Lady Slings the Booze by Spider Robinson

Author:Spider Robinson [Robinson, Spider]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Baen Books http://www.baen.com
Published: 2012-01-16T21:40:37+00:00

Back | Next

Contents

Framed

Back | Next

Contents

10. The Wrath of Jane

Context is everything. Breastfeeding is beneficial for all newborns—but for the elderly male cardiac patients it can be fatal.

—Neil O'Heret Brain, Tits for Tots

Rafalli paused. "You might think it an artistic error, starting big like this. Like a playwright putting his best song in Act One. But I find that if I demoralize you completely at the start, everything thereafter has a delicious sense of despair to it, even the comparatively minor indignities. Perhaps I'll ask you if you agree, when it's time to work on your tongue." Suddenly he giggled like a little girl, a sound much more shocking than his usual jovial chuckles and chortles. "Poor man. You've spent your life as a private dick. And you're going to die with no privates, and no dick." He laughed until the tears came.

I had long since set my face in cement, too angry to give him any satisfaction it was still within my power to withhold. But to my dismay tears leaked silently and unbidden from my own eyes. I did not cry or sob, but my eyes ran. And the sick son of a bitch drank my tears like fine wine with his eyes.

"Enjoy your thoughts," he said, and started his knife arm forward, and pushed the watchstem, and turned to smiling stone.

* * *

The first thing that struck me was the change in the light. The fact that it had a strong reddish color didn't surprise me. That had been in the MacDonald book, which I had so stupidly allowed to mislead me about the way a time-slowing watchstem is used. Something about light red-shifting, the visual equivalent of the roar on Mary's tapes that turned out to be hiss at half speed, I guess. What I hadn't been expecting was that the light would have texture to it. It was as though the air were full of some shimmering translucent red gas, which could just be seen to boil and swirl, much faster than dust dances on air currents. Like a space-filling swarm of almost invisibly tiny red gnats. It was hard to focus on any particular chunk of it, but in the aggregate it glowed in a shifting random pattern. It reminded me of a special effect meant to indicate an energy creature on Star Trek. It seemed to me that even in a drastically slowed world, this did not make sense. If Raffalli's watch slowed time enough to make photons visible, we should not have been able to capture him on tape. And photons as I understood it did not behave like gnats.

But what did I know about physics? Screw the swarming red light; what else was there to see, to occupy my thoughts for the next ten dreadful minutes?

Except for the light, not much. Everything was utterly still. If I tried I could see, at least nearby, the motionless dust motes the gnats were slipping between. A leather sling dangling from the ceiling, which Raffalli had brushed a few moments ago, was frozen about five degrees from vertical.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.