Far Horizons
Page 61
She came out in a deep stairwell where coiled stairs led up to the narrow alley. The alley led to the street. She went up, and out, head down, a little bent, the staff softly thumping as she moved slowly, like any other passerby. Ahead of her was the narrow malghaste gate through the city wall, never guarded, never even watched, for this was where the untouchables carried out the city’s filth. The strained and tattered rags marked her as one of them. Outside that gate a small malghaste boy guarded a flock of juvenile harpya, their fin-wings flattened against the heat, and beyond the flock was a well with a stone coping. The area around it was sodden, and she felt the mud ooze over her toes as she filled the bottle, slung it over her shoulder and walked away on the northern road, still slowly, as any malghaste might go. She did not run until she was out of sight of the town.
In her dream she was being hunted by dogs.
She woke to hear them baying, closer than before.
EUROPA STRIKE:
Book Three of the Heritage Trilogy
by Ian Douglas
The Singer’s benthic hymn was gloriously beautiful, with melodies and tonalities alien to Chinese ears…or to Western, for that matter. There could be no possibility that the music, or the message it carried, had anything to do with Earth or Humankind. The ocean within which Zhao was now virtually adrift was over six hundred million kilometers removed from any of Earth’s abyssal depths. The sounds filling the black depths around him were being generated by…by something deep beneath the surface of Europa’s global, ice-sheathed ocean.
It was the nature of that something that he was testing now.
“Give me a countdown to the start of the next ping,” Zhao said.
“Twenty-two seconds.”
“And take me lower. I want to see it.”
To Zhao’s senses, he seemed to be descending rapidly, though he still felt only the synthleather of the chair pressing at his back, not the cold, wet rush of the sea streaming past his face. That was just as well; the ambient water temperature was slightly below zero; its freezing point had been lowered slightly by its witch’s brew of sulfur compounds and salts. Even with Europa’s scant gravity, .13 of Earth’s, the pressure at this depth amounted to over a thousand atmospheres…something like 1058 kilos pressing down on every square centimeter of his body, if his body had actually been plunging through the Europan depths.
The light seemed to be growing brighter, and he was beginning to make out the fuzzy forms of walls, towers, domes…
The image was not being transferred by light in this lightless abyss, of course, but by sound. The Song itself, echoing repeatedly from the surface ice around and around the Jovian satellite, reflected from those curiously shaped alien architectures. Microphones at the surface retrieved those reflections, and advanced imaging AIs created a rough and low-resolution image of what human eyes might have seen, if in fact they were suspended a mere few hundred meters above the object and not nearly 78 kilometers. The object was twelve kilometers across, roughly disk shaped, but with myriad swellings, blisters, domes, and towers that gave it the look of a small city. Experts were still divided over whether it was an underwater city, built for some inscrutable purpose deep within the Europan ocean, or a titanic spacecraft, a vessel from Outside that had crashed and sunk here thousands of years ago…or more. So far, the evidence seemed to support the spacecraft hypothesis. The thing couldn’t be native; Europa was a small world of ice and water over a shriveled, stony core, incapable of supporting any sort of technic civilization. The Singer had to be a visitor from somewhere else.
“There is no question about it!” Zhao said. For the first time, he was beginning to allow himself to be excited. “The Singer is responding in realtime to the sonar signals transmitted from the surface. Do you realize what this means?”
“If true,” Albert replied, “it means that The Singer is not a recording or automatic beacon of some sort, as current theory suggests, but represents an active intelligence.”
“It means,” Zhao said, excited, “a chance for first contact….”
“It is likely that the CWS expedition has precisely that in mind. The Americans’ sudden interest in submarines designed for extreme high-pressure operations suggest that they plan to visit The Singer in person.”
And that, Zhao thought, could well be a disaster for China.
“We will have to inform General Xiang, of course.” Albert reminded him. “With the current political situation, the Americans are unlikely to grant us access to this find.”
“Of course.”
It was imperative that Great Zhongguo be the first to make face-to-face contact with alien visitors from Beyond. The nation’s survival—as a world power, as a technological power—depended on it. China’s population, now approaching three billion, could not be sustained by the capricious handouts of foreign governments.
And so, China would go to Europa to meet for themselves these song-weaving visitors from the stars.
