Free The Venging by Greg Bear Page B

our deepest prides. Pull out our mistakes and amplify them beyond all truth. What right do you have to take young children and twist their minds?" The wind sang through the cracks in the walls. I tried to see if Jack or Meg was there, but only shadows remained. "I know where you come from, don't forget that! Out of the ground! Out of the bones of old wicked Indians! Shamans and pagan dances and worshiping dirt and filth! I heard about you from the old squaws on the reservation. Frost and Spring, they called you, signs of the turning year. Well, now you got a different name! Death and demons, I call you, hear me?" She seemed to jump at a sound, but I couldn't hear it. "Don't you argue with me!" she shrieked. She took her glasses off and held out both hands. "Think I'm a weak old woman, do you? You don't know how deep I run in these communities! I'm the one who had them books taken off the shelves. Remember me? Oh, you hated itnot being able to fill young minds with your pestilence. Took them off high school shelves and out of listsburned them for junk! Remember? That was me, I'm not dead yet! Boy, where (44 of 197) The Venging are you? "Enchant her," I whispered to the air. "Magic her. Make her go away. Let me live here with you." "Is that you, boy? Come with your aunt, now. Come with me, come away!" "Go with her," the wind told me. "Send your children this way, years from now. But go with her." I felt a kind of tingly warmth and knew it was time to get home. I snuck out the back way and came
    around to the front of the house. There was no car. She'd followed me on foot all the way from the farm. I wanted to leave her there in the old house, shouting at the dead rafters, but instead I called her name and waited. She came out crying. She knew. "You poor sinning boy," she said, pulling me to her lilac bosom. |Go to Contents |
    Petra
    "God is dead, God is dead"Perdition! When God dies, you'll know it.
    Confessions of St. Argentine I'm an ugly son of stone and flesh, there's no denying it. I don't remember my mother. It's possible she abandoned me shortly after my birth. More than likely she is dead. My fatherugly beaked half-winged thing, if he resembles his sonI have never seen. Why should such an unfortunate aspire to be a historian? I think I can trace the moment my choice was made. It's among my earliest memories, and it must have happened about thirty years ago, though I'm sure I lived many years before thatyears now lost to me. I was squatting behind thick, dusty curtains in a vestibule, listening to a priest instructing other novitiates, all of pure flesh, about Mortdieu. His words are still vivid. "As near as I can discover," he said, "Mortdieu occurred about seventy-seven years ago. Learned ones deny that magic was set loose on the world, but few deny that God, as such, had died." (45 of 197) Indeed. That's putting it mildly. All the hinges of our once-great universe fell apart, the axis tilted, cosmic doors swung shut, and the rules of existence lost their foundations. The priest continued in measured, awed tones to describe that time. "I have heard wise men speak of the slow decline. Where human thought was strong, reality's sudden quaking was reduced to a tremor. Where thought was weak, reality disappeared completely, swallowed by chaos. Every delusion became as real as solid matter." His voice trembled with emotion. "Blinding pain, blood catching fire in our veins, bones snapping and flesh powdering. Steel flowing like liquid. Amber raining from the sky. Crowds gathering in streets that no longer followed any maps, if the maps themselves had not altered. They knew not what to do. Their weak minds could not grab hold" Most humans, I take it, were entirely too irrational to begin with. Whole nations vanished or were turned into incomprehensible whirlpools of misery and depravity. It is said that certain universities, libraries, and museums survived, but to this day we have little contact with them. I think often of