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Aliens beam greetings to the Earth. This is an opportunity for celebration, for reflection. And for one perfect murder.
"They were showing one of the alien pictures just then. On TV. A bunch of buildings on a wooded hillside, the sky full of sunset colors and thin clouds and some kind of faraway airplane or spaceship gleaming up high. Then the buildings got larger. Closer. I still remember all of it. The buildings had steep roofs and star-shaped windows. Five-pointed stars. And there was a fat old tree in the middle of them. The tree trunk looked like a mess of heavy-duty ropes twisted around each other, and there weren't any leaves on the branches, just wads of blue-green sponge-like crap. Except even knowing it was a different world didn't help. Aliens? I kept thinking of China, someplace like that. I was wondering who invented this business, because this news was probably someone's fancy big-time joke."
Robert Reed is a long-time science fiction author and a Hugo Award winner.
Genre: Science Fiction
"They were showing one of the alien pictures just then. On TV. A bunch of buildings on a wooded hillside, the sky full of sunset colors and thin clouds and some kind of faraway airplane or spaceship gleaming up high. Then the buildings got larger. Closer. I still remember all of it. The buildings had steep roofs and star-shaped windows. Five-pointed stars. And there was a fat old tree in the middle of them. The tree trunk looked like a mess of heavy-duty ropes twisted around each other, and there weren't any leaves on the branches, just wads of blue-green sponge-like crap. Except even knowing it was a different world didn't help. Aliens? I kept thinking of China, someplace like that. I was wondering who invented this business, because this news was probably someone's fancy big-time joke."
Robert Reed is a long-time science fiction author and a Hugo Award winner.
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Robert Reed's On the Brink of That Bright New World