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Originally posted by Aris Katsaris:
Or another called Sarah Jane? :-)

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Posts: 1087 | Registered: Jul 1999  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by TomDavidson:
*grin* Good one, Rivka.

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Thank you.

I adore that novella. I've been pondering since last night what element from it would be good.

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It was amazing what you could get used to. Mitch's murders were coming almost daily, now. At first he was worried that other people would remember the way Ted had, or notice him twitching from the reset. But gradually he learned that no one else noticed the assaults -- or remembered noticing, anyway -- as long as they weren't looking directly at the time dudes (or, occasionally, dudettes), when it happened, and repetition helped him reduce his own reactions until he could be cut down in midstride and never lose a step. He even started doing what he could to make his own assassinations easier and speed things along. When gunmen threatened, Mitch would turn slightly toward them, blocking them from the view of other students and providing a better target.

He even offered helpful advice, especially when they aimed at his face (he'd found that stung more than chest shots). "Center of mass, soldier!" he'd yell, holding his arms wide and pointing to his own body.

He found he preferred having his throat slit to being stabbed, especially if the stabber insisted on twisting the knife on the way out, and he had nothing but contempt for an assassin with a dull blade. Killers with swords found him turning to maximize their thrust or tilting his head to make decapitation easy and convenient for both of them. Mitch began to see it as his way of being polite, like good customer service.

Garottes just sucked.

Once he even got to throw himself on a grenade and save the girls' volleyball team, which was deeply satisfying even though they went back to ignoring him seconds later, his heroic valor and personal sacrifice lost to time.

It became a game, of sorts. Could he spot the killer before the killer spotted him? He'd still be wiped out either way, of course, but there was no reason he couldn't enjoy himself. Sneaking up on a sniper and beeping his nose, and the subsequent look on the guy's face, was totally worth getting his head blown off, in Mitch's opinion.

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Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
1.7 JIGGAWATTS!!!

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Originally posted by scholarette:
BB- is penny to pay for dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe?

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Originally posted by scholarette:
I remember very little of the Traveler to be honest- just his existence and he eventually takes Wesley away.

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Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by The Rabbit:
I can't believe no ones mentioned The Doctor.

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The Scholar's Tale: "The River Lethe's Taste is Bitter"
The pilgrims' voyage aboard the Benares ends at Edge, on the edge of the dangerous and vast Sea of Grass. The windwagon they are scheduled to take across the Sea is late, but it does arrive. Soon the pilgrims leave aboard it. After dinner, it is Sol Weintraub, the Jewish academic, who tells his story.

Sol Weintraub had been a professor of ethics on Barnard's World, the second colony founded from Old Earth. He and his wife, Sarai, had been happy; they had been even more happy when their only daughter, Rachel, was born. Rachel was the apple of their eye, beautiful and intelligent. She eventually became an archæologist, and while in her post-graduate studies went on an expedition to study the Time Tombs of Hyperion.

While mapping the so-called Sphinx for hidden passages or rooms, something happens to Rachel: all the instruments and equipment fail, and the Shrike appears in the Sphinx amidst a massive surge of "anti-entropic fields". (This incident is never clearly explained, although the second John Keats cybrid remarks on page 494 of The Fall of Hyperion that there were "several Sphinxes visible to my expanded sight: the anti-entropic tomb carrying its Shrike cargo back in time like some sealed container with its deadly bacillus, the active, unstable Sphinx which contaminated Rachel Weintraub in its initial efforts to open a portal through time, and the Sphinx which has opened and is moving forward through time again.").

Rachel is returned to the WorldWeb where her parents learn of the novel disease she has contracted, dubbed the "Merlin sickness" (after T.H. White's The Once and Future King), in which every time Rachel goes to sleep, she ages backwards two days (for a net loss of one day), losing her memories and in fact physically becoming younger; there is no sign that the condition will reverse itself when she ages backwards to her birth. Rachel's life is shattered by her slow retrogression into the past, shattering her links with the present; her parents devote their lives to caring for Rachel and trying to cure her. Meanwhile, Sol wrestles with his dreams, in which he is ordered to go to Hyperion and sacrifice Rachel, in a replay of the Binding of Isaac. Weintraub becomes increasingly fascinated with the ethical problem that the Binding presents.

As Rachel becomes younger, the Weintraubs resort to subterfuge to accommodate Rachel's beliefs as to when in time she is. Press coverage eventually forces them to flee to the Hebrew desert planet Hebron. While on a vacation home, Sarai dies. Sol begins worrying about what will happen when Rachel reaches her birthday, and begins a PR campaign to force the Shrike Church to allow him and Rachel to take the pilgrimage and implore the Shrike for a cure. The permission is granted literally bare weeks before Rachel's day of birth. The voyage arrested the condition, but nevertheless, time is short for Sol and Rachel.

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