Harsh Oases Read Online Free PDF

official ceremony. Had a car accident on the way, being severely stoned. So I had to collect my diploma the next day. Dean said I was the last.”
    “Boy, that’s a distinction,” she said, flopping back on her stomach.
    I sat up and slapped my chest. “A national treasure.”
    We were quiet a minute.
    “It was a hard world for the last ten years,” I said. “I drifted for five of them before I found something I think I can do.”
    “Never surrender,” she said, quoting a pop-prophet of yore.
    “Why?”
    She sat up too. “Death takes no prisoners “
     
    In between the time Nikki left and Jasmine returned, I studied the physics and lore of aurorae, intent on appreciating this upcoming show even more than the first. (I liked the archaic name for them: merry-dancers.)
    One description of the phenomenon caused a strange flipflop in my perceptions.
    It read: “The magnetosphere might be compared to a gigantic television tube. The polar upper atmosphere would correspond to the screen of a television tube that has a diameter of about 4000 kilometers … The aurora would then correspond to an image on the screen in a television tube.”
    I thought of Jasmine’s face, once endlessly replicated around the globe, and of Nikki’s streamers of cold fire, almost equally widespread.
    It seemed the choice I had to make was not what I had thought, less between shadow and substance, than between the images which two women cast on the screens of the world.
     
    “You heartless bastard,” Jasmine said in a flat, uninflected tone. She had passed the screaming, violent stage, entered tears and tantrums, and exited to resignation.
    “C’mon, Jazz,” I said hopelessly. “Don’t pretend what we had was anything grander than what it was. You know it was strictly a thing of convenience, on both sides.”
    “I still need you,” she said. “I’m still down, or maybe just crawling back up, and you’re gonna leave me. I was good enough for you when you had nothing, but now that you think you’re getting somewhere with this writing shit, you feel you can ditch me.”
    I couldn’t refute the truth, so I uttered a cheap shot.
    “You’ve been screwing the socks off Trollinger.”
    “That doesn’t count, and you know it. That was for my career.”
    “This is for my career,” I said, and turned.
    “Well, let me tell you, Marty: no one walks out on Alyx and gets away with it.” She passed her hand across her forehead, and whispered, “Jasmine. I meant to say Jasmine.”
    I walked out on her then.
    I was staying in a suite registered to Nikki, at the small Hesperides Hotel owned by Jaime Ybarrondo. I had moved all my few possessions there before Jasmine came home. Or so I thought, until I noticed a sheaf of manuscript missing.
    I dithered for an hour, and then went back for it.
    Jasmine was on the phone when I let myself in. “Just get it done. I don’t care what it costs.” I saw Trollinger’s head—now festooned with red curls—in the holotank. Then she cut the connection.
    “What do you want?” she coldly said.
    “Some papers.”
    She indicated the table where they sat. “I was going to put them in the trash, but they stank too bad.”
    I let her cheap shot arrow into my gut, to balance mine lodged in hers.
     
    Venus was falling. That bright wanderer among the stars seemed ready to dip into the chilly Pacific. There was no moon that night to compete with the aurorae, and I felt the show would be even more striking than the first.
    Once again the assorted yachts and hydrofoils rode the ebony sea, like some colony of the dispossessed, permanently adrift from the fixed realities of the land.
    I was not, of course, aboard Trollinger’s craft. Nikki had found me a spot with one of her backers. The man’s name was Song Ping, and he hailed from Hong Kong. He had left just before the Communists took over. I liked his sing-song, clang-bang name, and had been gratified to find the man himself a pleasant sort. Just prior