{"id":2697,"date":"2022-02-07T13:44:08","date_gmt":"2022-02-07T13:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2697"},"modified":"2022-12-01T14:40:02","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T14:40:02","slug":"river-of-stars-bridge-of-shadows-by-a-a-attanasio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2697","title":{"rendered":"River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows <\/em><\/strong>by A. A. Attanasio (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, January-February 2022) opens with Deri coming out of cleardrift (deepsleep) when her starship\u2019s gravity kernel fails and drops it out of paralux (FTL) near a neutron star. Initially she is greeted by a white snake, her zobot (robotic) valet, which tells her that they are in a decaying orbit and have thirty minutes left before they perish.
Deri soon meets another two characters in the stateroom: Jyla, a woman whose exotic past will later be revealed, and Ristin Taj, an omen coder. All of this (and indeed, the whole story), is told through baroque, high bit-rate prose:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cI know your name because we are the sole anthropes on this flight, child.\u201d Reflecting the tumultuous blaze behind Deri, Jyla\u2019s large eyes glittered like geodes.
\u201cMy escort identified you, and we induced your dialect before departure.\u201d She gestured to a petite, impossibly narrow person, nearly invisible in the dark. \u201cRistin Taj.\u201d
The diminutive character glided into the tremulous blue pall from the magnetar.
Raiment of maroon psylk draping the slight figure undulated, intelligently reading the environment. With swift accuracy, the fabric contoured itself against the body heat around Deri, elongating and widening the slender psylk form to precisely mimic the girl\u2019s stolid physique. The featureless head, a small gold sphere, rose to Deri\u2019s height.
She gawked at the perfect reflection of her freckled nose and startled gray eyes.
Enclosing the gold orb, a life-size holographic replica of Deri from the neck up materialized. The transparent image, lacking a reflection\u2019s reversed symmetry, looked odd to the girl even as she recognized that hay-nest of tousled hair, those skimpy eyebrows, thin lips and thick jaw\u2014her familiar and imperfect features, so unlike the symmetrical faces she had seen on Ygg.
\u201cRistin is an omen-coder,\u201d Jyla announced. She cupped her ear against the cluttering of the tormented starsteed and drew attention to the sibilance seeping from the head of mirroring gold. \u201cListen.\u201d
Deri heard mosquito whisperings.
\u201cThey are reading your changes. They will know all your probable futures.\u201d  p. 63<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We then learn more about Del\u2019s backstory, and her romantic disappointments, before discovering that Jyla is an Imperator, a human being from Earth who is sixteen thousand years old. The valet suggests that Jyla\u2019s compartmentalised memories may hold the key to their survival.
Various other events fill up the story\u2019s length (spoiler): Deri is taken out of her body by Ristin and put with the plasmantics (the other \u201chuman\u201d passengers on the ship are discorporate beings of sentient plasma); Jyla and Restin go to see the (unconscious) pilot, and discover that there is fault in a compressor outside the ship; Jyla says she will fix it, but Ristin objects to her her plan. As they quarrel, Deri, released by the plasmantic, arrives; Deri then goes outside the ship and, although mostly shielded from the neutron star flux by her own and the other valets, fixes the problem but apparently dies.
The last section sees Deri awaken to find that it was actually a five-space projection of Ristin that went outside to fix the compressor and not her, but Ristin isn\u2019t dead either (the omen-coder does die, but far enough away from the neutron star to be, I think, resurrected).
To be honest, I\u2019m not sure the plot of this amounts to much (and it isn\u2019t helped by the \u201cI woke up and it was all a dream\u201d ending), but the attraction of this for most will be the dazzle and glamour, all of which is enjoyable enough if you don\u2019t weary of the constant flow of information and complex prose.
*** (Good). 11,500 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio (Asimov\u2019s SF, January-February 2022) opens with Deri coming out of cleardrift (deepsleep) when her starship\u2019s gravity kernel fails and drops it out of paralux (FTL) near a neutron star. Initially she is greeted by a white snake, her zobot (robotic) valet, which tells her that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[539,24,681,4,683,7,682],"class_list":["post-2697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-539","tag-3-2","tag-a-a-attanasio","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-far-future-humans-2","tag-novelette","tag-starship"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2697"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6018,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697\/revisions\/6018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}