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

a moment or two, then added: 'Mind if I roll a cigarette?' On the inside of his left wrist he had a
home-made tattoo, the word FUGA, in faded blue-black ink. Kearney shrugged and went into the
galley. While Kearney made the tea Sprake strode about smoking nervously and picking pieces of
tobacco off his bottom lip. He switched the lights off, and waited with a satisfied air for the apartment to
fill with streetlight instead.
At one point he said, 'The Gnostics were wrong, you know.' Then, when Kearney didn't reply:
'There's a mist coming up over the river.'
After that there was quite a long pause. Kearney heard two or three small movements, as of someone
removing a book from a shelf; then an intake of breath. 'Listen to this тАФ ' Sprake began, but fell silent
immediately. When Kearney came out of the kitchen, the street door was open and the apartment was
empty. Two or three books lay on the floor, surrounded by torn-out pages which looked like wings. On
to the empty white wall above the sofa, in a bright parallelogram of sodium light, something outside was
projecting the shadow of an enormous beaked head. It looked nothing like the head of a bird. 'Christ,'
said Kearney, his heart beating so hard he could feel it rocking his upper body. 'Christ!' The shadow
began to turn, as if its owner, hanging in the air two storeys above a street in Chiswick, two in the
morning, was turning to look at him. Or worse, as if it wasn't a shadow at all.
'Jesus Christ, Sprake, it's here!' Kearney shouted, and ran out of the apartment. He could hear
Sprake's footsteps thudding on the pavement somewhere ahead of him; but he never caught him up.

Central London, 3 a.m.
Fractals spilled across icy blue displays, developing into something that resembled the jerky
frame-by-frame slow motion of a much earlier medium. Brian Tate rubbed his eyes and stared. Behind
him, the suite was dark. It smelled of junk food, cold coffee. The male cat was sniffing about in a litter of
discarded polystyrene cups and burger cartons around Tate's feet. The female sat quietly on his shoulder,
watching with a kind of companionable complicity the mathematical monster unspooling across the
screens in front of them. Every so often she dabbed out a paw, mewing impatiently, as if to draw Tate's
attention to something he had missed. She knew where the action was. Tate took off his glasses and put
them on the desk in front of him. Even at these speeds there was nothing to see.
Or almost nothing. At Los Alamos, bored тАФ though he would never have admitted it to anyone тАФ by
the constant talk about physics and money, he had spent most of his free time in his room, switching
restlessly from TV channel to TV channel with the sound turned down. This led him to think about
choice. The moment of choice, he thought, could be located very exactly as one image flickered, broke
and was replaced by the next. If you levered things apart, if you could get into the exact moment of
transition, what would you find? Entertaining himself with the fantasy of an unknown station тАФ something
more watchable than reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer тАФ transmitting into the gap, into the moment of
choice, he had tried to record a series of channel changes on the VCR and play them back in stop-frame.
This had proved to be impossible.
He reached back to stroke the cat's ears. She evaded him, jumped down on to the floor, where she
hissed at the male until he retreated under Tate's chair.
Tate, meanwhile, picked up the telephone and tried Kearney's home number. There was no answer.
He left another message.
 EIGHT

The Tailor's Cut




When Uncle Zip heard Seria Mau say the words 'Dr Haends', he sat perfectly still for a fraction of a
second. Then he shrugged. 'You should bring it back,' he repeated. This was his idea of an apology. 'I'll