"Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daniel Tony)

Life on the Moon
a short story by Tony Daniel
The Big Empty by Henry Colterman
If I ventured into the Big Empty,
a smaller movement between hard and fast stars,
if I ventured to the moon, and the dust of the moon,
and to those smooth ceramic halls, those lustrous and benign spaces,
or to the evaporated surface,
the empty mineral stretch and score,
would I find you?
Are you still in the valence between spaces? I would kiss the fall of your hair; I would lie
beside you in the silence,
and trace with my fingertip your lips' surge and fall.
I would pull you gently from the undermass,
the crystal and stone, like a spiderweb from foliage, like breath from a sleeper.
If I ventured to the Big Empty,
I would never stop looking for you, Nell.

Nell was skinny and wan. Her hair was brown, darkening to black, and her eyes were brown and sad. Henry did not understand why he loved her, for he had always considered himself a shallow man when it came down to it, with a head turned by shallow beauty and flashy teeth and eyes. Nell was a calm, dark pool. She was also probably the greatest artist of her generation, though, and when one had the extraordinary luck to claim such a woman's regard, one made exceptions.
They met at a faculty mixer in St. Louis. Henry was a visiting poet at Washington University's graduate writing program. Nell, already quite famous in her professional circles, had given a lecture that day at the architecture school-- a lecture that Henry had studiously avoided. Nell had not read any of Henry's poetry, for that matter, but few people had. If anything, twenty-first century poets were more obscure and unknown than their predecessors had been.
But both knew the other by reputation, and, being the only people at the mixer who were not involved in the intricacies of academic policy skirmishes, the two of them ended up in a corner, talking about corners.
"Why do they have to be ninety degrees," Henry asked. He leaned against one wall, trying to appear nonchalant, and felt his drink slosh over his wrist. For the first time, Henry regretted that he was not a man brought up to be comfortable on the insides of buildings.
"They don't," Nell replied. "But there are good reasons they mostly are." For some reason, Nell's face seemed lacking in some way, as if the muscles and tendons were strung out and defined, but weren't really supporting anything of importance. Odd.
"Structural reasons?"
"Why are there laps, when we sit down?"
Henry knew then that he was going to like her, despite her peculiar face.
"So we have something to do with our legs, I suppose," he said.
"And to hold cats and children on, too. Function and beauty." Nell smiled, and suddenly Henry understood the reason her face seemed curious and incomplete. It was a superstructure waiting for that smile.

They did not, of course, return to Henry's place and fuck like minks, although by the end of the mixer that was all Henry had on his mind. Instead, Henry asked her to coffee the following afternoon. Nell actually had a scramjet to Berlin scheduled for the early morning, Henry later discovered, but she canceled the flight for the date. Nell understood which situations called for spontaneity, and, being a careful, thoughtful woman, she always made the right moves.
Those first moments were so abstract, urban and-- formed, as Henry later recalled them. Like a dance, personifying the blind calls and pediments of nature. That was what it felt like to be alive in the houses of people you didn't really know, of living hazy days in parks and coffee shops and the chambers of the University. Nell and he had met the next day for espresso like two ballet dancers executing a maneuver. Touch lightly, exchange, touch, pass, pass, pass.
But something sparked then and there, because, of course, he had asked her to drive out to the Ozarks to see the flaming maples, and Nell had accepted. And in the Ozarks, Henry could become himself, his best self.
Nell had found one of his books, and when they stopped to look at a particularly fine farmhouse amidst crimson and vermilion foliage, she quoted his poem about growing up in the country from memory.
They kissed with a careful passion.

From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan
Lunar architecture will offer many new frontiers for artists, but the old truths must still apply if the edifices of the moon are to be places where people will want to live and work. Lunar architecture must take account of space and form above all. Art is the outward, objective expression of inner, subjective experience. It is the symbol of what it is like to be human.
Consider architecture. What is the great element of architecture? It is not form alone, for that is the great element of sculpture. We live and work inside the architectural sculpture, as well as pondering it from outside. We inhabit its spaces. This is why I say that its greatest elements are both form and space, and the ways the two relate to one another.

Two years later, Henry had published his fifth book to sound reviews and a little more money than he'd expected. On the strength of this, he had agreed to move to Seattle for a while to be with Nell, despite the fact that he had no academic appointment there, or prospects for one. They were married in a civil ceremony in the apex of the Smith Tower, a building Nell particularly admired.
And I am a man Nell particularly admired, Henry later thought. Perhaps love is not an emotion that is possible for the developed feelings. Perhaps the artist contemplates and symbolizes feeling to such an extent that he or she can't just have one after a certain point. Maybe that's why I'm only a good poet, and Nell was a genius. I feel too much stuff. Too much goddamn unformed stuff.
Yet Nell had remembered his poem, and, by now, she had read all of his work, and would quote parts of it when she was happy or animated by some idea.
In Seattle, Nell's earthly masterpiece was being built-- the Lakebridge Edifice. "Built" was, maybe, not the word for construction these days. "Substantiated" or "Formed" seemed more correct, as the macro and micro machines interacted with the algorithmic plans to produce a structure utterly true to the architect's vision-- down to the molecular level.
To achieve such perfection of craft took a little over two years, during which Nell and Henry shared comfortable apartments on the Alki-Harbor Island Span, a glassy affair of a neighborhood that stretched across Elliott Bay in a flattened arch. Nell thought it crass and atrocious. Henry decided to make the best of things, and planted a garden on the thirty foot long catwalk that opened up from their bedroom. His new book began to take shape as a series of captured moments having to do with plants and growth and getting soil on your pants and hands.

Production and Reproduction by Henry Colterman
In the nucleus of our home, my wife draws buildings
in concentrated silence, measured pace
as daylight dapples through the walls and ceilings