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

where I am ' it said, before its eyes closed tiredly and it stopped moving. At that the shadow operators
put their thin paws over their faces and retreated into the corners, making a noise like, 'Zzh zzh zzh.'
'Open me a line to Uncle Zip,' said Seria Mau.

Uncle Zip the tailor ran his operation from a parlour on Henry Street down by the Harbour Mole. He had
been famous in his day, his cuts franchised in every major port. A fat, driven man with protuberant
china-blue eyes, inflated white cheeks, rosebud lip;, and a belly as hard as a wax pear, he claimed to
have discovered the origins of life, coded in fossil proteins on a system in Radio Bay less than twenty
lights from the edge of the Tract itself. Whether you believed that depended on how well you knew him.
He had shipped out talented and come back focused, that was certain. Whatever codes he found, they
made him only as rich as any other good tailor: Uncle Zip wanted nothing more, or so he said. He and his
family lived above the business, in some ceremony. His wile wore bright red flamenco skirts. All his
children were girls.
When Seria Mau fetched up in the middle of the parlour floor, Uncle Zip was entertaining.
'This is just a few friends,' he said, when he saw her at his feet. 'You can stay and learn a thing or two.
Or you can come back later.'
He had got himself up in a white dress shirt and black trousers the waist of which came up to his
armpits, and he was playing the piano accordion. A round, rosy patch of blusher on each chalk-white
cheek made him look like a huge porcelain doll, glazed with sweat. His instrument, an elaborate antique
with ivory keys and glittering chromium buttons, flashed and flickered in the Carmody neon. As he
played, he stamped from side to side to keep the beat. When he sang, it was in a pure, explosive
counter-tenor. If you couldn't see him you didn't know immediately whether you were listening to a
woman or a boy. Only later did the barely controlled aggression of it convince you this voice belonged to
a human male. His audience, three or four thin, dark-skinned men in tight pants, lurex shirts and jet-black
pompadour haircuts, drank and talked without seeming to pay him much attention, although they gave
thin smiles of approval when he hit his high, raging vibrato. Occasionally two or three children carne to
the open parlour door and egged him on, clapping and calling him Papa. Uncle Zip stamped and played
and shook the sweat off his china brow.
In his own good time he dismissed his audience тАФ who vanished with a polite sly hipster grace into the
Moneytown night as if they had never been there at all тАФ and sat down on a stool, breathing heavily.
Then he shook one of his fat fingers at Seria Mau Genlicher.
'Hey,' he said. 'You come in down here in a fetch?'
'Spare me,' said Seria Mau. 'I get enough of that at home.'
Seria Mau's fetch looked like a cat. It was a low end model which came in colours you could change
according to your mood. Otherwise it resembled one of the domestic cats of Ancient Earth тАФ small,
nervous, pointy-faced, and with a tendency to rub the side of its head on things.
'It's an insult to the cutter, a fetch. Come to Uncle Zip in person or not at all.' He mopped his forehead
with a huge white handkerchief, laughed his high, pleasant laugh. 'You want to be' a cat,' he advised, 'I
make you into one no trouble.' He leaned over and put his hand several times through the hologram.
'What's this? A ghost, young lady. Without a body you're a photino, you're a weak reactor to this world.
I can't even offer you a drink.'
'I already have a body, Uncle,' Seria Mau reminded him quiet y.
'So why did you come back here?'
'The package doesn't work. It won't talk to me. It won't even admit what it's for.'
'I told you this is complex stuff. I said there might be problems.'
'You didn't say it wasn't yours.'
Faint disagreeable lines appeared on Uncle Zip's white forehead.
'I said I owned it,' he was ready to acknowledge. 'But I didn't s ay I built it. In fact, it was passed to
me by Billy Anker. The guy said he thought it was modern. He thought it was K-tech. He thought it was
military.' He shrugged. 'Some of those people, they don't care what they say тАФ ' he shook his head and