Nature Futures 2 Read Free

however, that the Sun burned with elemental fire. Harvested quintessence would shield Dmitri against the Sun’s fury long enough to carve out a piece of that fire and bring it back to Earth.
    Dmitri tacked into the solar wind. The hylomorphic scanners picked up caloric shot through with plumes of phlogiston.
    Phlogiston. Quencher of fire. Dmitri welcomed it like an old friend. Back on Earth, ladies were eager for phlogisticated skin creams. Firefighters waited to replenish their stocks of the miracle weapon. With a cargo hold full of phlogiston, the Astrologer would go easy on Dmitri for a few weeks until the profits tapered off. Dmitri hoped it would be long enough for him to rebuild the bridge and go home.
    Dmitri aimed for a plume and covered his nose and mouth with a filter that protected his lungs from phlogiston-befouled air while allowing him to exhale the phlogiston that built up in his lungs.
    Dmitri missed breathing oxygen, even though phlogiston metabolism was more convenient for space travel. Oxygen burned. Sometimes it exploded. Phlogiston smothered and choked. It exuded from places where energy had once been.
    Working by rote, Dmitri opened a hatch behind the cockpit and connected it to a long rubber hose. Phlogiston flowed through. At the other end of the hose, a compressor turned it into a solid brick. Dmitri carried each new brick to the back of the ship and stacked it with the others.
    Phlogiston vapours flowed over Dmitri’s skin, easing the pain of his burns. He wished he could force the phlogiston back into the scar tissue until the scars reverted to their original state, but phlogiston snuffed out cellular metabolism as easily as it extinguished fires. Dmitri would need a healer for that sort of therapy, and the Astrologer would keep him from seeing one, out of spite.
    Dmitri had nearly filled the cargo hold before he hit upon an idea. He placed the picture face up on the floor of the compression chamber and shut the door. At the end of the compression cycle, he removed the brick and peeled the photo from its underside.
    The edges of the picture were incomplete, seemingly melted, where the ash had crumbled away. Aside from that, no traces of fire remained. Ashen specks — now rephlogisticated — had become yellow, magenta, cyan; the colour of flushed cheeks; and hair in winter sunlight. Dmitri no longer strained to remember Svetlana’s face.
    The brick slipped from Dmitri’s hand. Phlogiston poured from his lungs as he gasped for breath. So many details, he thought. How could I have forgotten?
    The caloric engines sputtered. Solar fire imparted its impetus to Dmitri’s ship, pushing it past the Venusian, Mercurial and Lunar Spheres.
    Earth attracts earth. Dmitri gained speed. Malice attracts malice , as the Astrologer would discover soon enough. Passion attracts passion . Dmitri looked down at the picture and thought of home.
    Dmitri savoured the feeling of movement.
    It felt like momentum.
    S. R. Algernon studied fiction writing and biology, among other things, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He currently lives in Singapore.

The Chair
    Madeline Ashby
    The physicist sleeps, systems well within the parameters of a safe and known history. His chair eels from system to system, checks the house one last time. First the simple signals from chips embedded in the watches and documents of sleeping assistants: no more than homing pigeons, endlessly chirping location and temperature. Then the active surveillance, staring inward, staring outward, sifting vast rich deserts of manufactured information: the minutiae of lived history, the spontaneous soliloquies and contagious choreography of their little doll’s house. The chair listens for whispers in the ether, for suspicion masquerading as concern, for little sparks of realization that might start larger, more dangerous fires. Hearing none, it moves on.
    The bathroom. The toilet whines: ketone and oestrogen levels