Read To Hold Infinity for Free Online Page B

she said.
    â€œThat's not rude, is it?”
    â€œNot the last time I looked.” She smiled. “Go look it up.”
    She gave a sketchy wave, and joined the other passengers crowded in front of the gate. Beyond, a white umbilical led to the waiting mu-space ship.
    Her tanto, in its hardwood sheath, was in a pocket of her suit. Suicide weapon. On a sudden impulse, she called out Eric's name, and hurried back to him.
    â€œHere,” she said, holding out the sheathed dagger. “I won't be needing this.”
    He started to say something, smiling, then seemed to catch his breath. He took the tanto dagger from her without a word.
    Â 
    Tetsuo awoke slowly, eyes sticky with sleep, like a child. He turned his head, and sudden pain stabbed into his scalp.
    â€œDamn it. Uh, command mode. Upright.”
    He groaned as his couch morphed back into a chair, sitting him upright.
    Gingerly, he reached up, tracing the filigreed network of fine wire crowning his head, along to the scab-encrusted inserts into his scalp. Only the soft headrest and nervous exhaustion had allowed him to sleep at all.
    â€œDaistral.” His voice was a croak.
    Still dark outside.
    He rubbed his face. It was greasy with old sweat, rough with a stubble of beard. He felt awful, all the way through.
    The console beeped, and extruded a tray with his cup of daistral.
    He drank the steaming purple liquid gratefully. It washed away the fuzz from his gums, poured warmly into him, and cleared his brain.
    Last night, he had polarized the cockpit bubble to black opacity. Maybe it wasn't dark outside.
    He sat there, in his warm dark cabin, softly lit by indirect lighting, not wanting to see the world. Part of him wanted to call Rafael for advice, but Rafael might be part of the problem.
    Tetsuo didn't need to access a crystal to recall the beginning of his partially retrieved info: the courier and some unknown other person. The courier he had seen at the Bureau? It could be. And then there was the mention of Rafael.
    All of Tetsuo's troubles came flooding back to him. He was awake now, sure enough.
    He sighed. “Clear membrane.”
    The cockpit bubble grew transparent.
    Bars of roiling purple, interspersed with silver grey. High above, a fluffy-edged gap afforded a glimpse of greenish sky. All around, though, was bicoloured fog. Its purple and grey bands formed a strong Turing pattern, like the pelt of some strange striped carnivore.
    Something moved. A shadow in the fog.
    Tetsuo waited, but there was nothing more. His flyer's defences remained quiescent.
    He finished his daistral.
    After a while, a light shower of rain began to fall, spattering against the cockpit. Within minutes, it had washed the fog away. Then the rain, too, died.
    The air was crystal clear.
    The floor of Nether Canyon was a stippled expanse of rust-red and sugared-mint rock, glistening wetly in the morning sun. To either side, the canyon's immense walls rose up, sheer and vertical, for kilometres. The lime sky was a distant strip overhead.
    As Tetsuo watched, a small family of semitransparent whirling propelloids—each the size of his fist—drifted slowly past.
    The little group travelled onwards, parallel to the canyon wall. Tetsuo's gaze followed them until they were lost in the distance. Then he was alone, once more.

A stately pavane of life and death: glycoprotein-analogues drifting laterally through a fluid mosaic of phospholipids and protein-like molecules. Yoshiko pointed at a twisted filament, and it grew large as the display zoomed in.
    â€œExcuse me.”
    In a text volume, the relative atomic concentrations scrolled past, while graphs shifted in a third image. The primary display picked out a molecule and decoded it: hydrogen bonds in startling white, dynamic equations mapping field strengths.
    â€œI'm sorry.” A harried-looking woman walked right through the display.
    Most interesting of all, the overall-properties map was highlighting a