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The Stardrifter Grounded [MultiFormat]
eBook by Bruce Boston
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$0.49 |
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$0.42 |
eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: They told him he was too old for the rigors of stardrive, too old to brave the vacuum. Yet the grand distances of interstellar space still called to him like sirens, with a music he could not deny.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Figment #15, 1993
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2002
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [35 KB], eReader (PDB) [19 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [4 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [5 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [58 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [75 KB], hiebook (KML) [42 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [33 KB], iSilo (PDB) [4 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [5 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [33 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [11 KB]
Words: 1214
Reading time: 3-4 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
 
In the sordid company of assorted off-world cronies, human and not so, stranded like himself, the stardrifter waits out one rapid day after another in the back streets of a starport city. Circling too close for comfort to a brilliant white dwarf, sweltering beneath the cloud-clotted skies of a seasonless alien clime, the stardrifter waits out the short years--six-and-a-half odd local to every solo year on Earth--though he has long since ceased to calculate the conversions. He knows that time by any world's standard is no longer on his side. His aimless anger, his fits of despair and restlessness, he combats with whatever intoxicants, legal or not so, happen to come his way. He relieves his boredom by an occasional tryst with some native courtesan, creatures blue-skinned and angular, their customs and language strange, but no stranger than he has known before. Creatures of a species nocturnal by nature, yet still humanoid, soft in the right places, passionate enough in like fashion to his own human passions. They can often be beautiful, he thinks, in their own blue and angular way. As slender and graceful, he tells himself, as the sentient saplings of ... Midas VII? ... Althor VIV?
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