"Gwyneth Jones - Saving Tiamaat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Gwyneth)

SAVING TIAMAAT
GWYNETH JONES


O
ne of the most acclaimed British writers of her generation, Gwyneth Jones was a
cowinner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues
in science fiction, with her 1991 novel White Queen, and has also won the Arthur C.
Clarke Award, with her novel Bold as Love, as well as receiving two World Fantasy
Awards—for her story “The Grass Princess” and her collection Seven Tales and a
Fable. Her other books include the novels North Wind, Flowerdust, Escape Plans,
Divine Endurance, Phoenix Cafe, Castles Made of Sand, Stone Free, Midnight
Lamp, Kairos, Life, Water in the Air, The Influence of Ironwood, The Exhange,
Dear Hill, and The Hidden Ones, as well as more than sixteen young adult novels
published under the name Ann Halam. Her too-infrequent short fiction has appeared
in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Off Limits, and in other magazines and
anthologies, and has been collected in Identifying the Object: A Collection of Short
Stories, as well as Seven Tales and a Fable. She is also the author of the critical
study Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality. Her most recent
book is a new novel, Rainbow Bridge. She lives in Brighton, England, with her
husband, her son, and a Burmese cat.

In the vivid and compelling story that follows, she proves that coming to really
know your enemy may make your problems harder rather than easier to solve.

****

I had reached the station in the depth of Left Speranza’s night; I had not slept.
Fogged in the confabulation of the transit, I groped through crushing eons to my
favorite breakfast kiosk: unsure if the soaring concourse outside Par-liament was
ceramic and carbon or a metaphor; a cloudy internal warning—

Now what was the message in the mirror? Something pitiless. Some
blank-eyed, slow-thinking, long-grinned crocodile—

“Debra!”

It was my partner. “Don’t do that,” I moaned. The internal crocodile
shattered, the concourse lost its freight of hyperdetermined meaning, too suddenly
for comfort. “Don’t you know you should never startle a sleep-walker?”

He grinned; he knew when I’d arrived, and the state I was likely to be in. I
hadn’t met Pelé Leonidas Iza Quinatoa in the flesh before, but we’d worked
together, we liked each other. “Ayayay, so good you can’t bear to lose it?”

“Of course not. Only innocent, beautiful souls have sweet dreams.”

He touched my cheek: collecting a teardrop. I hadn’t realized I was crying.
“You should use the dreamtime, Debra. There must be some game you want to
play.”