"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 07 - Radiant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

feet and shedding hot tears, though I couldn't say what I was crying about.

Maybe I cried because I'd lost the flow. Once upon a time, I'd had the potential to be a dancer. Now
I'd never be anything but an Explorer.

So in the end, like most Explorers, I took up a hobby. My choice was sculpture. Making figurines out of
clay, wire, copper leaf, and the small industrial-grade gems thatPistachio's synthesizer system could
produce. I found myself constructing male and female "Gotamas": princes and princesses trapped in
ornate palaces that resembled Fabergé eggs. I molded expressions of horror on my Gotamas' faces as
they looked through windows in their eggs and caught their first glimpses of the world outside.

After a while, I found myself spending so much time on art that I skimped on bathing and eating. I didn't
shave my hair off, though—just cut it short to keep it out of my eyes.



I said I had no friends. That was true. I did, however, have a partner: a fellow Explorer. Unfortunately,
he was insane.

He was a lanky loose-limbed twenty-four-year-old beanpole who called himself Tut: short for King
Tutankhamen, whom Tut resembled. More specifically, he resembled Tutankhamen's funerary mask. Tut
had somehow got his face permanently plated with a flexible gold alloy at the age of sixteen.

Before being metallized, he'd lived with a facial disfigurement as severe as my own. He wouldn't
describe the exact nature of his problem, but once he told me, "Hey, Mom"—he always called me
"Mom" because I'd introduced myself as Ma Youn Suu and "Ma" was the only syllable that stuck in Tut's
brain—"Hey, Mom, I decided I'd rather soak my face in molten metal than stay the way I was. Paint
your own picture."

I doubted that Tut had truly immersed his face in liquid gold (melting point 1063°C), but I couldn't rule it
out. He was one of those rare individuals—always perfectly lucid, yet thoroughly out of his mind. If Tut
had found himself in the same room as a vat of molten gold, he might well take one look at the bubbling
metal, and think, "I could stick my face in that." Two seconds later, he'd be ears deep in yellow magma.
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That was the way Tut's brain worked. Odd notions struck him several times a minute, and he couldn't
judge whether those notions were merely unusual or utterly deranged. For example, he was obsessed
with keeping the gold on his face "shiny-finey clean," so he constantly experimented with different kinds
of polish—not just the usual oils and waxes, but also materials like ketchup, the ooze from my cheek,
pureed mushrooms in hot chocolate, and his own semen. Once while we were talking in my cabin, he
began going through my things, trying every garment I owned to see how well it buffed up his
complexion... all while we were discussing a complicated technical bulletin on new procedures for taking
alien soil samples. Every now and then, after he'd finished rubbing his metal forehead with my panties or
the toe of my ballet shoe, he'd turn from the mirror and ask, "What do you think? Shiny-finey?" I'd say I
couldn't see any difference, he'd nod, and we'd go back to debating the niceties of separating
extraterrestrial worms from extraterrestrial loam.