Diamonds in the Sky - Mike Brotherton

Diamonds in the Sky

Edited by

Mike Brotherton.PhD.

Contents

In the Autumn of Empire (Jerry Oltion)

A cautionary tale about why scientific misconceptions can be important. This story will also be appearing in Analog soon. Keywords: The seasons. Misconceptions.

End of the World (Alma Alexander)

Nothing is forever, not even the earth and sky. Keywords: Evolution of the sun.

The Freshmen Hookup (Wil McCarthy)

An exploration of how the elements are built in stars using the antics of college freshmen as a metaphor. Keywords: Stellar nucleosynthesis.

Galactic Stress (David Levine)

You think your life is stressful? How about having to deal with the entire universe? Keywords: Scales of the Universe.

The Moon is a Harsh Pig (Gerald M. Weinberg)

Robert Heinlein's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress about a revolt on the Moon was a landmark novel of the 1960s. Jerry's story is also educational. Keywords: Phases of the Moon, Misconceptions.

The Point (Mike Brotherton)

What is the meaning of life in an expanding universe? This story previously appeared at . Keywords: Cosmology.

Squish (Dan Hoyt)

How would you like a whirlwind tour of the planets? Keywords: The Solar System.

Jaiden's Weaver (Mary Robinette Kowal)

So many things about life on Earth depend on the cycles of the sky, from the moon and tides to seasons and more. Well, what if the sky were different? How would humans adapt to life on a world with rings?

Keywords: Planetary rings.

How I Saved the World (Valentin Ivanov)

The movies Armageddon and Deep Impact featured nuclear bombs to divert asteroids headed for Earth, but this is really not the best way to deal with this threat. This story was originally published in Bulgaria, in the annual almanac "Fantastika", the 2007 issue. Publisher: "Human Library Foundation", Sofia. ISSN 1313-3632. Editors: Atanas P. Slavov and Kalin Nenov. Keywords: Killer asteroids.

Dog Star (Jeffrey A. Carver)

It permeates space and has a subtle but important effect on our existence. What if the effect were not so subtle? Keywords: Dark Energy.

The Touch (G. David Nordley)

Life in the Milky Way can be harsh depending the neighborhood you live in. You should hope you have helpful neighbors when the times are harsh. This story originally appeared in The Age of Reason, edited by Kurt Roth, at in 1999. Keywords: Supernova (type 1a.)

Planet Killer (Kevin Grazier and Ges Seger)

And sometimes the times are harsh but you have to depend on yourselves. It helps if you have a little unlikely but useful faster-than-light starships as in Star Trek. Keywords: That would be telling!

The Listening-Glass (Alexis Glynn Latner)

What's the future hold for astronomy and astronomers? What would it be like to work on the moon? An earlier version of the story was first published in the February, 1991 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. Keywords: Radio astronomy, the Moon.

Approaching Perimelasma (Geoffrey A. Landis)

A sophisticated tale about the ultimate journey. Previously published in Asimov's Science Fiction, Jan. 1998. Keywords: Black holes.

Contributors

About The Project

ToC

In The Autumn of the Empire

by Jerry Oltion

This story also appears in Analog magazine.

The emperor of Earth didn't like to be wrong. Many of his acolytes had learned that the hard way, though this was merely rumor, since no surviving member of the inner court had actually caught Hadron the Perfect in a mistake, nor even witnessed one.

So when the little common girl, who had been brought to the palace garden to provide a photo op for His Excellency amid the falling leaves, asked him, "Why is there autumn?" two of his attendants faked sudden allergy attacks and ran coughing for the infirmary while another quickly said, "It's because of the tilt of the Earth's--"

Too late. The emperor laughed and said in his reedy voice, "Ah, my little darling, that's an easy one. We get autumn because the Earth is moving away from the Sun. Soon we'll be millions of miles away from it, and it'll be winter. But don't you worry, because that's as far away as we'll go, and then we'll swing around in our orbit and head closer to the Sun again, and it will be spring, and when we get as close as we're going to go, it'll be summer and the whole cycle will start all over again." He smiled for the video cameras in a sickly attempt to look caring and avuncular.

Curiously, only one of the camera crew wet himself. The others looked at him in puzzlement as he stammered an apology and rushed after the two fake allergy sufferers.

The others continued filming the emperor and the little girl amid the multicolored leaves, and the videocast streamed out into the datasphere, where the emperor's billions of subjects heard his explanation. Most of them hardly paused in their labors. A small fraction said, "Hmm, I didn't know that." And a smaller fraction yet said, "Wait a minute, it's the tilt of the Earth's axis that causes seasons."

Those people were never heard from again.

An astute businessman heard the emperor's pronouncement and immediately bought every cubic foot of refrigerated warehouse space he could find, funding it by selling everything he owned in the tourism industry. Then he bought every perishable fruit and vegetable he could lay his hands on, packing them away in his warehouses for a future he hoped would never come.

For the next few weeks the world buzzed with speculation, and even a few jokes about the emperor's knowledge of the planet he ruled with absolute authority, but the continual disappearance of jokesters and people with astronomical training slowed the innuendo until it seemed that the whole incident would blow over by winter. Or summer, if you lived in the southern hemisphere.

Yet one universal truth that had proved true for millennia kept raising its ugly head: it's nearly impossible to purge bad data from the system. The emperor's explanation to the little girl kept resurfacing to blossom

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