Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 Read Online Free Page A

eyes, secretly wishing that once he opened them the nursery would be gone. Nursery? Thoughts of harvesting and cutting filled his mind. They soothed him, allowed him to think more clearly.
    The fear he felt about the trees subsided. If he opened himself to them, he could almost feel them—an awkward kinship.
    Only friends I got since Kami….
    Julian allowed a distorted memory of Kami to flash into his mind. When Kami merged with the mast, just before the lightning struck. Then the memory was gone, banished until a time when Julian might better understand.
    He flopped down at the edge of the nursery by an elm sapling.
     
    ***
    Julian was content to sit for hours, for days. His skin grew dark and scabby. He wasn’t surprised when his feet disappeared into the sand—his toes spreading roots into the ground. On cloudy days he became hungrier than when the sun shone brightly. He felt the touch of his neighbors’ roots after a few months as they massed around his ankles and traveled up through his calves. After a few years, he stood as tall as the elm.
    Then one day billowing sails appeared on the horizon. Four ships arrived. The builders had finally come.
    Julian rejoiced at the first scratching of their saw blades. As they harvested him, they told him how he would be going back to sea. And this time he’d have his own ship.
     
     
    Copyright © 2007 by Heidi Ruby Miller
 
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Eric Flint is the bestselling author of more than 50 books of science fiction, the former editor of Jim Baen’s Universe , and the current publisher and editor of the Grantville Gazette.
 
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    A SOLDIER’S COMPLAINT
    by Eric Flint
     
    I don’t care what the genetic engineers say, I think it’s a bad idea.
    I didn’t mind the rats, once I got used to them. (Yes, yes, I know—they’re not rats, they’re engineered from primitive insectivore stock. Only genetic engineers would know the difference. They look like rats, don’t they? So as far as we grunts are concerned, they’re rats.)
    The truth is, most human soldiers get along fine with the rats. First of all, rats have a dark and pessimistic view of life, which any foot soldier can appreciate. From the first day, they fit right into the gripe sessions, predicting doom and disaster like seasoned veterans.
    Maybe a little too much on the grim side, your rats. Even by grunt standards. Personally, I think it comes from ancient racial memories of being the favorite prey of practically every small carnivore in creation. But when I raised the idea with Corporal Laughs-At-Digitigrades (and don’t ask me why rats insist on these silly names—we just call him Lad for short) he immediately sneered. Well, actually, he wriggled his whiskers in that particular mode which conveys “sneer” better than any human sneer ever could.
    “What a lot of crap,” he chittered. He took a hefty swig from his stein. (And that’s another thing I like about rats—they’ve got a proper appreciation for brew. Not like this new bunch! But I’ll come to that in a moment.)
    He made a big production of wiping the beer off his whiskers. Then he leaned back in his chair and emitted that disgusting bray which rats have instead of a laugh. It’s their worst characteristic, in my book. The sound is bad enough, but the sight of those huge yellow incisors!
    “Humans are so stupid.”
    “We invented you, didn’t we?” I grumbled.
    “Your only intelligent move, in a racial lifetime of blunders. It’s like they say—put a monkey in front of a typewriter long enough, and eventually he’ll write all of Shakespeare’s plays.”
    I didn’t get offended. Before they integrated our battalion, they gave us lectures on how to get along with rats. Stripped of the psychobabble, the gist of it was: don’t get offended. Even if they are a lot of offensive rodents.
    “The fact is, Sergeant Johnson,” he continued, “rats never gave a thought to predators. We had the