Laughing Wolf Read Free

happened when he viewed such recordings, he shivered at the thought that she was standing on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede.
    â€œHello, my sweets,” the hologram spoke. “I would have called sooner but the interference is terrible. We’ve also had some problems with the units — the oxygen leads are inefficient — but have managed at last to bring them on line. We now have fifty portables up and the colony’s impressive, if I say so myself.”
    Felix’s heart surged. He was proud of his mother. As the chief engineer for CosmoComm, a company that specialized in off-world projects, she was always travelling to distant regions, Mars, Deimos, the moon, and Ganymede, to ensure new portables were properly installed. Before her departure they’d toured the Clavius observatory, home to the earth’s biggest space telescope. Studying a screen that had projected scenes of Ganymede’s surface, they’d detected a tiny cluster of lights, from the outpost erected by the region’s first explorers. Barely able to control her excitement, she had revealed that she loved to construct portables because they formed the foundations for future cities and would spread human life even farther afield.
    â€œApart from the units, there’s not much else to report,” she went on. “No, wait. Two days ago we were struck by a comet. It shook the moon’s surface and blasted a crater over two miles wide. But other than that, my routines are the same. I miss you badly and can’t wait to return. I’m getting tired of the same old view. Here, let me adjust the camera so you can see for yourself.”
    His mother’s face vanished and an alien landscape took shape. In the foreground was a plain of ice, with a brown hue due to the atmosphere’s ions. In the distance were hulking crags of rock, the result of prehistoric crater collisions: their rough-hewn peaks craned up to the sky, desperate to catch a glimpse of the sun, which wobbled into view once a week for three hours. Of course there wasn’t any greenery present — no trees, no shrubs, not a single blade of grass. And because there was a total absence of wind, everything was preternaturally still, as if Felix were looking at a photograph or painting.
    Jupiter was hovering above this landscape, seemingly within arm’s reach of its moon. It was … vast. At one stage the camera was pointed straight at the planet and its bulk took up nine-tenths of the sky. Like its moon, it was beautiful but forbidding.
    â€œLonely, isn’t it?” she said, appearing again, “And do you know what the earth looks like from here? It’s no different from one of a billion stars. I sometimes find it hard to believe that on a tiny speck of light like that there are oceans, lakes, flowers, birds, trees, buildings, and crowds of people.”
    Felix nodded and was reminded, of all things, of his father’s place of work. The building contained millions of books on shelves that reached right up to the ceiling’s rafters. Exploring its aisles, he imagined each volume, with its collection of ideas, represented a world in miniature and that the repository itself was a universe …
    â€œOn a more cheerful note,” she added, “My job here will be finished in a month. The trip home will take at least two weeks — I’ll be transferring twice, on Mars and Deimos — but in six weeks time we’ll be together.
    I can’t wait —”
    Her face dissolved and reassembled, like a pond whose surface has been broken by a pebble.
    â€œOh dear,” she said. “The interference is increasing. I’d better say goodbye before the signal disappears. By the way, the disruption will be bad for awhile, so I might not call for the next three weeks. Take care, both of you. I love you with all —”
    The hologram ended before she finished her sentence.
    Felix glanced outside the