Alex shrugged and tried to recover his broken sleep. What was with Gordon, anyhow? Lost on frozen Earth, the authorities searching for him, and there he sat writing fiction in the middle of the night. A novel no one would read.
Sherrine drove the rig while Bob slept in the back. The hill country of southwest Missouri, trees shorn prematurely of their leaves, swept past on both sides of the nearly abandoned interstate. The setting sun nagged at the edges of her vision, not quite dead ahead and too low for the visor to help, painting the pastel clouds that hugged the horizon. She kept her speed down; from fear of the cops, but also because she had to watch each overpass as she came upon it.
Here the Ice was only a distant whisper beyond the horizon, borne on summer breezes that had become
crisp and cool. The fall came earlier, and the winter blizzards were more frequent.
And none of the overpasses had quite collapsed. But they were shedding. What had Fang called it? Spalling? Sometimes she had to steer the truck around chunks of concrete lying in the roadway under an overpass; and she sweated when she drove across a bridge. The dreadful blizzards of the smog-free 19th century Plains once more shrouded the heartland in winter, freezing and cracking the works of mankind.
Alex was crumpled against a pillow jammed between the passenger door and the seat back. He slumped loosely, dozing, bent like a contortionist, or a marionette. From time to time he would blink and raise his head and gaze around himself as if baffled before nodding off once more to the gentle rocking of the truck's suspension.
Gordon sat between them quietly reading a book. He had found it at the clubhouse in St. Louis and had pounced on it with unconcealed delight. A thick squat paperback with cracked and dog-eared covers. The Portable Kipling. The fans had made him a gift of it.
He closed it now, because it had grown too dark to read. Gordon gazed out the windshield into the gathering dusk, where sunset stained the western horizon. He whispered so as not to wake Alex. "I saw nothing like this in Freedom. Always we see sunsets from above."
Sherrine was glad of conversation. Driving in silence disembodied you. It was talk that made you real. "I've seen the old pictures, looking down on the Earth. They made my heart ache."
"Each place has its own beauties. We can learn to love the one, and still yearn for the other."
"What were you reading?"
"A story. A character sketch. 'Lispeth.' It tells of Indian hill country girl raised by English missionaries. She wears English dress and acts in English manner. When a young official of the Raj passes through, she falls in love. He swears he will return and marry her; but he never has such an intention and abandons her without a thought. Finally she realizes truth. So she gives up the mission and returns to her village and her gods and becomes peasant wife."
"A sad story."
"A tragedy." She could hear his smile in the dark. "I am half-Russian. We are not happy without a tragedy. Kipling saw the tragedy of India. Lispeth thought she was English, but the English never did."
"I haven't read much Kipling. His books are hard to find these days."
"Oh, but you must. I will lend you mine. Kipling. And Dickens. And London. And Twain. Wonderful writers. I have… No. I have only this one book now. Real book, of real paper. Still, you may borrow it."
Sherrine smiled to herself. "You like to read."
"Yes. Yes. Though much I do not understand. References. Shared assumptions of Downers. I read Austen one time; but her world is like alien planet. Still, I laugh and cry with her characters."
"I had a math teacher in college who had read Pride and Prejudice fifteen times, in fifteen different languages."
Gordon blinked. "Math professor?"
"Math professors read literature, Gordon. But it's not commutative. Lit profs never read math."
He laughed. "Russian literature is harder than maths. Do you smile, that I find Russian literature difficult? My matushka made me read Tolstoy, Gorki, Pushkin. It was so different from my father's Western literature. In the West, novel was biographical. About characters. About Lispeth or David Copperfield. In Russia, was writing about ideas. War and Peace. Crime and Punishment. Characters, even central characters like Karenina only illustrate the Idea. Very hard for each people to read the other kind. But my mnatushka said it was important I live in two worlds, the Rodina and the West. A new society is evolving in the habitats. Western optimism and Russian gloom.
Sherrine laughed. "It sounds… appropriate. It needs a new literature, then. A synthesis. Floater literature."
"Perhaps. Gloomy optimism. Optimistic gloom. I have tried… " Silence.
"Light-hearted pessimism. Mark Twain?" She turned on her headlights. Had Gordon said--"You've tried to write something?" Scratch any eager reader and you'll find a wannabee writer.
"Nichevo. Story fragments. A few poems. Such things are not survivalrelated activity. I must steal time to do them. So they are not very good. Nothing good enough for you to hear."
"Have you ever read a fanzine? No, really. I read some pretty awful stuff in my grandfather's old pulps. Go ahead. Recite one of your poems for me."
Next to him, Alex stirred shifted positions.
"No, I cannot," Gordon whispered.
She took a hand from the steering wheel and laid it on his arm. "Please?"
"I… If you will not laugh?"
"I won't laugh. I promise."
"I hold you to promise." Gordon coughed into his fist, straightened in the seat. He looked off into the black distance, not meeting her eyes, and spoke gently:
"Lying softly, white as snow is snow,
With delicate beauty, borne delightful to the eye,
Reflected in the silver, skydropped moon:
Her face, upturned and smiled on by the stars.
Asleep is she more lovely and at peace;
Her skin would glow a light unsnowlike warm.
She sleeps. Touched by the moon
And me.
He fell silent; still he would not look at her. Bashful. "Why, that's lovely, Gordon."
He turned at last. "You like it?"
"Certainly." Sherrine probed: "She must have been pretty."
"Who?"
"Your girlfriend. The one you wrote the poem to."
"She is. Very beautiful."
Aha! "Have you, ever recited for her?"
"Yeah-da. I did." Sherrine smiled broadly out the windshield. Gordon was caught on that cusp where he wanted to keep his love a deep, delicious secret and shout it to the world at the same time. She had been caught there once before. She and Jake. A long time ago, but she could remember the wonderful glow. With Bob it had been different fun, good times, a lot of laughs; but she had never glowed. "What did she say?"
"She said my poem was lovely."
"Well, that's a pretty tepid response to a love poem."
A long pause, then, "Ah. I had forgotten."
"Forgotten what?"
"You do not live in such close quarters as we do. You do not have to be so careful to avoid offense or to rub against your neighbor's feelings. So few of us, and still there has been murder, because we cannot escape from one another. One does not speak of love until one is sure."
"Then how can you ever be sure?"
He may have shrugged in the dark, but he did not answer. Sherrine returned her attention to the road. She kept it at thirty and slowed for every shadow in the road. Some shadows were hard and rigid. Approaching bridges, she crawled.
Ten minutes or an hour later, something went click in her head.
Oh, no. He means me!
It had been obvious for some time that both Angels lusted after her. Lord knew why. Tall and skinny was the Angel ideal, but… Lust she could deal with. A little recreational workout; fun for everyone and no hard feelings. It was impossible to sit between two horny males--three, counting Bob, who was in a perpetual state of rut without picking up the pheromones. She was more than a little horny herself.