Read Eidolon for Free Online

calmly, owner of The Friendly Glass. I do business
properly or not at all .
    And, really--who but a madwoman would allow
one of Korval to buy in to her business without a contract to
contain him?
    She took another breath, and moved one step
down the path.
    The dark-haired man in his bright orange
cloak looked up from his conversation with a lady, and saw her.
Ceola imagined his eyebrows rising. He leaned over to speak to the
tall white-haired man, and then stepped out of the circle.
    Ceola hesitated as he came briskly up the
walk.
    I should
bow , she thought, but she never had the
chance.
    A warm arm swept 'round her waist, turning
her with him, orange silk billowing, as they moved up the path,
toward the confectioneries and the Pleasure Tents.
    "Hullo, Ceola," he said, and it was Shadow's
voice, right enough. "Are you very angry with me?"
     
    --END--
     
     
     

 
     
    PERSISTENCE
     
    Beba walked faster now, nearly running;
she'd actually stopped and looked around to see if anyone was
within range and now she'd be late. For her, proximity was
important. Long range was ten or twenty paces of clear sight
distance, or just a few paces if a wall intervened. No one there.
And she was late.
    Ignorance is
winning .
    Somewhere between five deck and six deck the
idea surfaced, and at first she wasn't sure if it was hers or not,
it was so subtle, so tentative. She rarely picked up something as
direct as a thought, though once or twice she had; mostly when she
was young and hormonal. No one was in range though.
    The idea was persistent, so she turned it
over in her aware mind, saw the signs that it was her thought, and
that made it more necessary to think about it:
    Ignorance was winning.
    On consideration, that's what this morning's
time with the news round-up had showed: incontrovertible evidence
that ignorance was winning. Market flux caused by the industrial
committee's decision to favor blue over green this year, the newest
student-style of self-lighting ring hats that fluttered in the
presence of multiple low-power comm calls to the student accounts
that invited conference calls, so that they might all flap together
in a spotlight mocking illumination, the resurrection of the
so-called Mind Safety Administration. This run of strangeness, all
these things together, illustrated the fact that ignorance was
winning.
    Beba sighed heavily, a flip of the hand
telling the unseeing wall that even the freshly minted shift
schedules handed down by the new Bazaar administrators were created
more by wishful thinking than thoughtful planning. Orders came down
by fiat, by . . . ignorance. "Persistence."
    She said that word out
loud, knowing that, after all, she'd done this to herself created
in her own head the idea that there were only two volitional forces
at work in the inhabited universe. Those forces were not necessarily antagonistic,
except that somehow persistence ultimately was superior since
ignorance was entropic and the evolutionary dialectic favored
life's anti-entropic organizing principles.
    Alas, she'd written that in a paper for
philosophy class back when she'd still been permitted public
schooling and the result had been a severe setback to her grades as
well as her social range. Original thinking, it turned out, was
antagonistic to her novice philosophy instructor's preordained
lesson plans; she could see it in the stiff shoulder and neck
muscles when he walked into class, in the way he avoided looking at
her shape, in the swirling purple fog that wisped around his eyes
and ears, and in the scent.
    By then her emotive-control
tutor, long since banished off-planet as a threat to world order,
had deduced that the scent information she got was as real as the
visual, and that she ought not tell anyone about it, just as her
sister--off-planet now as well!--should not mention that she could-so pull names out
of people's heads, nothing else, just names they were thinking
of.
    The so-called philosopher was marked in her
memory for