Tony Daniel Read Online Free Page B
Author: Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
go to sleep, to get better and I sigh and curl as best I can into a ball and I am falling away, falling away to dreams where I run along a trail of spattered blood, and the spoor is fresh and I’m chasing rats, and TB is with me close by, and I will bite a rat soon, soon, soon—
A Simple Room with Good Light
Come back, Andre Sud. Your mind is wandering and now you have to concentrate. Faster now. Fast as you can go. Space-time. Clumps of galaxy clusters. Average cluster. Two-armed spiral.
Yellow star the locals call Sol.
Here’s a network of hawsers cabling the inner planets together. Artifact of sentience, some say. Others might dispute that. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars hung with a shining webwork across blank space and spreading even into the asteroids. Kilometer-thick cables bending down from the heavens, coming in at the poles to fit into enormous universal joints lubricated by the living magma of the planets’ viscera. Torque and undulation. Faster. Somewhere on a flagellating curve between Earth and Mars, the Diaphany, you will find yourself. Closer in. Spinning spherules like beads on a five-hundred-sixty-three-million-mile-long necklace. Come as close as you can.
Into the pithway transport you now travel upon. Into your one and only mind, now going on its second body. Into the fleeting human present.
All along the Mars-Earth Diaphany, Andre saw the preparations for a war like none before. It seemed the entire Met—all the interplanetary cables—had been transformed into a dense fortress that people just happened to live inside. His travel bead was repeatedly delayed in the pithway as troops went about their movements, and military grist swarmed hither and yon about some task or another.
We live in this all-night along the strong-bound carbon of the cables, Andre thought. Within the dark glistening of the corridors, where surface speaks to surface in tiny whispers like fingers, and the larger codes, the extirpated skeletons of a billion minds, clack together in a cemetery of logic, shaking hands, continually shaking bony, algorithmic hands and observing strict and necessary protocol for the purposes of destruction.
Amés—he only went by the one name, as if it were a title—was a great one for martial appearances. Napoléon come again, the merci reporters said as a friendly joke. Oh, the reporters were eating this up. There hadn’t been a good war in centuries. People got tired of unremitting democracy, didn’t they? He’d actually heard somebody say that on the merci.
How fun it will be to watch billions die for a little excitement on the merci, Andre thought.
He arrived in Connacht Bolsa in a foul mood, but when he stepped out of his pod, there was the smell of new rain. He had walked a ways from the pod station before he realized what the smell was. There were puddles of water on the ground from the old-fashioned street-cleaning mechanism Connacht employed. It was still raining in spots—a small rain that fell only an inch or so from the ground. Little clouds scudded along the street like a miniature storm front, washing it clean of the night’s leavings.
Connacht was on a suburb radial off Phobos City, the most densely populated segment on the Met. A hundred years ago, in the Phobos boom time, Connacht had been the weekend escape for intellectuals, artists, moneyed drug addicts—and the often indistinguishable variety of con men, mountebanks, and psychic quacksalvers who were their hangers-on. The place was run-down now, and Andre’s pellicle encountered various swarms of nostalgia that passed through the streets like rat packs—only these were bred and fed by the merchants to attract the steady trickle of tourists with pellicular receptors for a lost bohemia.
All they did for Andre was made him think about Molly.
Andre’s convert—the algorithmic portion of himself—obliged him by dredging up various scenes from his days at seminary. Today, his convert was unusually silent,
A Simple Room with Good Light
Come back, Andre Sud. Your mind is wandering and now you have to concentrate. Faster now. Fast as you can go. Space-time. Clumps of galaxy clusters. Average cluster. Two-armed spiral.
Yellow star the locals call Sol.
Here’s a network of hawsers cabling the inner planets together. Artifact of sentience, some say. Others might dispute that. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars hung with a shining webwork across blank space and spreading even into the asteroids. Kilometer-thick cables bending down from the heavens, coming in at the poles to fit into enormous universal joints lubricated by the living magma of the planets’ viscera. Torque and undulation. Faster. Somewhere on a flagellating curve between Earth and Mars, the Diaphany, you will find yourself. Closer in. Spinning spherules like beads on a five-hundred-sixty-three-million-mile-long necklace. Come as close as you can.
Into the pithway transport you now travel upon. Into your one and only mind, now going on its second body. Into the fleeting human present.
All along the Mars-Earth Diaphany, Andre saw the preparations for a war like none before. It seemed the entire Met—all the interplanetary cables—had been transformed into a dense fortress that people just happened to live inside. His travel bead was repeatedly delayed in the pithway as troops went about their movements, and military grist swarmed hither and yon about some task or another.
We live in this all-night along the strong-bound carbon of the cables, Andre thought. Within the dark glistening of the corridors, where surface speaks to surface in tiny whispers like fingers, and the larger codes, the extirpated skeletons of a billion minds, clack together in a cemetery of logic, shaking hands, continually shaking bony, algorithmic hands and observing strict and necessary protocol for the purposes of destruction.
Amés—he only went by the one name, as if it were a title—was a great one for martial appearances. Napoléon come again, the merci reporters said as a friendly joke. Oh, the reporters were eating this up. There hadn’t been a good war in centuries. People got tired of unremitting democracy, didn’t they? He’d actually heard somebody say that on the merci.
How fun it will be to watch billions die for a little excitement on the merci, Andre thought.
He arrived in Connacht Bolsa in a foul mood, but when he stepped out of his pod, there was the smell of new rain. He had walked a ways from the pod station before he realized what the smell was. There were puddles of water on the ground from the old-fashioned street-cleaning mechanism Connacht employed. It was still raining in spots—a small rain that fell only an inch or so from the ground. Little clouds scudded along the street like a miniature storm front, washing it clean of the night’s leavings.
Connacht was on a suburb radial off Phobos City, the most densely populated segment on the Met. A hundred years ago, in the Phobos boom time, Connacht had been the weekend escape for intellectuals, artists, moneyed drug addicts—and the often indistinguishable variety of con men, mountebanks, and psychic quacksalvers who were their hangers-on. The place was run-down now, and Andre’s pellicle encountered various swarms of nostalgia that passed through the streets like rat packs—only these were bred and fed by the merchants to attract the steady trickle of tourists with pellicular receptors for a lost bohemia.
All they did for Andre was made him think about Molly.
Andre’s convert—the algorithmic portion of himself—obliged him by dredging up various scenes from his days at seminary. Today, his convert was unusually silent,
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