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Burn
James Patrick Kelly
Tachyon Publications | San Francisco
Burn
Copyright © 2005 by James Patrick Kelly
This work, is distributed under the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5. Please see last page of this document for more information.
This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Tachyon Publications
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, ca 94107
(415) 285-5615
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Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
isbn: 1-892391-27-9
For H. D. T.
a timeless visionary
and
for my children,
Maura, Jamie, and John
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
- Walden
One
For the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
- Walden
Spur was in the nightmare again. It always began in the burn. The front of the burn took on a liquid quality and oo