A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories Read Online Free Page B

South Australia: The First Contact With the Gorgonids.” In the voice-over
     they told how it was her, Annie Laurie Debree, who had been the first human to talk with our friends from Outer Space, even
     beforethey sent the ambassadors to Canberra and Reykjavik. There was only one good shot of her on the film, and Jerry had been sort
     of shaking, and her highlighter was kind of streaked, but that was all right. She was the heroine.

N EWTON ’ S S LEEP
    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 cliché
     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 runningEnglish translation by the AI, droned away. “Look at it,” Esther said, peering, pushing her glasses