It was never necessary to watch the video to find out the really important news.

Certainly it had been a mistake to have only one psychiatrist along. Every therapist on Earth was also in therapy, it was part of the job, it came with the territory. But his therapist was back in Nice, fifteen timeslipped minutes away at best, and Michel talked to him but he couldn’t help. He didn’t understand, not really; he lived where it was

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real. But this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last.

So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking

The rocket thus descended slowly into the grasp of a gantry, looking like any other landing vehicle, except that there was a silver line extending up from it, a straight fine line that was only visible for a couple thousand meters above the rocket. Looking at it Frank felt as if he were standing on a sea floor and observing a fishing line, dropped

CONTENTS Part 1 Festival Night Part 2 The Voyage Out Part 3 The Crucible Part 4 Homesick Part 5 Falling into History Part 6 Guns Under the Table Part 7 Senzeni Na Part 8 Shikata Ga Nai

In Antarctica, no one can own land. No one country or organization can exploit the continent’s natural resources without the consent of every other country. No one can claim to own those resources, or take them and sell them to other people, so that some profit from them while others pay for their use. Don’t you see how radically different that is

Imaginary beings, in a real landscape. No wonder he had forgotten the carrot and the stick, and wandered off into the realm of new being and radical difference and all that crap. Trying to be John Boone. Yes, it was true! He was trying to do what John had done. But John had been good at it; Frank had seen him work his magic time after time in the

As they approached Underhill Michel felt the cold pushing through the fabric into his skin, and he felt the too-cool oxygenated air expand out of the mouthpiece deep into his lungs, and he glanced up at the sand horizon and the sand sky and said to himself, I am a diamondback snake, slithering through a red desert of cold stone and dry dust.