Story Excerpts

The Sixteenth Circumstance
by John Richard Trtek

Favoring handholds over harness, Monsieur Picot employed but a light touch to keep himself seated while contemplating the planetary limb of Aphalaon, whose mottled blue and ochre curve was overlaid with threads of white. To the Frenchman’s eye, it was a vision meant to be painted rather than merely scanned, but since none among his current crew were artists in that sense, he could only lean back and make do with this electronic rendition—and feel grateful that those pale obscurations were water clouds, for he had always found sleep difficult within the confines of an exoskin. READ MORE

Sisters of the Flare
by Stephen Case

I.
What I learned is that the substance of time is laid down, like the weave of a tapestry, and we are always only on the leading edge where the threads come together. Once the moment passes, the structure remains, and it remains unalterable. To change the position of a single thread is as impossible as changing the course of a single lonely star—and as futile.

Events in the past, the sisters theologicia would tell me, have an ontological weight as significant and unyielding as objects in space. They are, and they offer no more explanation or justification than a stone or a planetoid does.

Why the rain of darkness first came to Corvus. READ MORE