"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

kind of hypnotic tranquillity came over him. He pulled his shorts down and stood with his legs apart in the
sun, looking down at himself. Someone at school had shown him how to rub it. It j;ot big but he couldn't
make it do anything else. Eventually he grew bored and climbed out along a cracked willow trunk. He lay
there in the shade, looking down into the water, which teemed with tiny real fishes.
He could never face other children. They excited him too much. He could never face his cousins. Two
or three years later, he would invent the house he called 'Gorselands', sometimes 'Heathlands', where his
dreams of them, prurient yet somehow transfiguring, could be worked out in a landscape without threat.
At Gorselands it would always be full summer. From the road, people would see only trees, thick with
ivy, a few yards of mossy driveway, the nameplate on the old wooden gate. Every afternoon, the pale,
scarcely teenaged girls his cousins had become would squat in the warm sun-speckled gloom тАФ their
grubby feet slightly apart, their scratched knees and bundled-up skirts close to their chests тАФ rubbing
quickly and deftly at the stretched white fabric between their legs, while Michael Kearney watched them
from the trees, aching inside his thick underpants and grey school shorts.
 Sensing him there, they would look up suddenly, at a loss!
Whatever drove him like this to the waste ground of life, had, by the age of eight, already made
Kearney vulnerable to the attentions of the Shrander. It swam with the little fishes in the shadow of the
willow, just as it had sorted the stones on the beach when he was two. It informed every landscape. Its
attentions had begun with dreams in which he walked on the green flat surface of canal water, or felt
something horrible inhabiting a pile of Lego bricks. Dragons were expressed as the smoke from engines,
while the mechanical parts of the engines themselves turned over with a kind of nauseous oily slowness,
and Kearney woke to find a rubber thing soaking in the bathroom sink.
The Shrander was in all of that.
 FIVE

Uncle Zip the Tailor




Much of the halo is burnt-out stuff, litter from the galaxy's early evolution. Young suns are at a premium,
but you can find them. Still running on hydrogen, they welcome the human visitor with an easy warmth,
like the mythic hostelries of Ancient Earth. Two days later, the White Cat popped out next to one of
them, switched off her dynaflow drivers, and parked herself demurely above its fourth planet, which had
been named, in honour of its generous facilities, Motel Splendido.
Motel Splendido was as old, in terms of human habitation, as any other rock on that quarter of the
Beach. It had a tidy climate, oceans, and air no one had fucked up yet. There were spaceports on both
its continents, some of them public, others less so. It had seen its share of expeditions, fitted out, kitted
up and despatched under the deracinating glare of the Kefahuchi Tract, which roared across the night sky
like an aurora. It had seen, and still saw, its share of heroes. Gold diggers of 2400 AD, they risked
everything on a throw of the dice. They thought of themselves as scientists, they thought of themselves as
investigators, but they were really thieves, speculators, intellectual cowboys. Theirs was the heritage of
science as it had denned itself four hundred years before. They were beachcombers. They went out one
morning with their lives all washed up and returned in the evening corporate CEOs heavy with patents:
that was the typical trajectory on Motel Splendido: that was the direction of things. As a result it was a
good planet for money. One or two puzzling artefacts lay quarantined in its deserts, which had themselves
not been deserts until the escape forty years before of a two-million-year-old gene-patching programme
some-one had picked up on a derelict less than two lights along the Beach. That had been the big
discovery of its generation.
Big discoveries were the thing on Motel Splendido. Every day, in any bar, you could hear about the
latest one. Someone had found something among, all that alien junk which would turn physics, or