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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: On a future Earth of environmental devastation and political instability, rapidly mutating viruses have caused billions of deaths, and the future of the human race is in jeopardy. When a select group of pragmatists take residence in an orbiting habitat, the occupants begin to see visions of the unfortunates they left behind, and some fear that the environmental deprivation has bridged the gap between reality and hallucination.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Full Spectrum 3, ed. Lou Aronica, Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell, 1991
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2001

This eBook is also available in the following bundle(s):

• Ursula K. Le Guin Bundle

107 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [274 KB], eReader (PDB) [44 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [31 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [29 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [48 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [101 KB], hiebook (KML) [101 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [61 KB], iSilo (PDB) [26 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [33 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [61 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [46 KB]
Words: 9300
Reading time: 26-37 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

When the government of the Atlantic Union, which had sponsored the SPES Society as a classified project, fell in the Leap Year Coup, Maston and his men were prepared; overnight the Society's assets, documents, and members were spirited across the border into the United States of America. After a brief regrouping, they petitioned the Republic of California for settlement land as a millenarian cult group and were permitted to settle in the depopulated chemical marshlands of the San Joaquin Valley. The dometown they built there was a prototype of the Special Earth Satellite itself, and livable enough that a few colonists asked why go to the vast expense of wealth and work, why not settle here? But the breakdown of the Calmex treaty and the first invasions from the south, along with a new epidemic of the fungal plague, proved yet again that earth was not a viable option. Construction crews shuttled back and forth four times a year for four years. Seven years after the move to California, ten last trips between the launchpad on earth and the golden bubble hovering at the libration point carried the colonists to Spes and safety. Only five weeks later, the monitors in Spes reported that Ramirez' hordes had overrun Bakersfield, destroying the launch tower, looting what little was left, burning the dome.

"A hairbreadth escape," Noah said to his father, Ike. Noah was eleven, and read a lot. He discovered each literary cliche for himself and used it with solemn pleasure.

"What I don't understand," said Esther, fifteen, "is why everybody else didn't do what we did." She pushed up her glasses, frowning at the display on the monitor screens. Corrective surgery had done little for her severe vision deficiencies, and, given her immune-system problems and allergic reactivities, eye transplant was out of the question; she could not even wear contact lenses. She wore glasses, like some slum kid. But a couple of years here in the absolutely pollution-free environment of Spes ought to clear up her problems, the doctors had assured Ike, to the point where she could pick out a pair of 20-20s from the organ-freeze. "Then you'll be my blue-eyed girl!" her father had joked to her, after the failure of the third operation, when she was thirteen. The important thing was that the defect was developmental, not genetically coded. "Even your genes are blue," Ike had told her. "Noah and I have the recessive for scoliosis, but you, my girl, are helically flawless. Noah'll have to find a mate in B or G Group, but you can pick from the whole colony--you're Unrestricted. There're only twelve other Unrestricteds in the lot of us."

"So I can be promiscuous," Esther had said, poker-faced under the bandages. "Long live Number Thirteen."

She stood now beside her brother; Ike had called them into the monitor center to see what had happened to Bakersfield Dome. Some of the women and children on Spes were inclined to be sentimental, "homesick" they said; he wanted his children to see what earth was and why they had left it. The AI, programmed to select for information of interest to the Colony, finished the Bakersfield report with a projection of Ramirez' conquests and then shifted to a Peruvian meteorological study of the Amazon Basin. Dunes and bald red plains filled the screen, while the voice-over, a running English translation by the AI, droned away. "Look at it," Esther said, peering, pushing her glasses up. "It's all dead. How come everybody isn't up here?"

"Money," her mother said.

"Because most people aren't willing to trust reason," Ike said. "The money, the means, are a secondary factor. For a hundred years anybody willing to look at the world rationally has been able to see what's happening: resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government. But to act on a rational understanding, you have to trust reason. Most people would rather trust luck or God or one of the easy fixes. Reason's tough. It's tough to plan carefully, to wait years, to make hard choices, to raise money over and over, to keep a secret so it won't be co-opted or wrecked by greed or soft-mindedness. How many people can stick to a straight course in a disintegrating world? Reason's the compass that brought us through."