Voice of the Whirlwind Read Online Free PDF Page A

evening. Cars slid dimly through gridded streets. People were pouring out of apartments and restaurants, moving along the concrete. The interface between the condecos was lively, full of people looking for fun, for something new, hustling each other. At a fast-food store Steward bought a plastic bottle of beer, and vatshrimp in a red chili sauce. He ate dinner as he walked.
    The buildings diminished in size. This was the old part of town now, winding streets cut by bits of rugged terrain left in its natural state, like parks. The people were different, livelier, probably without as much money. They played instruments, passed bottles. Steward went into a liquor store and bought a bottle of old genever wrapped in foam insulation that would keep it cold for days. He drank as he walked, rekindling the fire inside him, feeling it spread warmly to his toes, his fingertips. The mountains were fully visible now, three peaks clothed in twilight gray. He kept walking.
    Cars hissed by on the dark street, trailing wisps of music. His leg muscles were driving him steadily uphill. The moon rose, a narrow sickle cutting through the fixed stars of satellites, power stations, orbital habitats. Shining on the metal cylinder where Natalie lived, alone with her postwar child. Cool breezes touched Steward’s face, his arms. The air smelled of pine.
    In another hour he was in the foothills, still moving. He sipped the genever whenever he felt his fires threatening to burn low. He was surrounded by a darkness that seemed tangible, friendly, like the inside of a tented blanket. Through the pines he glimpsed occasional glimmers, distant houses stuck to the rising slope like limpets. He walked toward the moon.
    When he came to a place where he couldn’t see any more lights above him, he stopped. He took a couple of slow swallows of genever and turned, looking at the jeweled spiderweb of the city below, the flashing red lights on the upper corners of the glass towers. Coleopter turbines moaned somewhere in the distance. He sat down, crossing his legs in front of him, and wondered if a telephone, somewhere, was ringing for him. Carefully, Steward imagined the sound.
    I’m getting there, he thought. I’m getting near the center. The cartridge, in his back pocket, dug into his flesh. He ignored it and took another drink. Lights guttered through a haze of rising air. Wind moved high in the pines but failed to stir the hair on his scalp. The wind sounded like a million people cheering, all seated around him in some dark and vast stadium. Cheering what he was becoming.
    *
    In the morning, unshaven, unbathed, reeking of juniper gin, he had some difficulty hitching a ride back into town. He’d slept on needles, under a blanket of boughs, and there was pine sap in his hair, staining his clothes. He filled his empty bottle with spring water and sipped it as he walked most of the way to the hospital.
    He could hear Dr. Ashraf’s voice murmuring in the sound of his room’s air conditioning. Protesting. Telling him he had to forget what he thought he knew, what he thought he cared about. Telling him to make his own life without reference to a deformed, crippled past.
    “Fuck that, Doc,” he said out loud. “They cut you into chunks with a knife and I bet they never even told you why.”
    If you wish to find the unclouded truth, he told himself, do not concern yourself with right or wrong. Conflicts with right and wrong are a sickness of the mind.
    The oldest Zen poem. He liked the sound of it.
    He called Ardala at work and told her he was checking out of the hospital.
    “What happened to you yesterday? I was calling. Police again?”
    “Can I stay with you till I get some work?”
    She laughed. “Why not? Stop by for the key.”
    “Thanks. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
    Steward showered, changed, and packed. His possessions filled one small athletic bag. He put the bag on the bed, took a last look around the room. His gaze lit on the vid, and