Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free

was a calm child, with blue, clinical eyes and angelic hair that didn’t come from me. He sprouted wings and a halo suddenly, and grunted. “What’s it for?”
    “It talks to God.”
    “What God?”
    “In God We Trust. That God.”
    He grunted again. “Pre-Real.”
    I nodded, leaned back tiredly, and watched him, wondering how much longer he would be neat, attentive, curious, polite, before he shaved his head, studded his scalp and eyebrows with jewels and implants, got eye-implants that held no expression whatsoever, inserted a CD player into his earlobe, and never called me Matrix again. Maybe he would go live with his father. I hadn’t seen him since Brock was born, but Brock knew exactly who he was, where he was, what he did. Speculation was unnecessary, except for aberrants like Durham.
    The outercom signaled; half a dozen faces appeared onscreen: Brock’s friends who lived in the station complex. They trooped in, settled themselves around Brock, and plugged into their wrists. They were playing an adventure game, a sort of space-chase, where they were intergalactic thieves raiding alien zoos of rare animals and selling them to illegal restaurants. The computer played the team of highly trained intergalactic space-patrollers. The thieves were constantly falling into black holes, getting burnt up speeding too fast into strange atmospheres, and ambushed by the wily patrollers. One of them, Indra, tried to outwit the computer by coming up with the most bizarre alien species she could imagine; the computer always gave her the images she wanted. I watched for a while. Then an image came into my head, of an old man in a field watching his neighbors pile stones on him until he could no longer breathe.
    I got up, went into my office, and called Durham.
    “I could have stopped it,” I said tersely. He was silent, not because he didn’t know what I was talking about, but because he did. “I was an angel from God. I could have changed the message.”
    “You wouldn’t have come back,” he said simply. It was true. I would have been abandoned there, powerless, a beardless youth with breasts in a long robe raving about the future, who would have become just one more witch for the children to condemn. He added, “You’re a researcher. Researchers don’t get emotional about history. There’s nothing left of that time but some old bones in a museum from where they dug them up to build a station complex. A gravestone with an angel on it, a little face with staring eyes, and a pair of cupid wings. What’s to mope about? I put a bonus in your account. Go spend it somewhere.”
    “How much?”
    He was silent again, his eyes narrowed slightly. “Not enough for you to go back. Go get drunk, Nici. This is not you.”
    “I’m haunted,” I whispered, I thought too softly for him to hear. He shook his head, not impatiently.
    “The worst was over by then, anyway. Heroics are forbidden to researchers. You know that. The angel Mather dreamed up only told him what he wanted to hear. Tell him anything else and he’d call you a demon and refuse to listen. You know all this. Why are you taking this personally? You didn’t take being a goddess in that Hindu temple personally. Thank God,” he added with an obnoxious chuckle. I grunted at him morosely and got rid of his face.
    I found a vegetable bar in the kitchen, and wandered back into the living room. The space-thieves were sneaking around a zoo on the planet Hublatt. They were all imaging animals onscreen while their characters studied the specimens. “We’re looking for a Yewsalope,” Brock said intently. “Its eyeballs are poisonous, but if you cook them just right they look like boiled eggs to whoever you’re trying to poison.”
    The animals were garish in their barred cells: purple, orange, cinnamon, polka-dotted, striped. There were walking narwhales, a rhinoceros horn with feet and eyes, something like an octopus made out of elephant trunks, an amorphous green