Fifteen - Colour Shock
A man called Silver held her hand,warming it, pressed between his own. ‘I've news,’ he said, ‘ofa Terran warship...the SS Usufruct?’
Sally Droover moaned, squeezed hisfingers. A ghosted outline sailed past her eyes, features plastic.
‘They described you as“dangerous,”’ Silver said. ‘You want to tell me why?’
She stuck her tongue out. It waspuffy. ‘Those f*ckers used us,’ she answered. ‘Ernie told me,in a dream.’
‘Ernie?’
‘Our engineer - before Byron.Did you find him?’
‘Byron? No, not yet.’
‘Neither willthey,’ Sal said proudly. She felt like a little girl; this was herfather who comforted her. He sat by her bed when she was ill, perhapswith mumps or a fever...
Kate would be out shopping withmother. They'd come bursting in waving bags and big, cheery smiles,teasing her, modelling new blouses, shoes, haircuts. She grimaced.
Silver looked worried. ‘Somethingwrong?’
‘My sister,’ she murmured,picking the tortoiseshell comb off her chest, dragging her thumb downits springy teeth. ‘I have to give her this.’
‘A present,’ he guessed.
‘A future,’ she corrected.
*
Uncle Stylo exited the narrowcanyon, kicking up dust. There was an uneasiness about him, like theworld, the false world of the Benches, the accessories to Radio City,its archipelago, was stirring. Roused from some magical sleep, aserpent, its crested tail woven through the tame Atlantic, thepre-industrialized, raw-natured element slowly reasserted itself.Manmade was no longer good enough. Reconstructions, illusions,effigies were being superseded, overtaken by the very forms andprocesses they themselves had destroyed and replaced. The planetaltered, Stylo imagined. Parts of it sank, were cast afresh from thewaves, as at first, born of the ocean's depthless womb, thrust uponto the land to struggle, fight, survive or die withoutintervention, matched and provided for, but in limited, finitenumbers. The imitations to dwindle, he saw. And the imitators to fallthe long fall...
Into what?Chaos? He glimpse a fresh solidity in the rocks, their rednessenhanced with green and blue and yellow. All the colours were here inthe stone under his feet. To his practised eye they shone with areality only touched on before.
A great sadness welled up insidehim. Yet, long-buried, the serpent stirred in him too.
And he smiled, pleased. Theabandoned kingdoms, the neglected realms, their fabulous gardens hadonce more opened their gates, set out their random, lavish stalls forbusiness.
Extraordinary, Stylo thought. Heturned for home, wanting, needing to capture it, to shape and mouldwhile the newly vibrant hues were still fresh in his mind.
Running, he laughed, and hislaughter floated on the wind, carried far and wide, even to the earsof Kate and Mordy, the two as yet struggling apart, soon to matchboth data and stories, scars and organs...compare the trees of theenergized forest to the support-systems and backups prevalent intheir lives, the lives of others: branches of wood and metal, rootsof tangled history, from seed to corpse; bark and leaves, skin andits sloughing, the passage of fluids, blood, sap and tear-droppedwater; thoughts across space, distance no obstacle to their willinghearts, the delay meaningless, time abundant...