The Slow Post

About this book

The physics is old and elegant: a ship placed on the right long orbit will swing past Earth, coast out, swing past Mars, and come back, forever, needing almost no fuel, a bus between worlds that never parks. The Postillion has ridden her cycle for forty years, and while the fast ships and the data links carry everything urgent, she carries the other cargo, the kind that has to weigh something: the settlers' pianos and seed chests, and above all the post, the letters and parcels people pay to send the slow way, by hand, because a message can be transmitted but a thing kept in a pocket for nine months and then placed in another person's hands cannot.