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

It should be enough.

After a while, by way of apology, the cook removes my cooling lunch bowl and replaces it with
a delicate porcelain plate bearing a honey-laden moon cake. I suspect him of humor, though
the timing is hideously inappropriate.

"Xie xie," I tell him in my Mandarin pidgin. He does not smile, but the lines around his eyes
relax.

Still, I will not stoop to the tea.



Huang arrives to the sound of barking dogs. I stand behind a latticed window in my garden
wall and look out into the alley. The gangster's hydrogen-powered Mercedes is a familiar
shade of Cherenkov blue. I doubt the aircraft paint his customizers use is hot, though.

There is a small pack of curs trailing his automobile. The driver steps out in a whirr of door
motors which is as much noise as that car ever makes. He is a large man for a Chinese, tall
and rugged, wearing the ubiquitous leather jacket and track pants of big money thugs from
Berlin to Djakarta. His mirror shades have oddly thick frames, betraying a wealth of sensor
data and computing power. I wonder if he ever removes them, or if they are implants. Life in
this century has become a cheap 1980s science fiction novel.

The driver gives the dogs a long look which quiets them, then opens Huang's door. The man
himself steps out without any ceremony or further security. If there is air cover, or rooftop
snipers, they are invisible to me.

Huang is small, with the compact strength of a wrestler. His face is a collapsed mass of
wrinkles that makes his age impossible to guess. There are enough environmental poisons
which can do that to a man without the help of time's relentless decay. Today he wears a
sharkskin jacket over a pale blue cheongsam. His eyes when he glances up to my lattice are
the watery shade of light in rain.

I walk slowly through the courtyard. That is where Huang will meet me, beneath a bayberry
tree on a stone bench with legs carved like lions.



He is not there when I take my seat. Giving instructions to the cook, no doubt. The pond
occupies my attention while I wait. It is small, not more than two meters across at its longest
axis. The rim is walled with rugged rocks that might have just been ejected from the Earth
moments before the mason laid them. Nothing is that sharp-edged out in the Belt, not after a
quarter billion years of collision, of dust, of rubbing against each other. The water is scummed
over with a brilliant shade of green that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who ever has had
responsibility for a biotic air recycling plant.

They say water is blue, but water is really nothing at all but light trapped before the eyes. It's
like glass, taking the color of whatever it is laced with, whatever stands behind it, whatever
shade is bent through its substance. Most people out in the Deep Dark have a mystical