Earth 2788 by Janet Edwards Read Free Book Online Page A

stabbed my lookup
with my forefinger to cancel the call. There was no point in trying to force
Lolmack to talk to me. The fact he wouldn’t even answer my call told me
everything I needed to know.
    I stared down at
my clenched fists. I had to face up to what was happening. Ardreath had
divorced me. Lolmack had disappeared and wouldn’t answer my calls, which meant
he’d chosen Ardreath rather than me. I should have known he would. Ardreath and
Lolmack had been lovers before I even met them. They were going to stay
together now. They were going to blame everything on me, blank me out of their
lives, and carry on together as if I’d never existed.
    Painful memories
of our wedding day came into my mind. The sound of our voices exchanging our
vows. I’d been so quiet that I’d had to repeat some of the words because people
couldn’t hear me the first time, and Ardreath had seemed surprisingly nervous
too, while Lolmack was totally calm. Anyone would have thought that Lolmack was
the one who was three years older than the other two of us, not Ardreath.
    When Ardreath
and Lolmack’s divorces were finalized, and both of them were legally free of
me, there’d be another wedding, but this time it would be a duo marriage not a
triad. I pictured them with their arms round each other, laughing happily,
while I stood watching them, alone and bereft.
    I winced at that
image, and then a host of trivial secondary worries came flooding in. What
about our furniture? What about the vid script Lolmack and I were in the middle
of writing? What about …?
    I felt sick
thinking of the dozens of mundane things that would have to be done to
disentangle my life from the lives of Ardreath and Lolmack, but at least I
didn’t have to cope with them alone. There would be plenty of people to help
me, because I was part of the sprawling extended family of a Betan clan.
    It was true that
my clan wasn’t important or historic. We were just a small clan cluster of the
lowest social rank, which had been formed less than forty years ago by a group
of clanless families. We didn’t live on one of the powerful Betan worlds like
Zeus or Romulus either. Artemis had been great once, but had been hit by
disaster over a century ago.
    None of those
things mattered. The key benefit of the clan culture of Betan worlds was that
your clan would always be there to support you through any crisis. I only
needed to call for help, and my clan would come to care for me.
    I reached for my
lookup. It was patterned with images of flowers, an incongruously frivolous
thing to use to tell people dreadful news. I frowned at it, wondering who to
call first, then realized the stupidity of making individual calls. Saying this
once was going to be painful enough. I couldn’t force myself to repeat it over
and over again.
    I set my lookup
to record a message. “Hello, everyone. I’m afraid I have b-b-b-bad news to …”
    I broke off and
bit my lip. I thought I’d broken myself of my stammer when I was a teenager,
but it was back. I couldn’t deal with that on top of everything else, so I took
the easy way out, summed up the nightmare of the last twenty-four hours in a
text-only message of three brief sentences, and sent it to my whole clan.
    An incoming call
came barely three minutes later. I didn’t even look to see who was calling,
just answered it, and was startled to see the rigidly autocratic face on my
lookup. My great-uncle, Lolek, our head of clan!
    “Great-uncle!” I
said. “It’s very kind of you to call me yourself, but it really wasn’t
necessary. I …”
    He ignored that.
“You have blood on your face, Lolia. What happened?”
    I’d known my
cheeks felt wet, but I’d assumed that was from my tears. I instinctively
touched my left cheek with my hand, and then studied my fingers. Yes, there was
some blood among the tears.
    “Ardreath
slapped me,” I said. “He wears the latest fashion in chunky jewelled rings, and
one of them must have scratched me. I