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Distant Fire [MultiFormat]
eBook by Richard A. Lovett
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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Fiona and Ted have the ultimate long-distance relationship. He's a space pilot; she's an Earth-bound actress. It's bad enough when Ted is only flying to Saturn. But when he's offered command of the first relativistic-speed interstellar flight--three years for him, 181 for her--Fiona faces a dilemma. An unabashedly romantic fable with a strong science-fictional twist, this story's first publication was deliberately timed for Valentine's Day.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Analog, 2004
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2006
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [177 KB], eReader (PDB) [29 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [16 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [15 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [76 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [87 KB], hiebook (KML) [90 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [44 KB], iSilo (PDB) [13 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [16 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [44 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [24 KB]
Words: 4542
Reading time: 12-18 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
The longest love affair in history was nearly two centuries old, but Fiona Newton didn't know it at the time. If she was aware of anything, it was a dream in which she again watched her youngest niece die--holding Tamara's cold, veined hand in her own smooth, warm one as her baby sister's last surviving child fought for one more breath, and then one more, and one more after that, until finally there were no more.
The funeral had been many years ago, but Fiona dreamed of it as though it were yesterday--as indeed it had been when she began the dream, which the outside world would perceive as occurring only in agonizingly slow motion: a barely perceptible squiggle of elongated brain waves, a heart rate that accelerated to two or three beats per day, lungs that drew a few shallow breaths each week.
She lay in a glass-lidded sarcophagus, surrounded by equipment that monitored her ultra-slow body functions and trickled chemicals into the blood inching so slowly through her veins. In the past, she'd been visited occasionally by doctors, but that had come less and less frequently as the life-support equipment proved reliable, until Fiona's most frequent guests were the technicians who gave the system its periodic check-ups, barely glancing at the dials that proclaimed her own unchanging condition.
At first, she'd also received visits from the press, with its love of follow-up stories timed for dates of significance only to editors in need of news pegs. "When's the last time we did a story on Sleeping Beauty?" someone would ask, and if it had been long enough, an editor would suggest timing the feature for Fiona's fiftieth birthday, or the thirtieth anniversary of her entry into the tank, or an anniversary of the most recent time she'd climbed out of it to walk the world of real-speed dreams. Or perhaps the editor would choose the one hundred seventy-fifth, one hundred fiftieth, or one hundred twenty-fifth year in the countdown before she hoped to return permanently to the realm of warmth and sun. Then another ambitious young reporter would visit--sometimes bringing the latest in high-tech telecommunications equipment, sometimes relying on the only medium that might outlive Fiona's slumber, the plain old-fashioned written word. He--the reporter was seldom a she--would gaze at the tresses that framed her face in Celtic fire. He would study the perfect complexion and toned muscles, barely altered from the dancer/singer/actress who'd once held the world in the palm of her hand, and if he had a heart--which he might be too young to have developed or already too jaded to remember--he would wish he could talk to the real person, rather than stare at the hardware-draped form of someone who by all accounts had once been one of the most engaging, beautiful, and alive people the Earth had ever known.
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