Aye, and Gomorrah

the long version

"A father must come to terms with his son's death in the war. In Venice, an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A while southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction - but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred and fifty years from now. Men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children yearn so passionately to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go."--Jacket.