Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, andnearly named after Peregrine Took. She is the only daughter of a poet and aluthier. The author is both a John W. Campbell and Locus Award laureate,and her books to be released in 2007 are New Amsterdam (SubterraneanPress), Whiskey and Water (Roc), Undertow (Bantam Spectra), and ACompanion to Wolves (Tor, with Sarah Monette). She lives in Connecticut,with a presumptuous cat. “Tideline” is her first story for Asimov’s.
Such tears as that might slide down her skin over melted sensors to plink unfeeling on the sand. And if they had, she would have scooped them up, with all the other battered pretties, and added them to the wealth of trash jewels that swung from the nets reinforcing her battered carapace.
They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her.
But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider’s palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.
