Read Destroyer of Worlds for Free Online

of Earth. Not that the Puppeteers hadn’t eventually found Earth anyway. . . .
    â€œWe’re two of a kind, Jeeves,” Sigmund said. We’re brain-damaged fossils from Earth.
    â€œIndeed, sir.”
    Jeeves’s mellifluous voice brought England to mind, the accent reminding Sigmund of Shakespeare in Central Park. That, uselessly, Sigmund remembered, but not the shape of England, or its size, or where on Earth’s surface it resided. Or, for that matter, what Central Park was at the center of.
    Damn
Nessus! He had violated Sigmund’s mind, and Sigmund hated thePuppeteer for that. But in bringing Sigmund here, Nessus had acted to protect the New Terrans from the darker instincts of his own kind. Here, Sigmund had started a new life. Here, he had the family on whom he doted. On New Terra, if he only could learn to embrace it, he might find actual happiness. So thank you, too, Nessus.
    â€œThe usual, sir?” Jeeves prompted. “If I may be so bold.”
    Sigmund had to smile. “Please.”
    A holo globe appeared over his desk, slowly spinning. Land, sea, and ice appeared on the surface, their boundaries ever changing. Jeeves invented topography, subject to the facts, and glimmers of facts, and wild speculations from facts—anything the two of them managed to dredge up. Occasionally, one of the random variations struck a chord, and then they had one more datum to guide a search for Earth.
    The globe spun on, bringing into view twinkling motes atop an island peak. A city. It evoked the omelet Sigmund had had for breakfast. “Denver, the mile-high city,” he said to himself. Whether on an island or in the heart of some continent, at least one major Earth city sat at that approximate elevation. Useless of itself, the random phrase from his subconscious had woken up Sigmund, his heart pounding, years after his arrival. Where one descriptive detail had surfaced from cultural trivia, others must lurk unsuspected.
    New England clam chowder. Did England, wherever it was, have an overseas colony? It implied England had coastline.
    Baked Alaska. The recipe involved ice cream and baked meringue. An implication of glaciers and volcanoes in proximity? That vague speculation evoked a second trace of memory. Who, Sigmund wondered, was Seward? Why was Alaska his folly?
    Jeeves knew more than ten thousand recipes, replete with terms that might be place names or mythological references or—Finagle knew what.
    Jeeves had more than cookbooks in his memory, and Sigmund was working systematically through it all. Legends and literature. Song lyrics. Not 3-V movies. A rotating globe, the outlines of Earth’s oceans and continents plain to see, had been the logo of a movie company. The memory remained tauntingly just out of Sigmund’s reach. In the rush to hide Earth from those who were boarding
Long Pass
, the entire film library had been erased.
    That Earth had a moon was another fact Sigmund believed he knew. Month and moon went together—didn’t they?—yet the months he remembered ranged from twenty-eight days up to thirty-one days. Not thathe knew the length of an Earth day. Perhaps Earth had several moons, each with its own orbital period . . . but no. He remembered tides, twice a day. One moon.
    Recently he had been sifting Jeeves’s musical library for clues. Lyrics cited a blue moon, a silvery moon, a harvest moon, an old devil moon, even a paper moon. What was fact, what metaphor, what—
    Sigmund started at a sharp rap on the door. The door swung open.
    A man, short and stocky, dark-skinned with a long, black ponytail, stood in the doorway. Eric Huang-Mbeke was the first person Sigmund, fresh from the autodoc, had met on this world. Now Eric was the chief tech wizard for the Office of Strategic Analyses. He usually managed to get made just about any gadget Sigmund could need—and like most New Terrans, Eric was too innocent to know what needed