Furious Gulf

Furious Gulf Read Free Page B

Book: Furious Gulf Read Free
Author: Gregory Benford
Ads: Link
walls, not major players in anything.
    Argo
was as friendly to its passengers as a ship could be, a fine artifact from the High Arcology Era. Trouble was, its systems
     assumed the passengers had educations that Family Bishop could only guess at.
    Example: the sewage. Neither Cap’n Killeen nor Cermo nor anybody else had been able to make head or tail of the instructions
     for the pressure system.
    It assumed something called the Perfect Gas Law, the instructions said. The foul stuff that actually flowed through the smooth,
     clear pipes was certainly not perfect, and it obeyed no law anybody ever heard of. It spewed out without provocation and often
     with what seemed to be insulting timing. Last week, a howling brown leak sprayed the Family when it was assembled for a wedding.
     That took a certain fine edge off the celebration.
    Toby joined the other poor souls who had drawn maintenance this week. He breathed through his mouth but that helped only a
     while, until the smell got up into his head. His teacher Aspect, Isaac, spoke to him in his mind while he bent over, pushing
     the foul stuff with a sponge brush.
    I have conferred with the most ancient records you carry in your chip-library. Interestingly, the term you use is actually
     derived from the name of the man on Old Earth who invented the flush toilet. An Englishman, legend has it, he made a fortune
     and benefited all humankind. His name, Thomas Crapper, has come to be—
    “Hey, give me a break.”
    I thought perhaps some distraction would make your task easier.
    “Look, I want distraction, I’ll play one of the old Mose Art musics.”
    You mistake the name, I fear. That should be Wolfgang Ama—
    Toby mentally pushed the sputtering Aspect back into its storage hole. Aspects were recorded personalities out of Family Bishop’s
     past, some quite old, like Isaac. They were really interactive information bases written on small chips, which Toby carried
     in his neck slots. Isaac was only a shrunken slice of a real, long-dead human personality, of course, mostly just old lore
     that might come in handy. Isaac had tried and tried to explain that Perfect Gas Law, but Toby never really got it.
    Knowing about Thomas Crapper wasn’t going to be any use to Toby, but he got a smile out of it; so maybe that was some purpose,
     after all. The Family used Aspects to help them get through troubles, carrying the masses of knowledge they needed to survive
     while living amid technology that was far beyond them.
    “Hey, you sleepwalking?”
    Toby came alert. Besen was standing beside him, neat and trim, her part of the cleanup done. Toby still had half a hallway
     to sponge up. “Uh, I was thinking deep thoughts.”
    Besen rolled her eyes. “Oh sure.”
    He gestured with his mop at the brown-stained deck. “Bet you don’t know who this stuff is named for.”
    Besen looked skeptical when he told her. “Honest truth,” he said.
    Besen gave him a grin and he marveled at how wonderful she looked lately. Fitted out in overalls, auburn hair tied back, spattered
     and grimy, to his eyes she still had a radiance. Girls bloomed just once, like flowers, before turning into women—but that
     was enough. Besen seemed impossibly fresh, alive, fun.
    “I was just remembering some of those plays we had to listen to,” he said. “They apply here.”
    “Oh?” she said skeptically.
    “Sure, you recall. ‘Good night, good night! Farting is such sweet sorrow.’ Great romantic stuff.”
    “That’s ‘
Parting
is such sweet sorrow.’ Some romantic you are!”
    One of their private games came from a truly ancient chip that Besen carried. It had actual texts from Old Earth, including
     a gray geezer named Shake-Spear. A great poet from some kind of primitive hunter-gatherer society, Besen thought. This Shake-Spear
     was one of the scraps humans had retained across the Great Gulf that separated them from the Old Earth cultures, and Besen
     liked to quote frags of such stuff, just to

Similar Books

Embrace the Fire

Tamara Shoemaker

Scrapbook of Secrets

Mollie Cox Bryan

Shatter

Michael Robotham

Fallen Rogue

Amy Rench

Dylan's Redemption

Jennifer Ryan

Daughters of the Nile

Stephanie Dray

At Home with Mr Darcy

Victoria Connelly