Read Online A Blink of the Screen by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online
Authors: Terry Pratchett
Ads: Link
with Steve Baxter, who I have always considered to be the UK’s finest writer of hard SF, a new journey began
.
Frankly I’m glad we did it this way; besides it was a lot more fun
.
They said that Daniel Boone would pull up and move on if he could see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Larry Linsay, Boone was pathologically gregarious. There was someone else on this world.
His
world. It was like finding a fingernail in your soup. It irked. It made the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Linsay had rigged an array of antennae in the pines at the top of the rise. In the virgin wavebands of this world the tiny blip of an arrival was crystal clear; it stood out on the miniature displays like an Everest among the background molehills. Only one type of person would come up this far into the high meggas. The gumment. In Linsay’s vocabulary the word was as pregnant with meaning as some of the old Chinese words that expressed a whole stream of thought. It meant regulations, and taxes, and questions, and interference. Other people. It had to be the gumment because it took money to get into the high meggas, and generally it was the sort of money that only the gumment could muster. Besides, people didn’t like it this far out, where the tuning had to be so fine and it took several weeks of real-time travel to get to the next human being. People didn’t like being that far from people. But there were other reasons. Things started to be
different
in the high meggas.
There was another blip.
Two
people. Linsay began to feel crowded.
They had to be from Forward Base. Linsay was annoyed – he went to Forward Base, they didn’t come to him. Hard to think of any reason that would bring them up here. He imagined them looking around in astonishment, unable to find him. The third rule of survival up here was: keep away from your point of arrival.
He took a bearing to make sure, picked up the rifle that leaned against his chart table, and set off through the scrub. Any watcher would have noticed how Linsay kept to shaded areas, broke cover only when he had to and broke cover fast. But there wasn’t any watcher. If there had been, Linsay would be creeping up behind him.
People got the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a jolly but determined man, heavily into goatskin underwear and manumission. But someone at Forward Base had loaned Linsay an old, battered copy of the book. Robinson Crusoe was on his island for over twenty-six years, Linsay learned, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Linsay approved of this: the man obviously had his head screwed on right.
It was late summer here in what was approximately southern France, although the Fist had made such a mess of the coastline that it was barely recognizable. Here there were no longer just the spatter craters that had been such a feature a few tens of Earths back. Up here the Fist had raked across Europe and western Asia, sending major fragments barrelling towards the very core in tongues of plasma. There must have been several years of winter before the atmosphere dropped most of the dust. When it cleared, the seasons were all wrong. The colander that was Europe was slightly nearer the new Equator, the Earth had developed a wobble, and the ice caps were spreading fast.
Mankind, however, was learning about Agriculture at the time and failed to notice. A pack of rantelopes watched Linsay cautiously. He didn’t hunt on this Earth – it was easy enough to hop back one for that – but all the same they weren’t entirely at ease. The winter following the Fist hadn’t wiped out all the primates, and some baboons in these parts were mean hunters.
The bull baboon he’d christened Big Yin watched him from his perch on a rock. Linsay waved at him cheerfully. Big Yin had seen the rifle. He didn’t wave back.
The man was crawling cautiously behind the inadequate cover of an outcrop of fused glass. He moved very much like
.
Frankly I’m glad we did it this way; besides it was a lot more fun
.
They said that Daniel Boone would pull up and move on if he could see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Larry Linsay, Boone was pathologically gregarious. There was someone else on this world.
His
world. It was like finding a fingernail in your soup. It irked. It made the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Linsay had rigged an array of antennae in the pines at the top of the rise. In the virgin wavebands of this world the tiny blip of an arrival was crystal clear; it stood out on the miniature displays like an Everest among the background molehills. Only one type of person would come up this far into the high meggas. The gumment. In Linsay’s vocabulary the word was as pregnant with meaning as some of the old Chinese words that expressed a whole stream of thought. It meant regulations, and taxes, and questions, and interference. Other people. It had to be the gumment because it took money to get into the high meggas, and generally it was the sort of money that only the gumment could muster. Besides, people didn’t like it this far out, where the tuning had to be so fine and it took several weeks of real-time travel to get to the next human being. People didn’t like being that far from people. But there were other reasons. Things started to be
different
in the high meggas.
There was another blip.
Two
people. Linsay began to feel crowded.
They had to be from Forward Base. Linsay was annoyed – he went to Forward Base, they didn’t come to him. Hard to think of any reason that would bring them up here. He imagined them looking around in astonishment, unable to find him. The third rule of survival up here was: keep away from your point of arrival.
He took a bearing to make sure, picked up the rifle that leaned against his chart table, and set off through the scrub. Any watcher would have noticed how Linsay kept to shaded areas, broke cover only when he had to and broke cover fast. But there wasn’t any watcher. If there had been, Linsay would be creeping up behind him.
People got the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a jolly but determined man, heavily into goatskin underwear and manumission. But someone at Forward Base had loaned Linsay an old, battered copy of the book. Robinson Crusoe was on his island for over twenty-six years, Linsay learned, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Linsay approved of this: the man obviously had his head screwed on right.
It was late summer here in what was approximately southern France, although the Fist had made such a mess of the coastline that it was barely recognizable. Here there were no longer just the spatter craters that had been such a feature a few tens of Earths back. Up here the Fist had raked across Europe and western Asia, sending major fragments barrelling towards the very core in tongues of plasma. There must have been several years of winter before the atmosphere dropped most of the dust. When it cleared, the seasons were all wrong. The colander that was Europe was slightly nearer the new Equator, the Earth had developed a wobble, and the ice caps were spreading fast.
Mankind, however, was learning about Agriculture at the time and failed to notice. A pack of rantelopes watched Linsay cautiously. He didn’t hunt on this Earth – it was easy enough to hop back one for that – but all the same they weren’t entirely at ease. The winter following the Fist hadn’t wiped out all the primates, and some baboons in these parts were mean hunters.
The bull baboon he’d christened Big Yin watched him from his perch on a rock. Linsay waved at him cheerfully. Big Yin had seen the rifle. He didn’t wave back.
The man was crawling cautiously behind the inadequate cover of an outcrop of fused glass. He moved very much like
Similar Books
