A Beautiful Friendship — Snippet 17

Stephanie’s mother was fascinated by the picketwoods. Plants which spread by sending out runners weren’t all that rare, but those which spread only via runner were. It was also more than a little uncommon for the runner to spread out through the air and go down to the earth, rather than the reverse. But what truly fascinated Dr. Harrington was the tree’s anti-disease defense mechanism. The unending network of branches and trunks should have made a picketwood system lethally vulnerable to diseases and parasites. But the plant had demonstrated a sort of natural quarantine process. Somehow — and Dr. Harrington had yet to discover how — a picketwood system was able to sever its links to afflicted portions of itself. Attacked by disease or parasites, the system secreted powerful cellulose-dissolving enzymes that ate away at connecting cross-branches and literally disconnected them at intervening nodal trunks, and Dr. Harrington was determined to locate the mechanism which made that possible.

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The Road Of Danger – Snippet 08

          She smiled suddenly. Daniel said, “Adele?”

          “Admiral Cox made me angrier than I realized,” Adele said, looking at her friend. She felt the smile still quivering on her lips; it wasn’t a feeling she was familiar with. “I’m still angry, it appears. That’s reasonable, but planning to shoot the head off a statue because it’s in the wrong place–”

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The Road Of Danger – Snippet 07

          The outburst proved Commander Ruffin was capable of umbrage at someone other than the captain and the signals officer of the Princess Cecile. As for who properly should have been handling a given duty, however…. The External Bureau was the Republic’s diplomatic hand, and the RCN was the sword which gave point to the Republic’s diplomacy. If the diplomats chose to offer a job to the armed service, Daniel’s feeling was, “So much the better!”

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A Beautiful Friendship — Snippet 16

8

Stephanie whooped in sheer exuberance as she rode the powerful updraft. Wind whipped through her birthday glider’s struts, drummed on its fabric covering, and whistled around her helmet, and she leaned to one side, banking as she sliced still higher. The counter-grav unit on her back could have taken her higher yet — and done it more quickly — but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun as this was!

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We are making available here, in a single posting, all of Eric’s columns from Jim Baen’s Universe on copyright.

We hope you enjoy this collection of the

Salvos Against Big Brother:

A Matter of Principle

by Eric Flint

I’m going to be writing a regular column on the subject of electronic publishing, and the challenges it poses to modern society—as well as the opportunity it provides. This column will take up a number of related issues, including such matters as the proper length of copyright terms, the nature of Digital Rights Management and why we are opposed to it, and the largely mythical nature of so-called “online piracy.”

We decided to keep this column separate from my general editor’s preface for each issue—see “The Editor’s Page”—because we think the issue is important enough for a separate column of its own. Furthermore, there will usually be a number of specific matters relevant to each issue of the magazine that I will need to address in “The Editor’s Page” that would simply get in the way of this discussion.

We’re calling the column “Salvos Against Big Brother” because that captures the key aspect of the problem, so far as Jim Baen and I are concerned. Both the publisher of this magazine and its editor believe that so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM)—by which we mean the whole panoply of ever more restrictive laws concerning digital media, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—are the following:

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A Beautiful Friendship — Snippet 15

7

Marjorie Harrington finished writing up her latest microbe-resistant strain of squash, closed the file, and sat back with a sigh. Some of Sphinx’s farmers had argued that it would be much simpler (and quicker) just to come up with something to swat the microbe in question. That always seemed to occur to the people who faced such problems, and sometimes, Marjorie admitted, it was not only the simplest but also the most cost-effective and ecologically sound answer. But in this case she and the planetary administration had resisted firmly, and her final solution — which, she admitted, had taken longer than a more aggressive approach might have — had been to select the least intrusive of three possible genetic modifications to the plant rather than going after the microbe.

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The Road Of Danger – Snippet 06

CHAPTER 2: Holm on Kronstadt

          Daniel supposed that he should have waited for Commander Ruffin to usher them into her office, but she was behind Adele and Daniel really wanted to get his friend out of the admiral’s presence before something happened. He was thinking tactically, not what he’d expected when they entered the headquarters building.

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The Road Of Danger – Snippet 05

          Adele wondered if commissioned officers could be charged with Dumb Insolence or if the offense was only applied to enlisted spacers. She would like to look up the answer with her personal data unit.

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A Beautiful Friendship — Snippet 14

6

Stephanie leaned back in the comfortable chair, folded her hands behind her head, and propped her sock feet on her desk in the posture which always drew a scold from her mother. Her lips were pursed in the silent, tuneless whistle that was an all but inevitable complement to the vague dreaminess of her eyes . . . and which would, had she let her parents see it, instantly have alerted them to the fact that their darling daughter was Up To Something.

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A Beautiful Friendship — Snippet 13

And so, because they hadn’t tasted the mind-glow for themselves and because he couldn’t explain how he could have tasted it so strongly, he’d accepted his scolding as meekly as possible. The cluster stalk he’d brought home had muted that scolding to some extent, for it had proved just as marvelous as the songs from other clans had indicated. But not even that had been enough to deflect the one consequence he truly resented.

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