Knight Moves by Walter Jon Williams

Author:Walter Jon Williams [Williams, Walter Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction
Publisher: Walter Jon Williams
Published: 2015-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

As usual, I awoke early. Mary had curled up on her side away from me, the covers over her head in a gesture I remembered. For a long moment I listened to the house hum, to the sound of the air conditioning and the little household robots that quietly cleaned the comers of cobwebs, and always the distant whispering of Zimmerman’s quiet and desperate madness, murmuring from every comer of this padded asylum he’d built for himself.

I knew Mary was a late riser. I didn’t want to wake her, so I slipped out of bed, made a quick knight move back to my own room, changed into running clothes and went in search of the indoor track I’d seen the day before.

The house was dark and there was only the hum to be heard. My bare feet made no noise on the deep carpet. The labyrinth seemed different from the day before and it took me longer than I’d planned to find the track. I ran thirty laps on green nonskid carpet, wondering if the track had ever been used.

After the run I went in search of the kitchen, thinking about a romantic breakfast in bed but understandably chary about asking Dorcas to deliver it. I had an idea that the kitchen was probably somewhere near the dining room we’d been in last night, which my sense of direction told me was somewhere near the huge unused dining room I’d seen on my way to the lab.

I found the kitchen after a brief search. There were actually two kitchens, one built for humans and the other for the convenience of robot cooks, all to the same sesquipedalian scale as the rest of the house. The refrigerators, freezers and storage areas were built between the two kitchens so that either people or robots had access to them.

The first thing I noticed was an espresso machine, which I immediately put to use. In the refrigerator I found some eggs and heavy cream, which started me thinking, so I continued rummaging and found an assortment of spices, pushed well to the human side of one of the cupboards as though the robots never used them— which, from the taste of the meals the day before, I could well believe.

I found some bread, cut the corners off to make octagons, and toasted it. Then I carefully removed a circle in the center of each, tearing it only halfway down so that each piece of toast presented a round white eye in its center. After that, I mixed the eggs with the heavy cream, some parsley, chives and tarragon, whisking them in a deep bowl so they would cook all together. When they were done, I filled some of the toast slices with the scrambled eggs and then put another toast slice on top of each. I found some orange juice and milk, put it all together with the espresso on a tray, and left the kitchen to head back into the maze.

I knew

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