Coyote Horizon Read Online Free PDF Page A

made up the kiosk walls. Several stacks of forms, carefully arranged according to purpose and separated into trays marked IN and OUT. Three pens, one of which was missing its cap. An electronic passport stamp. A small box of tissue paper. A plastic bottle of water.
    Every morning when he came to work, the first thing the inspector did was make sure that everything was in its proper place. There was seldom any change in the appearance of his desk from when he’d last seen it, unless another inspector had borrowed a pen (which was why one of them was missing its cap) or swiped some tissue paper; nonetheless, it was a way of starting the day. Reassured that all was right in his world, he would open the lower-right drawer and place inside a brown paper bag containing his lunch: a ham-and-cheese sandwich, an apple, perhaps a chocolate brownie that he’d picked up at the deli down the street from his apartment. He would then take a seat in the hard, straight-backed chair and, folding his hands together, lift his gaze to the partition, through which he could see the broad windows overlooking the landing field.
    Other customs inspectors sat in identical cubes, doing the same job as he did, or stood behind adjacent tables, ready to open suitcases, trunks, and bags in search of contraband: illegal drugs, unregistered firearms, explosive materials, invasive species of flora or fauna, or anything else that might pose a risk to the health and safety of the inhabitants of the new world. He seldom spoke to any of them, though, and they’d come to accept the fact that their coworker preferred to be left alone. But they’d all noticed the thick silver band on his left wrist and recognized it for what it was: a control bracelet, the kind issued to former criminals released on parole.
    He’d never told anyone the reason he had to wear it, and their supervisors refused to divulge that information. But the other inspectors were as resourceful as they were curious, and it didn’t take long for them to ferret out the background of their quiet colleague. During lunch-hour conversations in the break room—he almost always ate lunch by himself, so he was seldom among them—they sometimes discussed who he was and why he was here. And although they pitied him, or at least to the extent that anyone might express empathy for a young man with a troubled past, they also avoided him as someone who’d once committed an act of violence and who might well be provoked to do so again.
    They didn’t need to worry. The customs inspector would never again harm anyone. Those who were familiar with his case—his family; the superintendent of the rehabilitation farm where he’d lived for two and a half Coyote years; the psychiatrist who’d treated him; the magistrates who’d sentenced him and, later, approved his petition for conditional parole; the influential uncle who’d arranged for him to be assigned to a work-release program—agreed that he was not a dangerous individual, and that he should be given a chance to pay his debt to society.
    So the bracelet was fastened around his wrist, and a parole officer was designated to handle his case. Then he was sent to New Brighton, where he became a faceless bureaucrat performing a routine and unimaginative task. And there he sat, waiting to see what would happen next, knowing that this day would be pretty much the same as yesterday and the day before that, and that someday in the future, many years from now, he would take his last breath, and his death would come as blessed relief from a life that had long since lost any spark or flavor.
    His name was Hawk Thompson, and he’d killed his father. And now he was waiting to die.

The ships came from Earth.
    Some days, there would be only one; others, there would be two or three. Every now and then, more would touch down, and the field would be crowded with spacecraft, parked so close together that it seemed as if their wingtips nearly touched one another. But