"John Meaney - Blood and Verse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Meaney John)

Blood and Verse by John Meaney

***

AND RAIN. I’m not going to forget this rain.
Now I’m in love. Not wholly good news.
For the woman I’ve fallen in love with...
My father. I will honour your memory.
...is not the one I’m meant to kill.

***

Silver rain hisses on the dark wooden dock. Ocean swirls, in all directions. Swollen,
dark purple-grey skies hang overhead, their sombreness broken by twin arcs of
white points: the sunlets which ring this world.

I stand beneath dripping ceramic eaves, watching. Twelve of Quinvère’s tiny
suns are visible—thirteen, if I lean outwards, over the waves—above the boundless
seas which define this place.

No skimmers are visible amid the falling rain.

She’s gone...

For a moment, our eyes met: minutes ago, or was it years? Perhaps twenty SY
old, lithe with clear ivory skin and cropped hair, she stood straight-backed, and her
stare was as helplessly lost as my own. Then she shook herself, walked out onto the
dock, and climbed on board the public skimmer which had brought me here.
Striding forward with athletic grace, she called to the driver, then took the controls,
span the long skimmer into open ocean, and—in a burst of flying
spume—straightened her course and red-planed the speed.

Did she look back, as waves churned and the skimmer diminished with
distance and the misty rain?

None so blind as a love-struck poet.

My first commission, and already I’m smitten with the wrong person. It does
not render the task impossible. But artistic difficulty just leaped upwards by several
orders of magnitude.

For the beauty of my target’s death must become transcendent.

***

The hotel’s convex carapace is midnight blue, steady upon the waves. Behind
me, the entrance glows: a warm, welcoming orange light. Time to go in. I wipe rain
from my face, pull my sodden cloak around me, snap my fingers at the mesodrone
which bears my luggage. It rises above the walkway’s glistening slats, and floats
inside ahead of me.