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

A truth as old as time, and I'm dressing it in special effects.

I swear, sometimes I kill myself.



This day for lunch the cook brings me a stir fry of bok choi and those strange, slimy
mushrooms. He is as secretive as one of the Japanese soldiers of the last century who spent
decades defending a lava tube on some Pacific island. There is tea, of course, which I of
course ignore. We could play that ritual with an empty pot just as easily, but the cook
executes his culinary warfare properly.

The vegetables are oddly ragged for having recently spent time in a searing hot wok. They are
adorned with a pungent tan sauce the likes of which I had never tasted before entering this
place. The whole mess sits atop a wad of sticky rice straight from the little mauve Panasonic
cooker in the kitchen.

Food is the barometer of this household. When the cook is happy, I eat like a potentate on a
diplomatic mission. When the cook is vexed by life or miffed about some slight on my part, I
eat wretchedly.

I wonder what I have done this day to anger him. Our morning ritual was nothing more than
ritual, after all.

When I meet the cook's eyes, I see something else there. A new distress lurks in the lines
drawn tight across his forehead. I know what I gave up when I came here. It was no more
than what I'd given up long ago, really, when the fates of people and planets were playing out
somewhere in the Deep Dark and I went chasing the fortune of a dozen lifetimes. Still, I am
not prepared for this new tension on the part of my daily adversary.
"Have you to come to kill me?" I ask him in English. I have no Cantonese, and only the usual
fractured, toneless pidgin Mandarin spoken by non-Chinese in the rock ports of the asteroid
belt. I've never been certain he understands me, but surely the intent of my question is clear
enough.

"Huang." There is a creaky whine in his voice. This man and I can go a week at a time without
exchanging a single word. I don't think he speaks more than that to anyone else.

"He is coming here?"

The cook nods. His unhappiness is quite clear.

I poke the bok choi around in my bowl and breathe in the burnt ginger-and-fish oil scent of
the sauce. That Huang is coming is a surprise. I have sat quietly with my incipient tumors and
withering soul and made the caltrop shards ready for market. They are being handled by a
True Hero of the Belt, just as his advertising claims. Our bargain remains intact.

What can he want of me? He already holds the chitty on my life. All my labors are his. I have
no reputation left, not under my real name. I bear only the memory of the heavens, and a tiny
speck of certain knowledge about what once was.