The Beauty of Destruction (69 page)

‘Eileen!’ Grace shouted as she entered the house. ‘It’s Grace, it’s safe to come down.’ She looked up as Eileen, Dora, with her shotgun, and Ralph appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘Grace?’ Eileen said.

‘We can’t stay here,’ Grace said. ‘Get everyone, gather what you need, but only what you need. I have a vehicle and supplies, but we need to get going.’

‘Where are we going?’ Eileen asked. Andrea had come out to hug her mother. Grace looked at the frightened little girl for a moment before answering. ‘We’re going to find a safe place out in the desert.’ Eileen turned and started organising everyone. Grace went out to stand watch by the Cougar. Soon they would drive out of the canyon. The sun was setting on LA.

The City

Scab stared down at Talia and Vic’s bodies. He still felt the touch of Talia’s lips on his own. Bress, his nauseating clone, reached down and checked the pulse in Talia’s neck.

‘Dead,’ he said. Scab didn’t like that. He wasn’t sure why. Bress was pushing open Talia’s eyes, examining them as though he was looking for something.

‘Leave her alone,’ somebody said. Scab was surprised to find that it had been him. Bress turned to look up at him, studying him. Scab’s grip tightened on his tumbler pistol. The black roiling mass of hate was receding back the way it had come through the city, like a tide going out.

‘The city took their spirits,’ the human woman said. Her name was Britha. She was holding her swollen head, clearly pained. His clone moved to comfort her in a way he knew he never could. He just watched. ‘It sent them somewhere else.’

‘Did it work?’ Scab asked. It suddenly seemed important. Not because of existence – that was meaningless, abstract nonsense – but because for him to lose Vic and Talia it had to be worth something.

‘I don’t know,’ Bress said as he helped Britha to her feet. She was clearly in a lot of pain. It wasn’t a very comforting answer.

‘I don’t think I have much longer,’ she said.

‘Even here there are people, well, things really, that might be able to help.’ They started to walk away, Bress helping Britha.

‘Hey,’ Scab said. They stopped, and Bress looked back. ‘Where are you going?’

‘What it took me the longest time to learn was that I made myself unhappy. You try too hard,’ Bress told him, then he turned away from Scab and both of them walked deeper into the city. It was easy for him to say, his mind had had aeons to be destroyed and rebuilt. Scab turned back to look at his two dead … friends. With a thought his armour folded away and he looked around at the city. His new home. He took his cigarette case from the breast pocket of his suit, took out a cigarette, and lit it. He didn’t like the taste. He needed a purpose.

Woodbine sat down between Talia and Vic’s bodies in the ruins, and accessed the Monk’s,
Beth’s
, immersion construct.

He was standing on a pebble beach on a primitive pre-Loss Earth, next to a terminal for primitive ground effect vehicles. Beyond the terminal were the bright lights of some kind of entertainment area. Over the water he could see an island; behind him, the lights of a tiny city. The air smelled funny here.

The immersion had translated his image reasonably faithfully, though his tech was era-compliant. He reached into his suit and pulled out the revolver, the immersion replacement for his tumbler pistol. He looked at it for a long time and then he threw it into the water. Slowly he removed the rest of his weapons and threw them into the water. He kept the straight-edge razor because, well, you never know. Then he knelt by the water and washed the make-up off. He thought about stripping off naked, but it was a little cold, and he suspected it was against the local social norms. You could take symbolism too far.

The immersion’s predictive routine had guided him once it had understood what Woodbine wanted. As far as he could tell it was a place where people came to ‘learn’, which was some kind of inefficient way of imparting skills and knowledge. He was walking through an area where the learners, or students as they were apparently called, met to eat and socialise.

She was sitting on her own. She was dressed similarly to how Talia had dressed, but that was where the similarity ended. She was poring over her work, and was alone. Scab was sure she was called Maude. She looked up as Scab sat opposite her.

‘I would like a friend, but I am not sure how to go about it,’ he said. Her face scrunched up in consternation. Then she smiled.

Acknowledgements

A Thanks to Dave Arnott for astrophysics advice, it is not his fault that I’ve ignored him and just made shit up.

Thank you again, for the time and effort put in by Chloe Isherwood of Chloe Isherwood Photography, and Gabriella Howson as Britha.

Thanks, as ever, to Matt Bryant for continuing support, tech and otherwise. (Finally got your prize dude!)

To Jason & Katy Wheatley and their amazing family for advice (I am listening, even if it doesn’t always seem that way!) and a refuge of strangely peaceful anarchy.

To Film Night, Cat Hallsworth, Chris Edwards (A full service postie!), the noncontributing Dan Kendall, Becky Kendall and the occasional Dave Hurst, for providing a place of respite and an often much needed break.

Continuing thanks for advice, ranting, encouragement and drinks (strange how the latter is often a theme) to M.D. Lachlan, Peter F. Hamilton, Anthony Jones, my arch-nemesis and not-a-real man (it’s a long story) Hannu Rajaneimi. To Chris Wooding and Bill Thomas for their feedback and suggestions. And to relative newcomers (though Worldcon veterans) Jon Wallace and ewok-loving Edward Cox.

Thank you to Abigail Nathan for her extensive copyediting skills.

And to the Gollancz crew: Charlie Panayiotou, Gillian Redfearn and the amazing Sophie Calder (even though she sent me to Manchester for some reason), and of course my long suffering editor Marcus Gipps. It might not seem it sometimes but I do appreciate all your hard work.

A big thanks to the hardest-working agent ever: Robert Dinsdale of
AM
Heath.

Thanks to all my friends, I realise I’ve mostly been a social media mate recently and not seen enough of everyone, hoping to change that and looking forward to seeing more of you all in the near future.

My family who have gone above and beyond recently providing everything from proof reading and marketing support, to concept artwork, mechanical skills and DIY: Mum, Dad, Nicola, Simon, Nell & Amelie -thank you!

(Oh and Yvonne, but the book is dedicated to her, so I’m hoping that she’ll notice that.)

And finally thank you very much to everyone who bought or loaned-out a copy of any of my books, it is always greatly appreciated. I don’t think I’m terribly good at social media (My much neglected blog!) but I particularly want to thanks to everyone who follows, contacts, comments etc. (bear with me, I’m getting better) and all those who have taken the time to review, good or bad, in print and online.

Gavin G. Smith, Woking (where the Martians landed), 2015 www.gavingsmith.com

Also by Gavin G. Smith from Gollancz

Veteran

War in Heaven

Crysis
: Escalation

The Age of Scorpio

A Quantum Mythology

Co-authored with Stephen Deas, as Gavin Deas:

Elite
: Wanted

Empire
s
: Extraction

Empire
s
: Infiltration

Copyright

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Gavin G. Smith 201
6

All rights reserved

The right of Gavin G. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 201
6
by

Gollancz

T
he Orion Publishing Group
Ltd

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House

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0
Victoria Embankment
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An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.

A
CIP
catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

ISBN
978 0 575
12749 4

All
characters and events in this publication are fictitious and
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