Starmind

Начало книги

Rhea Paixao was considered odd even by other writers. But some things are universal. Like most of her colleagues, Rhea got some of her best writing done in the bathroom.

And this was her favorite bathroom. She stopped in the doorway and examined it before entering. She had known it since earliest childhood, and the passage of time and changing fashions had altered it very little.

True, it now contained a modern toilet and bath; there was such a thing as carrying quaintness too far. But the wall opposite her was simply that, a wall, not programmable in any way: it displayed nothing, could not even become a mirror. An actual silvered-glass mirror hung on the wall, over the sink, its image speckled and distorted by surface impurities. Between mirror and sink, offset to the left, was a widget that had once been used to hold toothbrushes and a plastic cup of germ culture. Farther to the left was an antique cast-iron radiator, unused in decades. The sink itself had mechanical taps, two of them, completely uncalibrated; one had to adjust the flow-rate and temperature by hand with each use. There was a depression behind the rim meant to hold a decomposing lump of phosphate soap. And slung beneath the sink was an antique seldom seen anymore in 2064: a spring-loaded roller intended to hold a roll of toilet paper. (There was no roll there now, of course—but there had been for years after people stopped using the horrid stuff. Nana Fish had insisted on it. Even after she had broken down and accepted modern plumbing, Nana had insisted on keeping a roll of the Stone Age tissue handy, “just in case.” She went back to the days when machinery used to fail all the time.) Every time Rhea saw that roller, she wanted to giggle.

Читать дальше →