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

cosmology, or the universe itself, on its head. But the real secrets, the long secrets, were in the Tract if
they were anywhere, and no one had ever returned from there.
No one ever would.

Most people came to Motel Splendido to make their fortune, or their name; Seria Mau Genlicher came
to find a clue. She came to make a deal with Uncle Zip the tailor. She talked to him by fetch, from the
parking orbit, but not before the shadow operators had tried to persuade her to go down to the surface
in person.
'The surface?' she said, laughing rather wildly. 'Moi?'
'But you would enjoy it so. Look!'
'Leave this alone,' she warned them: but they showed her how much fun it would be, all the same,
down where Carmody, a seaport long before it was a spaceport, was opening its sticky, fragrant wings
against the coming night. . .
The lights had gone on in those ridiculous glass towers which spring up wherever the human male does
business. The streets of the port below were filled with a warm pleasant smoky twilight, through which all
intelligent life in Carmody was drifting, along Moneytown and the Corniche, towards the steam of the
noodle bars on Free Key Avenue. Cultivars and high-end chimerae of every size and type тАФ huge and
tusked or dwarfed and tinted, with cocks the size of an elephant's, the wings of dragonflies or swans,
bare chests patched according to fashion with live tattoos of treasure maps тАФ swaggered the pavements,
eyeing one another's smart piercings. Rickshaw girls, calves and quadriceps modified to have the
long-twitch muscle fibre of a mare and the ATP transport protocols of a speeding cheetah, sprinted here
and there between them, comforted by local opium, strung out on caf├й ├йlectrique. Shadow boys were
everywhere, of course, faster than you could see, flickering in corners, materialising in alleys, whispering
their ceaseless invitation:
We can get you what you want.
The code parlours, the tattoo parlours тАФ all run by one-eyed poets sixty years old, loaded on
Carmody Rose bourbon тАФ the storefront tailor operations and chop joints, their tiny show windows
stuffed with animated designs like postage stamps or campaign badges from imaginary wars or bags of
innocent-coloured candy, were already crowded with customers; while from the corporate enclaves
terraced above the Corniche, men and women in designer clothes sauntered confidently towards the
harbour restaurants, lifting their heads in anticipation of Earth cuisine, harbour lights on the wine-dark sea,
then a late-night trip to Moneytown тАФ wealth creators, prosperity makers, a little too good for it all by
their own account, yet mysteriously energised by everything cheap and tasteless. Voices rose. Laughter
rose above them. Music was everywhere, transformation dub bruising the ear, you could hear its
confrontational basslines twenty miles out to sea. Above this clamour rose the sharp, urgent pheromone
of human expectation тАФ a scent compounded less of sex or greed or aggression than of substance
abuse, cheap falafel and expensive perfume.
Seria Mau knew smells, just as she knew sights and sounds.
'You act as if I don't know anything about this,' she told the shadow operators. 'But I do. Rickshaw
girls and tattoo boys. Bodies! I've been there and done that. I saw it all and I didn't want it.'
'You could at least run yourself in a cultivar. You would look so nice.'
They brought cut a cultivar for her. It was herself, seven years old. They had decorated its little pale
hands with intricate henna spirals then put it in a floor-length frock of white satin, sprigged with muslin
bows and draped with cream lace. It stared shyly at its own feet and whispered: 'What was relinquished
returns.'
Seria Mau drove the shadow operators away.
'I don't want a body,' she screamed at them. 'I don't want to look nice. I don't want those feelings a
body has.'
The cultivar fell back against a bulkhead and slid down on to the deck looking puzzled. 'Don't you
want me?' it said. It kept glancing up and then down again, wiping compulsively at its face. 'I'm not sure