Adiamante by L. E. Modesitt Jr. Read Free Book Online Page B

even the orange spice couldn’t have concealed that much death stench.
    In the windless chill, the heat from the trees was palpable, like a curtain, but heat or no heat, the jackrabbit prints
circled away from the grove, and I followed their tracks, swinging toward the north.
    I began to sweat even more, from the running, from the wool jacket, from the ground heat of the meleysen roots, for a dozen reasons, but I forced my strides back into a longer pattern.
    In time, the first of the hills leading to the iron mines—mines worked-out and reclaimed without visible evidence long ago—rose before me, a mixture of white slopes and dark cedars and piñons.
    Sensing the ruisine trail, I turned, panting, and kept running, my boots jolting unevenly on the hard ground, the sweat pouring down my hot face and cooling as it flowed.
    â€œThis is my last moment to sing … .”
    I pushed away the song and sent my perceptions out, trying to sense something—anything.
    And I did.
    Even from beneath the snow I could sense another fragment of adiamante, less than a dozen meters ahead and to my right. Adiamante—almost indestructible, shattered only by those forces that sundered both planets and the very ships that once sundered planets and their satellites.
    My legs slowed, glad of the respite, as I edged toward the unmarked spot.
    Had I really sensed it?
    After brushing away snow and digging around, I found it—a small oval scarcely bigger than my fist, neither giving nor taking heat, neither holding or dispersing cold.
    For some reason, I slipped it into my jacket pocket, trusting to my intuit senses that there was some reason for the action.
    I turned back downhill, moving more slowly and cautiously through the increasingly heavy snow.
    Dialogue one: Another chunk of adiamante … . Why now? Why had I been able to sense it—as opposed to sensing
eagles or ravens or jackrabbits? They were living beings, and that was something that adiamante certainly was not. Coincidence … or a reminder that the hardness of the past refused to stay buried or ignored? Or had I always been able to sense the hard darkness of the past and refused to acknowledge it?
    Dialogue two: Who ever looked for adiamante? The fragments were useless, and painful reminders of the lessons that had been so hard to learn, lessons whose existence the cybs still refused even to acknowledge.
    Back on the flat, I kept running, heading southeast back to the house, back to memories, and the netlink that would update me on the cybs, and the twelve adiamante hulls that orbited well above the heavy gray clouds of a too-early winter.

VIII
    THE OLD DRAFF’S TALE
    I n the low and still-too-near old days before the small stars scarred the fields to ashes, before the lands smoked, and before the ice walked the world, there were many types of fishes in the sea, and many animals that roamed the forests and plains and hills, and birds with all colors of feathers that roosted and perched and strutted.
    But there was only one kind of human. Sometimes that kind was man, sometimes woman, sometimes child, but for all the names, they were the same. Some were taller, and some were shorter, or thinner or thicker, and some spoke Anglas, and some Nippin, and some Mandi. But they were the same. That is, they all thought in the old-fashioned manner, and their thoughts stayed inside their heads.

    Their thoughts stayed inside their heads.
    Yet into that low and not-so-far-off time were born the fathers of the cybs and the demis, the dreamer Krikwats, the doer Ibmer, and the mighty Gates.
    Ibmer, with wire and diode and solder and chip, made the first cyb. It was not a good cyb, for it was of metal and ceramic and wire, and it was not really alive. It could count very fast and compare pictures of things, if a human fed those pictures into its head. And it was backwards, because it could only calculate. People could see its calculations, but it could see