J. Comer ( Read more... )

Cells ( Read more... )

J. Comer ( Read more... )

Everyone lives in a snaky twisting cramped space bursting with machinery and piled to the ceiling with heaps of equipment, clothing, bedding, dried and preserved food, rats, hydroponics tanks, potted plants, hamster habitrail, computers, and control panels no one understands.  Everyone's always lived there.  There are seventy-one people in the ( Read more... )

Up Four Decks ( Read more... )

They rode in silence, Charthat leading them into a switchbacking trail over ridges which lay below a long series of peaks, cut from the sandstone of a long-past ocean.  They were heavily overgrown with chaparral and stream side groves of oaks.  Until they reached a camp for secondday sleep, Charthat said nothing.  As they rubbed down the tired ( Read more... )

***

Five days passed, five of the fifty days of the Pendleton’s year.

The snow-sellers came into the City with their dripping, wrapped manhorse-carts of treasure, and sold them to the makers of mulberry-fool and mango-fool and tofu-ices and coconut-ices, and the coconut-ices and atemoya-ices and rambutan-ices fair flew out the stalls in the market on ( Read more... )

Kill her? Against all he stood for.  He reached to choke her and she struck him under the ribs with her fist.  He gasped for air and she reached for a walking-stick, or something, and swiped at him, screaming.  His arm came up in a block-THWACK!
He’d bruise there, and painfully, but he-

Agitation in the darkened house, male voices.  He decided, ( Read more... )

Kill her? Against all he stood for.  He reached to choke her and she struck him under the ribs with her fist.  He gasped for air and she reached for a walking-stick, or something, and swiped at him, screaming.  His arm came up in a block-THWACK!
He’d bruise there, and painfully, but he-

Agitation in the darkened house, male voices.  He decided, ( Read more... )

“He’s a tailor?”, Charthat had asked.

They had been riding east on a well-metaled mountain road, near the plastic mines at Horha Abankgth.  A huge wagonload of rough plastic rounded a curve ahead, hauled by eight manhorses.

“Why, yes,” Hilojat had replied.  “Why....do you consider that strange?”

“Well, he’s the descendent of the Prophet. Your Prophet ( Read more... )