You are listening to a Clarkshold magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator Kate Baker. Welcome to the

sixth story for the month of June 2025, issue 225. Our story is titled The Last Lunar New Year. It is by

Derek Kuskin. And this story like every other story in our past and well often to hopefully our future, is brought to you by your support.

Thank you if you were a subscriber or you've gone to patreon.com forward slash Clark's World or supported us through various other means.

Thank you.

And if you haven't yet done so, please consider doing so. We can't bring you

the art, the nonfiction, the podcast, the stories themselves without your ongoing support.

So please, if you can, go to Clarkshould Magazine.com to see how you can support the magazine.

Now, after leaving molecular biology, Derek Kinskin worked with street kids in Central America

before finding himself in the Canadian Foreign Service as a diplomat.

He has two space opera novel series, one beginning with the Quantum Magician and the other

with the House of Sticks, as well as a collection called Flight from the Ages and other stories.

Critic Rich Horton describes Derek as one of the best pure hard science writers of the current generation.

If you like what you hear, you can go back to Time Reveals the Heart and the Ghosts of Ganymede.

So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

Ambassador Shigui Sunyan and Prime Minister, Jean Kuliliyang,

floated in the crystalline water tank at one side of the courtroom.

Beyond the anchoring shelves for the

judges, the bulbous organic diamond window looked out onto a swollen orange solar atmosphere. The window

shielding in the tank's mirror finish reflected much of the incoming light, but even at that,

some sun shone through painfully. The courtroom bulged from the upper reaches of the Stewards Tower, which circled

the sun in Earth's L2-Lagrange Point, 2 million kilometers above the shriveled Earth's nightside.

...