First, though, the Americans and their puppets would have to be taken out of the way.…
About the Authors and Editor
FAR HORIZONS:
All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction
Edited by Robert Silverberg
Greg Bear sold his first short story at the age of fifteen. A Hugo and Nebula Award-winner, he has published seventeen novels. In “The Way of All Ghosts,” Greg Bear reexplores The Way, the artificial universe that leads to other times and other universes, from Eon, Eternity, and Legacy, and the life of the living myth, Olmy Ap Sennen.
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine, as well as the Nebula Award-winning author of eighteen novels. In “A Hunger for the Infinite,” Gregory Benford ponders the continual war of human and machine in the novels of the Galactic Center: In The Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and Sailing Bright Eternity, and asks one essential question of humanity at the beginning of its decline.
David Brin established himself as one of the premiere writers of hard science fiction with The Uplift Universe, where humans are not the only sentient race on Earth, or in the universe, and there’s a billion-year conspiracy behind the uplifting of races to sentience…In this new story, “Temptation,” multiple award-winning author Brin shows exactly how perilous it can be to be offered exactly what you have always wished for.
Multiple-award winning author Orson Scott Card is one of sf/f’s best-known and most-loved writers, and the novels of The Ender Series are his most famous, and brilliant, works. In “Investment Calendar,” Orson Scott Card tells the last hidden secret of his time-and-planet hopping protagonist Ender Wiggin’s life: the momentous first meeting between Ender and Jane, Ender’s computer-based, soon-to-be companion.
Joe Haldeman electrified the sf/f world with Forever War, the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning novel that brilliantly explored the experience of the Vietnam War, and war as a whole. In “A Separate War,” he relates the unknown story of Marygay’s separation from William, and offers hints about the new Forever War novel to come.…
What would you do if you never had to sleep again? And what would happen when everyone discovered that the same genes that kept you from needing sleep, also kept you eternally young? Nebula Award-winning author Nancy Kress questions the problems arising from genetic modification in her acclaimed trilogy Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride, and now in “Sleeping Dogs.”
A science fiction legend for her multiple award-winning classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin is known throughout the world for her novels of the Ekumen—brilliantly speculative novels that challenge the reader to reexamine their views of the worlds around them. In “Old Music and the Slave Women,” she takes another look at the wars of race and property.
Anne McCaffrey is one of science fiction’s most beloved writers, and in “The Ship Who Returned,” she returns to the intriguing world of The Ship Who Sang. Helva, the se
ntient Ship Who Sings, goes to warn a colony about invading marauders, only to discover that the colony worships her…
The Heechee…Ancient, alien, unknown, the mysterious visitors dared humanity to come into the Gateway universe and claim the gifts of alien technology, if they could survive. In “The Boy Who Would Live Forever,” the multiple award-winning Frederik Pohl returns to the Tales of the Heechee and the dangerous, enthralling universe of Gateway and its mystifying legacies.
Robert Silverberg is the multiple award-winning author of numerous science fiction novels, and best-selling editor of the fantasy anthology Legends. In “Getting to Know the Dragon,” he returns to the fascinating alternate-Rome universe of Roma Eterna, in which Christianity never existed, and Rome remained pagan, and unconquered throughout time.
Brilliantly fantastic novels of metaphysical and scientific ingenuity, David Simmon’s The Hyperion Cantos has helped redefine science fiction in the last twenty years, challenging it to move further and faster. In “Orphans of the Helix,” Simmons revisits the award-winning Hyperion universe, and asks more questions about the salvation of the human soul.
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Praise for
FAR HORIZONS
All New Tales From the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction
“Fantastic tales…by some of modern science fiction’s foremost writers…Far Horizons will stand as a benchmark for decades to come.”
Dallas Morning News
“An ideal combination of the reassuringly familiar and the excitingly new.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Excellent writing…New episodes in some of science fiction’s most honored series.”
Denver Post
“A useful addition to the library of any serious student of SF.”
Locus
“The stories are unfailingly good.”
Starlog
“Fascinating…This is a fine sampler-cum-introduction to larger bodies of top-notch work.”
San Diego Union-Tribune
“All the stories are, at a minimum, very good, and several are outstanding…This is an important anthology that should appeal to all serious readers of SF.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“Highly recommended for serious fans and newcomers alike.”
Library Journal
Copyright
FAR HORIZONS. Copyright © 1999 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition NOVEMBER 2005 ISBN: 9780061840708
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
The Ekumen
The Forever War
The Ender Series
The Uplift Universe
Roma Eterna
The Hyperion Cantos
The Sleepless
Tales of the Heechee
The Galactic Center Series
The Ship Who Sang
The Way
About the Authors and Editor
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher