infinities by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Scott Nicholson, Garry Kilworth, Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Kaitlin Queen, Iain Rowan, Linda Nagata, Keith Brooke Read Free Book Online

freezing winter Thursday the narrow streets were packed with tourists, those latter-day disciples of commerce: mainly diminutive, flat-footed Japanese with their incorrigible smiles and impeccable manners. We took in one bookshop before lunch, an expensive antiquarian dealer situated along Petergate. Mina lost herself in the classics section, while I scanned the packed shelves for those forgotten fabulists of the forties, fifties and sixties, De Polnay and Wellard, Standish and Robin Maugham, minor writers who, despite infelicities, spoke to something in my soul. They were absent from the shelves of this exclusive establishment—their third-rate novels neither sufficiently ancient, nor collectable enough, to warrant stocking.
    Mina bought a volume of Jane Austen's letters, I an early edition of Poe. We emerged into the ice-cold air and hurried to our favourite tea-room.
    Was it a failing in me that I preferred to have Mina to myself—the jealous lover, hoarding his treasure? I could never truly appreciate her when in the company of others. I was always conscious of wanting her attention, of wanting to give her my full attention, without being observed.
    One to one we would chat about nothing in particular, the people we knew in town, friends, incidents that had made the news. That day she asked me how the book was going, and I tried to keep the weariness from my tone as I recounted the novelisation's hackneyed storyline.
    Early in our relationship I had told her that my writing was just another job, something I did to keep the wolf from the door. I had been writing for almost twenty-five years, and though the act of creating still struck me as edifying and worthwhile, it no longer possessed the thrill I recalled from the first five years. She had said that I must be proud of what I did, and I replied that pride was the last thing I felt.
    She had looked at me with that cool, assessing gaze of hers, and said, "Well, I'm proud of you."
    Now I ate my salad sandwich and fielded her questions about my next serious novel.
    How could I tell her that, for the time being, I had shelved plans for the next book, the yearly novel that would appear under my own name? The last one had sold poorly; my editor had refused to offer an advance for another. My agent had found some hackwork to tide me over, and I had put off thinking about the next Daniel Ellis novel.
    I changed the subject, asked her about her sister, Liz, and for the next fifteen minutes lost myself in contemplation of her face: square, large-eyed, attractive in that worn, mid-thirties way that signals experience with fine lines about the eyes. The face of the woman I loved.
    We left the tea-room and ambled through the cobbled streets towards the Minster. She took my arm, smiling at the Christmas window displays on either hand.
    Then she stopped and tugged at me. "Daniel, look. I don't recall..."
    It was a second-hand bookshop crammed into the interstice between a gift shop and an establishment selling a thousand types of tea. The lighted window displayed a promising selection of old first editions. Mina was already dragging me inside.
    The interior of the premises opened up like an optical illusion, belying the parsimonious dimensions of its frontage. It diminished in perspective like a tunnel, and narrow wooden stairs gave access to further floors.
    Mina was soon chatting to the proprietor, an owl-faced, bespectacled man in his seventies. "We moved in just last week," he was saying. "Had a place beyond the Minster—too quiet. You're looking for the Victorians? You'll find them in the first room on the second floor."
    I followed her up the precipitous staircase, itself made even narrower by shelves of books on everything from angling to bee-keeping, gardening to rambling.
    Mina laughed to herself on entering the well-stocked room and turned to me with the conspiratorial grin of the fellow bibliophile. While she lost herself in awed contemplation of the treasures in stock, I