The Deadly Sky Read Free Page B

Besides, I want my own.”
    “What will you do with it?”
    “I don’t know. Buy a bigger house, a better wardrobe dispenser, a tastier menu, finer furniture, stuff like that.”
    “Everything bigger, better and nicer. What makes you think people want to wake up to the sights and sounds of a thunderstorm?”
    “I’d like it. Why wouldn’t they?”
    “Because they haven’t as much imagination as you do.”
    I looked at him. “Have you been talking to Willmett?”
    “An interesting young man. He thinks the universe emanates from his soul.”
    “Only when he’s been indulging. Normally he knows where reality comes from.”
    “Do you?”
    I didn’t give him a glance. “Reality isn’t what you or I think it is. It’s just there.”
    “Like the thunderstorms you want to give to the people of Emera?”
    Sargoth was just under six feet tall, colored like a rainbow, with one green eye and two thin arms. His specialty was detecting or solving mysteries. When I was twelve and he found me in the suburbs hanging out with some other trash my age, I hit him with my fist. My little finger still had a knot on it where it had broken. Sargoth was of the drell cult and I had never been able to figure out how a sane human being could relinquish his mortal coil and have his brain put in a glass house all for the sake of peculiar principles.
    To get back to my inventions, there hadn’t been a storm in or over Emera since a group of scientists discovered how to divert them by orbiting light shields in the sky. Heat and air were diverted elsewhere so that the weather in the city remained constant. Neutral was what I called it. Like a docked cat. Neuter. Not once had I ever awakened in my bedroom to the bang of thunder, the flash of lightning or the pouring of rain. To experience those natural disasters I had been forced to climb the mountain.
    “Birds,” said Sargoth. “Big ones, like horses. Such do not exist. However there is a species called jinga that lives in the open fields between cities. They are also sometimes seen flying toward the mountains. There is nothing unusual about them. They would probably roost on Emera’s spires the same as pigeons try to do except for the sprays of icy water. As you know, all flying fauna are kept away by the small vents in the ledges and spires—”
    “Is that all you found out?”
    “Not by a long shot. I can tell you anything you want to know about birds.”
    “Except for the jinga.”
    “I know all about them. I did as you told me, hooked into the library computer—”
    “You found out that people ride them.”
    “Not at all. People ride horses. Asses, too.”
    I gave him a wary glance. “People don’t ride the jinga?”
    “The only birds people ride are planes made of glass or vorite.”
    “What about the history of the mountain?”
    “That particular request of yours puzzled me all the way downtown. Mountains don’t have histories. They pop up out of the planet’s crust, sometimes they behave like volcanoes, and that’s really all there is to it.”
    “Tell me about Timbrini.”
    Sargoth shrugged, glistened, moved around the table in order to watch me cut a plate. His brain lay in its transparent globe where I could clearly see it, motionless, not pulsing or throbbing like a heart but hunching like coils of engorged intestines. Arteries made of vorite carried streams of blood up the sides of the globe, flooding the coils now and then, distracting me, fascinating and repelling me. The only thing human about Sargoth was the brain. All else had been given up and now he lived like a glassman, with head, thorax, arms and legs. He somewhat resembled the models I once constructed as a boy.
    “How will it work if you ever get it perfected?’ he said, referring to my latest project.
    “Like an antenna on the roof. It will catch the light from storms out in the wilderness.”
    “And the sounds?”
    “That I can’t catch with glass. Hmmm. I don’t think I can. Anyhow not