The Lowest Heaven by Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Sophia McDougall, Kaaron Warren, E.J. Swift, Kameron Hurley Read Free Book Online Page B

pleased, I think.”
    “And will their pleasure be of benefit to you? Will you also profit from this?”
    “I should imagine.”
    “Then we are all satisfied. You will return to the Collective? Delay your departure by a couple of days, and the work will be packaged and delivered to you. It really is a trifling little thing.”
    She had not been exaggerating, Oleg reflected.
    He tugged more of the packaging away. The upper quarter of A Map of Mercury was now visible. But everything below that was concealed by a thin layer of protective material with a circular hole cut into it. He dug his fingers around the layer until it began to come free. He grew incautious. If he damaged the material, he could always say it had been that way when he found it.
    Besides, he was starting to suspect that his masters would think very little of this offering no matter the condition in which it had arrived. It wasn’t the sort of thing they had been hoping for at all. Yes, it was a late Rhawn. But a globe? A Map of Mercury?
    Something that literal?
    The layer came free. He could see more of the globe now. There was in fact something a bit odd about it. Instead of continuing with the shape of the sphere he had been expecting, the object began to bulge in some directions and turn inwards in others. There was more packaging material to be discarded. He tugged it away with increasing urgency. There were two cavities opening up in one side of the no longer very spherical thing. Above the cavities was the fine swell of a brow ridge. Beneath the cavities – the eye-sockets – was the slitted absence where her nose would have been, and beneath that the toothy crescent of the upper jaw. There was no lower part.
    He pulled the whole thing from its box. The colours of the top part, the emulation of the planet’s surface features and texturing, continued across every part of it. There were ochres and tangerines and hues of jade and turquoise. It had a fine metallic lustre, sprinkled with a billion glints of stardust. It was simultaneously lovely and horrible.
    A Map of Mercury .
    That was exactly what it was. She had not lied. Nor would this piece – this piece of her – dent Rhawn’s reputation in the slightest. No wonder she had needed a couple of days to make it ready. At the start of their conversation, ten percent of her had still been inside this skull.
    Oleg had to smile. It was not exactly what he had come for, and not exactly what his masters had been after either. But what was art without an audience? She had made him her witness, and she had made art of herself, and she was still there, down on Mercury, having crossed twice.
    Clever, clever Rhawn.
    But then a peculiar and impish impulse overcame Oleg. He thought back to their conversation again. It was true, much of what she had said about him. He had been supine. He had tried and failed at art, and allowed himself to become the servant of powers to whom he was no more than an instrument. He had become spineless. He did what they told him – just as he was now executing Rhawn’s wishes.
    A tool. An instrument.
    A machine made of meat.
    A little while later a little door opened in the side of Oleg’s spacecraft. It was a disposal hatch, the kind he used for waste dumps. A small grey nebula coughed out into vacuum. The nebula, for an instant, glittered with hints of reflectivity and colours that were not entirely grey.
    Then it dispersed, and the ship continued on its merry way.



Days and nights aren’t even real; they’re a lie, a lie within a lie.
----
    A square glass plate negative of the Transit of Venus. Taken at Luxor in 1874 with one exposure of the planet Venus crossing the Sun’s limb.

ASHEN LIGHT
    ARCHIE BLACK
    I
    The village of Hartmann stands on the high sorghum plains of Ishtar Terra, a lonesome area that other Venusians call “out there.” This area of the IT is known as the Lakshmi Planum. It is a little less that two and a half thousand kilometers across, and