Periphery Read Online Free PDF Page B

know,” said older, colder Hilde, and I could still see that fluid weirdness in her. “My parents didn’t know either. But I’ve thought about it and I’ve read about the new science. I’ve guessed that it’s like Koffi said, do you remember? The Buonarotti Transit takes what Carpazian calls the soul apart: and it has unleashed monsters. Only they don’t “happen” near the torus—they get born on earth. The government’s trying to stamp them out, and that’s what I am. I didn’t mean to deceive you, Ruth. I woke up and I was here, knowing nothing and in love with you—”
    I wanted to grab my clothes and leave. I had a violent urge to flee.
    “You didn’t tell me.”
    “I didn’t know! I found the nightdresses, I knew that was very strange, I tried to tell you, but even then I didn’t know. The memories only just came back.”
    “Why did they send you out here? Why didn’t they kill you?”
    “I expect they were afraid.” Hilde began to laugh, and cry. “They were afraid of what I’d do if they tried to kill me, so they just sent me away, a long, long way away. What does it matter? We are dead, Ruth. You are dead, I am dead, the rest is a fairytale. What does it matter if I’m something forbidden? Something that should never have breathed?”
    Forbidden, forbidden… I held out my arms, I was crying too.
    Embrace, close as you can. Everything’s falling apart, flesh and bone, the ceramic that yields like soft metal, the slippery touch of satin, all vanishing—
    As if they never were.
vi
    Straight to orientation, then. There were no guards, only the Panhandle system’s bots, but we walked without protest along a drab greenish corridor to the Transit Chamber. We lay down, a hundred of us at least, in the capsules that looked like coffins, our grave goods no more than neural patterns, speed-burned into our bewildered brains. I was fully conscious. What happened to orientation ? The sleeve closed over me, and I suddenly realised there was no reprieve, this was it. The end.
    *
    I woke and lay perfectly still. I didn’t want to try and move because I didn’t want to know that I was paralyzed, buried alive, conscious but dead. Oh I could be bounded in a walnut shell and count myself the king of infinite space . I had not asked for a dream, but a moment since I had been in Hilde’s arms. Maybe orientation hasn’t begun yet, I thought, cravenly. The surface I was lying on did not yield like the ceramic fiber of the capsule, there was cool air flowing over my face and light on my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the grass: something very like blades of bluish, pasture grass, about twenty centimeters high, stirred by a light breeze.
    The resurrected sat up, all around me: like little figures in a religious picture from Mediaeval Europe. The team was mainly together, but we were surrounded by a sea of bodies, mostly women, some men. A whole shipload, newly arrived at Botany Bay. The romance of my dream of the crossing was still with me, every detail in my grasp; but already fading, as dreams do. I saw the captain’s armband on my sleeve. And Hilde was beside me. I remembered that Kitty had said teams like ours were linked . Teams like ours: identified by the system as the leaders in the consensus. I’d known what was going on, while I was in the dream, but I hadn’t believed it. I stared at the girl with the cinnamon braids, the shape-changer, the wild card, my lover.
    If I’m the captain of this motley crew, I thought, I wonder who you are…
    *
    GJ: The Voyage Out is the title of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, published in 1915. The opening sequence features a woman (actually a secondary character) in utter heartbreak, because she’s going with her husband on a trip-of-a-lifetime to South America, and she has to leave her children behind… It’s seen by many critics as a study of Woolf’s own costly transit from the private to the public world—and her voyage of rather toxic discovery—into