"Card, Orson Scott - Cruel Miracles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

CRUEL MIRACLES
Short stories by Orson Scott Card

v1.1 (Jan-30-2000)
If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute.

CONTENTS

Mortal Gods
Jan 1979, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Saving Grace
Night Cry 2:5, 1987

Eye for Eye
March 1987, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine

St. Amy's Tale
Dec. 1980, Omni

Kingsmeat
Analog Yearbook, ed. Ben Bova (Baronet, 1978)

Holy
New Dimensions 10, ed. Robert Silverberg (Harper & Row, 1980)

MORTAL GODS

The first contact was peaceful, almost uneventful: sudden landings near
government buildings all over the world, brief discussions in the native
languages, followed by treaties allowing the aliens to build certain
buildings in certain places in exchange for certain favors-- nothing
spectacular. The technological improvements that the aliens brought helped
make life better for everyone, but they were improvements that were already
well within the reach of human engineers within the next decade or two. And
the greatest gift of all was found to be a disappointment-- space travel.
The aliens did not have faster-than-light travel. Instead, they had
conclusive proof that faster-than-light travel was utterly impossible. They
had infinite patience and incredibly long lives to sustain them in their
snail's-pace crawl among the stars, but humans would be dead before even
the shortest space flight was fairly begun.

And after only a little while, the presence of aliens was regarded as quite
the normal thing. They insisted that they had no further gifts to bring,
and simply exercised their treaty rights to build and visit the buildings
they had made.

The buildings were all different from each other, but had one thing in
common: by the standards of the local populace, the new alien buildings