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eBook Category: Science Fiction Nebula Award(R) Winner, Locus Poll Award Nominee, Hugo Award Nominee
eBook Description: Imagine waking up in the morning to discover that every human being on Earth has been randomly relocated somewhere else: When Lawson wakes up in Seville, Spain instead of his home town of Lynchburg, Tennessee, he realizes that the chaos of mob rioting has brought modern civilization to its knees--and the same thing must be happening in every other city in the world. He wonders if he will see his wife and daughters ... or the world he once knew ... ever again.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Universe 11, ed. Terry Carr, 1981
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2001

195 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [261 KB], eReader (PDB) [48 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [36 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [33 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [51 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [108 KB], hiebook (KML) [104 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [63 KB], iSilo (PDB) [30 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [38 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [65 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [52 KB]
Words: 10165
Reading time: 29-40 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 city was Seville. The river was the Guadalquivir. Lynchburg and the James River, around which Lawson had grown up as the eldest child of an itinerant fundamentalist preacher, lay several hundred miles and one helluva big ocean away. You couldn't get there by swimming, and if you imagined that your loved ones would be waiting for you until you got back, you were probably fantasizing the nature of the world's changed reality. No one was where he or she belonged anymore, and Lawson knew himself lucky even to realize where he was. Most of the dispossessed, displaced people inhabiting Seville today didn't know that much; all they knew was the intolerable cruelty of their uprooting, the pain of separation from husbands, wives, children, lovers, friends. These things, and fear.

The bodies of infants floated in the Guadalquivir. Lawson, from his earliest reconnoiterings of the city on a motor scooter that he had found near the Jardines de Cristina park, knew that thousands of adults already lay dead on streets and in apartment buildings, victims of panic-inspired beatings or their own traumatized hearts. Who knew exactly what was going on in the morning's chaos? Babel had come again and with it, as part of the package, the utter dissolution of all family and societal ties. You couldn't go around a corner without encountering a child of some exotic ethnic caste, her face snot-glazed, sobbing loudly or maybe running through a crush of bodies calling out names in an alien tongue.

What were you supposed to do? Wheeling by on his motor scooter, Lawson either ignored these children or searched their faces to see how much they resembled his daughters.