Cronix Read Online Free PDF Page A

few days, chatting about his life in London and enjoying the nature. Since then, Oriente had lived only with his dogs. He wondered whether such a recluse could have anything meaningful to say to a woman with a will-o’-the-wisp mind. He cast around for something to break the ice, and pointed up to the sky where constellations wheeled slowly across the heavens.
    “See that cluster of stars?” he said. “That’s Andromeda, the chained lady. And that over there, that’s…er…” he racked his brain to dredge up the name. “Ursa Major! That’s it, the Great Bear.” The woman glanced up: not seeing anything worth looking at, she reverted to the hypnotic flicker of the fire.
    Oriente looked for another constellation. Occasionally, a bright speck of yellow light would trace a luminous trail across the night sky: the souls of billions of people floating in space.
    He pointed to the bright dot. “And  that  is where you come from,” he said. She looked up at him. “Yes, you. From up there.” This time she peered up for longer, squinting into space.
    “Those are the Orbiters,” he said. “Look, there’s another.” He pointed at another quadrant of the open sky. Her eyes followed his finger. “ Forever beyond the reach of the cold woods, the bears and wolves, all these antediluvian fears of man ,” he quoted, though he could not recall who he was quoting. “Until they come back, which they don’t do very often. I wonder why you were coming back?”
    She looked at him, pointed at her chest, as if to say 'Me?' She hadn't uttered a work since her monosyllabic demand for footwear that morning. She certainly didn’t talk much, but for a scold it was plenty.
    “Yes, you. You see, a long time ago, all this was full of people.” He swept his arm across the horizon. “You couldn’t even see the stars at night because of all the light from the city.”
    All those generations who had slept in the valley below, who could never have imagined that one day their descendants would glide silently across the night skies above, abandoned to whatever dreams they cared to indulge in. Not even Fitch had quite grasped what would happen when he unleashed his invention on the world.
    The thought of Fitch made him restless again.
    “They lived here, and they died here, for a very long time,” he said. “Until someone came up with an idea, a sort of machine, that allowed them to live on, but just their minds,” said touching his own head, aware she would have trouble grasping even a fraction of what he was saying. He kept talking anyway, because he was starting to find he liked it. “To keep them safe, they put them in these big containers up there. And sometimes they come back here for a few years, to work or have children, or…”
    He stopped. She was frowning, trying to follow what he was saying.
    “Yes,” he said gently. “Your mind, all that you think, or remember…” Except he knew it wasn’t her. What she was, in fact, was just a fragment of what she might have been. And yet she was still, irrevocably, her. “But now you are here. With me.” He smiled. She gazed at him and slowly the crease on her brows smoothed. She cocked her head and stared into the fire, then back up at the sky.
    “Okay,” he said. “Sleep now. Tent.” He opened the flap of the tent.
    “You take the sleeping bag, I’ll take the blanket.” She looked warily at the tent, so he put his hands to the side of his face in a gesture of sleep. “Warm in there. Cold out here.”
    He stepped inside, stripped down and wrapped himself in his insulating blanket. Through the wall of the tent he saw her silhouette move against the firelight, perhaps scouting for any lurking predator, Cronix or wolf. Or Fitch. Then she came in and lay on the sleeping bag.
    “No,” he said, reaching across, “You get inside...”
    The woman reached reflexively for where he knew her knife was hidden. He pulled back quickly as she squatted on her haunches, ready to