A Lamp for the Cormorant

About this book

Two hundred years after the Burning, the last four hundred thousand people live around Saturn on light borrowed from the Lamp, a laser array near the Sun held by the Wick, which rations the beam and darkens any habitat that defies it. On a cracked dish on Iapetus, Hollis Brandt hears the yearly signal everyone calls the Ghost Ship Hymn, the dead repeat of the starship Cormorant. This year it says his name. The Cormorant is alive, six thousand sleepers nearly at Alpha Centauri, and it cannot stop unless the Lamp turns away from Saturn for four years. A pilot with the last torch ship, a keeper inside the Lamp, a stubborn Titan speaker and the old Warden who buried the messages must decide what a promise made by the dead is worth, with every argument eighty minutes late. How much darkness would you choose for strangers?