Read Online Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies by Greg Bear - Free Book Online

enough attention.”
    â€œHe’ll be the next one, wait and see. Thanks for the time, and say hello to the wife for me.”
    Thomas returned to the board but had difficulty concentrating. He wondered if animals in the field and bush mourned long over the loss of a child. Did gazelles grieve when lions struck? Karen knew more about such feelings than he did; she’d lost a husband before she met him. His own life had been reasonably linear, uneventful.
    How would he cope if something happened, if Karen were killed? Like the Coopers, with a quick funeral and burial to make things certain, even when they weren’t?
    What were they burying?
    Four years of work and dreams.
    After lunch he took a walk along the beach and found his feet moving him north to where the whale had been. The coastal rocks in this area concentrated on the northern edge of the cove. They stretched into the water for a mile before ending at the deep water shelf. At extreme low tide two or three hundred yards of rocks were exposed. Now, about fifty feet was visible and he could clearly see where the whale had been. Even at high tide the circle of rock was visible. He hadn’t walked here much lately, but he remembered first noticing the circle three years before, like a perfect sandy-bottomed wading pool.
    Up and down the beach, the wrack remained, dark and smelly and flyblown. But the whale was gone. It was obvious there hadn’t been much wave action. Still, that was the easy explanation and he had no other.
    After the walk he returned to his office and opened all the windows before setting pencil to paper. By the time Karen was home, he had finished a good portion of the diagram from his original sketches. When he turned it in, Peripheral Data would have little more to do than hand it to their drafting department for smoothing.
    Richie didn’t visit them that evening. He came in the morning instead. It was a Saturday and Karen was home, reading in the living room. She invited the boy in and offered him milk and cookies, then sat him before the television to watch cartoons.
    Richie consumed TV with a hunger that was fascinating. He avidly mimicked the expressions of the people he saw in the commercials, as if memorizing a store of emotions, filling in the gaps in his humanity left by an imperfect upbringing.
    Richie left a few hours later. As usual, he had not touched the food. He wasn’t starving.
    â€œThink he’s adopting us?” Thomas asked.
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he just needs a couple of friends like you and me. Human contacts, if his own folks don’t pay attention to him.”
    â€œVarmanian thinks he might be the next one to disappear.” Thomas regretted the statement the instant it was out, but Karen didn’t react. She put out a lunch of beans and sausages and waited until they were eating to say something. “When do you want to have a child?”
    â€œTwo weeks from now, over the three-day holiday,” Thomas said.
    â€œNo, I’m serious.”
    â€œYou’ve taken a shine to Richie and you think we should have one of our own?”
    â€œNot until something breaks for you,” she said, looking away. “If Key Business comes through, maybe I can take a sabbatical and study child-rearing. Directly. But one of us has to be free full time.”
    Thomas nodded and sipped at a glass of iced tea. Behind her humor she was serious. There was a lot at stake in the next few months—more than just money. Perhaps their happiness together. It was a hard weight to carry. Being an adult was difficult at times. He almost wished he could be like Richie, free as a gull, uncommitted.
    A line of dark clouds schemed over the ocean as afternoon turned to evening. “Looks like another storm,” he called to Karen, who was typing in the back bedroom.
    â€œSo soon?” she asked by way of complaint.
    He sat in the kitchen to watch the advancing front. The warm,