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I wait outside the speaking chamber, where the young Speakers learn to Hear and Speak. The walls and carpeted floor are purest white, the color of this God place and the Speakers who live here walk by, all dressed in white like the walls and the floor, their palms on the shoulders of their guides.
Carefully, with gloved hands, she removed the object from its stone niche, where it had rested for centuries deep underground, inside the dormant volcano where the mysterious Icelandic cult that guarded it made its home. It hardly weighed anything.
In the asteroid belt you either have fast reflexes or you’re a statistic. I slammed into the airlock bulkhead and stopped dead, waiting to see where the laser beam would hit next.
The Dandelion lost structural integrity so quickly that I doubt the bridge even had time for a distress call, and this escape pod’s radio is only sub-light.
I gulp the whiskey and it burns my plastic throat, sets my nutrient sac on fire. I’ve got filters, but they haven’t been changed in six months. Too expensive.
The Makers had been dead for billions of years, yet Umos discovered one caught in the starship’s net. A young one, naked, with still-fused dorsal fins.
Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.
As her breath hissed out it thickened and spread and wrapped around the planet. Before long it was pushing everything down; my mother’s breath became the atmosphere of Mars.
The wan gray of polluted skies will weigh on your soul, and you will recall bluer days, and wish for your childhood, when the grass seemed taller and would rub your inner thighs as you rambled through the fields.
They opened the box and showed her Bob’s hands, resting side by side on a white pillow. The left one lay palm-down, the right one palm-up. The one that was palm-up twitched and waggled fingers at Rebecca when it saw her.
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