"Jeff VanderMeer - Three Days in a Border Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

other people. You walk by them all the time. Most all of them are dead, their flesh flapping off of them
like little flags." A bitterness creeps into the back of your throat.

You look up at the blue sky -- that mockery of a sky that, cloudless, could never give anyone what they
really needed.



"We should harvest the sky," Delorn said to you once. You remember because the day was so cool for
once. Even the sand and the dull buildings of your town looked beautiful in the light that danced its way
from the sun. "We should harvest the sky," he said again, as you sat together outside of your house,
drinking date wine. It was near the end of another long day. You'd had guard duty since dawn and
Delorn had been harvesting the last of the summer squash. "We should take the blue right out of the sky
and turn it into water. I'm sure they had ways to do that in the old days."

You laughed. "You need more than blue for that. You need water."

"Water's overrated. Just give me the blue. Bring the blue down here, and put the sand up there. At least it
would be a change."

He was smiling as he said it. It was nonsense, but a comforting kind of nonsense.

He had half-turned from you as he said this, looking out at something across the desert. His face was in
half-shadow. You could see only the outline of his features.

"What are you looking at?" you asked him.

"Sometimes," he said. "Sometimes I think I can see something, just on the edge, just at the lip of the
horizon. A gleam. A hint of movement. A kind of...presence."

Delorn turned to you then, laughed. "It's probably just my eyes. My eyes are betraying me. They're used
to summer squash and date trees and you."

"Ha!" you said, and punched him lightly on the shoulder. The warmth you felt then was not from the sun.



The rest of the day you spend searching for the familiar. It might already be dead, but even dead, it could
tell you things. It could speak to you. Besides, you have never seen one. To see something is to begin to
understand it. To read about something is not the same.

You try the tavern owner first, but he, with a fine grasp of how information can be dangerous, refuses to
speak to you. As you leave, he mutters, "Smile. Smile sometimes."

You go back to the street where you found the courier. He isn't there. You leave. You come back. You
have nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. You still have enough money left from looting desert corpses
to buy supplies, to stay at the tavern for awhile if you need to. But there's nothing like rifling through the
pockets of dead bodies to appreciate the value of money.

Besides, what is there to squander money on these days? Even the Great Sea rumored to exist so far to