Life

Hair­cut today. Then judo. Both went well.

Now I’m going to do some writ­ing. Here’s a sam­ple from my cur­rent project, Salyx:

There was an upright piano, a slab of black lac­quered wood and pol­ished brass, sta­tioned in the cen­ter of a navy-blue disc of rug woven with a fine fil­i­gree of white lines. The piano had the look of a fac­to­ry job, a tem­plat­ed, nano-shit repro­duc­tion, but it was the rug that drew Igraine’s eye. She stood for a long moment, squint­ing at the pat­terns, till with a start she real­ized what was so famil­iar about them: they were con­trol-sys­tem hier­ar­chy maps copied from one of the man­u­als for the Terns, their lines dis­tort­ed by the fact that they were wound around them­selves in a spi­ral that con­verged on the rug’s cen­ter, hid­den beneath the edges of the piano. She smiled and took a sip of the green-apple wine that William had scared up for her.
Kane, speak­ing from just over her left shoul­der, said, “You noticed.”

She laughed. “You sur­prised me,” she said.

Kane stepped from behind her. “My wife wove it,” he said. “She had a big loom, and I had about a dozen of the old books…”

Some­thing in his voice when he spoke of his wife told Igraine that she was dead now, Kane a wid­ow­er, and she low­ered her eyes for a sec­ond. “Musuf would’ve liked it,” she said.

“Musuf?”

“He was my hus­band,” she said.

“Ah,” said Kane, “I think I remem­ber him. Tall man, smiled a lot?”

“That’s the one,” said Igraine, her voice absent, her thoughts lost in the whorls of the rug. Musuf had been a con­trol expert. This was his kind of thing.

Some­one sat down at the piano and began to play “Rags to Rich­es”. Igraine fin­ished off her wine and said, “I need a refill, if we’re going to talk about the past.”