Solaris Rising 2 Read Online Free PDF

magical look of an impressionist painting.
    Outside the dome the squatters have erected ragged tents, shacks of tin and old lumber, piss pits beside which children play. Most of the squatters, I know, will be on the other side of the dome, hoping to someday rush the access chamber. It’s a stupid and futile hope. If they do, they will be shot by the guards. The courts have upheld these shootings as “legal defense of one’s home and person in the face of credible threat.” But still the squatters try, wanting more than the miserable little they have.
    What hurts me the most is the gardens. Some of these squatters have planted corn and vegetables. In the summer heat the plants are spindly and brownish. There must be a public well here somewhere, or the people couldn’t be here, but water would have to be hand-carried to water these brave little attempts at self-sufficiency. In the closest plot, a woman hoes weeds by hand. She raises her head to stare at the car.
    Wayne and I have only minutes. He steps on the gas as the first of the squatters rush the road ahead of us, waving clubs and shovels. They can’t take out their rage on the people in the domes, but we will do, in our luxurious car. Wayne revs the engine and we easily outdistance them without hurting anyone.
    Moments of silence, while the dry plains of Eastern Washington roll by. Finally Wayne says, “We can’t do it the same way, Catie.”
    “I know that.” And then, “Why haven’t you been trying a different way? For fifteen fucking years you haven’t tried anything real!”
    “We’ve tried what we could. Broadcasts, rallies, education –”
    “And look at all your great results!”
    Wayne doesn’t answer. Truth roils between us like deadly gas.
     
     
    “T HE COLORS OF the spectrum, Catie,” my father said.
    “Red, orange, yellow...” I froze. What came next? Then the right color popped into my six-year-old mind and I shouted, “Green! Blue, indigo, violet.”
    “Very good! Now the name of the glass triangle that breaks light into all those pretty colors.”
    “Prism!”
    “And the instrument that lets us study those colors.”
    This was one of the hard words, but I was sure. I said it extra carefully. “Spec-trom-e-ter.”
    My father smiled at me. We sat in the back seat of his big car, while Desmond drove with Ray, the bodyguard, beside him. When Daddy took me to school in the car on his way to work, it was our special time. Mama was in heaven and Daddy was usually busy, so busy, inventing things to keep people safe. I hardly ever saw him. Mostly I just saw my nanny, who pinched me to make me be good.
    “Daddy,” I said, “today in school we’re going to start learning Chinese!”
    “Good,” he said, still smiling at me. “Study hard. Make me proud of you.”
    “I will!” I liked school. All the kids there were smart, and most of them were nice, and the school was safe behind its high fences. Not every place was safe, I knew. We were driving right now through a part of the city that wasn’t safe, but we had to go through it to get to my school and Daddy’s work. This place was ugly, too, with litter on the streets and men – “the lazy out-of-work,” Daddy called them – sitting on sagging porches and steps in their undershirts. I saw a house with broken windows, the glass lying all over and nobody even sweeping it up.
    “Opaque the windows,” I begged.
    Daddy pressed a button. The car windows opaqued, and we were safe in our own cozy world, with its exciting smells of leather and aftershave, its quiet hum of the powerful car engine carrying us along.
     
     
    T HE COMPOUND HAS indeed changed in fifteen years. It’s shrunk.
    How many of us had there been when I was here last, just before my arrest? Nearly a thousand. We hadn’t been like the naïve commune-founders of two generations before mine. We assigned roles, established a working government, used appropriate technology even if it wasn’t green, until the time