This is a very exciting, and very reassuring, day. I am here today to answer questions: 'The lady in pink - ' 'Are these monsters we can see vegetarian?' 'Ma'am, would you be vegetarian with teeth like that?' It's the wrong answer. Not bad for a thing with a body the size of a stadium and a brain the size of a jam-jar. No! Yes! No! Yes! The most efficient killing machine ever invented before gun-powder. A picture of a scaly-coated monster with metal-plated jaws appears on the overhead screen. There is something there, yes, and it's very big and very good at its job. Any intelligent life at all? Depends what you mean by intelligent. Are there minerals? Is there gold? What's the weather like? Does it rain a lot? Has anyone tried the fish? Are there any humans? No, there are not any humans. A man pushes forward with a microphone - 'And is there oxygen?' Yes, there is. Moss that is concentrating on being green. Spores that wait for the wind and never look back.
A crack like a cut, and inside a million million microbes wondering what to do next. And, underneath, mushrooms soft and small as a mouse ear. Sardines that would take two men to land them.Įggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe. Grass the height of hedges, nuts the swell of pumpkins.
Trees like skyscrapers, and housing as many. On the white sand there are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. But everything is trial-size tread-on-me tiny or blurredout-of-focus huge. Contents Planet Blue.5 Easter Island.102 Post-3 War124 Wreck City.156 Acknowledgements.217 Planet Blue This new world weighs a yatto-gram. And to Ali Smith, who came later, and to Deborah Warner, always. PR6073.I558S762008a 823'.914 C2007-907667-X First Edition Text set in Monotype Bembo Printed and bound in the United States of America 246897531 This book is to my oldest friends - Philippa Brewster, Vicky Licorish, Henri Llewelyn Davies, Mona Howard, Peggy Reynolds, Beeban Kidron, Phillippa Giles, and Ruth Rendell. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Winterson, Jeanette, 1959 The stone gods / Jeanette Winterson. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks. Distributed by Random House of Canada Lirnited,Toronto. First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Hamish Hamilton, a division of Penguin Books Ltd., London. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Harcourt Books.
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