Nostalgia Read Free Page A

game, a Holly Chu lookalike with a big weapon will be the hero who teaches the Barbarians a lesson.
    So much for Maskinia, out there somewhere in Region 6 behind the Border. Most people couldn’t even point to it on a map. Elsewhere, the punitive, preventive war was dragging on in Bimaru, also in Region 6, Operation Stunning Strength. If we don’t beat them over the head, they’ll send their fighters here. And they play dirty. Therefore, stun and hold, stanch the flow. The scene was noisy, chaotic; flashes of light and dark; the muffled staccato of airships. A medical helicopter landed a few feet away, a wounded soldier was carried away, a leg blown off, the torn exposed flesh throbbing, life ebbing away as the bright red blood dripped its image onto the kilim carpet in my room.
    Elsewhere still, some sixty refugees had attempted last week to swim under the EuroBarrier section of the Long Border in the Mediterranean; some twenty-five survived, the remaining were electrocuted or simply drowned.
    Such daily reminders keep you thankful to be this side of all that horror. You repeat this gratitude like a mantra, the unlegislated anthem of our North Atlantic Alliance:
We live in the best city in the world; in the best and richest nation in the world; in the civilized world of worlds.
Of course other nations say the same thing, those of the East. But by what throw of the Dice of Life are you born
here
and not
there
in the Other? You might as well ask why you were born a human and not a fly. But if you found yourself
there
in that bottomless misery, wouldn’t it be natural, as part of life’s programmed struggle to survive, through osmotic pull to strive to get
here
, the prosperous North Atlantic? As natural as it is for us to do anything we can to keep them there. But once they are here, then we open our arms to these wretched of the earth and offer them a new life. Surely that’s fair.
    One of those twenty-five survivors could well have ended up at the Sunflower, and I would have been among the team that would give him or her a new life, transform them into someone useful to our society, someone perhaps who grew up in Egypt and ended up on a potato farm in Peoria, Illinois, or a vineyard in Niagara.
    But Presley Smith was not my creation. He came ready made but damaged, to have his wound stitched.
    —
    Joanie, my beautiful cheating BabyGen, breezed in, removed her jacket. “Hi, Doc!” She still calls me that. I switched off the TV. The studio was bathed for a fleeting instant in an eerie, spectral glow before returning to normal. We greeted each other with a peck.
    She looked tired, she looked spent, she looked alluring all the same. I buried my head into her straight blond hair and sniffed her. The perfume had gone faint by now. La Divina. She stepped away. How long would she stay with this back number that was me? As long as I supported her.
    —I’ll go and have a shower first.
    —How was the match?—who played? Like I cared.
    —Maple Leafs and Red Stars; Leafs lost.
    —Any good—the match? You had fun?
    —Uh-huh. Thrilling finish. We should have won.
    —Score?
    A pause.
    —Three–two…two–one…what does it matter?
    That edge in the tone, that silly response shouted guilt to me. And I replied mutely, It matters, but it doesn’t matter, because I know. And you know that I know.
    —You eaten? I asked instead. Of course she had.
    —We stopped at a bar after the match.
    She ran off to shower. And she emerged, ravishing, glowing, hard tits poking through the fitted pyjama top, and I grabbed her, to prove a point, disprove my suspicions…but to no avail. She skipped off to her side of the bed, got between the sheets. I followed. She curled up, a defensive hedgehog, her knees her armour. I knew she was no longer mine the last time we fucked, when she burped just as I came—hilarious, I know, if not so heart-tearingly pathetic. But she’d stay with me and we’d live the double life, pretending nothing was