Nebula Stories - Winter Fire.txt ???????? ╦н ╒IЄP╒IЄ\ mBIN кк ^
Geoffrey A. Landis: Winter Fire
First appeared in Asimovтs Science
Fiction, August 1997. Nominated for Best
Short Story.
------------------------------------------
I am nothing and nobody; atoms that have
learned to look at themselves; dirt that
has learned to see the awe and the majesty
of the universe.
The day the hover-transports arrived in
the refugee camps, huge windowless shells
of titanium floating on electrostatic
cushions, the day faceless men took the
ragged little girl that was me away from
the narrow, blasted valley that had once
been Salzburg to begin a new life on
another continent: that is the true
beginning of my life. What came before
then is almost irrelevant, a sequence of
memories etched as with acid into my
brain, but with no meaning to real life.
Sometimes I almost think that I can
remember my parents. I remember them not
by what was, but by the shape of the
absence they left behind. I remember
yearning for my motherтs voice, singing to
me softly in Japanese. I cannot remember
her voice, or what songs she might have
sung, but I remember so vividly the
missing of it, the hole that she left
behind.
My father I remember as the loss of
something large and warm and infinitely
strong, smelling ofЎof what? I donтt
remember. Again, it is the loss that
remains in my memory, not the man. I
remember remembering him as more solid
than mountains, something eternal; but in
the end he was not eternal, he was not
even as strong as a very small war.
I lived in the city of music, in Salzburg,
