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HIGH EARTH ORBIT, 2102


Sapphire, wreathed in soft cotton. The entire world lies beneath her: a jewel upon black velvet.

So wonderful.

Over her right shoulder floats the tiny biographer-globe, recording everything except what’s important: her thoughts and feelings. The orbital station’s view-bubble is reserved just for her.

If I’d listened to what everyone knew was “right,” I wouldn’t be here.

Gus has overridden both lawyers’ and medics’ wishes many times. (“There’s no such thing, as escape velocity,” she told them weeks before. “Not with continuous thrust. I’ll use a slow-shuttle. Perfectly safe.”) The occasional lie will not hurt them: she came up fast.

They don’t have her perspective on the world.

After all this time.

Seventy-eight too-short years have passed since her discovery. Lightspeed spinglobes, forming stasis fields within, were created 120 years after Einstein’s blistering insights into the relativistic nature of spacetime. Her own research (she does not consider herself in Einstein’s league) has taken this long to come to technological fruition.

“Two minutes, ma’am.” A respectful voice in her earpiece.

Wealth comes from her corporations, more than intellectual endeavours. One of her companies owns the patent for this bubble’s material: a transparent paramagnetic ceramic. She has always invested ten percent of income, given ten percent away (to children’s foundations, mainly) and wisely spent the rest.

But none of it had meaning…

Her own researchers, at her insistence, use her as a guinea pig, for telomere replenishment and femtocytic re-engineering: for every life-extending treatment which looks likely to work. Equally importantly, she practices Yang-style t’ai chi every morning. Gus refuses to die too soon.

… until this moment.

Dark space outside. She wishes Ives were here.

“One minute.”

She remembers Mother, so frail in the hospital bed, in the Radcliffe’s terminal ward.

“Why did you call me Augusta, Mum?”

A long pause, then the tiniest of shrugs, from shoulders so emaciated her bones looked razor-sharp, attempting to cut through skin.

“Family tradition, pumpkin-”

It was days before Mother found final peace in death. But those were the last coherent words she spoke.



SANTA MONICA, 2024 | The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20 | cледующая глава