The Sounds of Old Earth

Earth has grown quiet since everyone's shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz's empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz's Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart...

2013 Nebula Award Finalist

2013 Locus Recommended Reading List

2014 Best Science Fiction & Fantasy (Prime Books, ed. Rich Horton) – Recommended Reading List

2014 Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Edition (Macmillan, ed. Gardner Dozois) – Honorable Mention