Andromeda Gun by John Boyd Read Free Book Online Page A

of Bryce Peyton, had an angel to blame for his errors. G-7 was intrigued by the Mormon concept of angels, and it sensed that McCloud, with his forcibleness, might be the ideal instrument for bringing the opposing religious factions in the valley together and for lighting a flame in this small town which might someday illuminate the entire planet.
    Gabriella might assist G-7 in placing the outlaw onto a path toward legality, particularly if she were favorably impressed by tomorrow’s spooning, and G-7 was already determined to add its bit to the preservice festivities—purely for self-educational purposes. G-7 had deduced a working knowledge of the species reproductive methods from McCloud’s fantasies in the restaurant, but it needed practical experience and its own curiosity had been aroused by the girl. When she walked, the middle part of her swayed with the lightness of a wavering luminosity, and there was an evanescence in the perky uplift of her breasts…
    G-7’s host stirred and twitched, and the being quickly withdrew a strumming tendril from a sensitive area of the man’s thalamus.
    With Ian quieted, G-7 considered a paradox.
    On a planet of such limitless energy, romance and fertilization should have been combined into a single spontaneity of blithe and unpremeditated art. The impulse toward union was so strong in McCloud that he would have been the crown prince of pollinators on a sexually liberated planet such as Vulvula, but McCloud had been strangely timid around the female. G-7 had encouraged the man to be polite to the woman because politeness toward women was a part of the law-abiding syndrome, but it had not expected such powerful constraint, particularly around a female who literally burned to be ravished by him.
    The woman’s attitudes confused G-7 even more. Her flesh was willing, but her spirit was weak. She had leaped at the opportunity to go to church with a wayfaring stranger, not out of concern for the wayfarer’s spiritual welfare, as she so piously told herself, but from a covert yearning for the stranger’s body. Why covert, it wondered. Why deny love, the first law of the universe? It was written that the chalice of love should never be lidded by piety, for that, in the Code, was hypocrisy.
    G-7 would explore the enigma of womankind more fully tomorrow. Tonight it would explore the mind of its host and alleviate the man’s obsession with revenge. Swinging webs over dendrites, nets between lacunae, G-7 flagellated a cluster of neurons at the base of Ian’s thalamus and waited to seine for his dreams.
    Along well-worn neutral paths the dreams came. In clarity and with realism, Ian hunkered again in the shadows of a moonlit ravine to hear a tall, thin man in a gray uniform on a gray horse mouth again the insult which sent the sleeper into paroxysms of dream rage so violent the words were unintelligible to G-7.
    The sleeper stirred and G-7 withdrew its tracers. The clue to the man’s obsession was locked securely in his subconscious. To soothe the sleeper’s unease, G-7 stroked the area of pleasant dreams and conjured up a vision of Gabriella.
    Immediately, Ian was back in his old ravine, this time with the seraphic form of Gabriella standing approvingly behind him as he pumped bullet after bullet from a magic pistol into the skeletal form of Colonel Blicket, which writhed and grimaced but did not fall. Delighted by his magic weapon, Ian fired ten, twelve, eighteen…
    He bolted awake, grabbing his pistol, as a volley of revolver shots sounded from the street. Even as his grip settled on the pistol’s handle, Ian relaxed. Some of the boys were bidding Sheriff Faust a good night as they galloped past his office riding home from the saloon, firing their pistols in defiance of the posted order not to fire weapons inside the town limits.
    Ian rolled over and went back to sleep, thinking that the sheriff had erred in posting an ordinance with the word “please” in it. Western folks