LINKDING

<blockquote>Marie kept on chattering. “...and the suitors can start watching you dance for the unicorns next month. Philippe is first in line to try, right? He would make a good king.” “Mother danced for nine men before Father.” Zéphine mashed the custard with her spoon. “I wouldn’t like that.” Marie’s dark eyebrows drew together. “Nine men, all dead....” I would only like to summon a unicorn, thought Zéphine. The men can look after themselves. But she knew that no unicorn would ever come for her.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Amir Tarabi is scrubbing himself down in the misting rooms the first time he meets Mani Rizk. The mister in Beirut-4 is being upgraded, the zone’s residents using Beirut-3’s misting rooms on rotation, so it is especially crowded that day. Amir avoids making eye contact with the bathers in adjacent patches with rigorous politeness. At sixteen, he’s already spent a hundred personal growth hours thinking about civic decency, appreciates the role of uninterrupted private rituals in fostering social cohesion—</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Which way did my mother go?” Rhy-lee asked her father one day. “North,” he said, and pointed without looking. Young as she was, she could see the small collapse that happened inside him when he heard the question, knowing that one day she, too, would leave him. ‘Distant heart’, her name meant. Her grandmother and aunts made sure that Rhy-lee and her father could hear when they said that her name was well chosen.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Ahmed is a doctor working in a far flung outpost of humanity. His way was paid for by the leaders of his faith and his atheism is a guarded secret. His encounters with the “kite people” will cause him to doubt his whole worldview however when the aliens start dying and escalating tensions between religious extremists threatens to destroy the colony’s peace. “When Stars Are Scattered” is a moving story about alien contact, religious intolerance, and the redemptive power of the divine channeled through the spirit. Whether that spirit is human or alien.</blockquote>