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eBook Category: Science Fiction Nebula Award(R) Nominee, Hugo Award Nominee
eBook Description: An aging veteran tells the tale of how he lost his leg to a young man passing by. It's the story of the great Realignment, that terrifying war that pitted the uncaring Combine against the radical Quaestors. This story is set in the far future and is another example of Dozois's ability to paint a starkly realistic far-future landscape that involves a vast array of concepts, all tied together with some of the most visual prose you'll find anywhere. (Violent content)

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: New Dimensions I, ed. Robert Silverberg, 1971
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2000

69 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [194 KB], eReader (PDB) [64 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [54 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [48 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [61 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [121 KB], hiebook (KML) [135 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [71 KB], iSilo (PDB) [44 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [55 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [82 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [76 KB]
Words: 15989
Reading time: 45-63 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

This story makes you realize what a great writer Gardner Dozois really is, and makes you wish he'd have more time to write. Although it is quite violent at points and perhaps not for everyone, the sheer grandness of the ideas and the intense visual imagery are amazing. His description of the disruption device (used to destroy a city during a bloody war) is full of impact. (You can read it in the excerpt.) This is highly stylistic writing, told in rare second person format. The main character is an aging story teller who snags a young man in the morning and plies his trade (you, the reader, are the one he's snagged). But soon you are lost in his tale of his part in the Quaestor revolution. This story was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula when it was published in 1971. -Steve Pendergrast, Staff Recommender

And away over the foothills, God danced in anger, and his feet struck the ground to ash.

What was it like?

Kos still has oceans and storms. Did y'ever watch the sea lashed by high winds? The storm boils the water into froth, whips it white, until it becomes an ocean of ragged lace to the horizon, whirlpools of milk, not a fleck of blue left alive. The land looked like this at D'kotta. The hills moved. The Quaestors had a discontinuity projector there, and under its lash the ground stirred like sluggish batter under a baker's spoon; stirred, shuddered, groaned, cracked, broke: acres heaved themselves into new mountains, other acres collapsed into canyons.

Imagine a giant asleep just under the surface of the earth, overgrown by fields, dreaming dreams of rock and crystal. Imagine him moving restlessly, the long rhythm of his dreams touched by nightmare, tossing, moaning, tremors signaling unease in waves up and down his miles-long frame. Imagine him catapulted into waking terror, lurching suddenly to his knees with the bawling roar of ten million burning calves: a steaming claw of rock and black earth raking for the sky. Now, in a wink, imagine the adjacent land hurtling downward, sinking like a rock in a pond, opening a womb a thousand feet wide, swallowing everything and grinding it to powder. Then, almost too quick to see, imagine the mountain and the crater switching, the mountain collapsing all at once and washing the feet of the older Blackfriars with a tidal wave of earth, then tumbling down to make a pit; at the same time the sinking earth at the bottom of the other crater reversing itself and erupting upward into a quaking fist of rubble. Then they switch again, and keep switching. Like watching the same film clip continuously run forward and backward. Now multiply that by a million and spread it out so that all you can see to the horizon is a stew of humping rock. D'y'visualize it? Not a tenth of it.

Dervishes of fire stalked the chaos, melting into each other, whirlpooling. Occasionally a tactical nuclear explosion would punch a hole in the night, a brief intense flare that would be swallowed like a candle in a murky snowstorm. Once a tacnuke detonation coincided with the upthrusting of a rubble mountain, with an effect like that of a firecracker exploding inside a swinging sack of grain.