"James Patrick Kelly - The Edge of Nowhere" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

Rain found her way through the gathering darkness back to the apartment over Vronsky's Laundromat
and Monkeyfilter Bowladrome. She put some Szechwan lasagna into the microwave and pushed it
around her plate for a while, but she was too numb to be hungry. She would have gone to the eight
o'clock show at the Ziegfowl just to get out, but she was mortally tired of The Wizard of Oz, no matter
whom the cognisphere recast in it. The apartment depressed her. The problem, she decided, was that she
was surrounded by Will's stuff; she'd have to move it somewhere out of sight.

She placed a short stack of college-lined, loose-leaf paper and four unopened reams in a box next to
The Awakening, The Big Snooze, and Drinking the Snow. Will had borrowed the novels from the
Very Memorial Library but had made way too many marginal notes in them for her to return them to the
stacks. Rain would have to order new ones from Chance in the Barrow. She threw his Buffalo Soldiers
warmup jacket on top of several dusty pairs of Adidas Kloud Nine running shoes. Will's dresser drawers
produced eight pairs of white socks, two black, a half dozen gray jockey shorts, three pairs of jeans, and
a stack of tee shirts sporting pix of Panafrican shoutcast bands. At the bottom of the sock drawer, Rain
discovered flash editions of Superheterodyne Adventure Stories 2020-26 and The Complete Idiot's
Guide to Fetish. She pulled his mustard collection and climkies and homebrew off the kitchen shelves.

And that was all it took to put Will out of her life. She shouldn't have been surprised. After all, they had
only lived together for just over a year.

She was trying to talk herself into throwing the lot of it out the next morning when the doorglass blinked.
She glanced at the clock. Who did she know that would come visiting at 10:30 at night? When she
opened the door, Baskerville, Rover and Spot looked up at her.

"You found the book?" The bloodhound's bowtie was crooked.

Beneath her, Rain could hear the rumble and clatter of the bowling lanes. "There is no book."

"May we come in?"

"No."

"You threw the whistle off the edge," said Baskerville.

As if on signal, the two terriers sat. They looked to Rain as if they were settling in for a stay. "Where's
Will?" said Rover.

She wanted to kick the door shut hard enough to knock their bowler hats off, but the terrier's question
took her breath away. If the cognisphere had lost track of Will, then maybe he wasn't ... maybe he was
.... "I hate dogs," she said. "Maybe I forgot to mention that?"

Baskerville regarded her with his solemn chocolate eyes and said nothing.
The terrier's hind leg scratched at his flank. "Has something happened to him?" he asked.

"Stop it!" Rain stomped her foot on the doorsill and all three dogs jumped. "You want a story and I want
information. Deal?"

The dogs thought it over, then Rover got up and licked her hand.

"Okay, story." But at that moment, Rain's throat seemed to close, as if she had tried to swallow the page