"Gene Wolfe - Green Glass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

GREEN GLASS
by Gene Wolfe

****

"It's hard for me to believe that Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine has
turned thirty. I recall early issues when Isaac himself peeped out of the "O" in
Asimov's, issues to which he was a regular contributor. Heavenly days, I recall
Isaac, gracious, funny, and smart. There was never a quicker man with a quip,
nor a man more concerned to see that his quips gave no one serious pain. He was
a man I knew and counted as a friend, and a man I would have liked to know
much better. "His magazine is the same way. I've read it since the first issue. I've
sold it stories, beginning I believe with "The Woman Who Loved the Centaur
Pholus" in January of 1979. I've chatted with George Scithers, Gardner Dozois,
and Sheila Williams whenever I got the opportunity. It is one of the few magazines
I'll always subscribe to. But I don't know it from the inside, and I'm hoping Sheila
will tell us a little about that now.--Gene Wolfe

This celebrated author's most recent books include the two-volume
fantasy Wizard Knight series, which consists of The Wizard and The Knight,
and Soldier of Sidon, which was published by Tor Books late last year. In his
newest story, Gene upends reality to take a disquieting look at life under...
****
The passage, so narrow his shoulder rubbed its slick walls, ended abruptly at
a wide space in which a naked woman sat cross-legged, her eyes closed, as though
meditating. He thought of speaking, then of coughing. They seemed to him equally
impolite. Silently, he seated himself instead and studied her.
She was young, hardly more than a girl. Brown hair--long, soft, and nearly
straight--veiled her shoulders. Her face was lovely without being conventionally
pretty, a face (he thought) as pure and clean as spring water. If she was not real...
He admitted the possibility. It was possible, in fact very probable, that she
was not. If she was not, he hoped to go insane. To believe her, a soulless phantom
conjured from his own fevered imagination, wholly real and as human as he.
Anything else, any smallest shred of doubt, would be unbearable.
She was sitting in the middle of an open area. He propped his back against a
featureless green wall and sat facing her. There was no time. No day and no night.
His mind wandered, and for the most part wandered among nothing, nowhere.
****
At last she looked up and smiled. "Hello? Are you real?"
He grinned, "I think so. What are they going to do with us?"
 "Watch us together, maybe. If you're real. Can you get us out of here?"
"I can't even get myself out. What about you?"
"No. I--I meet people here. People who aren't real. Some of them are people
I know. Knew."
He nodded. "Same here."
"I ask them to get me out. They say they will, or that they'll try. Only I never
do. What's your name?"
"Joey. I was named for a baby kangaroo."
She giggled. "I like that. Last name?"
"De Mio. Now you'll think I'm a Mafioso. My dad's in the ice-cream