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Geoffrey A. Landis: Winter Fire                                                   Read these
                                                                                  Nebula-nomin
   First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1997. Nominated
                                                                                  ated stories
   for Best Short Story.
                                                                                  From Asimov's

                                                                                  Echea, by
                                                                                  Kristine Kathryn
                                                                                  Rusch
   I am nothing and nobody; atoms that have learned to look at                    Fortune and
   themselves; dirt that has learned to see the awe and the majesty of the        Misfortune, by
   universe.                                                                      Lisa Goldstein
                                                                                  Izzy and the
   The day the hover-transports arrived in the refugee camps, huge
                                                                                  Father of Terror,
   windowless shells of titanium floating on electrostatic cushions, the
                                                                                  by Eliot
   day faceless men took the ragged little girl that was me away from the
                                                                                  Fintushel
   narrow, blasted valley that had once been Salzburg to begin a new life
                                                                                  Lethe, by Walter
   on another continent: that is the true beginning of my life. What came
                                                                                  Jon Williams
   before then is almost irrelevant, a sequence of memories etched as
                                                                                  Standing Room
   with acid into my brain, but with no meaning to real life.
                                                                                  Only, by Karen
                                                                                  Joy Fowler
   Sometimes I almost think that I can remember my parents. I remember
                                                                                  Winter Fire, by
   them not by what was, but by the shape of the absence they left
                                                                                  Geoffrey A.
   behind. I remember yearning for my mother’s voice, singing to me
                                                                                  Landis
   softly in Japanese. I cannot remember her voice, or what songs she
   might have sung, but I remember so vividly the missing of it, the hole
                                                                                  From Analog
   that she left behind.
                                                                                  Aurora in Four
   My father I remember as the loss of something large and warm and
                                                                                  Voices, by
   infinitely strong, smelling of–of what? I don’t remember. Again, it is the
                                                                                  Catherine Asaro
   loss that remains in my memory, not the man. I remember
   remembering him as more solid than mountains, something eternal;
   but in the end he was not eternal, he was not even as strong as a very
   small war.
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   I lived in the city of music, in Salzburg, but I remember little from before
   the siege. I do remember cafés (seen from below, with huge tables and
                                                                                  If you enjoyed this
   the legs of waiters and faces looming down to ask me if I would like a
                                                                                  sample and want
   sweet). I’m sure my parents must have been there, but that I do not
                                                                                  to read more,
   remember.
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   And I remember music. I had my little violin (although it seemed so
                                                                                  another way to
   large to me then), and music was not my second language but my
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   first. I thought in music before ever I learned words. Even now, decades
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   later, when I forget myself in mathematics I cease to think in words,
                                                                                  We have a secure
   but think directly in concepts clear and perfectly harmonic, so that a
                                                                                  server which will
   mathematical proof is no more than the inevitable majesty of a
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   crescendo leading to a final, resolving chord.
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   I have long since forgotten anything I knew about the violin. I have not       online. There, you
   played since the day, when I was nine, I took from the rubble of our           can order a
   apartment the shattered cherry-wood scroll. I kept that meaningless            subscription by
   piece of polished wood for years, slept with it clutched in my hand            providing us with
   every night until, much later, it was taken away by a soldier intent on        your name,
   rape. Probably I would have let him, had he not been so ignorant as to         address and credit
   think my one meager possession might be a weapon. Coitus is nothing            card information.
   more than the natural act of the animal. From songbirds to porpoises,
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   any male animal will rape an available female when given a chance.
   The action is of no significance except, perhaps, as a chance to
                                                                                  Copyright
   contemplate the impersonal majesty of the chain of life and the
   meaninglessness of any individual’s will within it.
                                                                                  "Winter Fire" by
                                                                                  Geoffrey A.
   When I was finally taken away from the city of music, three years later
                                                                                  Landis, copyright
   and a century older, I owned nothing and wanted nothing. There was
                                                                                  © 1997 by
   nothing of the city left. As the hoverjet took me away, just one more in
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