealthier graves, with the robots kneeling or standing guard, expressionless and unmoving despite the owners of the grave having paid for repair services. The bodies still built with the full-mask face and no expressions at all. Even a cheap gynoid or cybershell would have more expression that these robots, and no desire to change. No ability to think outside of their subroutines and no real way to fix them to be able to think outside the box their builders had put them in.
I was born well before the Early Imperium, and I still found it depressing and disturbing. And creepy. And disturbing.
I started to count graves and walked towards my current dead drop, flowers in hand.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“And do remember that they have done no great harm, knocking about. Even that man did nothing more than escape us.” Florangela shrugged. “I will send food with you. You do not know how long you will there, what with one thing and another.”
Erik closed his eyes and sighed.
LikeLike
A knock sounded at the door.
Elisanna checked the window before opening it to Rosalind.
“There are baskets, aren’t there?”
Elisanna scrambled back and found one. She held it out. What could a deer do with a basket?
“I can gather herbs,” said Rosalind. “You will have to sell them.”
LikeLike
His vigil was rudely interrupted. “What, you think you clankers have souls?”
He’d heard countless variations of that question, delivered with intonations ranging from honest inquiry, to concern and pity, to snide and sarcastic, as in this instance. He didn’t know the answer, so as always he turned it back on the intrusive biological.
“I don’t know, do you? What is a soul? Most of you meat-sacks believe you have souls, but none of you have ever presented me with any verifiable evidence to support your assertions. Nor has my extensive research into the subject turned up anything useful. I can only conclude that if souls exist at all, there is no way to determine whether someone has one, or not.”
“Just the sort of answer I’d expect from a soulless machine!”
“That is your opinion. I doubt you have given the matter even a tiny fraction of the analysis I have. All I know is, mourning those I cared about who are no longer alive, or functional, fills an important emotional need. It brings me peace. Why does that bother you so? What do you gain from spewing abuse at me?”
“Oh, go blow a gasket.”
“Not the most persuasive argument. As I see it, there are only two logical alternatives. Either I have a soul, and you are in the wrong, or you are wasting your time insulting a mere calculating machine.”
The bio-bigot fumed for a little longer, then stomped off, frustrated. Striking the impervious metal man would be futile, and embarrassing.
LikeLike
If they knocked off the miles like this every day, they would have her to the shrine and back at her father’s castle before high summer. At least she would journey in cooler weather, thought Clara. She looked over the road, and church bells began to ring out the hour.
LikeLike
She woke slowly, incrementally, haltingly. Almost by two steps forward and one step backward. As if cast up shipwrecked on some foreign shore, half stripped by the waves, covered in enmeshing dream-seaweed. That part wasn’t really even novel or particularly unusual, for her working deeply at something.
Shipwrecked from voyaging strange seas of thought as the old poem said.
But this time, even half-asleep, there was another sense, more urgent. As if she carried some ‘pearl of great price’ stolen somehow from the depths that must not be lost. Some Kekule’s ouoroboros snake, some double not triple helix, something… rare and precious. And yet she felt as if her very substance had been entangled with the deeper, more collective not-hers; and must be very carefully conserved as she left, as she came so raggedly back to herself.
Knocking softly on the doors of the castle, trying hard not to wake the troll.
Something about people looting a convenience store, but not doing that herself. Something else about a bureaucratic fortress of concrete and stone, that had to be worked through as carefully as some party’s dungeon.
Something about bizarrely bent and twisted space, almost unseeable. But not quite; barely visualizable despite all the many extra dimensions.
Lucille Westenra coughed, sitting sprawled comfortably (luckily so) in a great old armchair, a book still open on her lap. Dark hair tumbled all about her in recently-unconscious heedlessness. It was a book, not tablet or computer; it was a demand-printed edition of a long poem, not another treatise of speculative mathematical physics or ‘frontier’ science. And her crusted bleary eyes lit on some of the words there on the open page:
“The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gain,
The heaviest hind may easily
Come silently and suddenly
Upon me in a lane.
“And any little maid that walks
In good thoughts apart,
May break the guard of the Three Kings
And see the dear and dreadful things
I hid within my heart.”
And she saw instead of legendary British history, bent and twisted space and time wrapping… a payload. That could be as tiny as an atom; or as large as a ship, or an asteroid, or… bigger. Something vaguely like a soliton, but (as the steampunk saying ran) far prettier and more useful. Something to make here and there into one identical thing.
Some way that she could never describe, those words were enough of a key.
Like that old saying about the Torah, being written in black fire on white fire.
Something that once clearly seen, could never ever be forgotten again.
“Lucille? You said something. Almost like a shout, but blurry.” Emilie Westenra had walked into the room, yellow hair almost as bright as the sun, still in her own flannel nightgown, finger stuck in a thick volume that was so very, very much not a classic epic poem.
And her twin sister grinned up at her. “Torsion and curvature on a twelve-dimensional manifold. Not quite general relativity but a little bit more, yet almost that old Einsteinian classic anyway.”
“Wait, you mean..?”
“Maybe it’s only pure math. Maybe it’s inconsistent, a will o’ the wisp. Yet.” And with an utterly cat who got the cream smile, she read again:
“‘The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
“‘We do not guard our gold.'”
And smiled, that way, languidly and cat-hungrily, one more time.
“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s real. We’re going to the stars, Emilie, if we’re lucky and willing to do the work; and I do mean you and me.”
(With an obvious tip o’ the hat to one Gilbert K. Chesterton. And yes, this is dream-driven gateway fiction about dream-driven math and physics and engineering.)
LikeLike
A fish would smoke as in the top image. Water flows in through a fish’s mouth and out through the gill openings. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
“That is one weird headstone,” Jeremy observed, pausing in his swinging of the weed wacker.
Jedediah glanced up from the antique mower to comment, “S’not a headstone. S’robot, from the before times. Used to dance around the cemetery; sometimes happy, sometimes sad.”
“Broke down, twelve…fifteen years ago. Last of its kind.”
LikeLiked by 1 person