improbable progress through the impossible medium of the dyne fields, Fix the bos'n prepared him meals he didn't eat.
'You got to eat, boss.'
Tiny Skeffern patched his Fender into the communications equipment. Broadcasting the Dynaflow Blues into the quaking, distorted universe outside — trailing slow ribbons of tachyon noise that might some day and in some unimaginably distant place be received and decoded as a stretched, alien music, the ship groped and crabbed and hurtled her way by turns a few light years closer to her captain's destiny.
Nobody mentioned Earth until it became necessary for landing procedures.
By that time, Truck had six of his twenty-four hours left.
THREE
The Longest-running Party in the History of the Universe Earth:
IWG and UASR, initially parasites of the political muscle-tissue, had eaten what remained of their twentieth-century hosts during the aftermath of the tragic and infamous 'Rat Bomb' wars of 2003—45, when the client-state system, that uneasy and paternalistic compromise between autonomy and empire, fragmented and fell apart.
A new Arabia swallowed the entire Sino-Soviet continent, engulfed the more fertile areas of Africa, but lost its original nerve center in Egypt. IWG swelled to contain both Americas, the husk of the unsuccessful European Economic Community, and the Mediterranean shores.
Between them, they devasted Australasia and, in a quarrel over the missile pits of Antarctica, set fire to the Pacific Ocean.
Now, they faced one another along the crooked boundary lines of the Syrian Desert and the Taurus Mountains, the cratered wastes of the German Strip, the Bering Sea. Silos in the radio-glass puddle of the Qattara Depression menaced Niger and the keelyards of Nubia.
They disputed the Red Sea warily, in gunboats — from the Israeli, causeway at Sinai to the fifty-lane Arabian road bridge at Al Shaab.
Hydrofoil flotillas, spraying rainbow arcs of oil and semipolymers to calm the sea before them, patrolled the South Atlantic; above them, piloted missile interceptors hung in precarious fragmentary orbits; and off' the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, enigma and threat under its power dome, humped out of the Magellan Strait like a huge, stranded alien fish.
There were many fronts, but few confrontations; they used the Galaxy for those.
It would have been naïve to consider the inheritors of the Earth as 'Jews' and 'Arabs': they had sold that birthright, and retained of it only the terminology. The millennial grievances that had motivated their wars prior to the last quarter of the nineteen hundreds had vanished; in consolidating their secondhand empires, they had merged a thousand nationalities and religions, only to lose their own.
More important, perhaps: each of them had surrendered its self-determination in favor of the politico-social and economic principles of the dead powerblocs — so that they were caught in the inevitable conflict of ideologies already worn pitifully thin four hundred years before, when Tiny Skeffern's shiny antique had given its first performance.
2367: The Mohorovicic Discontinuity was mined on both sides of the Red Sea Fault.
There were no more neutral zones.
Truck decided to visit his wife.
Cor Caroli was visible over the deserted inspection pits of Carter's Snort when, unaware of his position as an activator of entropy, he brought his boat down among them. He knew it for a murder-star, the killer in the houndpack of Venatici; but as yet he did not expect that his own star would eventually outshine it on all scales of magnitude.
He had to argue with Fix, the Chromian bos'n, who stood stubbornly on the loading ramp of My Ella Speed , coughing in the dirty winter air of Earth and saying: 'I'll bring the chopper, boss.'
Truck shook his head.
'You stay here, Fix. Tiny will tell you if they've pinched me. The boat's yours until you hear from me again.'
Fix grinned with embarrassment His teeth were like a sawmill. 'You need
'You got to eat, boss.'
Tiny Skeffern patched his Fender into the communications equipment. Broadcasting the Dynaflow Blues into the quaking, distorted universe outside — trailing slow ribbons of tachyon noise that might some day and in some unimaginably distant place be received and decoded as a stretched, alien music, the ship groped and crabbed and hurtled her way by turns a few light years closer to her captain's destiny.
Nobody mentioned Earth until it became necessary for landing procedures.
By that time, Truck had six of his twenty-four hours left.
THREE
The Longest-running Party in the History of the Universe Earth:
IWG and UASR, initially parasites of the political muscle-tissue, had eaten what remained of their twentieth-century hosts during the aftermath of the tragic and infamous 'Rat Bomb' wars of 2003—45, when the client-state system, that uneasy and paternalistic compromise between autonomy and empire, fragmented and fell apart.
A new Arabia swallowed the entire Sino-Soviet continent, engulfed the more fertile areas of Africa, but lost its original nerve center in Egypt. IWG swelled to contain both Americas, the husk of the unsuccessful European Economic Community, and the Mediterranean shores.
Between them, they devasted Australasia and, in a quarrel over the missile pits of Antarctica, set fire to the Pacific Ocean.
Now, they faced one another along the crooked boundary lines of the Syrian Desert and the Taurus Mountains, the cratered wastes of the German Strip, the Bering Sea. Silos in the radio-glass puddle of the Qattara Depression menaced Niger and the keelyards of Nubia.
They disputed the Red Sea warily, in gunboats — from the Israeli, causeway at Sinai to the fifty-lane Arabian road bridge at Al Shaab.
Hydrofoil flotillas, spraying rainbow arcs of oil and semipolymers to calm the sea before them, patrolled the South Atlantic; above them, piloted missile interceptors hung in precarious fragmentary orbits; and off' the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, enigma and threat under its power dome, humped out of the Magellan Strait like a huge, stranded alien fish.
There were many fronts, but few confrontations; they used the Galaxy for those.
It would have been naïve to consider the inheritors of the Earth as 'Jews' and 'Arabs': they had sold that birthright, and retained of it only the terminology. The millennial grievances that had motivated their wars prior to the last quarter of the nineteen hundreds had vanished; in consolidating their secondhand empires, they had merged a thousand nationalities and religions, only to lose their own.
More important, perhaps: each of them had surrendered its self-determination in favor of the politico-social and economic principles of the dead powerblocs — so that they were caught in the inevitable conflict of ideologies already worn pitifully thin four hundred years before, when Tiny Skeffern's shiny antique had given its first performance.
2367: The Mohorovicic Discontinuity was mined on both sides of the Red Sea Fault.
There were no more neutral zones.
Truck decided to visit his wife.
Cor Caroli was visible over the deserted inspection pits of Carter's Snort when, unaware of his position as an activator of entropy, he brought his boat down among them. He knew it for a murder-star, the killer in the houndpack of Venatici; but as yet he did not expect that his own star would eventually outshine it on all scales of magnitude.
He had to argue with Fix, the Chromian bos'n, who stood stubbornly on the loading ramp of My Ella Speed , coughing in the dirty winter air of Earth and saying: 'I'll bring the chopper, boss.'
Truck shook his head.
'You stay here, Fix. Tiny will tell you if they've pinched me. The boat's yours until you hear from me again.'
Fix grinned with embarrassment His teeth were like a sawmill. 'You need
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