A sequel and prequel to the 2007 story, "Hatch."
"Every living world sported its own best jungle: The towering forest standing beside a river of hot water, the canopy filled with mists and hungry mouths, bold songs and rot. The ocean world where towering worms and blind killers ruled the shoulders of a benign volcano. The thick gold varnish straddling a desert ridge. That lacework of beasts beside a methane river, centuries spent growing a single spore. Or the world where the resident atmosphere was too cold and thin for serious life, but a wet stone from the sky struck hard, leaving a crater where a few shaggy plants maintained their fragile dignity.
"You knew these places.
"But now, there was this jungle. This spectacle without any rival. Billions of square kilometers of barren hyperfiber were covered with a scalding ocean that in turn was capped with churning gasses deeper and far more complicated than any natural atmosphere. Instead of sunshine from above, this jungle made its own days, the native light inhabiting every portion of the EM spectrum, from mammoth radio waves to bursts of gamma radiation. Oxygen was everywhere and cheap, but the loveliest forms of life carried fusion reactors in place of stomachs. These were smart beasts, or at least they knew what they wanted. Emotion. The jungle possessed staggering quantities of emotion. Pride. Fury. Wild fear. This was the corpse and the afterlife of the vaunted Polypond, and here was the greatest honor of your long find life, standing on a high place, watching the shifting colors and shifting shapes of a jungle that was born just now."
Robert Reed is the author of several hundred published stories and novels. Reed won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella, "A Billion Eves." But he is best known for his ongoing Great Ship series.
Genre: Science Fiction
"Every living world sported its own best jungle: The towering forest standing beside a river of hot water, the canopy filled with mists and hungry mouths, bold songs and rot. The ocean world where towering worms and blind killers ruled the shoulders of a benign volcano. The thick gold varnish straddling a desert ridge. That lacework of beasts beside a methane river, centuries spent growing a single spore. Or the world where the resident atmosphere was too cold and thin for serious life, but a wet stone from the sky struck hard, leaving a crater where a few shaggy plants maintained their fragile dignity.
"You knew these places.
"But now, there was this jungle. This spectacle without any rival. Billions of square kilometers of barren hyperfiber were covered with a scalding ocean that in turn was capped with churning gasses deeper and far more complicated than any natural atmosphere. Instead of sunshine from above, this jungle made its own days, the native light inhabiting every portion of the EM spectrum, from mammoth radio waves to bursts of gamma radiation. Oxygen was everywhere and cheap, but the loveliest forms of life carried fusion reactors in place of stomachs. These were smart beasts, or at least they knew what they wanted. Emotion. The jungle possessed staggering quantities of emotion. Pride. Fury. Wild fear. This was the corpse and the afterlife of the vaunted Polypond, and here was the greatest honor of your long find life, standing on a high place, watching the shifting colors and shifting shapes of a jungle that was born just now."
Robert Reed is the author of several hundred published stories and novels. Reed won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella, "A Billion Eves." But he is best known for his ongoing Great Ship series.
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Robert Reed's Hawking