"Terry Dowling - The Lagan Fishers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dowling Terry)

or, well, the economic conditions that had led to horn beacons and shipwrecking and the original lagan, all
the other things that were lost? Things eroded, worn smooth and featureless by too much time.
It sobered him having Howard to measure himself by. It brought him back, made him remember to be
smarter. Kinder. Set him in the present as much as anything could.
"But Howie, what if it's real lagan? In the shipwreck sense?"
"What, marked with a buoy?"
"Or sent up as a buoy."
"What! Why do you say that?"
"I have no idea. Just should be said, I guess."

At 0140 on 15th October, Sam woke and lay there in the dark, listening to the wind stir in the dream hedges.
He was surprised that he could sleep at all, that he didn't wake more often. It was almost as if the soughing
and other hedge sounds were deliberately there to lull the lagan-blessed. Like the dross, the spindrift, the
honey-balm, it too was benign. The hedges breathing, thriving, being whatever they were.
Even as he drowsed, settled back towards sleep, that slipping, dimming thought made Sam rouse
himself, leave his bed and go out onto the verandah. Of course it was deliberate. Look at how everyone
accepted the phenomenon now, built it into their lives.
Sam regarded the fields picked out by the half-phase spring moon. He smelled the honey-balm wind that
blew up from the hedgerows and made himself listen to the "croisie," not just hear it-that mysterious,
oscillating tone produced by nearly all lagan blooms, a barely-there, modulating drone set with what one
moment sounded for all the world like someone shaking an old spray can, the next jingling bangles together
on a waving arm. Never enough to annoy or intrude. Oh no. Not the croisie. Lulling. A welcome and
welcoming thing. Always better than words made it seem. Something that would be missed like birdsong and
insect chorus when the bloom ended and the hedges were left to dry out and rattle and fall to slow dust on
the ordinary wind.
Sam left the verandah and walked down to the road. The hedges stretched away like screens of coral in
the moonlight or, better yet, like frames, nets and trellises of moonlight, all ashimmer-all "flicky-flashy" as
Howard would say-yes, like blanched coral or weathered bone robbed of their day colors but releasing a
flickering, deep, inner light, an almost-glow. Better still-fretted cloudforms, heat-locked, night-locked,
calcined, turned to salt like Lot's wife, turned to stone by the face of this world meeting the Gorgon-stare of
some other.
The croisie murmured. The honey-balm blew. Spindrift lofted and feather-danced in the bright dark. The air
smelled wonderful.
 What a wondrous thing, he thought. What a special time. If only Jeanie were here to see it. The different
world. The dream-hedges and lagan. The spindrift dancing along the road and across the fields. His own MF
legacies too, though she wouldn't have cared.
There are enough children in the world, she would've said. Who needs more than six in ten to be fertile
anyway? The world is the birthright, not people. It doesn't need more people. Hasn't for more than a century.
Can't have too many people or people stop caring for each other. Only common sense.
She would never have mentioned his face-or perhaps only to quip: "My Tiger. You were always too
handsome anyway."
She would have made it-easier.
Sam watched the ghostly palisades in their warps and woofs, their herringbones and revetments, found
himself counting visible towerheads till he reached the riot of the notre dame. Then he shut his eyes and
listened to the ever-shifting, ever-the-same voice of the croisie and tried to find, beyond it, the rush of the old
night wind in the real-trees. He could, he was sure he could, anchoring himself in the other, larger, older world
by it.
But he wouldn't let it take his thoughts from Jeanie. No. He kept her there in the questing-most vividly by
adding to the list of things he would have said to her, imagining what she might have said to him. Like how
you did start to count your life more and more as doors closed to you, that was a Jeanie line. How it took the