"Elizabeth Hand - Cleopatra Brimstone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

glycerine, which acted as a preservative, and next into a mixture of water and alco
Then she observed them under the microscope. Her glasses interfered with this workтАФ
bumped into the microscope's viewing lensтАФand so she switched to wearing contact lense
retrospect, she thought that this was probably a mistake.
At Argus College she still had no close friends, but neither was she the solitary creature
had been at home. She respected her fellow students and grew to appreciate the compan
women. She could go for days at a time seeing no men besides her professors or the comm
driving past the school's wrought-iron gates.
And she was not the school's only beauty. Argus College specialized in young women
Jane: elegant, diffident girls who studied the burial customs of Mongol women or
mating habits of rare antipodean birds; girls who composed concertos for violin
gamelan orchestra, or wrote computer programs that charted the progress of potent
dangerous celestial objects through the Oort cloud. Within this educational greenhouse, J
was not so much orchid as sturdy milkweed blossom. She thrived.
Her first three years at Argus passed in a bright-winged blur with her butterf
Summers were given to museum internships, where she spent months cleaning
mounting specimens in solitary delight. In her senior year Janie received permission to de
her own thesis project, involving her beloved shark moths. She was given a corner in a d
anteroom off the zoology lab, and there she set up her microscope and laptop. There wa
window in her corner, indeed there was no window in the anteroom at all, though the adjoi
lab was pleasantly old-fashioned, with high-arched windows set between Victorian cabin
displaying Lepidoptera, neon-carapaced beetles, unusual tree fungi, and (she f
these slightly tragic) numerous exotic finches, their brilliant plumage dimmed to dusty h
Since she often worked late into the night, she requested and received her own set of k
Most evenings she could be found beneath the glare of the small halogen lamp, entering
into her computer, scanning images of genetic mutations involving female shark moths exp
to dioxane, corresponding with other researchers in Melbourne and Kyoto, Siberia
London.
The rape occurred around ten o'clock one Friday night in early March. She
locked the door to her office, leaving her laptop behind, and started to walk to the sub
station a few blocks away. It was a cold, clear night, the yellow glow of the crime lights gi
dead grass and leafless trees an eerie autumn glow. She hurried across the campus, seeing
one, and then hesitated at Seventh Street. It was a longer walk, but safer, if she
down Seventh Street and then over to Michigan Avenue. The shortcut was much quicker
Argus authorities and the local police discouraged students from taking it after dark, Jane s
for a moment, staring across the road to where the desolate park lay; then, staring resolu
straight ahead and walking briskly, she crossed Seventh and took the shortcut.
A crumbling sidewalk passed through a weedy expanse of vacant lot, strewn with br
bottles and the spindly forms of half a dozen dusty-limbed oak trees. Where the grass ende
narrow road skirted a block of abandoned row houses, intermittently lit by crime lights. M
of the lights had been vandalized, and one had been knocked down in a car accidentтАФthe
fender was still there, twisted around the lamppost. Jane picked her way carefully am
shards of shattered glass, reached the sidewalk in front of the boarded-up houses, and bega
walk more quickly, toward the brightly lit Michigan Avenue intersection where the sub
waited.
She never saw him. He was there, she knew that; knew he had a face, and clothing
afterwards she could recall none of it. Not the feel of him, not his smell; only the knif
heldтАФawkwardly, she realized later, she probably could have wrested it from himтАФand
few words he spoke to her. He said nothing at first, just grabbed her and pulled her int
alley between the row houses, his fingers covering her mouth, the heel of his hand pres