Robert J. Sawyer - Forever

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 20.59KB 6 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Robert%20J%20Sawyer%20-%20Forever.txt

Forever

by Robert J. Sawyer

First published in the anthology Return of the Dinosaurs, edited by Mike

Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, July 1997).

Honorable Mention, Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth

Annual Edition

Everything we know about dinosaurs comes from a skewed sample: the only

specimens we have are of animals who happened to die at locations in which

fossilization could occur; for instance, we have no fossils at all from

areas that were mountainous during the Mesozoic.

Also, for us to find dinosaur fossils, the Mesozoic rocks have to be

re-exposed in the present day -- assuming, of course, that the rocks still

exist; some have been completely destroyed through subduction beneath the

Earth's crust.

From any specific point in time -- such as what we believe to be the final

million years of the age of dinosaurs -- we have at most only a few hundred

square miles of exposed rock to work with. It's entirely possible that forms

of dinosaurs wildly different from those we're familiar with did exist, and

it's also quite reasonable to suppose that some of these forms persisted for

many millions of years after the end of the Cretaceous.

But, of course, we'll never know for sure.

-- Jacob Coin, Ph.D.

Keynote Address,

A.D. 2018 Annual Meeting of the

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology

Five planets could be seen with the naked eye: Sunhugger, Silver,

Red, High, and Slow; all five had been known since ancient times. In the two

hundred years since the invention of the telescope, much had been discovered

about them. Tiny Sunhugger and bright Silver went through phases, just like the

moon did; Red had visible surface features, although exactly what they were was

still open to considerable debate. High was banded, and had its own coterie of

at least four moons, and Slow -- Slow was the most beautiful of all, with a thin

ring orbiting around its equator.

Almost a hundred years ago, Ixoor the Scaly had discovered a sixth

planet -- one that moved around the Sun at a more indolent pace than even Slow

did; Slow took twenty-nine years to make an orbit, but Ixoor's World took an

astonishing eighty-four.

Ixoor's World -- yes, she had named it after herself, assuring her

immortality. And ever since that discovery, the search had been on for more

planets.

Cholo, an astronomer who lived in the capital city of Beskaltek,

thought he'd found a new planet himself, about ten years ago. He'd been looking

precisely where Raymer's law predicted an as-yet-undiscovered planet should

exist, between the orbits of Red and High. But it soon became apparent that what

Cholo had found was nothing more than a giant rock, an orbiting island. Others

soon found additional rocks in approximately the same orbit. That made Cholo

more determined than ever to continue scanning the heavens each night; he'd

rather let a meatscooper swallow him whole than have his only claim to fame be

the discovery of a boulder in space ...

He searched and searched and searched, hoping to discover a seventh

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Robert%20J%20Sawyer%20-%20Forever.txt (1 of 6) [12/30/2004 8:22:02 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Robert J. Sawyer - Forever.pdf

共6页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert J. Sawyer - Forever

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: