Transcendent by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page B

manifestations of the kids clambered past sheer rocky walls. I remembered some spectacular vacations we had had as kids, when my parents had taken us to the Galapagos Islands, Australia, the African game parks—places full of exotic life-forms that had astounded and excited me. But nobody went in search of wildlife anymore, because it wasn’t there to be found. There were still beautiful places in the world, where rich people went to vacation, but they were inanimate, like this, landscapes of rock and water.
    But even dead landscapes had changed. You could see how the faces of the rocks had been fenced off and wired over. Rising temperatures were destabilizing high-altitude rock faces by thawing the deep permafrost beneath them. Climbers were another endangered species nowadays.
    I had got lost in thought. Both the children were looking at me, calm concern marking their perfectly smooth faces. They looked as if they had been coached to sit like that.
    I got out of the room.
    I rattled around the house. Maybe I could call a water cab and go into town for a while. Find a bar, preferably nonfloating. Or maybe just walk the shore. But I didn’t want to stray too far from John and his calls. Even then, even at such a dreadful time in my life, I was in his power, and my mother’s. I was in a kind of prison, I thought, trapped into immobility by all the unspoken rules and treaties that had been laid down in my fifty-two years of life with my family.
    Defeated, I trailed back upstairs to John’s room.
             
    He was sitting on his bed, glancing at headlines on a softscreen. “No news.”
    “You’ve checked with your office?”
    “No need. Feliz is a good guy; he will keep trying until he gets through, and he will call the minute he does. Take it easy. Do you want something? A drink—I brought some beer.”
    “No. Thanks.”
    Hands in pockets, I mooched around the room. There seemed to be even less of John in here than there had been of me in my room, although John would have systematically stripped the place of anything valuable long ago. But in one shadowed corner I found a small bookcase. “Hey. Here are my old science fiction novels.”
    “Really?” He came across to see. We bent down side by side, brothers, two thick-necked middle-aged men, straining to see the titles on cracked and yellowing spines.
    I said, “I imagined they had been thrown out. I guess Mother moved them in here in one of her clear-outs.” Which would have been typical of her, I thought sourly; this stuff had been unbelievably important to me as a kid, but she didn’t even know whether it had belonged to me or John.
    John ran his fingers over the titles. Some of these books went back to the 1960s or even earlier. They had mostly been gifts from uncle George, who had collected books that had been old when he was a kid. “These might be worth something.”
    “They were mine, you know,” I said, too hastily.
    He held his hands up, a faintly mocking smile on his face. “I don’t dispute it.” He pulled a couple of copies off the shelves, took them out of their protective Mylar bags, and leafed through them. “Not in great condition,” he said. “See how this is yellowed—too long in the sun.”
    I straightened up. “Yeah. But I wouldn’t want to sell them. And anyhow the collectors’ market for this stuff isn’t what it was.”
    “It isn’t?”
    “Too far in the past. We’re all too old. For every collectible there is a demographic. You’re at your peak as a collector at thirty, forty—old enough to be nostalgic, rich enough to have disposable income, young enough to be foolish about spending it. But science fiction is older than that, long over.”
    “It was over even when we were kids,” he said. “I never understood what you saw in the stuff.”
    “I know you didn’t,” I said testily. “Which is the difference between us.” I glanced along the shelf and pulled out a novel. “Nobody reads the literature,