"Connie Willis - The Sidon in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

THE SIDON IN THE MIRROR
by Connie Willis
We are near the spiraldown. I cannot see the mooring lights, and there are no landmarks on Paylay, but I
remember how the lights of Jewell’s abbey looked from here: a thin, disjointed string of Christmas tree
lights, red and green and gold. Closer in you can see the red line under the buildings, and you think you
are seeing the heat of Paylay, but it is only the reflection of the lights off the ground and the metalpaper
undersides of Jewell’s and the gaming house.

“You kin’t see the heat,” Jewell said on our way in from the down, “but you feel it. Your shoes all right?”

My shoes were fine, but they were clumsy to walk in. I would have fallen over in them at home, but here
the heavier gravity almost clamped them to the ground. They had six-inch plastic soles cut into a
latticework as fragile-looking as the mooring tower, but they were sturdier than they looked, and they
were not letting any heat get through. I wasn’t feeling anything at all, and halfway to Jewell’s I knelt and
felt the sooty ground. It felt warm but not so hot as I had thought it would be, walking on a star.

“Leave your hand there a minute,” Jewell said. I did, and then jerked my soot-covered hand up and put it
in my mouth.

“Gits hot fast, din’t it?” she said. “A tapper kidd fall down out here or kimm out with no shoes on and die
inside of an hour of heatstroke. That’s why I thought I bitter come out and wilcome you to Paylay. That’s
what they call this tapped-out star. You’re sipposed to be able to pick up minny laying on the ground.
You kin’t. You have to drill a tap and build a comprissor around it and hope to Gid you don’t blow
yoursilf up while you’re doing it.“

What she did not say, in the high sqeuaky voice we both had from the helium in the air, was that she had
waited over two hours for me by the down’s plastic mooring tower and that the bottoms of her feet were
frying in the towering shoes. The plastic is not a very good insulator. Open metal ribs would work far
better to dissipate the heat that wells up through the thin crust of Paylay, but they can’t allow any more
metal here than is absolutely necessary, not with the hydrogen and oxygen ready to explode at the
slightest spark.

The downpilot should have taken any potential fire-starters and metal I had away from me before he let
me off the spiraldown, but Jewell had interrupted him before he could ask me what I had. “Doubletap it,
will you?” she said. “I want to git back before the nixt shift. You were an hour late.”

“Sorry, Jewell,” the pilot said. “We hit thirty percent almost a kilometer up and had to go into a Fermat.”
He looked down again at the piece of paper in his hand. “The following items are contraband. Unlawful
possession can result in expulsion from Paylay. Do you have any: sonic fires, electromags, matches…”

Jewell took a step forward and put her foot down like she was afraid the ground would give way.

“Iv course he din’t. He’s a pianoboard player.”

The pilot laughed and said, “Okay, Jewell, take him,” and she grabbed up my tote and walked me back
to St. Pierre. She asked about my uncle, and she told me about the abbey and the girls and how she’d
given them all house names of jewels because of her name. She told me how Taber, who ran the gaming
house next door to her abbey, had christened the little string of buildings we could see in the distance St.
Pierre after the patron saint of tappers, and all the time the bottoms of her feet fried like cooking meat
and she never said a word.