Cover design by Glass Knife Press Technical Services.

Inside the Jump / Outside the Dome / Don’t bother looking / There’s nobody home.

That’s a children’s rhyme on Sarronny, which contains worlds of paradox and irony: nobody home, but that absence means nobody any good. The Void is not the enemy, but something worse. It’s utterly indifferent, and we’re the anomaly.

For ages I could make no sense of planet-side stories, until I realized that planet-siders have the luxury of ignoring their environment. The sky and earth love you in such places; you’re a part of them, or nearly so. And the colors—photosynthesis is a marvel, and if humans could do it, we would never have left the Original World, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

On Karis, they’ve never left off looking for the Original World.

***

Excerpt from “The Starship Captain’s Songs of Home,” in Tales from the Inhabited Worlds.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.