An evening breeze slipped gently through the open door of the Great Tur in Berestye, redolent with the smell of peat and flowering oak trees.
The heavy sheepskin that had covered the doorway during the recent winter was now folded neatly in a corner.
A small fire in the center of the room provided most of the light, although there were also wax candles spaced every few feet along the two long trestle tables.
Dir bent down to speak quietly to his father, the proprietor of the tavern. “Bac’ka,” he said, respectfully. There must have been something urgent in his tone, because Old Askold looked up. “The man in the corner,” Dir said.
The corner in question was far from the fire, and poorly lit. Somebody sat hunched over a wooden mug. Neither of them could make out his face from the other side of the room.
“What of him?”
“His skin is blue,” said Dir. “If I give him more harelka, I worry that he may become ill. If he dies in here, Gleb and I will need to drag him to the river, and the town watch will undoubtedly ask us many questions.”
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It was well past 9 pm, and Harv could probably have let Buddy off his leash, but there had been warnings about the raccoons in the densely forested areas north of 97th St. He still found the park a bit creepy after dark. Nowhere near as bad as thirty years ago, but still. It helped that Buddy was big. Although really, he’d probably just lick a potential mugger.
Traffic on the 395 was light at 6 AM. Phil made the L’Enfant exit, turned right onto E Street SW, and then a block later, rolled past the blue “NASA Employees Only” sign. He waved his ID on its lanyard at the guard, who recognized him and raised the gate just in time.
“Much knowledge has been lost over the centuries to fire. The several burnings of the Library in Alexandria destroyed, perhaps, a million books. Possibly the greatest of such disasters were the accidental burning of the 1931 UK census, which resulted in a data gap between 1921 and 1951, an entire generation, and also the destruction of the US 1890 census, from a period of immense population growth, and prior to consistent metrical record-keeping.” — anonymous archivist, 2025
Alejandro went to the store and bought a house. It was time, and then some, to move out on his own. He gave the cashier-bot a fiver, and slid his new house into his wallet. There was a small status screen in one corner of the card, and a touch-sensitive combination pad to open the door.
Pozsony County, May 1242:
I check my dosimeter again, and earn another dirty look from Abel. Problem is, we’re much too close to the big central chunk of neutronium, the paper-weight that makes everything on this asteroid point down, and not just float around. I don’t like the deep tunnels.
The late winter damp seeped through the sheepskin door of the Great Tur in Berestye. The proprietor, Old Askold, shivered and tossed another log on the fire that was the primary source of light in the tavern.
The littlest pig lived in a house made from structurally engineered bamboo. When the wolf peered through the huge, triple-glazed window, the pig was doing yoga. Behind him was a standing desk, with an expensive-looking computer on it.