Vivisepulture Read Online Free Page B

the slopes of Elysium Mons"
    "Riesling, sweet and cold?"
    "I'll see what I can do."
    The guy left the room through a sliding door.
    I drank my beer.
     
    In the morning I woke up and went to the john and puked and I felt better after that. I got a beer from the cold chest behind the bed and chugged it down, and then the guy in the silver suit came and said he'd show me around. I said okay, but would there be beer? He said there'd be plenty of beer.
    We left the room and walked into warm sunlight, down a path in a concrete complex with silver domes in the red sand. I was wearing old chinos and an old shirt, just like old times.
    The guy didn't offer his name and I didn't ask.
    We came to an open buggy with big wheels like beach balls and the guy said climb in. I got in the passenger seat and the guy indicated the back seat, a cooler there. I got myself a beer and drank and we set off.
    We drove out of the complex of domes and into the red desert. The guy told me a whole bunch of stuff about the terraforming of Mars. Most of it I didn't understand, and I wasn't interested enough to ask. The bottom line was that mankind had spread from Earth and was living on Mars and some of the moons of  Saturn and Jupiter, spread like a disease.
    Once when I turned in the seat to get another beer, I looked back at the complex we'd left. The domes glittered in the morning sunlight.
    After an hour we arrived at another complex in the desert, only this one as well as domes had factories with great pipes coming from them and spreading out across the desert.
    "These are the lungs of the planet, as it were," the guy said. He told me that here was where a whole load of stuff was pumped into the Martian atmosphere to keep it breathable. I didn't see a single person anywhere about the place.
    We passed the lungs of the planet and moved further into the desert, and I sat in the passenger seat and drank beer after beer.
    The guy said, "I make it a duty to read all the work of the retrievals I'll be working with."
    "That so?"
    "I've read practically everything you've ever written."
    I was impressed. There was a lot of it. "So what you make of it? My guess, a guy like you..." I gestured with the bottle. "Probably means jack shit to you."
    He said, "Buk, I was appalled, but I must admit fascinated at the same time."
    I saluted him with my bottle.
    "The drinking, the women... that was incomprehensible enough, but what really appalled me was your apathy."
    I shrugged. I couldn't be bothered to argue. The only time I ever defended myself was in a fist-fight. "So why the fuck did you read all the stuff?"
    "Because I was paid to do so, Buk."
    "Pretty easy job, as I see it, reading a whole bunch of stuff. Even stuff you didn't like."
    He ignored that and said, "Your apathy really astonished me, Buk. You were interested in nothing but drinking and copulating and the races..."
    "And boxing and books," I reminded him. "I read some, too."
    "And even here, now, Buk – you're just not one bit interested in the wonders of the modern age, are you?
    He gestured at something sailing by in the sky. It looked light and airy, like a kite made from aluminium and tin-foil, only it was about the size of an aircraft hangar.
    I remembered the sky scrapers and the railroads, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Saturn V rocket. I said, "Show me wonders of the modern age and all I see are rich fuckers getting richer."
    "You don't see progress?"
    "Progress is just another word for shitting on those at the bottom."
    He said, "You're ignorant."
    I stared at him. "Everyone is ignorant," I said.
    We drove on some. He said, "Why did you write?"
    I thought about that. "Because I had to."
    "Why did you write the kind of stuff that you wrote?"
    I thought some more. "Because I lived the kind of life I lived."
    "A life of ignorance and apathy and quiet desperation."
    I didn't argue. I looked down at my body. It was the body of a seventy-three year old, but the strange thing was I felt young and