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

Elvis. Every afternoon his shop was full of nervous mothers-to-be, designing their baby to have genius.
'Everybody wants to be rich,' he would complain. 'I made a million geniuses. Also, everybody wants to
be Buddy Holly, Barbra Streisaid, Shakespeare. Let me tell you: no one knows what those men looked
like.' It was barely illegal. It was all, as he said, a bit of fun. There was only so far he could go. It was the
modern equivalent, he said, of a kiss-me-quick hat you bought on Labour Day. Or maybe that old kind
of tattoo they had back then. In the lab, though, he cut for anyone. He cut for the military, he cut for the
shadow boys. He cut for viral junkies, in for the latest patch to their brain disease of choice. He cut alien
DNA. He didn't care what he cut, or who he cut for as long as they could pay.
As for his audience, they were cultivars: every one cloned тАФ even the shy young women in the black
tube skirts тАФ from his own stemcells, deep-frozen insurance he took out the day he went to Radio Bay.
They were his younger self, before he found his Dig secret, come to worship twice-nightly at the shrine he
had made of his success.

Motel Splendido turned, nightside up, beneath the White Cat. From the parking lot, Seria Mau stared
down. Carmody appeared like a sticky, abbreviated smear of light the colour or extent of which you
couldn't be sure, on its island in the curve of the southern ocean. She dawdled her fetch along its
magically lighted streets. Downtown was black and gold towers, designer goods in the deserted pastel
malls, mute fluorescent light skidding off the precise curves of matt plastic surfaces, the foams of lace and
oyster satin. Down by the ocean, transformation dub, saltwater dub, pulsed from the bars, the
soundtrack of a human life, with songs like 'Dark Night, Bright Light" and others. Human beings! She
could almost smell their excitement at being alive there in the warm black heart of things among the sights.
She could almost smell their guilt. What was she looking for? She couldn't say. All she could be sure of
was that Uncle Zip's hypocrisy had made her restless.
Suddenly it was dawn, and in a corner of the sea wall, where a water-stair went down to what was
now new-washed empty sand, grey in the thin light of dawn, she came upon three shadow boys. Running
on one-shot cultivars тАФ the throwaway 24-hour kind, all tusks and rank-smelling muscles, sleeveless
denim jackets, sores from bumping against things in an unconsidered manner тАФ they were squatting in
the dawn wind playing the Ship Game on a blanket, grunting as the bone dice tumbled and toppled, every
so often exchanging high-speed datastreams like squeals of rage. Complex betting was in progress, less
on the game than the contingencies of the world around it: the flight of a bird, the height of a wave, the
colour of the sunlight. After every cast of the dice they pawed and fought pantomimically and tossed
folding money at one another, laughing and snuffling.
'Hey,' they said when Seria Mau fetched up. 'Here, kitty kitty!' There was nothing they could do to
her. She was safe with them.
It was like having grown-up brothers. For a moment or two they threw the dice at blinding speed.
Then one of them said, without looking up: 'You don't get bored, being not real that way?'
They couldn't play for laughing at that.
Seria Mau watched the game until a bell rang softly on the White Cat and drew her away.
As soon as she was gone, two of the shadow boys turned on the third and cut his throat for cheating,
then, overcome by the pure existential moment, cradled his head in the warm golden light as he smiled
softly up at nothing, bubbling his life out all over them like a benediction. 'Hey you,' they comforted him,
'you can do it all again. Tonight you'll do it all again.'

Up in the parking lot, Seria Mau sighed and turned away.
'You see?' she told her empty ship. 'It always comes to this. All the fucking and the fighting, it all
comes to nothing. All the pushing and the shoving. All the things they give each other. If for a moment I
thought тАФ ' Could she still cry? She said, apropos of nothing: 'Those beautiful boys in the sunlight.' This
made her remember what she had said to the Nastic commander, out there in the shadow of his stupidly
big ship. It made her remember the package she had bought from Uncle Zip, and what she intended to
do with it. It made her recall Uncle Zip's offer. She opened a line to him and said: