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

message was over. Then Tate added, 'I'm really a bit concerned. Gordon was here again after you left.
So call.' Kearney switched the phone off and stared at it. Behind Tate's voice he had heard the white cat
mewing for attention.
'"Justine"!' he thought. It made him smile.
He sorted through the courier bag until he found the Shrander's dice. He held them in his hand. They
always felt warm. The symbols on them appeared in no language or system of numbers lie knew,
historical or modern. On a pair of ordinary dice, each symbol would be duplicated; here, none was.
Kearney watched them rattle across the tabletop and come to rest in the spilled coffee by his empty cup.
He studied them for a moment, then scooped them up, stuffed newspaper and phone hastily into the
courier bag, and left.
'Your change, love!'
The women looked after him, then at each other. One of them shrugged. By then, Kearney was in the
lavatories, shivering and throwing up. When he came out, he found Anna waiting for him. Heathrow was
awake now. People were hurrying to make flights, make phone calls, make headway. Anna stood fragile
and listless in the middle of the concourse, staring every so often at their faces as they brushed past her.
Every time she thought she saw him her face lit up. Kearney remembered her at Cambridge. Shortly after
they met, a friend of hers had told him: 'We nearly lost her once. You will take care of her, won't you?'
He had remained puzzled by this warning тАФ with its image of Anna as a package that might easily slip the
mind тАФ only until he found her in the bathroom a month later, crying and staring ahead, with her wrists
held out in front of her. Now she looked at him and said:
'I knew this is where you'd be.'
Kearney stared at her in disbelief. He began to laugh.
Anna laughed too. 'I knew you'd come here,' she said. 'I brought some of your things.'
'Anna тАФ '
'You can't keep running away from it forever, you know.'
This made him laugh harder for a moment, then stop.

Kearney's adolescence had passed like a dream. When he wasn't in the fields, he was at the imaginary
house he called Gorselands, with its stands of pine, sudden expanses of sandy heath, steep-sided valleys
full of flowers and rocks. It was always full summer. He watched his cousins, leggy and elegant, walk
naked down the beach at dawn; he heard them whisper in the attic. He was continually sore from
masturbating. At Gorselands there was always more; there was always more after that. Inturned
breathing, a sudden salty smell in an empty room. A murmur of surprise.
'All this dreaming gets you nowhere,' his mother said.
Everyone said that. But by now he had found numbers. He had seen how the same sequences
underlay the structure of a galaxy and a spiral shell. Randomness and determination, chaos and emergent
order: the new tools of physics and biology. Years before computer modelling made bad art out of the
monster in the Mandelbrot Set, Kearney had seen it, churning and streaming and turbulent at the heart of
things. Numbers made him concentrate more: they encouraged him to pay attention. Where he had
winced away from school life, with its mixture of boredom and savagery, he now welcomed it. Without
all that, the numbers made him see, he would not go to Cambridge, where he could begin to work with
the real structures of the world.
He had found numbers. In his first year at Trinity someone showed him the Tarot.
Her name was Inge. He took her to Brown's and, at her request, to a film called Black Cat White
Cat by Emir Kusturica. She had long hands, an irritating laugh. She was from another college. 'Look!'
she ordered. He leaned forward. Cards spilled across the old chenille tablecloth, fluorescing in the late
afternoon light, each one a window on the great, shabby life of symbols. Kearney was astonished.
'I've never seen this before,' he said.
'Pay attention,' she ordered. The Major Arcana opened like a flower, combining into meaning as she
spoke.