Added by 2 members
A young girl attends a futuristic fireworks show. Fission bombs are detonated inside a vast rocket nozzle, and she watches spellbound while her mother and her mother's lover sit nearby. Secrets are revealed that night and in the centuries to come. And against a backdrop of nuclear fire, a great love is born.
"Where You Have Been" is a new Great Ship story. Not a long story, but it should be seen as a companion piece to Reed's other Great Ship works. The author strongly recommends that you first read the novella "Camouflage." And it wouldn't hurt to add "Residue of Fire" and "Night of Time" to the list.
"She was the memory -- vivid urgent enthralled and ridiculously ignorant -- and within the same soul she was the adult watching memory from a far removed future. Both Sorrels were kneeling, the shared face pressed against chilled diamond. The purpose-built auditorium was filled with strangers, but their mother was sitting close behind them. The two Sorrels were staring at a rocket nozzle thousands of kilometers across, yet only one of them appreciated the scope, the magnificence. To the child, every rocket might be this large or even larger, and fusion engines were just one more impenetrable mystery in a life filled with little else.
“'White Sands,' said the AI announcer. Then a device built to exacting standards was imploded, abusing a bit of plutonium, and in revenge, the plutonium detonated as bright light and harder radiations.
"That’s when the celebration began. A horrible weapon -- the precursor to bombs that would kill millions of humans -- was made tiny by distance and by technology. There was no detectable heat. Demon walls between the detonation and the auditorium deflected most of the neutrons and charged nuclei, but even the particles that slipped past amounted to nothing. Every spectator was a stubborn immortal blessed with repair mechanisms and backup metabolisms as well as bioceramic minds that would never feel the faint radiological breeze. Yet this breeze was something to behold. The silent flash. The exclamations of strangers. Sorrel’s mother whispering soft words while her friend Rococo said, 'Shit.' And between them sat the captain who said nothing at all."
Robert Reed is a prolific science fiction best known for his Great Ship stories. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella, "A Billion Eves," and his story "Truth" was made into a small-budget movie called PRISONER X.
Genre: Science Fiction
"Where You Have Been" is a new Great Ship story. Not a long story, but it should be seen as a companion piece to Reed's other Great Ship works. The author strongly recommends that you first read the novella "Camouflage." And it wouldn't hurt to add "Residue of Fire" and "Night of Time" to the list.
"She was the memory -- vivid urgent enthralled and ridiculously ignorant -- and within the same soul she was the adult watching memory from a far removed future. Both Sorrels were kneeling, the shared face pressed against chilled diamond. The purpose-built auditorium was filled with strangers, but their mother was sitting close behind them. The two Sorrels were staring at a rocket nozzle thousands of kilometers across, yet only one of them appreciated the scope, the magnificence. To the child, every rocket might be this large or even larger, and fusion engines were just one more impenetrable mystery in a life filled with little else.
“'White Sands,' said the AI announcer. Then a device built to exacting standards was imploded, abusing a bit of plutonium, and in revenge, the plutonium detonated as bright light and harder radiations.
"That’s when the celebration began. A horrible weapon -- the precursor to bombs that would kill millions of humans -- was made tiny by distance and by technology. There was no detectable heat. Demon walls between the detonation and the auditorium deflected most of the neutrons and charged nuclei, but even the particles that slipped past amounted to nothing. Every spectator was a stubborn immortal blessed with repair mechanisms and backup metabolisms as well as bioceramic minds that would never feel the faint radiological breeze. Yet this breeze was something to behold. The silent flash. The exclamations of strangers. Sorrel’s mother whispering soft words while her friend Rococo said, 'Shit.' And between them sat the captain who said nothing at all."
Robert Reed is a prolific science fiction best known for his Great Ship stories. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella, "A Billion Eves," and his story "Truth" was made into a small-budget movie called PRISONER X.
Genre: Science Fiction
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Robert Reed's Where You Have Been