• Complain

Nancy Kress - After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

Here you can read online Nancy Kress - After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: San Francisco, year: 2012, publisher: Tachyon Publications, genre: Science fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Nancy Kress After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall
  • Book:
    After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Tachyon Publications
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2012
  • City:
    San Francisco
  • ISBN:
    978-1-61696-065-0
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

2012 Nebula Award Winner 2012 Locus Award Winner 2013 Hugo Nominee 2013 Sturgeon Award Nominee The year is 2035. After ecological disasters nearly destroyed the Earth, 26 survivorsthe last of humanityare trapped by an alien race in a sterile enclosure known as the Shell. Fifteen-year-old Pete is one of the Sixchildren who were born deformed or sterile and raised in the Shell. As, one by one, the survivors grow sick and die, Pete and the Six struggle to put aside their anger at the alien Tesslies in order to find the means to rebuild the earth together. Their only hope lies within brief time-portals into the recent past, where they bring back children to replenish their disappearing gene pool. Meanwhile, in 2013, brilliant mathematician Julie Kahn works with the FBI to solve a series of inexplicable kidnappings. Suddenly her predictive algorithms begin to reveal more than just criminal activity. As she begins to realize her role in the impending catastrophe, simultaneously affecting the Earth and the Shell, Julie closes in on the truth. She and Pete are converging in time upon the future of humanitya future which might never unfold. Weaving three consecutive time lines to unravel both the mystery of the Earths destruction and the key to its salvation, this taut post-apocalyptic thriller offers a topical plot with a satisfying twist.

Nancy Kress: author's other books


Who wrote After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Nancy Kress

AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL

A NOVEL

NOVEMBER 2013

It wasnt dark and it wasnt light. It wasnt anything except cold. Im dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasnt. Every time he thought that, all the way back to his first time when McAllister had warned him: The transition may seem to last forever.

Forever was twenty seconds on Petes wrister.

Light returned, light the rosy pink of baby toes, and then Pete stood in a misty dawn. And gasped.

It was so beautiful. A calm ocean, smooth and shiny as the floor of the Shell. A beach of white sand, rising in dunes dotted with clumps of grasses. Birds wheeled overhead. Their sharp, indignant cries grew louder as one of them dove into the waves and came up with a fish. Just like that. A fresh breeze tingled Petes nose with salt.

This. All this. He hadnt landed near the ocean before, although hed seen pictures of it in one of Caitys books. Thisall destroyed by the Tesslies, gone forever.

No time for hatred, not even old hatred grown fat and ripe as soy plants on the farm. McAllisters instructions, repeated endlessly to all of them, echoed in Petes mind: You have only ten minutes. Dont linger anywhere.

The sand slipped under his shoes and got into the holes. He had to leave them, even though shoes were so hard to come by. Cursing, he ran clumsy and barefoot along the shoreline, his weak knee already aching and head bobbing on his spindly neck, toward the lone house emerging from the mist. The cold air seeped into his lungs and hurt them. He could see his breath.

Seven minutes remained on his wrister.

The house stood on a little rocky ridge rising from the dunes and jutting into the water. No lights in the windows. The back door was locked but McAllister had put their precious laser saw onto the wrister. (If you lose it, I will kill you.) Pete cut a neat, silent hole, reached in, and released the deadbolt.

Five minutes.

Dark stairs. A night light in the hallway. A bedroom with two sleeping forms, his arm thrown over her body, the window open to the sweet night air. Another bedroom with a single bed, the blanketed figure too long, shadowy clothes all over the floor. And at the end of the hallway, a bonanza.

Two of them.

Four minutes.

The baby lay on its back, eyes closed in its bald head, little pink mouth sucking away on dreams. It had thrown off its blanket to expose a band of impossibly smooth skin between the plastic diaper and tiny shirt. Pete took precious seconds to unfasten a corner of the diaper, but he was already in love with the little hairless creature and would have been devastated if it were male. It was a girl. Carefully he hoisted her out of the crib and onto his shoulder, painfully holding her with one crooked arm. She didnt wake.

No doubt that the toddler was a girl. Glossy brown ringlets, pink pajamas printed with bunnies, a doll clutched in one chubby fist. When Pete reached for her, she woke, blinked, and shrieked.

No! Mommy! Dada! Cooommme! No!

Little brat!

Pete grabbed her by the hand and dragged her off the low bed. That wrenched his misshapen shoulder and he nearly screamed. The child resisted, wailing like a typhoon. The baby woke and also screamed. Footsteps pounded down the hall.

Ninety seconds.

