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William Faulkner
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
— <$title>, Requiem for a Nun (1951)
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May 29, 2091.
Pedro's Pentagon is packed. It’s pop-singer Francesca Duffy’s Centennial and the last free weekend before fall semester for half a million students in the Austin area.
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To the Moon, Gretel!
“Last call, now boarding Los Angeles to Buenos Aires! Last call, now boarding for Buenos Aires!”
It was Gretel’s subOrb flight. We hugged, kissed, and hugged again. Given the choice, I’d never let her go.
“I hear your ribcages creaking,” Grampa said, and we laughed.
Soon I’d board a subOrb for Cairo, while Gretel was headed to a week in Brazil, another in Sydney, and eight weeks on Luna. We’d never been apart for so much as a week, and I yearned to keep it that way. I wanted to drag her somewher...
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Happy Birthday, Gretel
In retrospect, the first déjà vu panic attack must have been Butterfly’s birth. She’d been immensely useful over the years, not to mention helping me defeat a Skirrl fellmonger in Isaac Nussbaum’s apple orchard, but now I had questions.
Was Butterfly a blessing or a curse? Surely she divided my strength, if nothing else. Would two of us firing synapses in the same brain overload and fry it? I’d accomplished a lot with multitasking over the past eight years, but I was afraid to do it now, if I ev...
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Lessons
I didn’t like giving Butterfly control, but back in the apple orchard, I promised her equal time. Without her help, the fellmonger and his mind-parasite shedu would have killed us or the breaker priest would have flayed us alive and left our body hanging from a tree limb. I’m a fast healer, but growing new skin from head to toe was a challenge I might not survive.
Besides, like it or not, she’s a person. I can’t keep her captive in the back of my brain forever. It would be cruel, and she’s too s...
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Babies
I woke up in bed, Nana sitting beside me, a hand on my brow, and Cardiff standing by the door. They looked worried.
“What happened?”
“He knocked you out,” Nana said.
“Crap. I didn’t think he could do that. Not to me or Kell.”
“You’re strong. Without powers he has but you don’t — kinetics and teleportation — I don’t think he could have beat you down in a million years.”
“He had zero gravity on his side,” I said. “I wanted to throw up every second.”
“The bastard played dirty,” Cardiff said.
“How d...
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Ortiz before shields
Ortiz knocked harder. “He’s like a narcotics cop on a bust. I’ll get the door while you dress … or not.”
She beat me to the door, and it opened.
“Good morning, sir!” Kell said, coming to attention — spine rigid, shoulders back, tits out.
It fucking hurt to look at her.
The captain looked a robust sixty to sixty-five, but Lon had told me Ortiz was a senior officer on the original Free Winona voyage seventy-odd years ago. That probably made him a hundred or more. He was a couple inches shorter tha...
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Card vs Ortiz
Bang! Bang! Bang! Someone pounded on the door.
“Spires,” Nana said. “It’s Captain Ortiz.”
Lon and Rufus got worried looks on their faces, but Joaquín only smirked. Maybe it was the only expression he could handle. “He’s pissed about all the noise you made.”
“I was not that loud,” Nana protested on the way to the door. Ortiz was banging louder and louder.
“He’s a huge fan of the itty bitty titty committee,” Joaquín said to Kell. “You’re just his meat.”
“That explains a lot,” she said. I had no cl...
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Amelia Dies
Chaos (Isaac Tomlin)
That Thursday morning I went out to feed the horses. Amelia was back at the house, cleaning up after breakfast. We hadn’t gotten much news on Kell’s situation, and that worried us, but we figured she should be perfectly safe with the Corps. We hoped so, anyway.
Walking to the barn I noticed the moon setting in the west, and — sky watcher that I’ve always been — knew that Jupiter was next to the moon, only a couple of degrees away in the sky. Scientific American had pointed i...
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Gather
Gathering (Kell)
In the morning, when I got out of the shower and went to the living room, I found Card opening a small gift-wrapped package. “There’s one for you,” he said, pointing, and I picked it up off the coffee table. I got a glimpse of the contents and stopped, leaving it inside.
He was pulling a wispy black thing out of his box and looking at it, confused. “Another skein?” he wondered. “You replaced the one the Hunter destroyed. Why did she send me this?”
I shrugged. “She knows what she...