Winter Song Read Online Free PDF

or a design flaw, the inhibitors appear to have failed, and if left to themselves will eat you alive.
         "The Long Night was the longest conflict since the Hundred Years War–"
        A strangely familiar voice cries out, "I won't lie down and die!"
         "The Isheimur populace is likely to suffer genetic drift and disease–"
        The man Ragnar's voice is a rumble from a mouth full of misshapen teeth, his words unintelligible.
         "Pappi: estimated height one-metre-eighty, mass eighty kilos–"
        The woman beside him answers, her voice lower. Her hair is lighter, but her features equally mismatched, one shoulder slightly higher than the other.
         "Oedipus: son of King Laius and Jocasta of Thebes–"
        You realise that the voice refusing to die was your own, but it sounds strange. It should be alto but is tenor instead. Perhaps your voice-box was damaged in the accident?
         "Pantropy lost favour as Terraforming grew easier–"
        The accident. The pain increases as a shard of memory brings with its suddenly perfect recall the accompanying agony: the smell of burning dust, the isolation, the heat. After a while your throat hurts with the scream – which tails off into a whimper.
         "A quasar at absolute magnitude −25.5 is 100 times brighter than our galaxy–"
        The girl – barely a woman – Bera strokes your head. "Hush, Pappi, he kannske skilja you," she says. Her breasts ooze milk, and a part of you realises that while she has given birth in the last three weeks for there to be lactation, there is no sound of a baby. The rational corner of your mind tucks this away for later, but the animal part that has control has you lunging forward on all fours, scrabbling at her clothes.
         "Humanity only found other sentient life after four centuries of spaceflight–"
        "Neh!" The sting of her palms raining down on your face and head are microscopic compared to the waves of agony that ripple across you, but still they are enough to make you pause. You stare up at her dark hair, wide-set eyes and full mouth and wonder what her lips would taste like if you ripped them from her face.
         "Oedipus left for dead with a shepherd but adopted–"
        "He eats like an hungradur dyr," Bera says, becoming more understandable with each sentence, as the linguaweave begins to take effect. "He almost choked on that meat we fed him before. But he can eat elda food now. No more breastfeeding–"
         "An Icelandic chieftain was politician, lawyer, and police man combined–"
        Some residual decorum makes you lurch away from her into a corner.
         "Grain was only grown in limited quantities in Iceland–"
        "Agh, he's vomiting! He splashed my best boots!" Pappi kicks you. You growl, but you are too busy gazing at the pool of vomit to attack.
         "The Mizar B pair mass approximately 1.6 times that of Sol–"
        "No, Pappi! He doesn't know what he's doing. The horsemeat was too much for him to digest at this stage of his bati."
         "In Iceland, the chieftain's position could be bought or sold–"
        "Well, keep him away. Oh, what's he doing now? He's eating his own puke!"
         "Nanotechnology requires vast consumption of energy–"
        The undigested horsemeat still tastes much as it did before, though now with a rancid flavour that may be the bile that you've brought up with it, but there are also others: salt and a metallic taste. By squinting you can zoom right in and see shapes invisible to an unenhanced human eye crawling among the chunks of meat. You have vomited up nanophytes with the food. From somewhere comes the knowledge that vomit is as corrosive as battery acid – their tiny carapaces must be almost indestructible to withstand it.
         "Sheep farming was the most common type in Iceland–"
        You know you must eat it to get the nanophytes back into your system, but Bera