Dreamfall (66 page)

I held the lenses pressed against my eyes for a long time,
long past the time when the cloud-whales had drifted beyond sight, long past
the time when my eyes had stopped seeing. Long past the time when unshed tears
left me too blind to watch the starport slowly expanding to fill my vision, as
it swallowed the sky and the land that had once belonged to a different people
... a world as green as the memory of her eyes.

The world was called Refuge, but I couldn’t imagine why.

Joan D. Vinge has been described as “one of the reigning
queens of science fiction” by
Publishers Weekly
and is renowned for
creating lyrical human dramas in fascinatingly complex feature settings. She
has won two Hugo awards, one for her novel
The Snow Queen
Vinge is the
author of
World’s End, Tangled Up in Blue,
and
The Summer Queen,
sequels
to
The Snow Queen.

Also in her series about the character Cat are
Psion,
in
which the character is introduced, and
Catspaw.
“Psiren,” a novella
about Cat, is one of her numerous shorter works. She also wrote the original
bestselling
Return of the Jedi Storybook
plus other film adaptations, as
well as
The Random House Book of Greek Myths.
Ms. Vinge is currently
working on a major revision of
Psion,
and also on
Ladysmith,
a
novel set during the Bronze Age in Western Europe. She lives in Madison,
Wisconsin.