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The Diagnostic Feast [MultiFormat]
eBook by William Shunn
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$0.65 |
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$0.55 |
eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Elven, Lynx, and Dido are sisters--of a sort. Highly evolved beings of pure energy, they come together billions of year in the future for a taste of life in the flesh, and perhaps to reconstruct what it once meant to be human.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Beyond the Last Star: Stories from the Next Beginning, ed. Sherwood Smith, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2006
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [215 KB], eReader (PDB) [32 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [19 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [18 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [78 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [91 KB], hiebook (KML) [102 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [42 KB], iSilo (PDB) [16 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [20 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [48 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [30 KB]
Words: 4976
Reading time: 14-19 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
The pocket universe bubbled into existence as the party arrived, each from its own wherewhen. They arrived simultaneously--Elven had reserved the coordinates when she realized the three of them would be passing within easy hailing distance of the same epoch and galactic cluster, and she knew if she didn't do it then it wouldn't get done. Let's converge for a feast, she had cast, studying the tangled multidimensional knot that plotted the knowable extents of their lives. It's much too far before our trajectories will permit it again.
Lynx had dressed to capture attention. She wore a variation of one of her favorite instantiations, a luminous pulsing body with hyperspherical symmetry and a corona of whip-thin sensory appendages that snaked through six dimensions. An array of stellar sails grew from her center, which, unfurled as now, would let her glide lazily down the currents of cosmic radiation--all the way to the next supercluster, if she weren't in a rush.
Radiant as ever, said Elven. You appear and already the feast is underway.
You flatter me, said Lynx, rotating six ways. There would be no feast without your strong attraction to bind us. Interesting choice, by the way. Very becoming.
Thank you. Elven wore the aspect of a writhing colony of matted vegetable life, photoreceptors and other sensory organs dotting the broad, peripatetic leaves. Even limiting herself to three dimensions, Elven's leaves, always in motion, enacted a complex dance that belied her low spatial order. It's modeled after a fascinating example of liquetic life I encountered in Hercules. Noble and sad, really--all this frantic activity, only to maintain stasis.
Dido spoke. But still recognizably you.
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