"Jay Lake & Ruth Nestvold - The Canadian Who Came Almost All the Way Back from the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

The Canadian Who Came Almost all the Way
Back from the Stars
Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold
From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)

Highly prolific new writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the
last couple of years, including Asimov's SCI FICTION, Interzone, Strange Horizons, The Third
Alternative, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, and many other markets. He's produced enough
short fiction to have already released four collections, even though his career is only a few years old:
Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, and Dogs in the Moonlight.
He's the coedi-tor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, and has also
edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, and TEL: Stories. He
won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. His most recent book is his first novel,
Rocket Science.

New writer Ruth Nestvold is a graduate of Clarion West whose stories have appeared in Asimov's, SCI
FICTION, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Futurismic,
Fantastic Companions, and elsewhere. A former professor of English, she now runs a small software
localization business in Stuttgart, Germany.

Here they join forces to give us a surprising story that's about exactly what it says that it's about.

Kelly Maclnnes was pretty, prettier than I had expected. She had that sort of husky blond beauty I
associated with the upper Midwest. Or in her case, the Canadian prairie.

Together we stared out across Emerald Lake, one of those small mountain lakes jeweling western North
America, framed by a vista of Douglas firs, longleaf pines, and granite peaks clawing their way into the
echoing summer sky. Midway out on the lake, the water gathered into a visible depression, as if a huge
weight had settled on it. The dimple was about forty feet in diameter and ten feet deep, perfectly flat at
the bottom, with steeply angled sides like a giant inverted bottle cap. It had appeared five days after Nick
Maclnnes had mysteriously called home three months ago тАФ years after he was presumed dead.

At which point Nick's widow had promptly dropped everything and come here to Yoho National Park in
darkest British Columbia. "It looks unnatural." It was a dumb thing to say, but I didn't have much to offer.
I was an intruder after all, a U.S. agent come to investigate phone call and dimple тАФand Mrs. Maclnnes.

"It is unnatural," she replied. "A couple of weeks after it appeared, every fish in the lake had beached or
moved downstream."

I could imagine the rot. Such a stench seemed impossible in this mountain paradise. The air had the sharp
tang of snow on pines, the flinty odor of wet rock, the absolute purity of the Canadian Rockies.

But there was a lot that was impossible going on here. I had seen the satellite tracking reports
тАФNORAD, NASA, ESA, even some Chinese data. The dimple had appeared, fish had diedтАФ
something had happenedтАФbut there was no evidence of re-entry, no evidence of any precipitating event
whatsoever. Only the hole in the lake in front of me.

And a phone call that couldn't have happened, from a dead man lost in interstellar space.
"You say your husband told you to come here." They'd all asked her the questions before: the RCMP,
the Special Branch, the FBI, several U.N. High Commissions. Kelly Maclnnes had met her husband in