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

technology remnants so old that our ancestors hadn't even gotten around to falling out of
trees when the damned things were fabricated. The human race was genetic potential lurking
in the germline of some cynodont therapsid when those caltrops had been made.

It had not occurred to anyone before that discovery to consider this hypothesis. The fact
that the question came up at all was a result of a serious misunderstanding of which I was the
root cause. In my greed and misjudgment I forced the loss of a device one of my crewmates
discovered, an ancient piece of tech that could have allowed us to do something with those
caltrops. My contribution to history, in truth, aside from some miniscule role in creating a
portion of Huang's ever-growing millions. That the discovery of the caltrops' nature arose from
human error is a mildly humorous grace note to the confirmation that we are indeed not alone
in the universe.

Or at least weren't at one point.

The artificial origin of the caltrops has been generally accepted. What these things are
remains a question that may never be answered, thanks to me. Most people prefer not to
discuss the millions of caltrops lost to Belt mining operations over the decades that Ceres
Mineral Resources has been in business.
Despite their carbon content, caltrops viewed under Earth-normal lighting conditions are
actually a dull grayish-blue. This fact is not widely known on Earth. Not for the sake of being
a secret тАФ it's not тАФ but because of Deep Dark Blues, the Academy Award-winning virteo
about Lappet Ugarte. She's the woman who figured so prominently in the discovery of the
artificial origin of the caltrops. The woman I tried to kill, and steal from. In their wisdom, the
producers of that epic Bollywood docudrama saw fit to render the caltrops about twice as
large as they are in real life, glowing an eerie Cherenkov blue. I suppose the real thing didn't
look like much on camera.

So most of the citizens of planet Earth don't believe that they're seeing actual outer space
caltrops unless they're seeing end-of-the-universe blue.

Huang sends me paint in very small jars. They're each cladded with lead foil, which makes
them strangely heavy. When I take the little lead-lined caps off, the paint within is a sullen,
radioactive copy of the color I used to see behind my eyelids out there in the Deep Dark.

Every time I dip my brush, I'm drawing out another little spray of radiation. Every time I lick
the bristles, I'm swallowing down a few drops of cosmic sleet. I'm the last of the latter day
Radium Girls.

Huang doesn't have to order the old cook to kill me. I'm doing it myself, every day.

I don't spend much time thinking about where my little radioactive shards go when they leave
my house off the alleyway here in Heung Kong Tsai. People buy them for hope, for love, to
have a piece of the unspeakably ancient past. There's a quiet revolution in human society as
we come to terms with that history. For some, like a St. Christopher medal, touching it is
important. Cancer will be important as well, if they touch them too often.

The truly odd thing is that the shards I sit here and paint with the electric blue of a dying
heaven are actual caltrop shards. We're making fakes out of the real thing, Huang and I.