McAllister! Pete cried, although of course that did no good. McAllister couldnt hear him. And ten minutes was fixed by the Tesslie machinery: no more, no less. McAllister couldnt hurry the Grab.

The parents pounded into the room. Pete couldnt let go of either child. Pete shrieked louder than both of themhis only real strength was in his voice, did they but know itthe words Darlene had taught him: Stop! I have a bomb!

They halted just inside the bedroom door, crashing into each other. She gasped: perhaps at the situation, perhaps at Pete. He knew what he must look like to them, a deformed fifteen-year-old with bobbly head.

Moommmeeeee! the toddler wailed.

Bomb! Bomb! Pete cried.

Forty-five seconds.

The father was a hero. He leaped forward. Pete staggered sideways with his burden of damp baby, but he didnt let go of the toddlers hand. Her father grabbed at her torso and Petes wrister shot a laser beam at him. The man was moving; the beam caught the side of his arm. The air sizzled with burning flesh and the father let go of his child.

But for only a few precious seconds.

Now the mother rushed forward. Pete dodged behind the low bed, nearly slipping on a pillow that had fallen to the floor. Both of them sprang again, the mans face contorted with pain, and clutched at their children. Pete fired the laser but his hold on the child had knocked the wrister slightly sideways and he missed. Frantically he began firing, the beams hitting the wall and then Petes own foot. The pain was astonishing. He screamed; the children screamed; the mother screamed and lunged.

Five seconds.

The father tore the little girl from Pete. Pete jerked out his bad arm, now in as much pain as his foot, as much pain as the mans must be, and twined his fingers in the childs hair. The mother slipped on a throw rug patterned with princesses and went down. But the father held on to the toddler and so did Pete, and

Grab.

All four of them went through in a blaze of noise, of light, of stinking diapers and roasted flesh, of shoulder pain so intense that Pete had to struggle to stay conscious. He did, but not for long. Once under the Shell, he collapsed to the metal floor. The father, of course, was dead. The last thing Pete heard was both children, still wailing as if their world had ended.

It had. From now on, they were with him and McAllister and the others. From now on, poor little devastated parentless miracles.

MARCH 2014

On the high plateau of the Brazilian state of Paran, the arabica trees rustled in a gentle rain. Drops pattered off dark green, lance-shaped leaves, cascading down until they touched the soil. The coffee berries were small, not ready for harvest until the dry season, months away. At the far edge of the vast field, a fertilizer drove slowly among the rows of short, bushy trees, some of them fifty years old. A rabbit raced ahead of the advancing machinery.

Deep underground, something happened.

Nonmotile, rod-shaped bacteria clung to the roots of the coffee trees, as they had for millennia. The bacteria stuck to the roots by exuding a slime layer, where it fed on and decomposed plant matter into nutrients. In the surrounding soil other bacteria also flourished, carrying on their usual life processes. One of these was mitosis. During the reproductive division, plasmids were swapped between organisms, as widely promiscuous as all of their kind.

A new bacterium appeared.

Eventually it, too, began to divide, not too rapidly in the dry soil. By and by, another plasmid exchange took place, with a different bacterium. And so on, in an intricate chain, ending up with a plasmid swap with the nonmotile, rod-shaped root dweller. A mutation now existed that had never existed before. Such a thing happened all the time in naturebut not like this.

Above ground, thunder rumbled, and the rain began to fall harder.

NOVEMBER 2013

The woman was hysterical. As she had every right to be, Julie thought. Julie laid her hand across her own belly, caught herself doing it, and removed the hand. Quickly she glanced around. No one had noticed. They all watched the woman, and all of them, even the female uniform, had the expressions that cops wore in the presence of hysterical victims: a mixture of stern pity and impatient disgust.

Maam maam if you could just calm down enough to tell us what happened

I told you! I told you! The womans voice rose to a shriek. She wore a gaping bathrobe over a flimsy white nightdress, and her hair was so wild it looked as if she had torn out patches by the roots, like some grieving Biblical figure. Perhaps she had. A verse from Julies unwilling Temple childhood rose, unbidden, in her mind:

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall»

Look at similar books to After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Ursula Vernon - Jackalope Wives
Jackalope Wives
Ursula Vernon
Greg Cox - Man of Steel
Man of Steel
Greg Cox
Gregory Benford - Timescape
Timescape
Gregory Benford
No cover
No cover
Kij Johnson
No cover
No cover
Vonda McIntyre
N. K. Jemisin - The Stone Sky
The Stone Sky
N. K. Jemisin
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi
Reviews about «After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall»

Discussion, reviews of the book After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.