Prophet Margin Read Online Free PDF

something of a sore-point for Wulf Sternhammer.
     
    It took Marteh Gumption a while to calm down. Wulf watched the entire show of snivelling and tear-blotting with disgust that punched through the pity barrier and out the other side.
    "Y-you're absolutely right..." the man said, when his voice had settled. "It's all fake. I-I made it all up."
    "All of what?"
    "Everything! I'm just a..." his voice lowered "a screenwriter."
    Wulf stared. Gumption had the air of a man describing a bad habit that marked him out as deviant. "I... I had a string of flops," he muttered, gazing at the tabletop. "It was the special effects, that's what did it... S-so I thought, well... they can't argue if it's all based on true stories, can they?"
    "I think I am seeing where this is going." Wulf pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting a headache. Just when you thought the twenty-second century couldn't get any weirder.
    "S-so I had a little reformative surgery and came back as... as Marteh Gumption, expert on Native American society."
    "Ah. Skraelings. Met some, one time."
    "Well, I mean, it seemed perfect. There aren't any of the buggers left, you see - not since the SkinWars fragged all their, ah," (he mimed a pair of quotation marks in the air) "'rosavayshuns'. Anyway, I paid some people to engage the last expert or two back on earth in... in... conversation, and-"
    "You had der real ones killed?"
    "No! No! I just had their brains wiped."
    Wulf shook his head, draining the last of his mead. "Go on."
    "W-well, that's it, really. Choose a subject that's going to... to gratify an audience. Loads of violence and primitive cultures doing, hur hur, primitive things - then make sure there's no one around to contradict you. Bang . Instant movie success!"
    Wulf sighed. The headache was getting stronger.
    "And now you are wanting to make movie with der Viking, as cool as der cucumber?"
    "Yes!"
    "With der pointy hats und der raping und der pillaging?"
    "Yes!"
    "Und you are thinking you can be buying the silence of Wulf Sternhammer with your lots-of-credit-moneys?"
    "No!"
    "Und y... No?"
    "No."
    "What then?"
    Gumption's twitching eyes looked down into Wulf's empty tankard.
    "I... I just wanted to buy you a drink," he said.
    Wulf frowned, a wave of suspicion fighting the throbbing of his head. With almost glacial slowness it occurred to him that he couldn't remember ever suffering from anything as fundamentally wimpish as a headache. He tried to grab for his Happy Stick - the double ended warhammer propped nearby - and was bewildered to find it suddenly weighed far, far more than he could lift.
    "Sneck," he said, toppling forwards into the heavily drugged dregs of his mead.

FOUR
     
    On the eastern crust of the dungworld Shtzuth - an orb of ammonia-rich excrement left in a life-supporting orbit by the giganism YELR millennia ago - there was a farm.
    Amongst the mouldfields and fleshgrub paddocks there was a patch of land where nothing grew, where the mouldcrops couldn't spread, where the grubs couldn't dig into the hard soil, and where even the temptation to raise buildings had been scuppered by the difficulty of digging foundations. The residents of Shtzuth called such spots of land Nutlumps, reasoning that some stellar matter had proved indigestible even to the gravitational intestines of the giganism.
    In the centre of this irregular Nutlump, lying on his back with his eyes fixed firmly on the methane clouds and flocks of shitgulls above, was a boy.
    His name was Roolán, he was seventeen, somewhat scrawny, and if he'd been in the habit of talking - which he was not - he might at that precise moment have opined that of all the many things in creation, two of the very worst were farms and shit.
     
    He was staring at the sky because, ten kilometres above him, a pair of thrusters on a mind-breakingly enormous construction robot were flaring softly through the clouds.
    In fact, from horizon to horizon the heavens were alive with rocket trails and signal