Luminous

Luminous

Greg. Egan

Language: English

Pages: 295

ISBN: 1857985516

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

indeed. I took out my photo of De Angelis. “Is this what you wanted of me? Are you satisfied?” She didn’t reply. I tore up the image and let the pieces flutter to the ground. I didn’t take the subway. I needed the cold air to clear my head. So I walked back into the city, making my way between the ruins of the incomprehensible past, and the heralds of the unimaginable future. THE PLANCK DIVE Gisela was contemplating the advantages of being crushed – almost certainly to death, albeit as

straight out of Harvard, back in 2005 – clearly, too routine by far … but then, I could understand how thirty years with an unblemished record must have given rise to a degree of complacency. Largo had never attempted to disguise his politics – apart from exercising the kind of discretion that was more a matter of etiquette than subterfuge; no Che Guevara T-shirts when visiting Los Alamos – but he’d never really acted on his beliefs, either. A mural had been jet-sprayed onto his living room wall

people, for the wrong reasons. I said, “And you trust him? He may not believe in the defect now, but once he’s convinced—” “He’ll want exactly what we want. I’m sure of that.” “Okay. But are you sure IA won’t be watching, too? If they’ve worked out why we’re here, and they’ve bribed someone—” Alison cut me off impatiently. “There are still a few things you can’t buy in this city. Spying on a military machine like Luminous would be suicidal. No one would risk it.” “What about spying on

either system. “Then … where are they?” At lightspeed, our attack on the far side could not have been felt any further away than Mars – and the strategy used to block the corrosion of the spike would have been impossible with even a few seconds’ time lag. “The atmosphere?” “You mean – Earth’s?” “Where else? Or maybe the oceans.” I sat down heavily. Maybe it was no stranger than any conceivable alternative, but I still balked at the implications. Yuen said, “To us, their structure wouldn’t

trade relationship with Europe. I couldn’t believe that any government would risk so much for a single work of art, in a country full of more-or-less interchangeable copies of the very same piece. It wasn’t as if Hengartner had got his hands on the 12th century original. Who, then? Another collector, another obsessive hoarder, whom Masini had outbid? Someone, perhaps, unlike Hengartner, who already owned several other baseball cards, and wanted a complete set? Maybe Masini’s insurance firm had

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