Moonseed Read Online Free PDF Page A

but she made him sit through it. Survival lesson, she thought. Listen and learn.
    But it was hard. It seemed a long time before little Billy led them out.
    In the yard, they all cast double shadows from sun and Venus, twin stars, and Jane shivered again.
    “It was our Hamish,” Billy said unexpectedly.
    “What?”
    Hamish turned out to be the elder brother of Billy and dead Joe. Eighteen years old. Jane realized, in retrospect, that there had been no sign of Hamish in his father’s flat.
    Hamish, it turned out, had led on the others.
    “Hamish used to take stuff up there,” Billy said.
    “Stuff?”
    “Lager. Ciggies and things. He even had a seat, so he could sit on top of the lift and ride up and down.” Even now, even after all that had happened, Billy smiled faintly at the bravado and daring of his brother, and Jane realized anew how very, very difficult it was to restrain boys from following the pack, all the way into the jaws of death.
    “But it was Hamish’s fault,” Billy said.
    “It was?”
    “He saw that planet thing.” Billy pointed. “When it flared up, like. Hamish saw it through a window. That’s why he let go of the doors, and the lift started going, and Joe fell down.”
    This boy will have to live with this. “Billy, Hamish is really just a kid too. Nobody’s to blame—”
    “Hamish says it’s not his fault. It’s the fault of that. ” And Billy’s small, grubby hand pointed straight at Venus.
     
    …And elsewhere in Edinburgh, a young policewoman called Morag Decker was pulling on her uniform, about to start her tour of duty. She was on attachment to a community policing unit that night, and would be working with drug addicts. Not an assignment she was looking forward to, but a major problem in Edinburgh. When Venus had first flared up it had caused a problem, as the full-Moon types had crawled out from under their rocks to howl at the new light in the sky; and tomorrow the local Emergency Planning Officer was going to brief them on Scottish Office guidelines on radiation poisoning and other stuff…But all that seemed to be fading, like any other nine-day wonder. For tonight her head was full of apprehension, and she tried to comfort herself with thoughts about the video and takeaway Chinese meal and bottle of wine she’d treat herself to tomorrow night, and she scarcely noticed Venus any more…
    …And to Debbie Sturrock, a trainee firefighter based along the coast in Dunbar, Venus was invisible, a light in the sky masked by the tower of flame she and her fellow students were trying to control, under the growling command of an unsympathetic station master. Fire in the sky meant nothing when you were confronted by fire on Earth…
    …And in Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, Jenny Calder had tried to follow the news—she had been interested in astronomy and science and stuff as a kid, and the Venus incident was strange and somehow disturbing—but now the kids were fighting again, this flat in the Gorbals, renovated or not, was just too small for all of them, and William, her husband, was worrying that if his new employers found out about his record he’d be kicked off the oil rig again, and so she pushed her hair from her eyes and stumbled from crisis to crisis, never quite falling over, and Venus was just too far away and too strange to deserve her attention…
    …And around the world, in the U.S., an Air Force pilot called Garry Beus test-flew an enhanced F–16 over the baked desert of California and looked up at Venus, smeared and distorted by his canopy in an eggshell sky, andthought with wistful sadness of his dying mother, Monica, and how she must be fascinated by this…And in Los Angeles, a journalist called Joely Stern, dismayed by yet another rejected job application, stared up at a Venus made Mars-red by filthy L.A. smog, and she stared at it, wishing she was up there, up in space, anywhere but here…
    …And in Japan, a geologist called Blue Ishiguro watched the