by Wil McCarthy
“You're afraid of it!” Malye said, surprised and obscurely pleased. Not that there was anything pleasant about this; she'd seen individual Waisters act startled or afraid, if some immediately dangerous stimulus were right there in their faces, but it had simply never occurred to her that as a species, as an overwhelmingly powerful species, they would be capable of fearing anything. Maybe this blue star sickness would be a serious problem, in a million years or so.
“AFRAID,” #Hthw# said, shrinking into herself slightly. “WE ARE AFRAID OF IT. WE DESIRE TO GREET SICKNESS BEFORE IT SPREADS FURTHER. WE DESIRE TO PRACTICE PFEACE UPON IT, BUT OF THIS WE KNOW NOTHING. OF ALL SPECIES KNOWN, ONLY HUA DEMONSTRATE PFEACE. WE MUST LEARN FROM YOU, QUICKLY.”
“Quickly,” Malye mused. “Your perception must differ greatly from mine. If you send them a slow light signal, it will be thousands of years before you get an answer back. That's hardly cause for alarm.”
“ALARM,” #Hthw# agreed, completely missing Malye's point. “SIGNALS WILL ARRIVE HERE FIRST. HUA ARE CLOSER. BLUE STAR SICKNESS WILL TOUCH HUA FIRST. YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS, AND PREPARE.”
“Thank you,” Malye said sincerely, “I'll let my people know. But really, I'm not very worried; I'll be dead before their light even gets here.”
#Hthw# made a face that Malye had learned was associated with confusion, or possibly disbelief. “THIS CRYOSTASIS ADAPTATION IS INTERESTING, FOR A SPECIES SO SHORT-LIVED. ARE YOU NOT MANY-SIX-POWER-TWO ORBITS OF THIS WORLD IN AGE?”
“I—” Malye stopped, letting the idea sink in. She was thousands of years old, and could easily live to be thousands more, if for some reason she went back into cryostasis. So perhaps a million years was not so long after all. Perhaps her children would still be alive, when the blue star sickness swept down upon the Human Spaces and did, well, whatever it was. She frowned, not liking that idea at all.
“I don't know,” she said finally. “Maybe you're right. Maybe you're right. But we're not going to solve the problem tonight.”
“WE WILL DISCUSS IN DETAIL?”
“Another time, yes.” Malye smiled reassuringly, a gesture she knew #Hthw# would recognize. “Meanwhile why don't you get a pressure suit on and come to the swimming festival with me? We can pile some stones beside the water.”
But #Hthw# had no sense of humor, and Malye wasted another half hour explaining the joke.
APPENDIX
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Engineer/Novelist/Journalist/Entrepreneur Wil McCarthy is a former contributing editor for WIRED magazine and science columnist for the SyFy channel (previously SciFi channel), where his popular “Lab Notes” column ran from 1999 through 2009. A lifetime member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Seiun, AnLab, Colorado Book, Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick awards, and contributed to projects that won a Webbie, an Eppie, a Game Developers' Choice Award, and a General Excellence National Magazine Award. In addition, his imaginary world of “P2”, from the novel LOST IN TRANSMISSION, was rated one of the 10 best science fiction planets of all time by Discover magazine. His short fiction has graced the pages of magazines like Analog, Asimov's, WIRED, and SF Age, and his novels include the New York Times Notable BLOOM, Amazon.com “Best of Y2K” THE COLLAPSIUM (a national bestseller) and, most recently, TO CRUSH THE MOON. He has also written for TV, appeared on The History Channel and The Science Channel, and published nonfiction in half a dozen magazines, including WIRED, Discover, GQ, Popular Mechanics, IEEE Spectrum, and the Journal of Applied Polymer Science. Previously a flight controller for Lockheed Martin Space Launch Systems and later an engineering manager for Omnitech Robotics, McCarthy is now the president and Chief Technology Officer of RavenBrick LLC in Denver, CO, a developer of smart window technologies. He lives in Colorado with his family.
Find more books by Wil McCarthy at http://ReAnimus.com/authors/wilmccarthy
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