Sleep Toward the Maybe

The light of a dead world takes years to cross the dark.When Earth's finally reaches the colony of Eos, it comes as a bulletin on an ordinary morning - and the arithmetic that follows is merciless: eighty-three million people, and room on the arks for a hundred and eighty thousand.Adrian Vale is one of the saved. His sister is chosen beside him; his mother, who stays to tend a dying world, is not.The fleet sails past the edge of every map - and meets a thing that will not resolve: a shape the eye slides off, that erases stars and pours the dead into a hundred thousand sleeping minds. Not ghosts. Memories. Borrowed grief, not your own.A people who can no longer trust their own memory come apart over the only question left: are the dead gone, or only far?Out past the last map, the universe is not cruel. Only indifferent. And it has our dead.