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

A smile flits across Huang's face before losing itself in the nest of wrinkles. "You have no
desires in the matter?"

"Only to remain quietly in this house until our bargain is complete."

Huang is silent a long, thoughtful moment. Then: "Money completes everything, spaceman."
He nods once before walking away,

It is difficult to threaten a man such as myself with no family, no friends, and no future. That
must be a strange lesson for Huang.

I drift back to the latticed window. He is in the alley speaking to the empty air тАФ an otic cell
bead. A man like Huang wouldn't have an implant. The dogs are quiet until he steps back into
the blue Mercedes. They begin barking and wailing as the car slides away silent as dustfall.

It is then that I realize that the dog pack are holograms, an extension of the car itself.



Until humans went into the Deep Dark, we never knew how kindly Earth truly was. A man
standing on earthquake-raddled ground in the midst of the most violent hurricane is as safe as
babe-in-arms compared to any moment of life in hard vacuum. The smallest five-jiao pressure
seal, procured low bid and installed by a bored maintech with a hangover, could fail and bring
with it rapid, painful death.

The risk changes people, in ways most of them never realize. Friendships and hatreds are held
equally close. Total strangers will share their last half-liter of air to keep one another alive just
a little longer, in case rescue should show. Premeditated murder is almost unknown in the
Deep Dark, though manslaughter is sadly common. Any fight can kill, even if just by diverting
someone's attention away from the environmentals at a critical moment.

So people find value in one another that was never been foreseen back on Earth. Only the
managers and executives who work in the rock ports and colonies have kept the old, human
habits of us-and-them, scheming, assassination of both character and body.

The question on my mind was whether it was an old enemy come for me, or someone from the
Ceres Minerals Resources corporate hierarchy. Even setting aside the incalculable damage to
our understanding of history, in ensuring the loss of the first verifiable nonhuman artifact, I'd
also been the proximate cause of what many people chose to view as the loss of a billion tai
kong yuan. Certain managers who would have preferred to exchange their white collars for
bank accounts deeper than generations had taken my actions very badly.

Another Belt miner might have yanked my oxygen valve out of sheer, maddened frustration,
but it took an angry salaryman to truly plot my ruin in a spreadsheet while smiling slowly. Here
in Huang's steel embrace I thought I'd managed my own ruin quite nicely. Yet someone was
offering good money for me.

Oddly, Huang had made it all but my choice. Or seemed to, at any rate. Which implied he saw
this inquiry as a matter of honor. Huang, like all his kind, was quite elastic in his reasoning
about money, at least so long as it kept flowing, but implacable when it came to his notions of