From the Nebula and Hugo Award-winner comes a noir mystery on a colonized Mars, where everything is cheap, and life is even cheaper. Alex Lomax is a P.I. working the mean streets of New Klondike, a domed Martian city that sprang to life in the wake of the booming fossil market. 40-years-ago, Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly discovered evidence of ancient life on Mars, and these fossils quickly became valuable antiquities. Now the motherlode of cold cases has landed in Lomax’s lap – the decades old murders of Simon and Denny, and God only knows what he may dig up.”–Publisher
Visible in the night sky, the Argus Station, its twin smelting plants like glowing eyes, looks down on nightmare Earth. From Argus, the Committee keep an oppressive control: citizens are watched by cams systems and political officers, it’s a world inhabited by shepherds, reader guns, razor birds and the brutal Inspectorate with its white tiled cells and pain inducers. Soon the Committee will have the power to edit human minds, but not yet, as twelve billion human beings need to die before Earth can be stabilized, but by turning large portions of Earth into concentration camps this is achievable, especially when the Argus satellite laser network comes fully online.
A powerful tale of ingenious survival and strange destiny. The only human child living in a human work colony on the Martian satellite Phobos, little Margaret Bain has devised a system for keeping the suffocating demons of boredom and loneliness at bay: She invents six imaginary companions, each an extension of her own personality, to play with. When the unproductive Phobos project is shut down, and after Margaret is forced to return to Earth with her parents, the child’s other selves are lost to her. But they are not gone. Left behind, each one flourishes — refining its own persona, acquiring its own history — before ultimately dispersing to far-flung destinations throughout the universe.
