"C. S. Friedman - Terms of Engagement" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman C. S)

Terms of Engagement by C. S. Friedman
C. S. Friedman has published seven novels, including In Conquest Born, This Alien Shore, and the
Coldfire trilogy. Her next novel, Feast of Souls, is slated for publication next March. Her first
appearance in our pages--one of her rare short works--is a sprightly story of the suspicion that
Ms. Friedman earned a Master's Degree from a university in the American south, but we're sure
that any similarities between her life and this fiction end right there.
I made a deal with the roaches.

Mind you, it wasn't something I wanted to do. The way I'd been raised, bugs were something you talked
to through the business end of a can of Raid, and the language consisted of one word: Die! My parents'
home had been hermetically sealed by window and door Experts, and any insect that mistook its
climate-controlled confines for suitable territory was quickly--and terminally--taught the error of its ways.
Houses were for humans, not insects.

Yes, I knew there were places where people didn't have the money or inclination to wage war so
successfully against the things that crept and slithered, the same way I knew there were striped horses in
Africa and creatures in Australia that carried their young in a pouch. But those things weren't in my
world, you understand. In my world, the closest you ever came to a cockroach was watching an insect
documentary on PBS ... and when the commercial came on you got up and washed your hands anyway,
just because watching them made you feel so creepy.

Then I moved to Georgia.

I was in grad school then, and in grad school you don't get to live in a hermetically sealed environment.
You live in a little apartment carved out of an aging house that boasts of "great atmosphere" and
"proximity to the college" rather than things like "living space" and "working appliances." The living room
wall may have had a little hole cut into it, in which a tiny air conditioner was placed in deference to
"yankee tastes" (my southern friends all assured me that air conditioning was unhealthy), but its existence
was mostly for cosmetic purposes, as it couldn't handle the kind of heat the Georgia sun belts out. Next
door to the west would be a fraternity house, most likely, which meant an ancient mansion taken over by
beer-swilling college boys with the personal hygiene habits of a sewer rat and the social habits of ... well,
let's just say the cockroaches loved it there. To the east would be a sorority house, whose members
valued the condition of their property a bit more than the guys did, and maintained it by partying on the
street in front of your apartment instead of at their own place, leaving enough trash behind to feed a
six-legged army.

At night the cockroaches would come out and dance on the sidewalk. I'm not kidding. You'd be walking
down the street your first night in town, looking straight ahead like yankees are taught to do (gotta watch
for muggers!), grateful that the blazing sun had set at last, when suddenly, squish! You would look down,
wondering what the hell you had stepped on ... and you saw a few dozen roaches contemplating the
same question. They were all over the sidewalk when night fell, celebrating the pleasures of cool
concrete, or something like that, and you couldn't just ignore them or your shoes would be a mess, so
you had to actually watch them, every step of the way, all the way home. Big ones and small ones,
sturdy aggressive ones and little shy ones ... all dancing around as if they were in Times Square and the
New Year's Eve ball had just dropped.

My friends assured me the big ones weren't really roaches, but some other kind of insect instead. That
was supposed to make things better. I suppose when a creepy bug runs across your kitchen counter and
it's three inches long (I am not exaggerating) and it looks like a roach and moves like a roach, it helps a
lot to tell yourself "Hey, it's only a palmetto bug, calm down!" I mean, maybe there are some people who