Rococo

Brother and sister travel to a new solar system. The goal is to claim new worlds for human colonists, but standing in the way are aliens that are very different from us. The Scypha don't exist as species, but instead as individual cells that can gather into bodies of any shape and practically any size. Satisfying their demands will be difficult. And one of the siblings might have to die.

"For nearly three years, the gray face of the world was simple and unlovely -- a bland fleck of light not worth a bare-eyed glance. But as Aasleen plunged toward that face, the world became huge, revealing a multitude of complications as well as a dirty, unpolished brand of beauty. Two seas rode the visible hemisphere -- shallow round bodies of muddy water straddling the dawn line, the southern sea wearing a stubborn patch of early summer pack ice. The cold flat desert between was home to a dust storm, ruddy and fragile, that was working its way to the east. Elsewhere volcanoes stood alone, dormant and possibly dead, young glaciers flowing from their summits, grinding rock into fresh eager dust. Peel away the world's dust and a landscape of overlapping pocks and blisters would be revealed -- the cumulative damage wrought by six billion years of tireless abuse."

Robert Reed's most successful stories belong to the Great Ship universe. "Rococo" introduces the Ship's greatest diplomat, while his sister, the brilliant Aasleen, is given a string of awful troubles that need fixing.


Genre: Science Fiction