Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

to drive toward something, to find something indefinable. The crash has placed a wedge of understanding between the two. Though Angel and Lisa once exchanged thoughts freely and easily, now Lisa wonders about Angel’s mind while Angel yearns for the innocent ignorance Lisa once possessed.

Angel knows nucleite is responsible, to some degree, for this loss. The quickly accessible energy source allowed the colony on Mars to prosper and exploratory vessels to venture to the Outer Planets. Probes now refuel in depots right in the Belt, allowing them further reaches into the frontiers of space. Angel knows nucleite has saved mankind, not only solving but erasing the energy problem. Only a couple of decades ago civilization was sinking into a culture of bandits and savagery, when his own father was killed over a few hundred gallons of Alaskan oil.

Yet he cannot help but compare this age of Endless Power to two centuries earlier, when eager young men had torn across the United States in search of gold, heedless of native landscapes, wildlife and tribes. When the continent was conquered, and the lust for gold faded, those rugged, ruthless men struggled to find new purpose. By the mid-twenty-first century, the eyes of Manifest Destiny, which had grown restless since running against the Pacific Ocean, gazed into the night sky.

Lisa jumps at the electronic chirp of the telephone. She answers and, after snatching the mangled towel away from him, hands the receiver to Angel. He listens, acknowledges, looks down, acknowledges again and hangs up.

Lisa stares at him. “Well?”

“Zappy’s wife.”

“Zappy?”

Lisa only knew the men before they had call signs. Angel cannot remember Zappy’s original name. He tries to explain, becomes muddled, and Lisa places her hands on her hips and frowns.

“Zappy’s dead,” Angel says. “Amphetamine OD.”

“How’d he get it?”

“We have connections in the Belt. It wouldn’t have been hard.”

“We?” Lisa says. She reaches out for the sugar bowl, not with an ebony arm but with a neon yellow proboscis, swollen with corrosive acid. Angel twitches, his fingers playing around the handle of a butter knife.

“He.Whatever. I do too.”

“You make no sense,” Lisa says. Angel looks at her arm, which is normal again.

“Don’t worry about me, Leese,” he says, trying to sound light. He blows her a kiss. She turns away.

“You’re not back yet, are you?” she asks. Angel says nothing. “Let me know when you are.” She walks out of the kitchen, slamming the door.

Angel crosses to the closet. On the door is a sticker, reminding him that in case of an emergency, one can enter the closet and seal it from the inside. The closet/emergency pod has enough water and oxygen to support human life for 96 hours. Angel digs at the sticker with his nail, then peels it off. Safety wrapped in safety, he thinks, and a shiver of shame runs through him. His friends had died in the Belt; he had not. Other men are still dying in the Belt; he is alive and safe. He flicks the sticker away and opens the closet.

Each movement stirs pain in his broken body as he dons his pressurized suit and goes out to the new transport. He sits in it, not thinking, just hating the safety he cannot escape. Then he turns on the ignition and, obeying all Martian colonial traffic laws, drives along the flagged routes to Zappy’s home. His head feels stuffed with insulation.

Angel parks in front of Zappy’s EnviroDome 3090. It is surrounded with a white plastic picket fence, a standard EnviroDome feature. Angel wants to kick the fence down. At the front door he buzzes the intercom. There is no reply, but he is not expecting one. Zappy is dead because his heart exploded, and Zappy’s wife is at the hospital with him. The front door is unlocked; Angel opens it and walks to the bathroom, where he knows he will find his old comrade’s remaining supply of amphetamine.

~~~

Angel is a boy of eleven, reading a beaten paperback on his front step. Though his friends tease him for reading when he isn’t playing ball, he cannot read enough fantasy stories. This book is a tale of adventurers who seek dragons and slay them out of duty to their king. All day long, Angel daydreams of the thrill of traveling to a distant, unforgiving land; hunting dragons; and slaying them. But at night he dreams he is a dragon being pursued by cruel, armed men. When he wakes he feels cold and confused, one question nagging him above all: After the knights slay the dragon, after so long training and practicing the ways of killing, what would they do in life? Could they ever return to their old lives, or to any sort of life at all?

~~~

Stomper squats between two jagged rocks on asteroid S093, his pupils wide in the darkness, his fingers twitching, his mind flashing like heat lightning. Custer floats around the cavern.

Zappy glues legs from dead Wasps on his pressurized suit with super-strength adhesive. He extends one of these dead legs to Splash, who is writing a report for Endless Power in corporate jargonese. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” Zappy says with an affected rasp. “Don’t know if you’ve met the mate and larvae yet—” Splash floats away to finish the report.

Clown’s replacement, Lizard, fires meaningless energy pulses into the rock. The other men rarely speak to him. S093 has been a grueling, confusing mission. A dense asteroid with narrow crevices and sharp angles. No nucleite. No Wasps or Spitters. Every shadow might be a Mantis, and turns out not to be. Stomper wonders if the Mantis is real. Reports insist that it is. Just like reports insist this rock is loaded with resources — and the crew is not allowed to evac until the resources have been secured. Stomper buffs his J-4 blade with a micro-abrasive cloth, like a knight of old polishing a longsword.

He thinks about knights and whether plowing a sword through a man would be sickening or thrilling. Intoxicating, he decides. Making oneself toxic.