Bête Read Online Free PDF Page B

them. It was slow and labour-intensive. Then Jazon grew middle-aged and suddenly it changed. He was the medieval monk who had spent a lifetime mastering calligraphy and looked up to see a billion kids dabbling at their screens and conjuring amazing edifices of programming via systems wholly intuitive and adaptable.
    So Preacherman was full of what the philosopherscall ressentiment . He blamed society as a whole for letting him down. A century ago he would have become a communist or a hippy or an anarchist. Nowadays environmentalism is the only game in town, and all the righteous rage of the young filters through it. So he took his skills, such as they were, to the Greens. When I met him he was in a period of disillusionment. We tramped about the countryside.We slept rough. The rain came down through the trees like the whole forest was collapsing on our heads. We found an old van, once smooth and white, now sharkskin-rough and the colour of coffee. We broke the back lock with a rock and spent the night in the back.
    In the morning the rain had stopped. A single blackbird flew meanderingly between the trees, like a lost glove blown on a strongwind.
    ‘Where will it all end, eh?’ Preach asked, meditatively. ‘What’s it all coming to?’
    ‘It’s going the same way it’s always been going,’ I told him.
    ‘But quicker. Yeah? You want to know what the gossip was, in the highest echelons of the Greens?’
    ‘You’ll tell me, whether I want to know or not.’
    ‘Plague,’ he said. ‘Gene-twerked. Lab-made. Miniature fingers rattlingthe Gs and Cs and As and Ts on the DNA spiral like beads on an abacus.’
    ‘Plague,’ I said, in a what-bollocks-you-speak tone of voice.
    ‘No need to be so dismissive, Graham,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. Scarring – scar tissue. It’s the Achilles heel. You know? Without the ability to clot and scar we’d drop down dead. But think what happens if your eyes scar over! Your lungs ! They developedit for the Great War that didn’t come. It is waiting to be released. It’ll be the end times. Just think.’
    ‘All I can think at the moment,’ I told him, ‘is how hungry I am.’
    We walked from town to town, and I offered my services as a butcher. My pool of customers was small, and ageing, but it held steady for a while. Of course, the cultural discourse of ‘butcher’ is now perfectly negative.Concentration camps, drone-killing-fields, slaughter as the idiom of hell. Long gone, the idea of jolly fat men in stripy aprons offering you a necklace of turd-shaped sausages, bright pink and promising deliciousness. But butchering is a skill, and cannot be acquired overnight. The killing and butchering of animals is not something into which Moore’s law can make any inroads.
    So we wentfrom town to town. I say I offered my services , but mostly it was Preacherman who had the contacts, and the social skills; who could insinuate his way into conversations and present me, with my skill set, to interested parties. At the beginning we got paid in money; later we tended to get paid in kind. I liked this less, since I’ve never been sentimental about meat – Vitameat is perfectly OK byme, so long as my belly is filled. But it was round about this time that Preacherman converted officially to that Christ the Carnivore cult, and for him a steak became a sacramental business. He expatiated at length about just how many times eating flesh is mentioned in the Bible.
    Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything[Genesis 9:3].
    As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables [Romans 14:1-2].
    For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. Theseare the animals you may eat: the ox, the