Under Heaven's Bridge
Page 16
She said nothing. For a long moment he stared at her, without withering back from her gaze, then strolled to the door and let himself out. He was careful not to slam the door.
On New Year’s Day, a little over three years later, the fifteenth dynastic year of the current Japanese Emperor (which is named, as is customary, not for his name in life, but for his death-name), Keiko minced painfully along Seventh Avenue—Shichijo-dori—towards Sanjusangendo. On her back, her most gracious kimono, which she had put on for the first time since retiring from her teaching position. It clung to her snugly, silkily, like a flexible cocoon. The Hall of Mercy drew her toward it in spite of her intellectual resistance, in spite of her having told herself repeatedly that she would not cave in to so unlikely a lure.
The Hall was open every day now. Many spectators believed that the Kyber was not a dead or an inanimate organism, but merely a statue from the stars; at best, the metallic analogue of a mummy. It was not hard, Keiko thought, to sympathize with their unenlightened view of the matter. Seeking no special exemption for having once belonged to the research team assigned to the Heavenbridge—to have done so would have been a vile hypocrisy—she joined the tail of the serpentine queue.
It was cold inside the Hall of Mercy, barely one degree centigrade. Keiko could not halt in front of the Kyber because the crowd, awe-struck but implacable, squeezed her along irresistibly. She was now one of several hundred pilgrims actually inside the temple, and the devotion—the scepticism—of each visitor had to be served. As she approached, however, Keiko studied the alien, and the fact that the astronomy unit at Luna Port had confirmed Dextro’s spectacular, though brief, flare-up during the Occident’s recent celebration of Christmas lent her appraisal of the Kyber a quiet excitement. She felt young again, innocent of pain and evil and regret.
Would the Kyber, recognizing her, step down and take her hand as she passed? Would it lift her into its arms as she had once been lifted to the ladder of Sixkiller’s floater? Would it then sprint with her from this human crush on tireless, pistoning legs and bear her up the hillside through the ten thousand crimson gateways of Fushimi …?
Keiko watched, but the Kyber did not move.
And yet, as she was borne past the alien’s pedestal, one of its peripheral eye-bulbs seemed momentarily to dilate, to glow, reflecting the layered gold leaf of the neighbouring statues of Mercy.
She would come again. The promise was there.
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Also by Ian Watson
Novels
Under Heaven's Bridge (1981) (with Michael Bishop)
Black Current
1. The Book of the River (1984)
2. The Book of the Stars (1984)
3. The Book of Being (1985)
Mana
1. Lucky's Harvest (1993)
2. The Fallen Moon (1994)
Other Novels
The Embedding (1973)
The Jonah Kit (1975)
Orgasmachine (2010)
The Martian Inca (1977)
Alien Embassy (1977, 2006)
Miracle Visitors (1978)
God's World (1979)
The Gardens of Delight (1980, 2007)
Deathhunter (1981)
Chekhov's Journey (1983)
Converts (1984)
Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986, 2009)
The Power (1987)
The Fire Worm (1988)
Whores of Babylon (1988, 2004)
Meat (1988)
The Flies of Memory (1990)
Hard Questions (1996)
Oracle (1997)
Mockymen (2000, 2004)
Collections
The Very Slow Time Machine (1979)
Sunstroke: And Other Stories (1982)
Slow Birds: And Other Stories (1985)
Evil Water: And Other Stories (1987)
Salvage Rites: And Other Stories (1989)
Stalin's Teardrops: And Other Stories (1991)
The Coming of Vertumnus: And Other Stories (1994)
The Great Escape (2002)
The Butterflies of Memory (2005)
The Beloved of My Beloved (2009) (and Roberto Quaglia)
The Book of Ian Watson (1985)
Dedication
To Greg Benford
Ian Watson (1943 – )
Ian Watson was born in England in 1943 and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first class Honours degree in English Literature. He lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish SF with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for the influential New Worlds magazine in 1969. He became a full-time writer in 1976, following the success of his debut novel The Embedding. His work has been frequently shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and he has won the BSFA Award twice. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed after Kubrick's death by Steven Spielberg; for which he is acknowledged in the credits for Screen Story. Ian Watson lives in Northamptonshire, England.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Ian Watson, Michael Bishop 1981
All rights reserved.
The right of Ian Watson and Michael Bishop to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11446 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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