Read Online Out on Blue Six by Ian McDonald - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ian McDonald
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had lost it again. That was the pain.
Strange, but in this incarnation of the dream, there was no wall of faces. No barrier to the Beyond. But what that Beyond was, she could no longer see. From the saddle of her high-flying bicycle/ornithopter, she could see the last dawnward towers of Great Yu. And beyond them, nothing.
The dream no longer comforted. But it was all she had, so she clung to it: the sixteen-o’clock dream.
And the others.
Like the dream, she could not be comfortable with them, but she could not be comfortable without them. At least they would be company. She would not face an indefinite future underground, alone. There would be the common bond of circumstance. Experiences would be shared, resources pooled, stratagems of survival tables, futures mapped out. That there was a future, a time to come reaching out ahead of her along the cableways and conduits and ducts until she found her own death there in the tunnels, was more than she could bear.
“I’m a yulp cartoonist,” she would convince the piles of romantic novels stolen on her furtive midnight forays to the surface. “I was born in the White Sisters of Koinonia Maternity Hostel, I was fostered by the Sigmarsenn family of Coober Peedie until, age seven, I was admitted to the Ladies of Celestial Succor Community Crèche, where I remained until at age fourteen the Ministry of Pain apprenticed me to Jovanian Yelkenko from whom I learned the cartoonic arts and took over his creation, Wee Wendy Waif. I lived in apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West, I worked producing Wee Wendy Waif for the Armitage-Weir Publishing House, and what I want to know is, what am I doing down here?”
Inevitably these arguments brought her back again to the question of whether or not contact with these others was desirable. Supine on her live-fur carpet (stolen in bulk from Thirteen Moons Furnishings on an after-hours raid through their floor service-hatch, she like some overwhelmed insect wrestling the huge roll of vat-grown fur down into her hole) she argued with herself. She argued this argument so many times that each pro, each con, had taken on an individual character and voice.
“Whaddya mean, whaddya mean, common experience?” This voice, straight-edged and gritty as a broken floor-tile, was Mr. Don’t-Be-Stupid-Girl. “The only common experience down here is you’re all criminals. PainCriminals. You know what you did to get yourself down here; Yah only knows what they had to do.”
“Be reasonable.” This was the voice called High-Pitched Reasonableness. “Everyone down here was a member of the Compassionate Society at some time. The rules aren’t easily forgotten.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” said Growly Accuser. “Who said the rules hold down here?”
“But you can’t be alone forever,” said Self-pitying Whiner. “Not: forever.”
“Better safe than dead,” said Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution.
Working her way one morning through the tangle of crawlways and ducts that led, eventually, to the air-conditioning plant under New Paris Community Mall, she came upon a workspace recently vacated by some lunch-or toilet-seeking environmental maintenance engineer. Magpie-minded, magpie-moraled, Courtney Hall fingered through his neglected toolcase until those fingers came to rest on the stubby metal barrel of a sonic impacter.
She had spied upon engineers using these devices. It was sign of how far she had strayed from the path of Social Compassion that she had devised ways in which one could be converted into a nasty little personal weapon. She slipped the impacter into the leather pouch she had just yesterday pickpocketed from Western Promise Novelties and Gifts and continued on her way to the surface and further petty crime.
That night she had a reply to the Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution. The Voice of Off-hand Tough-Nut Exuberance said, “Sure, I’ve got the impacter. What have I got to worry about?”
A
Strange, but in this incarnation of the dream, there was no wall of faces. No barrier to the Beyond. But what that Beyond was, she could no longer see. From the saddle of her high-flying bicycle/ornithopter, she could see the last dawnward towers of Great Yu. And beyond them, nothing.
The dream no longer comforted. But it was all she had, so she clung to it: the sixteen-o’clock dream.
And the others.
Like the dream, she could not be comfortable with them, but she could not be comfortable without them. At least they would be company. She would not face an indefinite future underground, alone. There would be the common bond of circumstance. Experiences would be shared, resources pooled, stratagems of survival tables, futures mapped out. That there was a future, a time to come reaching out ahead of her along the cableways and conduits and ducts until she found her own death there in the tunnels, was more than she could bear.
“I’m a yulp cartoonist,” she would convince the piles of romantic novels stolen on her furtive midnight forays to the surface. “I was born in the White Sisters of Koinonia Maternity Hostel, I was fostered by the Sigmarsenn family of Coober Peedie until, age seven, I was admitted to the Ladies of Celestial Succor Community Crèche, where I remained until at age fourteen the Ministry of Pain apprenticed me to Jovanian Yelkenko from whom I learned the cartoonic arts and took over his creation, Wee Wendy Waif. I lived in apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West, I worked producing Wee Wendy Waif for the Armitage-Weir Publishing House, and what I want to know is, what am I doing down here?”
Inevitably these arguments brought her back again to the question of whether or not contact with these others was desirable. Supine on her live-fur carpet (stolen in bulk from Thirteen Moons Furnishings on an after-hours raid through their floor service-hatch, she like some overwhelmed insect wrestling the huge roll of vat-grown fur down into her hole) she argued with herself. She argued this argument so many times that each pro, each con, had taken on an individual character and voice.
“Whaddya mean, whaddya mean, common experience?” This voice, straight-edged and gritty as a broken floor-tile, was Mr. Don’t-Be-Stupid-Girl. “The only common experience down here is you’re all criminals. PainCriminals. You know what you did to get yourself down here; Yah only knows what they had to do.”
“Be reasonable.” This was the voice called High-Pitched Reasonableness. “Everyone down here was a member of the Compassionate Society at some time. The rules aren’t easily forgotten.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” said Growly Accuser. “Who said the rules hold down here?”
“But you can’t be alone forever,” said Self-pitying Whiner. “Not: forever.”
“Better safe than dead,” said Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution.
Working her way one morning through the tangle of crawlways and ducts that led, eventually, to the air-conditioning plant under New Paris Community Mall, she came upon a workspace recently vacated by some lunch-or toilet-seeking environmental maintenance engineer. Magpie-minded, magpie-moraled, Courtney Hall fingered through his neglected toolcase until those fingers came to rest on the stubby metal barrel of a sonic impacter.
She had spied upon engineers using these devices. It was sign of how far she had strayed from the path of Social Compassion that she had devised ways in which one could be converted into a nasty little personal weapon. She slipped the impacter into the leather pouch she had just yesterday pickpocketed from Western Promise Novelties and Gifts and continued on her way to the surface and further petty crime.
That night she had a reply to the Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution. The Voice of Off-hand Tough-Nut Exuberance said, “Sure, I’ve got the impacter. What have I got to worry about?”
A
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