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

long since lost save for a few choppy-sockie movies, does not believe in the beverage.
Instead he is unfailing in politely pressing a bitter-smelling black tea on me at every
opportunity. I am equally unfailing in politely refusing it. The pot is a delicate work of porcelain
which owes a great deal to a China before electricity and satellite warfare. It is painted a blue
almost the shade of cornflowers, with a design of a round-walled temple rising in a stepped
series of roofs over some Oriental pleasaunce.

I've seen that building on postage stamps, so it must be real somewhere. Or had once been
real, at least.
After the quiet combat of caffeine has concluded its initial skirmish, I shuffle to my workroom
where my brushes await me. Huang has that strange combination of stony patience and
sudden violence which I have observed among the powerful in China. When my employer
decides I have failed in my bargain, I am certain it is the cook who will kill me. I like to imagine
his last act as the light fades from my eyes will be to pour tea down my throat as a libation to
see my spirit into the next world.

There is a very special color that most people will never see. You have to be out in the Deep
Dark, wrapped in a skinsuit amid the hard vacuum where the solar wind sleets in an invisible
radioactive rain. You can close your eyes there and let yourself float in a sensory deprivation
tank the size of the universe. After a while, the little mosaics that swirl behind your eyelids
are interrupted by tiny, random streaks of the palest, softest, sharpest electric blue.

I've been told the specks of light are the excitation trails of neutrinos passing through the
aqueous humor of the human eye. They used to bury water tanks in Antarctic caves to see
those things, back before orbit got cheap enough to push astronomy and physics into space
where those sciences belong. These days, all you have to do is go for a walk outside the
planet's magnetosphere and be patient.

That blue is what I capture for Huang. That blue is what I paint on the tiny shards he sends
me wrapped in day-old copies of the high orbital edition of Asahi Shimbun. That blue is what I
see in my dreams.

That blue is the color of the end of the universe, when even the light is dying.



Out in the Deep Dark we called them caltrops. They resemble jacks, that old children's toy,
except with four equally-spaced arms instead of six, and slightly larger, a bit less than six
centimeters tip to tip. Many are found broken, some aren't, but even the broken ones fit the
pattern. They're distributed in a number of places around the belt, almost entirely in rocks
derived from crustal material. The consensus had long been that they were mineral crystals
endemic to Marduk's surface, back before the planet popped its cork 250 megayears ago.
Certainly their microscopic structure supported the theory тАФ carbon lattices with various
impurities woven throughout.

I couldn't say how many of the caltrops were discarded, damaged, or simply destroyed by
being slagged in the guts of some ore processor along with their enclosing rock. Millions,
maybe.

One day someone discovered that the caltrops had been manufactured. They were