Voice of the Whirlwind Read Online Free PDF

hesitated. His hand moved involuntarily to his back pocket, feeling the outline of the vid cartridge through crisp denim.
    Kill the Buddha, he thought.
    He put the cartridge in the vid set and pressed the ERASE button. He thought of the variable-lattice alloy threads that filled the cartridge, the video coded on their molecular structure, and then he imagined them all changing, the message disappearing, becoming void. As he looked into the blank face of the set, it seemed to him as if his reflection was sharing a secret with him.
    The clerk was surprised when Steward told him he was leaving the hospital. “Your course of treatment isn’t over,” he said.
    “I’m not sick. I’ve adjusted.” Steward crossed his heart. “Honest.”
    “But it’s already paid for.”
    “Maybe I’ll come back later. If I fuck up.”
    He signed a form that made him responsible for himself and added his thumbprint. Before he left the lobby, he reached for the bracelet on his left wrist, hooked it with two fingers, pulled. It stretched like mint licorice, then snapped. He put it in an ashtray and then stepped out onto the street.
    Sounds boiled up around him. Noonday heat. Realities reflected in bright mirror glass.
    Steward felt right at home.

CHAPTER THREE

    Steward went through the heavy security in front of the condeco’s door and registered as a guest, a process that included thumbprinting an agreement to comply with the rules of the condecology’s constitution. As usual, this was based on the concept of “self-limiting options,” which so far as Steward could tell meant the inhabitants mutually agreed not to think about certain aspects of reality that might prove troubling. The rules here were fairly liberal, Steward saw, and forbade him to possess or distribute weapons, certain recreational drugs, named types of religious or political literature, proscribed software, and the more extreme forms of vidporn. Public nudity was forbidden, cohabitation was all right. Watching vid or headvid on channels not licensed by the condeco was grounds for expulsion. Steward was given a six weeks’ temporary pass, took the elevator to Ardala’s apartment. Once there, he walked among the small rooms, just orienting himself.
    The apartment had all the signs of the upwardly mobile: tasteful furniture, small alloy-and-crystal tables, a flat liquid-crystal video display hung on the wall. Abstract wall paintings, all desert tones, that were careful not to make any kind of statement.
    The intention of the decor—the careful abstraction of all hint of personality—was carelessly sabotaged by the artifacts of habitation: Ardala’s laundry scattered over the furniture, a few of her niece’s bright plastic toys sitting where her niece had left them, the jumble of filled ashtrays and cigarette lighters, the wineglasses misted with fingerprints, the cream blur of scansheet printouts, half-worked crosswords, and dogeared issues of magazines called Gals and Guys , which turned out to be weekly publications in which the unemployed advertised their talents. A turtle-shaped floor-cleaning robot wandered hopelessly among the ruins. The only place that was spotless was the kitchen, which she apparently never used. Steward looked in the refrigerator and found only wine and a few vegetables.
    Steward remembered furnishing the apartment in Kingston he’d shared with Natalie—how they went to fifteen stores before they could agree on a kitchen table, a rectangular transparency supported by a single twisting column of orbital alloy, seeming too thin to support the weight of the glass…. It had been the first piece of furniture Steward had ever bought new.
    Steward and Natalie had always kept their series of apartments spotless, the glass table shining. It had seemed a sort of military virtue to care for their equipment.
    He hadn’t really noticed the litter the first time he’d come here. The lights had been off when they came in and never really got turned