The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees Read Free Book Online

explanation – the RaTional explanation – to this conundrum, Trixie knew, and she would go a long way towards solving the question that had bedevilled thinkers in the DemiMonde since time immemorial: how had the Demi-Monde been created? And finding the answer to that would help solve the even more perplexing puzzle as to why the Demi-Monde had been created.
    But if her delving had been unproductive regarding discovering the composition of the Mantle, it had been very fruitful in other ways. The runes she’d found embossed into the Mantle had been a real find, and that they were rendered in Younger Pre-Folk meant she had a chance of understanding them. Not even the great Michel de Nostredame had managed to decipher Pre-Folk A.
    She took her notebook out of the breast pocket of her pinaforeand after carefully measuring the runic inscriptions made a sketch of them. The irritating thing was that whilst uncovering the runes was quite a coup, with this being an illegal dig she would have to keep the discovery secret. Respectable women in the ForthRight were not expected to engage in intellectual activities, especially those prohibited by the Ministry of Psychic Affairs. And if they found anything interesting in the course of these prohibited intellectual activities then, of course, respectable women couldn’t publish.
    And what she had discovered was interesting. According to UnFunDaMentalism, the fact that runes were seen on the Mantle throughout the Demi-Monde indicated that the DemiMonde had once been ruled by a Master Race of pure-blooded – Aryan-blooded – Anglo-Slavic godlings known as the Pre-Folk. So to have found runes so close to the Boundary was an amazing discovery. It suggested that once, long, long ago, there had been no Boundary Layer, that the Pre-Folk had lived in what was now the Great Beyond, the land beyond the Demi-Monde.
    Sketches complete, Trixie scribbled down a brief summary of the tests she had conducted. Tomorrow she’d hire one of the steam-driven drop-hammers she’d seen being used to break rocks at the docks, get it hauled to the site, erected down here in her excavation pit and then she’d see just how tough the Mantle really was.
    But she’d have to be careful. To be caught using a steam hammer to smash a way through the Mantle would create a real scandal, one even her father wouldn’t have enough influence to cover up.
    And as for her governess …
    No, she didn’t even want to think of the hissy fit Governess Margaret would throw if she was Censured again. Then Trixie really would be unmarriageable. No respectable man in theForthRight – now there was a contradiction in terms – would marry a Ratty. No respectable man would come near her.
    Thrusting this unpleasant thought to the back of her mind, Trixie climbed to her feet and brushed the dirt off her knees. Her stockings were ruined but that wasn’t a concern: she would blame her maid for that. Better a slave got a whipping than her governess discovered that her one and only charge was a closet RaTionalist who was conducting secret and very illegal experiments designed to overturn the supposedly inviolate beliefs of UnFunDaMentalism. RaTionalists weren’t popular with the Party. Only dead RaTionalists were popular with the Party.
    Lost in her cogitations, Trixie leant back against the Boundary Layer, feeling it yield just a little as she did so. She had had Luigi dig the pit in an abandoned warehouse owned by her father that butted hard up against the Boundary. Digging her excavation pit here gave her the opportunity simultaneously to examine both the Mantle and the Boundary Layer.
    The Boundary Layer.
    If the Mantle was a Mystery, then the ninety-four miles of Boundary Layer that circled the Demi-Monde was the Big Mystery, the Mystery at the heart of the enigma that was the Containment. More learned men (men, hah!) had studied the Boundary Layer than any other of the Phenomena in the DemiMonde. And what had their studies