"Jay Lake - The Sky that Wraps the World Round, past the Blue and Into the Black" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

The Sky that Wraps the World Round,
Past the Blue and Into the Black
by Jay Lake
March 2008 Issue




I believe that all things eventually come to rest. Even light, though that's not what they tell
you in school. How do scientists know? A billion billion years from now, even General Relativity
might have been demoted to a mere Captain. Photons will sit around in little clusters of
massless charge, bumping against one another like boats in the harbor at Kowloon.
The universe will be blue then, everything from one cosmic event horizon to the other the
color of a summer sky.

This is what I tell myself as I paint the tiny shards spread before me. Huang's men bring them
to me to work with. We are creating value, that gangster and me. I make him even more
immensely wealthy. Every morning that I wake up still alive is his gratuity to me in return.

It is a fair trade.

My life is comfortable in the old house along the alley with its central court crowded with
bayberry trees. A gutter trickles down the center of the narrow roadway, slimed a greenish
black with waste slopped out morning and evening from the porch steps alongside. The roofs
are traditional, with sloping ridges and ornamented tile caps. I have studied the ones in my
own courtyard. They are worn by the years, but I believe I can see a chicken stamped into
each one. "Cock," my cook says with his thick Cantonese accent, never seeing the vulgar
humor.

Even these tired old houses are topped with broadband antennae and tracking dishes which
follow entertainment, intelligence or high finance beamed down from orbit and beyond.
Sometimes the three are indistinguishable. Private data lines sling on pirated staples and cable
ties from the doddering concrete utility poles. The poles themselves are festooned with faded
prayer flags, charred firecracker strings, and remnants of at least half a dozen generations of
technology dedicated to transmission of something.

Tesla was right. Power is nothing more than another form of signal, after all. If the lights come
on at a touch of your hand, civilization's carrier wave is intact.

Despite the technology dangling overhead in rotting layers, the pavement itself holds life as
old as China. Toddlers wearing only faded shirts toss stones in the shadows. A mangy chow
dog lives beneath a vine-grown cart trapped against someone's garden wall. Amahs air their
families' bedding over wooden railings worn shiny with generations of elbows. Tiny, wrinkled
men on bicycles with huge trays balanced behind their seats bring vegetables, newspapers,
meat and memory sticks to the back doors of houses. Everything smells of ginger and night
soil and the ubiquitous mold.

I wake each day with the dawn. Once I overcome my surprise at remaining alive through
another sunrise, I tug on a cheaply printed yukata and go hunting for coffee. My cook, as tiny
and wrinkled as the vendors outside but decorated with tong tattoos that recall another era