After the Collapse Read Online Free Page A

discomfort of a magnitude unfelt by anyone before or after the Lilliputians tethered Gulliver.
    Tigerishka was bending over him, freeing him.
    “Sorry again, ape boy, that took longer than I thought. He even kept his hand on the gun right up until he climaxed.”
    Something warm was dripping on A.B.’s face. Was his rescuer crying? Her voice belied any such emotion. A.B. raised a hand that felt like a block of wood to his own face, and clumsily smeared the liquid around, until some entered his mouth.
    He imagined that this forbidden taste was equally as satisfying to Tigerishka as mouse fluids.
    Heading north, the trundlebug seemed much more spacious with just two passengers. The corpse of Gershon Thales had been left behind, for eventual recovery by experts. Dessication and cooking would make it a fine mummy.
    Once out of the dead zone, A.B. vibbed everything back to Jeetu Kissoon, and got a shared commendation that made Tigerishka purr. Then he turned his attention to his personal queue of messages.
    The ASBO Squad had bagged Safranski. But they apologized for some delay in his sentencing hearing. Their caseload was enormous these days.
    Way down at the bottom of his queue was an agricultural newsfeed. An unprecedented kind of black rot fungus had made inroads into the kale crop on the farms supplying Reboot City Twelve.
    Calories would be tight in New Perthpatna, but only for a while.
    Or so they hoped.
    —This story is indebted to Gaia Vince and her article in New Scientist , “Surviving in a Warmer World.”

CLOUDS AND COLD FIRES
    Out of a clear sky on a fine summer morning, a buckshot rattle of hailstones across the living pangolin plates of Pertinax’s rooftop announced the arrival of some mail.
    Inside his cozy, low-ceilinged hutch, with its corner devoted to an easel and canvases and art supplies, its shelves full of burl sculptures, its workbench that hosted bubbling retorts and alembics and a universal proseity device, Pertinax paused in the feeding of his parrot tulips. Setting down the wooden tray of raw meat chunks, he turned away from the colorfully enameled soil-filled pots arrayed on his bright windowsill. The parrot tulips squawked at this interruption of their lunch, bobbing their feathery heads angrily on their long succulent neck stalks. Pertinax chided them lovingly, stroking their crests while avoiding their sharp beaks. Then, hoisting the hem of his long striped robe to expose his broad naked paw-feet, he hurried outdoors.
    Fallen to the earth after bouncing from the imbricated roof, the hailstones were already nearly melted away to invisibility beneath the temperate sunlight, damp spots on the undulant greensward upon which Pertinax’s small but comfortable dwelling sat. Pertinax wetted a finger, raised it to gauge the wind’s direction, then directed his vision upward and to the north, anticipating the direction from which his mail would arrive. Sure enough, within a minute a lofty cloud had begun to form, a flocculent painterly smudge on the monochrome canvas of the turquoise sky.
    The cloud assumed coherence and substance, drawing into itself its necessary share of virgula and sublimula omnipresent within the upper atmosphere. After another minute or two, the cloud possessed a highly regular oval outline and had descended to within five meters of the ground. Large as one of the windows in Pertinax’s hutch, the cloud halted its progress at this level, and its surface began to acquire a sheen. The sheen took on the qualities of an ancient piece of translucent plastic, such as the Overclockers might cherish. Then Pertinax’s animated mail appeared across the cloud’s surface, as the invisible components of the cloud churned in coordinated fashion.
    Sylvanus’s snouty whiskered face smiled, but the smile was grim, as was his voice resonating from the cloud’s fine-grain speakers.
    “Pertinax my friend, I regret this interruption of your studies and recreations, but I have some dramatic