The Cryptic Age

An odd, ancient machine with three minds comes to the Great Ship, offering a rare gift in exchange for a home and passage. But the fabled Miocene handles the interview, and this ancient captain is impossible to impress.

"Her long legs waded across the ash and the short, sun-starved grass beneath. The ground dipped very slightly, falling into a broad depression filled with rainwater and wet ash, churned up mud and fresh corpses. The barrel-shaped rhinoceroses numbered in the dozens, the hundreds. One of the rhinoceroses was healthy, standing tall on four legs. She saw him at a distance, and he saw her. His powerful body wore crisscrossing belts and four arms. One pair of arms came from each end of the body. The posterior arms had small busy hands that worked with shifting emblems on some kind of crystalline control panel. The creature's front arms were thicker, the hands more robust, and those hands wove their fingers together, creating a bowl with the palms."

Robert Reed has written many stories about the Great Ship, plus several novels, including MARROW and THE MEMORY OF SKY.


Genre: Science Fiction