The Lion of Mercury, the heart of the city. There were so many people who had relied on Alex. All of them standing still, looking up, looking distraught. Out into the park, therefore, to wander in the crowd. Now she couldn't bear to be seen when Alex's ashes were scattered, and she didn't want to see Mqaret, Alex's partner, at that moment. The moment she had heard the news, she had dashed out of the city onto the land, driven by a need to be alone. She turned on the stairs and descended, wandered by herself. The sight of them pierced Swan-even the sunwalkers had come in for this. Down at the foot of the stairs clustered the sunwalkers who had just arrived, looking burnt and dusty. On a railing stood three smalls, each about a meter tall, all dressed in black. All crowded with humanity, speciating right before her eyes, each face intensely itself while also a type-Olmec spheroid, hatchet, shovel. A curved slope like a little Marseilles, with white four-story apartment blocks, black iron-railed balconies, broad boulevards and narrow alleys, dropping to a promenade overlooking the park. Below her rooftops, terrace patios, balconies. Swan stopped halfway up the Dawn Wall, unable to go on. And so now the townspeople, the diplomat visitors: all Alex's people, all grieving. A sudden collapse, and they hadn't been able to revive her. She had welcomed them on Friday now on the following Friday they were holding her funeral. There were a lot of visitors in town as well a conference had been about to begin, one that had been convened by Alex. The city's population had come out into the boulevards and plazas and were standing in silence.

Read ExcerptĪlex's memorial ceremony began as Swan was straggling up Terminator's great central staircase. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life.

It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future. Earth is no longer humanity’s only home new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. From the acclaimed author of New York 2140 and Red Mars, this NYT bestselling novel tells the story of a future where humanity has populated miraculous new habitats engineered across the solar system - and the one death that triggers a precarious chain of events that could destroy it all.

2312 robinson