discotechnology

The Apple of Eden (Tafaha al-Jannah) by Giyath-ad-Din ibn Sabbah al-Khepri In every Eden an apple To lure us into sin And with the Serpent to grapple A battle we can’t win For all knowledge a price is paid Exile, the sword of flame Even knowing the choice we made Would it remain the same? Who put a serpent in Eden? Who chose to make the tree? And in sin are we made even Nearer my God to thee? Are we made in the serpent’s shape Who easily deceive? Was exile the trap or escape This freedom we achieve? If this is hell, nor are we out If knowing is a curse If heaven’s the reverse of doubt Can we ask which is worse? We who

Thin and muscular, Aclis cut through the air like the knife she resembled.  Long, loosely-hung limbs snaked out and pushed off the sides of the close-parked tugs, adjusting her course with the fine and thoughtless control of one born to it.  She swam through the air like an eel and Susan wondered briefly if that's what she looked like to the planetsiders, like Turbulence and Morgan. [Aclis, daughter of Seiras.  A 'Seiras' presided as gidva over my duel with the Jatna.  I fought with her blade in my hand.  Are they the same?] [Yes.] [Curious.  In my experience the Jatna is usually also gidva of her lanzu.] [Usually,] she grunted. Susan wa

They had shackled Susan to the same post as Turbulence Sterne and she wished they hadn't. “Damn you, Ngn, I knew you was gonna get us in trouble.  Damn well knew it!” “What?  You're going to blame this one on me?  Really?” “Why wouldn't I?  That's the way it always goes.  Every damn time.  Everything's going along just swell and then, boom!  You come along and it all just sinks straight to the bottom.” “Oh, come off it, how could I... Correlation isn't causation.  Even you know that.” “The cold, deep Hell I do!”  With his free hand, he reached over and rubbed the lucky coin atta

They awoke Raj with a blow to the face and a laugh like broken glass. Raj was surprised to be waking up at all. It had all happened so fast.  The two figures had faced him across the dark expanse of space inside the container ship, with him floating between them and the fake supercapacitors holding the corpse-light.  Without communications there was no negotiation.  Everybody's hands had gone to their lasers.  The first figure had been faster but Raj had been more accurate, sending the figure scurrying back towards the airlock, a whitish geyser of air hissing from the holes in its suit.  But the second figure's aim had been more sure and Ra

They burned through the void, their heat signatures tracing a path in the darkness between the Xanadu and the Aiendes Homeship.  The waste heat from their engines glowed like bonfires on her sensors. Susan could see them in her mind's eye, ugly, blocky things, never meant to fight an atmosphere.  She had a pang of nostalgia from her wild days traveling with another clan, the Aberles, flying and racing the custom-built fast runners, what the People called balryma'e, all engine and power plant, nearly as fast as a military raider, if more lightly armed.  She could almost feel the rumble of those powerful thrusters shuddering through the hull a

Susan Ngn was riding high. She was burning fuel building up velocity towards the Goddess Ma-Tsu, with the Bonhomme Richard shrinking to insignificance behind her. She was dragging a small-gauge container vessel, an expensive model with environmental systems to keep the miltiar fresh, in a tractor behind the Xanadu. Sterne was in trouble and she had got what she wanted. Everything was coming up Susan. Grinning, she took her vape from her jacket pocket, snapped a theece cartridge smartly into it and commanded her lenses to call up Raj. He had thought this was a bad idea and she was feeling in the mood to dish out some 'told you so'. The signa

“Aye there now, Kublai Khan-b, what's about you then?” Raj had finally gotten a response from the tugs of the Rabiu Paiza that were headed towards the Kublai Khan's main driver. And all it had taken was setting the Kublai Khan-b (or Samarkand as the Captain insisted upon still calling it) on a course to intercept them at the driver. The Milo accent of the speaker, and he could definitely tell it was a Milo accent at this point, was a great deal thicker than the one of the tug pilot he had spoken to earlier. “That was my question, Rabiu Paiza. I see that you're headed to our main driver. Is there anything I might assist you

The great ship didn't actually appear out of nothing in a burst of Hawking radiation like a newborn universe, no matter what the sensors on the Xanadu were trying to tell Susan. It seemed that way only because when the drive field fell, letting the pocket of time and space inside it rejoin the universe and discharging the built up radiation, that it stopped moving faster than any eye, natural or artificial, could follow. Now that the field was down, the Xanadu's sensors could make out the mass shadows of a small cluster of ships and cargo containers. A vast object stirred in the center of the cargo cloud. It emerged with glacial slowness fro

“Damn me to the Cold Place, Kublai Khan, could you not manage to pick up even one single fucking barge that had its own guidance system on this last run of yours? I swear on the deep and frozen bones of Our Mother, if we have to haul all of these back ourselves...” The high lilting voice on the other of the comm channel trailed off into what Raj could only assume was profound obscenities in a language that didn't understand. Raj allowed allowed himself a little smile as he played his fingers through the lit controls that floated in his vision that indicated the small fleet of self-propelled barges that were following his tugship